Foreign News: KREMLIN COMER-

NAMED last week as First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union (a rank shared only with the seemingly indestructible agile Armenian, Anastas Mikoyan): Frol Romanovich Kozlov, a man all but unknown even to foreign specialists in Soviet affairs.

Early Life. Born Aug. 17, 1908, in the village of Loshchinino, southeast of Moscow, and like a good Communist leader, described as the son of peasants. Started work in a textile plant at 15, joined the Young Communist League and, at 18 in 1926, the Communist Party itself. The party sent him to a workers' college and then to Leningrad Polytech.

Career Beginnings. Sent to Izhevsk in the Urals as a foreman in a steel plant, he was shifted in 1939 into the ranks of Russia's real managers, as a party secretary in his plant. A Red junior executive marked for bigger things, he was brought to Moscow in 1944 to work for the party's Central Committee. Otherwise, nothing is known of his war years.

Khrushchev's Man. His climb to power dates from the murky 1949 days of the "Leningrad Case" (TIME, July 22, 1957), when the then powerful Georgy Malenkov liquidated the backers of Andrei Zhdanov. Kozlov emerged as Leningrad city party leader. His writings of that day, like every one else's, were stock Stalinist: "The party is the holy of holies; protecting its purity is the duty of a Communist." Even "the loss of a party card is a crime against the party."

When Khrushchev became party First Secretary in 1953, he journeyed to Leningrad to install Kozlov as party leader for all of Leningrad province, replacing a Malenkov supporter. In February 1957 Kozlov became an alternate member of the ruling Presidium of the party's Central Committee. Last June, when Khrushchev toppled Malenkov, Molotov & Co., Kozlov reached full membership on the Presidium. An experienced manipulator of the party apparatus, he is believed to be the man who at that crucial moment did most to quickly round up the 130-odd members of the Central Committee to rescue Khrushchev from defeat in the Presidium. In December he became Premier of the Russian Republic, largest in the Soviet Union.

Personality & Appearance. Half a head taller than the stubby Khrushchev, handsome Frol Kozlov has curly grey-blond hair and was photographed for his Pravda biography in an unorthodox button-down shirt. He is rated quick, intelligent, forceful, a good speaker with an assured presence, as if sometimes allowed to have his own way in what he has to say.