(See Cover]
At the elbow of Nikita Khrushchev, as he toured East Germany this summer, appeared a new traveling partner, sallow, stoop-shouldered, scowling. Unlike the previous sidekick, Bulganin, who looked like an amiable riverboat gambler living it up, this saturnine little man seemed to shrink from the speechmaking and the public panoply, the peculiar rites and duties of the proletarian potentates who parade about holding durbars in subject states like 19th century monarchs, while talking over their shoulders to the press like 20th century pols. Yet the world noted, as it was meant to, that wherever the Russians went in East Berlin, Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan was at Khrushchev's side, exchanging a steady stream of cronies' chatter, occasionally prompting in stage whispers, never hesitating to set his bouncy colleague right on the propaganda rails. For like it or not, Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, 61, was doomed to the limelight. He is the only one of the handful of top Soviet Communists to have bet the right way in last June's command showdown between Khrushchev and the old guard.
The losers have all been banished to the sticks. That old Kremlin durable, Molotov, presented his credentials as Ambassador to Outer Mongolia last week, obviously aware that the world was enjoying his humiliation. But he was probably more concerned by the knowledge that another loser before him, Lev Kamenev, had for a time seemingly flourished as Soviet Ambassador to Italy, only to be executed a few years later by Stalin. Among Khrushchev's other victims, Dmitry Shepilov, who rose swiftly but guessed wrong, was reportedly schoolteaching; Kaganovich was said to be running a cement factory;
Malenkov was running a power station at the end of the line in remote Kazakhstan. But the adroit Mr. Mikoyan was vacationing in proletarian luxury in his native Armenia last week.
Mikoyan, the Kremlin's agile Armenian, has made a career out of guessing right. Among the men who inherited Stalin's tyranny, his is the quickest and sharpest intelligence, and he is the slickest and shrewdest operator. He is the supreme Soviet trader, the one big Bolshevik to show both the talent and the will for business enterprise. As such, he not only organized a $120 billion-a-year retail trade (200 million customers) and a $6.2 billion-a-year overseas business, but in the process achieved an understanding of the wider world of trade and global politics that is unmatched among Politburocrats. To two generations of Western diplomats and trade negotiators, this brisk and comprehending commissar has seemed "the best of a bad lot." To the rough, tough muzhik Khrushchev, he is the useful Mr. Worldly-Wise of the Russian proverb who "knows where the shrimps stay in winter." Today, as in Stalin's time, Mikoyan serves indispensably—and survives. Says a Briton who has watched Mikoyan for years: "He knows how to jump at the right time."
One top U.S. diplomat who knew him well says that if Mikoyan had emigrated to the U.S. he would now be "heading his own export-import firm with a triplex apartment on Park Avenue." But ex-Ambassador Walter ("Beedle") Smith, less impressed, says, "Take away his ZIS limousine and Mikoyan would look like just another rug peddler in Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo."