Midway through the opening session of the 21st Communist Party Congress, the January sun broke through Moscow's leaden overcast. Bright rays streamed through the four-story windows of the Great Kremlin Hall and lit up the towering, 20-ft. statue of Lenin behind the platform and the short, round, balding figure at the speaker's stand below. "See!" cried Nikita Khrushchev, a talented ad-libber, thrusting aside his 46,000-word text. "Even the sun favors us. Nature smiles on the seven-year plan."
The 1,375 close-packed delegates—milkmaids, marshals, lady welders, robed Asian tribesmen—volleyed cheers. This was a Congress of Victors, and on this day when the Communist heads of a third of mankind were met to hear him tell it, there was no doubt who the winner was. Here was Nikita Khrushchev, 64, racing through the statistics of his triumphs—Lunik, Sputniks, "mass-produced" ICBMs, new targets for industry, farming and education. Gone was the last Congress' talk of collective leadership; gone were those saber-toothed old commissars (Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov et al.), who had been bloodlessly banished and disgraced.
Here was Nikita Khrushchev, the jaunty improviser enthroned as solemn Marxist prophet, pointing out the promise of history's biggest pie in the sky. It was an occasion to bring back memories of the first Congress of Victors—the 17th, in 1934, when the party sang the praises of Secretary-General Stalin (who had similarly licked but not yet liquidated his rivals), and when young Moscow Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev first won election to the party's holy of holies, the Central Committee.
The Promiser. With only a 20-minute noon break for nonalcoholic refreshments, Khrushchev talked for six hours. Topic No.1 before this extraordinary session was Russia's seven-year economic goals. Khrushchev was still trumpeting his familiar promises—80% more industrial output, 70% greater farm production, 62% more consumer-goods production—but, significantly, he omitted his 1970 target date for overtaking the U.S. He promised shorter hours, higher pay, a front door for every family, income tax repeal, "greatly reduced" police surveillance ("There are now no cases of people being made to stand trial for political crimes") —and he breezily explained that such "incentives" would make his goals possible.
On his tribune of victory the energetic pragmatist, who likes to voice his cornfield contempt for theoreticians, now demanded to be regarded as the first of living Communist theorists. Soviet speakers had lately taken to eulogizing their new Vozhd, or supreme chief, as they did Stalin, in personality-cult terms ("Initiator and soul of our glorious work").
Russian rockets have ended "capitalism's encirclement," proclaimed New Theorist Khrushchev, as new evidence of the old line that "socialism will conquer peacefully and fully." Then he set out to reverse the 20th Party Congress' approval of Tito's "separate roads to socialism." All Communist parties must follow "one general road pointed out by Marxism-Leninism," he said, but in building socialism they may, as the Chinese did, adopt their "own peculiar forms," and proceed at different tempos.