The Serfs Are Pleased

As usual, Nikita Khrushchev had a proverb handy. "We have a saying, 'When the lords are fighting, the serfs are bleeding.' It is incomprehensible that small countries would suffer if relations among the great powers improve."

In this characteristically homely fashion, the boss of all the Russias correctly gauged the prevalent opinion the world over to the news of the home-and-home visits between the Big Twosome.

Khrushchev himself had rarely bubbled so with glee. A half dozen times in the past year, he had hinted at, demanded and cajoled visitors for an invitation to the U.S., and now that he had it, he was a status-seeker who had got what he sought.

Pocket Rocket. Waddling happily to the rostrum of the Kremlin's marble-walled Sverdlov Hall, he greeted reporters with a grin as broad as the arc of a peasant's scythe. Even his normally glum interpreters, press officers and sword-bearers were smilingly cordial. For questioners, Khrushchev had a full armory of chuckles, solemnities and playful jabs. Did he expect to address Congress? "I do not know whether the U.S. Congressmen want to listen to me . . ." When the A.P.'s Preston Grover asked if Eisenhower would be invited to visit Soviet missile bases, Khrushchev turned on him as if the reporter were some baneful survivor of a forgotten era: "If I was talking with the President with one rocket in one pocket and another rocket in another pocket, what hospitality would that be?"

Moreover, said Khrushchev, he himself would not inspect an American missile base even if invited. As for his activities in the U.S., there would be discussion with Eisenhower but not negotiation, and a main topic would be Germany--but not Germany's reunification: "There are no hopes of unifying East and West Germany in the near future, consequently one must proceed from the real state of affairs, from the fact that there are two German states." Answering another question, he magnanimously assured everyone that Russia will attempt no change in Berlin's status so long as talks continue.

Overnight, on cue, critics in the Moscow press toned down their hitherto snide comments about the American exhibition, Pravda trotted out improbable quotes by metal workers and locksmiths applauding Eisenhower's invitation, and Americans in Moscow began getting telephone calls and visits from former Russian friends who had been silent for years.

In the obedient satellite world of Eastern Europe, the press was quick to crow, "A Personal Victory for Nikita Khrushchev," and it became indelicate to attack the classic enemy, "American ruling circles." The "Paris-Bonn Axis" became the new target, and Communists sought to isolate West Germany's Konrad Adenauer as the only warmonger left. Only in Communist China was there a delayed reaction, and then a restrained and dutiful approval of the Eisenhower-Khrushchev meeting (a similar lack of enthusiasm came from Formosa).

Wall of Suspicion. For just about everyone else the meeting was a good idea, and no one seemed to expect miracles. "One of the best pieces of news we have had for a considerable time," said India's Jawaharlal Nehru.* Worse than the political problems themselves these days, said Nehru, is "the strong wall of suspicion." Calcutta's Statesman thought it beyond the Big Two "to solve all problems for all time," but "the world has learned to be grateful for even brief respites from international insanity." Nasser was for the meeting as long as, he added nervously, it would "not be at the expense of small nations." And a Lebanese newspaper more candidly wondered what would happen to the Arab world if it could no longer play off both sides in the cold war.

To the British, the Big Twosome was fine even if they were excluded. To West Germans it was a new "temporary umbrella of truce" over Berlin, and in West Berlin the stockmarket shares jumped as much as 50 points. Konrad Adenauer was obviously not completely happy with the arrangement. Charles de Gaulle, who scorns "diplomacy by television," wants no summit and never likes being left out, was cool to U.S. Ambassador Amory Houghton, who drove down himself to De Gaulle's country home at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises bearing a warm personal letter from Ike.

Ike's proposed end-of-the-month trip to Europe, for quick visits with Adenauer. De Gaulle and Harold Macmillan, was being carefully billed as informal. Nobody took to the Italian proposal that there should be a NATO meeting before Khrushchev's visit: the whole essence of the new attitude is that Eisenhower would not be negotiating an agreement with Khrushchev on behalf of the West, but merely talking across a gulf to a man with whom (as Geneva showed) there is little present opportunity for agreement. A summit, meaning a working negotiation, was for later, if at all.

*Who snorted, "Nonsense," on learning last week that in Bombay state a movement had been formed to worship Nehru as "the tenth incarnation" of the Hindu god Vishnu, who returns to the earth in various guises--as a fish, a tortoise, a man-lion, and now as a Nehru--to save oppressed mankind.

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