Word: armenians
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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NIKITA Khrushchev's latest sidekick and fixer is an enigmatic Armenian who is Soviet Communism's big-time businessman. To find out all it could about Trader Mikoyan, TIME tracked down men who had bargained with him from Hong Kong to Marseille, ranging from U.S. ambassadors to Germans who dealt with him during the days of the Hitler-Stalin pact. One of the directors of Rome's Armenian Pontifical College insists that Armenians everywhere, Communist or antiCommunist, generally admire him as a "man with a head on his shoulders." Diplomats, defectors, Russian specialists in ten capitals from...
Mikoyan, the Kremlin's agile Armenian, has made a career out of guessing right. Among the men who inherited Stalin's tyranny, his is the quickest and sharpest intelligence, and he is the slickest and shrewdest operator. He is the supreme Soviet trader, the one big Bolshevik to show both the talent and the will for business enterprise. As such, he not only organized a $120 billion-a-year retail trade (200 million customers) and a $6.2 billion-a-year overseas business, but in the process achieved an understanding of the wider world of trade and global politics...
...busy-so busy that John Foster Dulles let it be known that he had asked U.S. intelligence agencies to find out who was the Mr. X behind the Kremlin's increased cleverness in foreign affairs (the provisional answer: some of the moves bear evidence that the shrewd little Armenian, Deputy Premier Anastas I. Mikoyan, is being heard-see COVER STORY...
...Stalin's nocturnal habits, negotiations with Mikoyan "usually began at 10 or midnight and ended at 4 or even 6 a.m. Once he said: 'You in England have been traders for many centuries. But we know how to bargain, too-I come from a long line of Armenian traders!' ): Another time, when Wilson chaffed, "The trouble with you Russians . . ." Mikoyan broke in: "I am not a Russian. Premier Stalin is not a Russian. You know that I am never free to meet you at 7 p.m. because at that time I always have a drink with Stalin...
...Year's gifts, and deciding what to give whom. Some typical decisions of those days: for Stalin, a chocolate jack boot; for Molotov, a chocolate stool; for Khrushchev, a chocolate bottle; for Malenkov, a chocolate table; for Beria, a chocolate pistol. An excellent cook who likes to serve Armenian fare with bottled Crimean wine bearing typewritten notes identifying place of origin, Mikoyan once invited his' crony, the late Secret Police Boss Lavrenty Beria, to try some of his specialties. Beria, sniffing the shish-kebab, saluted him as "Comrade Culinary Master." "Yes, yes," replied Mikoyan, with graveyard humor...