Nikita & the Capitalists

He called them "gentlemen capital ists," and only occasionally suggested that all capitalists are really robbers and cheats. Communist delegations from all over the world crowded into Moscow for the 46th anniversary celebrations of the Bolshevik Revolution. But Nikita Khrushchev devoted a total of seven hours to a traveling group of 20 top American executives (plus one educator) as if he found more challenge in their company.

On a European tour sponsored by TIME, the visitors first called on K. at the Kremlin. In the Oval Room, where the Soviet Council of Ministers usually meets, the callers sat in rows of small desks while he answered questions from behind a huge barricade of a table. He asked them to drop in at his anniversary reception the following day, and they in turn asked him to a party of their own (he promptly accepted). Throughout, Khrushchev put on one of those marathon propaganda performances at which he is by turns hearty, earthy, funny, menacing, seemingly frank, and totally impervious to argument.

He sounded his usual note of ritualistic optimism, vowed that in seven years--no more and no less--Russia will overtake the U.S. economically. To Henry R. Roberts, president of Connecticut General Life, "he acted like a corporation president who "is in trouble with his board of directors and is trying to get out of his dilemma by making aggressive and boastful statements."

Murder at the Wall. Apart from claiming victory in last week's Berlin incident and deploring the difficulties on the wheat deal (see THE NATION), Khrushchev suggested that Russia had not really given up on the moon race, at least not for the long run, and he almost teasingly hinted that the Sino-Soviet split might be mended one of these days: "The more you rejoice about the differences, the greater your disappointment will be."

Again and again he made a pitch for trade with the U.S., repeatedly pointed out that the U.S.'s allies trade far more heavily with Russia than the U.S. itself. Actually, as these businessmen well knew, Russia has few gold reserves to pay for U.S. products and little in the way of exportable goods that might interest the U.S. When National Cash Register President Robert S. Oelman asked what products Russia could offer, Khrushchev cited U.S. trade in machine tools with West Germany. "If we have managed to build a rocket no worse than anything you have in the U.S., then I am sure we will be able to build machine tools in no way inferior to anything the West Germans can build."

Moving from foreign trade to foreign relations, Khrushchev pulled out all the "peaceful coexistence" cliches, lost his aplomb (but not his temper) only when Chauncey W. Cook, president of General Foods, asked "Why is it necessary to build a Berlin Wall and shoot people down if they try to get over?"

"A state frontier is a state frontier," Khrushchev replied. "And every state, whenever its borders are violated, shoots the violators."

"Not to keep people in, we don't," snapped Cook.

"In your country, children are killed in a church for the sole reason that their color is different," K. snapped back. Before anyone could make the obvious retort--that murder at the Wall, unlike murder in Birmingham, is an act of the government--Khrushchev was off on something else.

A New Way to Cheat. Loosening up as it progressed, the interview closed in an exchange of banter, with Khrushchev maintaining that capitalists controlled the U.S. Government. "Who was McNamara before he became Secretary of Defense?" asked Nikita. "He was president of Ford Motor," answered G. Keith Funston, president of the New York Stock Exchange. "He's one out of ten in the Cabinet. Why not talk about the others?"

"What was the occupation of your former commander in Germany?" demanded K.

"General Clay is now with Lehman Brothers," said Avco Board Chairman Kendrick R. Wilson Jr. "He's an army officer who made good," added Funston. Khrushchev raised a pious eyebrow: "You have 190 million people. Why don't they all make good? Certainly they have not trespassed against God."

To Wilson's assertion that the American people, through the stock market, own much of U.S. business, Khrushchev laughed. "Capitalists are very astute to have thought that up," he said. "It's a new way to cheat people." He went on to describe the "parasitic" state of capitalism, where the coupon clipper "can live a life of luxury, drinking, carousing, or changing wives," then eased off. "I'm your host here," he concluded, "so please don't put me in the position of going into each individual here and asking where he directs his activities and so forth, how many wives he has. One of your fellow capitalists--Rockefeller--is losing in prestige because of that."

A Sense of Frustration. Next day, the jovial mood changed. At the traditional Red Square parade celebrating the anniversary of the Revolution, the Russians displayed a squadron of finned, 50-ft.-long rockets, which they insisted were anti-missile missiles (the birds looked more like beefed-up versions of the Soviet SA-2 antiaircraft missile, and Western observers thought that at most they could be the equivalent of the U.S Army's Nike Zeus). At the Kremlin reception later, Khrushchev's toasts were so heartily anti-Western that U.S. Ambassador Foy Kohler finally asked: "Where is the Spirit of Moscow? I haven't heard any toasts I could drink to."

But that evening, walking into the businessmen's reception at the Hotel Sovietskaya (which had been refurbished and restaffed for the visitors), he again was at his most amiable. Sitting at a table, oblivious to the massed diplomats and newsmen who were crowding in to listen, Khrushchev sipped "three-star" Armenian brandy as, one by one, the Americans were guided over to talk to him. Like the master politician he is, K. remembered names, faces and business specialties from the day before, even told a pretty secretary: "You wore a brown dress yesterday." He jokingly hit up Rudolph Peterson, president of California's Bank of America, for a $10 billion loan. With Eugene Beesley, president of Eli Lilly & Co., Khrushchev continued a discussion of possible U.S.-Soviet exchanges in medical research, and when he was reminded that a team of four U.S. doctors is in Russia now doing just that, Nikita nodded. "Good," he said. "And let's give them a laxative if they do badly." He eagerly discussed food-processing techniques with General Foods' Cook, magnetohydrodynamics with Avco's Wilson, and liquor with Seagram's Edgar M. Bronfman ("Our vodka is better than your vodka"). When Stock Exchange President Funston turned up at the table, Nikita

Khrushchev chanted, in English: "Wall Street! Wall Street!"

He seemed to regard the businessmen as doers like himself, and once took a left-handed dig at Communist inefficiency: "Capitalists know what is profitable; capitalists are not Soviet bureaucrats." Often Khrushchev returned to his theme of trade: "Remember, please, that you can always make a profit dealing with us." But the question remained: A profit for whom? Wall Street's Funston, for one, concluded that the U.S. should not trade with Russia, should do nothing to make life easier for them. Said he, in West Berlin: "I went away with a sense of frustration. How do you deal with people who He to you and to whom facts mean nothing?"

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