Uneasy State of the Union

For twelve minutes last week, Nikita Khrushchev was out of a job. As required by Soviet law, he solemnly tendered his resignation at the first meeting of the new Supreme Soviet--Russia's rubber-stamp Parliament, which was "chosen" last month by 99.47% of all adult Russians who voted for the 1,443 candidates of the Communist Party's choice. Then, in hardly more time than it took one of Nikita's pals to remind delegates of his "thoughtful and many-sided works," Khrushchev was unanimously re-elected to his second four-year term as Chairman of the Council of Ministers.

Khrushchev's resignation and re-election were part of the elaborate ritual by which Russia's rulers practice dictatorship while preaching democracy. On paper, the Soviet Union has a model constitution, guaranteeing all citizens freedom of speech and assembly, a free press, and equality under the law. In fact, as intended by Joseph Stalin, who introduced the constitution at the height of his reign of terror in 1936, it is a meaningless document because the Kremlin can and does ignore it at will.

Last week, in his State of the Soviet Union address at the Great Kremlin Palace, Khrushchev proclaimed that Russia has progressed from the "proletarian dictatorship" of Stalin's era to "a socialist state of the whole people," called for a new constitution that will "create even firmer guarantees of the democratic rights and freedoms of the working people." In addition, said Khrushchev, who heads the committee in charge of drafting the new document, it will "clearly formulate" the principle of peaceful coexistence, which is still regarded as heresy by diehard Stalinists in Moscow and Peking.

Glimmers of Hope. Though many Western observers expected that Khrushchev would use the Supreme Soviet session as a platform for tirades against U.S. nuclear tests, Moscow's announcement that it will follow the U.S. series with more weapons tests of its own left little grounds for righteous indignation. Indeed, Khrushchev and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko spoke in relatively muted tones; in almost identical words, both allowed that U.S.-Soviet talks on Berlin yielded "glimmers of hope." The published text of Khrushchev's recent three-hour interview with Look Publisher Gardner Cowles showed that the Soviet Premier has finally abandoned his insistence on a summit meeting in the near future, now agrees with President Kennedy that a conference of heads of state would probably prove "sterile" unless the issues at stake were negotiated in advance by their foreign ministers.

With a hint of his old testiness, Khrushchev protested that Russian rancor at the U-2 incident in 1960 has "not healed yet" and that if Kennedy were to visit Russia, it "would put our guest in a difficult position." (Actually, Westerners in Moscow know that, on the contrary, John Kennedy or any other U.S. President would get an overwhelming popular reception from the Russian people, would thereby embarrass the regime.) Khrushchev added nonetheless that there are "no reasons for serious disputes between Russia and the U.S."

As for himself, Khrushchev told Cowles that he would like to pay another visit to the U.S., but incognito: "It would be good to paste on mustaches, or a beard, or still better both, so as not to be Khrushchev but, let us say, Ivanov and to see everything interesting undisturbed."

Need for Fertilizer. Still very much Khrushchev and not Ivanov, he could not resist a gibe at China's economic woes. Said he: "If Communism is proclaimed where there is, say, one pair of pants per ten persons, and these pants are divided equally into ten parts, we shall all be going without pants. We reject such pantsless Communism."

Well aware that his fellow Soviet citizens overwhelmingly reject meatless Communism, Khrushchev was still preoccupied with his No. 1 problem: providing 216 million Russians with an adequate and balanced diet. As part of a sweeping reorganization of the farm bureaucracy,

Agriculture Minister Mikhail Olshansky was shifted to another job last week and replaced by his deputy, Konstantin Pysin, 52, a onetime farm administrator in the Altai region, one of Khrushchev's pet virgin-lands areas, where Pysin was once officially scolded for steadily dwindling milk production.

Pysin will boss Khrushchev's ambitious program to boost Russian farm output--notably by vastly increased production of tractors and chemical fertilizer--which will cause widespread dislocations in Russia's industrial machine. It was becoming increasingly plain that if he is to achieve his cherished goal by the time Russia goes to its sham polls again in four years, Khrushchev will need all the peaceful coexistence he can get.

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