It was in this job that Khrushchev soon began to shine. As we have seen, unlike most District Secretaries, he enjoyed getting about among the people; he was not afraid of them; he could talk to them and cajole them and bully them; in the last resort he could call on the GPU. He depended for lay help, as it were, on the dedicated Party workers, who, in the Ukraine, were thinner on the ground than in most areas of the Union, and on the village, town and city Soviets, or Councils—seen not as independent democratic bodies but as instruments of Party power. The chief value of these Soviets, a value which diminished progressively up the ladder (a village Soviet was a genuine parish meeting at which grievances and constructive ideas of all kinds could be expressed; whereas the Supreme Soviet meeting infrequently in Moscow was simply a rubber stamp for decisions taken by the Politburo), was as a safety-valve, as a means of giving ordinary people a sense of participation, and as a litmus paper. Through the village and town Soviets a District Party Secretary could easily discover just what the people could bear and what they could not bear. The other great channel of information upwards came from the police, whose reports were remarkably accurate and objective.1
We have only a fragmentary record of the workings of the Party and the police in the Stalino Region at this or at any other time. But we do have remarkably complete—and unique— records of what was going on in the Smolensk Oblast, in Byelorussia, some hundreds of miles to the north. And these enable us to get a fairly clear idea of the conditions obtaining at the time when Khrushchev was beginning to make his name as a promising apparatchik. For some reason the Party and police archives of the Smolensk Region were neither destroyed nor removed to safety when the Germans approached in 1941. The Germans seized a mountain of paper and sent it back to Berlin, where it stayed, unsorted, until the Americans got hold of it and shipped it back to Washington.2
Even in the Smolensk Region there was still a great deal of noisy opposition to Bolshevik rule, strikes, demonstrations, the shouting out and writing up on walls of anti-Leninist slogans. And this was a Region where the Bolsheviks had long been stronger than in the Ukraine. As the NEP progressed and the roaming bandit gangs were suppressed and the peasants found that it was worth while to till their fields, things became much quieter. But in the industrial areas conditions were such that the factory workers, far from benefiting from the Revolution, their own revolution, starved of food and consumer goods, were in a perpetual ferment. The Social Revolutionaries, outlawed as a party, were still active. The little band of Bolshevik apparatchiki lived islanded in a sullen and hostile land, like an occupying power. Urged on by the Regional Committee, which had at all costs to satisfy Kharkov and Moscow, detested as the representatives of a remote and dictatorial government by the workers among whom they had to move, the raion officials were driven to band themselves into a sort of compact family, buttressing themselves with their friends and living a life increasingly cut off from the countryside as a whole. Since the Regional officials depended on them utterly for their own jobs, the whole apparatus became a family establishment. Everybody in it depended on everybody else, and, as in all such closed societies, the moral tone soon began to deteriorate heavily. Everybody covered up for everybody else. The Russians have always been drinkers, and the provincial party bosses had easy access to drink. Drink, indeed, was the only amenity available. They were drunk half the time. Starting off by turning a blind eye to the excesses of their coarser companions, they soon descended to their level. While in Moscow the great “ideological” battle raged between Stalin and his challengers, in the provinces nobody paid much attention to all this, seeing in it nothing more than a quarrel for power among the top bosses, trying to decide with a cool eye where their bread and drink were coming from. Thus, in Smolensk, the Regional First Secretary, Comrade Beika, was said to have a wife in every town under his jurisdiction, and when he was called to higher duties in Moscow in 1926 he was succeeded by an honest worker called Pavlychenko, who continued and developed Beika’s practices. “Everyone in the Party organisation drinks—from the top to the bottom there’s drinking. District Party Conferences were just one big drinking party,” said one of the witnesses at the inquiry which followed.3
The Smolensk inquiry took place in the spring of 1928. It was conducted by two investigators from the Central Control Commission in Moscow and the result was that Pavlychenko and his senior colleagues were hauled up to Moscow and demoted. There followed a purge, carried out by a member of the Presidium of the Central Control Commission, who, at a two-day meeting, made a revealing report:
“The Katushka factory, which was one of the proletarian strongholds of the province and enlisted 50 per cent of its workers in either the Party or the Komsomol, was revealed as a nest of bribery and promiscuity. Female workers were taken advantage of by the foremen. In the Yartsevo factory there had been seven suicides of workers, because of the indifference of the Party leadership to their grievances. Old revolutionaries had turned into drunkards and indulged in sexual license. One volkom secretary had had five wives in the course of one year.”4
Smolensk was no doubt a particularly bad case, but it was not uncharacteristic. In 1930 Malenkov, then making his way upward in the backrooms of Stalin’s Secretariat, contributed to the periodical, Party Construction, an article devoted to the shortcomings of the Ukrainian Party. This article contained a particular reference to Khrushchev’s own Regional organisation as it was at the end of 1927 and early in 1928—i.e. at the time of the Smolensk scandal:
“About two years ago the organisation of the Stalino Region went through a deep and difficult crisis in its Party leadership. At the end of 1927 and the beginning of 1928, the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the Ukrainian Communist Party (Bolshevik) brought to light the rottenness of the leadership of the Region and part of its cadres. In its resolution of March, 1928, the Central Control Commission of the Ukrainian Communist Party (Bolshevik), took note of the systematic drinking bouts among the upper strata of the Regional Party organisation, of ‘self-provisioning’, of the ineffective struggle of the Bureau of the Regional Committee against waste, bad management, and the whitewashing of individual responsible workers, of the use of means of oppression by the Bureau of the Regional Committee against comrades who protested against shameful conduct, and other unwholesome occurrences.”5
Malenkov then dwelt on the purge of the Stalino leadership, which (writing in 1930) he said was still incomplete. It was taking so long because corruption, etc. had bitten deep down into the lower echelons of the organisation.
Khrushchev himself, in the years leading up to 1927, was emerging as a member of the “higher strata” of the Regional organisation, which was still run by Moyseyenko, who had appointed him to Marinka. And this was the atmosphere in which he lived and worked. In the purge which followed he was moved. Moyseyenko himself was not thrown out of the apparatus, as his Smolensk colleagues were, but he was demoted from the key industrial Region of Stalino to Poltava, in the agricultural wilderness. Khrushchev was moved to an unspecified appointment in Kiev. He was moved by the supreme boss of the Ukraine, the man responsible for carrying out the Stalino purge, Lazar Kaganovich, since 1925 First Secretary of the Ukrainian Party and, as such, viceroy over 35 million souls.
This move was a promotion rather than a check. It seems unlikely, in view of his later habits, that the young Khrushchev stood out against drinking. There is nothing to suggest that he was “oppressed” by his corrupt bosses. He was very much one of them. But he was also showing himself outstandingly able and outstandingly willing in the cause of Stalin. From 1926 onwards he was already a marked man, and he was already, far more than the great majority of his ranking colleagues elsewhere, deeply involved in Stalin’s personal drive for power. His career from 1925 to the end of 1927 when he was transferred to Kiev was quite remarkable for a raw District Secretary.
In the normal course of events he had attended late in 1925 the 9th All-Ukrainian Party Congress, with Kagan
ovich in the chair. The fact that he was there as the delegate from the Petrovsko-Marinsky District was enough to indicate that he was the true master of that District. He did not speak at any of the formal sessions, as far as the record shows. But his master, Moyseyenko, spoke long and loud, viciously denouncing all those, including some of the most distinguished Bolsheviks, who refused to endorse whole-heartedly the Stalin line in the struggle with Trotsky and others.6 But he clearly made an impression off-stage, because, almost at once, he was nominated as one of the delegates to the far more important All-Union Party Congress, which was held in Moscow in December 1925. This was the 14th Congress, in which Stalin defeated Kamenev and Zinoviev, his associates in the troika, or triumvirate, which had run the Party since Lenin’s death. They had been very necessary to Stalin in his initial humiliation of Trotsky at the 13th Congress in May 1924. Now, with Trotsky on the sidelines, they attacked Stalin on the issue of “Socialism in One Country” and in the matter of more liberal agricultural policies. Stalin, for the purposes of this argument, joined forces with Bukharin (who really believed in a liberal agricultural policy), but only for the time being. The really distinguishing aspect of the 14th Party Congress, which was a climacteric in the history of the Soviet Union, was the suppression of free debate within the Party itself. Lenin had suppressed free debate within the country by his dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and his creation of the Cheka. Stalin took matters a stage further and suppressed free debate within the Party itself. In December 1925 this was done by rowdyism: the Congress was packed with his supporters, who simply shouted down all opposition, and Comrade Moyseyenko is on record as being one of the rowdiest. Khrushchev did not speak, but no doubt he shouted with the rest—and went back to Stalino with Moyseyenko well-pleased with Stalin’s overwhelming victory: 599 votes to 65. There were 664 voting delegates and 641 non-voting delegates, of whom Khrushchev was one: just over 1,300 all told, representing just over a million Party members. Khrushchev, only seven years a Bolshevik, was now in the first 1,300. In the following year, in October 1926, he made his first formal public speech at a Ukrainian Party Conference in Kharkov. Under the eyes of Kaganovich, shortly to be called to Moscow as one of Stalin’s principal aides, he made a speech which put him a move ahead of Stalin.
Chapter 5
More Stalinist than Stalin
Years later, soon after Stalin’s death and when Khrushchev was moving to the top, I asked a Russian friend how this man with his incessant flow of talk, public and semi-public, his torrent of indiscretions, had possibly managed to keep quiet and behave discreetly during all his years of more or less anonymous service under Stalin, when nobody at all was allowed to talk out of turn: the strain of silence must have been unendurable. My Russian laughed: “He talked all the time! He has talked without stopping ever since anyone knew him. Sometimes he talked out of turn and was slapped down. Often he jumped the gun. But Stalin let him talk and found him useful. The only thing was that in those days he wasn’t much reported.”
Going back over the records, such as they are, one can see the truth of this. Certainly Khrushchev talked his way up at Yuzovka, then at Marinka and Stalino—much the same bullying, coaxing, no-nonsense talk that he later produced on the national, then the international stage. Then, in 1926, he started talking for the record—at Party Conferences (lower down the scale than Congresses) and meetings of all kinds. But, as far as the outside world was concerned, his speeches did not exist—though some of them are recorded in the minutes of those conferences.
This first recorded speech, at Kharkov, was a very interesting performance. Khrushchev was thirty-two. He had made up his mind where he was going and what was necessary for the country and for him. He had moved among the people of his district in a way uncharacteristic of the junior apparatchik of those days. He had seen some sort of order being produced out of chaos, and had himself helped to produce it. He had been convinced of the need for a strong hand—and, by nature, he himself had a strong hand. Only a few miles outside his district, at the famous Shakhty mine, demonstrating strikers had been shot down by the armed police. The strikers were the sort of men that Khrushchev was, with Khrushchev’s background; but Khrushchev was now on the side of order. He had his own potential strikers to cope with. Order meant discipline, above all labour discipline, without which nothing could be built. I have no doubt at all that when, thirty years later, Khrushchev told the Yugoslavs that their Workers’ Councils were no substitute for discipline and authority, he was thinking back to the brutal and chaotic days when he had helped to break the resistance of his comrades, the workers of the Stalino Region, if necessary by force—and, of course, for their own, for the country’s good.
He had been to Moscow and seen Stalin in action, smashing with his claque and his strong-arm squads at the 14th Party Congress the theorising windbags—as Zinoviev and Kamenev would have appeared to him. He had read Pravda digging the grave not of Soviet democracy (Lenin had done that in person) but of democracy within the Party, under the slogan, “Against discussion!” forbidding the very idea of open discussion within the Party, “because it shakes the very foundations of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the unity of the Party, and its dominant position in the country; because it serves the cause of petty groups which hanker for political democracy.”1 And this would have made sense to a man conscious of great practical gifts and with a naturally authoritarian temperament, impatient of subtleties of all kinds. He had read, in October of that year, the “declaration of submission” to the Party (i.e. to Stalin), signed by the defeated opposition leaders—Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Piatakov, Sokolnikov (all of them later to be killed by Stalin), which showed who the master was. And at the opening of the Kharkov Conference, the very next day, he heard Kaganovich pouring scorn on all those who said that democracy within the Party had been destroyed. Intra-Party democracy, Kaganovich said, with remarkable semantic agility, did not mean that everyone had the right to question the decisions of the majority: it simply meant drawing the masses into political activity under the Party’s wing.2 And when Kaganovich was sharply challenged by a comrade from Odessa (the Kharkov conference was by no means steamrollered by the Stalinists) Khrushchev got up to speak. While the Central Committee in Moscow, dominated by Stalin, was going out of its way to conciliate the Opposition, having won its victory, Khrushchev in Kharkov was setting the tone for the next stage, moving ahead of Stalin: he proved himself at the same time a polished master of what later came to be known as Stalinist invective and the Stalinist manner of flattening opponents by imputing bad faith and by brute, unsupported assertions:
“It is wholly clear to me that Comrade Golubenko [the man from Odessa] has intentionally slandered the Party and that he is lying about the situation in our Party organisation. If Comrade Golubenko says that the changes in our Party organs were achieved only by packing the ranks, then this is bare-faced calumny. … In my opinion to-day’s speech of the opportunist Golubenko wholly confirms the unscrupulous and superficial nature of the declaration of our Opposition. Our Party organisations require from the Opposition that they totally submit to the decisions of the Fourteenth Congress and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party. I believe that the declaration written by the Opposition is not a sincere declaration. Unless the Opposition entirely recognises the decisions of the Fourteenth Party Congress, there can be no question of collaborating with them. Should this not be the case, then we ought to demand from the highest Party organs that they apply repressive measures against the incorrigible members of the Opposition, regardless of their former merits and positions.”3
Stalin, it should be noted, had accepted the sincerity of the declaration of submission—at least for the record and for the time being. Khrushchev, in questioning it, threw the whole matter wide open.
What lay behind this performance? Was the tough young comrade from Stalino, with his bullet head, shaved close, his vehement, bullying style, speaking for himself? Had he calculated,
correctly, what Stalin’s next move would be, and was he determined to be first in the field and in at the kill? Was he, in a word, playing a hunch, and taking a gamble on impressing Kaganovich? Was his outburst the simple, uncalculated outcome of irrepressible moral indignation?
Certainly not the last. Khrushchev knew, because he had heard her at the 14th Congress in Moscow, that Lenin’s widow, Krupskaya, a venerated figure, had protested against Stalin’s treatment of the Opposition. She had been silenced and her protests rejected for reasons of expediency, and everybody knew it. Further, it seems unlikely to say the least that a young man on the threshold of his career would have taken the risk of speaking out of turn at that most critical moment. It seems far more likely that he was being used. There was no need for him to impress Kaganovich. That must have been done already, otherwise Khrushchev would never have been sent from the Ukraine to Moscow for the 14th Congress. The all but certain answer is that Stalin, while appearing to accept the submission of the Opposition in order to present himself in a conciliatory light, was already planning his next move—and that he had seen to it that certain of the more zealous comrades in the provinces would start raising a demand for that next move, to prepare the ground in advance. Kaganovich, already very close to Stalin, would make his dispositions accordingly, and the truculent young peasant from Kalinovka, who had shown that he knew how to combine active field-work with a sharp interest in higher strategy, would be given his instructions. He was to say, what he no doubt believed, that the Party was being too soft in its treatment of the Opposition: it had better look out. In that case the only risk the young Khrushchev took was that Stalin should later change his mind, come to terms with the Opposition, and throw to the wolves all those, the young Khrushchev among them, who had pressed too hard. Even if this was a large risk (and it was not) it was a calculated risk, very different from the reckless risk involved in playing a hunch, in leaping seriously ahead of Stalin; and Khrushchev was to show in his later life that he was deeply addicted to the calculated risk—which was not really a risk at all: as, for example, when he threatened Britain and France with long-range missiles at the time of Suez—but when he was certain that the crisis was effectively over; as, for example, with his great speech against Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in 1956.
Khrushchev Page 5