“Comrade Khrushchev’s office became indistinguishable from the project manager’s office where Party organisers, shaft overseers, engineers and individual brigade-leaders work out the detailed plans required to fulfil the daring, urgent assignments of their proved leader, L. M. Kaganovich.”
It is interesting to see, in this limited but extremely important theatre, the beginnings of a minor personality cult. The deification of Stalin himself had only recently started in 1935, and it is a little surprising to find that he was ready to permit the public glorification not only of Kaganovich but also of Kaganovich’s lieutenant. The authentic accents are most clearly heard in the account (written in 1935, not twenty years later when Khrushchev was supreme) of one of the tunnel engineers:
“In the life of every man there are especially memorable days. On days like this he suddenly begins to understand in a new way the simple things which he thought he knew all about long ago. On days like this he becomes inspired with love for things and phenomena which he had taken for granted before. Just such a day was the day when Comrade Khrushchev talked to me.”
The task of tunnelling was a job after Khrushchev’s heart: it called for boldness amounting to recklessness, sacrificial toil, vast operations based on insufficient forethought, a standing disregard of the limitations of human flesh and blood and the facts of nature. Speed was of the essence. Immense risks had to be taken to keep up to schedule: nobody knows how many died as a consequence of the inevitable catastrophes. The work was pressed through as though the very future of the Soviet Union depended upon its immediate fulfilment. But nothing except the amour propre of Stalin, Kaganovich and Khrushchev depended on it. Moscow’s immediate transport problems could have been solved far more cheaply and quickly by the development of surface transport. The Metro was a dream and a boast. The first section had to be completed in time for the seventeenth anniversary of the Revolution in November 1934. It was a characteristically arbitrary date. It was characteristic, too, that, after all the sacrifices and risks and wild improvisations, it was not after all completed in time: nobody lost his head for this….
Not everybody remembered Khrushchev’s interventions with love and gratitude. Labour discipline came first. In a speech he made in 1933 he showed what he meant by labour discipline. Addressing the managers and foremen at construction sites he told them not to rely on bureaucratic supervision but to get out among the workers and order them about directly: “The success of construction depends on the worker fulfilling his norm. If you are chief of a construction site, encourage the better worker, help him, let him earn more; but at the same time you must carry on a determined struggle against the self-seeker and the shirker, who comes to the construction site to snatch his wages and then run off….
“Under the influence of self-seekers who have wormed themselves into our construction sites, some workers have begun to think along the following lines: why don’t we try to get our norms revised downwards? Pernicious and disorganising aspirations of this kind must be severely put down. It is necessary to fight in a Bolshevik way, so that every bricklayer, plasterer, painter, fulfils his output norm. All kinds of opportunistic whisperers who talk of revising the norms must be rebuffed with total resolution: they reflect nothing but the pressure of the petty bourgeois element, sometimes even of the real kulak counterrevolutionary element….”2
Here, with Khrushchev in the van as usual, we see the beginnings of the system, soon to be accepted throughout the Soviet Union, which equated demands for less work or higher pay with a political offence against the State, to be punished as such.
If this was the spirit which moved Khrushchev as effective master of the whole Moscow labour force, when it came to the particular problems of the Moscow Metro we see in operation another quality—the headlong way in which he threw himself into grandiose schemes without adequate preparation, without adequate data, without any initial small-scale experiment to bring to light potential difficulties, and with no regard at all for waste of energy and man-power. This was a quality which was to become one of his distinctive marks when he could command all the resources of his vast land—which was, indeed, to lead to his eventual undoing. In the account of the building of the Moscow Underground we see this quality reflected in the narratives of the men on the job. Although the catastrophes and the attendant loss of life are minimised and never totted up, time and time again in order to demonstrate the resolution, the boldness, the temerity of Kaganovich or Khrushchev, or both, to say nothing of the heroism of the engineers, we are given glimpses of disaster as well as an unusual insight into the almost total disregard of the most elementary safety precautions so that the work might be pushed on without a check.
“During the construction of the underground we knew, of course, that we were tunnelling under a great city, that every disturbance of existing foundations might lead to disaster; nevertheless, during the first period of construction we did not show especial vigilance.”3
Those are the words of one of the chief engineers. An example of this absence of “vigilance” is given by one of his colleagues. There had, he wrote, been no time to shore up buildings along the line of excavation. One day one of the houses affected started to collapse. The inhabitants were evacuated and a special commission of experts was convened to discuss the situation. The commission laid it down that excavation should stop until the shoring up of the buildings had been completed. Now it was Khrushchev’s turn. On his daily inspection he saw that work had stopped. “What’s the matter with you? Are you frightened of buildings?” he asked the engineer in charge, Stepanov. Stepanov explained the situation and went on to say that in spite of the findings of the experts and the doubts of his own colleagues on the site, he himself would be prepared to go on excavating, taking the risk. “Nikita Sergeievich’s words definitely persuaded us to go ahead with the work along the entire line.”
Here is another example of the mood, this time featuring Kaganovich himself. Kaganovich could drive every bit as hard as Khrushchev. He, too, was prepared to expose the Muscovites, below and above ground, to avoidable risks. One day he appeared on the scene and remarked: “You are now about to tunnel under a house which is full of Americans. For political reasons this house must not be permitted to fall down.” Special measures were taken accordingly.
This sort of thing was going on in the very heart of Moscow. Years later the scars of collapsed houses and apartment buildings were still visible, until they became indistinguishable from the scars left by German bombs. And all the time Khrushchev drove. There were two tunnelling shields in operation, one English, one Soviet made. English engineers who knew all about this kind of tunnelling gave an advance of three-quarters of a metre in twenty-four hours as the most the shields should be expected to achieve in safety. Khrushchev would have none of this. The English shield, he said, must complete three-quarters of a metre per shift, and the Soviet shield must “catch up with it” in a given time. Soon even that was not good enough. Each shield must now achieve a full metre per shift. And, of course, the brigade leaders vied with one another in “socialist” competition.
Nobody, least of all Khrushchev, had a clear idea of the soil conditions on the line of the tunnel. The engineers were always being taken by surprise. But they were never given time to sit down and think. “Comrade Khrushchev ceaselessly kept his eye on our work. Every day the surveyor marked on a chart in Khrushchev’s office the movement of our shields. At the slightest slowing-down Khrushchev would immediately call in Comrade Tyagnibeda or Suvorov and demand an explanation as to why the slowdown had taken place and what the difficulties were. This constant vigilance of Comrade Khrushchev always inspired the workers to work even better.”
The nature of the difficulties and the conditions under which the workers (those who survived) were “inspired” to work even better, are often graphically illustrated. Thus, on one occasion, among many, the shield was suddenly flooded: “Immense torrents of water poured in from all sides, smashing the cro
ss-timbers and sweeping workers off their feet.” On another:
“The shield approached the silt—a brown, fluid mass. The caisson was working under an air pressure of 2.3 atmospheres. As each hour went by conditions became more difficult. Sometimes the silt resisted and unprecedented efforts had to be made to stop it, to save the tunnel, the machine, and, above all, the workers. Once a fire broke out in the caisson. In order to avoid the rapid spread of the fire in the compressed air, rich in oxygen, it was necessary to lower the air pressure. But this only opened the way for the silt, which poured in torrents into the shaft….”4
The tempo was frantic. In December 1933 Kaganovich himself made a speech to construction chiefs and shock brigade-leaders:
“It must be said with the utmost sharpness that if we go on as we are going now the first section of the underground will not be completed by November 7 [of the following year]. The main task is to speed up the construction tempo … we must increase the speed of excavating five times and the speed of tunnel building from eight to nine times.”5
In fact, as already remarked, the section was not finished after all in time for the seventeenth anniversary of the Revolution. It was not finished until May, 1935. All over the Soviet Union arbitrary deadlines of this kind were being laid down, arbitrary increases in tempo and productivity demanded: if a factory managed to fulfil its norm, the norm was promptly increased. This did not “inspire” the workers or the managers. It worked the other way. Enterprises soon learnt the technique of going slow, working all too easily within their powers, to avoid this inane and arbitrary progression. Khrushchev, as a shock-leader to end all shock-leaders, never learnt this simple lesson. To the end of his career he kept on reverting to his old barnstorming ways, proclaiming grandiose programmes to be achieved regardless of cost—and regardless of the fact that they could never be achieved. We shall see him at it twenty years later in the matter of the Virgin Lands. We shall see him at it in his absurd and meaningless boasting about “catching up” with America in no time at all in the production of this or that.
He trained his assistants well. “It was a difficult time,” wrote the Party Secretary in charge of one of the shafts. “Workers, even Communists, would come and ask to be released from work. Party candidate Kozlovski came and brought a doctor’s certificate to say that it would be injurious for his health for him to continue working. I did not release him. … It is necessary to get used to the work. When you start working, of course you are soon fatigued. But you must not leave your post: weariness passes, and working inspiration begins. The medical commission does not know this, but we—the Party organisation—know it well.”
Inspiration was a fashionable word at that time. It was a euphemism for going on until you dropped. Either you had it, or you were, in Kaganovich’s phrase, a “hostile element,” liable to be charged with wrecking and sabotage. Then you were dealt with by “administrative methods”: this was (still is) the euphemism for GPU (now KGB) action.
For the Moscow Underground a well-known Chekist was appointed to this end, as Assistant Chief of Construction. Unlike Khrushchev, he did not “inspire”; he purged. He himself recounted how during his first major purge some of the unsatisfactory workers had no personal papers: to escape being “sent away” the poor wretches tried to hide in the darkest recesses of the underground workings. But the gallant Chekist was too much for them. “My men descended into the shafts to hunt them out. Sometimes it was necessary literally to drag them up into the daylight.” One can picture the scene, the beatings up in the darkness, the groaning and the yelling. How much better to be inspired by Comrade Khrushchev and do overtime for no pay.
In those early days of the Metro construction forced labour was not used. That came later when the GPU had become the NKVD and Stalin’s great purges produced an unlimited number of bodies of all kinds for the dirtiest and most dangerous tasks. To begin with, the unskilled work was largely carried out by members of the Komsomol, the Young Communist League, who either volunteered to toil away for practically nothing to the greater glory of the Soviet Union, or else were pressured into it by moral blackmail. The work also attracted the sweepings of the Moscow slums. But Khrushchev knew about forced labour at this time and took it in his stride. One of his special interests was the construction of the Moscow-Volga canal, which, like the White Sea Canal, was the product of nothing but forced labour—Yagoda’s first drafts. Subsequent sections of the Moscow Metro were also built by forced labour—including, ironically, many foreign Communists who had sought refuge in the Soviet Union from the European dictatorships. One of the most distinguished of these, Valentin Gonzalez, the legendary anti-Franco general of the Spanish Civil War, known as El Campesino, was sent to work in the Metro as a last chance to prove himself a genuine Bolshevik: “Good, faithful work and evidence of change of heart might lead to my rehabilitation,” wrote El Campesino.
“The Russians are extremely proud of the Moscow Underground. It is their prize exhibit for foreign delegations, journalists and tourists. They claim it as a masterpiece of construction, and they are quite right. Only they forget to explain that it is a monument not only to Soviet engineering but also to the slave labour that went into its construction.
“Almost ninety per cent of the construction workers were in a position similar to mine. Many of them were old fighters, former military leaders, or even NKVD men. They had fallen into disgrace and had been allotted this sort of work, which offered them the faint—the very faint—hope that their efforts would in time restore them to their former position in the ruling class … the alternative to this work was Siberia, and so they did all they could to follow the faint ray of hope.”6
El Campesino (who himself finished up in Siberia) was writing of a later period, on the eve of the war, when Khrushchev had gone back to the Ukraine to be Stalin’s viceroy in Kiev; but, in spite of the industrial achievements of the Five-year Plans, working conditions in the Moscow Underground were then much the same as they had been in the early thirties. Soil still had to be shifted with wheelbarrows. “Lack of modern machinery and equipment made our work very difficult. Human muscles and effort had to replace the missing tools. I often worked in water up to my knees. After some time I noticed that I was always sent to the most dangerous spots when there had been a cave-in. An accident at work would have been a nice way of getting rid of me, I suppose. The Soviet propaganda would have turned me into a hero again.”7
So much for the reality behind the famous “Underground Palaces,” the stations of the Metro: great columned halls lined with multi-coloured, highly polished marbles, porphyries, and all the rest.
The first section cost more than 500 million roubles (El Campesino was earning, though he regularly exceeded his norm, 300 roubles a month, “the basic wage of navvies in Moscow—a starvation wage,” which came to barely 200 roubles when all deductions had been made).8 The appropriation for 1934 alone was 350 million roubles. According to the report of the 17th Party Congress in 1934, the Congress of the Victors, in the course of which Khrushchev was made a member of the Central Committee, the total investment in consumer goods for the whole of the Soviet Union under the first Five-year Plan, had been 300 million roubles a year.
“Over 70,000 square metres of marble were required for the stations of the first and second sections alone. This is one and a half times the amount used in all the palaces of Tsarist Russia during the fifty years preceding the Great October Socialist Revolution…. Lavish use was made of porphyry, granite, bronze, smalto and ceramic, as well as glazed panels. Many of the interiors were adorned with gold leaf, statuary, bas-reliefs and mosaics.”9
It is impossible to tell what the Muscovites really thought about this splendour. Crammed together, two families to a room, in hovels, cellars, and crumbling apartment blocks; ill-shod, wretchedly clothed, undernourished, they swarmed and shoved and cursed their way into the magic trains which swept silently out of the darkness, came to rest in these halls of glittering splendour, and
whisked the triumphant proletarians away to their miserable homes, to their bleak factories, or to queue for hours in front of barren shops for the simplest necessities of life—a box of matches, a needle and thread. We do not know what Khrushchev thought of these contrasts either. Later, much later, he was to condemn with great vehemence Stalin’s mania for monumental building, for wedding-cake architecture, for extravagant ornamentation—all diverting and wasting millions of roubles that should have been spent on necessary housing.10 But from 1932, first as deputy chief, then as supreme chief of Moscow, until 1938 he threw himself heart and soul into the great transformation of the city, which was never completed, and showed himself the best slave-driver of them all. For this he was duly rewarded.
Elected to the Central Committee in 1934, he became a candidate, or non-voting, member of the Politburo in 1938. By then he was earning Stalin’s approbation in quite another way: this time for the qualities which had caused Kaganovich to single him out in his early days at Stalino. 1934 was a climacteric year for the Soviet Union as well as for Khrushchev. The second Five-year Plan was going well. Throughout the great land the chaos, the hunger and the suffering produced by the collectivisation and the first shocks of Stalin’s “new style” in super-industrialisation were beginning to give way to a slightly easier tempo and at least the promise of stability. All over Europe totalitarian dictatorships had established themselves, partly as a desperate response to what appeared to be the total collapse of the capitalist system: in England and America, where democracy still ruled, governments were helpless in face of near bankruptcy and chronic unemployment; the Soviet Union alone among nations was forging ahead with steady purpose, transforming a nation of rough and illiterate peasants into an industrial society based on popular education. It was at this time, above all in 1933 and 1934, that Western visitors to Russia would return to a Europe scourged by dictators, to an England paralysed by a discredited fiscal and economic system, and proclaim that in the Soviet Union they had seen the future and that it worked. Confined to Moscow and Leningrad, as they were, and not allowed to see below the newly shining surface of the privileged districts of both, they had no idea of the cost. They knew nothing of the great famine, man-induced, which had lately desolated the Ukraine. They knew nothing of the millions of so-called kulaks killed, deported to Siberia, sent to labour and die in the saltmines and the coal-mines and the forests of the far North. The existence of great hardship they could see. There was no soap. There was considerable and, as it appeared to starry Western eyes, rather absurd pressure on intellectuals to toe the Party line: but obviously the Government could not tolerate intellectual sabotage, and there were plenty of hostile, counter-revolutionary survivals from the past who would all too quickly take advantage of any weakness on the part of central authority. Things would soon be better. They were getting better every day. Meanwhile, what mattered was the tremendous sense of purpose which filled the very young and, marching on, caught up the old and disillusioned in its train. How different from the state of the young under Baldwin and in America! How different, indeed.… At the very end of 1934, the glorious year in which Stalin had triumphed, confirmed, at the Congress of the Victors, the scattering of his enemies and the final defeat of counterrevolution, on the eve of 1935 which, obviously, would be the first year in which the hard-earned fruits of so much hardship, toil and suffering would at last be harvested—on 1st December, at exactly 4.30 in the dark winter afternoon, occurred the shooting of Sergei Mironovich Kirov, one of Stalin’s right-hand men, a member of the Politburo, supreme chief of Leningrad City and Leningrad Region. This assassination, or murder, started off a chain reaction which was to blacken Stalin’s name for ever, turn the great land into a charnel-house, and, as a by-product, elevate those who survived—Malenkov, Zhdanov, Bulganin, Beria, Khrushchev among them—to the most exalted positions, under Stalin, in the land.
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