Word: khrushchev
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Khrushchev: How did you feel...
Gagarin arrived in a turboprop airliner escorted by a swarm of jet fighters. Along with his parents and Wife Valentina, the entire upper crust of the Soviet hierarchy was on hand to greet him. The nuzzling, the bear hug and the long kiss he got from Premier Khrushchev seemed even more active than Valentina's warm embrace. Other dignitaries greeted the cosmonaut in their turn. Then, in a column of flower-decked cars, the official party drove slowly toward Red Square and a 20-gun salute from Red artillerymen...
Standing atop the Lenin-Stalin tomb, the most sacred spot in Communist Moscow, Gagarin was greeted by the Presidium, the powerful ruling body of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev made a long speech comparing him to Columbus, naming him a Hero of the Soviet Union and awarding him the brand-new title of First Hero Cosmonaut. The new major, neat in his grey and blue uniform, spoke with admirable poise, the party line rolling easily off his tongue. He thanked the party, the government and Premier Khrushchev for trusting him, a simple Soviet pilot, with the first flight to outer space...
...SECRET SPEECH, by John Robinson Beal (138 pp.; Duell, Sloan & Pearce; $3.50), is a satiric political fantasy that looks ahead to Khrushchev's overthrow, as explained by his imaginary successor, Comrade Dmitri Pushkov. (Khrushchev's fate is only hinted at: he becomes manager of the State Circus Trust.) Calmly, point by point-in a parody of Khrushchev's own speech in 1956 enumerating Stalin's errors-Pushkov proves to a Communist Party Congress that the man who once had only to pound on a U.N. desk with his shoe to frighten the world has really been...
...alarmists took Khrushchev's crudities and clowning as masking political genius, but in reality, he was too soft at Camp David on Berlin, wrong when he broke up the summit meeting in Paris, messed up the U-2 affair, helped build up NATO through his own "brinkmanship," and built up China too fast. Happy with his rockets, he neglected other weapons and left Russia vulnerable to attack. The Secret Speech is not meant as an exercise in smugness. Author Beal, for ten years TIME's State Department correspondent and now bureau chief in Ottawa, does not underrate Russia...