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He threw himself into the struggle with all the old vigor of his Ukrainian days. By now he wore the best clothes that Moscow could buy, dark suits and white shirts with jeweled cuff links. But his method was old and roughhewn: reorganize the party from the grass roots upwards. He launched a series of campaigns against inefficient bureaucrats, bad building, poor farming. The campaigns gave him the opportunity to shift party personnel. In his great Virgin Lands project he created a place to send the unwanted. In a couple of years he had shifted some 20% to 40% of the 327,500 party secretaries in the Soviet Union.
He had been able to make only a few shifts in the top party apparatus, the most important of which was to get Serov in the top State Security job. But neither Khrushchev nor Serov could liquidate in the old Stalin way. Not only did they not yet have the power, but there was strong resistance within the party and among the mass of Russian people against a return of a Stalinist-type dictatorship.
In his brief period as Party Secretary, Georgy Malenkov, evidently sensing this feeling, had appointed an old Communist named Andreev to the Party Control apparatus with orders to liberalize the prison system. Andreev had released some thousands of old politicals before Khrushchev was able to fire him. Complained Khrushchev: "Because some cases have been set aside, some comrades have begun to manifest a certain distrust for the workers of the State Security agencies." Seeing a minor victory over the hated police, people began to manifest a desire for other freedoms. Premier Malenkov promised them masses of consumer goods, but before this radical idea could get off the ground he was demoted to the Ministry of Electrical Power Stations.
Khrushchev could hit his own broad chest at an embassy party and say, "I am heavy industry—boom, boom," then tap Malenkov's chest and say, "He is light industry—peep, peep." Or at another party a tipsy Khrushchev could embrace Malenkov and weep, "The capitalist press says I want to hang my little Georgy." In the Kremlin jungle game of tiger eat tiger, humor is sabertoothed.