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Changing Masters. In the struggle for position after Stalin's death, Mikoyan showed supreme agility. He joined in the gang-up on Beria. As the original consumer-goods man he ought to have found Malenkov's breathing-spell policy congenial. But his shrewd nose for tactics told him not to commit himself to Malenkov. Although First Party Secretary Khrushchev might have seemed to Mikoyan a clodhopping countryman, Khrushchev had one prime quality that Mikoyan valued—political skill. Khrushchev could handle himself well in party scraps, and alone among Soviet leaders he could talk to the people. Outwardly, the Presidium was a crowd of collectively equal commissars, punching each other playfully in the ribs at Foreign Office receptions. But when Malenkov was bounced from the premiership in 1955, both Shepilov's accusing Pravda editorial and Bulganin's subsequent speech of denunciation were phrased as if by men who sought to keep dutifully within the outline of a party resolution; only Khrushchev and Mikoyan spoke out with the assurance of men who had made the policy.
Thenceforth, as they prepared to patch up the Kremlin's quarrel with Tito, these two were thick in intrigue, though in Belgrade Mikoyan appeared to be only a third man. Asked for his picture, he jerked a thumb at B. and K.: "They're the ones to photograph."
On their return to Moscow the junketers faced a full-dress attack by Old Stone-bottom Molotov. Playing up to a Western-minded opportunist like Tito, declared Molotov. was a betrayal of Leninist-Stalinist policies that he, as the last active co-worker of Lenin, could only condemn. It was Old Bolshevik Mikoyan who rose in the secret Central Committee session to answer that the Yugoslavs could and must be drawn back into the Soviet orbit, and to go on to indict past Russian policy—including his own trade deals—for failing to recognize and adjust to nationalist tendencies in the satellites. Molotov never recovered from the trouncing that Khrushchev and Mikoyan gave him at that meeting.
Down with Stalin. At the 20th Party Congress last year, it was Mikoyan who made the first forthright anti-Stalin speech. Presumably this was a maneuver planned ahead of time with Khrushchev's connivance to set the stage for the sensational speech by Khrushchev that followed. Yet such are the intricacies of Kremlin politics that the one innocent victim of Stalinist slaughter cited by Mikoyan was Ukrainian Old Bolshevik Stanislav Kosior, whose successor in Kiev, as everybody in the hall knew, was the keen young Stalinist Nikita Khrushchev.
Doubtless Mikoyan felt as strongly about Stalin's tyranny as anybody. "You understand," he told Author Louis (Russia Revisited) Fischer last year, "Stalin held us in his hand. Only one escape was left to us—what Ordzhonikidze did when he committed suicide. I stood before the same decision. And at the end of Stalin's life I was about to be executed. Now we have changed all this. Now we want to be left alone to build."