(4 of 10)
A Man with Bounce. Khrushchev is a man with machine gunner's eyes and thin, whitening hair that still shows streaks of blond. A Great Russian by race, he has the shoulders of a Stakhanovite (he was once a coal miner), the broad buttocks and high cheekbones of a Slav peasant. Bureaucratic life has covered Khrushchev's frame with an overlay of fat, but one of the few Western diplomats who have met him recently reported last week that he is "rosy and energetic: a man with a lot of bounce."
At 59, he is eight years older than his boss and ally, Georgy Malenkov, but both men regard themselves as "second-generation Communists" — too young to have been bomb-throwers in Czarist days, but old enough to have been hardened on Stalin's anvil. Said a German Foreign Office man who met Khrushchev in Moscow: "He is one of the best examples of the young Bolshevik — like Malenkov a fat, brutal, intelligent fonctionnaire, a new type created by Stalin: undogmatic, unintellectual, but effective rulers."
Until 1945 Khrushchev lurked in the shadows, a mere name to Western diplomats. Then, year by year, in pictures of the Soviet leaders seated at their desks before the Supreme Soviet, his bullet head loomed larger—from a white blur on the packed backbenches to a big, pale face, edging close to Stalin, and now to Malenkov. Khrushchev's advance was silent, but it had the momentum of a T-34.
Khrushchev has tackled some of the toughest jobs in Communism, but the one he had last week was the biggest and might be the bloodiest. Agricultural weakness sets a ceiling on Communist power; it is his job to remove it. To do so, he had taken absolute power over Communism's greatest assets: the Russian land and the 100 million peasants who till it.
One-Sixth of the Earth. The Russian land is vast: 8,500,000 square miles. If the city of Los Angeles were tossed into the Pripet Marshes (it would fit quite easily), the Mississippi River would trace the line of the Urals, Boston would be lost somewhere in the Siberian plains, and there would still be plenty of room to fit the North Atlantic Ocean, as far as the Azores, into the emptiness of Soviet Asia. Within this huge expanse (one-sixth of the world's inhabited land surface), there is vast diversity, and some of the natural wonders of the world. There are millions of acres of tundra, stretching across the north in frozen silence; mountains that run amuck from the Himalayas and belch volcanic ash into Bering Strait. There are 100,000 rivers, one-third of the world's forests, the greatest inland sea—the Caspian, five times the size of Lake Superior.
Two-thirds of Russia is either barren or too cold for cultivation under present methods, but underground, say Soviet geologists, there is half the world's iron and almost as much of its coal, half its known petroleum, one-third of its manganese.
More precious than all these is the "black wealth" of the steppe: the deep, black earth that covers most of the Ukraine and stretches across the Volga into the plain of Siberia. Shorn of its black earth, the Soviet Union would die. It feeds two-thirds of Russia's 210 million people.