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The Big Leap. How did Khrushchev jump so smartly from under secretary to First Secretary of the party, at Malenkov's expense? Outside the Kremlin, no one knows. In the months after Stalin's death, it was to the interest of all the jostling little cluster of Soviet leaders to show that there was none of what Malenkov called "panic and disarray." Some executions were inevitable. But significantly, they were all among the secret police: first Lavrenty Beria, Minister for the Interior, pulled down from his high place and shot; then Mikhail Ryumin, Deputy Minister of State Security. Last Christmas Eve it was Viktor Abakumov, former Minister of State Security, and three of his aides. All were identified with the "Beria plot" and the equally mysterious and never explained "doctors' plot" against the army (Vasilevsky, Shtemenko, Konev). Even the now deposed Malenkov can be described as a former police official, for as clerk of the 2,500,000 dossiers, he was actually Stalin's finger man in the great GPU purges.
Everyone in the regime's top leadership well knew that who controlled the policy controlled their necks. It was necessary to their common survival to disperse the State Security apparatus, and to make common cause against anyone out front, i.e., Malenkov, to keep him from getting this last key symbol of power. In April 1954, after Beria's downfall, the Security Services were detached from the Ministry of the Interior and placed under a Committee for State Security. Committee Chairman Ivan Alexandrovich
Serov did not belong either to the presidium of party or government. An old GPU agent, whose most notable exploits were liquidating the Baltic and Chechen peoples during World War II, Serov is a tall, cadaverous man who walks unevenly. The Germans knew him as "the one with the limp." They made his acquaintance in the Ukraine, where he is said to have worked with Khrushchev.
Tirelessly, Khrushchev labored to place his own men in key positions in the provincial and city organizations of the party. Then, in a succession of major policy speeches, he took the fight into the open (TIME, Sept. 28, 1953 et seq.). A series of near national calamities gave him the chance to pin Malenkov with a fine set of charges, and his success in reorganizing the party gave him the power to make them stick. That was the big thing.
The New Life. Malenkov had stepped into the premiership bellowing the slogan, "A new life for all." There were to be more and better houses, amnesty for political prisoners, an abundance of consumer goods, honest art and, above all, peace. It was an obvious tactic: after a generation of Stalinist austerity and terror, the leader who could deliver these things might consolidate himself with the masses. As a matter of fact, everyone climbed on the "new life" bandwagon, including Khrushchev himself.