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Everywhere he went he made speeches (scores—seven one day) that were fluent, effulgent, flabbergasting. Said he of the Malenkov opposition: "As they say among the people, a scabby sheep appeared among a good flock. They were thinking of seizing the key positions and of turning the current their own way. But you know, Comrades, how it ended. As one, we took them by their tails and threw them out." Murmured Premier Nikolai Bulganin, whose new, lesser role in association with Khrushchev was underlined by a new low in obsequiousness: "It is necessary to emphasize in particular that the First Secretary, Comrade Khrushchev, deserves great praise for unmasking and defeating the anti-party group."
For a man who had presumably just exposed and defeated a powerful conspiracy to grab power, Khrushchev had left Moscow rather quickly. The world was asked to believe that this was proof of how well Khrushchev had everything under control. But Stalin, a greater autocrat, never left home when a conspiracy needed routing out. The inference was that, though Khrushchev is No. 1, "others" were powerful enough to do the dirty work, and did not have to clear everything with Khrushchev. As Khrushchev strode confidently through Communist Czechoslovakia, he was followed by tanned, blond, smiling State Security Boss Ivan Serov, watchdog of the Communist state and liquidator of millions. Many of Nikita's more reckless, vodka-primed speeches to the Czechs were drastically edited by other hands before being passed out to the press: Did Stalin let someone else, without his say-so, edit his remarks? The easy confidence of the happy tourists reflected their satisfaction at the turn of events, but it also raised a question: Had the Malenkov affair been, as Communist sources were anxious to make out, a personal power struggle on the lines of a Maffia feud or a Chicago gang fight? Or was it, remembering the breadth and depth of the Soviet state, and the irreducible fanaticism of the Communist ideology, a power adjustment of pro-founder significance?
Destroying the Party. In the past three years Stalin's successors have released, for their own purposes, a flood of new material about the nature of the Stalinist regime. From this material, a completely new interpretation of the development of the Soviet Union has been reached by Western scholars and "Sovietologists." It is now known that between 1934 and 1939 Stalin attempted to destroy the authority and power of the Soviet Communist Party by liquidating thousands of its leaders and tens of thousands of its minor functionaries. For 13 years there was no full meeting of the Central Committee and, according to Khrushchev himself, Politburo meetings were a sham. In its last years, the Stalin regime was a pure autocracy. Stalin ruled through a personal secretariat controlled by a "special sector" whose head was Malenkov. The famous names that ranked beside Stalin's in the Politburo and in the government ministries were those of privileged shop-window dummies and personal toadies whom Stalin switched around at will, and sometimes caused to disappear.