(See Cover)
In Soviet Russia's hierarchy, the tightest concentration of naked power in the world, a short, fat man from the southern Ural steppes named Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov now stands just a level below the eminences where Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov stand. He seems, in fact, to be pressing so hard on Comrade Number 2 that Western diplomats call him "Number 2½."
Stalin and Molotov are Old Bolsheviks, the aging top-dog survivors of the conspiratorial crew who seized power 32 years ago. Malenkov, an adolescent when the Revolution began, is a New Bolshevik. His character was fashioned in the dark and stormy laboratory of civil war, purge trials, slave labor, thought control and the midnight calls of the secret police. He worked his way through the anonymous, self-anointed inner core of the party to its all-highest Politburo, to be Deputy Premier of the U.S.S.R. His rise to a position within touching distance of Stalin's mantle bears considerable portent. After more than three decades, the vast power of the old Communist revolutionaries is passing into the grip of younger men whom they taught and trained.
Of this rising Soviet generation with whom it will have to deal, the non-Communist world knows even less than it does of the greying Red masters. Malenkov is a sharp case in point. No Western diplomat or journalist seems ever to have had a serious, revealing talk with him. He has taken part in no international parley, save with comrades in the Soviet satellite belt. He has never traveled in countries outside Moscow's orbit. His career is known only in a framework as spare as the man himself is fleshy.
Impression of Menace. If the non-Communist world has not yet plumbed the leading New Bolshevik, it has, at least, an impression of him—an ominous impression. Western diplomats at Kremlin dinners have been struck by Malenkov's grim reserve and aloofness. Stalin, in the brief days of East-West banqueting, cracked a joke now & then, and Molotov sometimes unbent with vodka, but Number 2½ remained stiff and oddly repellent.
Usually at banquets, he talked earnestly with his neighbor and apparent close friend, bald, pince-nezed Lavrenty Beria, boss of the Soviet police. Obese, agate-eyed, sallow and waxy-faced, Malenkov exuded a vague menace. "If I knew I had to be tortured," said a former Western envoy to Moscow last week, "and if I were picking people from the Politburo to do the torturing, the last one I would pick would be Malenkov."
Another former top-level diplomat had a similar remembrance: "Malenkov did not bother to talk with the guests. It seemed as though he resented just being there. You could not tell what sort of fellow he was. He did not drink too much, and he did not abstain—a calculating toyer with a glass. Always he wore that party uniform [a drab, high-collared tunic, once affected by Stalin], which went out long ago in Russia . . ." The diplomat paused. Then, spacing his words for emphasis, he continued: "I -would -hate -to -be -at -the -mercy -of -that -man."