"I would want to live all my life in Paris if there was not this earth which is called Moscow," said Nikita Khrushchev in Paris last week, quoting the Russian poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky. But though Khrushchev was over the flu, in Paris he was still capable of catching a chill.
For the first time, he found himself in a Western nation with a powerful Communist Party. But never before had France taken such precautions for an official visitor. More than half the effectives of the Paris Prefecture, including 3,000 plainclothesmen, were assigned to protect him. Along his route, 2,000 firemen stood guard on rooftops, and the Metro stations below his route had been closed for an hour while engineers tested them for hidden bombs. A noisy barrage of 64 motorcycle cops boxed in his limousine. Even if there had been no guards around him at all, there would stiH have been a wall between Khrushchev and his hosts.
Guided at the airport by an unusually paternal President Charles de Gaulle, who towered a foot above him, the little visitor made his way down a 150-yard red carpet, past the lines of severely correct Frenchmen in cutaways. Then, standing on a carpet that had originally been woven for Napoleon's Josephine, he plunged into a round of handshakes in his now familiar manner—a quick look down for the hand, a look up for the owner, a short shake, and then onward. Behind him came friendly, roly-poly Mme. Nina Petrovna Khrushchev in black astrakhan coat and pillbox hat, her arms full of orchids. The rest of the family trooped in afterward—Daughters Julia, Rada and Elena, Son Sergei and Son-in-Law Alexei Adzhubei, editor of Izvestia. It was the first time since 1896 that a Russian ruler had visited Paris. It turned out that Khrushchev's target was the same as Czar Nicholas II's—Germany.
Unexploded Bomb. "Well, here you are," said General de Gaulle, face to face with a man who like himself had become a cartoonists' delight (see cuts). "We are ready to hear you and to be heard by you." Quicker than a wink, Khrushchev plunked his glasses on his nose, whipped out a thick manuscript. He paid pointed tribute to President de Gaulle as the man who had not "bowed his head to the [German] occupiers." If France and the Soviet had only had a firmer alliance, he said, blandly ignoring his own country's 1939 pact with Hitler, Germany might never have dared start World War II. As it was, both France and Russia were littered with "unexploded bombs and shells . . . abandoned by the Hitlerians." Should German militarism rise again, France would be the first to be threatened, for "not even a mad German militarist would risk war with us." When he had finished his ten-minute airport invitation to France to join a new alliance with him, he explained to General de Gaulle: "I too can speak without a text—that will come."