A Vote in Peace

His face was noticeably thinner, and his shirt collar sagged loosely around his neck. But no one had any trouble last week recognizing Nikita Khrushchev during his first public outing in a year. "How are you feeling?" someone asked. "I have been ill," he said, "but every one gets ill sometimes." As the crowd pressed in, a security guard angrily cleared a path, crying "Why don't you let the old man vote in peace?" At another Moscow polling station, former Deputy Premier Vyacheslav M. Molotov, whom Khrushchev ousted in 1957, greeted that aged hero of the 1918-21 civil war, Marshal Semyon Budenny, as he also tried to vote in peace.

The three figures from the past, like Soviet Russia's other 144 million registered voters, were casting their ballots for the unopposed candidates to the 1,517-member Supreme Soviet (Parlia ment). The candidates were prechosen by the Communist Party -- and, it would seem, by the voters. Everybody won, and by a margin that added up to a 99.8% endorsement for the government of Premier Aleksei N. Kosygin.

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