Victor's Congress

Midway through the opening session of the 21st Communist Party Congress, the January sun broke through Moscow's leaden overcast. Bright rays streamed through the four-story windows of the Great Kremlin Hall and lit up the towering, 20-ft. statue of Lenin behind the platform and the short, round, balding figure at the speaker's stand below. "See!" cried Nikita Khrushchev, a talented ad-libber, thrusting aside his 46,000-word text. "Even the sun favors us. Nature smiles on the seven-year plan."

The 1,375 close-packed delegates--milkmaids, marshals, lady welders, robed Asian tribesmen--volleyed cheers. This was a Congress of Victors, and on this day when the Communist heads of a third of mankind were met to hear him tell it, there was no doubt who the winner was. Here was Nikita Khrushchev, 64, racing through the statistics of his triumphs--Lunik, Sputniks, "mass-produced" ICBMs, new targets for industry, farming and education. Gone was the last Congress' talk of collective leadership; gone were those saber-toothed old commissars (Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov et al.), who had been bloodlessly banished and disgraced.

Here was Nikita Khrushchev, the jaunty improviser enthroned as solemn Marxist prophet, pointing out the promise of history's biggest pie in the sky. It was an occasion to bring back memories of the first Congress of Victors--the 17th, in 1934, when the party sang the praises of Secretary-General Stalin (who had similarly licked but not yet liquidated his rivals), and when young Moscow Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev first won election to the party's holy of holies, the Central Committee.

The Promiser. With only a 20-minute noon break for nonalcoholic refreshments, Khrushchev talked for six hours. Topic No.1 before this extraordinary session was Russia's seven-year economic goals. Khrushchev was still trumpeting his familiar promises--80% more industrial output, 70% greater farm production, 62% more consumer-goods production--but, significantly, he omitted his 1970 target date for overtaking the U.S. He promised shorter hours, higher pay, a front door for every family, income tax repeal, "greatly reduced" police surveillance ("There are now no cases of people being made to stand trial for political crimes") --and he breezily explained that such "incentives" would make his goals possible.

On his tribune of victory the energetic pragmatist, who likes to voice his cornfield contempt for theoreticians, now demanded to be regarded as the first of living Communist theorists. Soviet speakers had lately taken to eulogizing their new Vozhd, or supreme chief, as they did Stalin, in personality-cult terms ("Initiator and soul of our glorious work").

Russian rockets have ended "capitalism's encirclement," proclaimed New Theorist Khrushchev, as new evidence of the old line that "socialism will conquer peacefully and fully." Then he set out to reverse the 20th Party Congress' approval of Tito's "separate roads to socialism." All Communist parties must follow "one general road pointed out by Marxism-Leninism," he said, but in building socialism they may, as the Chinese did, adopt their "own peculiar forms," and proceed at different tempos.

The Timetable. The chief challenger to Khrushchev's theorizing was not present, for reasons unexplained, but the stocky shadow of Mao Tse-tung nevertheless leaned over the proceedings. Perhaps Red China's Mao knew that his ideas would not prevail. Breaking the long official Soviet silence on Red China's "big leap" to create communes throughout the countryside in 1958, Khrushchev declared that Communism--the ultimate, classless form of human society described by Marx, Engels and Lenin ("To each according to his need")--cannot be achieved without first building socialism ("To each according to his work").

"Society cannot leap into Communism from capitalism without going through a socialist stage of development," said Khrushchev. The transition "in which socialism develops into Communism is a regular historical process that cannot be arbitrarily violated or avoided." And instead of getting there first, as Mao had hinted China would, "Socialist countries, correctly using the opportunity of cooperation and mutual aid," said Khrushchev, "will more or less simultaneously reach the highest phase of Communist society." This would take "many years"; to try to leap there prematurely "would lead to the dissipation of accumulated means," necessary for expanding production.

The Tribute. Addressing the congress next day in place of the absent Mao, China's Premier Chou En-lai attacked Yugoslavia and the U.S. in terms far more bitter than Khrushchev's, and defended China's people's communes as "the best form for developing socialism under Chinese conditions." At the close, Khrushchev threw his arms round the speaker and, according to an old Russian custom, kissed him three times. It was, said a Soviet reporter, "as if not just two men but two great brotherly people had embraced." But Chou himself was forced to render tribute to Khrushchev for his "correct leadership" as a party theorist. About one new idea from the busy brain of Nikita Khrushchev Chou was significantly silent. In tossing out ideas for all kinds of Soviet-style disarmament plans, Khrushchev proposed an atom-free neutral zone in the Pacific, vaguely defined but seeming to include Red China, Japan, and the U.S. testing areas in the Marshalls. One obvious interpretation: Khrushchev too is not anxious to have his big and impetuous Chinese brothers admitted to the world's nuclear club.

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