To force famished and exhausted men to work in these conditions, first to restore what factories there were, to open flooded mines, then to start producing coal, called for a very high degree of toughness and some courage, Comrade Khrushchev filled the bill. His first known contribution to the Communist cause was to help get the mines of Yuzovka back into production. Either while he was still doing this, or immediately afterwards, he started going to school. The date is not certain; but the school, the Donets Mining Technical School, was not founded until May 1921. It was almost certainly not long after Khrushchev had seen his wife, still in her twenties, die of hunger and exhaustion. He had two young children to care for. He had found his talent for organising people and ordering them about. But he was still hardly more than literate. Disregarding the discrepancies between the various official reports, some of which say he worked and educated himself simultaneously, some of which say that late in 1922 he became a whole-time student, it seems likely that the death of his wife in 1920 had a bearing on the matter.4 Be that as it may. By 1923 Khrushchev was beginning to emerge as a politician among students. And after that he was never to work with his hands again. In 1923 he became a poli-trook, or political guide, at the Technical School. The students lived rough in a derelict, half-shattered barracks. It has been suggested that Khrushchev had better quarters because of his political work, but there is no reason to suppose this: a poli-trook was the lowest kind of political animal. I was personally acquainted with two or three of them serving in infantry regiments during the last war. Although they were spared certain fatigues they belonged to the rank and file, lived in billets or dugouts with the rank and file, enjoyed no special privileges, and worked desperately hard: their job, under the battalion Commissar, was to establish a moral ascendency over the men of their company, to interpret the news for them, to lecture endlessly: they functioned as a cross between a company education officer and a police informer. The young Khrushchev would have done all this besides slogging away at his own studies, sleeping on bed-boards with his fellow students: he would have had to farm his children out—whether back in Kalinovka with relations or with acquaintances in Yuzovka, we do not know.5 And it would have been now that he discovered not only a talent for organisation and man-management, to use a horrible phrase, but also for quick book-learning. By 1925, when he completed his course, he was wholly literate, sufficiently indoctrinated with Leninist thinking, and expert in the differences between Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Anarchists, and all other enemies of the people. For these were the days when GPU interrogators (the Cheka had been reorganised into the GPU in December 1921) justified their existence by smelling out counter-revolutionaries and often argued like theologians in their attempts to establish vaguely suspect individuals as Social Revolutionary or Menshevik conspirators. Later the emphasis was to be on wrecking and sabotage; later still, in the great purges of the thirties and thereafter, on espionage and conspiring with foreign powers.
Chapter 4
First Steps of a Very Long Climb
By this time, also, Lenin was dead. He had died on 24th January, 1924. For nearly a year he had lain paralysed and inert after the third of a series of strokes, almost certainly the result of the grave wounds inflicted in August 1918 by the bullets fired by Dora Kaplan-Roid, a Social Revolutionary. He was only fifty-four when he died and, after bringing the Soviet Union through the civil war, he had had to retreat from the frenzied campaign to achieve socialism in one sweep, falling back, in 1921, on his famous New Economic Policy which sought to harness the peasants and the remaining business-men and traders of all kinds to the salvation of the economy by allowing them to work for personal gain. But he was firmly set on the path which Stalin was later to follow. It was Lenin, the internationalist, who sought to impose Bolshevism by force on all the component parts of the Tsarist Empire—and who largely succeeded. It was Lenin, the philosopher, who inaugurated the Cheka and the Red Terror as a calculated act of policy. It was Lenin, the champion of the working-class, who put down in blood and violence popular rising after popular rising: at last broke the hearts of many of his most staunch and idealistic supporters by smashing at Kronstadt on the Baltic the very soldiers and sailors who had carried him to victory in October 1917, now turned against him for perverting the ideals for which they had fought. It was Lenin, the humanitarian, who imposed police rule on that vast and desolated land. His right hand in all this was Leon Trotsky, who was later to spend years of exile bitterly denouncing for his tyrannic acts the man who had had the impertinence to steal the power from him when Lenin died: Joseph Stalin.
Khrushchev never met Lenin. But in his days as a politrook at the technical school in Yuzovka, he heard a great deal about Trotsky, and, increasingly, about Stalin. The battle between these two, the one the flamboyant national figure who had created the Red Army, the other, colourless and unobtrusive, wonderfully calculating, was already joined—though Trotsky with all his brilliance and his catastrophic intellectual arrogance hopelessly underestimated the danger of Stalin’s challenge.
To Trotsky Stalin was a Georgian bandit disguised as a revolutionary. He was the man with the “sickly smile … the yellow eyes … the hangdog look” who clung to Lenin’s coat-tails and was useful as a bureaucratic organiser. He detested Stalin if only because at Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad) he had changed his, Trotsky’s, plan of campaign at a critical moment in the civil war—and won a decisive battle in consequence: it never seems to have occurred to Trotsky that a junior Bolshevik who dared challenge in this way the creator of the Red Army and Lenin’s right-hand must possess certain qualities which were worth serious consideration.
We do not know what Stalin thought about Trotsky, who was his exact contemporary, but far senior to him in Lenin’s eyes. We only know what he said about Trotsky, which is neither here nor there. The probability is that this brooding and vindictive condottiere, who was also a most accomplished administrator, regarded with total contempt and extreme jealousy not only Trotsky but also all those émigré revolutionaries who had flocked back to Russia in 1917—above all the intellectualising Jews, Zinoviev and others as well as Trotsky, who were full of sound and fury but had long been cut off from the Russian land, while he, Stalin, had been fighting and conspiring at home and serving his term in Siberia. At any rate, this is how he behaved. Lenin used him to sort out the problem of the minority nationalities and then, as the Secretary General of the Bolshevik Party, to carry out the sort of administrative duties the importance of which Lenin, who had once said that Ministers were unnecessary (any butcher, baker or candle-stick maker could run a Department of State), had always failed to comprehend. And, as Secretary General of the Party, Stalin saw his opportunity. While Lenin’s companions struck the attitudes, roused the rabble, and tried to cope, not very effectively, with problems of state government, Stalin applied himself to building up a bureaucratic machine which, under his direction, would one day be ready to take the government over. Thus he appointed to his Secretariat a number of men, all young, who felt as he did and whose faces Lenin hardly knew. Stalin was thirty-eight, and so was Trotsky. Apart from Lenin all the great public figures of the Bolshevik Party were in their middle and late thirties. Stalin, for his Secretariat, picked the young Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, twenty-seven at the time of the Revolution, and contemptuously described by Lenin as “the best filing-clerk in Moscow”; the young Lazar Kaganovich, twenty-four; the young Andrei Andreyevich Andreyev, twenty-nine. He was not content with packing the Party Secretariat; he picked other young men to occupy key positions in the provinces—for example, the young Andrei Zhdanov, twenty-one. These men, and others, were all prepared to back Stalin through thick and thin against an older generation when the time came for the showdown.
Khrushchev, in these formative years, was still at school, and coming up to thirty years old. Until Lenin died in 1924 he must have been perfectly unaware of the great struggle brewing up behind the scenes in Moscow. But before he graduated and
went out into the field, in 1925, the fight was already coming out into the open. It was essentially a power struggle, but it was presented as a conflict of ideological principle, very much as, forty years later, the great battle between Khrushchev’s Russia and Mao’s China was to be presented as a conflict of ideological principle. It was also, increasingly, a struggle between those, with Trotsky, who believed in “perpetual revolution” and saw the new Soviet Union’s only hope, backward and ravaged as she was and desperately in need of material assistance from abroad, as the active instigator of revolution in more advanced lands, and those who saw that Lenin’s hopes of a general European revolution were illusory: these saw that Russia was going to be encircled by hostile powers for many years, and that if the Soviet Union was ever to mean anything at all and be made viable it would have to concentrate on setting its own house in order first, leaving the foreigners to take care of themselves. This general idea came later to be known as “Socialism in One Country”; a more accurate slogan would have been “Russia First”; and Russia First was to be realised by a devious young Georgian from the hills, a man with a strong streak of violent irresponsibility, a man whose knowledge of Marxism was confined to what Lenin had told him, a member of a proud and cruel race who detested and despised the Russians as colonial oppressors. It was an improbable situation.
In 1925, when the public fight was in full swing, Khrushchev, thirty-one, was given his first appointment as a full-time professional Party functionary, an apparatchik, or member of the apparatus. It was an apparatus of whose existence Lenin had been scarcely aware, and it was controlled by Stalin. Khrushchev had never been nearer to Moscow than Kalinovka—unless one of the retreats in the civil war had swept him back with it for a time. Khrushchev was not appointed by Stalin, but he was given his job by one of Stalin’s lesser men, Comrade Moyseyenko, Party Secretary of the Yuzovka Region, or oblast. He was appointed to be Party Secretary of the Petrovsko-Marinski District, or raion, of the Yuzovka Region; and this was an important job. He had a parish of some 400 square miles, half the size of Warwickshire, in a predominantly industrial area which, however, contained large stretches of open farmland between the factory towns. Here he was the supreme boss, subject only to Moyseyenko in Yuzovka and to the surveillance of the GPU. It must have been a fairly hopeful job. The period 1925-8 was a sort of golden age of the Revolution. The peasants were at work, “enriching” themselves; the mines and factories were functioning; unemployment had dropped; the predatory bands of mutinous peasants, soldiers, workers, Ukrainian nationalists, who for years had terrorised the countryside, were wiped out; all that remained were the wild children, the besprisorni, orphaned by the civil war and the famine, who still would not settle down. Some were rounded up and put to work on irrigation schemes, railways, canals (Khrushchev himself is supposed to have started a hostel to reclaim some of these wretched, ragged bands). More were shot. But the country was in working trim, and Nikita Khrushchev was responsible for 400 square miles of it—out of a total of nearly two million square miles. His new wife, Nina Petrovna, a school-teacher, was to bear him two more children and develop into the comfortable, sensible and dignified figure who, years later, was to make such a favourable impact on the West. He was quite a personage; and he went to work with a will.
In one of his few references to his early days Khrushchev told an audience at Kiev: “When I was working as Secretary of a District Party Committee in the Donbas, I used to pay calls on the villages, and I would get into a sledge—at that time we had sledges instead of motor-cars—and wrap myself up in a sheepskin coat, and the frost would not bite me.” He was some way out into the country, due south of Yuzovka, and nearly ten miles from the nearest railway station. All his travelling in and out of Marinka, the capital of his little satrapy, had to be done by sledge in winter, by gig or pony-trap in summer. But the interesting thing about that little reminiscence is that even in those early days he got out and about—which is what we would expect from the man who, when all the Soviet Union was his territory, would travel about and get out among the people as no Soviet leader has done before or since.
Russian officials, Russian factory managers, building constructors, farm-overseers, or whatever, are notorious for their extreme reluctance to get mud on their boots. For the traditional Russian official or manager a large part of the advantage of being an official or a manager is that he need never again go out into the mud or the snow or the slush or the summer dust: he has qualified himself to sit indoors in winter, generating a classic fug, or in the shade on the veranda in summer, “managing” or snoozing or drinking away the tedious hours.
The Revolution hardly changed this at all. The old Tsarist officials, men with a certain education and a certain social background, were superseded by new men who were only too pleased to adopt the old official ways. They soon had a new bureaucracy in full working order, composed almost exclusively of men who were to make their entire careers as Party functionaries, or apparatchiki. Since our hero was to be one of these, in the end supreme among them, and since he moved up through the apparatus—Stalin’s apparatus—step by step, it is desirable to have a picture of that apparatus.
At the time of Lenin’s death, i.e. at the time when Khrushchev took up his first appointment in the field, the Party consisted of about one million members out of a population of 140 million. These were the élite of the new society. Some two-thirds of them were spare-time Party workers, forming Party cells in factories and institutions of all kinds, as well as on the land. Their task was to set an example to all those with whom they came in contact in their work and their recreation. In 1925 the great majority of these were dedicated men and women passionately certain that they were building a heaven on earth, ready to sacrifice themselves—and everybody else—to the demands and interests of the Party, to endure unpopularity, to be sent to outlandish regions. They lived for the cause. They were worker priests in a secular religion. It was only later that membership of the Communist Party became a sine qua non for all careerists and climbers, for all who wanted to get on.
Controlling this lay army were the professional Communists: the organisers and the actual dictators. In theory they derived their powers from the rank and file. The periodical Party Congresses, the All-Union Congress and the Republican Congresses, consisted of elected delegates from all parts of the Union and all parts of the individual Republics. At each All-Union Congress one of the main tasks was to elect a new Central Committee, to which all power was delegated until the next Congress. This Central Committee, meeting comparatively frequently, elected its permanent officers and standing committees. Supreme among these was the Political Bureau (Politburo), which was the standing policy-making body of the Central Committee—i.e. of the Party, i.e. of the Soviet Union. There was also a Secretariat, headed by the Secretary General, which was responsible for the execution of Politburo decisions and for overseeing the Party organisation. The actual business of organisation and disciplining was carried out by the Orgburo and the Party Control Commission. Already, when Khrushchev became an apparatchik in 1925, Stalin, as Secretary General, was in virtual control of these bodies: the men who were elected to them by the Central Committee were increasingly his nominees. The Secretariat, the Orgburo and the Control Commission between them were directly responsible for all major appointments in the All-Union Party and, indirectly, for Republican appointments.
There was then no separate Party organisation for the largest of all the Republics, the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, or RFSSR. Thus the General Secretary in Moscow could himself make appointments over a vast area from Leningrad to Astrakhan, from Novgorod to Vladivostock. He also appointed the key men in the Republican Party offices—e.g. in the Ukraine.
The chain of command worked down through Republic to Region (Oblast) to District (Raion). Thus, in the Ukraine, the Ukrainian Party had its headquarters in Kharkov, then the capital. Under Kharkov there were a number of Regional Committees (Obkoms); City Committees (Gorkoms); a
nd District Committees (Raikoms). But Moscow could, and on occasion did, by-pass the Republican Committee and put pressure immediately on the Regional Committees. These had the most critical role of all. They were responsible to the Kremlin for everything that went on in their Regions, from industrial and agricultural production to political education, discipline and morale. They were caught between the rigid and quite ruthless demands of the Centre and the hostility and inertia of the masses. They had to rely absolutely on their District Secretaries both to squeeze the masses (aided by the GPU) and to persuade them and exhort them, to translate remote paper decisions into practical politics—to keep the wheels turning, in a word. The only active help the District Secretaries could rely on came from the dedicated part-time workers referred to above. What the masses had to produce was coal and steel and building materials, above all food.
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