Word: bulganin
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...Bulganin joined the party at the age of 22, a few crucial months before the Revolution. He thus qualifies as one of the few Old Bolsheviks still in power in the Kremlin (the others: Voroshilov, Molotov, Kaganovich). Bulganin served his apprenticeship as an agitator, making trouble among the textile workers. After the fighting, he switched to the Cheka, where he bloodily put the agitators down. It was Kaganovich who sent Bulganin to Moscow to serve on the High Soviet of People's Economy. The High Soviet's appointed task: "To catch up with and surpass America...
...Bulganin was appointed director of the huge Moscow Electrical Station. He knew little about engineering, but the official biography explains that he "completed his education on the run, from the technicians under him." A Swiss engineer, selling machinery there at the time, says that overnight, slackness vanished in the plant. "When a man was no good," says the Swiss engineer, "he would be there one day and next day-pfft...
Mayor of Moscow. As a result of Bulganin's efforts, the Moscow Electrical Station fulfilled its target in the first Five-Year Plan in less than three years. Bulganin's reward was an assignment to succeed Kaganovich as chairman of the Moscow Soviet-in effect, Mayor of Moscow. Bulganin built boulevards and six bridges across the Moskva River. From Britain and France he imported such "improvements" as a fleet of trolley buses and a set of spanking white gloves for the capital's traffic cops. Bulganin worked with Kaganovich and Khrushchev, then a district party boss...
...Bulganin, as mayor, traveled widely in Western Europe. Another mayor, Konrad Adenauer of Cologne, asked him how he handled "Moscow's 4,000 city councilors." Bulganin answered in fluent German, as if explaining everything: "We simply hold our meetings in the opera house." Said Adenauer 20 years later: "I had an excellent impression of Herr Bulganin. Meanwhile, he has become Premier and I have become Chancellor. We both have done quite well...
Jack-of-All-Trades. Bulganin's administrative talents soon caught Stalin's eye. He was-,and still is-an energetic jack-of-all-problems, in business, bureaucracy or statecraft. Knowing little about banking, he became head of the Gosbank, Soviet equivalent of the U.S. Federal Reserve. Neither chemist nor metallurgist, (serving alongside Molotov) he whipped Russian production of explosives and gun metals to record heights...