IN a flurry of final preparations, Russian work crews last week hung red banners and bunting across Moscow's broad streets, while others mounted 2,000 floodlights on the Kremlin's walls or attached gaudy murals to the drab façades of government buildings. Schoolchildren rehearsed, probably for the thousandth time, a song whose refrain goes:
Lenin will always live
Lenin will always give.
This week, after an unparalleled outpouring of praise and propaganda that has lasted well over a year, the Soviet Union celebrates the centennial of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. While at least 100 delegations of foreign Communists and trade unionists look on, the Russians are staging a gigantic two-day marathon of speeches, parades, concerts and displays in honor of the founder of the Soviet Union (see TIME ESSAY). Meanwhile, the emergent Soviet navy is celebrating by sending its ships and subs on simultaneous maneuvers throughout the entire world.
However splashy, the centennial celebrations are unlikely to prove as interesting as the events that surround them. For weeks, tantalizing signs of a power struggle within the Kremlin have been trickling out of the Soviet Union. First came reports that a faction within the Politburo, led by Ideologue Mikhail Suslov and Trade Union Boss Alexander Shelepin, had criticized Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev for his role in the mishandling of the ailing Soviet economy. The suspense was heightened by the disappearance of five of the Politburo's eleven members, ostensibly for reasons of health. Among those reported to be ill with influenza were Premier Aleksei Kosygin and President Nikolai Podgorny. Together with Brezhnev, they constitute the nucleus of the collective leadership that has ruled Russia since Khrushchev's ouster in 1964. Speculation was rife that a shake-up was taking place in the Kremlin.
Persuasive Evidence. One by one, nearly all the absent Politburo members reappeared last week. At this week's celebrations, the entire Politburo in all likelihood would stand shoulder to shoulder in front of a huge portrait of Lenin on the stage of the Kremlin's Palace of Congresses, as if nothing had happened. Still, it was virtually certain that the heirs of Lenin (who in 1921 persuaded the Tenth Party Congress to pass a resolution outlawing factional fighting within the party) had indeed been engaged in a contest for dominance. For many Kremlinologists and Soviet citizens, who are accustomed to divining the fortunes of the leaders from obscure signs, the evidence was persuasive.