Khrushchev

by Edward Crankshaw

  That he was in a rebellious frame of mind goes without saying. Yuzovka had a great tradition of belligerent labour going back to the eighteen-eighties. But after the 1905 revolt, with the shooting down of the loyal and silent demonstrators in front of the empty Winter Palace and the severe repression which followed, the labour movement in the Donbas, as elsewhere, fell into a decline. When the fifteen-year-old Khrushchev started work there in 1909 things were very quiet indeed. There were strikes in 1912 and 1913. But in 1914 over a third of the miners were conscripted into the army, and it was not until 1916 that industrial action began to get out of hand in protest against the sharp deterioration of living and working conditions produced by the war.

  During all this period, until 1916, the Bolshevik party, numerically small, played an unimportant part. The main fomentors of revolt in Yuzovka were the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, and it was the slow recovery of these parties from the post-1905 repression which brought about the strike movement in 1912. In that year, too, Pravda had begun to appear openly, and there were groups all over the Ukraine, in Yuzovka too, engaged in trying to whip up subscriptions to the Bolshevik paper. But the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries were far stronger, so strong, indeed, that in the Ukraine they completely dominated the workers’ councils after the March Revolution in 1917 and continued in a majority even, after the Bolshevik seizure of power in October. It was not until six months later that Khrushchev joined the Bolsheviks.

  There is one particular reason for being certain that Khrushchev had no connection with the Bolsheviks at all until, seeing which way things were going, he joined them. In 1916, when Khrushchev was twenty-two and doing well, Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich came to Yuzovka to run the Bolshevik group there. Kaganovich, a Jew from the Kiev region, was only a year older than Khrushchev (and fourteen years younger than Stalin); but he had been an active Bolshevik since 1911, when he was eighteen, in and out of prison for fomenting strikes, and, generally, a fighter who had gained such ascendency over his fellow workers that when he was sacked from a shoe factory at Dnepropetrovsk they had carried out a successful six-week strike to secure his reinstatement. In Yuzovka this brilliant and powerfully-built young Jew must have been an outstanding and romantic figure. His task, in which he failed, was to turn the workers away from the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries and capture them for the party of Lenin. Any worker remotely sympathetic towards Bolshevism must have come in contact with him, and, once in contact with him, his persuasive ways, backed by an extremely strong personality, must have been hard to resist. Years later, in his steady upward climb, Khrushchev was to be very much a Kaganovich man; first his protégé; then, in one job after another, his assistant and successor; finally, in 1957, his destroyer. Any association between Khrushchev and Kaganovich, however tenuous, in those Yuzovka days, would, until 1957, have been underlined in red in the official biographies. No such association is mentioned. And all this can only mean that if Khrushchev played any part at all in the pre-revolutionary workers’ movement, he must have been on the side of the Mensheviks or the Social Revolutionaries: this is a thing that would not, could not, be mentioned after 1917. It is a big “if,” however. The signs are that the young Khrushchev was too busy bettering himself to risk his future in illegal revolutionary struggle. He was doing well by his employers. Although young and able-bodied, he was not called up in 1914, clearly because he qualified for exemption as an indispensable worker. He married in 1915 and had two children by his first wife, who, according to his second wife, Nina Petrovna, whom he married in 1924, died in the great famine of 1920. At a time when the young revolutionaries were fanatically active educating themselves in political theory, in history, in everything the young Khrushchev seems to have been quite happy without book-learning. And, when the revolution finally came, in 1917, his first recorded action “in the name of the Revolution,” took place not in Yuzovka at all, but back in his own village of Kalinovka. Suddenly he appeared there as chairman of the peasants’ committee engaged in parcelling out among the peasants the land seized from the land-owners.3 The picture we receive is of this tough, watchful, calculating mechanic observing the impact of the revolution and, leaving his bench, hurrying straight back to his native village to make sure that when the land was divided there would be some for his family.

  It was not until 1918 that the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Donbas over the rival revolutionary parties was clear for all to see. What Khrushchev did, in effect, was then to apply for membership of the ruling party.

  Not all the workers at that time hurried to join the Bolsheviks. On the contrary. But those who did were on the side of whatever authority there was. In January 1918 Lenin had dissolved the Constituent Assembly. It had sat from 4 p.m. on 18 January until 4.40 a.m. on 19 January. It was the cherished symbol of all revolutionary aspiration, the first truly democratic parliament Russia had ever known.4 But it included only 175 Bolsheviks among its 700-odd elected deputies. This would not do for Lenin. For a brief moment he had control of the only coherent force in Petrograd, the mutinous soldiers and sailors who, on the Bolsheviks’ behalf, had raided the Winter Palace and swept away the unfortunate Kerensky’s Provisional Government. He now reposed himself on that force. “All power to the Soviets!” (the soldiers’ and sailors’ councils) was still the slogan. If only he could disperse the parliamentary opposition and thereby shatter the cohesion, such as it was, of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, he, Lenin, could master the Soviets and transfer their power to himself. This is what he did. The new Russian democracy functioned for exactly twelve hours and forty minutes. Then the dictatorship of the proletariat took over. The two revolutions, the popular rising of March 1917, which had swept away the Tsarist autocracy, and the Bolshevik Putsch of October 1917, which exploited the chaos and the discontent induced by Kerensky’s determination to keep Russia in the war, had been carried through with very little bloodshed. The blood was to start flowing once Lenin, as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, started to consolidate his own dictatorship. It was at this point that Nikita Khrushchev became a Bolshevik.

  Chapter 3

  Revolution, Chaos, Civil War

  The new young Comrade Khrushchev had nothing to do at all with the feverish manoeuvring in Petrograd whereby Lenin and his trusted (also some not so trusted) colleagues organised some sort of a government and set about the seemingly hopeless task of subduing a vast country to their will, while, at the same time, holding the foreigner at arm’s length—sometimes a very short arm’s length. Outside Petrograd, Moscow, and one or two other centres, there was chaos. Yuzovka was part of that chaos.

  Khrushchev was not there. We do not know where he was— perhaps for a time at Kalinovka. Yuzovka was deep in the Ukraine, and in 1917 the Ukraine, together with the Cossack lands along the Don and the Volga, on the coasts of the Black Sea and the Caspian, rejected Bolshevism. The newly formed Red Army had only just completed the military subjugation of the Ukraine at the end of January 1918 when Trotsky, on behalf of Lenin, signed away the whole of it to Germany under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Then, until the Allied victory, it was governed by a German puppet, the Hetman Skoropadsky. There was no room in the Donbas for a man who felt himself neither a Ukrainian nationalist nor a pro-German. Khrushchev’s first appearance as a Bolshevik was as a Red Army man in the civil war.

  What he was doing is not clear. Once again the propagandists sought, years later, to magnify his position. He served, they said, as a politrabotnik with the Red Army.1 It is hard to be convinced of this. A politrabotnik, or political worker, was, even in those days, an active Bolshevik whom the Party could trust: his job was to keep the Red Army volunteers and conscripts up to the mark and instruct them in the inner meaning of Bolshevism. It was a necessary job. Trotsky’s Red Army was a very mixed lot. It included not only a mass of workers and peasants who joined it voluntarily, either out of conviction, or because they saw in the Bolsheviks their only hope of stopping the lan
dlords from coming back to claim their lands, but also, in hundreds of thousands, conscripts rounded up as the Red Army established itself in new territory, or men from the armies of the Whites captured by the Red Army and given their freedom to fight for it against the Whites. Untold thousands who hardly knew White from Red changed sides in this way, often many times.

  It was an appalling struggle, conducted in a mood of desperate savagery on both sides. Atrocity, designed as Terror, was the order of the day: massacres of sleeping villages, public hangings, summary executions, murder and rape and looting, systematic arson and destruction, complex and vicious treacheries. There were formal cavalry actions, sweeping and terrifying incursions by armoured trains, artillery bombardments, hand to hand fighting in the style of trench warfare. And behind the set pieces there went on all the time incessant guerrilla warfare, sniping, ambushing, torturing and throat-cutting, in the forests and in the towns. The Red Army had to face three separate major threats: Generals Denikin and Wrangel from the South, Admiral Kolchak from Siberia, General Miller from the North. The White Armies were supported by the Western Allies who started their intervention with a landing at Murmansk in June. The Entente powers had welcomed the March revolution and the fall of the Tsarist autocracy: Russia, the great dumb ally, would be purged, freed of the bonds of tyranny; would fight all the harder for finding her soul. The United States Secretary of State, Mr. Lansing, went so far as to declare to the Cabinet in Washington that the Russian Revolution “had removed the one objection to affirming that the European war was a war between Democracy and Absolutism.” But when, just seven months later, democracy went under to Lenin and his Bolsheviks, who had already indicated that their first task was to take Russia out of the war, benign approval of Russian progressiveness was succeeded by embittered consternation. Nobody quite knew who the Bolsheviks were. Lenin, they did know, was an extreme revolutionary who had been brought back to Russia in the famous sealed train by the Germans—was thus, inevitably and reasonably, highly suspect. He was surrounded by a number of very conspiratorial-looking figures, often bearded in an outlandish manner, often Jews, born equivocators who were also rabble-rousers. It was natural to assume that an extreme left-wing party in a land given to revolutionary terror and assassination should be more addicted to violence than all other parties; and, indeed, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and certain others looked just the sort of men to carry bombs in their pockets. In fact the Bolsheviks in opposition eschewed political assassination, not for moral reasons but for reasons of expediency; the Social Revolutionaries were the terrorists. To this image was added Lenin’s actions: his denunciation of all established governments and his appeal to all the workers of the world to unite and overthrow their masters; his denunciation of all existing treaties; his immediate trampling down of the first tender shoots of Russian democracy and his imposition of what amounted to a military dictatorship; his disgraceful separate peace with Germany. The Allied response was emotional rather than reasoned. Troops were sent to bolster up any Russian government which would fight the Germans; but soon they were helping the White generals to overthrow the Bolsheviks in favour of a government pledged to continue the war, and thus keep the German armies from moving across to the Western front, then desperately hard-pressed; they were also required to prevent the vast dumps of war material supplied by the Entente and piled up at Russian ports from falling into German hands. The Allied intervention was never in the least intended to restore either the monarchy or the landlords. In this context it should be remembered that the Whites were not the only ones opposed to the Bolsheviks and to the separate peace. The Social Revolutionaries, who had filled 370 seats in the short-lived Constituent Assembly to the Bolsheviks’ 175, were also fighting hard. They were still in being as a party and at the 5th All-Union Congress of Soviets which met in July 1918, four months after the peace of Brest-Litovsk, they tabled a motion declaring renewed war on Germany. This motion was defeated and the Social Revolutionary leaders were immediately arrested. But the party was far from dead. On 6th July it organised the assassination of the first German Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Count Mirbach, in order to provoke the Germans to military action against the Bolshevik Government. At the same time it launched its one military action against the Moscow Government, which failed. The troops who went over to the Social Revolutionaries and joined in this ill-fated march on Moscow were indistinguishable from the troops who fought against them in the Bolshevik cause.

  Somewhere in this phantasmagoric mix-up was Comrade N. S. Khrushchev, allegedly a trusted political worker from the beginning, in fact a raw recruit to the Red Army. The Red Army was indeed short of political watch-dogs and instructors, but Trotsky, its organiser and commander-in-chief, had high standards. A rough mechanic of twenty-four pitch-forked into the Red Army, then fighting for its life, would have to prove himself under the eye of existing politrabotniki who had joined the party before its seizure of power: only then would he be trusted. Comrade Khrushchev, strong, rough, energetic, and at the same time calculating as he then must have been, no doubt set himself to do precisely this. It is certain that by the time the civil war was over in 1920 he had in fact started to emerge as a useful and loyal figure, but still not a politician. And there is nothing at all in his official civil war record to compare, for example, with Malenkov’s performance. Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov was eight years younger than Khrushchev; but he joined the Red Army in 1919 when he was only seventeen and was almost at once (he was an educated bourgeois, not a mechanic) put to political work, even before he formally joined the party—first as the politrabotnik of a squadron, then of a brigade, then at H.Q. Eastern and Turkestan Front. These are the kind of details which are included, when they exist, in all official political biographies of Soviet leaders. But it was not until Khrushchev had achieved supreme power, and not until he had destroyed Malenkov himself, and also Kaganovich (who knew everything about him) that the propagandists got to work to rewrite this bit of history and built up for him a civil war legend.

  When the civil war was over, Khrushchev went back to Yuzovka to help get coal production going. Malenkov, in contrast, at nineteen, was called straight to Moscow to be trained at the Higher Technical School. Kaganovich, the young Ukrainian revolutionary, only a year older than Khrushchev, was already working hand in glove with Stalin and was sent off to Turkestan to put down the separatist movement before, in 1922, being called back to Moscow as head of the Personnel Department of the Party Central Committee.

  Khrushchev had last seen Yuzovka as a mechanic in the employ of a foreign capitalist. He returned to it as a member of the ruling party, and as assistant manager of one of the expropriated mines. The Bolsheviks were in control of the country, but now they were ruling by terror. Terror, which Lenin had found inexpedient when the Bolsheviks were in opposition, became immediately expedient when they were masters of the prisons and the machine-guns. The Cheka (the Extraordinary Commission to Fight Counter-Revolution and Sabotage) had been set up by Lenin in December 1917. The Red Terror was formally inaugurated in December 1918. The Cheka soon found plenty to do, and within a matter of months had become a virtually autonomous force under Felix Dzerzhinsky. Its autonomy was formally recognised in September 1918. “The All-Russia Cheka is absolutely independent in its activity and is invested with the power to carry out searches, arrests and executions.”2 Dzerzhinsky was an intellectual and highly neurotic Pole whom later generations of Soviet prisoners, and their relatives, were to look back to as a sort of chivalrous knight of a golden age, when terror was still an amateur affair, and when a personal appeal to Dzerzhinsky himself could often result in the righting of an injustice. But if the Cheka itself was autonomous, so, in effect, were local Chekist organisations: these were commanded as often as not by thugs and sadists, and the rank and file were illiterate peasant youths whose natural callousness and indifference to suffering were magnified by the unspeakable cruelties of the civil war.

  Any aspiring Communist activist was utte
rly dependent on the local Cheka for his necessary backing of force—and was himself under constant surveillance from that same Cheka: a false move, an injudicious word, the slightest hint of weakness, of failure of “Bolshevik resolution” in carrying out the harshest tasks, and he himself would be denounced and arrested as an enemy of the people. The twenty-seven-year-old Khrushchev, assistant manager of a mine and now Secretary of the Party cell of that mine, was learning in the Cheka school.

  We have one glimpse of Khrushchev in his first days as a minor Party activist. It is the picture of the burly assistant manager in his cloth cap haranguing the miners who were demanding their back pay. “Everything depends on coal. How can the factories produce boots and shirts if they do not have coal? All you demand you must get with your own hands. No manna from the sky is going to come down to you. So hack away with your picks with all your might!”3

  That story was told the American journalist who went first to Kalinovka, then to Donetsk (late Stalino, late Yuzovka), to see what light he could find on Khrushchev’s origins. Not all the stories told Mr. Martin by men and women who said they had known the young Khrushchev were true: some were demonstrably untrue. But this story has the authentic ring. It is the Khrushchev we know. And, indeed, this is the sort of work Khrushchev must have been doing. There were a million unemployed. The countryside was ravaged by armed bands. All over the country workers were striking and demonstrating, sometimes rising up in violent rebellion, because they were not being paid—more often than not for three or four months on end—and because what money they had would buy nothing. And it was the job of the local Party men, backed by the Cheka, to cajole them, to trick them, to bully them, into going on working. There was nothing else to be done unless Lenin chose to abdicate. This he could not do, even had he wished to. He had brought the country through the civil war, largely represented as a quasi-patriotic war against capitalist invaders. In the course of this struggle he had built up an army and a police force upon which his power reposed. He had driven out the Western allies and the Whites. He had conducted a war against the Poles, which had taken the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw. He had subdued strong separatist movements in the Ukraine, in the Caucasus, in Turkestan. For an internationalist who did not believe in colonialism he had done fairly well: when it was all over he ruled over the whole of the Empire conquered by the Tsars, less only Poland, Finland and Bessarabia. But that Empire was a ruin. It was on men like Comrade Khrushchev, scattered thinly over the whole vast ravaged landscape of the Soviet Union, that he depended to get the economy going again. This had to be done against the background of the worst famine since 1890. There was no light, no heat, no food. The peasants were reduced to eating grass and bark and chewing leather. In extreme cases—but by no means uncommon ones—they ate the corpses of their neighbours.