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Result was that even with Malinovsky in charge, the army continued to seethe with barely concealed dissatisfaction. Early this month, Khrushchev found it wise to sideline "for ill health" two of Russia's most prestigious soldiers—Warsaw Pact Commander Marshal Ivan Konev and Army Chief of Staff Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky.
The Right Wing. However fretful the army might be, Khrushchev would have had little to fear from it if he had—as he so often boasts of having—a monolithic Communist Party behind him. He certainly has filled the important places with men of his own choosing, but they are capable of thinking that at 66 he will not live forever.
In the atmosphere of Byzantine secrecy that envelops Soviet government, the opposition that Western experts call Stalinist and Muscovites call right wing constitutes a kind of underground rather than an open faction, and its leadership is all but invisible. In theory, dour, ascetic Mikhail Suslov reflects these views, but on the record, he has been as devoted a follower of the leader as the next one. Khrushchev can no longer invoke the capricious plotting, counterplotting and murders of Stalin's Kremlin. The power struggle is played differently these days. Suslov, for instance, has frequently been charged with executing some of Nikita's most controversial policies.
A Matter of Ethics. Most of Khrushchev's right-wing critics are clustered in the middle echelons of the Soviet bureaucracy. They are careerists who found Stalin's repression of creative thought and initiative a welcome buttress to their own positions of privilege. Many bear deep personal grudges against Khrushchev. By his decentralization of Russia's industrial and economic management and his abolition of many government ministries, he has forced hundreds of them out of comfortable Moscow flats and into barren, provincial lives in such boondocks as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In his bid for popularity with workers and peasants, Khrushchev has often loudly denounced the bureaucrats' shortcomings and indulgences, has nibbled away at their treasured perquisites of rank, such as the possession of government cars for private use.
In so far as their opposition to Khrushchev is doctrinal, it involves the belief that "relaxation" and cultural exchanges with the West undermine the Communist faith and foster a questioning and irreverent attitude in Soviet youth. What they contemptuously call the "spectacle" of Nikita's hobnobbing with Western leaders seems to them a betrayal of the Marxist ethic. Communism's mission, they argue, is to sweep the world, and it will only do so by keeping the West under steadily increasing pressure.