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Show Khrushchev Ends 10 Year Soviet Post; Brezhnev, Kosygin Head Kremlin Said 'Ailing Health5 Causes Russ Premier To Leave Post MOSCOW (AP) The Nikita Khrushchev era, embracing 10 years of cold war and coexistence, ended Thursday with his retirement retire-ment as premier and top man in the Soviet Communist party "in view of his advanced age and deterioration of his health." HIS PROTEGE, Leonid Brezhnev, at 57, Khrushchev's junior by 13 years, has taken over the key party post. Alexei Kosygin, the man Khrushchev trusted to run the government during his frequent fre-quent absences abroad, has become be-come premier. Khrushchev's jobs are thus divided, as they used to be. In the last two days Khrushchev Khru-shchev has disappeaed from public pub-lic view. A picture of him mounted mount-ed near the Kremlin was taken down Wednesday night. Three hours later, at midnight, came the official announcement of the changes, capping hours of rumors ru-mors that Khrushchev was on the way out. T a s s said the changes were decided upon Wednesday and Thursday. BREZHNEV, a burly native of the Ukraine who has been a Communist 33 years, has assumed as-sumed the party post from which both Joseph Stalin and Khrushchev Khru-shchev controlled Soviet affairs. The premier's role was secondary second-ary fof' many years, and both Stalin and Khrushchev assumed it after first serving as first secretary. sec-retary. It seems likely to become again the No. 2 spot in the So- . viet heirarchy. The Soviet news agency Tass, in carrying the announcement, said Khrushchev was "released" from the top jobs and also lost his membership on the Presidium of the Central Committee, a job he had held since 1939. WHEN KHRUSHCHEV defeated de-feated his leading party opponents oppo-nents in 1957 in a struggle for supreme power, he ousted them from the Presidium and banished ban-ished them to remote jobs. Stalin killed many of those he defeated in power struggles. There was no indication Khrushchev Khru-shchev attended the party Central Cen-tral Committee meeting at which he was shelved. His release as first secretary was agreed upon Wednesday and his retirement as premier was voted Thursday, the announcement said, citing his age and health. TASS SAID Anastas I. Miko-yan, Miko-yan, the durable old Bolshevik who succeeded Brezhnev this summer in the largely ceremonial ceremo-nial job of president, presided at the Thursday meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. So-viet. See KHRUSHCHEV page 4 Khrushchev . . . (Continued from page 1) The action closes a decade during which Khrushchev dominated dom-inated most of the Communist world. He wound up with the Red world shaken as Lenin and Stalin never could have imagined imag-ined in the midst of an ideological ideolog-ical scramble with Red China. WHAT EFFECT the changes will have on the Soviet Union's relations with the West remains to be shown. |