Communists: How to Slice the Cake

• Share

Nikita Khrushchev kept pushing his brand of consumer Communism. "We did not make a revolution so that we should live worse," he observed on the stump in Hungary. "Some people say, 'You already have one pair of trousers, and they cover everything trousers should.' To this I reply that trousers cover the sinful body, but that is not enough. Perhaps one pair of trousers suffices in the tropics. It doesn't in our country: something might freeze."

Back home, on the chilly banks of the Neva in Leningrad, plenty of bodies were uncovered as swarms of pale, fleshy Russians looked for a place in the thin spring sun, the very image of a people who want the better, freer—and more stylish—life Khrushchev promises. Sounding downright capitalistic, Izvestia launched a new plan to bring about this longed-for prosperity; it suggested putting a traditional Russian drink known as kvas on the world mar ket to compete with Coca-Cola.*

The Culprit Among Us. Scarcely stopping for the kvas that refreshes, Khrushchev wound up his ten-day visit to Hungary by again and again hitting his main theme: that the primary aim of the Communist revolution is achieving a prosperous Communism without resorting to nuclear war. Nor would he delude himself as to the difficulties of meeting that goal. When a Hungarian agronomist boasted at having surpassed the U.S. in wheat yield, Khrushchev put him in his place. "Don't fool yourself," he said. "The United States is doing better. The student in socialist countries is often afraid to work on the farm, afraid of cows and tractors. The agricultural institute in Moscow is too close to the ballet school."

Next day, speaking at the Budapest Optical Works, Khrushchev said he had been informed that factories in the liveries of electric motors. Searching through his entourage, he spotted tall, bald Petr Shelest, first secretary of the Ukraine Communist Party. "The culprit is among us," Nikita announced sarcastically. "Here is Comrade Shelest eating Hungarian goulash while his factories fail to deliver."

No Nose for Corpses. Khrushchev displayed the same poet-and-peasant touch in dealing with Mao Tse-tung's latest assault on Moscow's "revision ism." The Chinese, said Nikita, turning ever more violent, are "complete idiots" in espousing Stalinism. "There is a tradition to carry a corpse feet first out of the house so that it will not return. We carried Stalin out this way, and nobody will ever bring him back to us." The Chinese may "like the smell of corpses," he continued, but neither Russia nor the Western powers had the nose for it. "When it is a question of their own lives," he said, "the imperialists take things very seriously."

Of course the imperialists are still the enemy, but Peking, with its "despotism," "frantic slanders" and "chauvinism," is only giving them aid and comfort. The Chinese leaders, said Khrushchev, are producing a growing cluster of Communist splinter parties—which threaten to weaken the international Communist movement. "The imperialists must now be rubbing their hands with satisfaction. Can the great revolutionary cause be betrayed in a more vile way?"