Tidying Up

RUSSIA Tidying Up

The center of Soviet power is no longer in the Kremlin but a half mile away in the three-story, pastel green and yellow Moscow building that houses the secreariat of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. There, behind a door bearing only the brass nameplate "Comrade Khrushchev, N.S.," the First Secretary has been tidying up the political battlefield following his sensational breakthrough of 1957.

At the year-end Plenum, Khrushchev moved a clutch of his secretariat juniors into the party Presidium in place of Molotov and other old stagers flung out in last June's big command scrap. Of the top Presidium's 15 members, all but five Bulganin, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Shvernik and Kozlov) are now Khrushchev subbordinates who also hold jobs in the party secretariat.

Last week Khrushchev carried his political housewifery into the army. The Red army newspaper published word that* Colonel General F. I. Golikov, 57, a World War II commander (Stalingrad, Kharkov) who served most recently as chief of Moscow's Armored Forces Academy, had been named the army's chief ) political commissar. Golikov replaced Colonel General Alexei Zheltov, a political general who held the post when Marshal Zhukov was dismissed as army chief last summer on charges of interfering with the ideological training of officers. (Zheltov is remembered as the Soviet deputy high commissioner in occupied Austria who remarked of his soldiers' peccadilloes: "So what if an Austrian woman is raped--she may even have enjoyed it. And lootings? It's capitalist property anyhow that they are stealing.") By this little switch, Khrushchev rid himself of the man who helped him get rid of Zhukov, just as he had rid himself of Zhukov three months after the marshal helped him get rid of Molotov & Co. The further result was to give a member of the proffessional officers' corps the unpopular choice of enforcing the December directives 1) making compulsory 50 hours of indoctrination lectures yearly, and 2) making attendance obligatory for all, including highest-ranking officers.

The boss of all the Russias also took time to mend an international fence. Without fanfare or announcement, he repaired to a hunting lodge on the Polish side of the Soviet's western borders, there met for three days in closely guarded secrecy with Poland's Communist Boss Wladyslaw Gomulka and Premier Josef Cyrankiewicz. Likely subjects: 1) inter-party differences brought out at last November's Communist summit meeting in Moscow, notably Gomulka's reluctance to accept revival of any sort of Comintern; 2) coordinated moves to follow up Poland's plan for creating a "denuclearized" zone in central Europe; 3) Gomulka's bullheaded insistence on trying to borrow some $100 million from the U.S. rather than from the U.S.S.R. Results: unknown.

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