Russia: Stresses & Shoes

Nikita Khrushchev could not match the glamour of the Kennedys' Paris visit in his own progress toward Vienna, but he did his best. To counter Jackie, he brought along his stout, pleasant-featured wife Nina (who was recently caught staring wistfully at high-fashion corsets at the British Trade Fair in Moscow). He arranged stopovers to receive welcomes from his own "allies." Boarding his private railroad car in Moscow, he stopped first at Kiev and then at Lvov, where a dutiful crowd turned out to cheer--even though Lvov is a Polish city snatched by the Ukraine after World War II.

The train chugged on through one of Khrushchev's favorite satellites, docile Czechoslovakia, where Khrushchev stopped now and again to accept the traditional bread and salt, and to promise that "the Soviet voice will always be the voice of peace." He also released news of a new $500 million trade and aid pact with East Germany, designed to ease the East Germans' heavy dependence on West Germany for industrial supplies and thereby clearing the way for a new Berlin crisis. But Khrushchev looked wan and tired when he alighted in Bratislava.

Old Enemy. In Vienna, one of the first men Khrushchev chanced to see was Vyacheslav M. Molotov. The two men had last exchanged words four years before at a tense moment in Communist Party history when Khrushchev kicked Molotov out of the Party Presidium in a crucial power struggle. As befitted a low-ranking delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Molotov stood at the station in a crowd of Soviet women and children. "We must get together," said Khrushchev, unabashed, as he reached out to shake Molotov's plump hand. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who had been Molotov's underling for years, blinked in the bright sun and smiled a frozen smile. "Nice weather we're having," he said.

The curious encounter served as reminder that, whatever the strains in the Western camp, stresses are always at work in the Communist hierarchy. Last week at Vienna, the stresses were present in Khrushchev's mind. Molotov, a hard-line Stalinist, had lost. But for Khrushchev there was the longstanding and probably more formidable threat from another Stalinist, Red China's Mao Tse-tung, who has challenged Khrushchev's dogma of "peaceful coexistence." Some observers credit Mao with forcing Khrushchev into more belligerence than he considered wise in Cuba and Laos. In backward Outer Mongolia, the Russians and Chinese are in active competition (see below). Mao has made it clear that he deplores the Vienna conference.

New Needle. There were additional worries for Khrushchev in Albania, whose tough, Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha, loves to needle him. Last week, after a show trial that featured abject confessions in old Stalinist tradition, Hoxha, who openly prefers Mao to Khrushchev' shot four Communist Party officials for "spying." The trial got not a word in the Russian press. Reason: though the spies were accused of working for "Greek monarchist-fascists, Yugoslav revisionists and American imperialists," they were actually Khrushchev sympathizers.

Russia is also troubled by domestic discontent--and after his recent junkets about the country, Khrushchev knows it. Agriculture is hampered by inefficiency and pilfering (leading to the recent reimposition of the death penalty for flagrant cases of theft). Pressure for more and better consumer goods is growing. Mourned Izvestia: "Spring is here, but in the shops there are no newly styled dresses and suits." In one ten-day period last month, Pravda received 7,000 letters of complaint about shoddy merchandise. A typical gripe: "If we can send a man to the moon, why do my shoes fall apart?"

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