From Malenkov to Khruschev

If there is one lesson to be learned from the Malenkov “resignation,” it is that most of the journalistic guesses about the specific power relations in the Kremlin are utterly fruitless. No one really knows. And if the subject were not so grave, there would be something inexpressibly comic about the “Russian experts” whose expertness consists of little more than a close study of the photographs in Pravda and the order in which the names of the Russian rulers are listed.

Amidst the whirl of speculation a few facts might be remembered. The most fundamental is that the unchanging element in recent Russian history has been the concentration of political power in one man or a very small group, a power exercised through a totalitarian party. Nothing that has happened, neither Malenkov’s rise nor his fall, can yet be said in any serious way to modify this fact. The fundamental relations of social and political power in Russia remain as they have been for the past two decades.

Yet the questions, unanswerable as they may be, persist: Does the rise of Zhukov and Bulganin mean an increase in the power of the army? is there, as Secretary Dulles implies, a split between the party and the state, and is the latter now gaining a certain independence? Simply to ask such questions is to realize how difficult it is to answer them—we lack information, we lack the facts. Does, for example, Bulganin represent the army or the party? And how can we be certain, as most of the “Russian experts” seem to be, that the divisions in the Russian ruling circles take place along institutional lines (army vs. party, secret police vs. administrators etc.) rather than along lines which cross, horizontally, the various institutions?

If the most fundamental fact to remember with regard to the Russian state is the high concentration of power in a small ruling group, the next most important fact is the certainty of continued conflict among the power cliques. So that the occasional announcements of changes in major personnel, while in themselves not sufficient for an analysis of what or between whom this struggle consists of, is clearly evidence that the crisis within the ruling bureaucratic group remains.

The speculation that can probably be dismissed most easily is that of Dulles, which tries to establish some sort of independence in the administrative cadres of the Russian state vis a vis the party. Actually, the one constant in all the power struggles is the party, the omnipresent power center which reaches into every corner of the country—it is this, together with the unprecedented uses of terror and ideology, which marks the distinctive stigmata of the modern totalitarian state. Power in Russia is not primarily economic or military; power resides in political control, which means in the party; given an economy that is statified and a socie...