Vydvizhenets

Ever since Joseph Stalin abolished the Politburo last October, the mystery inside an enigma (as Churchill once called it) of the Kremlin has only deepened. Who really administers the country now, the 36-man Presidium or the loman Secretariat (kitchen cabinet)? On the theory that it is the smaller, tighter Secretariat, Western intelligence agents and analysts last week were keeping an eye on a newly powerful figure in it, Nikita Khrushchev.

Khrushchev, at 58 a cold and colorless "100% Stalin man," has been given unfettered authority to discipline 6,880,000 members of the Russian Communist Party, and to weld together even more tightly the parallel monoliths of party and state. Wielding such power, Khrushchev has taken his place in the Kremlin's anteroom alongside Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgy Malenkov and Lavrenty Beria.

Commissar. Born the son of a miner in the tiny Ukrainian village of Kalinovka, Khrushchev is what the Communists call a Vydvizhenets, one who is "pushed forward." As commissar for metropolitan Moscow, he no longer affects a worker's peaked cap, but still orates in the rough accent of his early years as a shepherd lad and a child laborer in the Czar's coal mines.

Khrushchev joined the party in 1918, got his first taste of slaughter in the bloody Civil War that ravaged the Ukraine after the Communist Revolution. In the '20s, he assisted in the liquidation of the kulaks and the mass deportation of millions of Ukrainian peasants; in the second Five Year Plan (1933-38), he bossed the excavation of Moscow's subway stations. His reward was the Order of Lenin and one of the party's toughest assignments: to stamp out the lingering embers of Ukrainian nationalism.

Purges. The Ukrainians, 40 million strong and proud of their own mother tongue, have a local patriotism as fierce as any Scot's. "For many centuries," Khrushchev himself once proclaimed, "the Ukrainian people fought for the right to develop their own culture, build their own schools, publish their own literature . . ." Yet it was to root out just such "bourgeois nonconformity" that Khrushchev was sent to Kiev in 1938. Characteristically, he started with a purge, not only of the "enemies of the people" (i.e., Ukrainian patriots) but of "all Communists who have lost their vigilance." Three thousand local party secretaries went to the cellar or were shipped to Siberia; six of the Ukraine's twelve provinces got new party chiefs. Purger Khrushchev's prize was the Order of the Red Banner of Labor and full membership in the Politburo.

Guerrilla. In World War II, Khrushchev took charge of the mass guerrilla movement that scorched the black earth of the Ukraine in the Wehrmacht's rear, won the Stalingrad Medal for his services as a political commissar. At war's end he went back to the war-charred Ukraine with orders from the Kremlin to 1) revive its agriculture and heavy industry; 2) liquidate the Ukrainians who had collaborated with the Nazis. He succeeded on both counts. "Half the leading workers have been done away with," he boasted in 1947.

In Stalin's Name. Awarded the title of Labor Hero for his mass transfer of Ukrainian farmers to agrogoroda (farm-cities), he was called to Moscow to take charge of all Soviet agriculture. At this point, peasants in the agrogoroda of the Caucasus and Ukraine showed signs of fight. Result: the peasants were crushed, and Nikita Khrushchev got his first setback. Pravda published an unprecedented "Correction of an Error." describing Khrushchev's orders as merely "matters for discussion."

But Khrushchev's doglike devotion to his master's voice, his belief that his was not to reason why, his reputation as a cold, hard doer, loud in his contempt for brighter, more ambitious "rhetoricians," left him still tall in Stalin's eyes, and he was "pushed forward" to greater heights.

Last October, when the Communist Party held its first national convention in 13 years, 72-year-old Stalin made only a brief closing speech (TIME, Oct. 27), but two men were chosen to speak at length in Stalin's name. One was Malenkov, the other Khrushchev. "Long live the Leader," he cried gratefully, "the inspirer, the organizer of ... victories, the Great Stalin." And then, getting down to the cold tasks ahead of him, he warned the party, which he was about to clean up, that it was too full of "yes men, lickspittles and incompetents."

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