Khrushchev, In 70th Year, May Drop Job

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30109, 18 April 1963, Page 9

Khrushchev, In 70th Year, May Drop Job

(N Z.PA -Reuter—Copyright)

MOSCOW, April 17.

The Soviet Prime Minister, Mr Nikita Khrushchev, begins his seventieth year today—amid rumours that he may soon relinquish some of his power.

Experienced observers in Moscow—both Communist and non-Communist —say the rumours are nothing more than that, but they admit the rumours have been remarkably persisent. One version has it that Mr Khrushchev is beginning to feel his age after nearly 10 years as Soviet leader, is contemplating giving up one of his top offices—Communist Party secretary and Prime Minister.

Another rumour suggests that a neoStalinist group within the Soviet leadership, critical of Mr Khrushchev’s handling of the Cuban crisis and the ideological clash with the Chinese, is campaigning strongly for his replacement.

Most observers take the view that Mr Khrushchev is not the man to step down from any high post at a time so crucial for the world Communist movement, or indeed as long as he is constitutionally able to continue in office He has been on holiday on the Black Sea coast for about a month, but this is not unusual.

The rumours are thought to stem in the main from the known difficulties faced by Mr Khrushchev, including: (1) The Chinese charge of appeasement in the face of imperialism, pressed after Russia's withdrawal of rockets, bombers and some troops from Cuba.

(2) The absence of any significant foreign policy successes since the Soviet Prime Minister touched off the Berlin crisis in November, 1958. (3) Continuing insufficiencies

in the Soviet economic system, particularly in Mr Khrushchev’s specialist field of agriculture. (4) The problem of preventing Mr Khrushchev’s own attack on Stalin’s crimes becoming a “green light” for fullscale intellectual and artistic freedom. Mr Khrushchev has had successes, but the failures are equally striking, and more recent. And they came all bunched together. Yet the short chubby Mr Khrushchev is still unquestionably the dominant figure in the Soviet Union. Force of Personality

He becomes by force of personality an imposing figure in every international gathering he attends. President Eisenhower once called him a “born leader of men.” President Kennedy him tough in Vienna in 1961. .

By force of personality and shrewd party operation he drove into political exile such veteran leaders as Malenkov, Molotov, Bulganin and Kaganovich. He took on the more complicated job of driving out the power of the spirit of Stalin himself. Mr Khrushchev was born on April 17, 1894, in the village of Kalinovka in the centre of European Russia. The village was poor, and his father worked in the mines in the Don Basin. Nikita, after a brief period in elementary schools, joined his father in the mines. There he joined the Communist Party, a year after the

1917 Revolution. The party has since been his life, and his path to power. He went through that hard training course that comes to revolutionary people, the long sessions of debate in cells and committees to decide what to do and how to do it—but he learned fast. He has visited many countries, but probably his most educational trip was his 1959 visit to the United States. Two years earlier he said the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in per capita production of meat, milk and milk products by 1961.

Since the 1959 trip, he somehow has seemed less sure how fast the Soviet Union would overtake the United States, or how fast communism might dominate the world. But he continues to be sure both will happen, and the many people who talk to him at length sense no real wavering in his faith.

His operations in rising to power are fascinating to study. He was first with one group, then with another, or, as current Soviet biographers put it, first one group clung to him, then another.

In 1956 he was bold enough to denounce Stalin as a tyrant. Stalin then had been dead three years, but it took courage anyway. It launched him on an inevitable battle with the group which had been most closely associated with Stalin. As a symbol, Stalin’s body was hauled out of the Lenin tomb and buried among other lesser men along the Kremlin

wall. The whole country began to breathe more easily. Artists, writers and poets picked up the ball of antiStalinism. They began asking “where was who” when thousands of party and Army leaders were executed before and after the last war.

Suddenly last winter, the probing was stopped by Mr Khrushchev. It was getting out of hand. On his sixty-nir.th birthday, Mr Khrushchev doubtless feels the liberal breath both from within his own country and from abroad. But his training clearly has prompted him to react in only one way. He sees no room for co-existence of two competing ideas. Change is in the making. Perhaps Mr Khrushchev himself is just at the frontier between what was, and what is going to be, an end of the old days of Stalinism, and the beginning of the new. But no-one in Russia is quite sure what the new may be, or just how much it will be affected by the liberal breath.