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Chewing Firecrackers. Physically, Frol Kozlov is a sturdy specimen (5 ft. 8 in., 176 Ibs.) of Kremlin man. His hands are small and active, and so are his well-shod feet. He has a big, oval face, pale as a Siberian snowfall, and his nose is straight and narrow-bridged. When he smiles, a thin upper lip edges high to reveal a set of glistening teeth and a flash of gold, and little lines creep round his fleshy face and forehead like crinkled aluminum foil. His wide, short neck is well-proportioned to fit his wide-shouldered chest and broad stomach. In his jovial moments he bellows; at his most earnest his voice modulates softly and melodiously. He changes his expression in a flicker; impressing the curious stranger, his small, blue-grey eyes grow bluer, his smile brightens. But he can harden his massive face when he talks to a group of underlings; on such occasions, his rat-a-tat of verbiage has the sound of a man chewing firecrackers.
A second generation Bolshevik, Kozlov was born in 1908—three years after the first big uprising against the Czar—in the village of Loshchinino. Ryazan province. His parents, he says, were poor farmers who owned their land but had to piece out their living by working at a nearby textile factory. At 15, Frol went to work in the textile plant and at 18 became a member of the Communist Party, which sent him off to a worker's school and later to Leningrad Polytechnic Institute. Engineer Kozlov served for a time as foreman in a steel plant, and in 1939 his record catapulted him into the job of party secretary of his plant, and in 1944 he was working for the party's Central Committee in Moscow.
The "Case." Kozlov's climb to the big time paralleled the infamous purges that constituted the so-called "Leningrad Case" of 1948-49, when Stalin Protege Georgy Malenkov directed liquidation of Central Committee Secretary Andrei Zhdanov. When the pall lifted, there, mysteriously, was Frol Kozlov, party leader of the city. Good Communist Kozlov kept his nose clean, and in 1953 First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev did him the honor of traveling all the way to Leningrad to install Kozlov as party leader for all of Leningrad region.
Step by step, Kozlov climbed, until February 1957, when he became a candidate member of the Communist Central Committee's powerful Presidium. It was in this capacity that Kozlov, skilled in the ways of Kremlinfighting, is reputed to have saved Khrushchev's neck by rallying the 130-man committee and, in so doing, helping Khrushchev to defeat the Malenkov-Molotov-Kaganovich wing of the party. That was in June 1957; that same month Kozlov was awarded full membership in the Presidium. Less than a year later, Khrushchev made him First Deputy Premier, ranking him with the crafty Armenian First Deputy Anastas Mikoyan. But Khrushchev has admitted to friendly diplomats that Kozlov, not Mikoyan, is his choice for successor as Premier.