Traditionally, a Party Congress in Russia blends parliamentary trappings with jungle techniques. Beneath the solemn propaganda ritual, beneath the automatic votes on prefabricated resolutions by hand-picked delegates, there is a half-hidden reality: rivalries of men and cliques, hardheaded appraisal of how well the party leadership is doing. This week, as the elite of world Communism eyed each other at the 22nd Party Congress, the public mood was unusually harmonious. From jampacked bleachers in Mayakovsky Square, a pride of poets droned odes in honor of the event. To welcome 4,500 Soviet delegates and "observers" from Communist parties of some 80 foreign lands, Moscow's streets had been scoured, shop windows filled with enticements. Behind the Kremlin's red walls and golden domes, Khrushchev had rushed to completion a starkly modern new Congress hall, equipped with "stereophonic" sound and translation equipment in 29 languages—the better to spread boast and threat, praise and invective.
All types of Communists came to listen: comrades from small Russian villages, café-sophisticated Parisians, bamboo-tough agitators from Asia. Eager crowds awaited such stalwarts as Viet Minh's Ho Chi Minh and Red China's Chou Enlai, Astronaut Gherman Titov, Lieut. Colonel Mikhail Voronov (billed as "the man who shot down the U-2") was there, and so, imprisoned in a vast new bust that stared across Sverdlov Square, was the old Russian-hater who started it all, Karl Marx..
Record Reviewed. There was no expectation of the kind of drastic policy change or major party infighting that has marked many congresses in the past.* In 44 years and 15 Party Congresses since the October 1917 Revolution, Communism's inner hierarchy has never seemed more stable or more successful. Since the previous congress in 1959, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev had routed the last implacable Stalinists from positions of power. In his major scheduled address about past accomplishments and future progress, he could point to Soviet industry and science riding a high curve of technological advance. Abroad, he could point to steady Communist erosion of the West's position from Laos to the U.N. By sending 28 divisions on far-flung battle exercises through Eastern Europe this week, Khrushchev would impress many delegates, even if he did not succeed in intimidating the West. Soviet experts predicted that he would cap the Congress with a spectacular space feat or a vast nuclear explosion.
And yet in the jungle world of the party, there was plenty of room for snarling and backbiting. Khrushchev is plagued by disastrous crop failures, particularly in his own pet "virgin lands." Internationally, it has been three years since he first started issuing ultimatums on Berlin, and though hard pressed, the West still stands firm; Africa is in the balance and Asia desperately menaced by Communism. But despite fulminations and victory claims, Khrushchev cannot really record a major recent cold war success except Cuba. That, at least, is the situation as it must seem to extremists—or '"maximalists"—including Red China.