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While diplomats and pundits the world over weighed these matters with care trying to measure the change from "coexistence" to hardness, from consumer to heavy industry, as if Malenkov and Khrushchev were members of a democratic cabinet politely begging to differ with each other, the fact was that in the final testing of strengths neither man cared basically about ideological matters. Proof of this lay in the resignation announcement. In losing the struggle for power, Malenkov even had to take the rap for errors in agriculture made by Khrushchev.
Two years ago, when Stalin died, the world expected a dramatic breakdown in Soviet politics, then settled back to see what would be done under a proclaimed collective leadership. Who is the No. 1 man? they asked. For the first fortnight they thought that it was Malenkov: he appeared confidently installed as head of the committee. But 16 days after Dictator Stalin's death, there was a significant change: Khrushchev supplanted Malenkov as First Secretary of the party, key position in the Communist setup, a job held by Stalin to the end of his life. Who was Nikita Khrushchev that he could grab so much power?
Little was known about him except that he was the son of a miner in the Kursk region, joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and served as a soldier in the civil war. As a party worker in the '30s. he caught the attention of Politburocrat Lazar Kaganovich (now First Deputy Premier and apparently No. 8 or 9 in the hierarchy), who brought him to Moscow. After the vast 1937-38 purge had carried off hundreds of thousands of his comrades, Khrushchev was sent into the Ukraine to help build up the demoralized party organization. He became a Ukrainian expert.
His blunt, rough manners, garrulity and good humor won him attention, but he fired thousands of party secretaries and workers, cracked down ruthlessly on resisting collective farmers. He had an easy audacity about him. During World War II, Stalin gave him the rank of lieutenant general, and he went to work with General (now Marshal) Konev on the Ukrainian front. Professional Soldier Konev masterminded the military strategy; Nikita Khrushchev took care of the politics.
Politics meant provoking German atrocities in order to disillusion the captive Ukrainian people with their German liberators and. as the Red army went forward, catching up with and liquidating Ukrainian nationalists and non-Soviet partisans. He came out of the war wearing the mark of that stony brutality which characterizes all the men who were around Stalin.
He was sent back to the rich, restless Ukraine to organize the reconstruction of that war-swept land, and to put the collective-farm organization in order. Out of that grew his characteristically audacious agrogorod plan, a scheme by which scores of small farm and village communities could be amalgamated into large agricultural towns and thus more easily supervised by the police. In effect, farm workers, like factory workers, would become a city proletariat, radiating out to tractor stations each day and returning to the towns each night. When the peasant rebelled in the only way he could, by working inefficiently. Khrushchev cracked down. Stalin rewarded him by putting him on the Presidium of the party and in 1952 making him one of the eight secretaries of the reformed party secretariat.