At a Kremlin reception a top Russian leader said to India's Prime Minister Nehru: "Your Excellency, we Russians make very good friends and nothing can separate us, but we are bad enemies, too—quite ruthless." Startled, Nehru paused, then replied: "We have no enemies. If there are any, we try to make friends." In the ruthless game of winning friends and influencing policy, Russia had a slight edge over India last week. With cheerful intent the Russians had sent Nehru off on one of the most exhausting tours ever planned for a visiting dignitary. At Stalingrad, after laying a wreath on a mass grave of Red army soldiers, Nehru was already complaining of "an exasperating day of dust and heat and painful war memories." Flown 500 miles southwest to the Crimea, he was taken aboard a yacht which cruised along the coast to Yalta, and he slept at the Livadia palace, where the Big Three signed their wartime pact. Wherever he paused along the route he was besieged by organized groups of chil dren dancing, singing and showering flow ers on his party.
The Red Carpet. In Soviet Asia, it was Nehru's turn to score. At a shishkebab and pilaf supper in Tashkent he found that the people, despite 40 years of complete isolation from the rest of Asia, "still had Asian consciousness." They greeted him with cries of "Salaam aleikum" (may peace be upon you), and in Samarkand the en tire population came out into the streets chanting community songs. Telegrams be gan to pour in from Russian citizens asking permission to name their sons Jawaharlal or their daughters Indira (after Nehru's daughter).
The swing through Siberia and the Urals took in a 100-mile drive through dust and desert wind to see one of the new state farms and a visit to the steel centers of Magnitogorsk and Sverdlovsk, where Nehru showed more interest in the geology museum than in the blast furnaces, but did not fail to note the rigid and extensive security measures, the number of hefty Amazons armed with Tommy guns, and the general attitude, "ask no questions and expect no answers." Headed westward again, Nehru stopped off at Leningrad. There, soon after his arrival, an Indian correspondent wearing a Gandhi cap was mistaken for Nehru and overwhelmed by a flower-brandishing mob who almost trampled him to death trying to kiss him. But there were no Indian newsmen around when Nehru got his ace view of the week: a peek at a Soviet atomic center.
The Slight Amendment. Back in Moscow, the Russians maneuvered for the payoff: a joint communiqué which would bring India into the new coexistence ring. By persistent snubbing, Nehru had been able to keep Party Boss Khrushchev out of the picture; Nehru made it plainly clear that he would deal only with the chief of government. But the bromide he and Premier Bulganin prepared together, though it bore many marks of Nehru's literary style, was dominantly Communist. Though Nehru might boast that the Russians had agreed not to interfere in other countries, words mean different things in different mouths; the net impression would be that Nehru and the Russians had found themselves in agreement.