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He has exploited the Sputniks at home and abroad. In one Moscow theater, the lights go down after each performance, and the audience cheers as a little white-lighted ball orbits over it from the ceiling. "People of the whole world are pointing to the satellite and saying that the U.S. has been beaten." he crowed at an East German embassy reception, and the lesson has not been lost on the undeveloped countries. "If the Russians are so oppressed, how could Russian talent be so creative?" asked a Ghanaian schoolmaster.
Mixed Gains. 1957's triumphs may not be permanent for Nikita Khrushchev. In the Middle East. Russia's callous manipulation of Syria for its own ends alarmed as many Arabs as it impressed. In the satellites, Poland's army is still restive. At home, the virgin lands Khrushchev plowed for grain are Russia's dust bowl; in 1957 they yielded a much lower harvest than the year before. At the same time that he promised a lot more housing and clothing, he boosted the goals of Communism's sacred heavy industry yet higher; by September he was forced to postpone the goals by scrapping the five-year plan for a seven-year plan ending in 1965. His foreign economic program is not going down well with Soviet citizens, who growl like any taxpayers at shelling out for others. The stubby little peasant worries lest the scientific and technological elite become an independent power force. He has slashed the high salaries some scientists have been getting. The party must reign supreme in the laboratory, too.
The Sputniks he sent whirling into outer space aroused the U.S. giant to its danger as nothing else could have. President Eisenhower, throwing off the effects of a slight stroke, risked health and leadership to journey to Paris and rally NATO to new heart. The U.S.'s European allies brushed aside Russia's threatening letters, joined with the U.S. to face in new unity the psychological pressures built up by the Soviets' scientific breakthrough.
At 63 Nikita himself does not yet have absolute power, is still best described as chairman of the gang. And to control such a gang, as Nikita well knows, takes far more political skill than Stalin ever required. Khrushchev's Russia needs its thinking men—its scientists and its technicians—and Khrushchev must allow them to think. They demand respect. They can do without Khrushchev, but Khrushchev cannot do without them. Within the party there may be younger men who will overtake him when he slows or stumbles. But in 1957, Nikita Khrushchev outran, outfoxed, outbragged, outworked and out-drank them all.