(8 of 8)
Economic Adventurism. Top Polish Planner Seweryn Bialer, who, before he defected to the West last year, had access to minutes of Kremlin meetings, makes the significant point that for all of Mikoyan's helpful contributions to Khrushchev's foreign policy, the astute Armenian has taken care not to associate himself too conspicuously with Khrushchev's domestic policy. This policy, which Bialer characterizes as "sheer economic adventurism," proclaims the highest priority simultaneously for heavy industry, for consumer goods and for agriculture, and bases its hopes of fulfillment not on basic expansion of plant but on increased efficiency—to be won simply by decentralizing and streamlining the vast Soviet economic bureaucracy. Mikoyan, says Bialer, is too smart an economist and businessman to believe in such fantasies. Shortly before Khrushchev vowed that in five years Russia would be producing more meat, milk, butter than the U.S., Mikoyan was saying privately in Vienna: "I know the living standards of Western Europe are three times as high as ours and America's three times as high as Europe's. We cannot reach that of America, but we could reach that of Western Europe—if we could reduce armaments and engage in big foreign trade." Communists may ransack the pages of Pravda in vain to find a Mikoyan speech endorsing Khrushchev's economic claims. On this aspect of Khrushchev's policy, says Bialer, Mikoyan is "waiting his time."
In the struggle for power still to come —for dictatorships have iron laws of their own, and committee rule is not one of them—the comrade who will always bear close watching is the glowering little man who even now can be seen edging away from the newsreel camera's center of focus. He has a record of survival.
* When French Premier Guy Mollet's party visited Moscow last year, Mikoyan pressed them to visit his home republic of Armenia. Khrushchev joined in, saying that the Armenian climate was good, even though the food and wine were terrible. In due course, Foreign Minister Christian Pineau flew to Yerevan, capital of the Armenian Soviet Republic, on Turkey's eastern border. At his hotel Pineau was confronted by hundreds of French-speaking Armenians who had been lured back from France after World War II by Soviet blandishments to "come home and help build a new Armenian homeland." They greeted Pineau with tales of hardship and persecution and tearful pleas for repatriation to France. Embarrassed, Pineau backed away, but before leaving, exacted from his official hosts a promise that there would be no reprisals against the demonstrators. Because of engine trouble, his plane did not take off as scheduled, and his party returned for another night to their hotel. That night, notes slipped under their doors said that within minutes after the French officials were presumed to have left town, most of the petitioners had been rounded up and jailed. Furious, Pineau demanded of his embarrassed hosts that they release the prisoners. Before he left, this was done—but what has happened to them since, nobody outside knows.