(See Cover)
The face that Moscow turned to the world this week was, except for the missing mustache, disconcertingly the same—fat, inscrutable, steelyeyed. Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov and his fellow heirs to the proletarian kingdom of Joseph Stalin had stepped into power with every outward sign of unity.
On the big Red Square tomb, where on state occasions Russian bigwigs customarily line up in careful order like squat tenpins, state sculptors chiseled the name CTARNH (Stalin) just below Lenin's. Presses began to grind out millions of copies of the three funeral orations by Malenkov, Beria and Molotov, and in many a dingy meeting hall from Thuringia to Tibet, dutiful comrades set to study them. It was important to get things straight, for this was the new catechism of Communism, to be echoed in a thousand Communist speeches and editorials. Thus Stalin got his reserved seat in the hierarchy of Red saints ("beside the greatest men in the history of mankind—Marx, Engels and Lenin"), and was singled out, in inflexible Red nomenclature, as the "inspired continuer of Lenin's will."
More modestly the buildup began for the new Premier, the Cossack with the shady past and forbidding presence who stepped from Stalin's shadow into the role of No. 1. Nobody cried: "Stalin is dead, long live Malenkov!" Molotov, in his funeral oration, did not even mention Malenkov's name. Beria, in his single reference to Malenkov, identified him as "the talented pupil of Lenin and the faithful comrade-in-arms of Stalin."
For the present, this was enough—and even this tribute involved some stretching of the facts. Far from having been a pupil of Lenin's, 51-year-old Georgy Malenkov took no part in Lenin's 1917 Revolution or the bloody civil war that followed. According to the official Soviet account, Georgy Malenkov joined the party at 18, which sounds young enough. The fact is, he had sat prudently on the sidelines for two years (1918-20), though the Red army occupied his Ural home town of Orenburg; he enlisted under Lenin's banner only after the outcome of the civil war seemed clear.
The New York Daily Worker, also prudent, ran the same editorial tribute to Stalin two days in a row because it was not sure what else to say; finally it got the word and began to speak of "the Malenkov government." In the fashion set by Stalin, Pravda set to work with retouching brushes and scissors to glorify Georgy Malenkov. It ran a photograph showing him with Stalin and China's Mao Tse-tung—just the three of them. This proved to be a mutilation of a picture taken three years ago at the signing of the Sino-Soviet treaty; some 15 other Soviet big shots, including No. 2 Man Lavrenty Beria and No. 3 Man Molotov, were excised from the picture, and Malenkov was moved closer to Mao.