The Scout

Precisely at 3 o'clock one afternoon last week, a Comet 4 jetliner landed at Moscow's Vrukovo Airport and began to disgorge a troop of Britons incongruously decked out in Russian-style fur hats, rented from London's famed provider of borrowed finery, Moss Bros. As the visitors emerged into the unseasonable warmth (41DEG), a Soviet honor guard sprang to attention, bayonets flashing in the sunlight, and a military band broke into God Save the Queen. Beaming broadly, Nikita Khrushchev doffed his own beaver hat and told Prime Minister Harold Macmillan: "We welcome you to our native land. This good weather puts us in a good mood."

Preceded by an eager army of 100 Western reporters.* Macmillan was caught up from the moment of his arrival in a Muscovite version of Anastas Mikoyan's recent visit to the U.S. From the airport Radio Moscow carried his initial words ("serious talks . . . better understanding") to a nationwide audience. As his Moscow residence. Macmillan was assigned a gingerbread Victorian mansion once occupied by Russia's ex-Premier Georgy Malenkov (who now presumably sleeps near a power station in remote Kazakhstan). Ahead of Macmillan lay the Inevitable ballet performances. Kremlin receptions, the tours of collective farms, visits to Kiev and Leningrad.

Between these rounds would be hours of palaver with tough, self-confident Nikita Khrushchev.

Diplomats & Dickens. Watching from the sidelines, some of Britain's allies posed the same question that Russian diplomats in London had been asking for two weeks: What did Macmillan expect to accomplish by all this? Macmillan himself had described his trip as "something in the nature of a reconnaissance." He did not have the authority to speak for the Western alliance as a whole--though the British picture him, after Dulles' illness, as the No. 1 Western leader. Nor had he any intention of trying to negotiate a solution to the Berlin crisis. He did hope, in his urbane way. to correct a few misimpressions (he expected to find Russia as much changed from his brief 1929 visit, he said at the airport, as "England is today from the picture painted by Dickens"--an amiable dart at Russia's favorite source of knowledge about Britain). He further hoped during his visit to the Soviet Union to plumb Khrushchev's intentions by dropping a few hints as to matters on which the West might be willing to negotiate at the proposed Big Four conference, e.g., a "thinning out" of Soviet and Western troops in Germany, a joint Soviet-Western non-aggression pact for Germany.

Sabers & Skittles. Five days before Macmillan's arrival, in a speech at the Russian manufacturing town of Tula (firearms and samovars), Khrushchev had opened the battle with what the British called "a shot across Macmillan's bow." He had no intention, said Khrushchev, of budging from his ultimatum to the Western powers to get out of Berlin by May 27. "Some excessively belligerent figures in the West," thundered Khrushchev, "say that should control over the access routes to West Berlin be turned over to the East Germans, they would fight their way through by force of arms. Only people who do not take account of the facts could reason this way. Soviet forces are stationed in East Germany, and they are not there to play skittles . . . We advise all those who are trying to rattle their sabers: If you feel nervous, take a cold shower and calm down. Otherwise there is danger to peace."

After such menaces, was there more to say? Prime Minister Macmillan, regarding nuclear war as "suicidal folly" proclaimed it "the duty of statesmen to see if it is possible to establish some basis of confidence."

Marks & Muddles. If Russia had any genuine interest in a compromise settlement, the Western allies had opened up one line of approach. In their recent notes to Moscow, the U.S., Britain and France had all indicated their willingness to have "advisers" from both East and West Germany present at a Big-Four conference. This was clearly a concession to Russia's insistence that reunification of Germany must be negotiated directly between the West German government and East Germany's Communist bosses. And last week Eleanor Dulles, sister of John Foster and an official of the State Department's "German Desk," pointedly stated in a Wisconsin speech that "new plans for the relations of the two parts of Germany and Berlin" might be considered by the West if the Communists "wish to relax somewhat the rigors of the regime in East Germany."

Despite the unending stream of 300 refugees a day out of East Germany, the economic conditions in the busy East German colony have lately improved. Last week a West German economic study showed that 9 out of every 100 East German families now have cars, as compared with 14 per 100 in prosperous West Germany. Nonetheless, most Western observers believe that the risk of an uprising that could shake the whole Soviet bloc remains too great for Khrushchev to seriously consider relaxing the Russian hold on East Germany.

If so, Harold Macmillan's mission to Moscow became, in a sense, more useful than ever. At his first Kremlin reception last week Macmillan told the assembled Soviet bigwigs: "It is impossible to hide from ourselves the dangers of war by miscalculation or muddle. That indeed would be a calamity to us all." In his restrained British way, Macmillan was seeking to make it unmistakably plain to Khrushchev that he was playing with dynamite; if Macmillan achieves nothing else, he is determined to convince the Soviet that the West will fight before it will surrender Berlin to a Russian-dominated East Germany.

*At the news of this journalistic invasion, Poet-Author Boris (Doctor Zkivago) Pasternak discreetly abandoned his dacha near Moscow for a Black Sea resort beyond camera or notebook range.

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