CAREER OF NEW LEADER

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 26984, 9 March 1953, Page 7

CAREER OF NEW LEADER

Mr Malenkov has long been regarded as Stalin’s successor. With Messrs Molotov and Beria. he shared a position immediately below that of Stalin. He was in charge of the Secretariat and the Orgburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the organisations through which party control is exercised; he was one of the most influential members of the Politburo. the policy-making body of the party, and the only Soviet leader to have a prominent place in these three key party organisations; and he was a deputy-chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, the official government of the Soviet Union, the core of which is formed by Politburo members. Like Stalin. Mr Malenkov based his career firmly on control of the day-to-day machinery of the Communist Party. From the very start of his career, Mr Malenkov was one of the bright young men of the Soviet Union’s inner circle He was born in 1901, in the nearSibenan town of Chkalov (formerly Orenburg), probably of bourgeois stock. His childhood and youth are hidden in the usual Bolshevik secrecy concerning the personal affairs of Russia’s leaders. He enlisted in the Red Army in 1919 during the civil war, and almost immediately became political commissar of a cavalry squadron. Admitted to party membership in 1920, he soon became political commissar of the Turkestan district of the Red Army, and then held similar positions in the Caucausus.

He completed his education in the Moscow Higher Technical College, from 1922 to 1925, where he concenon P r °b lem s of administration. At the same time he was secretary of the student party organisation and, most important of all. he managed io catch and hold Stalin’s eye. a hold he seemed to retain permanently. From 1925 to 1933 the official biography says Mr Malenkov was “engaged in important work for the Central Committee.” During most of this time he was Stalin’s private secretary. During these years he began to accumulate a card file which by 1949 was said to contain details of every Soviet official of note, and which was invaluable to Mr Andrei Vyshinsky's prosecutions in the 1936 to 1938 purges. Mr Malenkov’s sudden burst into international prominence came in 1941, when he addressed the all-union party conference held in that year. He was appointed alternate member of the Politburo and shortly afterwards became a member of the State Defence Committee, which exercised supreme governmental as well as party power until the end of the war in 1945. During the war he was put in charge of aircraft production. He raised the annual output of fighter bombers to 40,000 at the end of 1943 by ignoring all other types of aircraft, and maintained it at that figure till the end of the war. He was also directly responsible for the tremendous build-up of all types of military aircraft, including long-range bombers, which followed the expansion of the Soviet aviation industry in 1949-51. The party rewarded him with the titles of Hero of Socialist Labour, the 2_ r d er of Lenin, the Hammer and Sickle Gold Medal, and other high Soviet- decorations.