A Hard Day's Night

How did it really happen?

Pieced together from reports in the non-Russian Communist press and triangulated by a few facts gleaned by Westerners in Moscow, the story of Nikita Khrushchev's fall is still far from complete. Contradictions abound, and the motivation of persons leaking details is obviously suspect. But the account, as it stands so far, of that hard day's night in which Nikita met his undoing rings true in terms of his familiar personality. He evidently went down as he came up-swinging.

Bare Majority. Two weeks ago, as Khrushchev relaxed in the fall sun at his Black Sea villa, a call went out from Moscow for a secret meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee. The roundup call no doubt originated in the party Presidium, which Nikita unwittingly believed was heavily in his favor (he had hand-picked seven of its eleven other members). In from semi-exile flew such opponents of Khrushchev as New Delhi-based Ambassador Ivan Benekditov. Central Committee members known to be strong for Nikita were not called, among them Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in Washington. Khrushchev was confidently preparing a speech, which would point to Khrushchevian successes: a good harvest in the "virgin lands" and the successful orbiting of the three-man Voshkod spaceship, even then whirling overhead.

As Voshkod orbited, the party Presidium was in nonstop session-though Nikita knew nothing about it. Ideologist Mikhail Suslov was the major participant, arguing that Khrushchev had outlived his usefulness. A vote was taken, and all were against Nikita. The question was then carried to the full Central Committee, where a majority-but a bare one, some reports indicating as little as one vote-decided against him. Thus the coup makers had precluded the fate of the 1957 "antiparty group," which had mustered a party Presidium majority against Khrushchev only to lose when the vote came in the Central Committee. Dmitry Ustinov, 56, fast-rising chairman of the Supreme National Economic Council, was detailed to fly down to the Black Sea and bring Khrushchev back.

Across the River. Ustinov arrived on the morning of Tuesday, Oct. 13, as Khrushchev was talking with French Atomic Science Minister Gaston Palewski. The emissary demanded that Khrushchev return immediately to Moscow for the special meeting of the Presidium. Deeply upset, Khrushchev left Palewski with the words: "I have to go to the cosmonauts immediately." That explanation was at least partly true. After only 16 orbits, the Voshkod had returned to earth, possibly because of a mechanical failure but perhaps on order from the Presidium, which presumably did not want the spacecraft, with all its publicity potential, circling overhead while Khrushchev was being dealt with.

At sunset, Khrushchev and Ustinov landed at Moscow's Vnukovo Airport, where a ZIL limousine waited. The long black car whipped across the Lenin Hills, along Kremlevskaya Quai, where lights glittered on the Moskva River.

The Unkindest Cut. The car halted a few blocks from the Kremlin at Kuibyshev Street No. 4, a grey, six-story building with red marble columns and a sign in gold lettering that reads: "The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union." A thermometer mounted above the massive door registered a temperature of 40DEG F., but it was even chillier inside.

There Khrushchev found ten members of the Presidium awaiting him. Immediately Suslov got up and launched a sharp, biting attack against him. He accused Khrushchev of trying to start a new "cult of personality." He cited Khrushchev's inability to control himself, his lengthy, "boring" speeches, his "naive provincial behavior," and his "provocative attitude" toward the Red Chinese. He described Nikita's shoe banging at the United Nations in 1960 as "harmful to the reputation of the Soviet Union throughout the world." And he raised the matter of nepotism. Khrushchev had proposed that his son-in-law, Izvestia Editor Aleksei Adzhubei, be appointed to the Secretariat and placed in charge of agriculture.

Suslov's knifework lasted some four hours, but the unkindest cut of all was yet to come. Khrushchev's youngest protege on the Presidium, Dmitry Polyansky, rose to denounce Nikita's agricultural fiascoes with sharply pointed statistics.

Long Authority. Khrushchev was furious, defended himself with a fulminating three-to-four-hour speech laden with curses and invective. Caught unprepared, he could not counter coolly, and may have hoped to carry the night on the strength of his lungs and his long authority. It did not work. Suslov listened quietly until Nikita ran down, then rose to his feet. "You see, Comrades," he said slowly. "It is impossible to talk to him." Khrushchev's face reddened to the point that some witnesses thought he would hit Suslov. But he contained himself while the Presidium voted. It was unanimous against Khrushchev. Remembering 1957, Nikita hotly demanded an immediate session of the Central Committee. Again Suslov replied: "The members of the Central Committee are assembled and waiting."

Perhaps because they had been assembled and waiting for nearly eight hours, the Central Committee members were in no mood to hear more Khrushchevian haranguing. He was interrupted again and again with catcalls from the floor. When one minister accused him of a closed-door policy (he had tried to see Khrushchev for two years and failed), Nikita snapped: "My ministers are a bunch of blockheads." The Central Committee rejected him, but by a close margin. It was nearly dawn. Exhausted, Nikita Khrushchev offered his resignation in a soft, subdued voice and walked out of the hall.

Room with a View. The conflict had been long in the making, at least according to the Kremlin leaks appearing last week. Khrushchev had been voted down by the Presidium last February over his polemical blast at Peking (also composed by Suslov), had to delay a month before making it public while peace feelers went out to Mao and were rejected. He had further irritated the Central Committee by taking a three-week tour of the farm lands on the lower Volga and in Kazakhstan and not reporting back to them; by erupting in anger at Indonesian President Sukarno when he expressed sympathy for Peking; by announcing late in September a new plan for heavy emphasis on the consumer-goods industry that had/ not been cleared with the Presidium.

Khrushchev last week was apparently still in Moscow, by best report living in a four-room apartment above the Udarnik Cinema, on Serafimovich Street No. 2, within view of the Kremlin. Some Westerners reported seeing him riding in a limousine; others claimed they saw him walking, sober-faced and sullen, in the environs of Moscow University. All traces of his rule were being removed. When U.S. Ambassador Foy D. Kohler called on new Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin, he noted that Nikita Khrushchev's plastic toy cars were gone, along with his familiar paperweight, a lump of ore as crude and solid as its owner.

*The 175 voting members of the Central Committee elect the party Presidium-known as the Politburo until 1952, when that name became too odious. The party Presidium is not to be confused with the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Russia's ineffectual parliament, now headed by President Anastas Mikoyan.

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