RUSSIA: Still the Survivor?

Among the tiny handful of men who teeter perilously at the top of the Soviet ladder, none has shown such a talent for survival as swarthy, saturnine First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan, 64. But last week Western foreign offices and intelligence agencies hummed with speculation that Mikoyan had at last lost his footing.

To support their suspicions, the Kremlinologists had to fall back, as always, on indirect and fragmentary evidence. At the great May Day parade in Red Square, Mikoyan, for the first time since 1957, was not among the first five Soviet leaders to appear on the reviewing stand. On May 3 the Central Committee magazine Party Life ran an article on "Forty Years of Soviet Azerbaijan." Mikoyan, chief architect of the Bolshevik revolution in Azerbaijan, was not mentioned. Since May 7 Mikoyan has not been seen in Moscow.

A slick, self-confident Armenian, Mikoyan has shown less public reverence for Khrushchev than any other second-rank Russian leader. On one occasion during Khrushchev's 1955 visit with Marshal Tito, his Yugoslav hosts watched in open-mouthed disbelief as the bull-like Nikita and the wiry Anastas whiled away a few idle minutes scuffling about in a mock wrestling match. For all his flipness toward the boss, Mikoyan has always voted with Khrushchev in Kremlin disputes, has been one of the strongest advocates inside Russia's ruling Presidium of Khrushchev's policy of easier relations with the West. In fact, Mikoyan has been its most conspicuous salesman in the West. He served as Khrushchev's advance man in the U.S., peddled the soft line in Cuba and Iraq.

If Mikoyan was slated for the stageby-stage degradation that in Khrushchev's Russia has replaced Stalin's bullet in the neck as the approved Kremlin method of liquidation, the reason might well be his conspicuous association with the detente policy. Perhaps Khrushchev had offered Mikoyan as a sacrifice to Moscow's hard liners to divert their wrath from himself.

Given the primitive state of their art. Kremlinologists still could not exclude the simpler explanation offered last week by Nikita himself. Said Khrushchev: "I talked with Mikoyan over the telephone just yesterday from Pitsunda [on the Black Sea coast], where he is taking his vacation. He told me: 'Nikita Sergeevich. come on down. The weatheriswonderful.' "