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He is not a man anyone would choose to sit next to at dinner. His face is pale, round and expressionless; his cheeks are flabby, his chin is double, but his eyes are hard as carborundum. His stiff black hair looks as if it had been pasted on. He does not attempt to make himself agreeable. Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov is not what anyone could describe as a cuddly personality.
A prominent diplomatic visitor once described meeting him at a Moscow dinner: "My most vivid memory is the sight of Malenkov. It was the most sinister thing in the Soviet Union. I was struck by his repulsive appearance, bulbous, flabby and sallow . . . He was apparently oblivious of what was going on around him at the table. When toasts were made, he would lift his glass automatically, then relapse into sneering silence." Said another diplomat: "I would hate to be at the mercy of that man."
Georgy Malenkov holds millions at his mercy. As a secretary of the Central Committee, a member of the Politburo and of the Orgburo, he controls the party machinery, a vast, complex mechanism that reaches into every corner of Russia and beyond Russia's boundaries into the satellite nations and the party cells in the free nations.
Americans are beginning to recognize his face: a pudgy, petulant face which has begun to appear in official Soviet photographs next to Stalin's aging, feline mask. Malenkov was once even empowered to affix the dread signature of Stalin to certain documents, with a special rubber stamp. And more is rumored: that this short (5 ft. 7 in), fat (250 Ibs.), 50-year-old man will inherit Stalin's power. This week, as the19th Congress of the Russian Communist Party convenes in Moscow, great new honors will come to the wielder of Stalin's rubber stamp.
The Succession. "Our country lives in exciting days," proclaimed the party newspaper Pravda last week. All over Russia, from the smallest rayon (precinct) to the capitals of the 16 republics which make up the U.S.S.R., party bosses were picking delegates for the big event. Daily, the press ran stories about Stakhanovite workers doubling and tripling their output in honor of the forthcoming congress. Moscow's Hotel Metropole set aside its entire second floor for the incoming delegates. But, as usual, the preparations were for the most part hidden in secrecy. Even the location of the hall in which the 2,000 delegates were to meet was being kept under careful wraps until the last moment. In marked contrast with an American political convention, there would be no prying TV eyes, no creepie-peepies to eavesdrop on unrehearsed moments, no hooting and howling from spectators in the galleries—and nothing to be really voted on, either.
As usual, the delegates had been called to Moscow to sit through the act, obediently "voting" as they are told to vote, obediently applauding when they are told to applaud. They will be there to hear and cheer the decisions already made by the party's high command.