Nikita's Retort

When Red China's Mao Tse-tung decided two years ago to herd his 650 million subjects into beehive-style communes, nobody professed to be more appalled than Nikita Khrushchev. It wasn't the inhumanity he objected to; it was the dogma. Communes, Nikita told visiting U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey, were "oldfashioned and reactionary." But what really irked the Kremlin was Peking's implicit boast that the commune system would propel Red China into the Marxist never-never land of full Communism ahead even of Rus sia itself.

Last week, in the Soviet monthly Novy Mir, the Kremlin devised the subtlest ploy yet to put the bumptious Chinese back in their ideological place. Russia, too, wrote Veteran Soviet Economist Stanislav Strumilin, 83, plans to have agricultural communes--but not until 1980-85. And unlike Red China's jampacked, hardscrabble farms (see above), Russia's communes would be proletarian pleasure palaces whose 2,400 inhabitants would enjoy every amenity from lavish restaurants to beauty parlors for the ladies. Then, driving Nikita's stiletto deep into Mao's back, Economist Strumilin blandly opined: "Of course, such an honorable name as commune must be won by practical success in the real building of Communism. First, prove your ability--then stretch out your hand for the honored title."

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