Khrushchev took Stalin as he found him. He knew, all those who had attended the 15th Party Congress knew at first hand, and many more besides from hearsay, that Lenin in his last years had distrusted Stalin and wanted to see him put down. Many years later, in 1956, in the course of his historic attack on Stalin, Khrushchev was to quote from Lenin’s famous testament (a document known in the West for decades), in which he had warned the comrades against giving Stalin too much power because of his rough and overbearing ways. In 1956, filled with righteous indignation, Khrushchev spoke as though this testament had just come to light after having been suppressed for more than three decades. It had been suppressed not only by Stalin, but by all Stalin’s comrades-in-arms, including Khrushchev, who had heard it read out in Congress in 1927 and had voted to remove it from the record.4
Khrushchev knew who Stalin was and what he was driving at: greatness for the Soviet Union. And this suited him very well. It is improbable that he had ever given the least thought to world revolution. From the very beginning of his career as a Bolshevik he had been, as we have seen, interested in only three things: getting things going and making his part of the economy work, smashing down opposition of all kinds, and forwarding his own career by intrigue and by showing himself more Stalinist than Stalin. He thought in terms of the here and the now and the concrete; his vision of the future was concrete too, limited to the dream of material abundance and prosperity for his own people. There is nothing to suggest that he had thought of the outside world at all, unless as the supplier of pre-revolutionary capital for the exploitation of Russian mineral wealth. Stalin’s new and uninhibited emphasis on a strong and powerful Russia for the Russians would have appeared to him entirely right and proper, and so would the abandonment of egalitarian dreams: “to each according to his work,” the slogan which was to prepare the way for spectacular differentials, so that a Red Army subaltern would soon be earning a hundred times more than a Red Army private, so that a new privileged class of Communist officials, engineers, industrialists, writers, scientists and ballet dancers would soon be emerging, would have struck him as self-evident. As for the crash programme of industrialisation, cost what it might in suffering, Khrushchev himself was one of nature’s shock brigadiers. And, unlike most of his colleagues, he was prepared to roll his sleeves up and muddy his boots, to get down among the workers and show them by precept, exhortation and example.
This was the period when all over the vast land, above all in the Urals, vast new towns and enterprises were being raised out of the mud for the production of steel. The symbol of the day was the great new steel town, Magnitogorsk. And of Magnitogorsk Mr. John Scott, an American who worked there, wrote:
“In Magnitogorsk I was precipitated into a battle. I was deployed on the iron and steel front. Tens of thousands of people were enduring the most intense hardships in order to build blast furnaces, and many of them did it willingly, with boundless enthusiasm, which infected me from the day of my arrival. … I would wager that Russia’s battle of ferrous metallurgy alone involved more casualties than the battle of the Marne.”5
This was the mood not only in the great new steel towns, but all over Russia where construction work was going on. The young and idealistic, who knew nothing about their rulers, threw themselves into the most heart-breaking toil, suffering atrocious conditions for the sake of a dream: Russia had been stagnant; now, as the smoke and the dust cleared away after the cataclysmic earthquake, they were building. There was purpose behind everything they did, and everything they did was worth personal sacrifice—because what they were building with their own sweat and blood was the celestial city on earth, and in their lifetime this paradise would be completed. Those who were not young and idealistic, those who cared for nothing but their own survival, and those who had once cared deeply and were now disillusioned, were carried along on this almost palpable wave of enthusiasm, were shamed into working hard too, were goaded and bullied by the Party comrades, in the last resort were picked up by the GPU and carried off to work for starvation rations in concentration camps.
This was the mood. It might have been made for our hero: it was the sort of manic mood he liked. He knew how to exploit enthusiasm (he was enthusiastic himself), and he knew how to bully those who lagged. He knew, to the last inch, just how far he could drive these peasants turned construction-workers and machinists. He was in his element. Not in Magnitogorsk, but in Moscow, which Stalin was preparing to pull down and rebuild as the most splendid capital city in the world.
Khrushchev still had some way to go before he could fulfil himself as the great leader and commander on the construction front. It was not until January 1932 that he abandoned his Red Presnaya District to a smaller man and moved up formally to be Kaganovich’s second in command. He had achieved the Red Presnaya District six months earlier, as he had achieved the Bauman District still earlier, by clambering over the ruins of his predecessor, Comrade Kozlov, who had been made an official scapegoat for food-shortages caused directly by Government policies. Kozlov’s dismissal was preceded by the usual Pravda broadside.6 But instead of kowtowing and confessing his sins, he was foolhardy enough to fight back. He went. Khrushchev moved up in his place.
He did not improve the food situation, which was causing extreme discontent and some rioting, but he did begin at once to show himself a master of the “new style”—the Stalinist way of work. The Stalinist way was the shock way, which later led to Stakanovism. We have heard a great deal about the special and spectacular ad hoc mobilisations of whole districts, whole towns, whole age-groups, to achieve a particular task in a set time: these formed familiar features of the landscape of these days. The idea was first put into practice in the Red Presnaya District of Moscow in 1931, and it was Khrushchev’s own idea. He applied it not only to construction work but to everything he touched. He introduced special days for this and that, and special ten-day periods of supreme endeavour—it might be for digging a new drain, or for improving the training of candidates for the Communist Party. He also invented the device known as the Stalin estafette, which was to breed many horrors. This unlikely term was used to stand for a shock programme designed to enforce and to dramatise the “Stalinist style.” Under cover of a variety of euphemisms the new methods meant, among other things, conscription of labour; deprivation of the worker’s right to choose or change his place of work; saddling the worker personally with responsibility for the condition of the machines and tools he used (if these broke down or fell to pieces whether as a result of neglect or of faulty manufacture of installation, it was all one: the worker would be charged with deliberate sabotage). Within this oppressive framework all sorts of devices were introduced for the more thorough exploitation of labour: so-called “counter-plans” to exceed the demands of the official plan; forced State loans, called “the mobilisation of monetary resources”; the creation of the notorious shock-brigades working on a system of premium and progressive piece-work. The Stalinist estafette caught on and quickly spread to the whole of Moscow and elsewhere. It set the pattern which was to be formalised in the draconian labour laws of 1933 which were not to be repealed until after Stalin’s death. The standard-bearer of conscript labour was Nikita Khrushchev.7
We are still in 1932. It was a terrible year for the people and it was a terrible year for Stalin. The first Five-year Plan, with its impossible targets, had failed; but an immense amount had been done. A miracle had taken place—except that this “miracle” was paid for by the physical and mental suffering of untold millions and by the sacrifice of individual lives on a gigantic scale. The base had been laid, and the more sensible second Five-year Plan was to see the raising of the edifice. But now, we are told, Stalin for the first time lost his nerve. Worship of Stalin was not yet the required thing; he asked only to be feared. But he was detested too. Some even of the men round him were beginning to express anxieties and doubts long nurtured but concealed. There was no conspiracy, but senior members of the Government who had actively
helped Stalin defeat first the Trotskyists then the Bukharinites were exchanging memoranda urging that the Central Committee should have the courage to vote Stalin out of office by constitutional means. These included the chief of propaganda, Riutin, and the premier of the Russian Republic, Syrtsov: with others they were charged with conspiracy and sent to prison. Stalin had not then begun killing his own colleagues. The Ukraine, Khrushchev’s old stamping ground, made safe (for ever it seemed) for Stalin by Kaganovich, was in full revolt. Stalin sent one of his closest friends, Postychev (later to be killed by his friend and master), to conduct a ferocious purge. One of the most distinguished Old Bolsheviks, Skrypnik, killed himself as a consequence of that purge.8
It was in November of that year that Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Allilulyeva, comitted suicide:
“There was the man of steel, as he had called himself, … face to face with that corpse. It was at about this time that he stood up one day at a meeting of the Politburo and offered to resign. ‘Perhaps it is indeed true that I have become an obstacle to the unity of the Party. I am ready to go.’ The members of the Politburo—that body had already been purged of its right wing—glanced at one another in embarrassment. Who among them would take it upon himself to reply: ‘Yes, my friend—-just that. You had better go. It is the best thing you can do.’ Who indeed? The individual who brought out these words, without being sure of the others’ backing, would have risked a great deal. Nobody moved. … At last Molotov spoke. He said: ‘Stop it! Enough! You know you have the Party’s confidence …’ “9
He certainly had Khrushchev’s; and while the master faltered, the servant throve. It was in the summer of this terrible year that he was promoted to be Second Secretary of the Moscow City Committee, and, as such, Kaganovich’s deputy. This elevation, since all eyes were on Moscow, transformed him as far as his Party comrades were concerned from a local into a national figure. It meant to all who knew the signs that he was being groomed for very high office indeed. And he was exposed. For three more years he was to work with Kaganovich, but he was for all practical purposes more than Kaganovich’s deputy: his immediate master was so much taken up with his duties as a member of the Politburo, as the boss of the v/hole of Moscow Region (not just the city), with overseeing many of the most important industrial projects in the land, that for long periods Khrushchev was virtually in charge of the city’s life.
It was a turbulent life. In the intervals of beating down the Right opposition, conducting a civil war against the peasants and forcing through the Five-year Plan, Stalin had conceived the idea of turning Moscow into the most splendid capital city in the world. Plans for reconstruction on a massive scale were already beginning to take shape and, with the feverish pulling down and rebuilding at ground level, went the most grandiose project of all, the creation of the now celebrated Moscow Metro, the underground railway, or subway, conceived as the eighth wonder of the world and as a secular monument to the greater glory of the Soviet system, to surpass in splendour and magnificence the most splendid creations of past ages to the greater glory of God.
Although the whole system was called after Kaganovich, whose name was deeply incised in stone above the main entrance to each station, the man who was most directly responsible for the completion of the first stages of this masterpiece was our hero. From 1932 to 1934 he was subordinate to Kaganovich. In 1934, Kaganovich, while retaining the First Secretaryship of Moscow Province, appointed Khrushchev in his place as First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee. In that same year Khrushchev became a member of the All-Union Central Committee, having far outstripped both Malenkov and Bulganin. In 1935 Kaganovich became People’s Commissar for transport and devoted himself for a time above all to the radical reorganisation of the railway system of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev stepped effortlessly into his shoes and was now the supreme boss of Moscow Region as well as Moscow City. He retained these positions until 1938, when he was made a candidate, or non-voting, member of the Politburo and was sent back to the Ukraine to purge the purgers and then to rule over a population now some 40 million strong as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party. In 1939 he was made a full member of the Politburo. This was the summit.
Thus the final stages of Khrushchev’s elevation coincided precisely with the darkest period of Soviet history. It was in 1934 that Kirov was assassinated in Leningrad, and this assassination was the signal for the start of that appalling process whereby Stalin killed off not only all those Old Bolsheviks who had opposed him at any time but also all those, from senior functionaries to rank and file Party members, who had ever been associated with known members of the opposition or their associates, together with all those who might be suspected of harbouring critical thoughts, even though unspoken—and, for good measure, practically the whole of the higher command of the Red Army together with tens of thousands of officers of field rank and above. To carry out this holocaust Stalin depended on the obedient and active support not only of his senior colleagues, the Molotovs and the Kaganoviches, but also of the Malenkovs, the Khrushchevs, the Zhdanovs and the Bulganins, the new generation whom he had raised up to help him fight the old and who depended for their further promotion on the final liquidation of the old. Any who faltered, or who looked like faltering, were killed. Khrushchev was high among those who did not falter, and he received his reward. From 1932 onwards the records allow us to watch him in action. What we shall see is very different from the picture painted by Khrushchev himself, twenty years later, in his formal denunciation of Stalin. It will also help to explain why the Russian people, whose memories are long, never welcomed Khrushchev the liberator to their bosoms and entertained a view of him strikingly different from that which the West came to hold. They knew too much.
Chapter 8
“We Have a Beautiful Metro!”
By the beginning of 1932, when he became Kaganovich’s deputy in Moscow, Khrushchev had proved himself in two distinct fields. With his cloth cap, his sloppy clothes, his brash, overbearing manner and his ability to coax disgruntled workers and jolly them along as well as to bully them and lash them with his tongue, he was the practical man who knew how to get things done. High office and a host of sycophantic subordinates at his command had not changed him. As in his early days at Yuzovka, he still liked to get out into the field and face his problems on the ground instead of keeping his boots clean and operating from behind a barricade of paper. At the same time the talent for intrigue, for smelling out heresy, for paying out rope in the most calculated manner until his enemies stumbled and a short, sharp twitch of the halter broke their necks, put him in the front rank of Party hatchet-men. He could have made an outstanding career as an industrial overlord, a slave-driver that is, or as a Party watch-dog. The combination of two characters in one made him unique and invaluable to Stalin. Ultimately it was to give him a critical advantage over Malenkov, who for too long had concentrated on Party in-fighting of the most savage kind, always close to the very seat of power, and over Kaganovich, the supreme slave-driver, who quite lacked his protege’s finesse when it came to backroom operations.
The two separate strands in Khrushchev’s career were displayed most lucidly during his Moscow period. As a quasistudent in the Industrial Academy he had broken the anti-Stalin movement and heaved himself several steps up the ladder. As District Party Secretary, first in the Bauman District then in Red Presnaya, he had continued the good work and received grateful acknowledgment from the Central Committee for his zeal and efficiency in pursuing and scattering what was left of the Right-wing opposition. At the same time he had distinguished himself by introducing the new Stalinist discipline into the Moscow labour force. He was now to present himself as a prodigy of relentless drive on a positively Pharaoh-like scale, and soon as what can only be called an ideological terrorist of a savagery amounting to viciousness, the hammer of Trotskyites and Bukharinites, real and putative, and, without exception, the grossest flatterer of Stalin. Mikoyan was the runner-up. These two, in the 1930s,
did more to forward the personality cult, which, between them, they were later to define and indict, than any of their colleagues. This was the paradox, because these two also did more in their different ways to improve Soviet living conditions than all the rest of the Politburo put together. Khrushchev’s great contribution did not come until after Stalin’s death; but Mikoyan, the brilliant Armenian, who would have made a fortune in the West, was responsible for all those improvements in goods and services, all those alleviations of the bleakness of life under Stalin, which, through the darkest years, gave the Russian people some hope for the future. It could be argued, and it would probably be true, that he and Khrushchev were outstanding in their flattering of Stalin because, unlike their colleagues, they shared a vision of better times for the common people and were determined at all costs to survive long enough at least to begin to realise this vision.
Pharaoh operated above all in the tunnels of the Moscow Metro, and here—up to his knees in filthy water, giving pep-talks to the tunnellers, or in the chief engineer’s office above ground—we have our first glimpses of him as he appeared to others. In 1935 an official account of the construction of the first section of the Metro was published in Moscow.1 Although Kaganovich is cited throughout as the hero and inspiration of this tremendous feat, N. S. Khrushchev is permitted a remarkable share of the build-up too. Poor Bulganin is mentioned only as an afterthought. The various sector chiefs and engineers who actually directed and carried out the work are reduced to voices in a paean of praise for the glorious leadership of Kaganovich and Khrushchev:
“Comrade Kaganovich’s closest assistant in the subway construction was Comrade N. S. Khrushchev. All engineers, all brigadiers and shock-workers on the project know Nikita Sergeievich. They know him because he visits the construction sites each day, issues daily instructions, checks, criticises, cheers on and advises this or that shaft overseer, this or that Party organiser, on all specific and urgent problems.
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