The Situation Is Good

When Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev slowly emerged from his TU-104 turbojet in Bulgaria last week, he seemed to lack his usual bounce. He had lost weight, the skin on his neck and face was slack, his eyes lacked sparkle. It took him a full day to recover anything like his old roadshow form. Then, in the Black Sea city of Varna (formerly called Stalin), he planted two small trees, after which he handed the shovel to startled Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. "I have helped build Communism," joked Nikita. "Now you've got to work. This isn't like writing notes." Khrushchev was visiting Moscow's earliest, most slavish European satellite because of economic and political troubles.

After dispensing advice on how failing collectives could pull themselves together and "become a Bulgarian Iowa," he lectured some local Communists for their opposition to destalinization. Then Khrushchev remembered that Western correspondents were in the audience; in the middle of a table-thumping denunciation of Stalin, he cut himself short. "But enough," he said. "The world is listening." The world was indeed listening, mostly for his reaction to the war in Southeast Asia. Khrushchev sounded rather mild--for Khrushchev. He condemned the dispatch of U.S. troops to Thailand as "unwise," and predicted that the move would lead to a Korea-style war. American soldiers, he said, "did not come to play golf.

They will shoot, and those they shoot at will shoot back." The U.S., Khrushchev charged, was spilling blood in Southeast Asia. But he seemed almost detached when he added: "The Americans may fight 15 years there, but it will not help." Although he warned the U.S. against nuclear competition with Russia, and incidentally announced that he would resume testing, on the whole the Soviet Premier thought that the international situation was good: "The Americans frighten us with war, and we frighten them back a bit. They threaten us with nuclear arms, and we tell them: 'We have them too.' This is the situation, and this is why we think the situation is good."

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