Russia: Happy New Year, Comrades

Not since the imperial balls of Czarist days has the Kremlin seen such a night of festive gaiety. A sumptuously ornamented "New Year's tree" towered 50 ft. high in the vaulted St. George's Hall. Ambassadors, bishops, marshals in all their medals and all the top Soviet bosses thronged the long banquet tables and devoured mounds of caviar and salmon as Bolshoi sopranos sang and a symphony orchestra played. At the stroke of midnight,* Nikita Khrushchev raised his glass of Caucasian wine and shouted: "Happy New Year, comrades!" In great good spirits, he tossed out more toasts—"The heroic working class!" "The collective peasantry!" "The Soviet intelligentsia!" "The all-conquering ideas of Marxism-Leninism!"

Bad Past. Finally he took out a piece of paper, straightened his tie, and in more sober tones read: "We should like that with the departure of the old year, of the old President, our bad relations with the United States should also depart. During the election campaign, Mr. Kennedy said that had he been President he would have voiced regret to the Soviet government with regard to the U-2 flight. In view of all this, we obviously should not insist on discussing the question in the United Nations Assembly, so as not to let the bad past interfere with hopes for a better future."

Soon a band struck up lively dance music in the adjoining Vladimir Hall. First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, that scowling Old Bolshevik who helped the Soviets take over in Baku, led off with an Armenian solo. Then blonde Minister of Culture Ekaterina Furtseva, only woman on the top Presidium, danced decorously out on the arm of President Leonid Brezhnev. Khrushchev, after watching a while from a stairway, walked off to the Winter Garden with West German Ambassador Hans Kroll, whose government a few hours earlier had signed a treaty with the Soviet Union in Bonn, increasing their trade by a third.

To the Virgin Lands. Two days later Khrushchev appeared at a Cuban embassy reception to read another piece of paper—mostly about the Soviet Union's desire for peace in places like the Congo, Laos, Cuba. Khrushchev roared with laughter as Mikoyan started shouting "Cuba da, Yankee nyet!" Asked by reporters about the 1960 harvest, which is thought in the West to have lagged 20% below plans, Khrushchev said, "It was not as bad as the previous year," but still left room for improvement. "That explains the reorganization of the Virgin Lands," he volunteered, and dropped the first word that tubby Agriculture Minister Vladimir Matskevich had been sent to the Central Asian boondocks to take charge of Khrushchev's pet project (the Virgin Lands have suffered their third crop failure in five years). Grinned Khrushchev, "Out there Matskevich will be right on the job instead of signing circulars in Moscow." Later the Soviet boss:

¶Signed a deal with Indonesia's Army Chief Abdul Haris Nasution, to supply $300 million worth of Soviet military gear for Indonesia's armed forces.

¶ Congratulated the lady manager of a north Caucasus chicken farm for getting her 12,000 hens to lay 176 eggs apiece in 1960 and for pledging her hens to do even better in 1961.