The Lonely Summit

Like a receding thunderstorm, the echoes of the Zhukov affair grew fainter and fainter. No one seemed to be in any hurry to find a job for Russia's greatest living soldier, and by week's end Pravda was devoting only half a page to denunciations of the marshal's sins. Four and a half years after Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev stood alone and unchallenged.

But the death or disgrace of all his active rivals did not mean that Nikita was without opposition. In his climb to power, Khrushchev had downgraded the secret police, smashed the Stalinists, shaken up the bureaucrats who run Russian industry, and humiliated the army. Each of these victories had earned him new enemies in the middle ranks of Soviet officialdom--enemies who would be ever alert for weapons with which to cut him down.

Such weapons might not be far to seek. Early harvests in the newly opened wheat fields of Kazakhstan were so poor that they threatened to make a fiasco of the "virgin lands" program that Khrushchev had rammed through almost singlehanded. From the far-off industrial zones around Irkutsk and Alma-Ata came reports that Khrushchev's decentralization of industry (TIME, April 15) had created such confusion that some factories had shut down completely for want of supplies. Stalin had committed far worse blunders and survived. But Khrushchev, as yet, was no Stalin. Where Stalin, because of his absolute command of the secret police, was able to rule through terror, Khrushchev still depends on the support of the Communist Party. To retain his power, Khrushchev must still cultivate the good opinion of a majority of the members of the Central Committee. Even more important, Russia today is not the prewar Russia of Stalin. No longer a peasant nation, the U.S.S.R. now has 6,000,000 citizens with advanced or specialized education. The unwashed, untaught proletarians of a generation ago are the sophisticated technicians and scientists who have built ballistic and nuclear weapons and launched humanity into space. And because men who must be allowed /to think at their jobs cannot be prevented from thinking at home, the task of governing Russia grows more complex by the day. To stay at the summit, Nikita Khrushchev cannot afford to be as ruthless as Stalin--which means that he must be far more skillful.

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