Russia: How Nikita & Nina Came Back To No. 3 Granovsky Street

It looked and smelled like snow.

Thick, milky clouds piled high over Moscow, and a sharp northern wind stripped the last leaves from the birches.

The year’s biggest, brightest holiday, the 47th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, was at hand, but somehow the holiday mood refused to ignite.

There was one cheerful note. Russia’s new regime announced that for the first time in 13 months of grain rationing, everyone would be issued 41 extra Ibs. of flour for the cabbage pies that seem vital to the Russian soul.

With a bumper crop almost in, Nikita Khrushchev’s successors, Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin, could afford the gesture. “Well,” said one Russian woman, “I guess this shows that —what’s his name?—oh yes, Kosygin —is all right.” The Explainers. Khrushchev’s sudden ouster has seemingly stirred little emotion among the Russian people. But shock and indignation have mounted in Communist parties abroad, and the task of soothing the foreign comrades left Russia’s new B. & K. team red-eyed with fatigue. Into Moscow swept platoon after platoon of insistent commissars—French, Italian, Austrian, Danish, Indian, Mongolian—all clamoring for explanations. Why had Khrushchev been ousted? How could the new regime justify its coup d’état? What were Moscow’s new policies—particularly vis-à-vis Red China? And, ahem! was Nikita all right? “In fact,” said one old Moscow hand, “the problem is that this crowd came to power without a program and is now having to improvise like mad.” First they tried out their answers on Wladyslaw Gomulka, Khrushchev’s crusty crony whose approval Brezhnev and Kosygin greatly needed to placate other satellite leaders. Meeting Gomulka halfway, in the primeval depths of Bialowieza Forest on the Russo-Polish border, they conferred in a Czarist hunting lodge, while the last sizable herd of European bison stomped and snuffled outside; inside, B. & K. buffaloed Gomulka with reasons and reassurances. He went away satisfied enough to defend Khrushchev’s ouster in a Warsaw speech two days later.

Emboldened by their successful de-Khrushchevization, Brezhnev and Kosygin released to visiting Communists a 40-page “justification” that purported to explain why Nikita had to go.

Nikita’s Sins. The catalogue, which was evidently compiled by Ideologist Mikhail Suslov, accused Khrushchev of 29 sins, immoral, illegal, or fatheaded. Basically it corroborated earlier reports that Nikita’s underlings could no longer stomach his loutish, highhanded ways or condone his persistent bungling of agricultural, ideological and foreign policies. But there were some intriguing elaborations, such as charges that he tried to make Wife Nina chairman of the Union of Soviet Women, that he “antagonized intellectuals,” and clung to uneconomical building plans (he insisted on five-story rather than twelve-story apartment houses, on underpasses rather than overpasses).

Khrushchev’s gravest error, in his successors’ eyes, lay in conducting the Soviet-Red Chinese ideological dispute as if it were a barroom brawl. He was so busy argy-bargying with Peking that he completely failed to recognize China’s accelerated scientific progress, thus let Mao Tse-tung gain valuable prestige by exploding his bomb without warning.

The Neighbors. So where was Nikita? Moscow gossip placed him in a hospital at Rublevo, 15 miles from the capital, suffering from “blood pressure.” However, Communists maintained that Nikita and Nina had retreated to their old, four-room apartment at No. 3 Granovsky Street, a section that compares unfavorably with, say, Manhattan’s West Side around Amsterdam Avenue and 81st Street. But the social life should be interesting. Among other tenants officially housed in the building are two potentates purged by Khrushchev, former Premier Vyacheslav Molotov and Red Army Marshal Georgy Zhukov, as well as several comrades who gave K. the push, including Suslov and Kosygin.

According to the Italians, Nikita has been granted a monthly pension of 1,000 rubles ($1,111 at the official exchange rate). Not so lucky was Son-in-Law Adzhubei, who had been stripped of his influential job as Izvestia’s editor.

Despite a glittering new job offer—deputy manager of Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, a party blat deep in Khrushchev’s virgin lands—Aleksei decided to hang around. After all, Wife Rada still had her job as an editor of a Moscow scientific journal.

It was obvious that Moscow’s new leaders felt they could not immediately eliminate Khrushchev from the Moscow scene. His popularity in both the Communist world and the West would not permit such a move, even if the new regime had the stomach for it.

Communists the world over were still tut-tutting over Nikita’s great fall. So.

for that matter, was Angelo Litrico, a non-Communist tailor in Rome. Alas for Angelo, he was busy making two new suits for Khrushchev the day of his ouster. A single-breasted black and a double-breasted grey, custom-made for Nikita’s projected visit to West Germany. The folks on No. 3 Granovsky Street may never get to see them, nor the tailor his money.