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Who in the Ministry of Internal Affairs prepared Beria's arrest? If the tradition of the service holds, it may well have been his successor: clam-faced Colonel General Sergei Nikiforovich Kruglov, long a liaison man between the ministry and the Kremlin. At Yalta and Potsdam, Kruglov set up the protection screen which surrounded the Big Three,—was one of the very few who had free access to Stalin's quarters. At the San Francisco Conference, turned out in a blue serge suit and broad-toed shoes, he was Molotov's bodyguard. Although Kruglov's police career dates from 1938, the year Beria took over, and he has always appeared to be a Beria man, the" Central Committee Presidium (Malenkov) was clearly in no doubt about where his loyalty lay, although Beria may have been.
In Pravda's chilling announcement, in which the words "the great Stalin" were mentioned only in the concluding paragraph, Malenkov's name was mentioned not at all. The fiction of anonymity persists. Great play was made with another phrase: "The collectivity of leadership is the highest principle of the leadership of our party [and] corresponds to the well-known statement of Marx on the harm of . . . the cult of personality." To which a skeptical reader of Russian rhetoric might answer: "All leaderships are collective, but some leaderships are less collective than others."
Ambitious Patience. By "democratic centralism" within the Communist Party, Lenin had hoped—not very optimistically in his last days—to prevent a continuance of a personal dictatorship like his own. Rising to power by subterfuge and maneuver, Stalin destroyed every man of stature within his reach, at the same time paying vociferous lip service to "democratic centralism." Those he gathered around him, conditioning themselves to his homicidal suspicion, were small men, menials like Molotov, sycophants like Beria. Conscious of this, Stalin looked for successors among young party members, built them up to temporary power and fame, as often knocked them down. Such a man was Georgy Malenkov—with a difference. More subtle than the others, possibly more intelligent, he learned how to wait, how to accept demotion and be silent ; learned, in fact, the lesson of Stalin's own ambitious, patient youth.
There is some reason to believe that Malenkov may have fallen out of Stalin's favor in recent years; but it was already too late for the old dictator to choose and train a younger man. Had he calculated, in his last frantic seeking for a successor who would not throw away all he had won, on a balance of power? Was that what was meant by "collectivity of leadership"? In the milieu of bloody totalitarianism—his own creation—such an arrangement seemed like the product of a failing mind. Nothing was to keep so smart and faithful a student of the Stalinist method as Georgy Malenkov from eliminating one, two or ten thousand men in his way.