Word: beria
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...technique to Communist maneuver. Not even Stalin could match his deft juggling of friend and foe in shifting combinations and permutations. Moving into the key post of party secretary after Stalin's death, he teamed with Malenkov and Marshal Zhukov in 1953 to liquidate Secret Police Boss Beria. But that was the last time he had recourse to Stalin's murderous methods of eliminating rivals. When he joined with Molotov and Kaganovich to force Malenkov out of the premiership in 1955, the ousted Malenkov was merely demoted to the harmless Ministry of Electric Power Stations, and kept around...
Pigs & Sandhogs. Few would have picked Khrushchev as Joseph Stalin's heir. This was the muzhik from Kalinovka whom Stalin commanded to dance the gopak, the hayseed at whom Beria sneered years ago as "our beloved chicken statesman," "our potato politician." When Stalin put Nikita in charge of the Moscow party back in the '30s, Khrushchev used to don navvies' rough clothes, crawl down to visit the sandhogs tunneling out the new subway, take a hand with a pneumatic drill, and talk with the lads in the unprintable language for which, even in the Kremlin, he is famous. The palace...
Zhukov soon formed an alliance with Khrushchev. He may have helped him depose Malenkov as First Party Secretary. When the showdown with Beria came, it was Zhukov who ordered the army's tanks into the heart of Moscow to paralyze Beria's police. Elevated to Defense Minister, Zhukov was the man who ordered Soviet tanks into Budapest ("liquidating fascism," he called it) to crush the Hungarian rebellion for Khrushchev. Last June, when the Malenkov-Molotov-Kaganovich forces mustered a majority in the Presidium, it was. Zhukov who saved Khrushchev by throwing the army's support...
Changing Masters. In the struggle for position after Stalin's death, Mikoyan showed supreme agility. He joined in the gang-up on Beria. As the original consumer-goods man he ought to have found Malenkov's breathing-spell policy congenial. But his shrewd nose for tactics told him not to commit himself to Malenkov. Although First Party Secretary Khrushchev might have seemed to Mikoyan a clodhopping countryman, Khrushchev had one prime quality that Mikoyan valued-political skill. Khrushchev could handle himself well in party scraps, and alone among Soviet leaders he could talk to the people. Outwardly...
...Kremlin's jauntiest dresser and spriest waltzer. His wife Anush (whom he found in Rostov's Armenian colony just after the revolution) calls him babnik, which means flatterer. She once declared that he was one of only two hand-kissing, courtly gentlemen in Moscow (the other: Lavrenty Beria). They have four sons (another was killed in World War II): two are in the air force, a third is reportedly a wild-living, peg-trousered boidevardier in Gorky Street's "jet set." Mikoyan's brother Artem, an air force general, is famous in his own right...