by Norman Stone
In fact most of it came from the pre-revolutionary world. There was a superb mathematical and musical tradition in old Russia, and Sputnik owed most to equations produced by a Tatar-Polish theoretical physicist called Konstantin Cholkovsky in 1903: even in his native Kaluga at that time, electro-magnetism and the name of James Clerk Maxwell were known. The Bolsheviks had some understanding of what was going on, and did not, initially, make problems for men such as Cholkovsky (who died in 1935 at a great age). Another learned man of the old order, Vladimir Vernadsky (born in 1863: his brother, a notable historian of Russia’s Tatar aspect, emigrated) stayed on, and in 1922 guessed that there was ‘a great revolution’ coming, ‘a source of power’ that would have something to do with radium, on which he became an expert. Scientific institutes were important to the Bolsheviks, and the 17th Party Congress in 1934 announced that the Soviet Union was to be ‘the most technologically advanced state in Europe’. There was some international collaboration (most notably with Piotr Kapitsa, born in 1894, who spent twelve years at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, in the era of Rutherford and the splitting of the atom; but of course there was a strong German link as well). The scientific intelligentsia of that era were extraordinarily well-rounded men and women, good on their music and literature (one of the outstanding Soviet nuclear physicists was Yuli Khariton, born in 1904, who had studied at Cambridge, like Kapitsa, and, back home, had to do with the founding of the Writers’ House). Of course they took their role very seriously indeed, Kapitsa writing to Stalin to say that scientists were the new patriarchs — patriarchs having become quite obsolete.
Vladimir Vernadsky seems to have been the model for Professor Preobrazhensky in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, a splendid satire on the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In it, a gynaecologist of the old school and a man of broad culture (including the proper qualities of vodka and the zakuski, or caviar, to go with it) keeps a large and well-appointed flat in Moscow because he can rejuvenate sexual organs and powerful Party people use his services. He implants the testicles and other glands of a drunken thug into a lovable dog, creating a monstrous dog-man who fits in with the local Communist cell. The book was read out to a chosen audience that contained an informer, who in outrage recorded that the Vernadsky-Preobrazhensky figure complains that Communism had meant the theft of galoshes from the communal hallway, and that this had caused ‘deafening laughter’. The book then vanished, known only to a few people. In Khrushchev’s time, characteristically, the circle in the know grew wider, but the book was not properly published until 1987. A regime capable of such absurdities of censorship would not in ordinary circumstances have been able to produce anything of much sophistication, let alone a pioneering bomb and missile programme. In fact engineers were initially put in charge, and they were so sceptical that they regarded uranium just as a rock, and irradiated themselves. Without the men and women of the late-Tsarist educational system, science and for that matter cultural life of any but the most primitive sort would not have survived. Matters even then became very difficult for many of them, the writers especially, and it was the war that saved them; even the aeronautics expert Sergey Korolev was sent to Kolyma camp, and both A. N. Tupolev and the designer of the katyusha missile system, V. N. Galkovskiy, were imprisoned in a specialist camp, a sharashka. But the scientists were badly needed, and they were given organization (and motivation) that they might otherwise have lost. It is also true that the first Soviet bomb owed something to Western examples, known through espionage, a glory of the regime. Some of the nuclear physicists were anxious for the West to give the secret to the USSR, which they much admired (for some reason, natural scientists lost their minds when it came to the Soviet Union: Sir Julian Huxley had written a particularly silly book about Soviet science, comparing it very favourably with British, just as the British produced penicillin, radar, the cathode-ray tube and the atomic bomb). But the essentials were Russian.
The USSR set up a bomb remarkably quickly. The Americans always had superiority of numbers — nine in 1946, thirteen in 1947, fifty-six in 1949, 1,161 in 1953 — but it had meant an enormous expense (during the war, $2bn, though much of this was on buildings). The Soviet system, with far fewer resources, responded rapidly and the first uranium plant was ready by the end of 1945, with a design similar to that of Enrico Fermi’s atomic pile at Chicago. Uranium (of which the Western powers had cornered 97 per cent in the Belgian Congo and elsewhere) was available at the Jachymov mines in Bohemia (strangely enough its German name, Joachimsthal, lent itself to a silver coin, the Thaler, i.e. ‘dollar’) and convicts were set to work in them. The research was carried out in an old monastery, 250 miles east of Moscow, and the monks’ cells became the laboratories; columns of convicts trudged through it all, and the guards were primitives who thought that plutonium was just old iron. It was there that Y. B. Zeldovitch, an inspired and versatile mathematician, worked out the depth and range of the explosive power, in microseconds; and within three years, in August 1949, the first bomb was successfully tested at Semipalatinsk. Next came the thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb which the Hungaro-American expert Edward Teller likened to the Sun itself, an atomic device being used to trigger a vast explosion. In this, the Russians (in 1952, with the first test) proved to be ahead of the Americans, although they exploded an even more powerful, and immediately usable, one in 1953 (and a later test killed several Japanese fishermen eighty miles away). Soviet tests were also murderous, though this was concealed at the time; they caused the most prominent physicist, Andrey Sakharov, to have his first doubts as to the whole thing; and Igor Kurchatov himself, the director of the Soviet atomic-weapons programme, wrote to Molotov in 1954 to say that war would mean the end of the world. Molotov did not punish him, or publicize the letter, one of Khrushchev’s reasons for subsequently getting rid of him. More generally, a doctrine came up of the ‘nuclear deterrent’, which would make war unthinkable. One of the chief Soviet physicists, Lev Landau, also had doubts as to the morality of the whole enterprise, and he was eavesdropped on in his house by the KGB. He was heard to remark that the first lives to be saved by the nuclear deterrent had been those of the Soviet scientists.
At any rate, Sputnik, launched on 4 October 1957, was followed in November by a dog, and then in 1961 by the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. Lunik landed a red pennant on the Moon, and was first to photograph its hidden side. Still, whatever these triumphs, there was always Anna Akhmatova’s slum of a city. Food and housing were dismal and the USSR’s transport system was primitive — fewer railways than India. Communism was hated in much of central and eastern Europe; it was maintained only by a Moscow tyranny, and the local powers depended on the Soviet embassies. At home, there were millions of slave labourers (Khrushchev reckoned ten), and once Stalin died there were great revolts among them, as the famous places — Vorkuta, Karaganda, Norilsk — went on strike, organized by Chechens, Ukrainians and Balts. What was Khrushchev to do about it all? Change in the Soviet Union was exceedingly difficult, especially given the presence, in the Politburo and elsewhere, of the old Stalin guard. He did indeed set about reforms, and these were to become compulsive and very deeply unsettling, but in the first instance there was one thing Khrushchev could do, more or less in agreement with the Politburo, and that was to improve relations with the West. It was to be called the ‘first détente’, a word meaning ‘relaxation of tension’, though it also happened to mean ‘trigger’. Experience was to show that the first meaning led straight to the second.
As Khrushchev contemplated the West, what did he see? He hardly knew it at all (unlike Stalin, who in his revolutionary youth had briefly been in London) but there were certain main lines in his understanding of it, and his younger advisers were clever. Stalin had managed to unite it, with NATO and the pacts that linked almost all of the Soviet Union’s neighbours, however disparate. In 1955, at a meeting of the Politburo, Khrushchev made some sarcastic remarks at the expense of Molotov, whose ‘no’ in international gath
erings had become famously obstructive. The USSR under Stalin, he said, had managed to make enemies of everybody — even countries such as Iran and Turkey, which had been friendly since the Revolution and were now allied with the West. Yugoslavia, too, a faithful Communist ally, had been alienated — quite absurd because the place had a strategic position and it could also have been a sort of showcase. Yugoslavia contained seven different and sometimes very different peoples, and had inherited a good bit of poisoned history. Lenin had decreed how such problems should be dealt with: get rid of capitalism, and the brotherhood of peoples would prevail. In Yugoslavia a serious effort was made. Tito, a Croat, had led the resistance, and his partisans, drawn from all the peoples of Yugoslavia, had liberated much of the country even before the Red Army arrived. Tito then ‘built socialism’ in the Moscow-approved manner. However, there were signs of independence that Stalin did not like, and suspicion reigned: a quarrel became open in summer 1948, and the Yugoslav Party was expelled from Cominform. However, this did not break Tito at all. Instead, he gained strong domestic support, approached old allies in Great Britain, received financial and other help from the West, crushed his Stalinist opponents, and proclaimed neutrality. For a very long time to come, Yugoslavia received adulation in the West: all of it, said an apologetic Khrushchev, the fault of Stalin and Molotov.
And now there was also a Germany, again needlessly alienated, firmly anchored in the West, and being rearmed. Moscow might justly take pride in its leaders’ understanding of the dynamics of power politics, and Lenin had known which buttons to press. When in 1919 the international revolution failed to happen, he had made up to the Germans, and played off the Western powers against each other. German officers had trained secretly on Russian soil: German bosses had built up Russian industry during the first Five Year Plan. Why not dangle the carrot of unification before the Germans, in return for economic co-operation and neutrality? For Khrushchev, the time had come for a relaxation of the tensions that had so unnecessarily been built up. It was called ‘peaceful co-existence’, and coincidentally helped him to get rid of Molotov, packed off to run a power plant far away.
The United States had also been misplayed. Left to itself, America would have got on with business, but Stalin had done his work, and the Americans had built up a formidable war machine that had become an important and even indispensable part of American business life. Weapons research and production made California rich and kept universities going; exports of weaponry or aircraft became important for the balance of payments, and a whole political and media machine developed to foster these. Various pacts, underwritten by the American taxpayer, now linked nearly all of the Soviet Union’s neighbours against Moscow. Without Stalin’s ominous threats, that taxpayer (paying a marginal rate of 94 per cent) might have rebelled against this system, but as things were, even Eisenhower growled nuclearly over Korea. In January 1954 Dulles laid out a new ‘doctrine’: the USA would use its enormous nuclear superiority if the Russians attacked in Europe, ran the threat, subsequently modified.
Then there were the British and French. The British had had to go it alone as regards nuclear weaponry, although they could hardly afford it. They had exploded their own first bomb in October 1952 and were obviously looking for some independent role. In the first place, Churchill himself hoped to have a last grand international moment, reconciling the USSR and the rest, and in the early fifties, before German competition properly started, British exports boomed, and there was some life in the British Commonwealth. A third of the world’s trade was conducted in pounds, and money therefore came back to the City of London: Churchill could imagine that he had an independent role. With the French, matters were simpler. There was a large Communist Party; there was a great deal of resentment against Germany; there was cultural resentment of American domination; and there was a colonial war going on, in Vietnam, where Soviet help might be helpful. To have pushed all of them together, in NATO, had been extraordinarily clumsy. Once the Soviets decided to be more cunning the Korean War was wound up within weeks, and a year later, at Geneva, the parallel war in Vietnam was stopped, again with a division in the middle. What of central Europe?
In the air there was the question of disarmament. War might lead to the victory of the proletariat, but it could wipe out the planet as well. Malenkov had said as much, but was driven out by Khrushchev for saying it. Now, accompanied by an old-order totem, Bulganin, Khrushchev started to do his world rounds, visiting the United Nations, England, the USA and elsewhere, and saying much the same things as Malenkov had been overthrown for saying. He had a sort of rough charm, and was at any rate memorable, dropping peasant wisdoms like a caricature Russian: socialism was to have a human face again, and Stalin’s mistakes had to be made good. The moment was quite propitious. A business-minded Right, now mainly dominant in the West, had various uses for the USSR. It could for a start neutralize the public opinion that backed it. When Eisenhower won the election of 1952, he did so on a strongly anti-Communist platform, and his Vice-President, Richard Nixon, had made a name for himself as persecutor of Communists in general. The period of Joseph McCarthy was not long over, and public opinion in some places was strongly in favour of the use of American power: General MacArthur himself had argued for a nuclear strike against the Chinese ports, though Truman had sidelined him over this. In practice, the death of Stalin came as a huge present to Eisenhower, and let him off the Korean hook. He really wanted to go down in history as the man who had stopped a nuclear war. Business should be done.
How should the USSR respond? It mattered that Khrushchev himself had great faith in Communism, and was confident of the future, but for the moment he needed calm. After all, the USSR had made enemies of all of her neighbours except China, and China was a potential rival: Mao wanted the bomb. This time, in the context of possible German reunification, a new idea emerged in Moscow: a ‘security plan’ that involved ‘security guarantees in Europe’ and ‘a project for a treaty of collective security in Europe’. It was meant to establish permanent pan-European institutions, and not to include the Americans or NATO; foreign forces were to be withdrawn. The proposals were intelligent enough, and the immediate aim was clearly to prevent any European Defence Community. Appeal needed to be made to German pacifism — to rope the Germans into some overall European ‘structure’, which would be neutral. Beyond that lay the hope of detaching Europe from the USA. The Russians were generally agile when it came to managing these large-scale multinational bodies, their own foreign affairs being on the whole less messily conceived and executed than other countries’. Eventually, Molotov’s plan, put forward again and again, was realized with the Helsinki Conference of 1975, and it had some temptations in a Europe that might otherwise be the scene of nuclear war and was anyway on occasion resentful of the Americans. In 1954, in the very short run, the Molotov suggestion was successful enough in France, when the Paris parliament failed to ratify the EDC on 30 August. But that failure was not very significant: German rearmament was anyway going ahead.
Khrushchev needed to show that Communism did not need to mean labour camps. His Stalin speech was symbolic: rules would prevail henceforth. The Party, which was the essential institution, would be restored, whereas Stalin had considered just abolishing it and Beria had meant to turn it into a sort of baroque Scout and Girl Guide organization. The Central Committee, expanded by one third to 340 souls, met more often (six times in 1958) and congresses were held every four years, although the speeches, vetted beforehand, were ritualistic and, to an outsider, an ordeal: as John Keep says, ‘only by close examination could one detect here and there a slight emphasis that reflected some local or occupational interest’. Even the word glasnost was used, when its proceedings were published, but its real nerve was a secretariat, employing thousands, that operated in extreme secrecy. There was a Department of Agitation and Propaganda which covered the media and cultural life generally, and the number of people involved rose from 6 million in 1957 to 36 million in
1964. Party members doubled, to 12 million. The proportion of ‘specialists’ — engineers, for instance — went up, and there was more room for men in their thirties. At the 20th Congress, that of the Stalin speech, more than half of the eighty-four national or regional secretaries were replaced, and Khrushchev finally defeated the old guard in 1957 because over half of the Central Committee members were new appointments. In 1960-61 he repeated the anti-Stalin drive, and replaced fifty-five of the (now) 114 national and regional secretaries. At any rate, the personnel, if not the structure, was de-Stalinized, and there were no more mass killings. When Khrushchev was finally overthrown in 1964, he took pride in the fact that he had not been killed. That went together with a certain cultural liberalization, in that books open about some of the horrors of Stalin’s time were published, though there were limits. Still, whatever these limits, observers in the West could safely conclude that things were getting better, that business could be done. By 1955, when Khrushchev had established his authority, a half-thaw occurred in the Cold War.