Throwing Mud

It was grey and drizzling last week as Moscow turned out to celebrate the 44th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Only a few days after the panoply of the Party Congress, thousands of civilian demonstrators gathered in their assigned staging areas, huddling beneath banners, signs and floats. As crowds filled the bleacher seats on both sides of Red Square, the trim battalions of the Moscow garrison drew up across from the Mausoleum now solely occupied by Lenin.

The chimes in the Spassky tower atop a Kremlin gate struck 10 as Nikita Khrushchev, his party leaders and foreign guests filed up the steps to the top of the tomb. Last of all came 80-year-old Kliment Voroshilov, who had publicly apologized for his "antiparty" misdeeds and apparently assumed all was forgiven. An armed guard barred his way. Voroshilov made a second attempt to join his old comrades through a side door of the Mausoleum and was ejected by a plainclothesman. He then stood pathetically beside a white-smocked woman selling ice cream and watched somberly as Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky stood in the tonneau of an open Zil auto and took the roaring salute of the assembled soldiers. Old Comrad Voroshilov must have reflected how often he had played the very same role, but mounted on a white charger instead of riding in a car.

Death's Head. Again that afternoon at 4, at a reception in the vast, new banquet hall atop the Palace of Congresses. Voroshilov appeared, like a death's head at a feast. Wearing row on row of Soviet decorations, as if to say "They can't take that away from me," he stood at a buffet table, nibbling at hors d'oeuvres and glancing frequently at the enclosure where Khrushchev was shaking hands with members of the diplomatic corps. Voroshilov nipped through the gap between tables and joined Anastas Mikoyan and several friends who were obliged to clink glasses with him before a protocol officer steered him out of the exalted enclosure.

Nikita Khrushchev, who had stonily ignored Voroshilov's party crashing, chatted with newsmen in his many guises. He was folksy as he confessed to being a "bit tired" after the taxing 22nd Party Congress. He was deferential in describing his readiness for negotiations whenever the West was willing and added, "We can still wait. We are patient." He was bluff and manly on the subject of nuclear testing, agreeing that fallout was harmful, but adding that dropping H-bombs on cities would be a "million times more harmful."

Had the Soviet Union now concluded its test series? This brought forth the whimsical Khrushchev: "We stop in the evening and start in the morning." He was asked what would happen to Vyacheslav Molotov, who last week grimly left Vienna for home--and seemed on the verge of being expelled from the Communist Party, together with other "antiparty" heretics. This summoned up the confident Khrushchev. Said he airily: "Molotov belongs to the past."

One Bay, One Mountain. With the removal of Stalin's name and body from the Lenin Mausoleum, Russians everywhere hastened to help along Old Joe's "second death." The coal mining center of Stalino (pop. 800,000) became Donetsk; the main street of Minsk switched from Stalin Prospect to Leninsky Prospect. So it went down the line of cities, towns, villages, regions, streets, squares, and out into the country to include one bay, one canal and one mountain peak. The mayor of Stalingrad (pop. 600,000) wanted to do away with one of the legendary names of World War II--a place where over a million men clashed, in the turning point of the war--but had a hard time finding a new one; it was unthinkable that the city revert to its pre-Red name of Tsaritsyn. The final, river-inspired decision: Volgograd.

Changing place names was easy, but Russians were staggered by the problem of what to do with the hundreds of thousands of silvery Stalin statues, busts, romantic paintings, prints and touched-up photographs that were coming down from parks, museums, railway stations, airports, government buildings, hotels, factories and apartments. There had been nothing like it since the austere iconoclasts destroyed all the icons and shattered all the statues of the lusty 8th century Byzantine Empire.* Out in the satellites of Eastern Europe, stupefied Reds could not seem to make up their minds what to do about their years of Stalinolatry.

Party Hack. Things were even stickier in Red China, where the leadership continues to reminisce fondly about Stalin and to applaud Albania's nose-thumbing of Khrushchev. By ironic coincidence, last week was also the 20th anniversary of the Albanian Communist Party, which provided occasion for counterfire. Khrushchev may have accused the Albanian Reds of such terrorism that "even pregnant women are shot," but Peking sent congratulations to Tirana, praised the "correct leadership" of Albanian Boss Enver Hoxha, and crooned that the Chinese people admire the Albanian people "from the bottom of their hearts."

At week's end, over Radio Tirana, brash Enver Hoxha (pronounced Ho-jah), carried the attack directly to Khrushchev, warning that Albania "was not alone" in resisting Khrushchev's "calumnies, blackmail and blockade." The main issue, said Hoxha, was settling the problem of West Berlin and signing a peace treaty with East Germany. He bluntly accused Khrushchev of dragging his feet and of delaying "from year to year."

The Soviet theory of "peaceful coexistence" with the West, said Hoxha, was simply another way of "giving up the struggle" against imperialism. He insisted that Albania was not "throwing mud" on the Soviet Union,* but that it was Khrushchev who was libeling Albania, "just like the reactionary bourgeois press," by describing it as a country where "terror and murder held sway." To Khrushchev's charge that there was no "democracy" within the Albanian Communist Party, Hoxha insolently replied: "Better watch your own affairs."

For a country that has only one-fifth the population of Cuba and can scarcely field an army of two divisions, Albania was talking pretty defiantly. Hoxha seemed to be counting on his belief that Albanians had "friends and comrades in the Communist countries who have not left them and will not leave them in the lurch."

* Except perhaps for the occasion when the French Revolution in 1789 turned on its own former heroes, and all over Paris the busts of Dictator Jean-Paul Marat were smashed, while his body was taken from the Pantheon and thrown into the Montmartre cesspool.

* A cleaned-up version of the taunt made in Moscow last year when an enraged Nikita Khrushchev shouted at Hoxha: "Comrade, you have covered me with dung. You will have to wash it off."

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