RUSSIA Purge of the Purger (See Cover)
Down Sadovaya Boulevard, a wide, busy thoroughfare in north Moscow, sped a detachment of Soviet tanks and truckloads of soldiers. The time was 5 p.m., the day June 27. Such sights are rare in Moscow, and foreign diplomats noted the movement with interest.
At the Bolshoi Theater in Sverdlov Square that evening, the great red and gold curtain rang up on a new opera called The Decembrists, a propaganda piece about a rising of military officers in 1825, at the outset of Czar Nicholas I's reign. The Soviet Union's finest vocalists were on the stage, but opera was not the evening's sensation. Glancing towards the great state box, which dominates the glittering dress circle of the Bolshoi, the audience saw that it was impressively occupied. Sitting there, impassive, iron-mouthed, unsmiling, were the supreme leaders of the Soviet Union, some in the dark cloth of civilian office, others brilliantly bemedaled.
The unannounced appearance of the Soviet leaders at the Bolshoi was one of their rare public demonstrations of solidarity since the death of Stalin. Counting the heads, the audience found one missing; the cruel, slyly epicene face of Lavrenty Beria, first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, chief of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (police), boss of atomic energy, was not among those in the state box. Next morning, Moscow newspapers reported the visit of the great to the Bolshoi and carefully listed the twelve leaders present. The name of Beria was not mentioned; there was no explanation of his conspicuous absence.
Foreign ambassadors, including the U.S.'s Charles Bohlen (who had been denied ..admittance to the performance), passed the news on to their governments; foreign correspondents filed briefly. Rumors about Beria ran round Moscow, but there were no hard facts. Some recalled that Beria lives with his family in the posh Sadovaya district, in the direction the tanks headed—but so do many other Soviet leaders. U.S. Ambassador Bohlen asked Washington for vacation leave, and flew off to Paris, on the way to Majorca.
Behind the Scenes. Unknown to the foreigners at the time, and to all but a few Russians, a plenary session of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party was held ten days later, somewhere in Moscow. On this committee sit Russia's 200 mightiest Communists, men with great rank and great fears. They gathered to hear the most significant news since Stalin's death 93 days before: the struggle for power among the Kremlin's titans had begun.
It was suety Georgy Malenkov, the Premier, who got to his feet before them, to put the finger on Comrade Beria. This trusted man, said Malenkov, had committed "criminal anti-party and anti-state actions, intended to undermine the Soviet State in the interest of foreign capital." How had his criminality been manifested? In "perfidious attempts to place the U.S.S.R. Ministry of Internal Affairs above the government and the Communist Party."