Getting Set for B. & K.

After nearly three weeks in Great Britain, roly-poly Georgy Malenkov, the visitor from Russia, was getting to be almost like one of the family. Journeying northward from London, he stopped in at Lancashire's teeming seaside Blackpool, smiled amiably avuncular smiles right and left among the crowds of vacationing Britons, and gave a honeymooning bride a box of chocolates. Offering a stick of rock candy to three-year-old Richard Davies, 54-year-old Georgy said: "I have a grandson of this age. His name is Peter. This is for peace between Peter and Richard."

At Fleetwood Malenkov gurgled "Goo goo" at a 13-month-old baby lying in a crib, identified a chicken in a picture book for the baby's four-year-old sister with the comment, "Chick-chick-chick." Crossing into Scotland, Malenkov joined arms with a group of workmen at the modest Ayrshire cottage where Poet Bobbie Burns was born, and sang Auld Lang Syne in a rosy-red mist of good-fellowship. "Hip hip," cried one of the workmen, and the others chimed in, "Hooray!"

"There are far more things that unite Britain and Russia," said Georgy Malenkov at an official dinner in Glasgow later, "than things that disunite us."

Back in London once more to visit the House of Commons, where he sat deadpan in the "Distinguished Strangers' Gallery," the Russian confessed: "Wherever I was, I saw only friendly faces, and I constantly felt surrounded by friends."

Punchy Protest. Not everyone was so misty-eyed. One evening last week Manchester's ornate old Free Trade Hall, a familiar shrine of well-intentioned protests, was jammed with 2,500 Britons and East European refugees (including the famed Polish World War II General Anders), who had gathered at a shilling a head to protest the forthcoming visit of Russians Khrushchev and Bulganin. The meeting was called by waspish Punch Editor Malcolm Muggeridge.* Resolving with a group of friends to "do something about these murderers coming here," Muggeridge had tried to rent London's own sedate Albert Hall for the occasion, but he was turned down cold. "They told me," he said, "that Billy Graham was all right, but that I was too hot."

Bulwarked on the speakers' platform by an ex-missionary who had spent 50 months in a Red Chinese prison camp, Muggeridge asked his Manchester audience: "Will an amiable chap in Downing

Street or Chequers [Anthony Eden's official residences] be able to neutralize the cold, calculating and implacable exploitation of human rights on which the whole Soviet technique for world domination is based? ... It would be just as practicable to invite two professional ladies from Paris to attend Roedean [England's most select girls' school] in the hope that they would marry archdeacons and live in respectability for the rest of their lives."

"Churchill," roared a voice from the gallery, "wouldn't have tolerated them!" The meeting wound up with cheers and a unanimous resolution deploring the Russian visit. "The tide has very definitely turned," crowed Malcolm Muggeridge.

Lordly Assurance. A few days later the Duke of Norfolk, England's premier duke and the U.K.'s leading Roman Catholic layman, rose in the House of Lords to make plain his own objections to the B. & K. trip. Said the duke: "I ask Her Majesty's government to give assurance that they will make plain to their visitors that no peace can be obtained until freedom of worship is restored."

In reply, the government's spokesman, the Earl of Home, gave the Tories' strongest reassurance yet. "We are," he said, "a kindly and forgiving people, but it is worth reminding ourselves that, though Mr. Bulganin and Mr. Khrushchev come here on a mission of good will, Russia is still host to Burgess and MacLean . . . that though statues of Stalin may be destroyed in Russia, nevertheless the official line is to return to the doctrines of Lenin . . . that there will never be real peace or understanding between the West and the Communist world until the change of heart which the Russians tell us they feel is reflected in deeds."

*Whose magazine 112 years ago was equally opposed to the visit of Russia's Czar Nicholas I to Queen Victoria, and dryly proposed an appropriate set of toasts for the occasion:

"To universal despotism, persecution, intolerance and civil and religious bondage."

"To brute force, the mainstay of government and preservative of order."

"To slavish fear, the soul of obedience."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.