RUSSIA: The Survivor

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At the elbow of Nikita Khrushchev, as he toured East Germany this summer, appeared a new traveling partner, sallow, stoop-shouldered, scowling. Unlike the previous sidekick, Bulganin, who looked like an amiable riverboat gambler living it up, this saturnine little man seemed to shrink from the speechmaking and the public panoply, the peculiar rites and duties of the proletarian potentates who parade about holding durbars in subject states like 19th century monarchs, while talking over their shoulders to the press like 20th century pols. Yet the world noted, as it was meant to, that wherever the Russians went in East Berlin, Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan was at Khrushchev’s side, exchanging a steady stream of cronies’ chatter, occasionally prompting in stage whispers, never hesitating to set his bouncy colleague right on the propaganda rails. For like it or not, Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, 61, was doomed to the limelight. He is the only one of the handful of top Soviet Communists to have bet the right way in last June’s command showdown between Khrushchev and the old guard.

The losers have all been banished to the sticks. That old Kremlin durable, Molotov, presented his credentials as Ambassador to Outer Mongolia last week, obviously aware that the world was enjoying his humiliation. But he was probably more concerned by the knowledge that another loser before him, Lev Kamenev, had for a time seemingly flourished as Soviet Ambassador to Italy, only to be executed a few years later by Stalin. Among Khrushchev’s other victims, Dmitry Shepilov, who rose swiftly but guessed wrong, was reportedly schoolteaching; Kaganovich was said to be running a cement factory;

Malenkov was running a power station at the end of the line in remote Kazakhstan. But the adroit Mr. Mikoyan was vacationing in proletarian luxury in his native Armenia last week.

Mikoyan, the Kremlin’s agile Armenian, has made a career out of guessing right. Among the men who inherited Stalin’s tyranny, his is the quickest and sharpest intelligence, and he is the slickest and shrewdest operator. He is the supreme Soviet trader, the one big Bolshevik to show both the talent and the will for business enterprise. As such, he not only organized a $120 billion-a-year retail trade (200 million customers) and a $6.2 billion-a-year overseas business, but in the process achieved an understanding of the wider world of trade and global politics that is unmatched among Politburocrats. To two generations of Western diplomats and trade negotiators, this brisk and comprehending commissar has seemed “the best of a bad lot.” To the rough, tough muzhik Khrushchev, he is the useful Mr. Worldly-Wise of the Russian proverb who “knows where the shrimps stay in winter.” Today, as in Stalin’s time, Mikoyan serves indispensably—and survives. Says a Briton who has watched Mikoyan for years: “He knows how to jump at the right time.”

One top U.S. diplomat who knew him well says that if Mikoyan had emigrated to the U.S. he would now be “heading his own export-import firm with a triplex apartment on Park Avenue.” But ex-Ambassador Walter (“Beedle”) Smith, less impressed, says, “Take away his ZIS limousine and Mikoyan would look like just another rug peddler in Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo.”

Where Life Boils. The fact of Mikoyan’s business acumen is everywhere put down to one reason: “He is an Armenian.” Mikoyan himself is intensely proud of the Armenian reputation for shrewd trading, and of his own origin as a son of this small, hardy ethnic community.* He was born in 1895 in an Armenian village barely 60 miles across the Caucasian Mountains from Joseph Stalin’s Georgian birthplace. His carpenter father sent him to an Armenian seminary in Tiflis, just across town from the school where Stalin had studied for the Russian Orthodox priesthood 20 years before. “My father insisted,” said Mikoyan later, “that there is nothing better in the world than to be a priest and to be in God’s service. But when I received my certificate, I had a very clear feeling that I didn’t believe in God and that I had in fact received a certificate in materialist uncertainty; the more I studied religious subjects, the less I believed in God.” The young seminarian, having already dabbled in liberal and Socialist politics, joined the Bolsheviks and in 1917 plunged into the thick of the revolutionary fight, keen to be “where life boils.” Massacre and pillage were the order of the day. “The only time I ever directed a bank,” Mikoyan once wryly told a visiting businessman, “was in Tiflis in 1917—when I ordered the vaults of the Imperial Bank blown open.” In the Caspian oil center of Baku the 22-year-old revolutionary fought (and was wounded) at the barricades, rescued the famous Georgian Bolshevik Ordzhonikidze from advancing Russian anti-Bolshevik troops. Jailed when the Reds were driven out of Baku, Mikoyan escaped and fled with some 30 other Bolshevik leaders on a freighter bound for the Caspian’s Red-held northern shore. But the ship’s company voted to head instead for Krasnovodsk on the eastern shore, then seat of a British-backed anti-Bolshevik government.

What happened next is fuzzy “history.” The official Soviet version is that on one prisoner was found a paper listing 26 commissars who were to receive the special party favor of food packages while in the Baku jail. These 26 were marched into the desert and shot. Young Mikoyan’s name was not on the list, either through luck or by early practice in the art of survival. He was jailed instead, and a few months later was freed. He dashed to Moscow for his first meeting with Lenin and Stalin, then rode triumphantly back into Baku with Ordzhonikidze and Kirov at the head of the Red army.

Caucasian Suite. As the fog of civil war lifted, Mikoyan soon began showing his managerial flair. Party chief first in Nizhni Novgorod (Gorky) and then in Rostov, he won a name for neutralizing knots of resistance rather than shooting all opponents, and built such a record that in 1926 he was brought to Moscow and made Commissar of Internal and External Trade. That same year, at 31, he became an alternate member of the Politburo.

Thenceforth, while Stalin purged his foes and collectivized his peasants, Mikoyan kept store for the country without troubling his boss, making sure that the Red army and party leaders were well supplied if no one else was. Stalin called him a “genius of trade,” and invited him into the little clique of Caucasians who lived in the Kremlin and dined with the dictator every night. Stalin liked Mikoyan’s stories, and his silences. When Mikoyan’s old revolutionary chief Kirov was murdered by Stalin, Mikoyan quietly slipped into Kirov’s Politburo seat. When his old hero Ordzhonikidze, hounded by Stalin, committed suicide, Mikoyan raised no protest, later made a sycophant’s speech praising the secret police as “the organization closest to the people.”

Grand Quartermaster. All the time he was seeing and learning from every sort of foreigner. In 1936 he shopped the U.S. from coast to coast, bringing back to Soviet consumers such novelties as canned tuna, frozen foods and ice cream (now a great Russian favorite even in winter). He also returned with a lasting impression of “the initiative, inventiveness, the ability to get together, the simplicity in individual life” of Americans as he saw them at work. By 1939 he was welcoming Nazi negotiators with theater parties and banquets of caviar and Crimean champagne, then bargaining for weeks before selling them the cotton they were after. Says one such bargaining antagonist, now a DÜsseldorf businessman: “Mikoyan came closer to doing things as they are done in the West than any other Russian I ever met. A very impressive man.”

A year later, when Hitler invaded Russia, the invaluable Armenian became grand quartermaster to the Red army, serving on the State Defense Committee (as Khrushchev never did), organizing the eastward retreat of Soviet factories, taking delivery on $11 billion worth of U.S. lend-lease supplies. New York’s Governor Averell Harriman, wartime ambassador in Moscow, recalls Mikoyan as more international-minded and “less rigid” than Molotov, a wary bargainer but “one you could joke with.”

Grand Taskmaster. After the war Stalin sent his favorite trader to exploit the new Soviet lands in Eastern Europe. Mainly on the theory that so smart an operator could not really be identified with so shortsighted a policy as Russia’s postwar rape of the satellite economies, Mikoyan has often been pictured as a reluctant executor of these infamous deals, passing along orders with a shrug and a “that’s-the-way-the-boss-wants-it.” But this overlooks Mikoyan’s survival instinct. While he ran the show for Stalin, Russia wrung $30 billion worth of goods out of Eastern Europe. It was Mikoyan who extracted uranium from Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and set up the iniquitous joint-stock companies by which Russia got properties for nothing in Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria. It was Mikoyan who forced agreements granting special low prices to the Russians, e.g., Polish coal at one-twelfth world prices. Mikoyan’s policies were aimed at destroying the independence of Eastern European economies, at wrenching them around to dependence on Soviet Russia, their industrial output geared almost exclusively to Stalin’s military needs.

Mikoyan’s life remained just as closely geared to the dictator’s. Britain’s former Laborite Secretary for Overseas Trade Harold Wilson recalls that, in tune with Stalin’s nocturnal habits, negotiations with Mikoyan “usually began at 10 or midnight and ended at 4 or even 6 a.m. Once he said: ‘You in England have been traders for many centuries. But we know how to bargain, too—I come from a long line of Armenian traders!’ ): Another time, when Wilson chaffed, “The trouble with you Russians . . .” Mikoyan broke in: “I am not a Russian. Premier Stalin is not a Russian. You know that I am never free to meet you at 7 p.m. because at that time I always have a drink with Stalin. Do you know what toast we drink?” “No, tell me,” said Wilson. Said Mikoyan, hoisting his glass: “To hell with these bloody Russians.”

Culinary Master. This man who bargained so confidently with the world had almost every day of his life to bargain with Stalin. Yet he talked freely, never seemed worried lest he commit an indiscretion, cracked irreverent jokes. In 1946 a group of leading officials were sitting in Mikoyan’s dacha, a crenelated red brick atrocity created by a 19th century czarist sugar baron. Malenkov’s wife began grumbling about how poor and scarce Soviet nylons were. Snapped Mikoyan: “Yes, my dear young lady, but we have plenty of portraits of Stalin.”

One of Mikoyan’s favorite pastimes was preparing New Year’s gifts, and deciding what to give whom. Some typical decisions of those days: for Stalin, a chocolate jack boot; for Molotov, a chocolate stool; for Khrushchev, a chocolate bottle; for Malenkov, a chocolate table; for Beria, a chocolate pistol. An excellent cook who likes to serve Armenian fare with bottled Crimean wine bearing typewritten notes identifying place of origin, Mikoyan once invited his’ crony, the late Secret Police Boss Lavrenty Beria, to try some of his specialties. Beria, sniffing the shish-kebab, saluted him as “Comrade Culinary Master.” “Yes, yes,” replied Mikoyan, with graveyard humor, “but my dear Lavrenty Pavlovich, in my kitchen you don’t find a single damn piece of human meat.”

Yet the day came when Trader Mikoyan’s supreme assurance broke down. In the last months of Stalin’s life, Mikoyan’s name was mentioned in connection with the mysterious “doctors’ plot”; in his famed secret speech to the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev said that Stalin then scathingly “characterized Molotov and Mikoyan” and “evidently had plans to finish them off.” After negotiating a trade agreement with one Scandinavian nation, Mikoyan had become a close acquaintance of the country’s ambassador, who entertained him frequently. In their family circle Mikoyan relaxed and played parlor games. But in that winter Mikoyan cut his friend and other foreign acquaintances dead.

Changing Masters. In the struggle for position after Stalin’s death, Mikoyan showed supreme agility. He joined in the gang-up on Beria. As the original consumer-goods man he ought to have found Malenkov’s breathing-spell policy congenial. But his shrewd nose for tactics told him not to commit himself to Malenkov. Although First Party Secretary Khrushchev might have seemed to Mikoyan a clodhopping countryman, Khrushchev had one prime quality that Mikoyan valued—political skill. Khrushchev could handle himself well in party scraps, and alone among Soviet leaders he could talk to the people. Outwardly, the Presidium was a crowd of collectively equal commissars, punching each other playfully in the ribs at Foreign Office receptions. But when Malenkov was bounced from the premiership in 1955, both Shepilov’s accusing Pravda editorial and Bulganin’s subsequent speech of denunciation were phrased as if by men who sought to keep dutifully within the outline of a party resolution; only Khrushchev and Mikoyan spoke out with the assurance of men who had made the policy.

Thenceforth, as they prepared to patch up the Kremlin’s quarrel with Tito, these two were thick in intrigue, though in Belgrade Mikoyan appeared to be only a third man. Asked for his picture, he jerked a thumb at B. and K.: “They’re the ones to photograph.”

On their return to Moscow the junketers faced a full-dress attack by Old Stone-bottom Molotov. Playing up to a Western-minded opportunist like Tito, declared Molotov. was a betrayal of Leninist-Stalinist policies that he, as the last active co-worker of Lenin, could only condemn. It was Old Bolshevik Mikoyan who rose in the secret Central Committee session to answer that the Yugoslavs could and must be drawn back into the Soviet orbit, and to go on to indict past Russian policy—including his own trade deals—for failing to recognize and adjust to nationalist tendencies in the satellites. Molotov never recovered from the trouncing that Khrushchev and Mikoyan gave him at that meeting.

Down with Stalin. At the 20th Party Congress last year, it was Mikoyan who made the first forthright anti-Stalin speech. Presumably this was a maneuver planned ahead of time with Khrushchev’s connivance to set the stage for the sensational speech by Khrushchev that followed. Yet such are the intricacies of Kremlin politics that the one innocent victim of Stalinist slaughter cited by Mikoyan was Ukrainian Old Bolshevik Stanislav Kosior, whose successor in Kiev, as everybody in the hall knew, was the keen young Stalinist Nikita Khrushchev.

Doubtless Mikoyan felt as strongly about Stalin’s tyranny as anybody. “You understand,” he told Author Louis (Russia Revisited) Fischer last year, “Stalin held us in his hand. Only one escape was left to us—what Ordzhonikidze did when he committed suicide. I stood before the same decision. And at the end of Stalin’s life I was about to be executed. Now we have changed all this. Now we want to be left alone to build.”

Instead, having survived Stalin and then become the first to denounce him, Mikoyan has to be careful not to let the repudiation of Stalin get out of hand: the desire for revenge could easily devour all those who served him. Mikoyan was in the Kremlin group that flew to Warsaw last fall to smash the insurgent Gomulka —and found themselves encircled in Warsaw’s Belvedere Palace by Gomulka’s forces and compelled to agree to the Poles’ demands. He was in the thick of the Hungarian action, where his slick manipulation was not enough: it took a tank-led invasion. The final repression was the Red army’s idea, and at least once Marshal Zhukov showed himself relentless when the others hesitated. “We tried all we could to find another solution,” Mikoyan said later to a Western diplomat. “I myself advised the acceptance of one Hungarian ultimatum after another, but I couldn’t advise accepting the last one.”

Colonial Revolt. The truth is that in the satellites the Russian rulers find themselves bedeviled by the same problem of restive colonial peoples that plagues the rest of the postwar world. Because Russia is less industrialized than several of the satellites, the Russians have reversed the classic pattern of colonialism by exploiting the satellites’ skilled labor force instead of their raw materials, but it is exploitation nonetheless. Any gains the satellites have made have not been conferred on them by more “moderate” Russian leaders, but won by themselves. The

Russians have been compelled, since Budapest, to pour an estimated $1.5 billion into the satellites to keep them happy; they have not yet figured out how to pin the satellites down without spending too much on them. Economically, in fact, the satellites may soon prove more costly than valuable. There are some who argue that the main advocates of keeping Eastern Europe in thrall are the Red army marshals, who want plenty of acreage between Western front lines and Russian territory.

How Mikoyan felt about doing the Hungarian dirty work no outsider knows. A Briton who has lived long in Moscow says: “Mikoyan disappeared from the Moscow round from mid-October to the beginning of December. In those six weeks he aged ten years. He was drawn and haggard, and his skin was yellow when we saw him again. Instead of an old man looking young, he was an old man looking more than his age.”

The Mikoyan of 1957 can still turn on joviality like tap water, laugh off Khrushchev’s blunted barbs, and knock back bottoms-up toasts in the Armenian cognac he calls “best on earth.” He remains the Kremlin’s jauntiest dresser and spriest waltzer. His wife Anush (whom he found in Rostov’s Armenian colony just after the revolution) calls him babnik, which means flatterer. She once declared that he was one of only two hand-kissing, courtly gentlemen in Moscow (the other: Lavrenty Beria). They have four sons (another was killed in World War II): two are in the air force, a third is reportedly a wild-living, peg-trousered boidevardier in Gorky Street’s “jet set.” Mikoyan’s brother Artem, an air force general, is famous in his own right as co-designer of the MIG —the “MI” stands for Mikoyan, the “G” for Co-Designer Gurevich.

“I Am an Asian.” The last of the old Stalin gang to surrender his Kremlin apartment (he moved out grumblingly in 1955), Trader Mikoyan no longer goes daily to any of his Moscow offices. Though trade is so basic in his background that it is primarily still his responsibility, he has graduated from the management of domestic enterprise to become Khrushchev’s senior adviser and fixer. “He has no strong beliefs,” says one longtime British observer. “He operates against a background of Marxism the way a Western politician operates against the background of Christianity.” Mikoyan once said to a friend: “I am not a man to invent policies but to carry them out.” Nonetheless, Soviet specialists in Washington believe that such features of Khrushchev’s foreign policy as the subtle method of taking the West by flank movement, by intrigue and envelopment of neutrals rather than by head-on attack, bear the stamp of the agile Armenian. These days Mikoyan likes to tell visitors from the East, as Stalin did before him, “I am an Asian too.” No Soviet leader has been a more frequent visitor to Peking. Amid all the jolts and lurches that now characterize Russian foreign policy, the influence of Mikoyan appears to be at least as strong as any.

Through all the crashing and straining,

Mikoyan has hung on tenaciously beside Driver Khrushchev. Last winter, when some of the old crowd, emboldened by Khrushchev’s setbacks in Hungary and the Middle East, sought to confine his reach for top power, Mikoyan’s instinct made him stick with Nikita. In June, when even Bulganin and the aged Voroshilov deserted Khrushchev and swelled the Presidium’s vote to 7 to 4 against him, Mikoyan backed the party’s First Secretary and proved to have followed the right hunch. Within 48 hours Khrushchev, using his party machine in exactly the same fashion as Stalin did before him, summoned henchmen from all over the Soviet Union to a Central Committee Plenum that reversed the Presidium decision.

Now that Bulganin is plainly on the skids, Mikoyan is being talked of as his likely replacement for Premier. In Khrushchev’s eyes, Mikoyan, the lone operator, has the merit of never having tried to build up his own party machine. The delay in pushing out Bulganin suggests that although Khrushchev has bested his rivals, he still has powerful opposition to contend with. The deadly struggle for power that began with Stalin’s death four years ago is not yet ended. Who would know that better than Mikoyan?

Economic Adventurism. Top Polish Planner Seweryn Bialer, who, before he defected to the West last year, had access to minutes of Kremlin meetings, makes the significant point that for all of Mikoyan’s helpful contributions to Khrushchev’s foreign policy, the astute Armenian has taken care not to associate himself too conspicuously with Khrushchev’s domestic policy. This policy, which Bialer characterizes as “sheer economic adventurism,” proclaims the highest priority simultaneously for heavy industry, for consumer goods and for agriculture, and bases its hopes of fulfillment not on basic expansion of plant but on increased efficiency—to be won simply by decentralizing and streamlining the vast Soviet economic bureaucracy. Mikoyan, says Bialer, is too smart an economist and businessman to believe in such fantasies. Shortly before Khrushchev vowed that in five years Russia would be producing more meat, milk, butter than the U.S., Mikoyan was saying privately in Vienna: “I know the living standards of Western Europe are three times as high as ours and America’s three times as high as Europe’s. We cannot reach that of America, but we could reach that of Western Europe—if we could reduce armaments and engage in big foreign trade.” Communists may ransack the pages of Pravda in vain to find a Mikoyan speech endorsing Khrushchev’s economic claims. On this aspect of Khrushchev’s policy, says Bialer, Mikoyan is “waiting his time.”

In the struggle for power still to come —for dictatorships have iron laws of their own, and committee rule is not one of them—the comrade who will always bear close watching is the glowering little man who even now can be seen edging away from the newsreel camera’s center of focus. He has a record of survival.

* When French Premier Guy Mollet’s party visited Moscow last year, Mikoyan pressed them to visit his home republic of Armenia. Khrushchev joined in, saying that the Armenian climate was good, even though the food and wine were terrible. In due course, Foreign Minister Christian Pineau flew to Yerevan, capital of the Armenian Soviet Republic, on Turkey’s eastern border. At his hotel Pineau was confronted by hundreds of French-speaking Armenians who had been lured back from France after World War II by Soviet blandishments to “come home and help build a new Armenian homeland.” They greeted Pineau with tales of hardship and persecution and tearful pleas for repatriation to France. Embarrassed, Pineau backed away, but before leaving, exacted from his official hosts a promise that there would be no reprisals against the demonstrators. Because of engine trouble, his plane did not take off as scheduled, and his party returned for another night to their hotel. That night, notes slipped under their doors said that within minutes after the French officials were presumed to have left town, most of the petitioners had been rounded up and jailed. Furious, Pineau demanded of his embarrassed hosts that they release the prisoners. Before he left, this was done—but what has happened to them since, nobody outside knows.