(See Cover)
Stalin spoke of the continuity of Soviet policy. If anything were to happen to him, there would be good men ready to step into his shoes.
—Winston Churchill in Triumph and Tragedy
Georgy Malenkov was the man Stalin chose six months before his death in 1953 to step into his bloodied jack boots. But last week pudgy Georgy Malenkov. like hundreds of thousands of Communists before him, was on his way to banishment in Asia's outer reaches. Kicked out of the Soviet Communist Party Presidium and Central Committee, demoted from the Ministry of Electric Power Stations, he had been put on a job as a Dynamo-Dan at a hydroelectric project at Ust Kameno-gorsk in the remote Altai Mountains near the Mongolian border—1,800 crow-flight miles from Moscow. The area is part of the Karaganda administration of Gulag, the vast slave-labor system that Malenkov helped found. In Ust Kamenogorsk, Malenkov will be constantly watched. If his exile follows the pattern of previous top-party banishments (Trotsky was banished to the same province), he will be amply supplied with creature comforts and vodka, but there will be no escape. Nor would there be any real contact with people, because the risk of close association with him would be too great.
Malenkov's banishment, announced last week in foreign broadcasts by Radio Moscow, was intended as proof of the Soviet Union's new ''lose-and-live" policy. Demoted with Malenkov for their "anti-party"' activity ( TIME. July 15). two more of Stalin's "good men." Yyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich. were also said to be slated for minor, unspecified jobs in the government apparatus. But there was a curious dichotomy about the lose-and-live policy: the avidly curious Russian public had been told nothing about these shifts, instead was being treated to a stepped-up hate-and-horror campaign. All . over the Soviet Union, haranguing poli-truks were laying the basis for what could be a monster show trial of Malenkov on the charge of having organized a mysterious, little known (outside the Communist Party) 1949 conspiracy called "the Leningrad Case" (see box).
The Black Sheep. Whether the Soviet Union can be anything but a monolithic state in which all opponents must, of necessity and for public instruction, be physically annihilated sooner or later depends at present on a rotund, cup-nosed, mica-eyed man who was bustling and belly-laughing his way through Czechoslovakia last week. Xikita Khrushchev, the muzhik with the mostest. was acting like a champion who has dusted off the challenger. Overflowing with friendship and good humor, he bussed pale, frigid Czech Communist Leader Antonin Novotny on both cheeks and rode through Prague, which was tapestried with flags and banners and huge portraits of himself, on the jump seat of the reception automobile waving a panama hat.