Dear Georgy

"How old might this Gletkin be? . . . He must have taken part in the Civil War and seen the outbreak of the Revolution as a mere boy. That was the generation that had started to think after the flood. It had no tradition and no memories to bind it to the old, vanished world. It was a generation born without umbilical cord, . . . It is just suck a generation of brutes that we need now."

—Comrade Rubashov in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon

The most powerful, most important Gletkin in the Soviet Union reached his Soth birthday last week. The tallowy face of Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov glowered from the front page of every important newspaper in the land. As a birthday gift he got the Order of Lenin, Communism's highest decoration. The Kremlin's praise was laid on with a trowel:

"The Central Committee . . . and Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. warmly greet you, true pupil of Lenin and companion-in-arms of Stalin, outstanding leader of the Communist Party and the Soviet State, on your 50th birthday . . . We wish you, our friend and comrade, dear Georgy Maximilianovich, many years of health. . .'

Special Significance. Such praise comes to each Soviet bigwig on his soth and sometimes his 60th birthday. But there was something in the tone of the Malenkov birthday observance that vibrated political antennae all over the non-Communist world. Soviet censors allowed the Associated Press Moscow bureau to say that it "seemed to have design and special significance." The implication was that Georgy Malenkov, a New Bolshevik who was an adolescent when the Revolution began, had become the likely heir to the aged (72) and ailing Joseph Stalin.

Malenkov is the youngest, most vigorous of the men now within reach of Stalin's mantle, and his hand is on the most powerful political lever in Russia—the Soviet Communist Party apparatus with its 6,000,000 members. He grew to power with Stalin's help. He was studying mechanical engineering and bossing the Communist cell in Moscow's High Technological School when Stalin spotted him in the 1920s and whisked him off to be his personal secretary and snooper. He became known as Stalin's walking card-index file.

By 1941, cold-eyed Georgy Malenkov had grown strong enough to electrify a party conference with rousing attacks on Communist bureaucrats, "windbags" and "ignoramuses." Soon after, several commissars were demoted and Polina Zhemchuzhina, wife of Vyacheslav Molotov, was booted out of her job as Commissar of the Fish Industry. Malenkov was honored with a junior membership in the Politburo, later became boss of the party apparatus.