Huntsman, What Quarry?

Nikita Khrushchev's favorite pastime is shooting for sport. The boss of the Soviet Communist Party owns a luxurious collection of shotguns and rifles, and he likes to slip quietly out of Moscow to the water meadows of the Ukraine to bag a string of ducks. Last week Nikita Khrushchev traveled all the way to Yugoslavia to indulge his hobby in one of Europe's more exclusive hunting grounds: the vast domain at Belje, once a sporting ground of the Habsburg princes, now a model "socialist farm" and preserve of Marshal Tito and his cronies. In a happy day's hunting Khrushchev potted three chamois, one stag. But even as the guns barked at Belje, it was evident--and local Communists were saying--that Comrade Khrushchev had come to Yugoslavia for bigger game than that.

The visit was a surprise to Tito, and from the way he and his comrades acted, an embarrassing surprise. On his visit to the Soviet Union last June, Tito casually invited Khrushchev to repay the visit at some future, unspecified date. Far sooner than Tito & Co. expected, Khrushchev suddenly accepted, and one day last week landed at Zemun airport, to be greeted by Tito and a few retainers. Newsmen were barred, and were left only to wonder at the timing and the intent of Khrushchev's arrival.

Waiting for Ike. Inevitably the speculation turned to agile Marshal Tito's pending economic deals with the West. He was about ready to conclude a war settlement with West Germany that will give Yugoslavia $14 million in cash and $57 million in credits. And he was waiting for President Eisenhower to decide whether the U.S. should go ahead with a plan to give Yugoslavia $20 million worth of surplus agricultural products and other economic aid in view of Tito's return to cozy relations with Moscow. Khrushchev's arrival, dramatizing Tito's ties with the Soviet Union, could have been a deliberate attempt by the Russians to jeopardize these negotiations. Yugoslavs were not slow to point out that Khrushchev, with a bumper Soviet harvest reported this year, was in a position to cover the U.S. wheat offer, probably would like to impose this extra obligation on Tito.

While this kind of maneuver fits well in Khrushchev's repertory, it seemed likely that the two old Moscow-trained Communists had something more far-reaching to talk about: the future of Tito and Titoism. In the last two months the Russians have shown some impatience with Tito's propaganda in the satellite states, where he encourages local Communist autonomy in line with the "many roads to socialism" thesis. His jailing of Moscow-repatriated Yugoslav Communists who took the Cominform side in his quarrel with Stalin has drawn a rebuke from Pravda. Did Soviet leaders think the time had come to cut Tito down to size?

Friends & Enemies. Between the gunshots at Belje last week, a student of Belgrade-Moscow relations imagined he heard Khrushchev saying to Tito: "All right. We admitted we were wrong about you. We came down here and apologized. We got others to apologize and resume good relations. We had your old enemy Rakosi kicked out of the Hungarian Party and Chervenkov out of the Bulgarian. Your pal Gomulka was rehabilitated in Poland, Rajk in Hungary and Kostov in Bulgaria. We dissolved the Cominform. We had the parts of the Slansky trial that reflected on you struck from the record. We paid off for the trade damage the Cominform blockade did to you and got the satellites to do the same. We don't feel obliged to do anything more. And, by the way, in the U.S.S.R. destalinization is over. Now we all get back to the work of building Communism."

A pretty good shot himself, Tito was not likely to underrate Khrushchev at his favorite sport.

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