And so the Chinese went home.
At the airport, when a Western correspondent asked Teng Hsiao-ping, the chief of Peking's departing delegation, how the talks had gone, he replied, "Very good." Obviously, the opposite was true. During their last week in Moscow, while Western negotiators were feted and nattered, a kind of Great Wall surrounded the unwelcome visitors from Peking. From their isolated compound on Moscow's Lenin Hills, the Red Chinese delegates ventured out only in curtained black Chaika limousines for the short drive to Peking's embassy; on alternate days they met with a Soviet delegation, obviously to no effect.
Khrushchev pointedly stayed away from the meetings, although he was otherwise active in the diplomatic and social whirl. The Mocow Film Festival provided an excuse for lots of parties, at which Western envoys and Soviet functionaries mixed amiably with such movie stars as Shelley Winters, Susan Strasberg, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret. At week's end Khrushchev finally turned to his other guests and, in a relatively gracious gesture, tossed the Red Chinese a farewell dinner. Although described as "friendly," the meal could have produced little beyond dyspepsia, for Khrushchev had spoiled the table talk in advance, delivering an oratorical blast at Peking that in effect declared political war on the Chinese.
The Challenge. At a massive rally of party bureaucrats and propagandists in the Kremlin's Palace of the Congresses, Khrushchev spoke with such apoplectic vehemence that at one point he groped for words and rhetorically begged the audience: "Help me out." But he didn't need much help. Angrily defending his destalinization drive against Peking's attacks, he demanded: "What do they want? To frighten our people, to bring back the days when a man went to his job and did not know whether he would see his wife and children again?" Dropping his voice to a dramatic whisper, Khrushchev said that letters to him from all over the country expressed gratitude for ending the Stalinist terror. Then he added: "If Stalin had died ten years earlier, it would have been even better."
The Soviet boss was equally contemptuous on the subject of Peking's warmongering foreign policy. "They say one should start a revolution, a war," he shouted, "and on the corpses and the ruins, a more prosperous society will be created. And who would remain in this prosperous society? Wouldn't the living envy the dead?" Directly accusing the Chinese of trying to unseat him, Khrushchev dared Peking to take its case to the Soviet people: "I declare to those who would like to overthrow us—I challenge you, comrades—let's pick out any plant or collective farm. You present your program and we will present ours. You won't need armor or a pillow for protection. Our people are polite. They'll listen and say: 'Get out of here.' "