RUSSIA: The People’s Trust

Across one-sixth of the world’s land surface, the dictatorship of the Soviet proletariat campaigned for re-election last week on a platform of peace, bread, and four more years of all-out effort to “catch up with the West.” In snowbound Lettish villages, in orange-scented Georgian watering places, in Uzbek desert oases, the same red-and-white signs marked the local “agitpunkt” campaign headquarters for the 1,364 unopposed candidates running for election to the Supreme Soviet. At rallies everywhere candidates, including the country’s top bosses, blared campaign promises as if they really needed votes.

The Partly Full Dinner Pail. Old Campaigner Nikita Khrushchev addressed 14,000 constituents of his Moscow steel-mill district in Moscow’s Luzhniki Sports Palace. “The Soviet people are a people of champions, a trail-blazing people,” he proclaimed. “The trust of such a people is a great and lofty honor that must be repaid. I promise to make every effort to live up to the trust.” Pointing with pride to Russia’s peace-loving protestations, he viewed with alarm “the stubborn unwillingness of certain Western circles” to agree to a summit meeting at once. Khrushchev praised the “immense positive role” of his, industrial reorganization, forecast that his “truly revolutionary plans” to turn over all state-owned tractors to collective farms will give Russian farmers their place in the sun, and promised houses enough for everybody in ten to twelve years.

Sometimes he seemed to be running against the U.S. He pointed with ill-concealed glee to figures of U.S. unemployed, crowed that “the people see that the future belongs to the socialist world, which does away with all hardship.” He scoffed at the members of the U.S. Congress as “all representatives of large capital, no real workers or farmers.” asserted (with a pre-election confidence possible only to dictatorships) that the new Supreme Soviet will include 44% factory or collective-farm workers. It will also include 26% women, he said, as against 3% women in the U.S. Congress. “There are no two ways about it,” he concluded. “Only socialism brings true freedom.”

Pravda’s Straws. Since Khrushchev’s socialism does not include freedom to choose, few Russians sat up listening for late returns on the balloting as 130 million eligible voters went to the polls this week. Students of the tides of power were more interested in Pravda’s pre-election compilations of how many election districts nominated various Kremlin leaders as their candidates. In the past Stalin’s name had led all the rest. 1958’s score for Presidium members:

Khrushchev 223

Voroshilov 79

Mikoyan 59

Bulganin 15

Pervukhin 1

Ex-Five-Year-Planner Mikhail Pervukhin, who voted against Khrushchev during last June’s leadership showdown, was shipped off even before the elections to be Soviet Ambassador to East Germany. Question for Premier Bulganin, who also guessed wrong last summer: If one nomination meant East Germany, what did 15 portend?