New Heir

As Nikita Khrushchev headed for Vienna, TIME'S Moscow Bureau Chief Ed Stevens reported that the Kremlin, where changes in the Soviet top command often happen imperceptibly, now had a new heir apparent. His name: Dmitry Polyansky, 43, a man the world has scarcely heard of.

The man generally ticketed as the anointed heir has long been ponderous Party Secretary Frol Kozlov, 52. Khrushchev himself told Averell Harriman in June 1959 that he had picked Kozlov as his successor. As recently as last April, Kozlov stood beside Khrushchev at the triumphant reception for Spaceman Gagarin. Since then, Kozlov has dropped out of sight. Last week diplomats heard that he had suffered a heart attack (Kozlov is known to have high blood pressure). Other reports were that Kozlov had merely incurred Khrushchev's displeasure on matters of policy. Whatever the reason, Kozlov is now considered permanently shelved.

On Moscow's in-the-know circuit, other somewhat obvious candidates are brusquely dismissed. First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, 65, the hardy survivor of a dozen plots and purges, is an Armenian. Tousle-haired Party Secretary Mikhail Suslov, 58, the "hard line" party theoretician, is rated too theoretical; First Deputy Premier Aleksei Kosygin, 58, a veteran economic planner, is thought to lack the stomach for the job. Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev was earlier kicked upstairs.

More than any other man in the Presidium, Polyansky typifies the new generation of technocratic leaders who are empirical in their outlook and have little time for dogma. The party biography supplies him with the best of credentials. He was born in a poor peasant's hut in the Ukraine on Nov. 7, 1917--the day the Bolsheviks took power. Polyansky missed the confusions and disorders of the civil war and forced collectivization, graduated from the Kharkov Agricultural Institute, then rose steadily through the party's administrative ranks. He is a brash and bouncing extravert. At Kremlin functions, Polyansky does not stand around stiffly with the other Presidium members making small talk with diplomats; he table-hops around the hall, mingling with rank-and-file party functionaries, slapping backs and trading wisecracks.

First sign that Kozlov was slipping in Khrushchev's favor came in early 1958, when Polyansky replaced him as premier of the Russian Soviet Republic, which includes both Moscow and Leningrad and is the biggest and richest of all Soviet republics. Thereafter, it became slowly apparent that Khrushchev was transferring his affections from the flannel-mouthed Kozlov to the nimble young newcomer. In last winter's Party Plenum debate on the agricultural crisis, Polyansky's role was second only to Khrushchev's. When Khrushchev followed up the debate with a two-month, cross-country talkathon to exhort Russia's peasants to greater effort, it was Polyansky he took along to back him up.

Americans had a look at Polyansky when he visited the U.S. in early 1960 as head of the delegation of Soviet republic premiers. His booming voice and bouncing gait distracted attention from the careful cliches of his speeches. But speeches are not what count in Kremlin politics.

Nikita Khrushchev, no more than Stalin, can dictate who shall succeed him once he is dead. But as of now, and if the choice is his, Nikita Khrushchev would choose Polyansky.

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