Gathering of the Clan

In the six months since the last meeting of the Supreme Soviet, the Kremlin's ancient crenelated brick walls have been shaken by momentous events, and the 1,300 delegates assembling this week to do what they are told could only guess whether they would be greeted with a whiff of reassurance, a burst of recriminations or a snuffing of careers.

For the past month the Kremlin leaders have been stumping their vast country like politicians. Khrushchev addressed a mass meeting in Tashkent, Bulganin talked in Stalinabad. Mikoyan in Ashkhabad (significantly all in Moslem areas of Soviet Central Asia). Molotov was haranguing central Russia, Malenkov speechmaking near the Urals and Kaganovich in Siberia. Wherever they went, they conferred orders and decorations, talked informally with party organizers and worthy workers. This was political fence-mending, Russian style.

Hungary's revolt had thrown into doubt a scheduled Bulganin-Khrushchev swing through Scandinavia. Last week, as a sort of second best, B. and K. accepted an invitation to visit Finland in the spring. Cracked Khrushchev: "Spring is the best time of the year because love is then at its strongest." Meanwhile, Defense Minister Marshal Georgy Zhukov was visiting India. Although Nehru pointedly spent more time in the company of another visitor, his old friend Lady Mountbatten, Zhukov had a profitable week riding an elephant and showing Nehru's tough Indian cadets how to use a bayonet.

Deficiencies. Though meetings of the Supreme Soviet usually dully rubber-stamp economic plans and decrees, February is becoming a newsworthy month in Communist Russia. It was at a February Supreme Soviet meeting two years ago that Georgy Malenkov confessed to mismanagement, and dramatically resigned his premiership. It was also in February, one year ago at the 20th Party Congress, that Khrushchev opened the Pandora's box of Stalin's crimes.

As the 1957 Supreme Soviet assembled, the state of the Soviet Union was newsworthy but not very happy. The U.S.S.R. annual economic report, while claiming an 11% increase in industrial output, listed some serious deficiencies: capital investment was down 6%, and coal, iron, cement, glass, some machine tools and much farm machinery fell short of set goals. More important, from the viewpoint of the elite, dwelling construction fell short of aims by 30 million sq. ft. The same economic report told of a 20% increase in the 1956 grain harvest, mainly due to heavy plantings in the Siberian "virgin lands"--a pat on the back for those who had responded to Khrushchev's call two years ago. But the biggest setback since the last Supreme Soviet meeting was in foreign affairs. The coexistence policy, a successful operation a year ago, had been literally shot to pieces by the Russian attack on Hungary. To restore their prestige in the satellite countries, the Soviet leaders had had to call on the good offices of Red China's urbane Chou Enlai, a manifest humiliation for Russian leadership. Finally, they had the difficult job of reassuring their own elite that they were in full and competent command of the Communist world.

Discussions. Even inside Russia, the universities, if not in a revolutionary mood, were in a questioning frame of mind. Much of the debate gathered around a bestselling novel. Vladimir Dudintsev's Not By Bread Alone, the story of a brilliant young inventor who is victimized by a group of corrupt bureaucrats (standard villains of Soviet fiction) and is sent to a prison camp. Since its publication last August, Not By Bread Alone has been eagerly seized upon by millions of young Russians who find, beneath the technical jargon which covers many of its pages, a hidden symbolism, a new message, best expressed in the words of its hero Dmitry Lopatkin, back from the slave camp: "Somebody who has learned to think cannot ever be fully deprived of freedom . . ."

At a recent gathering of Moscow University students, called to discuss the meaning of Not By Bread Alone, some who had evidently learned to think shouted: "Tell us about Hungary and Poland!" Replied the lecturer: "It's irrelevant!" In the ensuing bedlam the Soviet authorities felt they had solved the problem by turning off the lights.

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