"Our Dear Guest"

Gamal Abdel Nasser made a spectacular payment on his debt to the Kremlin last week. He flew to Russia to pay the long-postponed visit that had to be put off in 1956 because of the Suez crisis. Moscow greeted him with such a welcome as no other foreigner but Nehru and Tito had received before him.

The whole Soviet leadership in Moscow met him at Vnukovo airport. Under giant paired portraits of Nasser and President Voroshilov, strapping paratroopers mounted honor guard. "Hail, leader of the Arab world!" shouted a drilled student group. Thousands excused from work lined the roads to the city, carrying Nasser pictures and waving little United Arab Republic flags in the bright spring sunshine. Jutting broad-shouldered and broad-grinning over the heads of Voroshilov and Khrushchev, the dictator of the Nile paraded, standing in an open ZIL convertible, to his luxurious guest quarters in the Kremlin.

Appetite for Acclaim. On May Day--an occasion notable this year throughout the world for its listlessness as well as its planned lack of proletarian provocation--Nasser became the first non-Communist head of state ever to take the Red army's salute as guest of honor beside Khrushchev and Marshal Malinovsky atop the Lenin-Stalin mausoleum in Red Square. "Nasser Reviews Red Army," crowed the Cairo press. Khrushchev entertained him at his dacha, at the Bolshoi ballet, at a Lenin Stadium soccer match, at a whole round of banquets. Taking time off only to pray at Moscow's mosque, Nasser drank in the flattery with all the appetite for acclaim of the Middle East's biggest balcony-lover.

Toasting "our dear guest" as a "national hero," Khrushchev proclaimed: "Ours is a peace-loving, selfless policy. We give to help the people of the Middle East. We want only one thing: consolidation of the position achieved by the Arab peoples." Replying, Nasser reviewed his old line against "imperialism" and "treacherous aggression," thanking his hosts for "your support and your ultimatum, factors which upheld freedom and morale" in the Suez showdown.

Normalize to Neutralize. Careful not to let his tongue outrace his ambition, Nasser added prudently: "The Arab people intend to get rid of every foreign domination. They believe in non-alignment." He had need of a little help, as well as loud hurrahs, from the Russians. His arms debts (including those he inherited by absorbing Syria) were strapping him: not only is his cotton crop mortgaged to Russia for years, but Russia is dumping Egyptian cotton elsewhere at lower prices, thus debasing its value.

Just before Nasser left for Russia, the West had given him a chance to escape any further Russian clutches. After Nasser settled the expropriated Suez Canal Co.'s claims for $81 million (TIME, May 5), Washington freed $26 million in frozen Egyptian assets, and U.S. Ambassador Raymond Hare told Nasser that the U.S. was preparing generally for a return to "normal'' relations with Cairo, was ready to resume CARE surplus food shipments, student exchanges and rural improvement aid, and to end restrictions on delivering such industrial items as ball bearings, lubricating oils and spare parts.

The future U.S. attitude, Hare made clear, would depend on Nasser, including his attitude toward America's friends elsewhere in the Middle East: the Hashemites in Iraq and Jordan, the oil-rich sheikdoms in the Persian Gulf. Other U.S. ambassadors in the Middle East were instructed to reassure Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia that the U.S. would still support them politically and economically, and was not running out on them. The first result of the friendly U.S. gesture to Nasser was, to judge by the Cairo press, to increase Egypt's monumental selfesteem. Swallowing hard, the U.S. tried to act as if it did not mind--so long as Nasser did not go too far in his merry 18-day trip through Russia.

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