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Possibly the final testing of strength came too quickly, and at an awkward moment for the regime, so that it was necessary to make the clash seem merely a modest confession of Malenkov's domestic inadequacy. The one new complicating factor that had intruded on the Central Committee's locked-door meetings just before the Supreme Soviet session was foreign policy. The "peaceful coexistence" line had won important people outside the Soviet Union, but was not achieving its basic purpose of defeating German rearmament. In Asia, Chou En-lai's unyielding stand on Formosa had raised the awkward question of whether the Russians were prepared to support him if he got into war with the U.S. The two men who emerged most triumphantly from last week's shake-up—Khrushchev and Bulganin—were the men who journeyed to Peking together last fall and promised "to support the Chinese people in their determination to liberate their suffering brothers from the oppression of the Chiang Kai-shek brigands on Taiwan [Formosa]." But if their victory over Malenkov was won on that issue, it was victory at a cost: the cost of exposing to the world the basic weakness of Moscow. The leadership was in disarray, and the new coalition that emerged was only a new balancing of strength in a struggle that is not yet fought out.
In the new coalition, Khrushchev the adventuresome was the big figure of the day. Malenkov, having confessed his errors, had possibly for a time saved his neck. Other realignments showed caution.
Durable Molotov, who had made the proper noises about coexistence without sounding personally convinced, was still the big voice on foreign affairs (in the jostle for power, he had no cause to love Malenkov: in 1940 Malenkov's charges of nepotism in certain commissariats had cost Madame Molotov her job as boss of the fish industry and put Molotov on a spot). The army marshals got a big play in the propaganda, which would comfort those Russians who might take Molotov's thunderings about capitalist encirclement seriously, for the marshals, though party men. also have a loyalty to the army.
Shortly after the announcement of Malenkov's demotion, the Supreme Soviet approved a decree elevating Liquidator Serov, the man with the limp, to ministerial rank. The decree said its aim was to "strengthen the links" between the committee in Moscow and the security committees (recently reorganized by Serov) in the 16 Soviet republics. Apparently the time has not yet come for seizure of absolute power. Any direct attempt to take the mantle of Stalin might well lead to Khrushchev's own suppression.
After 37 years of power, the Communist Party had not yet solved the problem of how to run an economy, only how to sit on one. The party was exposed as a power group which cannot resolve its leadership. Committee or collective leadership fails because the strongest member of the group moves towards absolute power. In the face of its economic and organizational failure, the party had returned to the only business in which its members excel: conspiracy, intrigue and terror.
There have been some who have thought that Communism might possibly work, but only at very great cost. The power struggle in the Kremlin revealed that it still does not work, even at great cost.