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At this time, Khrushchev dared not make a bid for full power; the cunning and untrusting old hands around the Presidium were united by one resolve—not to let one man get such power over them again. And so the Soviet myth of collective leadership spread. They were all presumably such buddies: "I'm heavy industry, boom, boom!" said Khrushchev at one diplomatic reception. Then he tapped Malenkov on the shoulder: "And Georgy here is light industry, peep, peep!"
First Move. Last summer Khrushchev made a major move against Peep Peep. He produced a plan for reorganizing Soviet industry in a manner that would put the great plants and government enterprises under the control of his own regional and district party chiefs, instead of being centralized in Moscow. He could argue that the Moscow bureaucracy was top-heavy; it is. But Khrushchev had another motive. As Stalin's personnel manager, Malenkov had been largely responsible for building up the industrial technocracy. He had his principal supporters there. Malenkov saw a threat to his own strength, and fought back.
At this point Malenkov may have made common cause with those old Stalinists, Molotov and Kaganovich, neither of whom Malenkov normally would have chosen as allies. They did not like Khrushchev's plan either, and together the three were able momentarily to check Khrushchev's headlong pursuit of power—partly because Khrushchev was also embarrassed by the Hungarian revolt then raging. At the Central Committee meeting last December, Khrushchev's industrial plans were considerably amended. Deputy Premier Saburov, who was State Planner at that time, was replaced by Deputy Premier Pervukhin, but both apparently obstructed Khrushchev's plans—a factor which cost them their Premierships last week.
The final testing of power came at a special meeting of the powerful, 130-odd-man party Central Committee, which lasted from June 22 to June 29. According to Polish Communists (who often have a good pipeline to the Kremlin), Molotov may even have sought the meeting, confident that his side had the top hand. Khrushchev proposed that the first item of the agenda should be the current situation of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Molotov countered with the proposal, meant to put Khrushchev on the defensive, that the international position be considered, "in the light of attempted imperialist putschs in Poznan and Hungary," and "its relations with so-called Marxist Parties of Poland, Italy, Japan and the U.S."
Immediately Presidium Member Andrei Kirilenko, a virtual unknown from Sverdlovsk, attacked Molotov, saying that the party conservatives were "responsible for the outcry against the Soviet Union." And in a three-hour speech Khrushchev charged that the Malenkov group, operating from a headquarters in Moscow, with ramifications throughout the Soviet Union and in the Foreign Ministry and Soviet embassies abroad, had frustrated his attempts at a reconciliation with Yugoslavia's Tito in 1954, and had sabotaged his efforts to lull the West with his "relaxation-of-tensions" campaign.