B-Flat

When well-established teams break up --such as Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, or Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev--one partner usually gains and the other loses. Last week, as Nikita Khrushchev gallivanted across France with a new team he obviously trusted more (his wife and family), news leaked out of Moscow about his luckless old road-show sidekick, Marshal Bulganin.

No longer was Bulganin in Caucasian exile as chairman of the obscure Stavropol Economic Council. He had been banished there for siding with Khrushchev's "antiparty" foes in the big 1957 leadership showdown. Even after he had made a groveling confession of his "mistakes" before the Moscow Central Committee late in 1958, the local zealots in Stavropol apparently kept calling him an enemy of the state. According to a story passed by the Moscow censors, Bulganin appealed to Khrushchev, who suggested that Bulganin retire on a pension. At 64, a pale shadow of the jovial, rotund figure who represented his country at the 1955 Geneva summit meetings, Bulganin now lives on a $300-a-month pension on the outskirts of Moscow, of which in his time he was mayor, an ailing and disgraced man who had once been wartime boss of Soviet industry, and Premier, until two years ago, of the Soviet Union.

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