Flowers, Swallows & Strangers

The game of "peaceful coexistence" that Nikita Khrushchev has set out to play often keeps him as busy as a one-man army in a two-front war. There is the problem of keeping his own fractious Communist house in order, and at the same time keeping the warm wind of detente blowing toward the West. Last week missives and missionaries were flying in all directions over Nikita's far-flung battle lines.

Do What One May. For months he had been planning to call a conference of Communist parties in order to thresh out the ideological split in the international Communist movement. But be fore he could even send off his invitations, Peking further complicated the whole affair by refusing to attend and promising to keep off the list of invited guests its allies in the ever-growing Sino-Soviet squabble.

"The day your so-called meeting takes place will be the day you step into your grave," the Chinese taunted in a letter to the Soviets. "But since you have made up your mind, you will most probably call it anyway. Otherwise, by breaking your word, would you not become a laughingstock down the centuries?" The 9,500-word polemic called Khrushchev's meeting "arbitrary, unilateral and illegal," and in the viciousness of its tone helped to widen the already gaping split between the two Red nations. To end the letter on a properly inscrutable note, the Chinese chose a poetic refrain from the Sung Dynasty (A.D. 960-1279):

Flowers fall off, do what one may:

Swallows return, no strangers they.

Seduction on the Seine. Meanwhile, a tough little Balkan swallow was flitting around Paris, much to Nikita's further dismay. He was Ion Gheorghe Maurer, Premier of Rumania and the first East European satellite Prime Minister to pay an official visit to a NATO country. For the Rumanians, who are defiantly determined to push ahead with full-scale industrialization of their country, the visit was a gesture designed to show Khrushchev that they would neither accept the grocery-store and gas-station role he wants to assign them in Comecon (the Kremlin's Common Market), nor would they meekly bow to Moscow's bidding in the ideological battle with China.

The boys from Bucharest did the customary tourist scene--a bateau mouche ride down the Seine, a grand tour of Versailles, a quick tramp through the Louvre, a weekend in the Loire Valley chateau country--but at the same time took plenty of opportunity to flirt with the French government. Charles de Gaulle is convinced that the Soviet bloc is crumbling under the pressure of traditional nationalisms, thus opening opportunities for the spread of French influence. De Gaulle himself granted Maurer an hour-long audience in which he turned on that rarely seen Gaullist charm. As Maurer emerged, newsmen asked him if le grand Charles had been in good form. The Rumanian, who speaks fluent if Italian-sounding French, rolled his eyes to the ceiling and said: "Et comment!"

The upshot of the week's business was a Franco-Rumanian pact promising increased scientific and technical cooperation. And that certainly did not please Nikita. No sooner had Maurer flown off to Paris in his special Tarom Airlines Ilyushin 18 than Nikolai Podgorny, Secretary of the Soviet Central Committee and Khrushchev's third-ranking lieutenant, flew in for a daylong fence-mending session with Rumanian Boss Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.

More Than a Press Pass. If Red China and Rumania put Nikita on the defensive, he was nonetheless preparing for an offensive of his own in another direction. In one of those gestures of detente toward the West that so aggravate his Chinese Communist adversaries, Khrushchev called in a visiting "capitalist-imperialist" for a 21-hour chat in the Premier's Kremlin office. The visitor was none other than David Rockefeller, of Wall Street and the Chase Manhattan Bank, who had been attending a meeting in Leningrad when Nikita summoned him. In a "relaxed, friendly, even though extremely frank" atmosphere, Khrushchev renewed his insistence that trade between the U.S. and Russia be increased, told the financier that Russia would be willing to pay a sizable portion of her $10.8 billion wartime Lend-Lease debt in return for long-term U.S. credit, and even discussed Barry Goldwater.

At the same time, Nikita was taking a cautious step toward improved relations with his old enemies, the West Germans. To that end, he sent his son-in-law, Izvestia Editor Aleksei Adzhu-bei, swinging through West Germany on an ostensibly "private" journalistic tour. But when Adzhubei got to Bonn, it became clear that he was traveling on something more than an ordinary press pass. In a private talk with Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, the Russian guest revealed his real mission: to arrange a visit to West Germany for Father-in-Law Nikita.

Erhard seemed willing enough to meet Khrushchev, assured the guest that the agenda would be "unrestricted" --which meant that Nikita could talk all he wanted to about the evils of NATO membership, and Erhard would be able to raise at will the question of German reunification. Though Khrushchev still has to say "da" before a formal invitation from Bonn is forthcoming. But there was no question that both leaders seemed to feel that they had nothing to lose by such a meeting --and possibly something to gain.

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