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"I Am an Asian." The last of the old Stalin gang to surrender his Kremlin apartment (he moved out grumblingly in 1955), Trader Mikoyan no longer goes daily to any of his Moscow offices. Though trade is so basic in his background that it is primarily still his responsibility, he has graduated from the management of domestic enterprise to become Khrushchev's senior adviser and fixer. "He has no strong beliefs," says one longtime British observer. "He operates against a background of Marxism the way a Western politician operates against the background of Christianity." Mikoyan once said to a friend: "I am not a man to invent policies but to carry them out." Nonetheless, Soviet specialists in Washington believe that such features of Khrushchev's foreign policy as the subtle method of taking the West by flank movement, by intrigue and envelopment of neutrals rather than by head-on attack, bear the stamp of the agile Armenian. These days Mikoyan likes to tell visitors from the East, as Stalin did before him, "I am an Asian too." No Soviet leader has been a more frequent visitor to Peking. Amid all the jolts and lurches that now characterize Russian foreign policy, the influence of Mikoyan appears to be at least as strong as any.
Through all the crashing and straining,
Mikoyan has hung on tenaciously beside Driver Khrushchev. Last winter, when some of the old crowd, emboldened by Khrushchev's setbacks in Hungary and the Middle East, sought to confine his reach for top power, Mikoyan's instinct made him stick with Nikita. In June, when even Bulganin and the aged Voroshilov deserted Khrushchev and swelled the Presidium's vote to 7 to 4 against him, Mikoyan backed the party's First Secretary and proved to have followed the right hunch. Within 48 hours Khrushchev, using his party machine in exactly the same fashion as Stalin did before him, summoned henchmen from all over the Soviet Union to a Central Committee Plenum that reversed the Presidium decision.
Now that Bulganin is plainly on the skids, Mikoyan is being talked of as his likely replacement for Premier. In Khrushchev's eyes, Mikoyan, the lone operator, has the merit of never having tried to build up his own party machine. The delay in pushing out Bulganin suggests that although Khrushchev has bested his rivals, he still has powerful opposition to contend with. The deadly struggle for power that began with Stalin's death four years ago is not yet ended. Who would know that better than Mikoyan?