In the years when Georgy Malenkov was Stalin's personnel manager, he helped his boss build up a hierarchy of young technocrat-commissars. To get his men into key jobs, Malenkov had to shove out many a stubborn old Bolshevik. At the Commissariat of Heavy Industry, where old-line Commissar Ordzhonikidze gave notice that he would resist purging, Malenkov quietly put in his own security chief. The new man quickly turned over the commissariat's personnel files to the NKVD (central secret police), thus putting them in a position to purge most of Ordzhonikidze's engineers and...
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