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Soviet Schweppesman. When Khrushchev nominated Bulganin to become the Soviet Union's sixth Premier, he told the Supreme Soviet: "We all know Nikolai Alexandrovich ..." The fact was that few in Moscow did know him. But within a matter of weeks the marshal had become a hearty, back-slapping adman for a Soviet campaign of sweet reasonableness, with a quip, a smile and a "come and see my place in the country" for almost every foreign diplomat in Moscow.
When Nehru arrived in Moscow, Bulganin set a precedent by driving through the streets with him in an open car. Last week he offhandedly refused the barbed-wire fence which the Swiss offered to build around his Geneva villa. At parties and receptions, Premier Bulganin has set the style for the new aggressive chumminess, or coexistence by cocktail party.
Bulganin enjoys his new headman role, which fits him as neatly as his custom made pin-stripe suits. Unlike some of his colleagues, who parade their ill manners as a proof of their proletarian ancestry, he can be effusively polite, a man of mellifluous phrases and old-fashioned courtesy. Bulganin never bellows or uses foul language, as his old friend Kaganovich does; he has polished manners, clean fingernails, and never spills his soup, as Stalin used to do. In different circumstances, Bulganin might have let his beard grow and become a Soviet Schweppesman, peddling bottled charm.
Women find Bulganin a regular old smoothie ("A real gentleman," cooed one of the chorus girls of the touring Comédie Française, after Bulganin paid a visit backstage at the Bolshoi). Nikolai Alexandrovich returns the compliment. During the Russians' visit to Belgrade (TIME, June 6), a Western newsman watched Bulganin ogle a girl translator. Later, at the ballet, Tito remarked that Belgrade's dancers were easier on the eyes than negotiators. "Yes," mused Bulganin, eyes onstage. "Khrushchev never had legs like these."
Hand of Terror. At 60, the Premier of Russia is hearty and handsome, an erect, vigorous little man. Struggling to characterize his bluff good looks, the New York Times, in a single article, compared Buiganin to "the concertmaster of a prewar provincial German band," to "that traditional turn-of-the-century figure, 'foxy grandpa,' " to "a Brussels banker" (Bulganin once ran the Soviet State bank). He also has the look of a riverboat gambler: the courtly grin is matched by an appraising eye.
In a face softened by comfortable living, the appraising eye is the one conspicuous reminder of Bulganin's unamiable past. As a 24-year-old Chekist (secret policeman), he sacked every non-Bolshevik trade union and peasant cooperative in his home town, Nizhni-Novgorod (now Gorky), and earned a local reputation as "the hand of the Red Terror." Today his outward benignity and a certain dignified reserve gain by contrast with the party secretary, Khrushchev, though both grew up in the same hard school.