The Confidence Man

Less than three years before, a badly shaken and bellicose Nikita Khrushchev had flown into Warsaw only to find that he had been outmaneuvered: the new boss of Poland--which had come so close to open rebellion against the Soviet Union --was none other than Wladyslaw Gomulka, an out-of-favor Communist whom Stalin had once arrested for refusing to castigate Tito. "Traitor!" Khrushchev bellowed at him during that all-night 1956 session in the Belvedere Palace. "If you don't obey, we will crush you!"

Last week, as Khrushchev alighted from his plane to begin a ten-day visit to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the founding of Poland's people's republic, he warmly bussed Gomulka on both cheeks. "Dear Comrade . . ." his airport speech began, and it ended with, "Long live the eternal, unbreakable Soviet-Polish friendship!" Gomulka was just as unctuous, praised Khrushchev as "the sincere friend of the Polish people," a "wise, distinguished man."

Talk, Talk. It was perhaps just coincidence that Khrushchev's trip came at a time when the Big Four foreign ministers were wrestling in Geneva, but nowhere better than in Poland could Khrushchev more cockily display his power. The electric hopes of 1956 had long since been buried in Poland, and though the Roman Catholic Church and the Polish farmer enjoy a degree of freedom unparalleled behind the Iron Curtain, faithful Communist Gomulka had led his nation's policies safely back into the arms of Moscow. Now Khrushchev was back, and everywhere party workers had crowds organized to cheer and applaud him. "I am an old man," said Nikita Khrushchev, 65, rambling on in lengthy speeches, "and when I am allowed to talk, I talk."

He was at his proletarian best. In the mining town of Katowice he proudly proclaimed: "I used to work as a miner myself." insisted that no smell was more "dear to my heart" than the smell of coal dust. He felt so confident, in fact, that at one point he dared to strike a particularly sensitive spot. "Your priests," he said, "promise you happiness in heaven. We will offer you happiness here on earth. Those black-robed beggars don't want to work for it." Only when he followed up by asking whether everyone was happy was he made aware of the deadly silence in the crowd.

It was in Sosnowiec. where an International (Communist) Mine Workers' Congress was in progress, that Khrushchev hit his stride. There he promised: "Never, never, never will we launch a war against any country anywhere at any time." (He did not promise never, never, never to stay in lands that want to get rid of the Russians.) He continued in his cocky way: "I have told the Americans: 'You have no intercontinental missiles. You have missiles that can send up oranges. We have missiles that can send up tons. Imagine the kind of bombs that could be contained in our missiles.' "

"Look, a Capitalist!" The West, he snorted, was insisting on free elections in the two Germanys, "but we point out that there are more people in West Germany and that therefore they would win." For Khrushchev, this seemed to settle the matter of free elections. It was this sort of logic that led him to his conclusion: eventually the capitalists will all end up in museums. "We will look at them as today we look at the remains of prehistoric monsters and say, 'Look, that was a capitalist!'" Recently, he added, he had been visited by Averell Harriman, who was defeated for the governorship of New York by a Rockefeller. "What is the difference to the workers," said Khrushchev, "between a Rockefeller and a Harriman?"

But his main target of the week--and one that was calculated to appeal to the Poles--was West Germany. In fact, Khrushchev got his only show of genuine enthusiasm on his Polish tour when he rolled through the haunted, once-devastated "Western territories," formerly German but now Polish, and enthusiastically sided with Polish claims. Said Khrushchev, as he set the theme in Katowice: "Adenauer seems to follow in the footsteps of Hitler, who is now decaying in the earth. I say to Adenauer: 'If you try to attack the Socialist countries, you won't be able to leave your own hole in the ground.' " Then up spoke Wladyslaw Gomulka, the perfect host: "Adenauer strives to win France for his policies. Our new friend President de Gaulle may be compared to a dog who barks loudly, but is nevertheless only a toothless dog."

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