Businessman, Soviet Model

In the 16th Century, Richard Chancellor, captain of the Edward Bonaventure, sailed from England to Russia. He reported: "The Russian upper classes overeat and overdrink; but the poor is very innumerable, and live most miserably . . . nor the fish cannot be so stinking nor rotten, but they will eat it."

To lift the eating standards of the 20th Century Soviet people from stinking fish to somewhere near the standards of American sharecroppers, has been the achievement of Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan. In the '305 he visited the U.S., brought back to Russia the Eskimo Pie.

Needed: Good Beer. Mikoyan is the U.S.S.R.'s prime businessman, with a finger in all the pies. Usually brushed off in the U.S. as "foreign trade chief," he was also, until last week, supervisor of all Soviet domestic commerce, director of consumer-goods production, director of the production of food, supervisor of the ministries of ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy. And, in addition, he has been one of the few people with whom Stalin liked to pass his hours of relaxation.

A trim-looking little Armenian, Mikoyan is an exception to the run of humorless Bolsheviks. He is happy-go-lucky, and he can tell a story. He likes to hum a tune, dance, drink. (He promised the Soviet people he would produce a good beer.)

One of Stalin's first assignments from Lenin was to weld together the bickering nationalities of the Caucasus, and it was then that Mikoyan became his henchman. In this stubborn problem, Mikoyan demonstrated that he could be politic, patient, persuasive and in a pinch--like all Bolsheviks--utterly merciless.

To the Slaughter. Mikoyan was born in 1895, and is who's-who'd in the approved Soviet manner as the son of a worker. Like Stalin he once studied for the priesthood. He graduated in 1915 from the Armenian Religious Seminary (Nestorian Catholic) at Tiflis, switched the same year to the Bolshevik Party.

In 1922 he was elected to the Party Central Committee, and in 1926 to the Politburo as a nominee. He has been a full member since 1935. Then he began his long stint as internal and foreign trade commissar, with the goal of raising the Soviet people's standard of eating.

In 1936 Mikoyan studied U.S. meatpacking processes in Chicago. He returned home to set up the huge Mikoyan packinghouse in Moscow and to teach the Russians how to eat cornflakes, drink canned fruit juices. He said then: "We do not need to copy Americans, but we can learn much from their advertising methods."

So far, the Kremlin had not been persuaded that it pays to advertise to the people just what it has in mind when it shifts top administrators.

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