Khrushchev's Plan

To put over his plan to swallow Berlin, after all the buildup and the bluster, Nikita Khrushchev called the first press conference of his premiership. Looking relaxed and chipper, and sporting a glistening gold peace-dove emblem in his lapel, the Soviet boss told 250 reporters in the wood-paneled oval room of the Kremlin's Council of Ministers Building that the notes his government had just sent the U.S., Britain and France were not in "the form of an ultimatum." But, he said over and over, the Soviet Union regards West Berlin as "a cancerous tumor," and sees "no other way out" but to denounce the Berlin occupation agreements, hand over Russia's present supervision of Allied traffic from the West to its "sovereign" East German puppet state, and--as a "realistic" concession--leave West Berlin "for the time being" in the status of a "demilitarized free city."

Air of Improvising. For an 8,000-word document as cunningly loaded with distortions of the past and with booby traps for the future, the notes that Moscow had sent gave off an air of improvisation. Only the day before, Secretary Dulles --no mean lawyer--had suggested, with the hint of a smile, that the note might have been so long delayed because Soviet lawyers had to correct Khrushchev's initial impetuosity.

"If the Soviet Union takes the position that the Potsdam agreement is nonexistent," said Dulles, "the consequences of that would be not to destroy our rights in Berlin, because they don't rest upon the Potsdam agreement at all, but it might greatly compromise the territorial claims of Poland [to former German lands east of the Oder-Neisse line], which do rest upon the Potsdam agreement primarily."

The new Soviet note was careful not to denounce the 1945 Potsdam agreement outright. In the face of the determinedly solid Allied resolve to stand fast in Berlin, it included another amendment that let out a lot of the heat that Khrushchev had pumped into his crisis. The Soviet ambassador in Bonn had talked jauntily about Soviet troops leaving Berlin before Christmas. Russia now promised to make no change in Berlin for six months.

The Soviet note, with a spurious mildness and plausibility, set out to court every color of German or European political opinion. ''Millions of Englishmen cannot forget the tragic lot of Coventry," or the Czechs, Lidice. Could the West be sure a rearmed West Germany "will not attack its present partners again?" Khrushchev's underlying theme was that he rejects German reunification. The Communists are there to stay in East Germany (see below), and the only kind of reunification that can be hoped for is a confederation.

"Now that the Western powers have begun to arm West Germany and turn her into an instrument of their policy spearheaded against the Soviet Union," Moscow said, "the very essence of the Allied agreement on Berlin has vanished ... A patently absurd situation has thus arisen, where the Soviet Union is supporting and maintaining, as it were, the favorable conditions for the Western powers' activity against the U.S.S.R."

Free Fantasies. "Of course the most natural and correct way to solve the Berlin problem." Moscow continued, would be to add Berlin to the surrounding Communist state. But Khrushchev granted, with a growl about the "fantasies" of freedom that Westerners keep clinging to, that some people might not like that. As a concession to them, then, let West Berlin be "an independent political entity --a free city--demilitarized . . . having its own government and running its own economy . . . without any state, including either of the existing German states, interfering in its life." Said Khrushchev: "If the West Berliners want capitalism, let them have it." Anyway, he shrugged, "mechanical merger" of two already developed economic and social systems "would be like mixing two unmixable liquids and producing a harmful chemical reaction."

But even this soft sell had its hint of menace in it. To permit West Berlin to be a "free city" would require "a definite sacrifice" on East Germany's part. Therefore, "in its turn, West Berlin would commit itself not to tolerate on its territory hostile subversive activity." And "if this proposal is not acceptable to the U.S. Government, there is no topic left for talks on the Berlin question by the former occupying powers."

Moscow's note concluded with an unmistakable threat: if the Western Allies should not accept this proposal, and should not pull out their estimated 11,000 troops in time, the Soviet Union would hand over to its East German puppet government the present Soviet occupation functions in Berlin, including sovereign control over air, land and water routes to West Berlin. Any armed challenge to East German authority would "be regarded by all members of the Warsaw Treaty as an act of aggression against them all," and would bring immediate "appropriate retaliation."

At a weekend Albanian embassy reception in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev protested that he wants a peaceful solution of the Berlin question, and would "like to discuss things around a round table. We would like to drink toasts again with our wartime allies." But the West had sat around the table with Khrushchev, toasts and all, before. This time Nikita had no eager takers.

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