For a week big black government limousines had been rolling through Red Square and into the Kremlin, Top Soviet ambassadors had been recalled from abroad, and a June 30 flypast of Soviet planes had been canceled (on account of the muggy, sling weather, it was first suggested). But when a scheduled B. and K. trip to Prague was postponed, Muscovites, old in ways of Communists, knew that something big was brewing. The grapevine that takes the place of normal newspapers said that the party's Central Committee was meeting, and that big shifts were in the making. Then, early one grey morning, when the newspapers of the Western world were already responding to the news broadcast by Radio Moscow, the 4:40 a.m. edition of Pravda broke it to Russians: Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich had fallen. They were out.
The communiqué was more softly worded than the one that had ousted Security Boss Lavrenty Beria exactly four years earlier (only to be shot in six months), but beneath its repetitious, doctrinaire prose, the voice of Nikita Khrushchev was clearly heard. The three party bigwigs had long opposed Khrushchev on six specific counts: They had 1) "sought to frustrate so vastly important a measure as the reorganization of industrial management"; 2) "failed to recognize the necessity for increased material incentives for the collective-farm peasantry"; 3) stubbornly resisted "the measures which the . . . party was carrying out to do away with the consequences of the personality cult"; 4) "offered constant opposition . . . to the struggle against the revisionists of Marxism-Leninism" inside and outside the country; 5) they had "attempted to oppose the Leninist policy of peaceful coexistence between states with different social systems"; and 6) they had "carried on an entirely unwarranted struggle against the party's appeal . . . to overtake the United States" in food production.
The Old Notions. Old Bolshevik Molotov, for 13 years Soviet Foreign Minister and for 51 years a 'hardheaded, hard-bottomed servant of Communism, was singled out for special attack. It "cannot be considered accidental" that he had repeatedly come out against "measures to improve relations between the U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia," and was "against normalization of relations with Japan." He was opposed to the "different ways of transition to socialism" thesis, and "denied the advisability of establishing personal contacts between the Soviet leaders and the statesmen of other countries." The anti-party group was "shackled by old notions and methods," and Molotov in particular had "manifested a conservative and narrow-minded attitude." But the Big Three's big crime had been "entering into collusion on an anti-party basis" and using "antiparty fractional methods in an attempt to change the composition of the party's leading bodies."