KHRUSHCHEV'S ROGUES' GALLERY

Six Satellite Rulers Descend on New York

TO applaud his speeches, second his motions and demonstrate "the unity of the Socialist camp," Nikita Khrushchev brings to New York this week six captive chieftains from the Bleak Lands of Double Think. The men Khrushchev chose to accompany him to the U.N. are the ones who wield real power in Russia's European satellites--though only two hold formal government offices. Of the satellite bosses, only East Germany's Walter Ulbricht is missing: he had to be left behind because his nation does not belong to the U.N. For the West, their arrival is a rare opportunity for firsthand inspection of the ruthless survival experts who rule 79,633 million enslaved Eastern Europeans. The roll call:

Albania. Premier Mehmet Shehu (pronounced Shay-who) is a 47-year-old soldier who won his military spurs in the Red-led Garibaldi Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, got his final polishing at Moscow's Voroshilov Military Academy. The son of a mullah, Shehu is the only satellite leader who speaks English, which he learned during childhood studies at Tirana's American Vocational School. Despite his soft speech and crisp good grooming, Shehu is known as the "Butcher of Albania" for his bloody suppression of anti-Communists as boss of Albania's secret police; at a 1950 meeting of the Albanian Cabinet, he reportedly shot an argumentative colleague dead over the conference table. His chief political stock in trade is his implacable hatred of Yugoslavia. Since Moscow's latest falling-out with Tito, this has apparently led Khrushchev to favor Shehu over Albania's First Party Secretary Enver Hoxha.

Bulgaria. Though he holds no official government job, Todor Zkivkov, First Secretary of Bulgaria's Communist Party, considers himself the Bulgarian Khrushchev and, like his hero, is fond of making trips into the countryside to pose as the peasants' folksy friend. In Zhivkov's case, the effect is diminished by monotone oratory and a repugnant personality. A onetime printer and World War II partisan leader, chunky Todor Zhivkov, 49. is cold, humorless and conceited. Under his leadership, Bulgaria has become the only European satellite which has successfully herded virtually all its peasants onto collective farms; it is also one of the few countries in the world that possesses fewer cattle now than in 1935. But in Khrushchev's eyes, Zhivkov's unquestioning loyalty to Moscow apparently makes up for his notorious lack of intelligence.

Czechoslovakia. Efficient, unimaginative President Antonin Novotny, 55, recalls Lenin's famous wisecrack about Molotov--"the best file clerk in the country." One of the two satellite leaders who are simultaneously head of state and Communist Party boss (the other: East Germany's Walter Ulbricht, who became head of state last week), Novotny is a chronic tubercular of morose disposition. Trained as a locksmith, he joined the Communist Party at 17, spent much of World War II in Nazi Germany's Mauthausen concentration camp. Under his heavy hand, Czechs have benefited less than any other satellite people from international Communism's post-Stalinist "liberalization." Even in 1956, when destalinization was at its height, Novotny stubbornly refused to rehabilitate the memory of former Czech Communist Leader Rudolf Slansky, whose 1952 execution was largely Novotny's work. Though he admitted that the charges of Titoism and "Jewish cosmopolitanism" which had been used to destroy Slansky were ''false and fabricated." Novotny ingeniously argued that Slansky deserved hanging anyway for torturing political prisoners.

Hungary. Janos Kadar (pronounced Kah-dahr), 48, is a brusque, ill-educated peasant's son who specializes in betrayals. A member of Hungary's Communist resistance during World War II, Kadar escaped death at Nazi hands only because the wife of his close friend Lazlo Rajk refused to disclose his whereabouts even under Nazi torture. In 1949 Rajk was jailed for Titoism. Kadar, then head of Red Hungary's sadistic secret police, talked his old friend into making a false confession by promising to save his life. Then he personally signed the order for Rajk's execution. A few years later, Kadar himself was charged with Titoism and thrown into one of his own prisons--where his former subordinates softened him up by pulling out his fingernails. Released by Hungary's then Premier Imre Nagy, Kadar showed his gratitude by joining Nagy's government at the beginning of the 1956 Hungarian revolution--and, after ten days, deserting to the Russians. When the Russians rewarded him by installing him as Premier, Kadar swore to grant an amnesty to all who had fought in the revolution. Predictably, he kept his vows by ordering a wave of summary executions capped in 1958 by that of Imre Nagy, to whom Kadar had personally promised immunity. Kadar still runs Hungary for the Russians, though he resigned the premiership almost two years ago, is now officially only First Party Secretary. Khrushchev's apparent purpose in bringing this model Communist careerist to New York: to win for Kadar the aura of legitimacy which the Hungarian people refuse to grant him.

Poland. Wladyslaw Gomulka, 54, is the only satellite leader ever to face down Khrushchev and the ruler of the only Warsaw Pact nation to accept U.S. aid. A "homegrown Communist," who is alive today only because he was in a Polish jail in 1937 when Stalin liquidated the rest of Poland's Communist leadership, Gomulka is an irascible, puritanical man who hates conviviality and chitchat; he has strictly forbidden his aides to publicize his private life--which is largely given over to swimming, volley ball and his Russian-Jewish wife Zofja. Like Hungary's Kadar, Gomulka was arrested in 1951 for Titoism, but unlike Kadar he refused to crack despite three years' confinement. Reinstated as First Party Secretary in Poland's near revolution in 1956, he defied Khrushchev's threat to turn Soviet troops loose on Warsaw and granted his people considerable economic and social freedom. But as Poland's deep economic difficulties and bitter church-state conflict showed no signs of solution, his natural crotchetiness and distrust of "liberals" reasserted itself. (Says one of his associates: "Asking Gomulka to be reasonable and listen to advice is like asking a bear to be good-natured.") Bit by bit, the liberties of Poland's people have been curtailed, and the world has learned that though Wladyslaw Gomulka may be a Polish patriot, he is, above all, a dedicated Communist.

Rumania. Along with Gomulka, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (pronounced Ghee-or-ghee-you-DAYGE) is one of the rare satellite leaders to enjoy some degree of genuine popularity in his own country. A small-town boy from Moldavia whose education stopped with elementary school, Gheorghiu-Dej, 58, began his real schooling when he was jailed in 1933 for organizing a bloody railway strike near Bucharest. After eleven years in prisons and work camps, he was allowed to escape in 1944, as a gesture to the advancing Red army, began rising rapidly through Rumania's Communist hierarchy. (To distinguish himself from the rest of the Gheorghius, who are as common in Rumania as Smiths in the U.S., he took the added name "Dej," in honor of one of the many towns in which he had served time.) Since 1952, when he ousted the unlovely Ana Pauker, Gheorghiu-Dej has ruled Rumania without challenge, first as Premier and currently as First Party Secretary. Slow and obstinate in his mental processes, Gheorghiu-Dej is frequently mocked by Rumanians for his ignorance. But, at bottom, his cynical, pleasure-loving countrymen are proud of the fact that Gheorghiu-Dej, alone among the satellite bosses, is famed as a heavy-spending bon vivant and lady killer.

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