Chapter 10
Viceroy of the Ukraine
In the speeches he made at the time of the great purge we become aware for the first time that, with all his other qualities, Khrushchev was also a most accomplished actor. As with all born actors, it is the hardest thing in the world to separate genuine feeling from histrionics, and later on in his career we shall be confronted time and time again with this very problem—most spectacularly perhaps in his extraordinary diatribe against the West after the breakdown of the Paris summit conference in the summer of 1960, but also in a hundred lesser episodes. As he reveals himself increasingly in his activities on the international stage it will become clear that he in fact had an extremely ugly temper, but also that, on occasion, he was clever at appearing to lose his temper when he was calculating to a nicety the intended effect of this or that demonstration.
Calculation was very much a part of his quite sickening demagogy over the corpses of his late comrades in the middle 1930s. He knew, none better, that the charges brought against the old Bolsheviks—charges repeated by him in his speech to the 200,000 and on many other occasions—were false to the point of high fantasy; he knew, further, that their so-called confessions were elicited by torture and moral blackmail in the Lubianka prison, a few blocks away from his Moscow Party headquarters. Later, in his secret speech of 1956 and thereafter, he was to retail, with the air of a man outraged by the sudden revelation of evil, a few very carefully selected instances of false witness and physical torture. But, like every other Russian, he knew very well what was going on at the time. He acquiesced in it; as we have seen, he actively connived at it. More than this, once again he put himself a jump ahead of Stalin. It will be remembered that in the last sentence of the extract from the speech to the 200,000, he spoke of the need to “finish off and wipe out all remnants of these vile murderers, Fascist agents, Trotskyites, Zinovievites, and their right-wing accomplices.” That was in January 1937, immediately after the second great treason trial, which, like the first, had concerned itself with alleged Trotskyite conspiracy. The third great trial, which featured Bukharin and other “rightists” and retrospectively associated them with the Trotskyites, was not mounted until March 1938— fourteen months after Khrushchev, none other, had prepared the way by publicly accusing them of being Trotsky’s “accomplices.” He was still running true to type, pointing the way, as he had done in Stalino in his very early days, which Stalin was later going to take. He knew just as well that Bukharin and his associates had never been accomplices of Trotsky as he knew that Radek and Sokolnikov had not planned with Germany and Japan the overthrow of the Soviet Union, and that Trotsky himself had not planned the restoration of capitalism. But his voice as he proclaimed these lies, and many more besides, quivered with outrage and indignation.
He was making an important career, a career that had been jeopardised by the rise of Kirov, now safely murdered in his prime. It was a career which depended utterly on Stalin, who could make him or break him. What had he to offer to Stalin? Not a powerful and subtle brain like Malenkov, not a keen understanding of finance and administration like Bulganin: he had to offer his total subservience, his remarkable gifts as an agitator (a transmission-belt between Stalin and the workers), and his capacity for intrigue in the interests of Stalin—and himself. Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Voroshilov, and a handful of others could, certainly at this stage, argue with Stalin. Malenkov, at a lower level, could produce useful and constructive ideas. Khrushchev could only act, through agitation and command. He had no justification except as Stalin’s instrument; and he had to go to very great lengths to demonstrate that he was nothing but Stalin’s instrument.
What he thought about the atrocities in which he was required to assist, we do not know. The born actor is necessarily a man who can think himself into a part until he becomes that part. It is fairly safe to say that the demagogue in the high flush of his oratory believes for the moment what he is trying to make others believe: as we say, be becomes carried away by his own eloquence. He is also conditioned, of course, by the phrases which are the common currency of his time. Our own “free world” contains some rather nasty dictatorships; the phrases “Western values,” or “Christian values” are used by Western politicians to characterise the TV or Coca-Cola culture; in America “Commie” is a term of abuse for anyone who stands to the left of Mr. Joseph Kennedy; in Britain the “affluent society” contains the slums of Glasgow and Dundee. In Khrushchev’s Russia “sabotage” and “wrecking” came to stand for ignorance or carelessness, “Fascist agent,” “Trotskyite,” “degenerate” or “filthy spy” for anyone who had ever queried any of Stalin’s policies.
In between his burst of public eloquence, nevertheless, Khrushchev knew that he was lying, and from 1938 onwards he himself was not merely an abettor and instigator of terror but also an important part of the terror machine. Violence, though not the violence of malevolence and spite, came very naturally to him. We must remember that long before Stalin broke into violence Khrushchev Was demanding the immediate application of “repressive measures.” And long after Stalin was dead, his image shattered, Khrushchev was to turn to violence in Hungary; still later, he was to tell rebellious Soviet writers that the Hungarian revolt would never have taken place had there been a little preliminary shooting of the Hungarian intellectuals: there was to be no nonsense of that kind in Russia, he declared at that famous and macabre garden-party in the summer of 1957; if it came to the crunch: “my hand would not tremble!” It is worth remarking too, that even in the sweetly reasonable reflections in the course of his secret speech on the fate of those who had been shot for Trotskyism, he did not condemn all the shootings. “Was it necessary,” he asked, “to annihilate such people? We are deeply convinced that, had Lenin lived, such an extreme method would not have been used against many of them.” He did not instance those whom Lenin would also have had shot.
Now, in 1938, a newly appointed candidate, or non-voting member of the Politburo, one of the top dozen, he was about to instigate a reign of terror of his own. He was sent back to the Ukraine as Stalin’s viceroy over forty million souls, after leaving it for Moscow as a quasi-student of the Industrial Academy just ten years before.
He was forty-four, the father of two children in their teens and two still younger. His second wife, that comfortable figure who was later to impress the West with her quiet authority, her modest and common-sense attitudes, her understanding tolerance, was still with him, had stuck with him during all this decade of climbing ever upwards over the corpses of late comrades. She must have seen something in him invisible then to those around him, but to become apparent to the whole world in years to come. When we ask ourselves how the Khrushchev who had clawed and manoeuvred his way upwards, stepping again and again into the shoes of colleagues disgraced or liquidated, managed to retain more than a spark of common humanity, the answer must be, can only be, that he was married to Nina Petrovna. The life story of this remarkable woman, if it could be told, would help us to understand Russian reality better than any account of the activities of her husband. But Russian reality with its extraordinary mingling of violence and gentleness, treacheries and loyalties, ruthlessness and warmth, still remains hidden behind the ugly barrier of Soviet propaganda and Soviet government action.
Khrushchev’s return to the Ukraine, his escape from the hysterical viciousness of political existence in Moscow, must have been a very great relief to Nina Petrovna as well as to him. It was also the luckiest promotion imaginable. In all he was to spend twelve years away from Moscow, four of them in war, unremarked by the outer world with its gaze fixed on the Kremlin, and increasingly detached from the ceaseless infighting among those who believed that the sure way to power and glory was to attach themselves as closely as possible to Stalin’s person. These were wrong, Malenkov above all was wrong. The man who in 1953 was ready to exercise supreme power was the man who had for many years been practising the use of power as virtual dictator of a grea
t province of the empire, a whole country of forty millions, with its own language, its own history, its own proud traditions. Many believed that by staying away from Moscow for so long, Khrushchev had put himself out of the running for the succession. He knew better: he had learnt how to govern, where his more spectacular colleagues had learnt only how to intrigue and to survive. He had learnt how to handle men, while his colleagues in the Kremlin had learnt only how to command them, intrigue against them and kill them. He had learnt a great deal about the way people lived, while his colleagues deliberately barricaded themselves against the people, confining their contact with the common man to the reading of police reports on the one hand and the lies of corrupt statisticians on the other. By the time he came back permanently to Moscow in December 1949 he had matured into an independent force, an almost unique phenomenon in Stalin’s Russia.
But he did not start off like that. On the contrary, to begin with he had to justify his promotion by carrying to Kiev Stalin’s message of ill-will.
The Ukraine, with its separatist ambitions and its tendency to despise the Great Russians, had suffered more deeply than any other part of the Soviet Union from Stalin’s policies since 1928. It was a land of vital importance to the Soviet leadership. Although in area it amounted to only 3 per cent of the Soviet Union, it held 20 per cent of the Soviet population—and the most advanced 20 per cent at that. With its infinitely rich black earth, it had long been the granary of Russia, and before the development of the Urals it was also the supreme workshop of Russia. Resistance to collectivisation had been stronger and more bitter there than in any part of the Soviet Union, and the great famine which desolated the country as a result of the killing of livestock, the burning of crops and the seizure of what was left by the police and the military, was above all a Ukrainian famine. In Moscow and Leningrad people went hungry; in Kharkov and Kiev they starved to death in tens of thousands.
After the departure of Kaganovich to Moscow in 1929, Party leaders of the Ukraine were chosen for their toughness. But toughness could not save the ablest among them. There were suicides and liquidations. Finally, two men who owed everything to Stalin and exerted themselves to carry out his most malignant commands, Postychev and Kossior, were themselves arrested and shot.
Khrushchev in his secret speech had a good deal to say about these men—and he had good reason for this. He had stepped immediately into their shoes. He tried to turn them into martyrs, passive victims of Stalin’s homicidal mania. They were not martyrs. The fate they themselves suffered was the fate they themselves had prepared and consummated for untold thousands. The best account of the Ukrainian variation of the Yagoda-Yezhov terror, presided over by Postychev and Kossior, is contained in one of the most remarkable prison narratives ever written, the account of his imprisonment and torture and interrogation in Kharkov by the German scientist Alex Weissberg.1 This is a classic account of the atrocities with which we are all now familiar (if only through Khrushchev’s own story of them!) written by a man of such remarkable character that he could look back on his experiences as a bad joke. The bad joke took place under Postychev and Kossior. Postychev himself was then already on the way out. He had offended Stalin, as Khrushchev himself was to tell us much later, by querying the validity of some of the vozhd’s accusations against some of his Ukrainian colleagues. After a period of obscurity, during which he was almost certainly under arrest, he was formally expelled from the Moscow Politburo in January 1938—and the man who moved up into his place as a candidate member was Khrushchev. In that month Kossior, who had succeeded Postychev in Kiev, was demoted and Khrushchev took his place as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Party. A few months later Kossior was arrested. This left another vacant place in the Moscow Politburo, and, in 1939, Khrushchev moved up to full member.
By now he had become the scourge of the Ukraine. His first job was to purge the Ukrainian Party of all sympathisers with, or associates of, the arrested leaders. In the words of D. S. Korotchenko, then Chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Peoples’ Commissars, later to be advanced by Khrushchev, Comrade Khrushchev, “the best son of our people, the excellent Bolshevik, the Donets miner,” had been sent to Kiev by Stalin to pull the faltering Party together and “to deal the final blow to the whole Trotskyite, Bukharinite, bourgeois nationalist gang in the Ukraine.”2
Deal with it he did. By 1938 the industrialisation of the Soviet Union was beginning, on the surface, to show. Food production had very far from recovered from the collectivisation; consumer goods were still in very short supply. The surface was so thin that even after another three years of accumulation, when the Germans came crashing in, it took only six weeks of war to bring down the whole country to starvation level and empty the shops of all goods of all conceivable kinds for the duration and much longer. But Khrushchev and his colleagues were part of the surface. In Kiev, as in all great cities, there were special shops and special restaurants reserved exclusively for the highly privileged: above all for senior Party officials, political police officers, officers of the Red Army, ballet dancers, actors and writers, senior scientists and engineers. Access to these shops secured for the privileged luxuries undreamt of by all but some scores of thousands. And over this remarkable élite presided the Party Secretaries. I have called the First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party Stalin’s viceroy. Khrushchev was precisely this, and he lived in vice-regal splendour. Polo ponies and elephants he lacked, polo never having been a Russian game and elephants not being indigenous to the Ukraine. He had everything else, as Stalin had everything else in his palatial villas outside Moscow, at Sochi on the Black Sea and elsewhere: hosts of servants, an army of bodyguards, a fleet of sleek, black motor-cars, some of them bullet-proof, furs and jewels, women, food and drink of the richest and grossest kind. All over the Soviet Union senior Party Secretaries, flanked by the local garrison commanders and chiefs of police, lived like alien and barbaric conquerors in and off a hostile land: in the Ukraine, as also in the Caucasus and Russian Turkestan, they were in fact precisely this, often ruling through native henchmen at all levels of the kind known in other circumstances as collaborationists. Korotchenko, a born Ukrainian, might celebrate Khrushchev as “the best son of our people”: but Khrushchev was not a Ukrainian at all, and his job, surrounded in his palace by his court, was first to kill off all Party members who might be suspected of thinking of themselves as Ukrainians,3 then to Russify with all possible speed, and with the sort of roughness which came so naturally to him, his dominion of forty million souls.
With the first he began moving at once. “I pledge myself to spare no efforts in seizing and annihilating all agents of Fascism, Trotskyites, Bukharinites, and all those despicable bourgeois nationalists on our free Ukrainian soil.”4 This pledge is taken from Khrushchev’s election address in May 1938. How insipid, by contrast, the election addresses of even the most rancorous Conservatives and Socialists, to say nothing of Liberals, in our own effete society! What is more, here was a politician who fulfilled his election pledges…. Soon the survivors of his purge were offering glowing testimonials. Thus, in July, the Ukrainian Party organ declared:
“The merciless uprooting of the enemies of the people— the Trotskyites, Bukharinites, bourgeois nationalists, and all other spying filth—began only after the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party sent the unswerving Bolshevik and Stalinist, Nikita Sergeievich Khrushchev, to the Ukraine to lead the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party.”5
Here is an even more valuable testimonial from none other than Comrade Uspensky, chief of the NKVD in the Ukraine, the uppermost authority in all that land on the techniques of oppression:
“I consider myself a pupil of Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov. Comrade Yezhov teaches us to fight the enemies of the people, to purge our country, our Motherland of the enemies. I pledge myself to follow Comrade Yezhov, the militant leader of the NKVD in every respect….
“Only after the faithful Stalinist, Nikita Sergeievich Khrush
chev, arrived in the Ukraine did the smashing of the enemies of the people begin in earnest…,”6
That was in June 1938. Kirov had been dead three and a half years. For two and a half years the great purge had raged throughout the Soviet Union, very much including the Ukraine. Early in 1937, Yagoda, the original horror, had been superseded by Yezhov, whose “degenerate practices” Khrushchev was later to condemn so picturesquely. For eighteen months he had run amok over the Soviet Union like a rabid dog. Yet, after all this, Khrushchev and Uspensky still found work to do. Yezhov in fact had only another few months to go at the time of Uspensky’s tribute. Beria was to take over effectively almost at once as a result of a sudden panic action by Stalin when it was borne in on him that the country, above all its heavy industry and its armed forces, was being choked to death by Yezhov. In December 1938 this unspeakable creature finally disappeared for ever, liquidated by his successor, Beria—and with him, among thousands of other senior police officers (who had only been carrying out the instructions of the master-murderer, Stalin, as best they knew how), went poor Uspensky, his faithful pupil, for such a short time the right-hand man and impassioned admirer of Khrushchev in the Ukraine.
Beria, brought in to abate the Yezhovschina, soon got into his stride as the head of a terror machine which was to act a good deal more discreetly but no less bloodily than the Yezhov machine. The difference was that while Yagoda and Yezhov had been primarily concerned with ridding the Party, the Army and other institutions of all who did not owe everything to Stalin and could not be relied on to sink or swim with him, Beria was more concerned with terrorising the masses, which he did in fine style, at the same time rounding up hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of unpolitical unfortunates to keep going the vast and expanding network of GULAG, the forced-labour administration, which performed the very useful task (in a land where food and clothing were short) of providing immense contingents of expendable unskilled labour for mining or development work in the more inclement regions of an extremely inclement land. Beria himself, who was not a subtle man in spite of his scholastic appearance when sober,7 would have been hard put to it to say whether his primary task was to keep 180 million people subdued and obedient by police terror or to provide an immense pool of labour which did not have to be paid and could be exploited and worked to death without any questions asked.8 In the end, of course, it was discovered that even Russia could not go on squandering man-power in this way and was being brought to a standstill as Yezhov had all but brought it to a standstill in 1938. But that was not until after Stalin was dead. Until that time, from 1939 until 1953, Beria and Khrushchev were associated in the closest manner in Stalin’s Politburo.
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