Word: malenkov
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...Malenkov has been married twice. His first wife was one of Molotov's secretaries. He divorced her and married Elena Khrushchev, a handsome actress. The present Mrs. Malenkov turned from the stage to the schools. As director of Moscow University, she motors in a long black Zis (the U.S.S.R.'s copy of the Packard) from her husband's Kremlin quarters, dresses in severe, mannish suits, is served by two housemaids, rates an office with a thick Persian rug, a mahogany desk, a daily vaseful of roses, an ornate silver samovar...
...Malenkov's parental and class origins hardly anything is known. He was born on Jan. 8, 1902 in Orenburg, since renamed Chkalov in honor of the famed Soviet flyer who in 1937 hopped over the North Pole to the U.S.* His father was presumably a Cossack subaltern. Orenburg, on the southern flank of the Urals, where Europe meets Asia, was in those days a terminal for camel caravans from Turkestan. It also had the reputation of being a restless, independent place. The Cossacks and peasants of the Orenburg region had mounted one of the most troublesome popular uprisings...
...uprising of 1917-18 came to Orenburg while Malenkov was a pupil at the local high school. He cut his classes, joined the Bolshevik army, fought in bitter campaigns against the local anti-Bolshevik forces of Ataman (Chief) Alexander Dutov. At 18, Georgy Malenkov joined the party, was assigned as politruk, i.e., political commissar, to a Red army battalion. He was an effective indoctrinator, kept a keen check on the loyalty of his men. Within three years he moved up to be commissar for a regiment, then for a brigade, and finally for the whole "Eastern and Turkestan Fronts...
...school. The party had its eye on him. In 1922 he entered Moscow's Higher Technological School. While he studied mechanical engineering, he kept on practicing political technique. He became boss of the school's Communist Party cell. Then, by a chance not clearly known, Student Malenkov met and impressed Stalin, who whisked him from mechanical to political engineering...
...party, under General Secretary Stalin, had need of an engineer such as young Malenkov. The Communist apparatus was grinding and bumping under the pressure of Old Bolshevik rivalry and suspicion. While Stalin cut down and purged his rivals, Malenkov served him as personal secretary and snooper. The student technician of power had charge of all party dossiers in the middle and upper levels. He developed an astonishing memory, became a walking file from which Stalin could extract at any moment whatever record was needed to help along the ruthless struggle for power...