RUSSIA: The Survivor

• Share

(6 of 8)

Instead, having survived Stalin and then become the first to denounce him, Mikoyan has to be careful not to let the repudiation of Stalin get out of hand: the desire for revenge could easily devour all those who served him. Mikoyan was in the Kremlin group that flew to Warsaw last fall to smash the insurgent Gomulka —and found themselves encircled in Warsaw's Belvedere Palace by Gomulka's forces and compelled to agree to the Poles' demands. He was in the thick of the Hungarian action, where his slick manipulation was not enough: it took a tank-led invasion. The final repression was the Red army's idea, and at least once Marshal Zhukov showed himself relentless when the others hesitated. "We tried all we could to find another solution," Mikoyan said later to a Western diplomat. "I myself advised the acceptance of one Hungarian ultimatum after another, but I couldn't advise accepting the last one."

Colonial Revolt. The truth is that in the satellites the Russian rulers find themselves bedeviled by the same problem of restive colonial peoples that plagues the rest of the postwar world. Because Russia is less industrialized than several of the satellites, the Russians have reversed the classic pattern of colonialism by exploiting the satellites' skilled labor force instead of their raw materials, but it is exploitation nonetheless. Any gains the satellites have made have not been conferred on them by more "moderate" Russian leaders, but won by themselves. The

Russians have been compelled, since Budapest, to pour an estimated $1.5 billion into the satellites to keep them happy; they have not yet figured out how to pin the satellites down without spending too much on them. Economically, in fact, the satellites may soon prove more costly than valuable. There are some who argue that the main advocates of keeping Eastern Europe in thrall are the Red army marshals, who want plenty of acreage between Western front lines and Russian territory.

How Mikoyan felt about doing the Hungarian dirty work no outsider knows. A Briton who has lived long in Moscow says: "Mikoyan disappeared from the Moscow round from mid-October to the beginning of December. In those six weeks he aged ten years. He was drawn and haggard, and his skin was yellow when we saw him again. Instead of an old man looking young, he was an old man looking more than his age."

The Mikoyan of 1957 can still turn on joviality like tap water, laugh off Khrushchev's blunted barbs, and knock back bottoms-up toasts in the Armenian cognac he calls "best on earth." He remains the Kremlin's jauntiest dresser and spriest waltzer. His wife Anush (whom he found in Rostov's Armenian colony just after the revolution) calls him babnik, which means flatterer. She once declared that he was one of only two hand-kissing, courtly gentlemen in Moscow (the other: Lavrenty Beria). They have four sons (another was killed in World War II): two are in the air force, a third is reportedly a wild-living, peg-trousered boidevardier in Gorky Street's "jet set." Mikoyan's brother Artem, an air force general, is famous in his own right as co-designer of the MIG —the "MI" stands for Mikoyan, the "G" for Co-Designer Gurevich.