East, West

Russia is a place where only the most convulsive changes can break through the interminable loudspeaker insistence that ill is well, the leadership is collective and opinions are unanimous. Western Europe, on the other hand, is a place that emphasizes its divisions, airs its numerous arguments, and sometimes half convinces itself that it is close to ruin.

Last week was one of those rare times when both halves of Europe were simultaneously lit by the flare of significant events, and the weaknesses of the East and the strengths of the West could be better seen. Moscow got the big headlines: Nikita Khrushchev's grab for power, his overturning of Soviet Russia's most durable Politburocrats, his emergence in the top spot, was dramatic evidence that collective dictatorships in time become one-man dictatorships.

Events in Bonn and Paris made the inside pages--but they were milestones too, and history will so record them. West Germany took last week and France will take this week the crucial steps to declare themselves part of a Common Market that will enable these divided lands for the first time in modern history to have a vast, tariff-free trading zone comparable to the U.S., embracing six nations and 160 million people. At the same time (see below), the most powerful of Western European nations, West Germany, voted, to outlaw the return of cartels in favor of free enterprise and competition. It did so largely at the insistence of one man--Minister of Economics Ludwig Erhard. West Germany's new law, though it was not all that Erhard hoped for, was big news in a Western Europe that talks freedom but practices monopoly and restraint of trade.

The prosperity of Western Europe and the poverty of Eastern Europe were all part of the same story, as no one knows better than Russia's new czar, Nikita Khrushchev, who made it a key plank of his new program that Russia must "catch up with America in the per capita production of milk, butter and meat in the next few years."

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