Courtiers B. & K.

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KING: How, madame-Russians? PRINCESS: Ay, in truth, my lord; trim gallants, full of courtship and of state. --Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost

They came bearing royal gifts (Mongolian horses and a baby bear) to court British favor, but they were in a hostile land. Russia's Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev knew it the moment their sleek cruiser Ordzhonikidze slid into Portsmouth harbor last week.

A 19-gun salute boomed from the British aircraft carrier Bulwark, and First Lord of the Admiralty Viscount Cilcennin stepped forward briskly to shake hands. "This is an historic moment," said Bulganin, shuffling past the guard of honor. On the train to London there was Chateau Lafite-Rothschild '50 for lunch, but when Khrushchev asked whether he could take the bottle along with him, the waiter said: "I'm sorry, I can't do that, sir. Regulations." At London's cavernous Victoria terminal Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, towering head and shoulders above B. & K., greeted them with an official smile and a correct speech. Bulganin pulled a speech script out of his pocket, keynoted: "We have to live together on one planet." Outside Victoria, thousands of Londoners coolly watched them drive away.

Gumshoes in the Bin. At famed Claridge's, a place for princes, maharajas and others who do not count their money, a Red flag hung from the marquee masthead. Detectives had already checked the coal bins for concealed bombs, replaced foreign-born waiters and busboys with a specially screened British floor staff. A squad of 80 uniformed constables jostled the crowd outside, while inside the hotel scores of bowler-hatted Scotland Yard gumshoes threaded their way among tables crowded by Mayfair society. As B. & K. hustled through the side entrance and up the stairway to the 50-room Russian reservation, there was dead silence. Said a social voice: "Claridge's will never be the same again."

Afterwards, sightseeing around London in a four-car cavalcade escorted by 21 motorcycle cops, Nikita Khrushchev recovered his old form. When the dean of war-damaged St. Paul's Cathedral pointed to the place "where Hitler dropped his bomb," Khrushchev cracked: "Looking ahead, Dean, you won't need a repair job if an H-bomb falls." At the Tower of London, told that Tower ravens are protected because of the legend that if they disappear the British Empire will perish, Khrushchev observed mischievously: "I don't see any ravens."

Next day, as another undemonstrative crowd watched B. & K. enter Buckingham Palace "to sign the book" (the royal family was away at Windsor), police jumped on a small boy with a toy air rifle, hustled him away. At the Soviet embassy luncheon, over vodka and caviar, Khrushchev made an appeal to British reasonableness: "Both in the Conservative Party and in the ranks of the Opposition there are those who are in favor and those who are against our visit. We regard such a situation as natural, and it does not embarrass us." Khrushchev softly pleaded for peaceful coexistence: "As people say, you have to live with the neighbor that God has sent you and not the neighbors you would like to have."

Later at Downing Street, packed from end to end by a curious and curiously quiet crowd, the official talks began under strict wraps "to encourage Russian frankness." That night at No. 10, Prime Minister Eden gave a banquet, at which Britain's great appeared in "lounge suits" in deference to their guests' limited wardrobe. B. & K. came in voluminous gabardine topcoats over grey suits. But the hit of the evening was Sir Winston Churchill, pink and beaming at the old familiar door, waving a cigar and giving a V sign. Bulganin gave a jovial speech in which he obliquely compared Khrushchev to Churchill.

At breakfast next morning cops intercepted a letter for B. & K. It contained one snub-nosed bullet and a warning that "each of you will get one of these inside you." On the way to the Lord Mayor of London's luncheon, there were boos along the route. Said Khrushchev: "I'm not displeased. It shows some people have spirit."

Old Saws. At the Mansion House the elite of London's financial and industrial world was waiting to meet them. As they took their seats in the vast gold-columned Egyptian hall, they were serenaded by the Honorable Artillery Company band. Bulganin replied to toasts in a long, rambling speech which made the assembled capitalists fidget. When he quoted "an old Russian saying that Moscow was not built in a day," the hall rocked with laughter, without Bulganin having any idea what the joke was about.

That evening at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, as guests of the Admiralty, it was Khrushchev's turn to talk. The "only way out" of the present world situation, Khrushchev suggested, is "to give up war altogether" and "ultimately to abolish armed forces." Entering the college, B. & K. had been rudely greeted by a loudspeaker from across the river Thames: "Here come Marshal Bulganin and Khrushchev. They are here to destroy mankind and disrupt our Empire." The voice was that of a member of the League of Empire Loyalists which, earlier in the week, had presented Prime Minister Eden with a 10-ft.-long wooden spoon to illustrate an old--but non-Russian--saying: "He must have a long spoon who sups with the Devil."

Something had plainly changed in London since Georgy Malenkov's enthusiastic welcome only three weeks before. The pinpricks (or possibly worse) from disgruntled exiles and refugees (there are a quarter of a million Iron Curtain exiles in Britain) had been expected and discounted. But where were the lipstick-heavy shopgirls and the schoolchildren eager to be bemused by the roly-poly Russians? The subtle, artful labors of Foreign Office schedulemakers, hoping to keep B. & K. from public contact, had proved an unnecessary precaution.

London, which had taken Hitler's worst, could also take Khrushchev and Bulganin's best.

The fact was that in its first five days, the B. & K. act was proving one of the great flops of modern diplomacy. In full view of the world, and unexpectedly, they had fallen flat on their faces. What had gone wrong? Hadn't they forehandedly sent Malenkov ahead, and hadn't he reported the atmosphere friendly? Of course, all those disagreeable press fellows led by Punch Editor Malcolm Muggeridge had been stirring up trouble. And it had been a serious tactical mistake to send Khrushchev's unsavory friend, MVD General Ivan Serov, to check up on security precautions. But something deeper was involved in Britain's changed mood. Its root lay in Khrushchev's recent exposure of Stalin as a mass murderer, anti-Semite, traitor and fool. There was something extremely distasteful in receiving the mad Stalin's old associates, and acknowledged heirs, at a moment when his--and their--crimes were so vividly in the public mind.

Visiting Britain's atomic research center at Harwell, B. & K. met their first British workingman: Vincent McCarthy, 35, a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. McCarthy shot a direct question at Khrushchev: "Can we expect that the Russian government will now progress to the point where they can withstand criticism from free trade unions and religious denominations without having to apply pressure?" Khrushchev was determined to turn his back on taunts. He answered: "If you take into account our point of view, we will take into account yours. If we start criticizing each other, we shall not get anywhere."

Meeting such hostility was nothing new to Nikita Khrushchev. What had been new was the spontaneous mass enthusiasm he had stirred during his Asian tour last year. He was not used to having such crowds with him. Dealing with hostility has been his specialty.

Man for the Job. hrushchev's big thrust for power began back in 1937 when Stalin picked him to pacify the Ukraine, then in ferment as a result of Stalin's brutal collectivization of the rich farm lands. What made Khrushchev the right man for the job was that he was a peasant and could be expected to handle the peasants in terms they understood.

Nikita Khrushchev had been born in a mud-and-reed hut in the village of Kalinovka on the Kursk steppe, where as a barefoot boy he had tended cattle. He grew up to have the Russian peasant's rough manners (even today he sometimes stuffs his mouth with food at public banquets, picks his teeth with his fingers). He was short (5 ft. 5 in.) and thickset with a round face and jug ears. He had small, dark, merry, merciless eyes and was as shrewd and crafty as he looked.

In 1918 he joined the Bolshevik Party and got an intense, if defective, party education. On his untrammeled peasant mind Marxist-Leninist theory had the power of revelation. He took the Stalinist line and stuck to it. T hus he became one of the realists of Communism, an undeviating supporter of power-in-being. With his bull-like energy, ready grasp of slogans, he was soon shouldering his way through the party ranks.

Taking Over. In the Ukraine, Khrushchev (at 43) became absolute boss of a country three times the size of England and almost as populous. He spoke Russian with a phony Ukrainian accent, put on an embroidered Ukrainian shirt and wore a kartuz (workingman's cap). He went everywhere, bawling out party organizers, bureaucrats and collective farm managers, but he listened carefully to the agricultural experts sent in from Moscow. He exchanged quips with the farmers, drank buckets of vodka, and got a laugh out of most situations. Behind the facade of bonhomie he was ruthlessly liquidating all who stood in the way of Stalin's plans. Stubborn peasants were turned over to his friend, NKVD Colonel Ivan Serov. and shipped off in boxcars to Siberia; Jewish culture in the Ukraine was (to use a recent Communist phrase) "wiped out."

But Khrushchev's principal and most expert job was reconstructing the Ukrainian Communist Party. The old leaders, including his predecessor Stanislav Kossior, were executed, and the membership recast. The new party was a tight, tough instrument of Stalinist policy.*

Khrushchev subsequently had his ups and downs with Stalin. In World War II (and after becoming a full-fledged member of the Politburo), he was sent back to the Ukraine.

Last February, at the 20th party congress in Moscow, he elected to tell party leaders about some of his troubles with Stalin.

During the first German attack on the Ukraine, Khrushchev had called Stalin to ask for more guns, but Stalin had refused to answer the phone, put Malenkov on the line instead to say that all available guns were being sent to Leningrad. Later, after the Red army counterattacked Kharkov, Khrushchev had called Stalin at his summer resort to ask for a change of plan. Again Stalin had got Malenkov to say no, with the result that Kharkov was lost and the overextended Red army driven back across the Don. The old dictator had also treated him contemptuously, Khrushchev complained, called him Khokhol, a derogatory Russian name for a Ukrainian. "Khokhol, dance the gopak," Stalin had ordered at a Kremlin party. The gopak is a fast, vigorous Ukrainian dance, and the 52-year-old Nikita had danced it. Stalin, in his last days, said Khrushchev tearfully, "was so sickly suspicious and obsessed" that he often looked at people like Khrushchev and asked: "Why are you so shifty today? Why have you today turned your eyes the other way? Why do you not look me straight in the face?"

But it was not fear of Stalin that made Khrushchev accept the job of secretary of the Moscow region party committee in 1949. Three years later, at the 19th party congress, it was plain gratitude which made him say, "Our beloved Stalin, great leader and genius-like teacher," as he accepted one of the ten key secretaryships of the new party Central Committee. The truth was Stalin liked and encouraged Khrushchev. Immediately after the dictator's death Khrushchev had inherited enough of Stalin's power within the party structure to take over the party secretaryship, Stalin's old job, from Georgy Malenkov, who became Premier.

Jeweled Cuff Links. The Soviet story in the past three years is largely the story of Nikita Khrushchev's effort to wear the mantle of Stalin's leadership.

He threw himself into the struggle with all the old vigor of his Ukrainian days. By now he wore the best clothes that Moscow could buy, dark suits and white shirts with jeweled cuff links. But his method was old and roughhewn: reorganize the party from the grass roots upwards. He launched a series of campaigns against inefficient bureaucrats, bad building, poor farming. The campaigns gave him the opportunity to shift party personnel. In his great Virgin Lands project he created a place to send the unwanted. In a couple of years he had shifted some 20% to 40% of the 327,500 party secretaries in the Soviet Union.

He had been able to make only a few shifts in the top party apparatus, the most important of which was to get Serov in the top State Security job. But neither Khrushchev nor Serov could liquidate in the old Stalin way. Not only did they not yet have the power, but there was strong resistance within the party and among the mass of Russian people against a return of a Stalinist-type dictatorship.

In his brief period as Party Secretary, Georgy Malenkov, evidently sensing this feeling, had appointed an old Communist named Andreev to the Party Control apparatus with orders to liberalize the prison system. Andreev had released some thousands of old politicals before Khrushchev was able to fire him. Complained Khrushchev: "Because some cases have been set aside, some comrades have begun to manifest a certain distrust for the workers of the State Security agencies." Seeing a minor victory over the hated police, people began to manifest a desire for other freedoms. Premier Malenkov promised them masses of consumer goods, but before this radical idea could get off the ground he was demoted to the Ministry of Electrical Power Stations.

Khrushchev could hit his own broad chest at an embassy party and say, "I am heavy industry--boom, boom," then tap Malenkov's chest and say, "He is light industry--peep, peep." Or at another party a tipsy Khrushchev could embrace Malenkov and weep, "The capitalist press says I want to hang my little Georgy." In the Kremlin jungle game of tiger eat tiger, humor is sabertoothed.

To cover a situation of stalemate in the power struggle, the old Leninist phrase "collective leadership" was revived. The apparatus Stalin left behind was neither youthful, vigorous, nor rich in ideas. Some oldtimers like Molotov (66) are apparently slated for retirement, or about to be kicked upstairs, say, to the presidency in place of aging (75), ailing Marshal Voroshilov, who has taken to drinking heavily. Khrushchev, at 62, is in no shape to engage in a long-term fight and this makes him basically unsure of his position. On the other hand there is Malenkov (54) and a group of Central Committee secretaries, such as Mikhail Suslov, Peter Pospelov and Dmitry Shepilov (who masterminded the Czech arms deal with Nasser), whose main concern seems to be a desire to see that no one else gets too much power. This leaves the balance of power to be exercised, in uneasy tension, by such forces as the Red marshals (backed by the army cadres in the party), the industrial elite (technocrat commissars), or the bureaucracy. When it became clear to the party leaders a couple of years ago that this situation was unlikely to resolve itself for some time to come, and certainly not without great internal stress, they saw that what was needed for their mutual and collective protection was a long period of peace and security. This brought up the question of foreign policy.

Points at Parties. The "collective leaders" suddenly emerged as partygoers. None was more popular than round, ruddy-faced Nikita with his big smile and happy handclasp. When engaged in engrossing conversation he grabbed his victim by the lapel or arm, or finger-pinched him vigorously in the chest. When bored (which was seldom), his eyes assumed a far away look. When in his cups (which was often), a scar under his nose and the three moles on his cheeks stood out from his flushed face. He offended the French by saying that in Paris (which he has never visited) "you cannot walk down a street without being accosted by a woman." Such bluff, blunt indiscretions were at least human -and something new in Soviet foreign relations. But this was not all.

The Communist leaders were willing to make concessions abroad in order to be free to work out their quarrels in peace at home. First Khrushchev and Mikoyan went to Red China to insure Mao's friendship with promises of new industrial supplies. Then they ate crow at the lean table of the renegade Tito, where Nikita stayed drunk most of the time. After that came the parley at the summit, which they bought into cheaply by freeing Austria. But for all the sweet talk at Geneva, the Russians were unwilling (or felt no need) to make any real end to the cold war in Europe, or agree to any solution of the big problem, which was Germany. B. and K. went galumphing off to India and Burma where in a riot of flowers and oriental emotionalism Khrushchev hit his old demagogic stride. Asian adulation went to Nikita's head. Those who were waiting for Communism to crumble (i.e., the West), he told Pravda readers, would have "to wait until shrimps learn to whistle."

Home from his foreign exploits, Khrushchev began preparing for his major triumph as First Secretary: dominating his first party congress. His 47,000-word speech was loaded with tables of production, learned quotes from Lenin, and exhortations to efficiency and greater production. It sounded like (and might easily have been) a rehash of one of Stalin's old speeches. In Stalin's mighty fashion, Khrushchev took lofty cracks at top party comrades, referred to Malenkov as an "incorrigible braggart," and told how it had been "necessary to correct" Molotov on an important ideological point.

It was the attitude of a man who undoubtedly considered himself Stalin's legitimate heir. But crafty little Anastas Mikoyan, the Armenian trader, had been chosen to deliver a speech (obviously approved by others in the leadership) which snatched the rug out from under Nikita's big feet. Mikoyan attacked Stalin's Short Course of the History of the Party, for years the ideological basis of all such Communists as Khrushchev. He dismissed Stalin's phony account of the civil war and talked of "party leaders of that time who were wrongly declared to have been enemies of the people." Adding insult to injury, Mikoyan named Khrushchev's liquidated predecessor Kossior as one such and asserted, to the sound of laughter, that "Ukrainian historians will be found who will write a history of the emergence and development of the Ukrainian socialist state better than some Moscow historians." The speech, opening up the whole case against Stalin, and by indirection the complicity of his associates, was a sensation.

For two days it was withheld from print. Then, as the 20th congress ended, Khrushchev called his famous secret meeting in which he tearfully blabbed the whole story of Stalin's mass murders, torturings and evil motives. Nikita's reasons could be deduced: if the party was going to open that one up, he was going to be chief opener. If they intended to pin a guilt label to him, he would show that they were all equally guilty. By twice indicating in his speech that Georgy Malenkov was Stalin's most trusted collaborator, he wanted to make certain that Malenkov (whom Muscovites now somewhat affectionately call Georgy Neudachnik--Georgy the Unsuccessful) came in for his share of guilt.

Leaked to the world press and foreign diplomats at a French embassy party (attended by Mikoyan), the story exploded on the foreign Communist Parties and rebounded in the Soviet Union with atomic force. In Soviet newspapers it was the signal for an intense campaign against "the cult of personality." Ostensibly the campaign was directed against the dead Stalin, and busts of the dictator began falling all over the land. But it was also a warning to Khrushchev. The subsequent acknowledgment of Stalin's anti-Semitism was also a reminder of Khrushchev's work in the Ukraine. As the Central Committee began rehabilitating liquidated Red army officers, Nikita's chosen partner Bulganin suffered a severe loss of prestige. Marshal Zhukov, who had been downgraded (and all but liquidated) by top military commissar Bulganin at the high point of his great wartime victories, had an old score to settle.

In Moscow, where people are quick to catch the political drift, anyone can get a laugh today by starting out in high-pitched Russian, "Ya i moi droog . . ." a phrase which appears often in Khrushchev's speeches, meaning "I and my friend . . ." i.e., Bulganin. Jokes about Bim and Bom, famed Russian circus clowns, have suddenly found a new popularity in Moscow.

Boo & Chant. In Britain last week Bim and Bom (or B. & K.) doggedly labored at their act, even though their audiences were cool. At Oxford some 5,000 people, mostly students, broke police lines to crowd around them booing and chanting: "Poor old Joe, poor old Joe!" (to the tune of Stephen Foster's Old Black Joe). Bulganin stood up smiling and raising his arms like a boxer acknowledging applause, signed autographs and patted student cheeks. In New College quadrangle, students set off a huge firecracker which made B. & K. jump, led Bulganin to quip: "Are they making an atomic bomb?"

It was now clear that the traveling troubadours wanted, and perhaps badly needed, a success in Britain to take home. "Come to Russia," Khrushchev told Labor Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell. "It's not the same now." They were wooing not only Britons. As Khrushchev told Eden: "We hope you'll help us to have friendlier relations with the U.S." To gain their end, they might yet give Sir Anthony Eden some concession that he could regard as a diplomatic victory. If the Russians had any genuine concessions to make, so much the better. But gone was the worried feeling in many an Englishman's heart that other Englishmen (though of course not himself) might prove dangerously susceptible to Soviet blandishments.

The British were, in fact, beginning to take their two sinister visitors more lightly. At week's end the spectacle at Windsor Castle of the Soviet Premier and the First Secretary of the Communist Party gallantly presenting the Queen of England with a sable stole no longer appalled; instead it appealed to the British sense of the ludicrous. Said one old lady: "They look like two little boys blown up by bicycle pumps."

* In Kiev in 1939 a man in the uniform of a railroad official threw a bomb into the compartment of a train in which Khrushchev was sitting. Two passengers traveling with Khrushchev were killed. (The small slit scar under his nose is believed to be a memento of this incident.)

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