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On the Move. At home, Khrushchev nominated himself as spokesman of the New Class in the Soviet Union. He was careful to disassociate himself from Stalin's terror, and the New Class was grateful. Khrushchev himself told British Laborite Aneurin Bevan the story of how it had been before. Presidium members, said Khrushchev, drew up a plan to decentralize the economy after World War II, and Voznesensky, the chief economic planner, took it to Stalin. "Voznesensky came back," said Khrushchev, "and told them Stalin had denounced him as a traitor to socialism. This made them angry because Voznesensky had merely done what they had told him to do. They went to Stalin next day and told him this: that it was their collective plan, not Voznesensky's; that he had been unfair to Voznesensky and ought to apologize to him. 'I can't,' said Stalin. 'He was shot this morning.' "
Having blandly appropriated the defeated Malenkov's consumer-goods program, he promised 250 branches of Moscow's huge GUM Department Store in the capital's outskirts and is building 20 blocks of apartment buildings to give some of the elite's rising expectations a little houseroom. Said one proud engineer: "It is time for others to think of us as other than backward. We are moving, and Khrushchev is helping us move."
In 1957 the Russians opened on the Volga the world's largest hydroelectric station, developed west of the Urals the world's biggest new oilfield, built at Dubna, outside Moscow, the world's largest synchrocyclotron (particles accelerator). In 1957 Russia graduated three times as many engineers as the U.S. and published five times as many book titles. In the judgment of their U.S. peers, Russian scientists in 1957 excelled in such fields as astrophysics, very high energy studies, cosmic-ray research and certain branches of higher mathematics, and ran close to U.S. performance in oceanography, cryogenics and geology. The Russians moved up in air defense, long-range bomber capacity, and in reorganizing their traditionally massive ground forces into small, fast-moving units capable of using tactical atomic weapons. Says General Maxwell Taylor: "The equipment display in the 7th of November Moscow parade included numerous such weapons, one at least a tactical army missile of greater range than any presently operating in the U.S. Army."
A Little White Ball. Nikita has made the most of his shiny new rockets, in hand or in prospect. Just before the NATO summit meeting, Russia showered the U.S.'s allies with letters threatening destruction if they accepted U.S. missiles. "We do not want to continue the arms race," Nikita told visiting U.S. Publisher William Randolph Hearst Jr. "We have already won over you. Your cities and bases could be stricken from the face of the earth. Your overseas bases are yours, but they are surrounded by the peoples of those countries. You will see—one day they will awaken from their slumber and recognize the folly of depending on NATO and such alliances for their protection." But he ordered his diplomats to break off disarmament talks at the U.N. and rejected the new overtures made by the NATO leaders at the Paris meeting.