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The Foreigner. A few steps behind walked the new Premier, Malenkov, in a huge black coat with grey fur collar. On his left, in a position of singular honor, strode not a Russian but a foreigner—Premier Chou En-lai of Red China, representing Mao. Flanking them walked the rest of Moscow's hierarchy, and behind them the diplomats and the plenipotentiaries of the satellites—Czechoslovakia's Gottwald, Hungary's Rakosi, Poland's Bierut and others. The procession halted and the pallbearers, headed by Malenkov, gently moved the coffin from the carriage. Silently the new leaders of Russia climbed the 40 marble steps to the top of Lenin's tomb, where Joseph Stalin had stood innumerable times to receive the salute of the masses—where he had stood grimly that day in November of 1941 to review the Red army while the German Wehrmacht pounded at the gates of Moscow; where he had stood triumphantly on the unforgettable day in 1945 as his army passed, and tossed the shattered banners and standards of the crushed invaders at his feet.
This time it was Stalin's eulogizers who stood there. From new Premier Georgy Malenkov came the kind of message that served his mentor so long and so well. "The Soviet Union . . . is waging a consistent policy . . . of peace . . . A policy based on the Lenin-Stalin premise of the possibility of coexistence and peaceful competition of . . . capitalist and socialist," said he. But Russia had a "sacred duty" to keep its army mighty. Next spoke Beria (who called Malenkov the disciple of Stalin) and then, slightly choked by emotion, Old Bolshevik V. M. Molotov. At 11:55 a.m.the orators were done, and the world was noting the order in which they spoke—Malenkov, Beria, Molotov. At 11:58 the body of Stalin was pushed behind the big metal doors of the mausoleum. At the first stroke of noon by the Kremlin clock, a wave of sound—artillery salvos, clanging chimes, blasting factory whistles—ranged across Soviet Russia and its satellites. Thus was the conqueror laid to rest—not with a prayer, but with whistle's scream and cannon's roar.