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Tito Smells Bad. But there is another side to Khrushchev's benevolence and melting concern for peace and prosperity. Tossing away a party-prepared oration at a workers meeting in Czechoslovakia last week, Khrushchev gave vent to some tough talk about Tito. "Now certain clever boys begin criticizing us. They say you have done this badly and that stupidly. Listen, dears, where were you when we started the Revolution?" Nikita made clear that he was talking of Tito by telling Yugoslav journalists present not to put down what he had to say, that he would soon tell Tito to his face. "The front of the revolutionary working class must be broadened, and Yugoslavia must not be excluded from this front. But, let us not discuss who is cleverer and who is more stupid, to put it plainly. We won't criticize you, but if you criticize us, Comrades, we know how to pay back. Now in this fight which broke out on the Hungarian question, what did we get? We got absolute unity and the rallying of the Communist ranks of the world. Yugoslavia remained isolated, and who spoke in its favor? Dulles, Eisenhower, Guy Mollet and so forth and so forth. What a group! Socialism that gets help from Dulles smells bad."
Next day there was a shocked silence in Belgrade. This was Khrushchev the dictator talking, sure now of his ascendancy, contemptuous of all but his. own, threatening to crush anything in his way. When the time came to change the theme of benevolence, an exile in Ust Kamenogorsk could expect no mercy.
The West watched the new Khrushchev with mixed feelings. There was a widely shared belief that any trouble in the Communist Party was good for the world. But was this trouble or a strengthening of the party? If Khrushchev's bull voice had been muted before, it would soon be in full throat, making his demands known around the world. A top-level U.S. expert says: "Khrushchev has won, but the results will be catastrophic for him. He is now almost alone. Mikoyan will always leap to the winning side, and cannot be depended upon. The only first-rate man left on Khrushchev's side is Zhukov." Many felt that there was an advantage in the fact that Khrushchev was no ideologist, no man of theory, but a pragmatist, and that his pragmatism would lead him into blunders, or against his will into making more concessions than would a more doctrinaire man. But a U.S. intelligence evaluator had another view: "He has demonstrated time and again that he is a gambler, ready to go for broke. Such a man at the head of a great atomic power is always to be reckoned with soberly."
The great party institutions in Moscow were stuck with their new leader; so was the world.
* Later recreated as a ministry, the MVD, though the old name stuck. * Security Boss Ignatiev, who may know a great deal about Stalin's death two months later, is still alive, a full member of the Central Committee and the only living ex-NKVD boss. * Khrushchev's answer, delivered last week in Czechoslovakia: "On a hungry stomach, Marxist-Leninism may be very difficult to un derstand. It is not wrong to throw in a piece of bacon and a piece of butter in the course of improving the theory of Marx."