Big Wind in the Alps

Grotesquely mixing buffoonery with terror, Nikita Khrushchev waddled on last week through the lovely little country that is Austria. At his side, wherever he went, was Austria's embarrassed Chancellor Julius Raab. The favorite story in Vienna's cafes: one of Khrushchev's bodyguards asked an Austrian why Raab looked so gloomy. Replied the Austrian: "Too much friendship can be sickening."

Just Like Hitler. Khrushchev's portable platform was a scraggly, 15-bus convoy that wound through the peaceful Austrian countryside. For a starter, at the old Mauthausen concentration camp where 123,000 prisoners died, Khrushchev denounced German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer for "Hitler" policies and later elaborated on the theme: "Hitler opened his mouth and wanted to swallow everybody. Adenauer licks his lips, he gets angry, but he cannot move from the spot. Should he attempt to touch the Socialist countries, he will be smashed immediately on the spot. Immediately!"

At the mammoth VOeEST steel works (formerly the Hermann Goring plant), Khrushchev exploded when told it had been rebuilt with Marshall Plan dollars. "Who will help you?" he cried. "The United States? No! Britain? No! West Germany? No! The capitalistic countries think of Austria as a competitor. We of the Soviet Union cooperate."

Stiff-lipped but studiously correct, Chancellor Raab got the final shocker at a hotel banquet in Klagenfurt. "Neutrality is no mountain fastness," Khrushchev warned. "The fight for peace concerns all people. The presence of rocket bases in northern Italy--and if they are used against the Socialist countries--would presuppose a violation of Austrian neutrality." For its own sake, he said, Austria should warn Italy against "playing with fire." The clear threat: if war should start, Russian troops would cross the Austrian border without compunction.

A Hand at the Tie. As always, Khrushchev could switch with bewildering speed from bully to ham. "Communism is my elixir of life," he bragged. "All I want is to live long enough to see the Red flag flying all over the world." At one point, riding through the Alps by cable car, he burst into the Volga Boatmen's song, insisted that Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko join in. While his wife Nina stayed humbly to the rear, he flirted with his attractive blonde Minister of Culture, Ekaterina Furtseva, 50. They joined in frequent private giggles, and occasionally she straightened his tie. But the pace began to tell. Khrushchev was pale and fatigued by evening, and Wife Nina worried to a friend: "He's trying to do too much."

Though Raab remained diplomatically silent through Nikita's tirades, the Austrian people made their feelings plain. Most boycotted Khrushchev's public appearances; special Masses were held for the "silent Church" behind the Iron Curtain. "A demagogue is using Austria as a base for propaganda rockets," cried the Vienna daily Express.

Both the U.S. and West Germany sharply protested Austria's refusal to "dissociate" itself from the tirades. But Khrushchev could not be stopped. At a final press conference, he warned that if the West German Bundestag held its annual symbolic meeting in Berlin this fall as planned, he might seize the occasion to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany. Chortled Nikita: "This would mean that all members of the Parliament would have to ask for visas from the East German government to get back home."

With a small trade victory safely in hand (the ending of Austrian oil shipments as war reparations in 1964, a year earlier than scheduled, and the beginning of talks toward a five-year trade pact), Raab saw Nikita off at the airport with obvious relief. With Khrushchev safely back home and rattling his rockets at the U.S. in behalf of his newest protege, Cuba, Raab went on radio to set the record straight. He called the attacks on Adenauer "extremely unpleasant," affirmed his friendship for the U.S., and noted that Communism was "declined by 97% of our population" in last year's elections.

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