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As if by an afterthought, Bulganin announced that ex-Premier Georgy Malenkov had been made Minister of Electric Power Stations, and would continue to be a Deputy Premier.
Again the Great Hall was deathly silent. Who among the bureaucrats and functionaries in that room did not remember that Trotsky, deposed by Stalin, had been contemptuously given the Electric Power Stations job?
The Headless Dictatorship. This sudden and cataclysmic shifting of power at the top came as a shock to the audience. Nothing in the previous day's debate had prepared them for the abrupt announcements. Even the high-ranking generals among the Deputies had been surprised. It had all happened behind closed doors, within that narrow circle of men who, each fearful for his own life, had tried to create a headless dictatorship with checks and balances, and had failed. In the party Presidium pew Malenkov was hamming a little, pretending to talk to the men around him. But no one in that audience was deceived. They knew now how serious it was for Malenkov. At the other end of the bench the parched, crushed-satin face of Molotov was turned away, and Marshal Bulganin fussed with papers like an old white parrot. Khrushchev alone among them seemed willing to exchange a word with the ex-Premier.
The First Secretary of the Communist Party is a garrulous man. In relaxed moments at embassy parties, Khrushchev-likes to buttonhole diplomats, talk to them endlessly in badly phrased, ungrammatical Russian. Only a few days before, he had joked and winked with foreign newsmen about the idea of capitalists and Communists sitting around a table talking together, and as he assured visiting Publisher William Randolph Hearst Jr.* that there was no possibility of a rift between himself and Malenkov, his blue eyes were as candid as a baby's.
When Khrushchev smiles, the light flashes on two gold bicuspids. He is short (5 ft. 3 in.), like all of Stalin's men, but bulky, and he has a blunt, peasant face. Among Russians he has a crude way of addressing all those below him in rank with the unceremonious and familiar "thou." Said a Russian who knew him during his days in the Moscow Soviet: "He exudes self-confidence and aplomb. He knows very well how to annoy people with explanations of their party tasks." Was he talking with Malenkov now about his failed party tasks? Was he using the familiar "thou"?
Test of Strength. First Secretary Khrushchev could afford to joke to Malenkov if he had a mind to. He had chosen to make his battle for power public for more than a year now. Openly he had criticized the government ministries under Malenkov's control for inefficiency, for lagging production, etc. Pointedly he had demanded an increasingly harder Stalin line, as opposed to the soft line Malenkov had identified himself with.