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The various unofficial accounts of this meeting heard round the world last week are all from Communist sources. They may be generally correct, but they have one ulterior purpose: to convince the non-Communist world, inside and outside Russia, that a genuine democratic committee fight can be staged in destalinized Moscow and put to a vote. Undoubtedly there was a .heated Presidium meeting, followed by a meeting of the Central Committee, which lasted far beyond normal duration. The men soon to be fingered as the organizers of the Leningrad Case (see box)—a charge which, according to all Soviet precedent, would cost them their lives—undoubtedly put up a vigorous fight: Molotov, attacking Khrushchev's inept foreign policy; Malenkov, agilely trying to save his skin; and the sour-voiced Kaganovich, full of murderous hate for the man who had once been his protege. But they lost because the mass of the party was against them and had ordained that they should be formally shorn of their great offices and privileges. In its final stage the meeting was probably less of a democratic gathering than a ghastly charade, designed to provide Khrushchev with his "scabby sheep" thesis (i.e., a cleansing of the party) and to speed the old Stalin associates to exile, if not to death. The stage arrangements, the cues picked up by party workers all over the country, seem too patly rehearsed to have been the outcome of a chance, snap meeting.
Family Man. Cried Khrushchev in Czechoslovakia last week: "What will the policy be like? This is a stupid question. What will happen? Everybody knows what will happen. We will do the same, but with more emphasis." The emphasis where peace was concerned: "Trust in God, but look out for yourselves. When you walk among dogs, don't forget to carry a stick. After all, this is what a hound has teeth for, to bite when he feels like it." On the subject of controlling the people: "The party leadership must not be divorced from the ranks of the party and must not become divorced from the masses. If there is a divorce there will be no comrades. Hungary serves a vivid lesson. As a result of disintegration and divorce a handful of Hungarian counterrevolutionaries, with help from abroad, were able to stage a blood bath in Budapest, when a mere sneeze from the party members should have been enough to blow them away."
These were homely analogies, a tough line folksily delivered, to conform with the current theme of benevolence. Folksiness is Khrushchev's style. Back in Moscow there is a Khrushchev family: dumpy, grey Mrs. Khrushchev, almost never seen at public functions, who once wistfully complained to a U.S. diplomat's wife that she did not go to the theater "as much as she would like to." The Khrushchevs have a downtown apartment in Moscow, a house in Lenin Hills of the boxy type favored by Nikita, nicknamed a Khrushchobka by builders, a dacha in the Crimea. In Moscow also are his son and two daughters, Nadia and Rada (of whom he once jokingly said, "They keep me from paying taxes"): one daughter married to roly-poly Alexei Adzhubei, editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda, organ of the young Communists; the other talked about all over Moscow for having stolen the handsome boy friend of a famous actress. There is also the legend of a hero son killed at Stalingrad.