Of War & Peace

The scene was the Great Kremlin Hall within whose floodlit, white-marble walls Russian history has unrolled in war and peace. Before the admiring gaze of 1,378 Supreme Soviet delegates, of his wife (seated alone on a chair placed in an aisle), and of galleries packed with diplomats and newsmen, Premier Nikita Khrushchev again claimed his day in history. In a 3 1/2-hr. State of the Union address aimed more at the world than his own 212 million subjects (copies of the speech in English were handed out, an unprecedented thing, as he spoke), Khrushchev proclaimed that the Soviet Union intended to reduce its standing armed forces by a third in the next year or two, from 3,623,000 to 2,423,000.

This, reported Pravda, brought "very stormy applause." What better way to proclaim peaceful intentions on the eve of Khrushchev's trip to India, Burma and Indonesia? The basic motive of the troop cut, cried Khrushchev, "is a lofty humanitarian ideal inherent in our forward-looking concept of life, of a Socialist society."

Yet, as Khrushchev unrolled some details, he made it clear that he was not being a bit impractical. "Our air force and navy," said Khrushchev, waving a stubby finger at his listeners, "have lost their previous importance. Their arms are not being reduced but replaced. We have cut down and we shall even discontinue the manufacture of bombers; already our armed forces have to a considerable extent shifted to rocket and nuclear arms. The proposed reduction will in no way reduce the firepower of our armed forces, and this is the main point. . . Soviet scientists have made it possible to equip our army with weapons hitherto unknown to man."

"Loving Care." Furthermore, he said, in a passage reminiscent of the Pentagon's "bigger bang for a buck," Khrushchev said that his proposals would save the government $1.6 billion, though "we shan't save rubles at the risk of our peoples' lives." Demobilized troops would also provide manpower in factories and down on the farm ("We must treat these comrades with loving care so that they will feel comfortable in the new working collectives").

"It is now quite clear," Khrushchev went on, "that the U.S. is not the world's most powerful military power. We are not trying to sweat anybody, but these are the facts." Rattling his rockets in the style he used to assail Western "military circles" for doing a few years ago, Khrushchev promised to "wipe from the face of the earth" any aggressor, and boasted: "Though the weapons we have now are formidable indeed, the weapon we have today in the hatching stage is even more formidable. The weapon, which is being developed and is, as they say, in the portfolio of our scientists and designers, is a fantastic weapon." (U.S. Atomic Physicist Ralph E. Lapp guessed that the Russians might be planning an H-bomb to orbit the earth indefinitely, ready on signal to plunge down on any terrestrial target.)

Before Khrushchev finished speaking (there was a half-hour break for lunch), he also promised not to resume nuclear tests unless the West does, warned that he might yet sign a separate peace treaty with the East Germans if the Berlin question is not settled "soon." Then Defense Minister Marshal Rodion Malinovsky and other brass paraded to the rostrum to endorse the boss's cutback of forces.

For Home Folks. Khrushchev's war-and-peace speech was meant for heavy propaganda play abroad. There was further news for the home folks. The government dissolved the Ministry for Internal Affairs, once the dread MVD police power that bossed Stalin's slave-labor camps, and turned over its remaining authority to the 15 constituent republics. The second important move was the demotion of Aleksei Kirichenko, 51, the hard-boiled Ukrainian who has been a Khrushchev henchman since 1937, and was often spoken of as his successor. ("The most insecure man in Moscow," says a Washington official, "is the man who is regarded as the logical heir.") A brief paragraph in Pravda, saying simply that "A. I. Kirichenko has been appointed party secretary in Rostov," was the first hint that Kirichenko had lost his all-powerful post as party personnel boss and his membership in the ruling Presidium. At the closing Supreme Soviet session, where the seating is as much a conspicuous evidence of status as Louis XIV's nightly choice of courtiers privileged to watch him undress, Kirichenko shuffled in to take a seat far back at the edge of the platform with the alternates. By another flat Pravda paragraph the same day, Westerners learned that Nikolai Belyaev, the Presidium pal whom Khrushchev publicly denounced last month for spoiling the virgin-lands harvest, had lost his job as party secretary in the Kazakh republic.

In its first blast in a decade at the "shortcomings" of party propaganda, the Central Committee last week followed up these firings by demanding that complacent Communists get back to "the burning issues that affect the masses," address themselves to the political apathy of youth, speak out against "graft, speculation, sycophancy, drunkenness, shirking, hooliganism," and do something to inspire an interest in "the Marxist-Leninist classics." Taken together with his 1960 travel plans, these moves suggested that Nikita Khrushchev has not slackened in the breakneck pace at which he has run Russia since he denounced Stalin in the Great Kremlin Hall four years ago.

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