"Khrushchev," said Radio Moscow on tour's eve, "is always on the go, taking journeys, talking to the people." This week in the U.S., on the go, talking to people, Khrushchev will be surrounded by a 100-strong entourage of family, personal staffers, Kremlin bureaucrats and state-trained newsmen that adds up to a composite of not only Khrushchev's interests but Khrushchev's U.S.S.R. Standouts in the entourage:
Pleasant, shy Mrs. Nina Petrovna Khrushchev, 59, is on her first headline trip outside Russia. According to Kremlin publicists, she fought for the Bolsheviks as an 18-year-old in the Russian civil war, went on to become a social science teacher, married Khrushchev in 1938. She is his second wife —First Wife Nadezhda died—and she raised Khrushchev's children. Three of the children will be with them in the U.S.: Julia, 38, a chemist, married to Kiev Opera Director Viktor Gonchar; Rada, 29, a biologist, married to Izvestia Editor Alexei Adzhubei; Sergei, 24, an electrical engineer. Khrushchev's son Leonid was a Red air force pilot killed early in World War II, and his daughter Lena, 21, is now a law student at Moscow University. Mostly back home, Mrs. Khrushchev keeps house in their trim villa, frequently talks to groups of fellow veteran Communist women, since 1957 has turned out increasingly with her husband at Kremlin receptions, trying out her growing knowledge of English on foreigners with sentences like: "Travel is so educational."
TRANSLATOR
Literally the closest man to Khrushchev coast to coast will be Oleg Troyanovsky, 38, his personal interpreter and probably the best Russian-English linguist in the world. Troyanovsky, son of ex-Czarist Officer Alexander Troyanovsky, who was the U.S.S.R.'s first Ambassador to Washington (1934-38), attended the Quakers' Sidwell Friends School in Washington ("Blessed with that charm, the certainty to please," said the student quarterly), put in his freshman year at Swarthmore before returning to Moscow University. Troyanovsky first appeared in the Kremlin big picture as Stalin's interpreter in the 1947 conference with U.S. General George C. Marshall, later journeyed about the world with Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan.
BUREAUCRATS
Best-known Kremlin bureaucrat accompanying Khrushchev will be dour Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, 50, who, as the youngest counselor in the Soviet embassy in Washington at the age of 30, got dubbed "the oldest young man in the capital," became Stalin's Ambassador to the U.S. (1943-46) and then to the United Nations, where he set a U.N. walkout record of 13 days 21 hr. 46 min. Khrushchev says of Gromyko: "If I tell my Foreign Minister to sit on a block of ice and stay there for months, he'll do it without back talk." Gromyko's personality opposite on the tour: Ambassador to the U.S. Mikhail ("Smiling Mike") Menshikov, 56, whose beaming arrival in Washington 18 months ago first signaled the Kremlin thaw. He has addressed more U.S. luncheon clubs and business groups than any other Red Russian in history. His wide travels have doubtless provided reporting on the U.S. mood.