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                                                                              ╚January 6, 1958

Man of the Year:Nikita Khrushchev

Up From the Plenum



    The symbols of 1957 were two pale, clear streaks of light
that slashed across the world's night skies and a Vanguard rocket
toppling into a roiling mass of flame on a Florida beach.

    With the Sputniks, Russia took man into a new era of space,
and with its advances in the art of missilery, posed the U.S.
with the most dramatic military threat it had ever faced. And
with the Vanguard's witlessly ballyhooed crash at Cape Canaveral
went the U.S.'s long-held tenet that anything Communism's driven
men could do, free men could do better. Whatever the future might
bring, in 1957 the U.S. had been challenged and bested in the
very area of technological achievement that had made it the
world's greatest power.

    The shock wave from that reversal ran, perceptibly and
profoundly, through the world's watching millions, disturbing the
U.S.'s friends, cheering its enemies, swaying the uncommitted, as
eyes in African jungles and Asian market places, in European town
squares and American suburbs strained skyward for a glimpse of
Russia's tiny moons. In 1957, under the orbits of a horned sphere
and a half-ton tomb for dead dog, the world's balance of power
lurched and swung toward the free world's enemies.

    On any score, 1957 was a year of retreat and disarray for the
West. For Britain and France, the U.S. allies who fill out the
world's Big Four, the year's theme was a recessional. Sir Anthony
Eden, physically sick and spiritually drained after the fiasco at
Suez, resigned as Prime Minister. His successor put out a White
Paper proclaiming that Britannia was done with ruling the waves,
was thinning out the proud red line of far-flung posts on which
the sun never set, and withdrawing to a more realistic stance as
a tidier, tighter nuclear power. Guy Mollet, the other architect
of the Suez failure, fell from power in his turn, but France
fought out its frustrations in Algeria, where 39,931 perished in
the year's most bitter war.

    Ritual & Blunder. Moving to order the political disorder left
in the Middle Eastern land asking for help against Communist
attack. The President's pledge and the Sixth Fleet's presence
gave Jordan's spunky young King Hussein heart to eject ministers
talking of Soviet alliance and to line his country up in the
ranks of the West. But when the Soviets countered with a coup
that put pro-Communists on top of Syria's army, the U.S.
blundered into trouble, airlifting arms to neighboring Jordan
with such zealous haste that even its Arab friends felt obliged
to pledge ritually their support to the Syrians in the name of
Arab unity. At home, the big U.S. news of 1957 was the unhappy
sight of paratroopers with bayonets, called out reluctantly by
President Eisenhower to enforce a federal court order admitting
Negro pupils to Little Rock's Central High School over the
defiance of Arkansas' Governor Orval Faubus.

    Unquestionably, in the deadly give and take of the cold war,
the high score for the year belongs to Russia. And
unquestionably, the Man of the Year was Russia's stubby and bald,
garrulous and brilliant ruler: Nikita Khrushchev.

    So Far So Fast. In any year, Khrushchev was as extraordinary
a dictator as the world has ever seen. Not since Alexander the
Great had mankind seen a despot so willingly, so frequently, and
so publicly drunk. Not since Adolf Hitler had the world known a
braggart so arrogantly able to make good his own boasts. In 1957
Nikita Khrushchev did more than oversee the launching of man's
first moons. He made himself undisputed and single master of
Russia. Few men had traveled so far so fast.

    As 1957 opened, Khrushchev and his policies were in jeopardy.
His denunciation of Stalin and his proclaimed "separate roads to
socialism" had resulted in rebellion in Hungary, defiance in
Poland and denunciation by the world. The restless spirit of
dissent seethed in Rumania, in East Germany, even in docile
Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. In France and Italy, in every
Western country, the Communist parties were in turmoil;
everywhere veteran comrades were resigning in outrage over his
brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolt. At the December 1956
Plenum of the Communist Party Central Committee in Moscow, he was
conspicuously not one of the speakers.

    In 1957's twelve months, Nikita Khrushchev, peasant's son and
cornfield commissar scorned by the party's veteran intellectuals,
disposed all his serious rivals -- at least for the time. For
good measure, he turned on the Soviet Union's No.I soldier and
war hero, Marshall Georgy Zhukov, dismissed him with an airy
promise of "some job for which he is experienced and qualified."
He reorganized Soviet industry, laid down the law to Soviet
intellectuals, stemmed the tide of desertions from the Western
Communist parties, soothed the incipient rebellion in the
satellites, and got from China's Mao Tse-tung a showpiece pledge
of allegiance.

    Internationally, he achieved what the Czars had long desired:
a foothold for Russia -- however uncertain it might be -- in the
Middle East. He proved the foothold's reality by a war scare that
set the world's nerves on edge, creating it with one brash
rocket-rattling threat against Turkey, then dispelling it with
one cocktail-party crack as soon as his pro-Communists had
consolidated their control of Syria. More than any other man,
Nikita Khrushchev dominated 1957's news and left his mark -- for
good or evil -- on history.

    Pigs & Sandhogs. Few would have picked Khrushchev as Joseph
Stalin's heir. This was the muzhik from Kalinovka whom Stalin
commanded to dance the gopak, the hayseed at whom Beria sneered
years ago as "our beloved chicken statesman," "our potato
politician." When Stalin put Nikita in charge of the Moscow party
back in the '30s, Khrushchev used to don navies' rough clothes,
crawl down to visit the sandhogs tunneling out the new subway,
take a hand with a pneumatic drill, and talk with the lads in the
unprintable language for which, even in the Kremlin, he is
famous. The palace courtiers dubbed him "Comrade Lavatory Lover"
because Nikita not only insisted on equipping the Moscow metro
with the world's best subway toilets, but often broke in rudely
on conference speakers: "All right, all right, comrade, you have
achieved this and that, but what about lavatories in your
factory? How many lavatories? What is their cultural state?"

    Sent by Stalin to the Ukraine, Khrushchev skipped theories
and philosophies, talked pigs and potatoes with peasants and
workers. "Comrades!" he cried. "Socialism means first of all full
stomachs, felt boots and sheepskin jackets." In those down-on-
the-farm days, Khrushchev opposed building a rocket-research
center near Dnepropetrovsk. "Rockets are the weapons of
imperialist aggressors, not the weapons of the peace-loving
U.S.S.R.," he told a visiting Kremlin bureaucrat.

    Fish in Water. Nikita Khrushchev was not a student of Marxist
theory. As peasant and sometime miner, he did not, finish
elementary school, did not begin serious reading until he entered
an adult training class at the age of 27. Unlike Malenkov or
Molotov, doctrinaire intellectual theoreticians, Khrushchev
learned his Communism not out of a book but by contact. Alone
among Stalin's lieutenants, he lived and spoke as a man who moves
in Communism as a fish in water, oblivious of dialectical debate
or moral pang. Drunk or sober, he never seemed to worry about
what he said, who was listening, how it might diverge from the
current line. A man in motion, he had the air of a man who never
looked nervously back over his shoulder in his life.

    Khrushchev recognized what his rivals did not. By terror and
personality, Stalin had built Russia into a technological and
military power. But at Stalin's death, the technocrats were
coming to political maturity. A man encouraged to think at his
job could not be forbidden to think the moment he stepped outside
the laboratory. The peasants, filled with new chauvinistic pride
after Russia's armies had defeated Hitler, would be demanding
butter and neckties. Uninterested in fomenting world revolution,
they wanted a better life at home. Coldly and pragmatically,
Khrushchev recognized that in post-Stalin Russia, terror on the
Stalin scale would not produce results.

    The Fable. Stalin's successors installed the potato
politician in the tyrant's key job as First Party Secretary
because they never supposed such a clodhopper could fill such
shoes. But Khrushchev, as ruthless as any of Stalin's other
minions (he killed 3,000 party men in the Ukraine during World
War II) used the job to build a party machine in his own image,
replaced so many regional and local secretaries that he came to
the crucial 20th Party Congress in February 1956 with some 500
delegates in his pocket; the Central Committee that the delegates
chose became the instrument with which he destroyed his rivals in
1957. In a burst of typical frankness, Khrushchev told Western
reporters a fable:

    "Once upon a time," said Nikita, "there were three men in a
prison. They were a Social Democrat, an anarchist and a humble
little Jew -- a half-educated little fellow named Pinya. They
decided to elect a cell leader who would watch over distribution
of food, tea and tobacco. The anarchist, a big, burly fellow, was
against such a lawful process as electing authority. To show his
contempt for law and order, he proposed that insignificant little
Pinya be elected. They elected Pinya. Things went well, and they
decided to escape. The Social Democrat had a good intellect; he
made the plan to tunnel. The brawny anarchist did the digging.
But they realized that the man to go first through the tunnel
would be shot at by the guard. They all turned to the big, brave
anarchist, but he was afraid to go. Suddenly, poor little Pinya
drew himself up and said: 'Comrades, you elected me by democratic
process as your leader, therefore I will go first.'

    "Little Pinya, that's me.

    "No matter how humble a man's beginning," he added,
explaining his own fable, "he achieves the stature of the office
to which he is elected."

    Counter-Revolution. After the glum December Plenum, Nikita
set to work. Like the practical man he is, he recognized that his
liberalization had gone too far. In November 1956, when Hungary
was fighting for its freedom, Nikita had lurched up to U.S.
Ambassador Charles Bohlen at a Moscow party and said: "I want to
talk to you about Suez." "I want to talk to you about Hungary,"
replied Bohlen. "What are you going to do about it?" Khrushchev
exploded. Pumping his fist in a series of short uppercuts, he
shouted: "We will put in more troops -- and more troops -- and
more troops -- and more troops -- until we have finished them."

    To patch the dike of Communist unity, he charged off to
Prague, to East Berlin, to Bucharest, received one satellite
delegation after another in the Kremlin. He offered loans here,
concessions there. "You like workers' councils? Take them. We
won't criticize you," he said in a speech to the Czechs.

    Cracking down on the critics who had risen in the thaw after
his own attacks on Stalin, he persuaded Gomulka to stifle the
young bloods who had stirred Poland. "We are all Stalinists," he
announced. "God grant that every Communist be able to fight as
Stalin fought." ("We say the name of God," explains Khrushchev,
"but that is only a habit. We are atheists.") To Westerners who
predicted that his destalinization program could be used to
topple the Soviet empire, he shouted: "You will no more succeed
at this than you will succeed in seeing your ear without a
mirror."

    But in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, he told the hard-
lining bosses of those satrapies that they no longer had anything
to fear from the Kremlin. "As the saying goes," he told the
Czechs, "trust in God and look out for yourself. When you walk
among dogs, don't forget to carry a stick. After all, that is
what a hound has teeth for, to bite when he feels like it."

    Bark on the Wind. The December Plenum had conservatively cut
back Khrushchev's expansive plans for agriculture and industry.
Nikita's reply was to organize some 514,000 "discussion" meetings
across the country, in which his loyal party workers exhorted the
comrades to back Nikita's dreams of Russia's future. Nikita
himself launched an attack on Moscow's desk-bound administrators.
"Bureaucrats sprout like mushrooms after a rainfall," cried
Nikita. In May the Supreme Soviet voted to hand over industrial
control to Khrushchev by scattering Moscow's managerial elite
among 105 new economic regional councils -- all tightly
supervised by his regional party henchmen.

    As the new class of government managers and engineers was
blown from desks and dachas to the four corners of the Siberian
steppes. Khrushchev roared of for his old corn-belt stamping
grounds to deal with Soviet Russia's biggest worry the farm
problem.

    "You must plant potatoes in square clusters. You must grow
cabbage and as my grandmother did," he lecture cloth-capped
peasants. He admitted that his plans for planting corn ("sausage
on the stalk") had not panned out so well everywhere. "If you
cannot catch the bird of paradise," he advised, "better take a
wet hen." Bidding for the farm vote, he promised the
collectivists lower taxes and an end to compulsory delivery to
the state from their private plots, then crowed "Within the next
few years, we shall catch up with the U.S. in per-capita
production of meat, milk and butter."

    The West would call him crazy, said Nikita. His answer was to
quote a Russian proverb: "The dog barks and the wind carries the
sound away." Barked Nikita: "This program is stronger than the H-
bomb. If we catch up with the U.S., we will have hit the pillars
of capitalism with the most powerful torpedo yet."

    The Old Cell Game. Khrushchev's Presidium rivals thought
Khrushchev was overdoing it. They had thought so ever since he
rose in the Kremlin's Great Hall at the 20th Party Congress in
1956 to deliver his weeping, three-hour indictment of Stalin as a
"murderer" and "maniac." They sprang their showdown last June,
and it was a close thing. The majority present voted to deny
Khrushchev the chair, and Bulganin took over. Did the Old Guard
think that because they had destroyed Stalin's police power, they
could vote Khrushchev freely out of his job as they had voted
Malenkov out before him? Khrushchev fought back, and the old
commissars learned that the new party boss swung a new kind of
political power. According to an East German radio report.
Marshal Zhukov sent out his aircraft to fetch Khrushchev's
Central Committee henchmen to Moscow. In the final vote all
joined to censure the "antiparty group" except Molotov, who
stubbornly abstained. Molotov, the last living collaborator of
Lenin: Kaganovich, the first sponsor of Nikita's career;
Malenkov, Stalin's designated successor -- all were shipped off
to obscure posts in remote areas. The dictator jounced off to
visit the Czechs. In Slovakia, he airily dismissed the anti-party
group: "As they say, a scabby sheep got into a good flock. We
took the sheep by the tail and chucked it out."

    Zhukov was next. The marshal had emerged from the June fight
with more power than ever, and he was going around telling
Khrushchev's propaganda boys not to confuse his army's
disciplined efficiency with their lectures about the party's
supremacy. It was an awkward time for Khrushchev to strike; by
then the marshal was touring Yugoslavia as Tito's honored guest,
and the preparations for celebrating the Soviet's 20th
anniversary were well under way in Moscow. But Khrushchev struck.
His party machine whirred soundlessly. Within a week after
Zhukov's return to Moscow, the Soviet Union's top soldier and war
hero made an abject confession of "errors," and Khrushchev told
foreign reporters with boozy insouciance: "In life, one cell must
die and another take its place. But life goes on. Marshal Zhukov
did not turn out well as a political figure, but he was a good
marshal and a good soldier." Just then, Sputnik II shot into
space, and its roar drowned out the hubbub over Zhukov's fall.

    In the Middle East Nikita Khrushchev posed as an altruist.
Advancing $563 million in arms and economic aid to the Arab
nationalists of Syria and Egypt, he cried: "Is Nasser a
Communist? Certainly not. But nevertheless we support Nasser. We
have only one objective, that the peoples be freed from colonial
dependence." Last week Pravada offered the pro-Western Arab
states of Lebanon. Saudi Arabia and Iraq "ready Soviet Union
cooperation in economic development," if they too would accept
"the same [i.e., neutralist] principles" as Syria and Egypt.

    In the eyes of those who go by appearances, Nikita changed
the face of Russia. Instead of the remote, terrifying, frozen
face of Stalin, he presented the jouncy, faintly ridiculous
figure of the cartoonists' politician: he kissed babies, was
smeared with villagers' vermilion paste on a visit with Nehru,
rummaged among cornstalks as though he were running for office.
In his trips abroad, he was as folksy as an overweight Will
Rogers, carefully avoided any association with the skulking,
oldtime conspiratorial local Communists, managed to suggest that
Communist parties are as respectable as Christian Democrats or
Tories. After destalinization. Italy's Communist party lost
250,000 members and its inner discipline. Last week three of
five party members attended their cell meetings-reportedly the
highest proportion since 1946.

    Nikita's success was ratified at the ceremonies celebrating
the 40th anniversary of the Soviet revolution in Moscow last
November. China's Mao was so convinced of the rightness of
Khrushchev's policy reversal that he led the way for the adoption
of Khrushchev's manifesto. Mao formally acknowledged the Soviet
party's "leading role among the Communist and workers' parties,"
added: "China does not even have a quarter of a Sputnik and the
Soviet Union has two."

    On the Move. At home, Khrushchev nominated himself as
spokesman of the New Class in the Soviet Union. He was careful to
disassociate himself from Stalin's terror, and the New Class was
grateful. Khrushchev himself told British Laborite Aneurin Bevan
the story of how it had been before. Presidium members, said
Khrushchev, drew up a plan to decentralize the economy after
World War II, and Voznesensky, the chief economic planner, took
it to Stalin. "Voznesensky came back," said Khrushchev, "and told
them Stalin had denounced him as a traitor to socialism. This
made them angry because Voznesensky had merely done what they had
told him to do. They went to Stalin next day and told him this:
that it was their collective plan, not Voznesensky's; that he had
been unfair to Voznesensky and ought to apologize to him. 'I
can't,' said Stalin. 'He was shot this morning.'"

    Having blandly appropriated the defeated Malenkov's consumer-
goods program, he promised 250 branches of Moscow's huge GUM
Department Store in the capital's outskirts and is building 20
blocks of apartment buildings to give some of the elite's rising
expectations a little houseroom. Said one proud engineer: "It is
time for others to think of us as other than backward. We are
moving, and Khrushchev is helping us move."

    In 1957 the Russians opened on the Volga the world's largest
hydroelectric station, developed west of the Urals the world's
biggest new oilfield, built at Dubna, outside Moscow, the world's
largest synchrocyclotron (particles accelerator). In 1957 Russia
graduated three times as many engineers as the U.S. and published
five times as many book titles. In the judgment of their U.S.
peers, Russian scientists in 1957 excelled in such fields as
astrophysics, very high energy studies, cosmic-ray research and
certain branches of higher mathematics, and ran close to U.S.
performance in oceanography, cryogenics and geology. The Russians
moved up in air defense, long-range bomber capacity, and in
reorganizing their traditionally massive ground forces into
small, fast-moving units capable of using tactical atomic
weapons. Says General Maxwell Taylor: "The equipment display in
the 7th of November Moscow parade included numerous such weapons,
one at least a tactical army missile of greater range than any
presently operating in the U.S. Army."

    A Little White Ball. Nikita has made the most of his shiny
new rockets, in hand or in prospect. Just before the NATO summit
meeting, Russia showered the U.S.'s allies with letter
threatening destruction if they accepted U.S. missiles. "We do
not want to continue the arms race," Nikita told visiting U.S.
Publisher William Randolph Hearst Jr. "We have already won over
you. Your cities and bases could be stricken from the face of the
earth. Your overseas bases are yours, but they are surrounded by
the peoples of those countries. You will see -- one day they will
awaken from their slumber and recognize the folly of depending on
NATO and such alliances for their protection. "But he ordered his
diplomats to break off disarmament talks at the U.N. and rejected
the new overtures made by the NATO leaders at the Paris meeting.

    He has exploited the Sputniks at home and abroad. In one
Moscow theater, the lights go down after each performance, and
the audience cheers as a little white-lighted ball orbits over it
from the ceiling. "People of the whole world are pointing to the
satellite and saying that the U.S. has been beaten," he crowed at
an East German embassy reception, and the lesson has not been
lost on the undeveloped countries. "If the Russians are so
oppressed, how could Russian talent be so creative?" asked a
Ghanaian schoolmaster.

    Mixed Gains. 1957's triumphs may not be permanent for Nikita
Khrushchev. In the Middle East, Russia's callous manipulation of
Syria for its own ends alarmed as many Arabs as it impressed. In
the satellites, Poland's army is still restive. At home, the
virgin lands Khrushchev plowed for grain are Russia's dust bowl;
in 1957 they yielded a much lower harvest than the year before.
At the same time that he promised a lot more housing and
clothing, he boosted the goals of Communism's sacred heavy
industry yet higher; by September he was forced to postpone the
goals by scrapping the five-year plan for a seven-year plan
ending in 1965. His foreign economic program is not going down
well with Soviet citizens, who growl like any taxpayers at
shelling out for others. The stubby little peasant worries lest
the scientific and technological elite become an independent
power force. He has slashed the high salaries some scientists
have been getting. The party must reign supreme in the
laboratory, too.

    The Sputniks he sent whirling into outer space aroused the
U.S. giant to its danger as nothing else could have. President
Eisenhower, throwing off the effects of a slight stroke, risked
health and leadership to journey to Paris and rally NATO to new
heart. The U.S.'s European allies brushed aside Russia's
threatening letters, joined with the U.S. to face in new unity
the psychological pressures built up by the Soviet's scientific
breakthrough.

    At 63 Nikita himself does not yet have absolute power, is
still best described as chairman of the gang. And to control such
a gang, as Nikita well knows, takes far more political skill than
Stalin ever required. Khrushchev's Russia needs its thinking
men -- its scientists and its technicians -- and Khrushchev must
allow them to think. They demand respect. They can do without
Khrushchev, but Khrushchev cannot do without them. Within the
party there may be younger men who will overtake him when he
slows or stumbles. But in 1957, Nikita Khrushchev outran,
outfoxed, outbragged, outworked and outdrank them all.