The Sceneshifrers

For months Nikita and Nikolai, the Kremlin's stubby twosome, have been as busy as a brace of one-armed sceneshifters, dressing up and restyling Communism's raddled charms. They rearranged the diplomatic furniture, chalked out new guide lines, devised lulling offstage music. Last week they added some final touches. When the curtain rises on the foreign ministers' meeting at Geneva in October, the world will be presented with a scene of a Communist world beaming with good will, disbanding armies, releasing prisoners, withdrawing from foreign bases, sending cultural missions abroad and beckoning businessmen to its marts.

No nook or cranny of the world stage was too remote or too dusty to escape the stagehands' attention: P: The Russian ambassador to Washington dropped into American Red Cross headquarters with a $25,000 contribution to the fund for relief from the recent East Coast floods.

P: Pianist Emil Gilels headed West for a guest appearance with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the first U.S. performance by a topflight Soviet musician since 1921; Violinist David Oistrakh will come soon for a U.S. concert tour, followed, perhaps, by famed Ballerina Galina Ulanova.

P: To a parliamentary delegation from France, Khrushchev disclosed that the Soviet Union was freeing 23 French prisoners and added genially: "Some way must be found to reaffirm French-Russian friendship." Next day, Chief Economic Planner Maxim Saburov crooned: "Why does France sacrifice her own interests for those of her partners? Our orders for ships, machine tools and other goods would provide good earnings for French businessmen and workers." P: Having won its earnestly desired diplomatic relations with West Germany by agreeing to release prisoners who should have gone home years before, Khrushchev tried the same tactics on the Japanese.

Japan, too, he told some visiting Japanese Diet members, may have all their prisoners of war (Japanese estimate: 10,000; Russian: 1,047) in exchange for ending the state of war and establishing diplomatic relations. Also, he hinted, the Soviet Union might throw in two tiny islands north of Hokkaido that Russia has held since the end of World War II--but not the Kurils and southern Sakhalin, awarded to Stalin by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at Yalta.

It was no easy task to transform the cold, cruel look of Soviet Communism without altering its substance, and Khrushchev and Bulganin were obviously tuckered out from the months of effort it had required. Last week both left Moscow for a vacation; the Party boss went to Yalta and the Premier to Sochi in the Caucasus.

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