He also had the tremendous and uncovenanted advantage of speaking the truth when he accused Trotsky, Zinoviev and the rest of “insincerity” in their act of submission: it was Stalin in his pretended belief in their good faith who was acting the hypocrite. Of course they were insincere, as all confessions or recantations or submissions obtained by force majeure are insincere. Through all the decades of Stalin’s rule this charge of insincerity, correct but perfectly irrelevant, was to be the burden of a thousand thousand accusations. Vyshinsky screamed it unceasingly during the great purge trials of the middle thirties. It was to outlive Stalin. After the smashing of Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and all the so-called “Anti-Party Group” which marked Khrushchev’s accession to something like supreme power, his own supporters at meeting after meeting were to accuse Bulganin, Pervukhin, Saburov and others of insincerity in their “self-criticisms,” on the face of things accepted as genuine by Khrushchev himself, and to demand more drastic punishment—clearly indicating that Khrushchev himself at that time was playing with the idea of further action against his own defeated opposition.
It was thus at the Kharkov Party Conference in 1927 that one of the main infinitely recurrent elements of the Stalinist pattern of oppression was established, and it was established by Khrushchev, in league with Kaganovich, Stalin’s right-hand in the Ukraine, when, on the face of it, he was still no more than a very junior Party officer from Marinka.
He was on the way up. At some time in the following year he was moved from Marinka to Stalino itself. And in November 1927 he made another speech, this time at the 10th Ukrainian Party Congress in Kiev, this time, by all the signs, the outcome of his own thinking. It was a contribution on questions of Party organisation, and the main sense of it was an argument for increased centralisation of Party control in the provinces; for the independence of the District Party Committees to be reduced (Khrushchev had just been promoted to a higher level than the District!) and for the curtailment of elections to Party cells and of District Party conferences—all with a very clear eye to the reduction of the number of occasions on which Party members could engage in critical discussion and to the facilitation of authoritarian control from the Centre.4 The proposals were presented in a fairly innocuous way. They were not discussed at the time, but they were to form part of the pattern of the future.
These two speeches, unimportant in the context of Stalin’s own grand design, were of extreme importance in the development of Khrushchev. They show that his character was formed, that he was a convinced believer in authoritarianism, and that his ambition had taken control: he had become a pace-maker for Kaganovich, and therefore for Stalin, and he was already committed by conviction to the development of authoritarian rule which was to be the distinguishing feature of Stalin’s career. As a newly-fledged Regional Party official with a particular interest in Party organisation, he had deliberately cut himself off from his less thrusting comrades with their doubts, their uncertainties, their human inertia, and identified himself with the great machine then taking rapid shape, of which he was still only a very minor part. At thirty-three, in Stalino, he had decided where he was going. He was going where the power lay, and he was shaking himself free from the loyalties of his early manhood. It was at this moment that the great purge of Stalino took place, but Khrushchev was not punished. He was sent to Kiev.
This great and beautiful city, a city of trees and gardens and broad avenues built on a great hill high above the Dnieper, looking out over that historic waterway to Moscow and the East, to where sky and land blend in an invisible horizon, was the birthplace of Christian Russia. It was down that great river that the Vikings came from the North on their way to Constantinople, and from Constantinople they brought back Christianity to Kiev and founded a dynasty to rule over the Russian settlements clustered on its banks. Kiev was a holy place, more of the West than of the East. Later, under the Tartar occupation, it lost its supremacy to Moscow, the Muscovite princes proving themselves more amenable to the Tartar over-lordship and zealous in collecting tribute for the Golden Horde in exchange for privilege. As time went on the Kiev Russians and the Muscovite Russians, the Little Russians and the Great Russians, developed distinguishing characteristics. Under the absolutism of the Great Russian rulers, and their blood mixed heavily with Finnish and Tartar contributions, the Great Russians became the servile instruments of an imperial and military house; the Little Russians on their rich, black soil, laced with their Cossack enclaves, were, by contrast, stubborn, hard-working and proud. Their history grew apart from the history of Muscovy. After the withdrawal of the Tartars they fell under Lithuanian, then Polish rule. Muscovy did not take over until the seventeenth century. But to this day many Ukrainians dream of their own sovereign state and despise the Great Russians as idle and feckless and submissive. Khrushchev, in spite of all beliefs to the contrary, was not a Ukrainian by birth; but it is beyond all doubt that his life-long association with the Ukraine has had a deep effect on him. Many years later he was to surround himself in Moscow with a solid block of Ukrainian officials of the toughest kind—a sort of counter-colonisation.
In 1927, when he went to Kiev as a functionary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, he was moving decisively towards one of the three great centres of Soviet power: these were Moscow, Leningrad and Kharkov (it was only later that Kiev became once again the capital of the Ukraine). Leningrad had been Zinoviev’s city, and, under Zinoviev, it had started its career as a challenger to Moscow. Lenin had moved the government from St. Petersburg to Moscow in order to emphasise the Russianness of Soviet power: St. Petersburg had always been the window on the West, as it is to this day. Zinoviev had been broken at the 14th Party Congress and the city won for Stalin, who put there as his viceroy Sergei Kirov, one of his toughest and ablest supporters, whose assassination, perhaps on Stalin’s instigation, was to unloose the great purges of the thirties. The Ukraine had already been won for Stalin by Kaganovich. And it was Kaganovich, as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party who drew Khrushchev more completely into his extremely powerful apparatus. The object of this transfer was to give this powerful, impetuous yet level-headed young tough from Stalino a spell in one of the important centres of the new Party bureaucracy and to see how he shaped as an administrator. Within a year Kaganovich was called to Moscow to be a Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ail-Union Party, and almost at once Khrushchev followed him. After that, until Khrushchev turned on his old master and destroyed him in 1957, he was never far from Kaganovich’s side.
Chapter 6
To Moscow! Perseverance and Intrigue
Khrushghev was now fast approaching the first great crisis of his life, in which everything he had so carefully built up might have been lost for ever. But his personal crisis was so intimately bound up with the greatest crisis of Stalin’s own career, which was also a climacteric in the history of the Soviet Union, that it is necessary to stand away from Khrushchev for a moment and look at what was happening to Stalin—and to Russia.
In 1925, as we have seen, Stalin had received the submission of the Zinoviev opposition; but, as Khrushchev himself had said at Kharkov, it had been an insincere submission. And the opposition continued to underestimate Stalin. On the anniversary celebrations of the Revolution in November 1927 Trotsky and Zinoviev still dared to organise public demonstrations and lead independent “opposition” processions through the streets of Moscow and Leningrad. For this act of defiance both men were at once formally expelled from the Party, and at the 15th Party Congress in the following month seventy-five of their sympathisers followed them into excommunication. Stalin had been glad to use Kamenev in his initial fight with Trotsky, but at the 15th Party Congress in December 1927, he said of his old comrade’s speech that it was “the most lying, pharisaical, scoundrelly and rascally of all the opposition speeches that have been made from this platform.”1 At this Congress what was later to be known as the “Left Opposition” was shattered for ever; but already a new oppo
sition was forming, headed by some of the men who had most decisively helped Stalin in his previous victories: Rykov, who had succeeded Lenin as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, or Prime Minister, Bukharin, the brilliant but unreliable intellectual of the Party, and Tomsky, the Trade Union Leader. These were the leaders of the new “Right Opposition.”
The crisis in Stalin’s career was not produced by his struggle with the “Right Opposition”—the opposition of the Bukharinites, so called to distinguish it from the “Left Opposition” of Trotsky, and, later, Zinoviev, etc. This disintegrated in terror with scarcely a fight. The crisis arose as a result of his struggle with the peasants, who were much tougher than their self-appointed champions among the Bolshevik intellectuals.
Until 1927 Stalin had been devoting by far the greater part of his very considerable energies to manoeuvring against his opponents and consolidating his grip on his new Party machine. He had contributed no ideas of his own to the conduct of either domestic or foreign affairs, apparently content to see the country make its slow recovery from the ravages of war, revolution, civil war and famine under the general direction of Lenin’s NEP. During these years he appeared as a moderate in all matters of high policy, contemptuous of extremism either on the right or on the left; and this appearance in all probability coincided with his own convictions. The vast chaotic land, its governing class destroyed, had to be pulled together, and the only way to pull it together was to encourage all classes to work together in their own interests. Intellectual theorists of all kinds he held in deep contempt, though he did not mind picking their brains; fanatical ideologists were beneath his contempt. He had entertained strong reservations about certain of Lenin’s teachings; but he would take things from Lenin which he would take from nobody else. In practice, like any ambitious politician, he trimmed. He was against antagonising the peasants by pushing collectivisation too hard; he poured scorn on the idea of expropriating the kulaks; schemes for rapid super-industrialisation he rejected as absurd and impracticable; he was in favour of slow, steady and organic progress towards material prosperity and the development of socialism. The men closest to him were Molotov, young and still obscure, who acted not only as his Bolshevik conscience (it had been Molotov who, at twenty-seven, had striven in the background to keep the Party on the right lines before Lenin’s return from exile in April 1917) but also as his chief-of-staff; Klementi Efremovich Voroshilov, the one-time sergeant-major and hard-drinking hero of the civil war; Sergei Mironovich Kirov, a ruthless young man of immense dynamism, great practical sense, and a certain far-ranging imagination; Kaganovich, the strongest, the most ruthless and most able organiser and manager in the country. With these, and a few others, he took council. Behind them, not consulted but eager to serve, were the brightest newcomers, including Malenkov and Zhdanov, already at home at the very heart of the Party machine. Behind these were the tough and violent young commissars—as the professional party workers, the apparatchiki, were universally known.
“Everywhere there were new elections,” wrote Pasternak in Doctor Zhivago of the first winter of the Revolution, “for the running of housing, trade, industry and municipal services. Commissars were being appointed to each, men in black leather jerkins, with unlimited powers and an iron will, armed with means of intimidation and revolvers, who shaved little and slept less.”2 Now, ten years later, the men in black leather jerkins had stolen the country from the revolutionary dreamers. They had the power and they were determined to keep it. They were impatient and intolerant and they were determined to make things work; everything, everybody, that stood in their way they would sweep aside with merciless single-mindedness. They dramatised their ruthlessness, and, glorying in it, made themselves out far worse than most of them really were. They despised the old order with a total and uncomprehending blankness; but fellow revolutionaries who still dreamed dreams, who showed themselves humane, or who argued and discussed and theorised in the traditional Russian manner, they hated and feared. Many of them hated Jews. Stalin, the born organiser, the man with an iron will, the anti-dreamer, was their hope.
And Stalin was going to need them. He had been fairly easygoing: get things properly organised, clear the rhetoric out of the way, and the country would soon begin to sort itself out. But suddenly, in the moment of his personal triumph, he found he had been wrong. The shouting over the 15th Party Congress had scarcely died down when Russia was found to be on the edge of another famine. Unless the towns and cities were to starve, unless industry was to founder, the Government had to extract immediately another two million tons of grain from the peasants. By the early summer the collectivisation was in full swing: Stalin, reacting to a dire emergency with convulsive, almost paranoic, violence, had embarked on a course which he had never planned—which, indeed, he had actively opposed— which was to destroy the lives of millions, which was to bring the country to the very edge of ruin, and which was to shatter the agricultural economy and alienate the peasantry for decades to come.
The story of the collectivisation and of the first Five-year Plan is so familiar that it need not be retold. As Stalin himself confessed to Winston Churchill, this terrible action was more critical for the Soviet Union than any of the crises of the second world war.3 That is saying a good deal. After what amounted to a civil war against the peasants, with whole villages being driven into the collectives at gun-point, with the physical liquidation, by firing-squad, deportation, or starvation, of all the most able and enterprising villagers, Soviet agriculture lay in ruins. In their bitter and passionate resistance to being forced off their own land, the peasants slaughtered their livestock, destroyed their implements, burnt their crops rather than let the State lay hands on them. In the end the State triumphed. But the field of victory was desolation. In 1929 there had been 34 million horses, 70 million cattle, 130 million sheep and goats. In 1933 there was famine of the bitterest kind. Immense areas of land were untitled and unsown (the peasants ate what seed there was). There were less than 17 million horses, 30 million cattle, 40 million sheep and goats.4 Even when the fields were got working again, agriculture was a shadow of itself. Only the poorest, the feeblest of the peasants remained to work the new collectives, and these were sullen, dazed, and shocked. By the eve of the German invasion in 1941 Soviet agriculture had still not been restored to the 1929 level of productivity.
This terrible interlude is of importance to us for three reasons. First for the light it throws on the character of Stalin, the man whom Khrushchev chose to support, body and soul; secondly because of its effect on the development of the Soviet Union, which persists until this day, and on the minds of the men responsible for that development; third because it was to be Khrushchev himself, over twenty years later, who was to make the first serious attempt to redeem Soviet agriculture, and, later still, to make the first honest admission of its backwardness— though, even then, without stating the basic cause of this backwardness. For good measure, it was Khrushchev’s failure to achieve his agricultural aims which helped to bring about his ultimate downfall in 1964.
It was in 1929 that Stalin first revealed himself as a hysteric. Until then he had impressed himself on all his colleagues as sober, calculating and neutral in tone—if with a marked streak of malice. The manoeuvres whereby he had concentrated so much power in his own hands had, to all appearances, been the manoeuvres of an organisation-man with a natural bent for intrigue. The actual policies over which he had presided had been cautious and middle-of-the-road. Now under the impact of the discovery that the system was not working, that the gradual industrialisation of the Soviet Union was on the way to failure because of hunger in the towns, that the poor peasants working their own land were producing only enough to feed themselves and that the more prosperous and enterprising peasants, the kulaks, were holding the towns up to ransom, all caution was thrown to the winds. It was as though the man who by sheer will-power and ruthlessness had smashed the pretensions of his most able colleagues had suddenly decided
that with a further exercise of will-power and ruthlessness he could smash the opposition of millions of unorganised peasants who were standing between him and the fulfilment of his very modest plans for the development of socialism in one country. And the way he set about things showed those who could use their eyes a glimpse of the sort of man he was. Those who were attaching themselves or had attached themselves to him knew by 1931 at the latest that he was a man without principle, scruple or pity, emotional to the point of hysteria, convulsively domineering, jealous and vengeful, malicious if not malevolent, a maniac-depressive in whom fits of gleefully savage recklessness alternated with periods of pessimistic gloom, in whom the gambler in the grand manner alternated with the coldly prudent schemer.
The first really credible picture of Stalin in his maturity was given us by the Yugoslav rebel, Milovan Djilas, and the main characteristic which emerges from that picture is irresponsibility. Apart from his natural gifts and drive Stalin had no settled allegiance to anyone but himself, and to no idea but the idea of power: “settled” is the operative word. And he was wholly contemptuous of all other individuals—except for one or two who were also bold, successful and strong for power: e.g., Hitler and Winston Churchill.
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