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In Moscow, where people are quick to catch the political drift, anyone can get a laugh today by starting out in high-pitched Russian, "Ya i moi droog . . ." a phrase which appears often in Khrushchev's speeches, meaning "I and my friend . . ." i.e., Bulganin. Jokes about Bim and Bom, famed Russian circus clowns, have suddenly found a new popularity in Moscow.
Boo & Chant. In Britain last week Bim and Bom (or B. & K.) doggedly labored at their act, even though their audiences were cool. At Oxford some 5,000 people, mostly students, broke police lines to crowd around them booing and chanting: "Poor old Joe, poor old Joe!" (to the tune of Stephen Foster's Old Black Joe). Bulganin stood up smiling and raising his arms like a boxer acknowledging applause, signed autographs and patted student cheeks. In New College quadrangle, students set off a huge firecracker which made B. & K. jump, led Bulganin to quip: "Are they making an atomic bomb?"
It was now clear that the traveling troubadours wanted, and perhaps badly needed, a success in Britain to take home. "Come to Russia," Khrushchev told Labor Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell. "It's not the same now." They were wooing not only Britons. As Khrushchev told Eden: "We hope you'll help us to have friendlier relations with the U.S." To gain their end, they might yet give Sir Anthony Eden some concession that he could regard as a diplomatic victory. If the Russians had any genuine concessions to make, so much the better. But gone was the worried feeling in many an Englishman's heart that other Englishmen (though of course not himself) might prove dangerously susceptible to Soviet blandishments.
The British were, in fact, beginning to take their two sinister visitors more lightly. At week's end the spectacle at Windsor Castle of the Soviet Premier and the First Secretary of the Communist Party gallantly presenting the Queen of England with a sable stole no longer appalled; instead it appealed to the British sense of the ludicrous. Said one old lady: "They look like two little boys blown up by bicycle pumps."
* In Kiev in 1939 a man in the uniform of a railroad official threw a bomb into the compartment of a train in which Khrushchev was sitting. Two passengers traveling with Khrushchev were killed. (The small slit scar under his nose is believed to be a memento of this incident.)