Nobody recognized the aging white-haired man who walked about Moscow, staring with rheumy eyes at the broad streets and tall buildings. He was Andrei Bubnov, one of the five top Bolsheviks to direct the October 1917 Revolution. As Lenin's Commissar of Education he had set out to create Homo sovieticus, the new Soviet man. But somewhere along the line, vodka-swilling Andrei Bubnov had tangled with a new type of Soviet man called Joseph Stalin, and in 1937 he disappeared. Unlike tens of thousands of other old Bolsheviks, Bubnov had survived 19 years of Soviet prison camps, to be raised for the living by Nikita Khrushchev.
Bubnov was luckier than Nikolai Voznesensky, a Politburo member who disappeared in 1949 after his book on economics was denounced by Mikhail Suslov, a member of today's Presidium. Last week Moscow learned that Stalin had personally written the end to the Voznesensky story. It was one word—"execution"—scribbled across Voznesensky's dossier (Khrushchev called it "murder").
Unable to bring back Voznesensky, the regime last week hung his portrait in a place of honor in the Red Army Museum. There were hints of other acquittals. In his secret address to the 20th Congress, Khrushchev attributed the Yugoslav Communist breakaway to the paranoic Stalin's attitude towards Tito, and in Czechoslovakia a Soviet commission was reported to be looking into the case of Rudolf Slansky and 13 Communist comrades, most of them executed in 1952 for "Tito-ism." This suggested that a whole series of "Titoist" purges in the satellite countries (e.g., Poland's Wladyslaw Gomulka, Hungary's Laszlo Rajk, Rumania's Ana Pauker, Albania's Koci Xoxe) might be reopened. It was given out in Moscow that the last victims on the mad Stalin's liquidation list had been Molotov, Voroshilov and Khrushchev himself.
What to Believe. A petition for the removal of Stalin's body from its place beside Lenin in the red granite tomb in Red Square was reportedly being circulated among party members. But the number of simple nonparty Russians queueing up for a look at the embalmed "leader and teacher" of Communism was as long as it had ever been. Asked if he had heard about the new line, an old Russian mumbled: "Criticism? Criticism? I am waiting for the mausoleum doors to open."