Back on the Job

Tanned and bouncy from three weeks' vacation in the sunny Crimea. Nikita Khrushchev last week returned to Moscow. Portents of trouble began cropping up all over.

The first was in West Berlin. Angry over scheduled congresses there of former war prisoners and of "expellees" from once German lands now held by Poland and Russia, the East German Communist regime imposed the severest curbs on travel in or out of Berlin since the 1949 blockade. For five days, said the East Germans, no West German would be allowed to enter East Germany or East Berlin without a special pass. The East Germans also warned the allies against flying "militarists and irredentists" into West Berlin along the air corridors that link the city with West Germany.

The huffing did not really hurt. West Berlin's Mayor Willy Brandt announced that his government would pay the air fare of any West German prevented from traveling to Berlin by train or car. and in well-publicized defiance of the East German threats, allied planes proceeded to fly in delegates to the rallies. But at check points along the land routes, many an ordinary West German was turned back, and traffic piled up for miles as East German cops carefully checked the background of the occupants of each car.

Exclusion Act. Khrushchev's next move was more spectacular. He had decided, he announced, to come to New York Sept. 20 to lead the Soviet delegation at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly. Apparently this meant quite a gathering of the clan. Day before. Rumania's Party Chief Gheorghe Gheorgiu-Dej proclaimed that he would head his country's U.N. delegation. Presumably, all the satellite leaders would troop across the

Atlantic. Presumably, too, Khrushchev's new-found friends in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba's Castro and Dominican Dictator Trujillo, would also make in-person appearances at the U.N. And Nikita blandly allowed that he thought "it would be good" if President Eisenhower and Britain's Prime Minister Macmillan also put in an appearance.

What does Khrushchev hope to accomplish at the U.N.? He himself made one of his purposes plain when he announced that the Western chiefs of state should meet him at the U.N. to achieve "a rapid solution" on disarmament. As part of his campaign to alienate Afro-Asian neutrals from the West. Khrushchev clearly plans to launch a new disarmament spectacular at the General Assembly.

But Khrushchev has another audience he keeps much in mind these days: Red China's insubordinate Mao Tse-tung. By assembling in New York all the world's Communist chieftains save Mao. Khrushchev underlines Peking's exclusion from the U.N. and perhaps emphasizes the isolation in which Red China would stand if it ever broke with Russia. The sight of Nikita bustling about the U.N. corridors closed to Mao might also be intended to remind Afro-Asians which Communist power can do most for them diplomatically, now that Peking and Moscow are competing around the world for support.

The Space Train. At week's end Khrushchev bounced across the Finnish border to Helsinki, ostensibly to celebrate the 60th birthday of Finnish President Urho Kekkonen. As he stepped out of his special train in the Finnish capital, he purred coyly: "I can assure you that my visit has no mysterious purpose. Can visits not be made in a friendly spirit?" Next day he casually remarked that the Soviet Union planned soon to launch "a train" into space. As usual, no one was quite sure how seriously to take him.

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