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There was sound reason for the attack on Mikoyan: his ministry had been obliged to carry the burden of Malenkov's promised "sharp upsurge" in consumer goods. With the recent hardening of Soviet foreign policy towards the West as a result of the approaching rearmament of Germany, the consumer-goods policy has fallen into disfavor.
"It would be difficult to imagine a more antiscientific and rotten 'theory' and one that would more disarm our people," said the editor of Pravda last week, in a long article calling for a return to the "Stalin economic theory" of full emphasis on heavy (i.e., war) industry. On the same day, the Moscow newspapers carried two sentences on their back pages announcing Mikoyan's resignation from the Ministry of Trade. Nothing was said about his giving up his place on the Party Presidium or his job as a Deputy Premier, but more may be heard of that at the meeting of the Supreme Soviet on Feb. 3.
Into the Spotlight. The eclipse of Mikoyan, even if temporary, throws into high relief a growing figure on the Soviet scene: stocky, jug-eared Nikita Khrushchev, general secretary of the Communist Party—a job held by Stalin to the end of his life. A dozen major speeches have put Khrushchev in the world spotlight during the past year. He has attended Communist Party congresses in Poland and Prague, led a Soviet delegation to
Red China, visited the outlying states of Siberia. He has taken the lead in the Soviet Union's two most pressing problems, housing and agriculture (TIME, Jan. 31). In his speeches during the present heavy stress on anonymous "collective leadership," he frequently uses the first person, unusual among party leaders. He has broken precedent by personally signing decrees of the Central Committee. He has allowed himself to be named as one of a previously unheard-of subcommittee (the others: Zhdanov and Shcherbakov, both deceased, and Bulganin) to direct military policy during World War II. On his 60th birthday (April 17, 1954) he graciously accepted the Order of Lenin (his fourth) and was made a Hero of Socialist Labor. At a Moscow reception he told a British newsman: "Churchill speaks for Britain, I speak for the Soviet Union."
More significant has been his adroit manipulation of party jobs. He has named new secretaries to the Communist Parties of Russia, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Moldavia, Georgia and Azerbaizhan. He appears in Leningrad and the next day the first and second secretaries of the local party organization are ousted. He criticizes cotton growing in Uzbekistan, and Uzbekistan Premier Usman Yusupov is fired. In Moscow he launches an "anti-bureaucracy" drive, ostensibly to divert thousands of Moscow functionaries (i.e., minor party members) into more "useful employment in production." but no doubt to make way for Khrushchev men.