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Bulganin was appointed director of the huge Moscow Electrical Station. He knew little about engineering, but the official biography explains that he "completed his education on the run, from the technicians under him." A Swiss engineer, selling machinery there at the time, says that overnight, slackness vanished in the plant. "When a man was no good," says the Swiss engineer, "he would be there one day and next day—pfft."
Mayor of Moscow. As a result of Bulganin's efforts, the Moscow Electrical Station fulfilled its target in the first Five-Year Plan in less than three years. Bulganin's reward was an assignment to succeed Kaganovich as chairman of the Moscow Soviet—in effect, Mayor of Moscow. Bulganin built boulevards and six bridges across the Moskva River. From Britain and France he imported such "improvements" as a fleet of trolley buses and a set of spanking white gloves for the capital's traffic cops. Bulganin worked with Kaganovich and Khrushchev, then a district party boss, on the building of the Moscow subway. With Georgy Malenkov, then the chief of Moscow party cadres, he purged the party apparatus. One day Voroshilov complained that his limousine was constantly being held up on a narrow boulevard. Bulganin personally supervised the widening of the entire street.
Bulganin, as mayor, traveled widely in Western Europe. Another mayor, Konrad Adenauer of Cologne, asked him how he handled "Moscow's 4,000 city councilors." Bulganin answered in fluent German, as if explaining everything: "We simply hold our meetings in the opera house." Said Adenauer 20 years later: "I had an excellent impression of Herr Bulganin. Meanwhile, he has become Premier and I have become Chancellor. We both have done quite well."
Jack-of-All-Trades. Bulganin's administrative talents soon caught Stalin's eye. He was—,and still is—an energetic jack-of-all-problems, in business, bureaucracy or statecraft. Knowing little about banking, he became head of the Gosbank, Soviet equivalent of the U.S. Federal Reserve. Neither chemist nor metallurgist, (serving alongside Molotov) he whipped Russian production of explosives and gun metals to record heights in 1939.
When Hitler attacked Russia, Bulganin, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, made a name for himself by being the first high Soviet official to "volunteer" for war service at the fighting front. Bulganin became the civilian organizer behind Marshal Georgy Zhukov's defense of the Soviet capital. Since he has become Premier, his biography has been edited to paint a picture of Bulganin at the barricades. He was never at the barricades but he—and Moscow's embattled citizenry—did the necessary job. As a reward, Bulganin got a general's rank in the Red army and rapid advancement to the post of political commissar. While Khrushchev, in the days of German retreat from Russia, was liquidating the rebellious peasants who had sided with the Germans in the Ukraine, Bulganin was doing the same job in Belorussia.