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According to Warsaw, Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich all spoke during the debate, but on the next-to-last day, seeing the tide turning against them, all joined abjectly in a bout of selfcriticism. To get his unanimous vote of condemnation against them, Khrushchev was reported to have promised his crony Bulganin that sanctions would not be imposed on the four men: i.e., their lives would be spared. If Khrushchev so promised, would he keep that promise now?
The New Faces. Of the old Presidium, only Khrushchev, Bulganin, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Suslov and Kirichenko remained. Up from the ranks of the alternates came plump, photogenic Ekaterina Furtseva, long a particular Khrushchev favorite, and the first woman ever to reach the Presidium. Along with her came chesty Marshal Zhukov, hero of Berlin, 69-year-old Trade Union Specialist Nikolai Shvernik, Frol Kozlov, a Leningrad party boss who backed up Khrushchev's stand on the Leningrad Case at the 20th Party Congress, and Leonid Brezhnev, who had worked with Khrushchev years ago when he was cleaning out opposition in the Ukraine. Four new faces were added: Otto Kuusinen, 76, a longtime Finnish Communist, Averky Aristov from Chelyabinsk in the Urals, Nikolai Belyaev from the Altai Krai in Siberia, and Nikolai Ignatov, a onetime partisan hero whom Khrushchev had planted in a key spot during the preparation of the Leningrad Case.
The Soldier Moves Up. The rise of Marshal Zhukov, the only real fighting man (except the ancient Voroshilov) admitted to the top Presidium of the party, gave rise to a rash of headlines and a flurry of commentators' speculations on the key role of the Red army. But U.S. specialists on Soviet affairs do not go so far: they point out that Zhukov was just one of five alternates who automatically moved up to fill a vacancy; had the army exacted a special price for its support of Khrushchev, some other marshal would presumably have moved up to alternate. U.S. specialists discount Zhukov's own desire for independence: he has always been an obedient party man.
They think that the Red army, which is honeycombed with watchful political commissars, wants to stay out of party factionalism and power rivalries, and that its professional elite would act in its own right only in case of a patriotic crisis of leadership. Nonetheless, for the first time, U.S. agencies in Washington considered it a possibility that three to five years from now, given further convulsions, Russia might move toward a military dictatorship.