Yuzovka was named after a Welshman called Hughes, who built the iron works there in 1869. By the time of the Khrushchev migration the town and the whole region round it was effectively in the hands of foreign concessionaires.
“I worked,” Khrushchev himself was much later to say, “at a factory owned by Germans, at pits owned by Frenchmen, and at a chemical plant owned by Belgians. There I discovered something about capitalists. They are all alike, whatever their nationality. All they wanted from me was the most work for the least money that kept me alive. So I became a Communist, and all my conscious life I worked with my whole heart and all my energy for my party. I was not born a Communist any more than you [he was speaking to visitors from abroad] are born members of your own parties. But life is a great school. It thrashes you and bangs you about and teaches you.”1
This is an over-simplification. It was 1906 when Khrushchev settled with his parents in Yuzovka, three years after Lenin had quarrelled with his fellow Social Democrats and founded the Bolshevik party. Khrushchev did not join the Bolsheviks until 1918, when he was twenty-four and when Lenin was already in power. Soviet sources, and Khrushchev himself, prefer to blur this point and we have not been told why Khrushchev took so long to make up his mind to follow Lenin. But there was nothing disgraceful about this hesitation. Khrushchev was a rebel long before he became a Communist, and he was in good company. The great majority of the most ardent rebels in those days were anything but Bolsheviks, including most of the dedicated humanitarian idealists and many of the fiercest destructive spirits— among them Trotsky.
If we do not know why Khrushchev did not join the Bolsheviks or any other revolutionary party sooner, we can at least guess, putting together what we know of those sullen, restless times and what we now know of the character of Khrushchev himself. All through his public life, familiar from 1953 onwards, quite well documented in outline as we shall see, but unfamiliar to all but specialists for twenty-five years before that date, he was to show a remarkable sense of timing: it was not an unerring sense (he made his mistakes), but it was keen to a degree. During that epoch of his career, the last twelve years, which was lived out under the eyes of all the world, this gift, this sense of timing, was often obscured by the continuous noisy running commentary, a kind of glorified conjurer’s patter, which accompanied and partly covered all his actions. But it was very much in evidence underneath the blarney and the ballyhoo. And it was a gift which went hand in hand with a very cool and cautious and far-sighted mind. Time and time again, first as a provincial boss with great powers, then as a metropolitan figure, then as a national chieftain, finally as an international statesman, he showed that he could withdraw from the scrummage, quietly watching the state of play with almost perfect detachment, and then move in to strike at the critical moment. Often and often his most compelling exhibitions of apparent indiscretion were no more than cover, a sort of smoke-screen, for these spells of intent and purposeful watchfulness. At the same time he was always a great learner. He was constantly talking about learning from life and he was, indeed, one of life’s most eager and rewarding pupils. He even had the gift, so rare among politicians, of learning from his own mistakes.
He must have been always like this: the youth of eighteen held the pattern of the autocrat of sixty. Rough, impulsive, coarse in his language, inclined to bully he must have been then; but also watchful and cautious—and learning. He had a great deal to learn.
In biographies of Western statesmen, whose lives from childhood onwards may be reconstructed and documented in some detail, the usual method of procedure is for the biographer to start at the beginning and go on to the end, building up the character of his hero as he proceeds. But the early lives of Soviet politicians are not documented at all and we are told next to nothing about them. Khrushchev used to talk about his own life, or part of it, more freely than any other post-revolutionary Russian politician, but he did not tell us much, and it is not until he began making important public speeches in his middle thirties that we can begin to trace the development of his career and his way of thinking with any certainty. Thus, in order to understand the sort of person Khrushchev was when, in 1918, at twenty-four, he became a Bolshevik, we need the clearest possible picture of the mature public figure. Only then can the scanty information about his early days and the few extremely revealing photographs of the young Communist boss, begin to make sense.
All the world has seen Khrushchev on television and knows what he looked like at the height of his power and how he spoke. But television performances conceal as much as they reveal. We can do a little better than that: we can catch Nikita Khrushchev as he appeared before he achieved confidence as a world statesman; we can catch him, also, speaking not to a mass audience or even in carefully calculated indiscretions to foreign diplomatists, but to a small group of people whose brains he was trying to pick, as far as he knew unobserved by any outsider.
The occasion was Khrushchev’s first visit to the world outside his own closed society, that celebrated pilgrimage to Yugoslavia in 1955, about which we shall have more to say later. With Marshal Bulganin, titular Prime Minister, cheerful and blowsy and very much in holiday mood, and Anastyas Mikoyan, grimly sardonic and fathomlessly bored, he had gone to Belgrade to make the quarrel up with Marshal Tito, whom Stalin had so viciously and vainly sought to destroy, using every method short of military bombardment or invasion. He found himself with a harder task on his hands than he had expected. It was clear from the moment he stepped from the aeroplane, a squat little figure with flapping trousers, that he was taking it quite for granted that Tito would be flattered and overjoyed by this grand gesture of a reconciliation—the leaders of mighty Russia abasing themselves before the master of a poor, weak country. Tito must certainly have felt triumphant, but he showed no joy; and he made it clear at once that he was standing no nonsense of any kind at all. The first nonsense was when Khrushchev in his speech at the airport said he had come to bury the hatchet, that the Soviet Union had behaved badly towards Yugoslavia, but it had all been the fault of Beria…. Tito knew it was the fault of Stalin, who had not then been pulled from his pedestal, and he knew that Khrushchev, Bulganin and Mikoyan had been among Stalin’s chief aides: he was not going to have the whole affair, which had been a matter of life and death for Yugoslavia, nearly death, smoothly blamed on the chief policeman of the Soviet Union, who had been executed by his colleagues less than two years earlier. He showed his displeasure: he interrupted the interpreter who had started putting Khrushchev’s speech into Serbo-Croat, and stalked off, waving on his Russian visitors, to the waiting car.
This was Khrushchev’s first mistake. He swallowed its consequences and never made that mistake again. During the next few days he was to make so many mistakes that the onlookeis, the diplomatists and the journalists, began to write him off as a clumsy nonentity, who could not possibly last long. What they appeared not to see was that Khrushchev registered his mistakes as he made them, digested them, and never made the same mistake twice. What most of them never had a chance to see was Khrushchev at his ease, concentrating on a job in hand which he really understood.
Tito made things as difficult and awkward as he could. This man, who himself went about in fear of assassination, decided to show off by conducting his visitors through crowded streets in an open car. Khrushchev was used to bullet-proof cars with shaded windows, tearing in convoy through the cleared streets in Moscow. But he blinked only once before stepping into this death-trap of a vehicle, and then settled down, waving to unresponsive crowds, as to the manner born. In private meetings Tito declared himself ready to resume cordial State relations with the Soviet Union, but he would have nothing to do with the Soviet Communist Party as such: Khrushchev was there not as Prime Minister (that was Bulganin) but solely as First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. At a grandiose reception in the White Palace Tito put all his senior officials into dinner jackets and their wives into full evening dress. The Russians had no dinner jack
ets and arrived, to be kept standing in the glare of Klieg lights, still dressed in their badly cut, square-shouldered summer suits: Bulganin looked foolish; Mikoyan looked daggers; Khrushchev simply blinked a little and stood, quite passively and patiently, his hands clasped loosely in front of him. Tito insisted on racing Khrushchev about the Adriatic in a high-powered motor-boat. Khrushchev was not sick. He must have had a most humiliating time, but he came through it, and he became, at the end, enough himself to get noisily drunk at the Soviet Embassy reception: it was the last time he was ever to get seriously drunk in public.
And in the middle of it all, in spite of many harassments, in spite of innumerable snubs by his host, he was able, when necessary, to concentrate on the job in hand.
One day, after being rushed all over the Yugoslav countryside, he had to visit a factory at Ljubljana in Slovenia. The factory made turbines; it was new and up-to-date, and the construction of pre-stressed concrete with a finely arching cantilever roof was beautiful and impressive.
There was a large assortment of Western journalists waiting for the arrival of the Russians: only two were to receive permission to join the party on its tour of the factory, and in the end the correspondent of The Times was chosen, a young woman of a startling elegance and beauty not readily associated with Printing House Square, and the correspondent of The Observer. We were chosen because The Times spoke Serbo-Croat and could understand the interpretations, while The Observer spoke a little Russian and could, it was hoped, listen in to Khrushchev and his colleagues.
There was the usual immense procession of officials, engineers, hangers-on, east-European journalists, and the rest. Khrushchev and Bulganin leading, the procession made its way at a brisk pace down the vast central aisle of the swept and garnished building, with great chunks of recondite machinery in various stages of completion and assembly dotted about the floor in a surrealist manner, or suspended from overhead rails. Khrushchev was not interested in the machinery: he had that at home. What he was interested in was the building itself, which was a model of functional design and light as air. For some months past, in Russia, he had been touring the country on one of his crusades, this time a crusade for the use of concrete, especially prefabricated concrete units, for industrial and institutional buildings: the Soviet Press had been full of nothing else for weeks, as, earlier, it had been full of nothing but maize as the universal panacea. Khrushchev, to hear him, might have invented concrete: well, here concrete was, in a perfect object lesson in what it might do. In the middle of that vast hall, Khrushchev stopped and proceeded to deliver a lecture to Bulganin, Mikoyan, Shepilov, and anybody else who cared to listen. They had heard it all before, and they looked as if they had heard it all before. But this did not deter the master: he had talked to them about concrete, now he was showing them concrete. Would they kindly pay attention to what he said, make a note of what they saw, and get on with the manufacture of concrete and the construction of concrete buildings when they got home? Bulganin emerged from his perpetual purring dream for long enough to look intelligent and reply that indeed he would see to it. Mikoyan said nothing. The Yugoslav conducting officials (Tito had demonstratively stayed behind in Belgrade) were a little taken aback. They had wanted to show off their turbines, of which they were very proud; they wanted to talk about their Workers’ Councils, in which Khrushchev was not interested: they were presenting a splendid picture, and here was Khrushchev insisting on praising the frame. They had also expected Khrushchev to have something to say to the workers, grouped round their machines, but this working-class master of the original workers’ paradise seemed unaware of the existence of the workers: like a caricature of a capitalist tycoon, he poked around and prodded, never addressing a question to the men on the job, behaving as though they were not there. This was a shock. It was also another mistake. By the time that tour was over Khrushchev had registered this mistake: the Yugoslays took the line that the workers mattered; very well. Next day, at a factory in Zagreb, he remembered the workers and talked to them a great deal.
At the end of this little tour the Yugoslav hosts had arranged for the Russians and a handful of Yugoslavs to move in to the factory director’s room for drinks and conversation. When the time came for this The Times and The Observer were both just behind Khrushchev and just in front of Mikoyan: it was the easiest thing to infiltrate with them before the barrier was closed. The chief Soviet and the chief Yugoslav security men looked a little surprised, but the Russians must have thought they were accredited Yugoslavs, and the Yugoslavs must have thought they were accredited Russians. There were only a dozen or so people in that room, but both newspapers were offered drinks with the rest. Bulganin from now on could not take his eyes off The Times. While Khrushchev talked technicalities his eyes strayed constantly. In the end he could resist no longer. He leant across to where The Times was standing, patted her gently, raised his glass, beamed moonily and murmured: “A vous, Madame!”, words he had clearly been rehearsing for some minutes past. He went on beaming. Khruschev’s eyes, a little startled, flickered across; but he had seen beautiful young women before. Mikoyan looked disgusted. The meeting proceeded.
The real interest was Khrushchev himself. He sat down in an arm-chair in front of a round table spread with blueprints. He drank freely and absently, but he was a man transformed. No longer the public clown, no longer the bullying demagogue, no longer the man showing off about concrete, his whole immense vitality was concentrated on the job in hand. The job in hand was twofold: first to understand the details of the concrete construction and to make sure that these details were conveyed to him in Moscow in such a form that they could be readily and completely understood by Soviet engineers; secondly to tell the Yugoslavs that all their ideas about a workers’ democracy, about workers’ participation in factory management (the famous Workers’ Councils) were so much nonsense, and why: workers had to be told what to do and made to do it, and that was that; any government, any managerial staff, which shirked this responsibility in the name of democracy was heading straight for trouble.
All this was done very quietly but with an authority which was absolute. This little man, no longer a comic figure with badly fitting clothes, had become, without emphasis, without raising his voice, the born and unquestioned master. There are some great men who, in a group, achieve their ascendancy by, as it were, radiating vitality, by giving out. Khrushchev gave out nothing. He was learning, and at the same time commanding. He became at once the still centre of that small and powerful gathering and instead of giving he took. It was as though all the energies, all the vitality, of everybody in that room were being drained from each individual and absorbed into this small figure who knew just what he wanted and was going to get it with perfect economy of effort—and just what he did not want: it took only a barely perceptible wave of the hand to divert an eager torrent of explanation, which he did not want; it took a single word to turn the conversation in the direction he required. Another man who had this quality, this capacity to subdue, to draw out, to pull the essence of other people’s specialised experience almost physically into his own mind, without lifting a finger to dominate, was the late Ernest Bevin—who could also be garrulous and bullying, and histrionic on occasion. It was impossible to watch this performance without being convinced that behind Khrushchev the showman and the extrovert there was a man born to supreme authority. It explained a great many things.
It explained, when one came to think of it, his early career. We have to reconcile two images: on the one hand, the rough, loquacious, joking, bullying extrovert, impetuous to the point of recklessness; on the other, the calculator, withdrawn into himself, watching, learning, waiting. The supreme authority which he was to show in that Ljubljana factory by the carriage of his head, the exactness and economy of a gesture, was a quality which obviously developed in later life. But those other qualities must have been present in quite early days. The side he then put forward was the rough side, and even when he was forty years old an
d making a formidable career in Moscow he consistently presented himself as a rough diamond, hectoring and familiar in his public speeches, more of a coal-miner’s son than he had ever been in real life. At a time when his senior colleagues were beginning to spruce themselves up, Khrushchev went about in a cloth cap spectacularly hideous even by Soviet standards, as though to emphasise his proletarian origins. Indeed, these were of the greatest value to him. The higher reaches of the Bolshevik Party were not rich in proletarians. Stalin himself was a cobbler’s son; but he was a Georgian, a member of an élite tribe, and he had been educated for the Church. Molotov, Malenkov, Zhdanov, Beria, Bulganin, were all born into bourgeois families, high or low. The most distinguished of the old Bolsheviks whom Stalin killed off belonged to the intelligentsia. Khrushchev, with one or two others, was able to exploit his contempt for the bourgeois and the intelligentsia, and he did so.
When, at fifteen, he went to work in Yuzovka he was gifted enough to keep out of the pits and to turn himself quite soon into a skilled worker of sorts. He moved from factory to factory. He got himself trained as a fitter, and, on the eve of the 1914 war, he was in charge of the maintenance of a pit-head installation, the lift-cage, in which the miners went up and down.
Various attempts, frequently contradictory, have been made to present the young Khrushchev as an active revolutionary worker in those early days: these include remarks made by Khrushchev himself from time to time and, more particularly, romanticised accounts of his youth put out for foreign consumption on the various occasions of his foreign tours. But there is not a word in the dry official biographies to substantiate the claims that he was engaged in large-scale strike activity, or that he undertook negotiations with the management on behalf of his work-mates. Indeed, Khrushchev himself once said that he had never played any part in the trade union movement.2
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