The Seen & the Unseen

In a noisy confusion compounded of incessant oratory, the rumble of tanks and the clinking of glasses, the Communist world last week celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. In Prague a 105-ft. statue of Stalin was bathed in floodlights. In Budapest a monument to 24 Soviet soldiers killed in the Hungarian "counterrevolution" was unveiled. In Ulan Bator the elite of Outer Mongolia were treated to an address by Soviet ex-Foreign Minister Vyacheslav

Molotov. But, as ever, the biggest show of all was in Moscow, where 10,000 chosen commissars crowded into the huge new Lenin Sports Palace for a ceremonial session of the Supreme Soviet.

There were, of course, a few unavoidable absences. Marshal Georgy Zhukov was nowhere to be seen, and Yugoslavia's Marshal Josip Broz Tito, suffering from a case of lumbago aggravated by the ticklishness of his international position, stayed at home in Belgrade. But to show how civilized the Soviet state has become, the audience even included three discredited Khrushchev foes--Georgy Malenkov, Dmitry Shepilov and Lazar Kaganovich (who, when asked about his present work, replied: "That would be very difficult to explain just now"). On the dais, clustered around Red China's Mao Tse-tung, sat the leaders of 13 Communist nations, the rulers of nearly a billion people.

Pie & Sputniks. Standing at the rostrum, the bull-necked peasant who now presides over this vast empire savored his time of triumph to the full. For four long hours Nikita Khrushchev boasted of the past and future achievements of the U.S.S.R. In the next five to seven years, he declared, Soviet industry would "fully satisfy . . . footwear and fabric requirements." In ten or twelve years there would be an end to Russia's acute housing shortage. Best of all, "the Soviet Union in the next 15 years can not only catch up with the U.S. in the production of basic items but also outstrip it." Some Khrushchev estimates of Russia's 1972 production: steel, 110 to 132 million tons; oil, 2.4 to 2.7 billion barrels; coal, 715 to 825 million tons; electric power, 800 to 900 billion kw-h.*

If all this pie was still in the sky, so were two Sputniks. For days past, Karandash, a famed Russian clown, had been convulsing Moscow audiences by exploding a small balloon, then explaining, "That is the American Sputnik." Never one to pass up a surefire gag, Nikita, too, harped on U.S. discomfiture: "The U.S. announced that it was preparing to launch an earth satellite to be called the Vanguard. Not anything else. Just Vanguard . . . But it was the Soviet satellites that proved to be in the vanguard." Then, all joviality abandoned, Nikita Khrushchev made clear his intention of using Russia's new technological power as an instrument of international blackmail: "We would like a high-level meeting of representatives of capitalist and socialist countries to take place so as to reach an agreement based on the consideration of true reality."

Girls & Hardware. The day after Khrushchev's speech came the public climax of the anniversary gala--the four-hour parade through Red Square during which the Soviet armed forces traditionally show off their new weapons. This year, after Khrushchev's talk of intercontinental missiles and the persistent rumor that the Russians had sent up a rocket timed to hit the moon Nov. 7, the parade was an anticlimax. Though Rome's Communist daily L'Unit`a had confidently predicted that the day would be fine, because "Soviet experts are capable of creating good weather," the Moscow sky was so overcast that the scheduled Red air force flypast had to be canceled.

Stepping briskly past the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum, where new Defense Minister Marshal Rodion Malinovsky took the salute that two weeks earlier would have gone to Zhukov, the troops of the Moscow garrison drew a roar of cheers; so did the trim female marchers of the Spartak Sports Club, who carried a large globe around which revolved two model Sputniks. But the hardware that clanked through the world's most effective display case for military might was impressive chiefly for mass rather than quality. Of the 38 different rockets displayed, all were short-range with the possible exception of one single-stage, 70-ft. monster that looked like an overgrown German V2. The big new T-54 tanks had already been seen in action in Budapest, and the only noteworthy artillery pieces were two huge cannon (12-16 in. bore) presumably capable of firing nuclear shells. "We saw nothing that worries us," said one Western military attache. "It's what we haven't seen that does."

An Old Song. That evening, to wind up the anniversary program, the aristocracy of the Communist world flocked to the Grand Palace of the Kremlin, where once the Czars and their nobles made merry. Jauntily, Nikita Khrushchev moved among his hard-drinking guests, smiling and shaking hands like a ward boss. Once, captured by an excited female comrade, he let himself be whirled through a few dance steps to the accompaniment of shouts of "Molodets!" (bravo). Later, somewhere in the background, half-drowned out by laughter and the clatter of dinner plates, an orchestra burst into the strains of an old song:

Hey Daddy . . .

I want a brand new car,

Champagne, caviar.

For the gentry disporting themselves in the Kremlin, 40 years of Communist power had provided all those things and more. But, as always happens when the gentry are having a ball, the kitchen help and field hands were harder pressed than ever. In the mines and factories of Russia's satellites last week, tens of millions of people "celebrated" the Bolshevik Revolution fittingly by working an extra shift without pay.

* U.S. production last year: steel, 115 million tons; oil, 2.6 billion barrels; coal, 575 million tons; electric power, 684 billion kw-h.

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