RUSSIA: The Fellow Traveler

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Wherever Nikita Khrushchev went last week, he had a shadow. Whether it was Paris, Berlin or Moscow, there at Nikita’s elbow was the hulking, impassive Ukrainian, whose short-cropped grey hair and bulldog face were in dour contrast to his gleaming epaulets and the nine rows of gaily colored medal ribbons that adorned his chest. By no accident, the wrecking of the Paris summit coincided with the West’s first close-up look at Rodion Malinovsky, Marshal of the Soviet Union and Russia’s Minister of Defense.

In time past, Nikita had kept his soldiers out of the diplomatic limelight, had even been prone to twit them in public. Only a fortnight ago, while boasting of the Soviet army’s current troop cuts at a diplomatic reception, Nikita gibed: “One of our generals over there just scratched his head. Another reduction!” But last week, as he ranted through the most clamorous diplomatic debacle of modern times, Nikita thrust Russia’s top soldier into the public eye at every opportunity.

Even in his summit-eve private calls on Charles de Gaulle and Harold Macmillan (TIME, May 23), Nikita brought Malinovsky along to buttress the boast that Russia is militarily stronger than the U.S. When Khrushchev impulsively cantered out of Paris to Pleurs, 84 miles southeast, he was visiting the village where Malinovsky had been billeted with Russian troops serving on the western front during World War I. When Malinovsky pointed out the hayloft in which he had slept, Khrushchev swiftly moved in to extract every possible kernel of corn. “Cows below and a future marshal above,” he said. “Well, cows make excellent heating appliances.”

At his final wild-eyed Paris press conference, Nikita took time out to launch into unsolicited discourse on his Defense Minister. Malinovsky, Khrushchev declared, was “a hero of World War I and II … a person who has often been decorated for his outstanding services … a true son of a socialist motherland.”

Hints & a Symbol. Astonished by this unprecedented buildup for a Soviet military man, some Westerners inevitably began to see signs that Khrushchev was on a leash. After all, the Red army is known to have little enthusiasm for Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence. Four days before his departure for Paris, Communist Party workers assigned to the Red army had assembled in Moscow for a conference at which one of the chief speakers was tousled-haired Marxist Theoretician Mikhail Suslov, who is always billed by Kremlinologists as the leader of the hard line in Russia’s ruling Presidium. Marshal Malinovsky had been added to Khrushchev’s list of traveling companions only three days before the Paris confrontation. Was he sent along to make sure that Nikita stuck rigidly to the position papers drawn up for him? Suspicions were reinforced by the curious tone of some of Nikita’s pronouncements in Paris. During his half-hour diatribe against the U.S. at the summit’s one, abortive session, Khrushchev had dropped the unprecedented hint that he was forced to act as he did because of “internal politics.” The experts could only speculate, mindful that Khrushchev has been capable before of implying that he had no choice in doing what he decided to do.

And Khrushchev’s peaceful coexistence has always had its hard underside; after all, the summit conference was precipitated in the first place by his threats to West Berlin. In Paris last week, Rodion Malinovsky was an overt reminder of the brute force that Russia’s Communists command if they chose to turn tough. He was also the visible symbol of one of the forces that press upon Khrushchev.

Iron Man. At 61, Rodion Yakovlevich Malinovsky is deprecated by many Soviet officers as a political marshal and a Khrushchev stooge. Gross (5 ft. 7 in., nearly 300 lbs.), diabetic and slow-moving, he retains the abrupt manner of a noncom. But over a 40-year career in the Red army, he has combined a talent for political survival with an impressive combat record.

Son of a Ukrainian laborer, Malinovsky quit school at twelve to go to work as a shop messenger in Odessa. Too young (15) for enlistment in the Czar’s army when World War I broke out, he stowed away with a unit leaving for the German front, was adopted as a mascot. Within a year, he was promoted to corporal, won the St. George’s Cross, and was wounded.

When he recovered, Malinovsky was assigned to the Iron Division, a crack Czarist outfit sent to France as a symbol of Allied solidarity. In France, Malinovsky acquired respect for British troops—”Ah, those British! Always smoking their pipes, even during an attack!”—and a sneaking liking for Americans: “The Russians and the Americans got along together, especially when it came to having a drink or smashing glasses in a café.” But his fondest memories are of “those French girls.” In Paris last week, he confided that the three phrases he could still manage in both English and French were: “Good morning,” “Good night,” and “I love you.”

Model of a Marxist. Malinovsky’s nostalgic tone vanishes when he recalls what happened when news of Russia’s 1917 revolution reached the Iron Division. “Our camp,” he says, “was encircled by Allied troops. The French tried to pacify us with artillery fire.” Finally, in 1919, the remnants of the Iron Division were shipped to Vladivostok, then in the hands of the White armies. Some foreign military men still cherish a suspicion that Corporal Malinovsky put in some time with the White forces before joining the Bolshevik armies in Siberia as a machine-gun instructor.

But once he joined the Reds, Malinovsky rapidly became the very model of a modern Marxist officer. He was sent to the Frunze Academy, Russia’s equivalent of the Command and General Staff College, acquired a wife, four children, and more important, a Communist Party card. Somehow the purges that all but shattered the Soviet officer corps in the ’30s never touched him. Stepping into the shoes of executed superiors, he was a one-star general commanding a cavalry corps when World War II broke out.

Bear in Karakul. Much of Malinovsky’s war was spent in the Ukraine —where he had the good fortune to come under the eye of Nikita Khrushchev, then a member of the military council for the Ukraine. In January 1943, just after Malinovsky’s army had completed the southern arc of the encirclement of Stalingrad, Western correspondents recall meeting him in a tiny, unheated village schoolhouse, short-legged and big-hipped, like a grizzly bear in a brown greatcoat and karakul hat. He traced with a thick forefinger the movement of the fleeing Germans on a field map, naming their divisions and commanders, all with a cool, precise assessment and without the slightest vainglory.

At dinner he drank toasts to Stalin, then Churchill, then Roosevelt, each time quaffing a full tumbler of vodka. One correspondent remembers his eyes: “bright, suspicious, ever moving, advertising the cunning thought, but also humorous and undaunted.”

Happy-Go-Lucky. A British military expert who saw Malinovsky in action also found him impressive: “In defensive operations, he never panicked, no matter how hopeless the situation looked. But in offensive operations he was a bit happy-go-lucky. He planned up to the point of launching the attack. But from then on, he was inclined to improvise.”

Before World War II ended, Malinovsky had plenty of practice in improvising offensives. As commander of a Ukrainian army group, he directed the capture of Bucharest, Budapest and Vienna. Then, shifted to command of Russia’s Far Eastern armies, he mopped up Japanese forces in Manchuria in the “one week war” that Stalin launched against a Japan already negotiating surrender to the U.S.

For the next ten years Malinovsky stayed in the Far East. But as Khrushchev’s star rose, so did Malinovsky’s. In 1956, at the same party congress at which Khrushchev denounced the dead Stalin, Malinovsky at last became a full member of the Central Committee of Russia’s Communist Party. Before long, he was Deputy in charge of ground forces, under Defense Minister Marshal Georgy Zhukov. Then, in 1957, Khrushchev turned on Zhukov. Resentment still smoulders over Nikita’s shabby treatment of Zhukov. The army recognized Zhukov as the best soldier Soviet Russia had produced, and as a champion at court who had no patience for the party’s effort to establish control over the officer corps. Zhukov once reportedly told his pudgy boss: “We each have our specialities. Mine is the army. Yours is corn.”

After Stalin’s death, Zhukov helped Khrushchev in destroying Secret Police Chief Lavrenty Beria. And in 1957, when a coalition led by Molotov actually defeated Khrushchev in a Presidium vote, Zhukov used his air force to fly into Moscow enough pro-Khrushchev “backwoodsmen” to reverse the vote in the Central Committee. The cunning Khrushchev was both grateful and apprehensive that a soldier should have such power. Khrushchev fired him. Malinovsky was quick to denounce his old boss as a “fresh-baked Bonaparte.” Perhaps, as his enemies charged, Malinovsky had never forgiven Zhukov for stepping in and taking charge of a lagging Malinovsky offensive in Rumania in 1944. More likely, he had his eye on the payoff Khrushchev quickly gave him. Stepping once again into the shoes of a purged superior, Rodion Malinovsky at last became Defense Minister of the U.S.S.R.

Back to the Lathe. When he took command of Russia’s armed forces, Malinovsky also took over Nikita Khrushchev’s most vulnerable political flank. Though infiltrated at every level by the commissars, the army has a fighting elite that is dubious of Khrushchev’s adventures. And as Russia began to feel the manpower pinch resulting from its low wartime birth rate, it became clear that Khrushchev could not make good on his promises of the fuller life so long as the nation had nearly 4,000,000 men in uniform and continued to spend 25% of its national income (v. 12% for the U.S.) on defense.

Khrushchev, ever the pragmatist, reacted by seeking “a bigger bang for a buck” by ordering a switch away from manned airplanes to missiles. He even set up his rocketeers as a separate branch of the Soviet armed forces. Last January, ostensibly as a “disarmament” measure, he decreed that by 1961 the Red army must cut its strength by 1,200,000 men.

To Russia’s career officers, Khrushchev’s jest that the Soviet army might be the first to “voluntarily liquidate itself” had the macabre ring of hangman’s humor. Under Nikita’s demobilization plan, 250,000 officers were slated for return to civilian life. For most of them, demobilization would mean sharply reduced income, loss of pension rights, and, in effect, expulsion from the Soviet aristocracy; nearly two-thirds of the officers discharged in previous troop cuts wound up as ordinary workers.

Qualms & Tactics. Dutiful Rodion Malinovsky publicly spared no effort to reconcile the army to Nikita’s policies. “The interests of the state must come first,” he cried. But, at heart, Old Infantryman Malinovsky almost surely had qualms, too. Khrushchev’s reliance on rockets was in flat violation of strongly held Soviet strategic doctrine that nuclear weapons, far from reducing the need for ground forces, made them more necessary than ever; it is the nation with the strongest conventional army, argue Soviet military theorists, that will roll on to victory over the debris of nuclear devastation. Nikita’s policy also made harder the army’s task of maintaining Soviet mastery of the satellites. To the generals’ way of thinking, talk of coexistence made people like the Hungarians restless, and the army needed all the men it could muster to keep the lid on.

Result was that even with Malinovsky in charge, the army continued to seethe with barely concealed dissatisfaction. Early this month, Khrushchev found it wise to sideline “for ill health” two of Russia’s most prestigious soldiers—Warsaw Pact Commander Marshal Ivan Konev and Army Chief of Staff Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky.

The Right Wing. However fretful the army might be, Khrushchev would have had little to fear from it if he had—as he so often boasts of having—a monolithic Communist Party behind him. He certainly has filled the important places with men of his own choosing, but they are capable of thinking that at 66 he will not live forever.

In the atmosphere of Byzantine secrecy that envelops Soviet government, the opposition that Western experts call Stalinist and Muscovites call right wing constitutes a kind of underground rather than an open faction, and its leadership is all but invisible. In theory, dour, ascetic Mikhail Suslov reflects these views, but on the record, he has been as devoted a follower of the leader as the next one. Khrushchev can no longer invoke the capricious plotting, counterplotting and murders of Stalin’s Kremlin. The power struggle is played differently these days. Suslov, for instance, has frequently been charged with executing some of Nikita’s most controversial policies.

A Matter of Ethics. Most of Khrushchev’s right-wing critics are clustered in the middle echelons of the Soviet bureaucracy. They are careerists who found Stalin’s repression of creative thought and initiative a welcome buttress to their own positions of privilege. Many bear deep personal grudges against Khrushchev. By his decentralization of Russia’s industrial and economic management and his abolition of many government ministries, he has forced hundreds of them out of comfortable Moscow flats and into barren, provincial lives in such boondocks as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In his bid for popularity with workers and peasants, Khrushchev has often loudly denounced the bureaucrats’ shortcomings and indulgences, has nibbled away at their treasured perquisites of rank, such as the possession of government cars for private use.

In so far as their opposition to Khrushchev is doctrinal, it involves the belief that “relaxation” and cultural exchanges with the West undermine the Communist faith and foster a questioning and irreverent attitude in Soviet youth. What they contemptuously call the “spectacle” of Nikita’s hobnobbing with Western leaders seems to them a betrayal of the Marxist ethic. Communism’s mission, they argue, is to sweep the world, and it will only do so by keeping the West under steadily increasing pressure.

Hurray for Holocaust. And then there is massive Red China glowering in the wings. According to knowledgeable Russians and Eastern Europeans, Moscow’s Stalinists are in good communication with Mao Tse-tung. Peking plainly wants no relaxation of tensions between the West and the Communist world. Khrushchev’s economy may now be at the point where it can provide Russians with a few more of the amenities of life, but sprawling, primitive China can only hope to complete its revolution and its all-important industrialization through vast suffering—suffering that can most easily be justified to the Chinese people by keeping them in terror of an “imperialist attack.” And where Russia, with its vast industrial complexes, is highly vulnerable to nuclear war, Red China’s leaders profess to believe that “after the next war, there will be 20 million Americans, 5,000,000 Englishmen, 50 million Russians, and 300 million Chinese.”

The Turn. As the summit approached, Nikita Khrushchev must have found it harder and harder to brush off the complaint that his “soft” policy toward the West was not producing results. In fact, he undoubtedly agreed, being the agile fellow he is.

The turning point in Khrushchev’s thinking apparently came in late April, when Under Secretary of State Douglas Dillon, in a speech to an A.F.L.-C.I.O. meeting, echoed Secretary Herter’s warning that there was little prospect for significant agreements being reached at the summit, and implied that any progress at all depended on Soviet willingness to abandon its demands on West Berlin. Only a month before, sauntering through the Rambouillet gardens with the visiting Khrushchev, Charles de Gaulle had concluded that Nikita was not going to press too hard at the summit. But five days after Dillon’s speech, Khrushchev made a speech at the oil town of Baku, rattling his rockets, reviving his threats on Berlin.

“Some people,” said he grimly, “apparently hope to reduce this meeting to an ineffectual exchange of opinions and pleasant—it may be—talks, and to evade the working-out of concrete decisions . . . I should like to tell Mr. Dillon and those who may share his views that such methods are least of all suited for dealing with the Soviet Union.”

Down over Sverdlovsk. Khrushchev was plainly deciding to talk tough at the summit. Then came May Day. During the May Day parade in Moscow, Khrushchev and Malinovsky, up in the Red Square reviewing stand, were observed excitedly poring over a military map, and at one point, a messenger was sent dashing off carrying a note scribbled by Khrushchev. The U-2 had been downed over Sverdlovsk.

At first, the Russians treated the U-2 as a useful propaganda weapon to supplement the tough talk with which Khrushchev hoped to extract Western concessions. In his first outcries over the U2, Nikita was careful not to foreclose negotiations with the U.S. at the summit. As late as May 6, Russia’s Chief Air Marshal Konstantin Vershinin was still cheerily urging the U.S. air attache in Moscow to accompany him on a long-planned courtesy tour of U.S. air bases. In a Czech embassy reception speech lambasting the Pentagon (TIME, May 23), Khrushchev himself made a point of stating that he was “convinced of the ethical qualities” of U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Llewellyn E. Thompson. Above all, Khrushchev significantly suggested that, in all probability, his good friend Ike had not even known about the U-2 flights.

The Personal Touch. When Eisenhower declared that he was personally responsible for the overflights and Secretary of State Herter implied that the flights would go on, it must have been a bitter blow for Khrushchev, who had been assuring his comrades that Eisenhower was a man he could handle. But if personally stung, he and the Presidium must have had painful second thoughts about this stance on the part of the U.S. Before the eyes of the world, Russia’s vaunted defenses had been shown incapable of halting the U-2s.

In his anger and humiliation, Nikita revealed in Paris something of what he presumably had suffered inside the Presidium. He burst out: “What would you think of your government if it treated with indifference, with unconcern, the overflights of your cities by military planes . . . Would you respect such a government? Would your families and you yourselves feel safe listening to the drone of an alien plane over your heads?” Later, in East Berlin, he made the grievance more personal, exclaiming bitterly: “There was a wry smile on the faces of President Eisenhower, Herter, Nixon and, above all, Allen Dulles, when they anticipated the meeting in Paris where Eisenhower would glance at Khrushchev and think: ‘What is the use of trying to convince us here? U.S. planes flew over the territory of the Soviet Union, and you could not do anything and nevertheless came to Paris.’ ”

The Russians, cool strategists even if given to hot flashes, had decided to torpedo an unprofitable summit. But perhaps the vehemence with which Khrushchev set out to destroy Ike as his pet U.S. peacemaker and as the shiny symbol of the possibility of relaxation of tensions owed something to Khrushchev’s pride and anger alone. Signs indicate that the policy reversal took place almost literally overnight. Within 24 hours of Ike’s public endorsement of the U-2 flights came the tipoffs: Khrushchev’s remarks at the U-2 exhibit in Gorky Park that Eisenhower would probably not be welcome in Russia, and the abrupt, last-minute cancellation of Air Marshal Vershinin’s U.S. visit.

The Ripening. The crudity and violence of Khrushchev’s Paris performance suggested that he was about to launch an all-out vendetta against the West. Yet his hanging-on in Paris suggested that the worst was not about to happen. And then he flew into East Berlin. He knew that East Germany’s Red bosses, despised by their people, wanted a helping hand. Instead, he announced that he planned to postpone for “six or eight months” his threat to “wipe out” Western occupation rights in Berlin by signing a separate World War II peace treaty with the East Germans. “Let’s wait a bit,” he said. “It will ripen better.” Russia, he added reassuringly, “will not do anything that might aggravate the international situation and bring it back to the worst times of the cold war.”

Though it is always dangerous to count on the predictability of Moscow’s behavior, it seemed a curiously empty accomplishment Khrushchev was going home with. It was almost as if he promised the world: no real trouble, but more invective.

The most Khrushchev seemed to have in mind was a personal diplomatic boycott of Dwight Eisenhower. Like a jilted suitor, he seemed at times almost aggrieved. By openly admitting that his six-to-eight month delay was motivated by the fact that “a new President will be elected in the U.S. in half a year’s time,” Nikita left no doubt that he hoped to make Ike a premature lame duck in foreign affairs. But his treatment of Ike was hardly calculated to make either Republican or Democrat—or De Gaulle and Macmillan for that matter—eager to sit down again with Khrushchev. Robert Murphy, retired Under Secretary of State, last week remarked that in 39 years of diplomacy, he had concluded that summitry “is the least effective form of negotiation which has thus far been devised.” Along with Khrushchev’s diatribes against Ike, the U.S. could undoubtedly expect continual diplomatic harassment, beginning with the Soviet complaint to the U.N. over the U-2 overflights.

Another Time. Having concluded that he was not going to win anything at the summit, and rather than sit down at the table to play a losing hand, Nikita Khrushchev had decided to kick over the table. But another time, with another hand, he might like to try again. Another time might give him another inspiration.

But would all that look like much of a victory in Kremlin councils? Or, as usual, was Khrushchev about to lead the parade that was heading off in another direction? This was a gambit he had used often before and with conspicuous success. As a politician, one of Khrushchev’s prime strengths is his ability to sniff out the sense of a meeting and dexterously leap in to head the new trend before it is fully formed. When Malenkov, in 1955, showed signs of winning popularity with the masses and with Russia’s managerial class through his calls for more consumer goods, Khrushchev promptly toppled him, but at the same time elected himself the prime apostle of a better break for Soviet consumers. At the 1956 20th Congress of the Communist Party, the first gingerly complaints at Stalin’s excesses came from other party leaders, but by quickly capping his colleagues with his famed “secret” speech, Nikita won himself a firm place in history as the repudiator of Stalinism. And when the Hungarian uprising broke and Kremlin opposition to his “liberalization” policies grew dangerously strong, Nikita Khrushchev promptly converted himself into the butcher of Budapest.

Risky Game. But, even for a politician as canny as Nikita Khrushchev, this was a risky game. And when the game gets risky for the leader inside the Kremlin walls, it gets risky for everybody. Among others who would have to watch carefully was Rodion Malinovsky. For, dutiful Khrushchev supporter though he has seemed, the man who shadowed Nikita last week did not survive and prosper through two generations of Soviet Russia’s turbulent history without watching the wind.