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Calm, impassive, cold-eyed, his heavy arms folded, Malenkov looked straight ahead. This was the man who for 25 years had been Stalin's chief administrative assistant and one of the three or four directors of the Soviet effort in World War II.
"I can see particularly clearly [Volkov went on] my guilt and responsibility for the unsatisfactory state of affairs which has arisen in agriculture, because for several years past I have been entrusted with the duty of controlling and guiding the work of central agricultural organs and the work of local party and administrative organizations in the sphere of agriculture . . ."
Eyes shifted to balding, jug-eared Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the party and high panjandrum of Soviet agriculture, whose report of a week previous had revealed the disastrous state of that industry.
"It is to be expected that various bourgeois, hysterical, ranting viragoes will busy themselves with slanderous inventions in connection with my present statement and the fact itself of my release from the post of Chairman of the U.S.S.R. Council of Ministers, but we, the Communists and the Soviet people, will ignore this lying and slander . . ."
A few more phrases and Malenkov's ignominious abdication speech was ended. Volkov stepped back and Alexander Puzanov, premier of the Russian Republic, moved that Malenkov's resignation be accepted. Every right hand in the audience went up automatically, nor did anyone bother to glance backward to see if there was a sneaking abstainer.
The meeting adjourned. It had lasted seven minutes.
The Mess in the Kremlin. Immediately, there was a buzz of conversation in the hall. Foreign newsmen leaped out of their seats and headed for the Central Telegraph office in Gorky Street, where they broke the news to the world. The predictable had happened: the struggle for power among the Soviet Communist leaders, forecast in hundreds of recent headlines (TIME, Feb. 7), had broken out. Once again the mess in the Kremlin was being laundered in full sight of the world.
Around 4 o'clock that afternoon, the Supreme Soviet Deputies trailed back to the Great Hall. This time, stubby Nikita Khrushchev stepped to the rostrum, his bald head gleaming.
"Comrade Deputies, on instructions from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Council of Elders, I submit the proposal to appoint as Chairman of the Council of Ministers . . . Comrade Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin. We all know Nikolai Alexandrovich ..."
Khrushchev stepped back. The parliament that never says Nyet obediently raised an assenting arm. Immediately afterward, Molotov went into his belligerent, bragging foreign-policy speech (see below).
Next morning the Deputies met again to "debate" the foreign-policy issue. This time it was the turn of the new Premier, portly Marshal Bulganin, 59, to take the rostrum. His marshal's shoulder boards flopping, his white goatee bobbing as he spoke (the morning newspapers had retouched his hair and beard black), he nominated as Defense Minister to succeed him Marshal Georgy Zhukov, three times Hero of the Soviet Union, defender of Moscow, conqueror of Berlin.