Russia: Camp Nikita

Accompanying Secretary of State Dean Rusk on his Russian trip, Western newsmen last week got their first glimpse of Nikita Khrushchev’s seaside hideaway. It made the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port look like a Boy Scout bivouac.

Camp Nikita nestles, half hidden, in a grove of rare prehistoric pine trees (each labeled with a metal plate) on the Pitsunda peninsula, 18 miles southeast of Gagra on the Black Sea. On three sides the estate is bordered by a vast state farm; the fourth side is a gentle, U-shaped bay. The beach is broad but rocky; to protect tender feet, boardwalks lead to the water’s edge. Four piers, each with a cozy pavilion, jut out into the sea. Dotting the beach are cabanas, each outfitted with swimming trunks and soft towels. In one, presumably the Premier’s, is a white emergency telephone. Phones in blue boxes are scattered along asphalt walks that meander through the forest.

The main compound, surrounded by an ugly ten-foot cement-block wall, is composed of three villas. Khrushchev’s is designed in Soviet-modern, a boxlike, sandstone, two-story building topped with a roof-garden penthouse reached by an outside elevator. A huge porch is enclosed by glass on two sides and opens to the sea. Near by is a similar two-story villa for servants and security men. The third building is a recreation house that erupts in a variety of verandas, terraces and wall-to-wall windows. Attached to the back is a glassed-in gymnasium with Oriental rugs, where Rusk and Khrushchev played a brisk game of badminton. Medicine balls of assorted sizes lie around along with other muscle-building equipment, such as parallel bars, weight pulleys, climbing bars and a gymnastic horse. A corridor leads to Nikita’s pride and joy: a 25-yd. swimming pool that can be heated to any temperature, or opened to the sea breeze by a pushbutton that controls enormous steel-and-glass walls. The roof of the pool is made of old bomber wings.

Everywhere there are signs of Nikita’s three grandsons, the children of his daughter Rada and Izvestia Editor Aleksei Adzhubei. Toys and bikes are parked near flower beds. Aleksei Jr., a towheaded eight-year-old with hornrimmed glasses, zooms around in a green, gasoline-powered Cheetah Cub Car, an American-made miniature sports model that Dad picked up on a visit to the U.S. The seat of the Cheetah is covered with real leopard skin.