Who Controls the Police?

In the years when Georgy Malenkov was Stalin's personnel manager, he helped his boss build up a hierarchy of young technocrat-commissars. To get his men into key jobs, Malenkov had to shove out many a stubborn old Bolshevik. At the Commissariat of Heavy Industry, where old-line Commissar Ordzhonikidze gave notice that he would resist purging, Malenkov quietly put in his own security chief. The new man quickly turned over the commissariat's personnel files to the NKVD (central secret police), thus putting them in a position to purge most of Ordzhonikidze's engineers and to get rid of the troublesome old Commissar himself. The new man: a hulking, fresh-faced peasant with an impeccable record in the revolutionary Cheka, Sergei Kruglov.

Kruglov was a natural for the next big job of Soviet industry: helping to organize the sprawling GULAG prison camps into a source of slave labor. He carried out the job with impersonal ruthlessness. During World War II he moved on into SMERSH, the Soviet counterespionage outfit, and at war's end he was so much in Stalin's trust that he was made top security man in the Kremlin. In this role Comrade Kruglov appeared at the Teheran Conference, where he kept close to Stalin's side. He was Molotov's personal bodyguard at San Francisco. He was at Yalta and at Potsdam, where he was introduced to President Truman and received an autographed portrait. Allied newsmen remember his great belly laugh and piercing eyes, noted that he carefully concealed a halting knowledge of English. But for his expertness in security the U.S. awarded him the Legion of Merit, the British made him a Knight of the British Empire.

The Rising Deputy. When Stalin split the unwieldy Soviet security apparatus into two branches, Kruglov became MVD boss, controlling a crack security army of a million men. His deputy: Colonel Ivan Serov. After Stalin's death. Internal Affairs Minister Beria began liquidating top security bosses, but before he had gone far--or far enough--he was himself arrested. The day of Beria's arrest. Kruglov's troops blocked all exits and entrances to Moscow, froze the city tight. The same day, Premier Malenkov named Kruglov Minister of Internal Affairs in place of Beria.

But the star of Georgy Malenkov and his technocrat-commissars was on the wane, that of Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev rapidly rising. Shortly after Malenkov's dramatic resignation (February 1955), the world learned that Kruglov was not, after all, top Soviet security man, but that there had existed for some months a higher State Security Committee, presided over by Kruglov's former deputy Ivan Serov. When Khrushchev went junketing to India, it was Serov who went along with him. Meanwhile, Minister Kruglov's department was under oblique criticism: his organization had failed to curb abuses in such pet Khrushchev projects as the building industry and the Virgin Land.

Seven Lines in Pravda. But the big tip-off that all was not well with Kruglov came recently with the report that six former NKVD interrogators had been tried and executed for the murder of Ordzhonikidze, who in 1937 was said to have died naturally. Last week a seven-line paragraph on the back page of Pravda announced that Kruglov had been "released"' and would be replaced by Nikolai P. Dudorov, a little-known bureaucrat with Khrushchev connections.

In the labyrinthine politics of Soviet power, control of the police apparatus is vital. Khrushchev and his party cadres have apparently gained one more sector on the eve of this week's 20th Party Congress. But they still advance carefully. The Pravda announcement referred to Kruglov as "comrade," indicating that he was not, so far, an "enemy of the people." All five previous bosses of Russia's secret police either died at their jobs or were executed shortly after being removed.

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