Lavrenty Beria's fall, like H. Dumpty's, was a great event, and all the Russian experts in the West started trying to piece together facts, rumors and Communist propaganda lies in order to reconstruct their theories of what is going on in the Kremlin. Charles Bohlen, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, probably knew as much about what had happened as any outsider could. But last week, when he flew home to brief the Big Three Foreign Ministers' Conference, it was apparent that even "Chip" Bohlen did not know much.
The most obvious lesson of Beria's arrest was probably the most useful: the...