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Foreign News. The Eastern European Red bloc was also dismayed. Even East Germany's Walter Ulbricht, who had not had the best of treatment at Khrushchev's hands and might have been expected to toady to the new men in the Kremlin, eulogized Nikita and expressed "profound emotion" over his sudden eclipse. The East Germans found it hard to believe that Khrushchev had "shown himself to be no longer equal to his tasks."
Czechoslovakia's reconstructed Stalinist Antonin Novotny praised Khrushchev, as did Hungary's Janos Kadar and Poland's Wladyslaw Gomulka. But there was only determined coolness from the recalcitrant Rumanians, who had successfully bucked Khrushchev on economic matters and thus probably helped provoke his ouster. Rumania's party newspaper Scinteia played the story of his fall under the heading "Foreign News" on page 4.
The New Face. There were, of course, those who crowed over Khrushchev's removal. Pro-Chinese Reds in Rome produced a poster of Stalin that read: "Khrushchev has fallen! Stalin is vindicated! Hurray for glorious Comrade Stalin!" The new face of Russian Communism, as it began to emerge, was far from Stalinist; it was definitely Khrushchevian in its lineaments, though more serious and nowhere near as lively. But there were hints of changes ahead, and the most significant concerned China. While B. & K. kept Mao Tse-tung's name out of their pronouncements, Brezhnev hinted that Moscow would take the initiative in trying to "overcome difficulties" within the Communist movement. Unlikely as it sounded, Ideologist Mikhail Suslov was reported preparing to make a trip to Peking aimed at easing the Sino-Soviet rift. There were even rumors that Mao might be coming to Moscow.
In other matters, the new team almost frantically reassured everyone that the old policies would continue. In his Red Square speech, Brezhnev implied that Khrushchev's basic foreign and domestic policies were still "the only, immutable line of the Soviet government." Playing it both ways for the moment, Kosygin continued emphasis on production of consumer goods, while Brezhnev also promised greater investment in heavy industry. There were other promises, reassuring to the army, that cutbacks in defense spending would be halted. B. & K. also showed their sympathy for the army by turning up at the Moscow funeral of Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, Red Army Chief of Staff killed last week in a Belgrade plane crash as he flew in to attend Yugoslavia's 20th anniversary of liberation from the German occupation.
Ultimately Willing. "You get the impression that during this period a genuine committee is at work," says a high U.S. Official. "The speeches look like State Department drafts. In other words, there's not an interesting word in them." The professional Kremlin watchers now speak of the new pair in Moscow as a "diarchy within an oligarchy," clearly a precarious situation.