“An ungainly dwarf of a man passed through gilded and marbled imperial halls, and a path opened before him; radiant, admiring glances followed him, while the ears of courtiers strained to catch his every word. And he, sure of himself and his works, obviously paid no attention to all this. His country was in ruins, hungry, exhausted. But his armies and his marshals, heavy with fat and medals and drunk with vodka and victory, had already trampled half Europe underfoot, and he was convinced that they would trample over the other half in the next round. He knew that he was one of the most cruel and despotic figures in history. But this did not worry him a bit, for he was convinced that he was carrying out the will of history.”5
That was Stalin, as seen by Djilas, after the defeat of Germany. He had moved a long way from the lean and hungry revolutionary. This was the man who commanded Khrushchev, his viceroy in the Ukraine (according to Khrushchev himself), to dance the gopak at a drunken party;6 the Stalin who, again according to Khrushchev, might at any moment, at any time, in a moment of anger or irritation or sheer boredom, give the order to his bodyguard to seize any of his closest colleagues and lead them off to prison.7 This man did not exist in 1927, or even in 1931; but by 1931 the makings of this man were evident. They became clear in the civil war on the peasants, still the mass of the population of the Soviet Union, the collectivisation. The switch from the moderate, industriously intriguing Secretary General to the arbitrary dictator was very sudden indeed. But there was plenty of time for his loyal colleagues and their protégés (e.g. Kaganovich as one, Khrushchev as the other) to entertain second thoughts about their new leader who suddenly, overnight as it were, abandoned moderation and issued instructions to the Party and police to declare war on the kulaks and then to transform the face of rural Russia by pushing through a gigantic industrial programme in record time. They did nothing of the kind. Molotov stood at Stalin’s side actively encouraging his most excessive actions; Kaganovich lent his strong right arm. Khrushchev was Kaganovich’s man.8
At this period, when the Soviet Union, slowly but surely pulling itself up by its own boot-straps, was transformed into a madhouse running blood, Khrushchev was in no way a policy maker; but he exploited in his own interests the terrible mood of the times. His theatre of action was, to begin with, the Moscow Industrial Academy; and it was from this unlikely launching-pad that he took off for higher things. He arrived at the Academy, fresh from a minor position in the provinces, in September 1929. By 1934 he was supreme party boss of Moscow. By 1939 he was a full member of the Politburo of the Central Committee, the supreme policy-making body. The period of his rise, swift, uninterrupted, from a provincial agitator to one of Stalin’s closest colleagues, coincided precisely with the ten years of Stalinism at its worst. This man, who was later to become one of the world’s senior and in some ways most far-seeing and beneficent statesmen, achieved his eminence at a time when it was a disgrace for any Russian to succeed, and when success could only be obtained by atrocious methods and over the dead or broken bodies of innumerable comrades. The Khrushchev story from 1929 to 1939 has been known in detail outside Russia only to those especially interested in what are called the minutiae of Soviet affairs. In other countries minutiae of this kind are commonly known as high politics and fill the newspaper headlines week-in, week-out, year-in, year-out: how did Lloyd George overthrow Asquith? How did Baldwin become Prime Minister? How did Kennedy beat Nixon? By what remarkable manoeuvres did de Gaulle make himself effective dictator of France? In England and America we discuss these things, however imperfectly. In the Soviet Union equivalent developments may not be publicly mentioned. Events which, occurring in a Western country, would be hotly debated in public for weeks at a time, filling the front pages of the newspapers, are not so much as mentioned in the Soviet Union, and when Western journalists try to point to them and explain them, they are not thanked. The rise of Bonar Law, the rise of Harold Wilson, may not be very important in the eyes of God, but they matter to us here. The rise of Khrushchev, and its nature, also mattered.
It started when, instead of applying himself to industrial education, he became active in the Academy’s Party cell. It was a very interesting Party cell, and what went on in it was an exact pattern on a small (but rather exalted) scale of what was going on in larger Party organisations all over the country: the good were being broken by the bad. Those who were not inherently bad but who, for whatever reason, attached themselves to the winning side, were themselves soon forced to behave badly. Arbitrary government operating by force, by terror, must destroy the best, the boldest dissenters in sheer self-defence; soon it finds itself destroying all who, on the one hand, do not actively assist it or, on the other, do not passively submit. This process we all know about. But it has another quality which is less generally understood: it turns men who are not born wicked into thugs. It corrupts, usually irredeemably, all those who, for what seem to them quite good reasons, lend themselves to its activities. Khrushchev voluntarily enrolled himself under the banner of a man who was a natural terrorist and murderer. He did this at a time when Stalin’s true nature was not apparent, partly from personal ambition, partly because he had a naturally authoritarian nature and was impatient with the vacillations of so many of the old Bolsheviks. When, in 1929, Stalin was beginning to reveal himself for what he was, he could have drawn back. He did not, for reasons which are obvious. Soon he was so deeply committed that there was no escape and he himself became an active instrument of terror. He was corrupted, one would have said, irredeemably. We shall soon have to consider some of the things that Khrushchev said and did at the height of the great purges when he was manoeuvring his way to the topmost echelon of the Soviet leadership; we shall find ourselves wondering how any man could conduct himself in this way who was not an unmitigated villain. That he was not this, we know. Years later, when he had the stage to himself, it emerged that he had—though corrupted in many ways—retained a large measure of his natural humanity. How this could be is the great question-mark which hangs over his story. The conflict between his natural humanity and the corruption which bit deeply into him during the years of his rise to the top was to be the great drama of the last ten years of his career.
Moscow in 1929 was a strange town. Nothing had been done to it since 1914. It was still a vast city with, apart from certain great churches and the Kremlin itself, the appearance of an overgrown provincial town—but a provincial town now in decay. Stucco peeled from innumerable buildings; old palaces and mansions, gutted, taken over by technical institutes or turned into apartments which were really dormitories, presented blank, uncurtained windows to the outside world. In the Red Presnaya district, which Khrushchev was soon to command, buildings burnt out during the 1905 Revolution still stood roofless, gaping, deserted. There were no new buildings. Roofs leaked. Every festering basement and cellar teemed with ragged humanity. The overcrowding was such that it was the commonest thing to find three or more families to a room. There was little food; heat and light were hopelessly inadequate; infinite hours were spent by hundreds of thousands glumly queueing for the necessities of life. There was no soap. And yet the city had vitality. In countless thousands of odd corners sad relics of the old régime, the “former people,” kept starvation at bay (not always) by selling in the commission shops, piece by pathetic piece, their last precious possessions. But the workers in the factories, who had recently inherited the earth, were seized in some measure, particularly the young and naïve, with the intoxication of the dawning age of the machine. The revolutionary intelligentsia and the artists, already marked down by Stalin for suppression as dangerous elements, hardly knew yet what was hitting them. Alexander Blok had died, disillusioned, years earlier. Sergei Yessenin had committed suicide in 1925. In 1929 Boris Pilnyak (who had suggested, prophetically, in one of his earlier books that the death of Frunze, the People’s Commissar for War, had been a medical murder contrived by Stalin) was expelled from the Writers’ Union: later, at the time of the great purge, he was to
vanish, like Isaak Babel and so many others, presumed shot. The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) had established control over all the field in a highly dictatorial manner: the first decisive step on the stony road much later to be known as Zhdanovism. But Pasternak was still writing, and the theatre, especially the theatre of Meyerhold, had not yet been killed. Thousands of artists of all kinds were fighting back, not yet understanding that their cause was lost in advance.
Similarly, although Stalin had crushed the high political opposition, at lower levels, and particularly among students of all kinds (this included students in their thirties, being trained to fill the great gap left by the extinction of the ruling and managerial classes), the fight went on. Those not close to the seat of power had not yet understood the full implications of Stalin’s victory, first over Trotsky, then over Zinoviev and Kamenev, then over Bukharin: they did not realise that the battle was lost. They were, moreover, behind the times, still geared to Stalin’s own preaching of moderation. When they saw what was happening in the countryside, when they saw that Stalin was launching into a frenzied programme of super-industrialisation, regardless of the cost in present suffering, they were outraged, and they said so.
It was into this milieu that Khrushchev, now thirty-five, was precipitated in September 1929. The Stalin Industrial Academy, an élite collection of the most promising young men and women in the Soviet Union, gathered together into what was intended to be a forcing house, under Stalin’s own protection, to produce new leaders in industry and administration in record time, was in full revolt against Stalin. The situation was complicated beyond all measure by the fact that one of the most gifted students, beautiful too, the thirty-two year old Nadezhda Allilulyeva, was Stalin’s own wife. And Nadezhda Allilulyeva, who went home to sleep in the Kremlin every night, while the Khrushchevs and many more besides packed themselves into their bleak and shabby quarters, was herself in revolt against her husband’s policies. She was a member of the Academy’s Party cell, which was purged again and again for right-wing deviationism, for Bukharinism. Less than three years later, at the height of the great famine produced by her husband’s policies, she solved her problem by committing suicide. This was after an evening of bitter recrimination at the home of Voroshilov. The rumour went round that Stalin had strangled his wife with his own hands in an access of rage; many Russians still believe this, but there is not a shred of evidence—unless evidence of character, unless evidence of Russian Tsarist tradition. But the problem for Khrushchev, up from the Ukraine, owing his call to Moscow to Kaganovich, Stalin’s right-hand man, and deeply committed to support of Stalin, must have been difficult indeed. We do not know just how he solved it, but there are pointers, and he succeeded brilliantly. By 1932, when Nadezhda Allilulyeva killed herself in despair (she was the gentle and idealistic daughter of an old revolutionary who had given shelter to Stalin in the days of his Siberian exile), Khrushchev had risen to the point when he was second in command of the Party organisation for the whole of Moscow city.
When he arrived in the great city to start the dreary hunt for quarters for his wife, his two children by his first wife and another on the way, he would not have been oppressed by the physical decay and the dreariness of life in Moscow: it was a great deal better, though more crowded, than life in Stalino or Kiev. He would have been wholly oblivious of the steam-rollering of intellectual life: he was himself impatient of intellectuals. The great political battle was over, and he was comfortably on the right side. He would not have been upset by the rapidly increasing regimentation of life and the command to tighten belts: he was an authoritarian by nature, and he had risen as far as he had done by his talent for bullying and cajoling people into tightening their belts. In the light of later events there is no reason to doubt that he was a man possessed by a vision: Russia, the sprawling, the feckless, the anarchic, the inchoate, was to be dragged into the industrial age and transformed utterly. The wretched peasants, from whom he had sprung, were themselves going to achieve this transformation, the best of them transplanted into factories and fed by their less intelligent and enterprising cousins. They were going to succeed where all the panoply of an antique ruling-class had failed. Their children were going to inherit the earth, cost what it might in suffering meanwhile; and he, Nikita Khrushchev, toiling on the side of Marx, Lenin and history, was one of the chosen few who were going to drag them by their shirt-tails, kicking and groaning, into the twentieth century—as Peter the Great before him had dragged their ancestors into Europe. He did not know what Europe was. He did not know what the twentieth century was: to him it was machines and monuments to the glory of industry. Industry was the peasantry of Chekhov let loose in a machine shop and producing, God knew how, the machines to make machines to make machines which would one day bring plenty and prosperity to poor old Mother Russia. He did not know what prosperity and plenty were: he had never seen them. But he knew what desperate poverty was; he had never seen anything else. And if it was rough on the peasants to drive them into collectives, and rough on their cousins in the factories to punish them violently for sabotage when they broke machines, admittedly most often through clumsiness, but sometimes through malice and bloody-mindedness—well, they had to be taught. And life in Russia was rough and always had been. He did not know what gentleness was, but he knew what roughness was. For centuries the peasants had been bullied and knouted to keep them down; they were still being bullied and knouted—but this time to force them to work for themselves, and their children, for the revolution embodied in 180 million idle, garrulous, feckless Russians, for the glory of the new workers’ state. There was a difference.
In a word, arrived in Moscow at the age of thirty-five, Khrushchev was shocked by nothing he saw, was excited and stimulated, rather—until his induction into the Party cell at the Industrial Academy. Here there were others like him, workers and peasants who had shown outstanding talent for leadership and had been hand-picked for training as a new ruling élite, subservient, of course, to the Secretary General and his caucus: these were not ordinary students; most of them had already learnt much in the hard school of post-revolutionary Russia and were ten years older than the ordinary run of students, already experienced in responsibility. Besides the workers were sons and daughters of the intelligentsia who had thrown in their lot with the new régime and men and women who had thought a great deal, far more than Khrushchev and those like him, about the theory of the revolution and also about ways and means, other than brute force, of building up a socialist paradise and swinging the masses behind the Bolshevik leadership. They talked, discussed, criticised authority, exchanged horror stories, and debated hotly among themselves. Khrushchev had always been a doer rather than a debater, and though he was a great talker he favoured the monologue, the harangue. For a long time now he had been shouting down all critics, in the interests of getting things done. The open discussions in the Party cell at the Industrial Academy would have seemed to him frivolous and adolescent at best, but dangerous too: the mood was running fiercely against Stalin and his ruthless drive, towards Bukharin. This was dangerous. It would have to be changed, and it would be his job to help change it. And yet, there at the very heart of the unrest, stood the sad, tense, splendid beauty who was the wife of the Leader himself. What was to be done? How did one do one’s duty by Stalin and the new Soviet State, fighting subversion all along the line, reporting heresy to the proper authorities, without getting into trouble for slandering Nadezhda Allilulyeva—the sort of woman Khrushchev had never met: she might have been a Turgeniev heroine. Although her father had been a worker, he had educated himself richly, in the manner in which fifty, sixty, seventy years ago, so many English workers contrived to educate themselves. His daughter was highly cultivated. She had those great Russian eyes, but she was closer in spirit to that Polish heroine of Conrad’s whom he transposed into Antonia of Nostromo than to the conventional woman Bolshevik fighter of those days. Stalin was a passionate man. He once must have
been deeply in love with her in his greedy, reckless Georgian way. He was forty when they married, she eighteen. It says something for the vividness of his character, which in its later manifestations so horrified Milovan Djilas, that this young woman fell in love with him.
Khrushchev may have been warned. Kaganovich himself may have warned him (later Kaganovich was to stand by and let Stalin ruin his own brother, apparently without a murmur) that all was not well with the Industrial Academy and that Nadezhda Allilulyeva had been countenancing criticism of her husband. It is probable, indeed, that Khrushchev was chosen as the sort of man who could be relied upon to help put an end to the nonsense. The whole interlude of his spell at the Academy is mysterious. He entered it, apparently, in the ordinary way. In a short time he had come to dominate it. He can have done little training after his first six months; then it was all politics and agitation. And long before he was due to finish his course he was off and away and up.
There had been trouble before he arrived, and it continued. Here are the facts we know.
The Academy was one of the key Moscow institutions, falling under the jurisdiction of the city’s first Party Secretary. In October 1928 the Moscow Party secretariat, headed by Uglanov, a Bukharin supporter, was heavily purged. But the Party cell of the Industrial Academy continued to harbour Bukharinite ideas, and the cell itself was purged in the late autumn of 1929. It was more than a purge: the cell bureau was dissolved and another group, assumed to be reliable, put in its place. Khrushchev had nothing to do with this: he had only just arrived and was feeling his way. But he would have been for a brief period a member of the old cell and he was very much a member of the new one, “elected” in November 1929. Within six months there was further trouble. In May 1930 Pravda went into the attack on the Academy, accusing the Party bureau of right-deviationism, of a total failure to preach to cell-members (including Khrushchev) the urgent necessity for stepping up the struggle against the “rightists” and “conciliators” (i.e. the Bukharinites and Uglanovites), and even, in the case of some unspecified individuals, of spreading “slanderous anti-Party rumours concerning the leadership of the Party.”9 This attack was launched with cries of horror and outrage, as though it were a new discovery. It may have been a new discovery for the editor-in-chief of Pravda, but what followed indicated clearly enough that someone in authority (Kaganovich? Stalin himself through Kaganovich?) must have known what was going on. They knew, indeed, from Nadezhda Allilulyeva of opposition in principle: they must have known from someone else what was happening in detail, because what followed had all the hallmarks of the sort of manoeuvre already perfected by Stalin, later to be developed by him in the grand manner, later still, when Stalin was dead, to be employed by Khrushchev in his fight with Molotov on the one hand and Malenkov on the other.
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