Beria For Yezhov

Next to Stalin the most powerful man in Soviet Russia for the past two years has been Nikolai Yezhov, Commissar for Internal Affairs since September 1936. Comrade Yezhov is the man who in 1937 put on the largest and costliest purge to date, for which he provided the evidence, the victims and the executioners. Last week a small, back-page notice in Izvestia informed Russians that Comrade Yezhov had been relieved of his post at his own request, would be superseded by Laurentius Pavlovich Beria, until last summer head of the political police in the Transcaucasus, since then Yezhov's assistant.

Least ominous explanation of the change is Comrade Yezhov's "ill health." He is known to be suffering from tuberculosis, overwork, and possibly from poisoning, if the fantastic accusation that his predecessor, Henry Yagoda, sprayed the executive office in the Commissariat for Internal Affairs with atomized mercuric poison be true. Comrade Yezhov will continue to be Commissar for Water Transportation, secretary to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and a member of the Politburo.

On the other hand, if Boss Stalin has at last concluded that Nikolai Yezhov's drastic thinning of the top-rank Soviet administrators, generals and diplomats was itself a peculiarly subtle kind of sabotage. then Comrade Yezhov's removal last week was the beginning of his end. Every previous Commissar of Internal Affairs has eventually fallen victim to his successor.

Unlike Nikolai Yezhov, who is small, saturnine, mysterious and narrowly intelligent, new Commissar Beria is tall, heavyset, fond of speechmaking and public appearances. Not so uncouth as his predecessor, Laurentius Beria, despite a more polished exterior and pince-nez, can be just as bloodthirsty and relentless, has been a professional man hunter since his first assignment to the Cheka soon after the Bolshevik Revolution.

A Georgian peasant like Stalin, Beria in 1917, when still a student joined the Georgian Communist Party, then presided over by Stalin. Until last summer all his work was in the Transcaucasian republics, especially Georgia, where he headed the secret police for 16 years. He is known as the "Stalin of the Caucasus." Now 39, he is one of several younger officials recently given high government posts which the oft-purged older generation of Bolsheviks is apparently either incompetent or afraid to fill.

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