Khrushchev

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by Edward Crankshaw


  Chapter 9

  The Great Purge

  We now have to take account of an entirely new element in our unravelling of Khrushchev’s past. In later life Khrushchev was to say little or nothing about those years of swift promotion from 1926 to 1934, from the moment he left Stalino to the moment when he succeeded Kaganovich as the Moscow Party chieftain. In the secret speech of 1956 he had nothing at all to say against the manner in which Stalin seized and consolidated his power, nothing at all about the excesses of the collectivisation and the super-industrialisation programme, the smashing of all opposition, first from the left, then from the right, the elevation of the secret police to become, virtually, a state within a state. For Khrushchev, Stalin’s crimes began only in 1934 with the murder of Kirov and the beginning of the “personality cult”—i.e. the deification of Stalin.

  This was not, as some have suggested, because Khrushchev himself, as an ardent Stalinist, was actively involved in the construction of the Stalinist system, so that any criticism of Stalin’s conduct and policies from 1926 to 1934 would inevitably have been self-criticism. On the contrary, all Khrushchev’s colleagues in 1956 and all politically conscious Russians over the age of forty, knew very well that the man who was now denouncing Stalin’s crimes had, from 1935 onwards, not only profited by them directly but had also most actively abetted them. The colleagues were in no position to point this out because they had all been in the same boat. The citizens, unable to speak out, could only remember and shrug their shoulders. The reason why Khrushchev had nothing to say in criticism of the system which Stalin had built up from 1926 to 1934 was that this system was still in operation and was to be retained indefinitely. For the same reason, in his denunciation of his late master, Khrushchev limited himself to exposing Stalin’s crimes against Communist Party members and, to a lesser degree, against the Red Army higher command. He had nothing at all to say about the oppression of the Soviet masses and the non-Communist intelligentsia; and this was for the very good reason that he, Khrushchev, proposed to continue oppressing these. At no point, as certain Italian Communists, including Signor Togliatti, indiscreetly pointed out, did Khrushchev ever suggest that there was anything wrong with a system which had bred such atrocity: this would have cut the ground completely from under his own feet, since he intended to perpetuate the system. Throughout, his attack was selective and arbitrary, and was concerned only with presenting Stalin as a great man gone wrong, and, in a sort of madness, perverting the noble system which he had built up in the tradition of Lenin and which it was his, Khrushchev’s, mission to restore. This was not a project calculated to please the Russians as a whole.

  From the murder of Kirov onwards we are no longer confined to the official records of Khrushchev’s actions and speeches; we can compare the record with Khrushchev’s subsequent apologia. The discrepancies here are very sharp indeed, so sharp that they make it impossible to accept Khrushchev’s unsupported word for anything at all. More than this, they make it impossible to believe the unsupported word of any of Khrushchev’s colleagues, including the present leaders of the Soviet Union. These have never yet challenged the Khrushchev version, which they know to be false.

  By 1934 Stalin, to all appearances, felt so sure of himself that Moscow was once more full of his late enemies returned from Siberia, like Zinoviev and Kamenev, or actually employed as Stalin’s advisers or even officially as members of the Government. Bukharin, Rykov, Piatakov, Radek and many others were all co-operating, had all recanted and denounced their own errors. Bukharin, for example, who had just three years to live, was still on the editorial board of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, which he had helped to launch in 1928. Soon, with other one-time opponents, he was to be a member of the commission appointed under Stalin to draft the new “liberal” constitution. It was a confusing time. For even while the most distinguished survivors of the Bolshevik Old Guard were making their final submission to Stalin and being variously rewarded, a savage and continuous purge was in progress among the rank and file of the Party and, still more, the Komsomol: a new generation was arising which had begun to question the validity of Stalin’s growing tyranny and which was disgusted with the abject capitulation of the old oppositionists. But even as they raised their voices, these younger men were thrown out of the Party and the Komsomol and set to work in the forced labour camps (inaugurated originally as “re-education” centres) of the new police chief, Yagoda.

  Stalin himself seemed to be undecided as to what to do next. In one breath he amnestied large numbers of kulaks who still survived; abolished the GPU as an autonomous force and handed over its duties to the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD; gave the Attorney General the power to supervise the activities of the NKVD and keep them within the law; invited members of the late opposition to co-operate in the drafting of a new constitution. In the next he would come out with some atrocious decree, such as the one which made a whole family responsible for any treasonable act committed by any one of its members: informing, even by children on their fathers, was thus made compulsory; failure to inform, even on husband or wife, was punished with great severity.1

  How the Old Bolsheviks reconciled their submission to Stalin with this sort of thing will never be known. They may have acted out of sheer moral and nervous exhaustion; or they may have believed they had reason to hope for a change if only they could hold on long enough. Whatever the reason, it helped them not at all: soon they were all to be dead at Stalin’s hand.

  There were, indeed, reasons to hope for a change. Stalin’s Politburo was itself divided. And the issue was whether or not the time had come to ease the rule of force and invite the active co-operation of all who had been in opposition for the urgent task of building a strong, healthy and united Soviet Union to meet the growing military threat from the outer world—from Nazi Germany, from Japan, from any of the Western powers who might join with either of these in a final effort to overthrow the Soviet Government before the country was strong enough to be invulnerable.

  The chief among those who believed in the policy of reconciliation was Sergei Kirov, who had succeeded Zinoviev as the Party chieftain of Leningrad and was a member of the Politburo.

  Kirov was not a sympathetic figure. His eyes were pale and cold. He was far and away the most able of Stalin’s younger lieutenants and he had been as tough as anybody in the drives against the opposition and the peasants. To all appearances he was the very prototype of Pasternak’s ruthless young commissars in their black leather jackets. But he was also highly intelligent, he had the born orator’s feeling for the popular mood, and, tough though he was, harsh and cruel when he was convinced of the need for harshness and cruelty, he had not a vestige of Stalin’s vengefulness, malevolence, and joy in cruelty. He wanted the Revolution to succeed, and he believed the time had come for the new rulers to show their strength by accepting rebels and malcontents back into the fold.

  In Leningrad, always the headquarters of particularism and rebelliousness, he had had more experience of dealing with difficult situations than any of his colleagues. And, amazingly, he was making himself respected and liked by the very people he had scourged. He had set himself up even against the excesses of the NKVD and was rapidly taking on the image of protector of the little man and champion of the aberrant who wished to live down their pasts and prove themselves useful citizens. And his fame had spread to Moscow.

  At the Congress of the Victors in February 1934 he had made a dazzling appearance, applauded, some said, more warmly even that Stalin himself. At the end of the Congress his position was immensely strengthened: re-elected to the Politburo, he was also elected to the Orgburo and made a Secretary of the Central Committee: all the strings of power were now in his hand. This meant that he would soon have to leave Leningrad and take up residence in Moscow. But, for some reason—it was said that his presence in Leningrad was for the time being indispensable— the call to Moscow was delayed. All through 1934 he went on taking his own line in
Leningrad. In November he attended a plenary session of the Central Committee in Moscow, which he dominated completely, putting forward proposals for specific measures to hasten the movement towards amelioration. It was then agreed that he must return to Moscow for good almost at once. That was on 28th November, 1934. On 1st December he was dead.

  Western observers, above all the New York Menshevik circle writing in their Russian language paper, which so often told the truth about what was going on behind the scenes in Russia,2 believed from the start that there was more than met the eye in the killing of Kirov. The actual shooting was done by a young Communist called Nikolayev, who was allowed, armed with a loaded revolver, to penetrate the security screen of the Leningrad City Soviet, and kill Kirov in his own office. Nikolayev was seized, tried in camera, and shot out of hand, together with fifteen other young Communists known to have been associated with him. In the first convulsive reaction it was given out that Nikolayev had been a “Fascist agent” in the pay of a foreign power: 104 unfortunates who had been sitting in prison since long before the crime, were dragged out and shot for good measure. Then, without a word of explanation, the “Fascist agent” story was abandoned. Now it was the Zinoviev-Kamenev opposition which was responsible. Leningrad was suddenly said to be teeming with oppositionists—the whole country for that matter; but Leningrad, whose independent ways had long exasperated Stalin, was the worst hit. Tens of thousands of individuals who, often for the most ludicrous and trivial reasons, were regarded as potentially untrustworthy, were rounded up and set off in the long, slow trains to labour-camps in the East and the North. Zinoviev and Kamenev were seized too, charged with responsibility for Kirov’s murder, tried in camera and sentenced to ten and five years penal servitude respectively. But Stalin had no intention of making martyrs of these two wretched dead-beats. He wanted to extract from them a confession of guilt which would enable him to smear with the Trotskyite brush anybody else he proposed to get rid of. Trotsky, still active in exile, still the man who was loudly and insistently telling the world about the realities of Stalin’s Russia, was the symbol of all opposition and all things that were anathema. “What followed was a grotesque process of bargaining over a formula of recantation, bargaining that went on between Stalin’s offices in the Kremlin and the prison cells of the Lubianka, where Zinoviev and Kamenev were held.”3 Zinoviev was choosy about the phrasing of this, his latest recantation in a long series. But it did not matter what he said. Zinoviev and Kamenev had become a comic turn. Not even their final trial and execution two years later could transform them into figures of tragedy. These two men in their time had helped to send many to their deaths: they were not even objects for pity.

  Meanwhile, with the news of Kirov’s death, and before even Nikolayev had been shot, an elaborate covering-up operation was set in motion. Stalin himself descended upon Leningrad, accompanied not only by Molotov and Voroshilov, as might have been expected, but also by the much younger Zhdanov (who was soon to be Kirov’s successor in Leningrad) and none other than Nikita Khrushchev—functioning as a member of the commission to arrange Kirov’s funeral and also as the representative of the workers of Moscow. This, as far as is known, was Khrushchev’s first appearance on the national stage in immediate association with Stalin. Many years later, when he was seeking to disassociate himself from Stalin, it was to prove an unfortunate conjuncture. For some very strange things went on in Leningrad immediately after the murder. Khrushchev must have been privy to them. Twenty-two years later he was to confirm Western belief that Kirov’s murder had been connived at, if not directly arranged, at the highest level. But, although later still he was to announce that a formal commission of inquiry was to sit on the case, he never went beyond vague accusations:

  “It must be asserted,” he said in his secret speech, “that to this day the circumstances surrounding Kirov’s murder hide many things which are inexplicable and mysterious and demand a most careful examination. There are reasons for the suspicion that the killer of Kirov, Nikolayev, was assisted by someone from among the people whose duty it was to protect the person of Kirov.

  “A month and a half before the killing, Nikolayev was arrested on the grounds of suspicious behaviour, but he was released and not even searched. It is an unusually suspicious circumstance that when the Chekist assigned to protect Kirov was being brought for interrogation, on 2nd December, 1934, he was killed in a car ‘accident’ in which no other occupants of the car were harmed. After the murder of Kirov top functionaries of the Leningrad NKVD were given very light sentences, but in 1937 they were shot. We can assume that they were shot in order to cover the traces of the organisers of Kirov’s killing.”4

  Whom did Khrushchev have in mind, as being responsible for Kirov’s killing? He never said. Three years later it looked as though he was about to say more, when he announced to the ‘21 st Party Congress that by an extraordinary chance the chauffeur of the car in which the responsible Chekist had been killed had been discovered still alive in Siberia, and was being questioned. The matter then died.

  If Khrushchev meant Stalin, why did he not say so? In that same speech he was accusing his late master of crimes no less atrocious. The same applies to Yagoda, head of the NKVD at the time of the murder. If Khrushchev had wanted to accuse Yagoda there was nothing in the world to stop him doing so. He did not. And, in any case, by 1937 when the Leningrad NKVD chiefs were finally shot, Yagoda himself was under arrest and being prepared by his successor, Yezhov, for his own trial and execution.

  Who then? Why was it necessary first to make a most disturbing and damaging accusation, and then to wrap that accusation up in mystery?

  The time was February 1956. The occasion, the 20th Party Congress, marked Khrushchev’s final bid for supremacy over all his colleagues by setting himself up, with the help of Mikoyan and others, as the man who could dethrone Stalin and turn the Soviet Union into happier paths. On the platform with him were, among others, Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov. It was known that Molotov and Kaganovich had been most zealous in that critical year in persuading Stalin to stick to the hard line of terror as opposed to Kirov’s soft line of reconciliation. Malenkov, of course, was not yet on this high level, any more than Khrushchev himself; nevertheless, he was already very much of an insider. After his years on Stalin’s personal secretariat and his experience as a member of the Moscow Party Committee, where he had worked closely with Kaganovich, Khrushchev and Yezhov, he was posted in 1934 to a full-time appointment in the newly created Department of Leading Party Organs (ORPO), which superseded the Party’s Department of Higher Personnel. Here he was second-in-command to Nikolai Yezhov at the time of the Kirov murder. Yezhov was the dreadful little psychopath who, in the early autumn of 1935, was to take over the NKVD from Yagoda and carry the great purge to almost unbelievable lengths. Kaganovich, as head of the Party Control Commission from February 1934, was Yezhov’s immediate boss, until Yezhov succeeded him in 1935, leaving Malenkov to run ORPO.

  We thus discover a new combination: just as in 1932 Moscow was being run by Kaganovich, Khrushchev, Yezhov and Malenkov—with Bulganin on the side, so, in 1934, the Control Commission of the Party, with its subsidiary, OPRO, was in the hands of Kaganovich, Yezhov and Malenkov—with Khrushchev on the periphery as Kaganovich’s confidant and as the working colleague of the other two. The Control Commission was uniquely in charge of Party discipline and higher Party appointments. When the great purge was running wild under Yezhov it was Malenkov’s task, as chief of ORPO, to supply him with dossiers of all Party members it was thought desirable by Stalin or any of his colleagues, or by Malenkov or Yezhov themselves, to eliminate. This was their heyday. Less than a year before Yezhov was himself destroyed by Stalin and replaced by Beria, Malenkov wrote of his master in Party Construction:

 

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