Garden Fresh

Nikita Khrushchev is a bull who is not particular about which china shop he bustles through. Fresh from his triumphal "election" as Soviet Premier and accompanied by his latest favorite, First Deputy Premier Frol Kozlov (see box, p. 24), Khrushchev descended on Budapest, scene of his most dubious triumph. He bounced out of his TU-104 jetliner, kissed Hungarian Party Chief Janos Kadar and Premier Ferenc Munnich on both cheeks, and with a wave of a black Homburg. told 4,000 stone-faced Hungarians: "The Soviet Union and the other Socialist countries are your most loyal friends." Replied the sallow, thin-haired Kadar. without a blink at the sepulchral irony of his own words: ''The Hungarian people will never forget that Soviet troops liberated our country."

Guards stood watch every 50 yards along his road to the city, and lined up two deep the second day as he laid a wreath on the Soviet war memorial. Also on hand, though unannounced in any list of the Soviet delegation, was Colonel General Ivan Serov, the Soviet secret police boss who was returning to the scene of his crime. It was he who had treacherously arrested General Pal Maleter, hero of the 1956 Budapest rising, as Maleter parleyed with Red army officers.

Plants & Digs. Before long, Khrushchev ducked away from his security guards, hopped over a park railing, and started shaking hands and kissing children, calling back to Kadar to come and translate for him. Ceremonies creaked on through their echoing silences, and the shabby little parade of the Hungarian army, on the 13th anniversary of Hungary's capture from the Nazis, only served to show that it could muster neither as many tanks, planes, rockets nor men as the other military force stationed in Hungary--the Red army. But it was a national holiday and Good Friday, and after the parade a crowd of perhaps 200.000 Hungarians surged through the streets.

Khrushchev started his speech in Russian, then let a translator read on in Hungarian. It was as brutal a speech as the one in which he told Berliners last summer that they would never see their country united on any terms but Moscow's. From a platform set up at the foot of the huge Stalin statue whose destruction by rioters sparked the 1956 uprising, he announced that the democracies of the West must not think of including Eastern Europe on the summit agenda: "No, gentlemen, don't step into anyone else's garden."

The silence was total as his words sank in. Khrushchev jeered at President Eisenhower's comment on the Soviet decision to stop nuclear tests: "If Eisenhower really thinks we have stopped atomic and hydrogen tests for propaganda reasons, then why don't he and other Western statesmen try the same propaganda and halt tests themselves?"

Kicks & Kisses. Khrushchev's visit squelched the insistent rumors that Rakosi and other old-guard types were on the way back to supplant Kadar, who was once himself out of favor and brutally tortured in Communist prisons. Kadar's renewed mandate seemed to be sealed by the first airport kiss and stamped and double-stamped in platform pronouncements and party powwows. Just before Khrushchev's call, Kadar had ducked over into northern Yugoslavia for a secret meeting with Marshal Tito. Apparently, both Khrushchev and Tito want Hungarians to resign themselves and agree that poor Kadar stands for all the liberation they can expect for now.

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