The Nyet Man

When Vyacheslav Molotov stepped out of the Soviet Foreign Ministry last June, the day before the ceremonial reception to Marshal Tito, the reason seemed obvious: as the man who had signed the letters that expelled Yugoslavia from the Cominform, Molotov was unacceptable to Tito. The fact that the Soviet leaders were willing to sidetrack Molotov after years of service showed that they attached much importance to winning back Tito. The man they pushed forward in Molotov's place was a burly, bushy-haired fellow with a mobile face, Dmitry T. Shepilov, Central Committee secretary and Pravda editor.

Shepilov's one claim to international fame at this point was to have traveled the Middle East, presumably only as Pravda editor, and there to have sold President Nasser on the big buildup of Soviet arms in Egypt. Though lionlike in aspect, Shepilov was a mild man and an appropriate mouthpiece for the soft words of coexistence with which the Soviet leaders were then screening their far-flung operations. The reason for the great play for Tito only became obvious later: they wanted to use him to help dispel the trouble that, sooner than they expected, exploded in Hungary and Poland.

Taking the Rap. The post-Molotov policy in the satellites and Egypt has been one of Nikita Khrushchev's staggering failures, but apparently it has not yet weakened his hold on the first party secretaryship. Last week the Central Committee, meeting in Moscow, decided that Shepilov should take the rap and sent him back to his secretarial duties after only eight months as Foreign Minister. His successor: Andrei A. Gromyko, 47.

It is a name much better known to the average American than to the average Russian. Gromyko's diplomatic career began as a rebuke to the U.S. when Stalin, withdrawing Maxim Litvinoff in 1943 as a protest against the absence of a second front, offhandedly made Litvinoff's 34-year-old secretary the Washington ambassador.

Diplomats called him "the oldest young man in the world" because of his cold, deadpan expression. Born near Minsk in the village of Gromyki (90% of whose inhabitants are called Gromyko), he started out as a teacher and never lost his pedantry. Molotov plucked him out of the Academy of Sciences in 1939, and his fortunes have paralleled those of his master. He was at Molotov's elbow at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam.

The Technician. For millions of Americans, Gromyko's televised image became a symbol of the cold war, a scowling, blue-serge embodiment of Soviet intransigence. As Russia's first U.N. representative, his nyet, uttered in the course of 26 Soviet vetoes, was a byword, and his precedent of walking out of a debate that embarrassed the Soviet Union became known as "pulling a Gromyko."

He was seen about Fifth Avenue, in a newsreel theater, and it was known that he had a family (a son, now 26, and a daughter, now 20), but nothing humanly attractive was known about him. To a questioner he once said tartly: "I am not interested in my personality."

Behind the formality, observers detected a skillful diplomatic technician, in this respect second only to Molotov. He could not change the U.N. majority against him, but he could and did bog it down in technicalities and delays, until fine hot outrage was largely dissipated and the vote anticlimactic. His own bosses, slow to give him high rating, only last year made him a full member of the Central Committee. Later he accompanied B. & K. on their laughing-boy journey through India and Burma, and was seen on occasion to smile himself.

Amid all the onrush of speculation over whether Gromyko's appointment means a revival of the old hard-face Molotov policies, the basic fact remains that Russian Foreign Secretaries are not of the top circle of Kremlin leadership these days: they make the faces, but they do not make the policies. As if to underline this fact, and incidentally to acknowledge the abruptness of the change of ministers, the Kremlin announced that the "definitive" foreign-policy speech made four days earlier by Shepilov was still definitive, even though he had already lost his job.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.