It looked and smelled like snow.
Thick, milky clouds piled high over Moscow, and a sharp northern wind stripped the last leaves from the birches.
The year's biggest, brightest holiday, the 47th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, was at hand, but somehow the holiday mood refused to ignite.
There was one cheerful note. Russia's new regime announced that for the first time in 13 months of grain rationing, everyone would be issued 41 extra Ibs. of flour for the cabbage pies that seem vital to the Russian soul.
With a bumper crop almost in, Nikita Khrushchev's successors, Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin, could afford the gesture. "Well," said one Russian woman, "I guess this shows that —what's his name?—oh yes, Kosygin —is all right." The Explainers. Khrushchev's sudden ouster has seemingly stirred little emotion among the Russian people. But shock and indignation have mounted in Communist parties abroad, and the task of soothing the foreign comrades left Russia's new B. & K. team red-eyed with fatigue. Into Moscow swept platoon after platoon of insistent commissars—French, Italian, Austrian, Danish, Indian, Mongolian—all clamoring for explanations. Why had Khrushchev been ousted? How could the new regime justify its coup d'état? What were Moscow's new policies—particularly vis-à-vis Red China? And, ahem! was Nikita all right? "In fact," said one old Moscow hand, "the problem is that this crowd came to power without a program and is now having to improvise like mad." First they tried out their answers on Wladyslaw Gomulka, Khrushchev's crusty crony whose approval Brezhnev and Kosygin greatly needed to placate other satellite leaders. Meeting Gomulka halfway, in the primeval depths of Bialowieza Forest on the Russo-Polish border, they conferred in a Czarist hunting lodge, while the last sizable herd of European bison stomped and snuffled outside; inside, B. & K. buffaloed Gomulka with reasons and reassurances. He went away satisfied enough to defend Khrushchev's ouster in a Warsaw speech two days later.
Emboldened by their successful de-Khrushchevization, Brezhnev and Kosygin released to visiting Communists a 40-page "justification" that purported to explain why Nikita had to go.
Nikita's Sins. The catalogue, which was evidently compiled by Ideologist Mikhail Suslov, accused Khrushchev of 29 sins, immoral, illegal, or fatheaded. Basically it corroborated earlier reports that Nikita's underlings could no longer stomach his loutish, highhanded ways or condone his persistent bungling of agricultural, ideological and foreign policies. But there were some intriguing elaborations, such as charges that he tried to make Wife Nina chairman of the Union of Soviet Women, that he "antagonized intellectuals," and clung to uneconomical building plans (he insisted on five-story rather than twelve-story apartment houses, on underpasses rather than overpasses).