The Return of the Hammer

The world could scarcely have been more startled if Moscow had proclaimed that caviar would henceforth be green. Three years after his exile to the Soviet embassy in Outer Mongolia, the Kremlin last week announced that former Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. ("The Hammer") Molotov was being brought back to represent Russia on the International Atomic Energy Agency in gay Vienna. With characteristic tact, the Russians chose to break the news on the 21st anniversary of the day Molotov signed the 1939 non-aggression treaty between Russia and Nazi Germany.

As usual, Moscow's motives were hard to fathom. Noting that the Soviets had previously tried in vain to get Argentina,

Greece and The Netherlands to accept Molotov as Soviet ambassador, some Soviet experts said that Khrushchev was treating his old foe gently just to point up the contrast between Khrushchevian "humanitarianism" and the bad old Stalin days, when politicians usually lost their lives along with their jobs. Others speculated that it made Nikita nervous to have Molotov in a post so near Red China; in the ideological dispute now raging between Russia and China, long-time "hardliner" Molotov would presumably share Peking's view that Khrushchev is dangerously soft on capitalism.

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