Guests, Welcome & Unwelcome

"We want to see the machinery and the people," said pudgy Georgy Malenkov. "We are trying to combine them both, but the people are more important than the machinery." In a round of visits to Britain's atomic research laboratories and power plants last week, Georgy's fellow delegates made copious notes, but if

Georgy was interested he failed to show it. Yet he never neglected the people.

Sometimes his efforts came a cropper. Urged by photographers to pose with an English child in Hampton Court, Malenkov, with hundreds of children to pick from, unhappily seized on six-year-old Thomas Klouda and his brother Peter, aged three, and plunked them on his knees. The boys happened to be the sons of former Czechoslovakian Consul-General Antonin Klouda, who fled Prague after the Communist coup. "Frankly, my first thought," said father Klouda, "was how easy it would be to assassinate him."

In Staffordshire Electrical Engineer Gleb Kerensky indignantly turned down an invitation to act as Malenkov's interpreter. His father, it seems, was the same Alexander Kerensky who was deposed as Russian Premier by the Bolsheviks.

Iron Curtain. In many another quarter, however, Georgy was doing fine. Time and again he had his picture taken grinning from ear to ear amid a sea of female workers. At an official dinner one night, he commandeered one of the entertainers, pretty, blonde Xylophonist Pauline Joy, and invited her to sit beside him. As Malenkov beamed and flashbulbs popped, Pauline in her tights banged out a selection of Russian folk tunes. After a couple of encores, the courtly Malenkov sent a waiter out to buy her "a large box of chocolates."

At an electrical plant in Staffordshire, two impulsive canteen waitresses pinned the visiting Russian and planted moist, ruby-red busses on his cheeks. A moment later, in high good humor, Georgy stepped into a freight elevator, watched the steel door clank shut and cracked: "Ah ha, I see you have an Iron Curtain here. We've discarded it in Russia."

At dinner in London with a group of 19 British Laborites, some of whom he himself had entertained in Moscow, Georgy Malenkov impressed the brethren with his skill and confidence under a barrage of questions. Laborite R. H. ("Dick") Crossman gave an account of the interview to reporters next day, later dutifully repudiated it in the face of official Russian protests. "He told us," Grossman said, " 'We have effectively prevented a repetition of the dictatorship of Stalin.' Asked in detail how that was done, he did not answer except by saying, 'We have done it.' " Did Malenkov, who was Stalin's closest ally in those last years which are now deplored, say he did not like Stalin? Said Grossman, "He certainly gave that impression."

Despite Visitor Malenkov's best efforts to win friends and influence Britons, the old animus occasionally showed through on both sides. Touring a boiler factory in Buxton, Malenkov discovered to his surprise that it took 18 months for the British to assemble one boiler and promptly announced that the Russians could do it in less than four. He offered to send the British engineers some Soviet do-it-yourself pamphlets to help them along their fumbling way. The offer was politely and coolly declined.

Jet Boast. At mid-week another Russian visitor arrived, whose presence seemed calculated to strain the bonds of hospitality even more.

Ostensibly a mere public servant duty bound to check British security arrangements for the forthcoming visit of Soviet Bigwigs Khrushchev and Bulganin, Russian Secret Police Chief General Ivan Serov (TIME, Dec. 19) roared into London in a gleaming airplane that was itself a veiled threat and a smug boast. A jet transport similar to the much-touted Russian-built Badger jet bombers (see SCIENCE), it perched on London's airport in sneering challenge to Western jet development. Before its motors were cold, an R.A.F. photo plane roared over it at a low altitude.

Serov, a wiry, unobtrusive little man in a broad-brimmed hat, did his best to ingratiate himself. "Look at me," he said, grinning and thumping his chest for newsmen, "would you call me Ivan the Terrible?" The newsmen were unmoved. "An odious thing arrived at London airport yesterday," the Daily Mirror's columnist Cassandra told his 5,000,000 readers. "Mark him well. Look upon his smiling face, for this man is the Himmler of the Soviet Union. His business is terror, torture and the grave."

Britons seemed willing to take amiable Georgy Malenkov as one of Communism's more presentable faces. But Serov, the paid purger, come to apply his time-tried methods to the protection of Khrushchev and Bulganin from the threat of their British hosts, was too much for even British tolerance.

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