Russia: A Treatment for Tularemia & A Promotion for the Cops

According to the men who ousted him, Nikita Khrushchev was feverishly prone to "harebrained scheming." Last week the 330-man Soviet Central Committee offered what it hoped would be a cure for that particular strain of political tularemia. Meeting for the first time since it gave Khrushchev the boot, it ordered a top-to-bottom renovation of the Russian Communist Party structure —and in the process assured itself of more internal chaos, discontent and power struggles.

Fix Needed. What the new Russian leaders are trying to correct is a system started two years ago when Khrushchev split the party bureaucracy into a brace of inevitably competitive economic units: agricultural and industrial. K. hoped that a bifurcated bureaucracy would give his underlings more chance to specialize and thereby help production. But he was only falling victim to a political extension of Parkinson's Law: though the number of bureaucrats was doubled, each man felt bound to covet his opposite number's authority and neglect his own job.

To fix all this, the Central Committee picked Nikolai Viktorovich Podgorny, 61, onetime protege of Nikita and a specialist in party organization. During last week's meeting, Podgorny formally proposed a re-merger of the agricultural and industrial segments of the party, a return to the "territorial principle" of leadership at local and regional levels. The proposal was passed unanimously, and Podgorny was charged with administering the shakeup—or shakeback—which probably will begin after the Supreme Soviet, Russia's rubber-stamp Parliament, meets Dec. 9.

With the start of de-Khrushchevization, first things came first: Nikita's son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei was fired from the Central Committee for "mistakes in his work." Next, the top of the Soviet hierarchy was reshuffled.

Rising Stars. What with his powerful new assignment, Podgorny now appears solidly ensconced behind Brezhnev as party Second Secretary. Once Nikita's favorite whipping boy—he was publicly tongue-lashed by K. for failing to grow enough corn in the Ukraine, regained favor by doubling Ukrainian grain sales the next year—Podgorny resembles his former patron physically, including moon face and broad peasant shoulders. But he is more controlled and aloof.

His major competitor in the party Presidium, Dmitry Stepanovich Polyansky, 47, is just as cool but not quite as stiff. A bright, backslapping opportunist, Polyansky shares his birthday with the Bolshevik Revolution, has been working quietly behind the scenes since Khrushchev's ouster (during which he delivered the recitation of Nikita's agricultural sins).

Either man could move to the top in the months ahead, but both will have to keep an eye on a handful of ambitious apparatchiki who were elevated to positions of new authority. Among them: