RUSSIA: Farewell, Comrade

Andrei Vishinsky is a gifted ham actor.

The white-maned old faker, now head of the Soviet delegation to the U.N., commands a dozen voices, from the sly wheedle to the choleric roar, a dozen expressions, from the impish grin to the basilisk glare. For all his arrogance, he is a much more entertaining performer than Russia’s wooden men—Molotov, Malik, Gromyko. He is also a remarkable survivor of 37 years of power struggle in the Kremlin. A onetime Menshevik, he came through unscathed when the Bolsheviks put the Mensheviks out of business in 1921. He not only rode out the great purges of the ’30s but was the flamboyant and savage state prosecutor of their victims. He became a diplomat in 1940. Stalin’s death brought him a reduction in rank (from Foreign Minister to his present post) but never stirred a hair of his snowy head.

Last week the Russian delegation disclosed that Vishinsky was sailing for home May 5 on the Queen Elizabeth. Was it adieu or just au revoir? The New York Times frontpaged a report that he was ill, weary, tired of the U.S. and eager to retire. He is nearing 71. Vishinsky himself would not comment (except to squawk that the Times, which said he was 71, never got the facts right), but he is reportedly resentful that he was not invited to Geneva, which, more than the Berlin Conference, concerns subjects supposedly his specialty, such as Korea.