Surrounded by Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky and other smiling brass, Nikita Khrushchev proposed a toast to the Red army as "the only army that voted for its own liquidation." Since it was such a jolly occasion, he obviously meant his own disarmament proposals, and was not calling up the evil days of 1937-38, when the officer corps was decimated by purges. In the chandeliered glitter of the Kremlin's St. George Hall, Toastmaster Khrushchev went on to offer five more toasts on the 42nd anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, all of them in what...
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