Happy Returns, Nikita

In Moscow last week, amid quiet vodka toasts and cries of Mnogie leta! (Many years of life), Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev turned 68. Unlike Joseph Stalin, whose birthdays became vast public orgies of obeisance, Khrushchev celebrates his anniversaries in private. In fact, he had little reason to celebrate--and was under doctor's orders not to. Though four years younger than Stalin at the time of his death, Khrushchev has high blood pressure and a heart condition. Moscow rumors persist that he suffered a stroke in recent months; twice, after absences that were officially attributed to flu, Nikita has himself told friends that he suffered a more serious ailment. He has markedly curtailed his social calendar, is on the wagon and a strict diet, and at diplomatic functions seldom seems compelled these days to act the life and soul of the Party.

He remains nonetheless an exceptionally energetic man for his years. After an interview with Khrushchev that lasted nearly three hours, Look Publisher Gardner Cowles said last week that the Soviet Premier seemed to be "in extremely good, vigorous health." Khrushchev himself assured the 14th Congress of the Young Communist League: "I am working overtime. According to Soviet law I already have the right not to work. Where must I spend the energy? Must I take it to the grave with me? No. All the energy must be put into work for the welfare of society." Indeed, it was not health but history that deserted Nikita Khrushchev in his 68th year. Early in the year, he declared truculently that he would sign a peace treaty with East Germany by year's end.

Last week, nearly four months after his deadline, talks continued in Washington on the Berlin issue; Dean Rusk seemed ready to offer Russian Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin some of the semi-concessions that the U.S. had suggested before* but stood firm on all essentials. Khrushchev's boldest move in 1961 was to raise the Berlin Wall; today it seems less like a master stroke than a monument to the misery of 100 million souls imprisoned in East Europe.

In the nuclear competition, by exploding 120 megatons last fall, Khrushchev merely goaded the U.S. to end its own three-year moratorium on testing. Even Khrushchev's compelling space triumphs have paled since the U.S. gave the world a ringside seat for John Glenn's flight.

Paper Utopia. In Khrushchev's script, the crowning achievement was to have been last October's 22nd Party Congress at which delegates from 81 Communist nations dutifully ratified the Khrushchev Code, a glittering prospectus for Communism's future by which Nikita hoped to add Khrushchevism to Marxism-Leninism. Yet his paper utopia seemed impossibly remote to most Russians. As a thundering anticlimax, Khrushchev in March unveiled his new blueprint for agriculture, leaving no doubt that the inertia and inefficiency of Russia's farm system will not be overcome in Khrushchev's lifetime, if ever.

Peasant-born Premier Khrushchev has staked his political fortunes and personal popularity on his ability to reverse Soviet agriculture's 35-year history of collectivized chaos. Yet for all his boasts of overtaking U.S. meat and milk output by 1960, last year's better-than-average harvest was followed by a winter in which Russia's overall food shortage was more critical than at any other time since the early postwar years. Khrushchev now proposes to boost food production by doubling tractor and fertilizer output and drastically reshuffling the farm bureaucracy. But none of his crash measures gets to the root of Russia's farm problem: the peasant's stubborn refusal to work harder or produce more without greater incentives in cash and consumer goods than the hard-pressed Soviet economy can spare.

Consumer Communism. Throughout Asia and Africa, the new nations seem more likely than ever to elude Russia's net, as Europe did in Lenin's and Stalin's time. Russia's foreign aid program has dwindled to a trickle, and even this is resented by Russians, who think that their own underprivileged economy should come first. Moreover, Khrushchev's withdrawal of aid to Communist China may well have been prompted by the inadequacy of Soviet resources as much as by ideological differences with Mao Tse-tung. Taking advantage of China's internal crisis, Khrushchev may have temporarily forced Mao (who is also 68) to let up on his cold war with Moscow (see below). In time even this minor gain for the Soviet leader may deepen the rancor with which China's leaders look on Khrushchev's "consumer Communism."

At 68, Nikita Khrushchev is still powerful, sharp-witted and capable of living the "many years" he was wished last week. Increasingly, though, it looks as if the man who vowed to "bury" the West will himself be under ground before Russia resolves its troubles with the rest of the Communist bloc, with the West, or with its own overcommitted, overregimented economy.

*A "new" plan circulated by the State Department was simply a catalogue of long-discussed possible negotiating points on both Berlin and disarmament. Included were 1) East German and West German committees to discuss mutual problems, 2) a 13-nation authority, with representatives from both Germanys and from East and West Berlin, to control access to Berlin, 3) a nonaggression pact between NATO and Warsaw-pact nations, and 4) agreement by the U.S. and Russia to restrict atomic arms to those nations already possessing them. West Germany, while reluctantly agreeing to Rusk's memorandum, deliberately leaked the plan to the press, raised a howl particularly over the measure of "recognition" of East Germany that they felt was implied in the idea of discussion committees and the international authority.

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