Khrushchev

by Edward Crankshaw

  In spite of Pravdah stricture the Bukharinites in the Academy cell fought on. They had the boldness to elect, among others, eight of their number to represent the Academy at the Moscow Party conference, then in preparation. Their talk was wild, but to the point. Stalin was attacked, the collectivisation was attacked, one speaker declared that the only solution was to develop a species of “organised capitalism”10—he did not mean State capitalism, which was precisely what Stalin was in the process of organising. “It is all the fault of the Central Commitee,” said one. “The Central Commitee does not lead; it lags behind.” Another spoke openly of the “bankrupcy of the Central Commitee line.” When the storm broke it centred on the head of an unfortunate comrade, A. P. Shirin, secretary of the Bauman District Committee (the Academy was situated in the Bauman District of Moscow) who was directly responsible for the Party manners of the Academy.

  The heretics were put down. More, the cell recanted its errors. The cell bureau was dissolved for the second time in six months. A new one was “elected,” its Secretary Nikita Sergeievich Khrushchev. His first act was to conduct a new and more drastic purge. Some of the members of this élite body of potential managers were to be expelled from the Party, others were to be expelled from the Academy itself. More interesting, progress was to be reported directly to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party of the Soviet Union, of which Stalin was General Secretary. Khrushchev, at thirty-five, was now officially reporting to the highest Party organ, and one of the people on whom he had to report was Stalin’s wife.11

  It was not quite the end of Shirin. He had another six months to go as Party boss of the Bauman District: he had not, after all, agitated against Stalin; he had merely turned a blind eye on some of those who had, including Nadezhda Allilulyeva. Within six months Khrushchev had done what he had to do in the Industrial Academy and was ready to move to higher things. Shirin was sacked and Khrushchev, his course uncompleted, took his place. None of these things could have happened had Khrushchev, in the guise of a student, not in fact been working in the closest liaison with high authority. It was the Kharkov speech, in which Khrushchev went one further than Stalin, all over again. The dates speak sufficiently clearly. Khrushchev was called to Moscow very soon after Kaganovich had finally established himself there, leaving the Ukraine to become a Secretary of the Central Committee. In 1930 he became First Secretary of the Moscow City and Regional Party organisations. Poor Shirin was one of his underlings. Kaganovich, of course, was responsible ultimately for the health of the Party in the Industrial Academy, as throughout Moscow. If one of his underlings failed there was nothing to stop him quietly shifting him to another sphere or reducing him to the ranks. But the hierarchy never worked like this in Stalin’s Russia, and for two reasons: the higher leadership was above criticism, except by Stalin himself, which meant that for every failure there had to be a scapegoat; further, the sins of omission or commission were habitually dramatised: the rank and file, as well as all officials except the very senior, were to be kept on the stretch without intermission as part of a system of subdued terror. There were two theories at work here, and they contradicted each other: one was that the best way to keep officials up to the mark was to let it be understood that at any time a lapse on their part might be visited with exemplary severity; the other was that total obedience from all officials could only be ensured if they knew that the least deviation from the prescribed line would mean their ruin. There was something to be said for the first, as a harsh and savage expedient; but the second, as time went on, led to the extinction of initiative and to sycophancy on a monstrous scale, breeding inefficiency and corruption. Later, as we know, Stalin applied this system to his own immediate colleagues, none of whom knew from one day to the next whether they were safe. But in the early days of Stalin’s ascendency, at the beginning of the thirties, Stalin still needed desperately the Molotovs, the Kaganoviches, the Kirovs and the rest. These were safe. But they, in their turn, depended absolutely on loyal supporters who understood the game and could combine cunning, brutality, organising ability, and boundless energy. They also needed courage too, for they could be thrown to the wolves at a moment’s notice if things went wrong, or if the Party line, Stalin’s line, suddenly changed. There were plenty who could combine brutality with cunning, many had organising ability, some had boundless energy, but few could also bring courage. Khrushchev was one of these few. It is perfectly clear that he was the junior partner in an arrangement, a kombinatzia, organised by Kaganovich. But there was plenty of room for things to go wrong. If they had gone wrong he would have been repudiated, disgraced, never heard of again. But they did not go wrong. It was Khrushchev’s courage, or calculated recklessness, which most distinguished him from many of his contemporaries—that, even more than the very remarkable combination of a capacity for intrigue (Malenkov had that), skill in organisation (Bulganin had that) and a passion for hard practical work in the field (few had that). It was not an accident that he rose so fast: he had, in the context of the collectivisation, in which he had very little part,12 and the first Five-year Plan, in which he played an important role, and in the final consolidation of Stalin’s supremacy, to which he was indispensable, well earned his preferment.

  His relationship with Kaganovich was a fascinating one. Kaganovich was a working-man too, and much of an age; but as a revolutionary he was far senior, and he had an attacking, not a calculating temperament. He was also a Jew. Khrushchev in later years showed himself an anti-Semite.13 He was a tough and unimpeachable Russian mouzhik. As Stalin consolidated his position the Jewish revolutionaries, to whom Lenin owed so much, were being beaten down. Kaganovich, the Jew, who was also an anti-Semite, may have found it useful to show as his most useful protégé the very type of the anti-Jewish, anti-intellectual peasant. He must have been aware, too, that Khrushchev, for all his brash and noisy overbearing ways, had reserves of subtlety and cunning which he lacked. Kaganovich’s revolutionary cunning was adequate for his purposes, but it never aspired much beyond the Leninist double-cross. Khrushchev’s mind, behind those small, screwed-up eyes, was more devious; his nature, behind the bluster, far more patient. He was a long-term schemer, which Kaganovich never was. There is a photograph of him taken, judging by the look of it, about this time. He is back in the Ukraine, visiting the scenes of his childhood. It is a group picture, and the little man with his head shaved and his ears sticking out, sits passively among an eager group of local Party workers. He might be sitting on a cloud, detached, those eyes fixed on a private vision—a vision of power? A vision of achievement? There is even now the air of perfectly relaxed authority which, decades later, I was to feel so strongly at close quarters in that Yugoslav factory. Kaganovich was never relaxed; he never dreamed.

  Chapter 7

  City Politics, Moscow Style

  It was January 1931 when Khrushchev, after only fifteen months, said farewell to the Industrial Academy and launched himself into Moscow city politics. Within weeks of taking over from the unfortunate Shirin the secretaryship of the Bauman District Party Committee he was elected to the City Party Committee itself, a Committee of fifteen, dominated by Kaganovich as First Secretary. Kaganovich was already a member of Stalin’s Politburo as well as a secretary of the Central Committee, which meant that Khrushchev, at thirty-six, was in direct contact with the supreme direction of the Soviet Union. He was also favoured by it. In July 1931 he took another step upwards, being appointed Secretary of the most important of all the Moscow Districts, Red Presnaya, while contriving to keep the Bauman District in his hands. In January 1932, exactly a year after his Moscow city début, he was made Second Secretary of the Moscow City Committee, immediately responsible to Kaganovich.

  The kombinatzia was showing its teeth. More importantly the Stalinist pattern of government was quickly taking shape, and the men now being moved into high positions were those who, with one or two exceptions, were to dominate the Soviet Union for more than two decades to come. The final patter
n did not take shape until after the 17th Party Congress, “the Congress of the Victors,” in 1934; but already in 1931 the Stalin team occupied strategic positions. Stalin’s only contemporary, Voroshilov, was in charge of the Red Army; Molotov and Kaganovich were already members of the Politburo. Andreyev joined it in the course of 1931. Kuibyshev was soon to die a natural death. Ordzhonikidze and Kirov, two of Stalin’s closest supporters, were later to be killed, almost certainly by Stalin. Mikoyan was in charge of foreign trade and a candidate member of the Politburo; Beria, after a spell in the Cheka, was Stalin’s deputy in the Caucasus; Kaganovich, of course, ran Moscow; Kirov Leningrad; Kossior the Ukraine; Zhdanov was master of Nizhni Novgorod (later Gorky), which then occupied the key industrial position, later to be taken over by Stalingrad; Shvernik was a secretary of the Central Committee and head of the trade unions. The two chief policemen of terrible fame, Yagoda and Yezhov, were rising stars: Yagoda ran GULAG, the central administration in charge of labour-camps, soon to become notorious; Yezhov, by all reasonable standards a criminal lunatic, was to move up to his fearful eminence via the Central Control Commission (the disciplinary arm) of the Party itself.

  Others were also on the move, among them Bulganin, a year younger than Khrushchev, whose career was to march very closely with Khrushchev’s until, as Prime Minister, he was finally broken by his old comrade in 1958. Bulganin, indeed, appointed Chairman of the Moscow City Soviet in 1931, was to form the third member of the triumvirate which completely dominated Moscow. His first appearance as a Bolshevik was in 1918, when he joined the newly formed Cheka. After four years as a political policeman, it was discovered that he had a talent for organisation and a head for figures. In 1922, while Khrushchev was still in Stalino, he moved to the Supreme Council of National Economy, the forerunner of the State Planning Commission. In 1927 he was put in charge of the Moscow Electric Plant, a huge and favoured concern, which he turned into an example for all Soviet industry. In 1931 he was appointed Chairman of the Moscow City Soviet, or, as he was sometimes called, Mayor of Moscow. He maintained this position during the whole of Khrushchev’s Moscow period, and the two worked hand-in-glove together. The Party organisation, headed first by Kaganovich, then, in 1935, by Khrushchev himself, provided the drive, the direction, the guidance, the discipline. It was the task of the City Soviet in its attractive old building on the Tverskaya Boulevard (now Gorky Street)1 to work out ways and means of carrying out the Party’s directives, or to reconcile them with reality. But there was no clear-cut division between the two organisations. The First Secretary of the Moscow Party organisation was the unquestioned boss, responsible only to Stalin; but Bulganin, as chairman of the City Soviet, was also a member of the Moscow City Committee, thus helping to arrive at decisions which it would then be his duty to implement. These three made a strong team.

  To these were added two others. For five years the young Malenkov had been working behind the scenes in Stalin’s private secretariat. In 1930 he too emerged into the open, backed by an invaluable knowledge of Stalin’s modus operandi and of the strength and weakness of his most exalted colleagues. He was given a department inside the Central Committee of the All-Union Party and, at the same time, he was put in charge of the Organisation Bureau of the Moscow Party Committee, responsible to Kaganovich and a close colleague of Khrushchev and Bulganin. Also on the City Committee was Yezhov, later to commit the worst excesses of the great purge; later still to be denounced as a criminal by Khrushchev, his one-time colleague. The team was a constellation. Four of the potentially most powerful men in the Soviet Union were gathered together in one committee under the leadership of Kaganovich, who was already among the first four or five under Stalin. Kaganovich, thirty-seven; Khrushchev, thirty-six; Bulganin, thirty-five; Malenkov, twenty-eight and Yezhov…. The great city was effectively in the hands of these five immensely tough young men, cloth-capped, booted, shirts buttoned up to the neck. It was this team, less Yezhov, executed long before, plus Molotov, Stalin’s right-hand man, which, twenty-three years later, was to take over the country from Stalin—with the help of the newcomer, Beria, whom they were soon to kill. Now they ran Moscow.

  A strong team was needed. Between 1930 and 1932 the mood of the Soviet Union underwent a change. With the first Five-year Plan under way and the collectivisation completed there were to be no more arguments about ways and means. The course was set, and it had nothing whatever to do with socialism or Communism as understood either by Lenin or by Marxists outside the Soviet Union. The dictatorship of the proletariat, which for some time had been transformed into the dictatorship of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, operating through its organs, the Politburo, the Secretariat, the Orgburo and the Central Control Commission, was now the dictatorship of Stalin, operating first through the Politburo and the Secretariat, later through the GPU. And although this dictatorship was for a time not absolute, it was Stalin and Stalin alone who, in his speeches, could break new ground and set the tone. In 1931 Molotov was made chairman of the Council of Peoples’ Commissars or Prime Minister, in succession to Rykov, who had taken over from Lenin and was later to be executed by Stalin. Molotov’s first act was to declare his subservience to the Party, i.e. to Stalin. Once upon a time the Council of Peoples’ Commissars (after 1946 the Council of Peoples’ Ministers), with Lenin as Chairman, had been a force in the land. Now it became merely the executive arm of the Party, and its most important members, from Molotov down, were themselves high Party functionaries. Every activity in the land—heavy industry, light industry, trade, agriculture, transport, communications, etc.—was the responsibility of the relevant Commissariat, and Molotov, at forty, thus acted as Stalin’s overseer for the administration and production of the whole of the USSR. What Stalin in fact was doing was to impose upon the country a system of state capitalism, and for a time his one and only interest was to make this system work. It took him a long way from socialism. It forced him to develop a completely regimented state engaged in carrying out an industrial revolution through dictates from above. The excesses of the English industrial revolution—the forcing of country-dwellers into horrible new towns, child labour, grinding poverty, the stunting of bodies and souls—had been perpetrated by individuals in search of profit and allowed by the government to operate in its crudest form the law of supply and demand because it was considered immoral to interfere with the “natural laws” of economics. The excesses of the Soviet industrial revolution which led to similar situations, but on a vast and Russian scale, were perpetrated by Stalin’s decree: instead of being forced into the towns by the enclosures, instead of being forced into the mines and mills, men, women and children, by the threat of starvation, Russian peasants were moved about by decree and, when this failed, by the GPU, which, under Yagoda, constructed vast labour-camps filled by arbitrary arrests, on construction sites, in forests, in mineral-bearing areas. Tens of thousands would be picked up to labour, and often to die, as slaves on the Baltic-White Sea canal, in the Lena goldfields, in the killing climate of the Magadan region, in the coal mines of Norilsk.

  And to what end? It was in 1931 that Stalin abruptly put an end to the last dreams of the revolutionary idealists by insisting on the necessity for steep differences of reward to act as incentives, initiating a policy which was formalised three years later when at the 17th Party Congress he declared that egalitarianism had nothing to do with Marxism, but was a “reactionary, petty-bourgeois absurdity worthy of a primitive sect of ascetics but not of a Socialist society organised on Marxist lines.”2 In 1931, too, for the first time he sounded the nationalist, chauvinist note which ever after was to obsess him: it was back to the Tsars with a vengeance:

  “No, comrades … the pace must not be slackened! On the contrary.…

  “To slacken the pace would mean to lag behind; and those who lag behind are beaten. We do not want to be beaten. No, we do not! Russia … was ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans, she was beaten by the Turkis
h beys, she was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords, she was beaten by the Anglo-French capitalists, she was beaten by the Japanese barons, she was beaten by all—for her backwardness. For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. She was beaten because to beat her was profitable and went unpunished. You remember the words of the pre-revolutionary Russian poet: ‘Thou art poor and thou art abundant, thou art mighty and thou art helpless, Mother Russia!’

  “We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.”3

  The spirit of internationalism, of world revolution, was departed. From now on all who worked with Stalin were to work for one thing only: the greater glory of the Soviet Union. All ideologies were perverted to this end; all methods, however brutal, however misguided, were directed to this end.