Significant Shake-Dps

The man who sold Stalin the idea that South Korea was another ripe plum waiting to fall into the Soviet basket was three-star General Terenty F. Shtykov, boss of the Soviet armed forces in North Korea and later Soviet ambassador to Pyongyang. When the Communist invasion unexpectedly ran into allied armed opposition, Stalin pulled the rank and ribbons off Shtykov and sent him into that twilight of disfavor which has so often preceded the long night for Communist bigwigs. But last week Shtykov surprised the world by springing back into the news: at Vladivostok (only 400 miles from his old stamping ground) he took over the regional Communist Party secretaryship, the key job in the Soviet Far East.

There was more politics than persistence in Shtykov's comeback. The man he replaced was Nikolai N. Shatalin, who had been in the top Moscow secretariat when Georgy Malenkov was Premier, but had been literally sent to Siberia when Khrushchev and Bulganin took over. Shtykov's return to favor is the latest in a series of significant changes in the Communist Party superstructure in the past month (others: in the Russian Republic, Lithuania, Uzbekistan). This sudden flurry of shake-ups apparently represents Khrushchev's increased grasp of the party machinery on the eve of this week's 20th Communist Party Congress in Moscow, the first since Stalin's death.

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