The Blowup

"I feel like a lion who discovers that the bear's hug doesn't break his ribs." So said Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan on the first jovial evening of his mission to Russia. This week, as he prepared to carry out the diplomatic equivalent of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, Macmillan has learned a little more about bears.

In the beginning, the Soviet bear hug seemed full of earthy cordiality. At Stalin's old dacha 60 miles southeast of Moscow, Macmillan and Khrushchev jaunted companionably through the pine woods in a troika, sharing a lap robe and chatting with apparent candor about the great issues of the cold war. Next night in the British embassy Khrushchev harked back to the Geneva Conference of 1955 (which Macmillan attended as Britain's Foreign Minister), warmly told the Prime Minister: "It was with your help that the Geneva spirit was created."

The Irritation. But behind the Soviet smiles, irritation was rising. The British diplomats and political backroom experts who had urged Macmillan to go to Moscow had done so on the basis of a fatally naive and condescending assumption. Sublimely convinced that no diplomats in the world are as smooth as British diplomats, Macmillan's advisers seriously thought that Khrushchev might somehow be persuaded, three months before a showdown date he himself had set, to take the urgency out of a crisis Khrushchev had deliberately provoked to try the free world's nerve.

The backroom experts also forgot that Khrushchev had no urge to enhance Macmillan's prestige with the British electorate; to the Russians, Britain's Socialists, with their distrust of the U.S. and their more experimental approach to the cold war, have more appeal than the Tories. Khrushchev's main interest in the Macmillan visit, obvious except to Whitehall, lay in his hope that it would uncover a split between the U.S. and British governments over Berlin. When he found Macmillan consistently taking the line that the West was unshakably united in the determination to hold its position in Berlin, Khrushchev complained to his companions that Macmillan was "just sitting and saying nothing while we make proposals."

The Campaign Speech. The blowup came on the fourth day of the visit, when Macmillan's back was turned. Though feverish from a nagging cold, Macmillan dutifully allowed himself to be bundled off to the Soviet bloc's Joint Nuclear Research Center at Dubna, 95 miles south of Moscow. With Macmillan safely out of the way, Candidate Khrushchev--running unopposed for the Supreme Soviet of the Federated Russian Republic in this week's "elections"--delivered a campaign speech that shook the Western world (see above).

This was not the first time that a Western state visitor to Moscow had been deliberately humiliated. Konrad Adenauer had been confronted with a cold blackmailer's offer--10,000 German P.W.s would be returned only if Bonn formally recognized Moscow. And on the very evening in 1956 when France's Premier Guy Mollet signed a communique hailing Franco-Soviet friendship, Khrushchev, at a Kremlin reception, toasted Algerian independence. But never before had the Russians exposed an eminent Western statesman to quite such open boorishness. With calculated contempt, Khrushchev chose to confide to his campaign audience several pertinent ideas--such as a proposal for an Anglo-Soviet nonaggression treaty --that he had not bothered to mention to Macmillan during more than 20 hours of supposedly intimate and frank discussion. The Cold War. From the moment Macmillan learned of Khrushchev's speech, relations between the two Premiers became a contest in coldness. In such a contest, Harold Macmillan, who prides himself on his "unflappability," was at no disadvantage. At a British embassy reception the night after Khrushchev's speech, while Mikoyan was praising his master for the stir he had created, Macmillan publicly remarked: "This is an extraordinary method of diplomacy." At luncheon next day Macmillan addressed only two stiffly formal remarks to Khrushchev. At the Bolshoi Ballet the two men sat side by side without speaking throughout an entire performance of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. And when it came time for Macmillan to set off on a four-day tour of Kiev and Leningrad, Khrushchev, who had promised to accompany him, excused himself on the transparently dishonest grounds that he had a toothache. Gromyko, not even admitting to a toothache, begged off too. Within a few hours of Macmillan's departure for Kiev, Khrushchev was receiving an Iraqi government delegation--lending further farce to what the offended London press called "the toothache snub."

Then reports of the outside world's shock over the treatment Harold Macmillan had received began to reach Moscow. At that the barometer began to rise a little. At week's end when Macmillan flew into Leningrad, a crowd tens of thousands strong lined the roads to greet him. Also on hand, unexpectedly, were Mikoyan and Gromyko, both radiating good cheer.

Khrushchev & Co., old Moscow hands concluded, had suddenly recalled their huge propaganda investment in presenting Russia as the world's most peace-loving power.

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