Word: bulganins
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...Kremlin's conciliatory new look in the early years of the post-Stalin era. For more than a decade, he was a member of the Soviet Union's ruling elite. Yet by the time he died last week at age 79 after a long illness, Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin had become an unperson in his homeland, an ignored and forgotten figure who in his last years idled away his time strolling along Moscow's boulevards and watching chess games in the park. Izvestia devoted only a paragraph to his obituary and no officials attended the perfunctory 30-minute...
...protégé of Stalin's who nimbly escaped the dictator's endless purges, Bulganin was born in Nizhni Novgorod (now Gorky) to a middle-class family. He joined the Bolshevik Party a few months before the 1917 revolution and advanced quickly in a succession of jobs: member of the secret police, no-nonsense manager of a key Soviet electrical-equipment factory and mayor of Moscow. Although he had no battlefield command experience, Bulganin became a general during World War II. Actually, he was a political commissar, charged with the task of keeping Red Army officers loyal...
Although often derided by party compatriots as a mediocrity, Bulganin had a shrewd instinct for survival. In 1953 he joined the Presidium plot to arrest the hated secret police chief Lavrenty Beria, and two years later he backed Nikita Khrushchev's successful attempt to oust Georgi Malenkov as Premier. As a reward, Bulganin was given Malenkov'sjob...
...Bulganin played a key role in softening the style of Kremlin leadership. As Premier, he launched "cocktail co-existence," giving numerous receptions for diplomats and journalists in Moscow at which he chatted affably and insisted that all the Soviet Union desired was a reduction of world tensions. Bulganin and Khrushchev also carried this message to foreign capitals, where the two bulky leaders were quickly dubbed the "B. & K. road show...
...hated secret-police chief; Beria was executed six months later. Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Communist Party in September 1953, but that powerful post was not enough. Sixteen months later, he ousted Malenkov, the Premier and Stalin's successor, and replaced him with his own puppet, Nikolai Bulganin. Finally, in March 1958, he assumed the premiership himself, acquiring undisputed control...