RUSSIA: Home Are the Salesmen

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The two-engined Ilyushin plane bearing Soviet Premier Bulganin and First Party Secretary Khrushchev had hardly cleared the mountains ringing Kabul when Afghanistan's Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan called a press conference. Daoud's message to the West: no secret political or military pacts had been made with the Soviet Union, and Afghanistan's policy of neutrality was unchanged. The $100 million credit extended to Afghanistan by the departing Russians would be used for peaceful projects, i.e., hydroelectric power, irrigation, etc. In effect, said Daoud, Afghanistan is still free "to shop" with the West. The hint was heavily underlined: the Afghans, who like to think of themselves as the Orient's wiliest wheeler-dealers, were inviting the U.S. (which has already granted Afghanistan credits amounting to some $50 million) to outbid the Communists.

Guns for Sale. In New Delhi, Daoud's remarks were taken with a grain of sodium chloride. The city buzzed with the news that an Afghan arms-buying mission would soon be on the way to Moscow, and that large quantities of Soviet arms would get into the hands of Afghanistan's border-raiding Pathan tribesmen. Thus the Soviet Traveling Salesmen sought to punish the West's good friend Pakistan. Having endorsed India's claims to Kashmir (disputed by Pakistan), they now encouraged the Afghans' claim to northern territories of West Pakistan.

Prime Minister Nehru, however, was having a few third thoughts. A few days after the departure of the Russians, he told a closed meeting of the Indian Congress Party that he had been "embarrassed" by their speechmaking while in India, and described Khrushchev's charge that the Western allies had sent Hitler against the Soviet Union in 1941 as "twisting history." He has still to say as much in public.

Friends Won. At Moscow Central Airport, bundled to their ears in thick fur coats, Bulganin and Khrushchev hurried from their homecoming plane to an arc-lighted platform, told Russia's radio and TV audience that it had been a "wonderful trip." Said Khrushchev: "In the 370 million people of India, as well as the people of Burma and Afghanistan, we have allies in the struggle for peace throughout the world . . . India is a great and good friend of our country. Just like the Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic. India stands firmly in the ranks of the struggle for peace. And India, China and the Soviet Union—as Lenin taught—constitute an invincible force."

Although neither India, Burma nor Afghanistan are colonies, Khrushchev lashed out at "colonialism." "In our speeches in India, Burma and Afghanistan, we exposed the criminal policy of the colonizers." In contrast to Khrushchev, Marshal Bulganin acted like a tired old man.

The streets from the airport were lined with Red army soldiers and tens of thousands of dark-clad Muscovites, who stood in the sub-zero cold, craning their necks for a glimpse of the official entourage. Among those welcoming the "peacemakers" were a number of top-level bureaucrats just back from viewing a series of thermonuclear explosions * in north Siberia. Together they all piled into the Kremlin to get ready for this week's special meeting of the Supreme Soviet. Though the welcome was vast, it was silent; no one in the streets cheered.