Windbags at Work

Windbags at Work In the week when the U.S. Senate was struggling passionately with itself over whether to provide aid to Communist satellites (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), Nikita Khrushchev unexpectedly flew into Sofia to address the Bulgarian Party Congress on the same subject.

His speech was a go-minute diatribe against Bulgaria's next-door neighbor, Comrade Tito, whom he called "the Trojan horse of the imperialist camp" in Eastern Europe. He was sorry that he had ever tried to make up with the fellow, and now argued (contrary to his enthusiastic courtship of Tito three years ago) that Stalin's Cominform had done right to expel Yugoslavia in 1948. "Revisionism, or right-wing opportunism," is now the major problem of the Communist camp, said Khrushchev, and he was all against different roads to socialism, or letting a hundred flowers bloom. (Echoed Peking: "The fight against revisionism has just begun. It must be smashed completely"--thereby proving Khrushchev's contention that "vain are the attempts to find different shades" in criticism from China.)

Khrushchev sneered at Tito and other "ideological windbags" who "exist only because of the alms they receive from imperialist countries in the form of leftover goods ... I cannot refrain from asking the question which deeply concerns all Communists everywhere. Why do the imperialist bosses, while striving to obliterate from the face of the earth the socialist states and squash the Communist movement, at the same time finance one of the socialist countries, granting that country credits and free gifts? . . . Everyone knows that the imperialists never give money to anyone without a purpose, just for the sake of 'beautiful eyes.' They invest their capital in those enterprises from which they hope to receive a good profit. If the imperialists agree to give assistance to a socialist state, they do not take such a step in order to strengthen it."

Nikita Khrushchev--a notably pragmatic man, but now expected as head Communist to be boss of all Communist ideology too--seemed to be a little miffed at Yugoslav charges that he was a mere "practi-calist," and that international Communism was not generating any new theoretical concepts. Well, asked Khrushchev, how about his plan to catch up with the

U.S. in meat, milk and butter, his program for abolishing tractor stations, his scheme to build a chemical industry to make better clothes for consumers? Weren't those new ideas?

But after arguing the thesis that good practice meant good theory, Khrushchev made it clear which side of the argument his heart is on. Theory, said he, is sterile if it does not meet "the test of life. Theory, my friends, is grey, but the eternal tree of life is evergreen." As if to show how little he is handicapped by theory, Khrushchev, in the same week in which he argued that any Communist who accepted capitalist favors was inviting in a Trojan horse, also asked Washington for U.S. long-term credits.

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