The Three Horses

Best expression of Khrushchev's current mood--amiable but implacable--is his new troika tactic. Deceptively attractive, the troika seems to promise something for everyone: a committee of three (one Communist, one Westerner, one neutral) to take over every major world problem. Why not? smiled Soviet Delegate Georgy Pushkin to the U.S.'s Averell Harriman at the Laos peace talks last week. "Troika means three beautiful horses moving smoothly in stride, pulling a sled." The catch is that the three must be unanimous, thus guaranteeing the Russians a veto at every step.

Recognizing this, President John F. Kennedy went to meet Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna hoping to find some give in the Soviet position. Khrushchev would not budge. "This is a basic Soviet position and not negotiable," said Nikita firmly. He was frank to admit that it all began last year, when U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold was able to maneuver the Reds out of the Congo. It was at the shoe-banging U.N. General Assembly session in September that Khrushchev first broached the troika idea, demanding that the U.N. Secretariat be run not by one man, but by a team of three secretaries. Since then Moscow's delegates have applied it to every international conference in sight, including Laos and the nuclear test ban talks.

Surprisingly few neutral nations have been taken in. They have seen enough of the Russian veto technique to realize that it could paralyze the very international bodies in which they put their trust.

At the test-ban talks, Russia's Semyon ("Scratchy") Tsarapkin was candid: "We are never again going to be caught with a neutral as we were at the U.N." And there the Russian horse sat, on its haunches.

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