The "Liberal" Life

Nikita Khrushchev, in the view of one Western school of thought, is the best man our side has in Russia. For all his bullheadedness and ugly threats, it is said, Khrushchev should be helped to stay in power, since his downfall might bring a far worse man to the top--presumably an adherent of the militant Stalinist or Chinese line. Soviet diplomats, seeking concessions abroad, subtly encourage this view, and Yugoslavia's Tito has been plugging it. Lately, it has found new and prominent exponents in the West. Last week Hearst Columnist George Sokolsky, a veteran antiCommunist, startled readers with the strident prediction that "if Khrushchev falls, we shall have immediate war.'' On television, former Vice President Richard M. Nixon declared, "We can feel quite fortunate that Khrushchev rather than someone else is the dictator of the Soviet Union." Last week the case for Khrushchev as a man of peace--and a possible future ally of the West against Red China--was given front-page treatment in a series of articles in the New York Times written by Reporter Harrison E. Salisbury after a two-month swing through the Soviet Union.

As a Moscow correspondent for the

Times in Stalin's final paranoiac years, Salisbury had worked under the world's stiffest censorship; as a result, his blue-penciled stories in those days sometimes read more like items from Pravda than straight news. Not until Salisbury returned to New York in 1954 could he write the facts; Moscow promptly blasted him as ''ignorant" and a "liar," and refused him another visa for several years. Salisbury's latest product doubtless would win him some plaudits in the Kremlin--and some angry snarls as well.

Cuba "Folk Dances." He wrote of a nation and an ideology in deep ferment, belying the Communist theory that enough agitprop and malice can stop man's thoughts and instincts and create a horde of obedient automatons. On the contrary, wrote Salisbury, a large section of Russia's youth is rebellious and alive with foreign ideas in the wake of the long years of Stalinist repression. Salisbury does not ignore the millions of sober Communist youngsters who study hard in their schools and universities, or work enthusiastically in factories. But more importantly, said Salisbury, there is rising a "lost generation . . . alienated from Soviet goals and strongly oriented toward anything Western--from a new hairdo to democratic freedoms."

American jazz is everywhere; the party no longer even attempts to suppress it. "Moscow bands play a solid repertory of Western numbers. When the bands stop playing, they switch on tape recordings made from broadcasts of Music U.S.A., a Voice of America program." Latin American music--the samba, the mambo, the cha cha cha--is also popular, often under the guise of "native folk dances" of Cuba, Russia's Communist friend. Though Russia has its brawling young nihilists, the day of the stilyagi (zoot suiters) is gone; more often youths are dressed in conservative grey with pencil-thin trousers. There is even a blue-jean fad, to the anger of militant party stalwarts, who note acidly that the blue denim must have been smuggled in from abroad, since it is a product not even manufactured in the Soviet Union.

The Greatest Defeat. Young people pepper their conversation with Western-slanted jargon such as "tip top" and "okay," refer to one another as "zhentlemen." In Soviet teen-age slang, flesh-royal (royal flush) means wonderful, zhelezny (iron) means great or terrific, and tackka (wheelbarrow) means the family car. These youths, wrote Salisbury, "are the despair of the Communist Party." As one party loyalist put it, "This is our greatest defeat. The young people have deserted the cause. I do not know how we are going to get them back."

There is also ferment among some of the highest Soviet scientists, reported Salisbury; they are beginning to accept a spiritual concept of the universe. "These men have not become believers in a formal religion or dogma . . . But they are no longer atheists." At the same time the young priesthood of the Russian Orthodox Church is pushing its own reform movement to rescue the image of the church from that of superstition and backwardness; the priests want to relate the church to modern life. "One priest, for example," wrote Salisbury, '"is presenting a series of sermons on topics of immediate and controversial interest. He announces the series in advance, like a lecture, and encourages discussion after the sermon." From time to time the Communist Party cracks down by closing a seminary here, a church academy there; it also floods the bookstores with anti-religious propaganda. But some 20,000 churches remain open, and nourish.

Spiritual Mentor. To experts in the field, much of Harrison Salisbury's account was neither new nor controversial, but it constituted topnotch, readable reporting of daily life in Russia. It was when Salisbury took up the larger issue of Soviet policy that he began to get in trouble with the Kremlinologists. Many of them disagreed with his thesis that "a bitter struggle is emerging . . . between a powerful neo-Stalinist faction and a broadly based group of liberals for the dominant role in the country's future."

The "liberals," said Salisbury, were Nikita Khrushchev and some of the older men grouped around him, e.g., First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan. The "neo-Stalinists" were said to represent a wide range of middle-aged and young men who pay lip service to the anti-Stalin campaign, then proceed to support Stalin's old tough ways. Such men, said Salisbury, are Vladimir Semichastny, head of the secret police; Aleksandr Shelepin, former secret police chief who is now a high-ranking member of the party secretariat; Leonid Ilyichev, the government press chief. Their "spiritual mentor,"said Salisbury, seemed to be Mikhail Suslov, the Communists' chief ideologist, who said in a speech two weeks ago that peaceful coexistence permits "reasonable compromises" on the political front, but must not lead to "ideological disarmament." Disagreeing with Salisbury, Kremlinologists generally regard Semichastny and Shelepin as Khrushchev's own creatures, and Suslov is currently tagged by most experts as Nikita's ally.

Most startling was Salisbury's conclusion that some of the men around Khrushchev "are liberal not only in contrast with Stalinist authoritarianism, but, by and large, in the Western sense of liberalism as well . . . They believe in a rule of law, of justice, as it is known in the West, and in freedom of the individual within socially recognized bounds . . ." To many Western experts, this seemed .preposterously wishful thinking. Says a Munich-based expert: "There are no liberals and no neo-Stalinists--only hard-line and soft-line men in the ideological war with the rest of the world."

Necessary Warning. No doubt there are major differences between the "hardline" and the "soft-line" men in the

Kremlin that the West must not ignore and may be able to exploit. Khrushchev may in fact be preferable, says one Western diplomat, "as the devil I know to the devil I don't know." But any concessions to him, in the most realistic Western view, should be made not "to help him stay in power" but only if they are clearly in the Western interest as well.

As Reporter Salisbury ended, the Times itself felt it necessary to warn readers in an editorial against "wishful thinking" about Moscow's intentions: "Premier Khrushchev may well be anxious to avoid a nuclear war as long as the West is strong enough to meet a Soviet attack with retaliatory nuclear annihilation . . . But this does not necessarily mean real peace. 'Peaceful coexistence' may be nothing more than a way of waging all but nuclear war to assure a Communist world triumph."

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