Figures of the purged are hard to come by. We know from Khrushchev himself that 98 of the 139 full and candidate members of the All-Union Central Committee elected in 1934 were shot.9
The 1934 Central Committee was elected at the notorious 17th Party Congress, called the Congress of the Victors, because in the course of it Stalin formally celebrated his victory over the opposition. By the time the 18th Party Congress met in 1939 70 per cent of the “victors” had been killed.
The Ukrainian Central Committee reflected this general pattern. By the time Khrushchev arrived in Kiev in January 1938, 69 per cent of the Central Committee elected at the 13th Ukrainian Party Congress only six months earlier in June 1937 had already disappeared, and yet Uspensky could declare that “the smashing of the enemies of the people” only started seriously after Khrushchev’s arrival. Could Khrushchev do better than this? Indeed he could! At the 14th Ukrainian Party Congress, held six months after his advent, only three of the 166 members and candidate members of the 1937 Committee were left. And the purge went on: at the 15th Congress in 1940 over half the 1938 Committee, elected under Khrushchev’s aegis, were re-elected. In a word, as far as the destruction of higher Party functionaries was concerned, Khrushchev in Kiev did as well as, if not better than, Stalin in Moscow. By 1940 he had an instrument exactly suited to his will.
It will have been noticed that in their Kiev speeches Khrushchev and his admirers made frequent references not only to the usual Trotskyite-Bukharinite-Fascist-Spying Filth but also to a new enemy, “bourgeois nationalism.” This was, in fact, the main enemy from 1938 onwards: it was the Stalinist term for local patriotism whether in the Caucasus or in Soviet Turkestan or in the Ukraine; but above all in the Ukraine. It was Khrushchev’s main task in the years that remained to him before the Germans came trampling in (to be received at first by many Ukrainians with bread and salt as heaven-sent liberators from Stalin—and Khrushchev) to smash the Ukrainian national consciousness, which had flared up in 1918, so that the Ukraine proclaimed itself a sovereign state, only to be crushed by Lenin and Trotsky, and again in the great fight against collectivisation in 1929. Beaten again into submission the Ukrainians had nevertheless clung to their language and their national customs: these were now to be stamped out.
A vivid idea of the strength and tenacity of Ukrainian patriotism, its dislike of the Moscow government in general and of the Moscow Bolshevik government in particular, can be obtained from an instruction of Trotsky’s to a Communist agitation squad dispatched to the Ukraine in the days after the Revolution when it was struggling to maintain its independence under the Hetman Petloura. This instruction is not only a first-class example of Bolshevik infiltration techniques; it is also an indication of what Lenin and Trotsky were up against in the Ukraine (they had to go very carefully indeed, operating what was in effect a major deception plan or confidence trick). It is also, incidentally, a pleasure to be able to show that Trotsky, like many other Old Bolsheviks whom Stalin was to kill, was in some respects no better than his murderers.
“The arguments,” wrote Trotsky, “we discuss here in Russia with perfect frankness can only be whispered in the Ukraine. … It will therefore be your duty to observe the following precepts:
1. Do not force Communism upon the Ukrainian peasants until our power is stabilised in the Ukraine.
2. Set about the cautious introduction of Communism on the old estates in the guise of co-operative associations.
3. Do your best to make people believe that Russia is not really Communist at all.
4. To take the wind out of Petloura’s sails, insist that Russia is all for the independence of the Ukraine, provided that she agrees to set up a Soviet Government.
5. Only a fool would go about shouting from the housetops that the Soviet Government is fighting Petloura. Sometimes it will be advisable even to start rumours to the effect that we are in alliance with Petloura, at any rate until Dennikin is finally liquidated.”10
Here is a perfect example of Leninism in practice offered by a man who spent his declining years indicting Stalin for brutal and unscrupulous behaviour. Lenin and Trotsky won. The Ukraine was subdued. It was Khrushchev’s task in 1938 to give it the knock-out blow.
Here is what Lenin said he believed about the nationalities problem, formulated in a resolution adopted at the 7 th Conference of the Bolshevik Party in April 1917, after the overthrow of the Tsar, but six months before the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power:
“The right of all nations forming part of Russia freely to secede and form independent states shall be recognised. To deny this right or to omit measures which will guarantee its realisation in practice would be equivalent to advocating a policy of seizure and annexation.”11
The moment he obtained power Lenin changed his mind. Not content with the seizure of the Ukraine and the Tsarist colonies in the Caucasus, he made a spirited attempt to take Poland.
In 1923, after the civil war, which brought more ruin to the rich Ukrainian lands than to any other part of the Soviet Union, great promises were made about recognising the equality of the Ukrainian language with Russian, the Ukrainisation of Party and administrative machines, the autonomy of Ukrainian literature and Ukrainian culture generally. Ten years later these promises were forgotten. Those who reminded Stalin of them were destroyed. Their destroyers, above all Postychev and Kossior, were then themselves destroyed—and now it was Khrushchev’s turn. To defend Ukrainian culture was now high treason. All those who had stood up for the Ukrainian language and for Ukrainian culture, such a short time before officially recognised by Moscow, were now branded as “Fascist degenerates” and “bourgeois nationalists.” Khrushchev himself accused “Fascist-Polish gangs” of doing everything they could “to detach the Ukraine from the Great Soviet Union, from the heart of our Motherland—Moscow.”12 The school curricula were changed to drive out the native language and memories of the native traditions. Ukrainian spelling was changed. Ukrainian history was rewritten so that national heroes became renegades and traitors. The school-teachers themselves had to be taken off work in large numbers to be given shock courses in the Russian language. To assist him in this good work Khrushchev was pleased to exalt certain Ukrainian writers and intellectuals who were prepared to sell themselves, renounce their own birthright, and assist in the oppression of their own people in return for Stalin’s blessing and larger sales for their books than they had ever dreamed of. Chief among these was the writer Alexander Korneichuk, who was to make a brilliant career first by denouncing his own countrymen, then by advancing as the liberator of Ukrainian culture with Timoshenko’s troops as they occupied first the Polish Ukraine (after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), then Bessarabia, finally, with his Polish renegade wife, the novelist Wanda Wasilewska, as an integral part of Stalin’s notorious peace-offensives. As far as the record goes, Korneichuk was Khrushchev’s first acquaintance in the world of culture, which he had not encountered until he was elevated to the rank of viceroy, disposing of all the patronage associated with great princes, in 1938. It explains a good deal of what was to happen later.
Chapter 11
1939: Invader of Poland
With his promotion to full membership of the Politburo in March 1939 Khrushchev received Stalin’s formal acknowledgement that he had done all that had been expected of him in the Ukraine. Although he was still based on Kiev, as Zhdanov, Kirov’s successor, was based on Leningrad, and was to remain there until the Germans came two and a half years later, he was now a voting member of the highest council in the land, one of the handful of men who assisted Stalin in the making of policy and who would, if they survived, be in the running for the succession when Stalin died.
It is time to glance at these men who, with two or three others, formed the group which dominated the 18th Party Congress in 1939. Kalinin was to die naturally in 1946, Zhdanov in dubious circumstances in 1948, but the rest were to stick together, reinforced from time to time with new blood, until the end of the Stalin period. All
the senior old Bolsheviks had been killed, all the Stalinists too who had ever questioned the absolute Tightness of any of Stalin’s decisions had been killed with them (Kirov, Ordzhonikidze, Yenukidze, Postychev, Kossior, Chubar, and many other lesser figures). The men who were left either owed their positions entirely to Stalin or had in effect been created by him.
Stalin himself was now fifty-nine. His only contemporaries were Marshal Voroshilov, fifty-eight, who controlled the Red Army, and Kalinin, sixty-one, a colourless individual who, as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, was titular head of State.
Then came four men whose Bolshevik pasts went back before the Revolution, whose ideas had thus been formed under Lenin, but who had been insignificant figures compared with scores, with hundreds, even, of their murdered comrades, but who had firmly attached themselves to Stalin in the early days of his struggle with Trotsky. By far the most distinguished of these was Molotov, now forty-nine, who, as a very young man, had indeed played an important role in Petrograd in 1917. With his wooden appearance and his stammer, he had been dismissed by Lenin as “the best filing-clerk in Petrograd.” But Lenin was not perceptive about people: he never understood that it had been Molotov who had kept the Bolshevik Party on the rails until his arrival at the Finland Station in April 19171; and he certainly never realised that this unprepossessing young man was acting as Stalin’s confidant and chief-of-staff in the highly successful operation to create and capture the Party apparatus while Lenin was still alive. Afterwards, and until the death of Stalin, Molotov was to figure without a break as Stalin’s Bolshevik conscience, steadfast, wholly loyal and wholly bloody, doing more than any man to strengthen the will and purpose of his master when he wavered.
A little younger than Molotov, and also pre-Revolutionary Bolsheviks, were Kaganovich, forty-six, whom we have already met, Andreyev, forty-four, a dour and devoted apparatus man, and Mikoyan, also forty-four, both of whom we shall encounter hereafter.
Khrushchev himself, now forty-five, also belonged to this age-group; but, as we have seen, he had not joined the Party until after the Revolution. And he himself at this time was overshadowed by Zhdanov, two years his junior, whose rise had been spectacular and swift: after serving for twelve years far from Moscow at Nizhni Novgorod, where he did brilliantly well, in 1934, at the age of thirty-eight, he was made in one great sweep a member of the Party Secretariat and a candidate member of the Politburo—then, after Kirov’s murder, sent to Leningrad in his place. Zhdanov was an extraordinarily interesting and able figure. Had he lived it is unlikely that either Malenkov or Khrushchev would have achieved their dizzy summits: by virtue of his personality and his ability he was Stalin’s natural heir. Because he was known above all to the West for his heavy-handed conduct towards Tito’s Yugoslavia and for the post-war persecution of writers, musicians and painters known as the Zhdanovschina, his full character has never been understood outside Russia. In fact he was the only Stalinist in the same street with Kirov. Tough and intransigent to a degree in getting his way, actively hostile to the West, ruthless in his insistence on obedience in according to certain principles (but he was the only man in Stalin’s entourage who had any principles), within this harsh framework he was alert, interested, intelligent, amusing and good-tempered in a coarse and cynical way. He subdued Nizhni Novgorod on behalf of Stalin, as later he subdued Leningrad; but he managed to spike his opponents with a minimum of violence and often to win them to his side. How this was done he was to show after the war when he was Stalin’s representative in Finland: the Finns had every reason to hate him, since it was he above all who had urged Stalin to invade in 1939; but in 1945 he managed to get on remarkably well with his victims, putting the Soviet demands for reparations and the surrender of territory with perfect clarity, but, once these were accepted, conducting himself like a civilised and amiable human being.
After Zhdanov and Khrushchev came Malenkov, thirty-eight, and Beria, forty. Neither of these were yet members of the Politburo, but both were very strong: Beria by virtue of his command of the police, Malenkov because of his control, in Stalin’s name, of the Party apparatus. The great drama of the succession was to be played out, while Zhdanov was still alive, between Zhdanov and Malenkov; after Zhdanov’s death between Malenkov, Beria and Khrushchev.
Zhdanov, Malenkov, and Khrushchev all allowed themselves a certain independence of mind; Zhdanov and Malenkov achieved also a certain independence of speech which was denied to Khrushchev: Zhdanov because he was an outstandingly strong character with ideas of his own, Malenkov because his finger was continually on Stalin’s pulse and he knew from day to day, from year to year, just how far he could go. Khrushchev was dictator of the Ukraine, but it was not until much later that he felt strong enough to take a line of his own.
He was lucky in his new job. As a member of the Politburo he would be called to Moscow for important meetings or when his own particular province was under consideration. But he was not one of the inner council who met nearly every day under Stalin’s chairmanship. In 1939 the problems facing this council were grave and pressing and of a kind of which Khrushchev had had little experience. The purges were over. Beria, while quietly inaugurating his own particular brand of terror and building up the forces of the political police into an army organised on military lines, with its own heavy weapons, tanks and aircraft, was, at the same time, engaged in reversing a large number of sentences on Party members and Army officers of outstanding value who had not been shot but only sent away. Stalin and Molotov and Voroshilov were above all now concerned with foreign policy, with nothing less than the issue of war and peace. In May 1939, eight months after Munich, two months after the invasion and dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, Stalin replaced his Foreign Secretary, Litvinov, with Molotov: the clearest of signals that propaganda for collective security in face of Hitler was to be dropped and that the Soviet Union was no longer going to pretend that it was concerned with anything but its own survival. In June it fell to Zhdanov, who, for some time, had been concerning himself with foreign affairs, to give the first unmistakable clue as to Stalin’s new direction. In a signed article in Izvestia he wrote:
“I permit myself to express a personal opinion … although my friends do not share it. They still think that in beginning negotiations on a pact for mutual assistance with the USSR, the British and French Governments had the serious intention of creating a powerful barrier against aggression in Europe. I believe that the British and French Governments have no wish for an equal treaty with the USSR. … It seems to me that the British and French desire not a real treaty acceptable to the USSR but only talks about a treaty in order to play upon public opinion in their countries about the supposedly unyielding attitude of the USSR and thus to make it easier for themselves to make a deal with the aggressors.”2
This was the first official hint of the Soviet pact with Germany. Zhdanov, of course, was not acting on his own initiative. He was flying a kite on behalf of Stalin and Molotov: just as Khrushchev had several times been used to prepare the way for new phases in Stalin’s domestic policy, so Zhdanov was now being used to prepare for a new initiative in foreign policy.
There is no evidence at all that in these days Khrushchev took an active interest in foreign affairs. His whole background, training and adult preoccupations with the purely practical problems of survival, advancement, and helping to make the Soviet Union work would only have confirmed a native insularity. Stalin saw himself as a strong man manoeuvring among strong men on the international stage, with Molotov as his chief of staff. Mikoyan had been to America to study foreign business and manufacturing methods, and thus had a clearer picture than any of his colleagues of the real nature of the outer world. Kaganovich, with his responsibilities for heavy industry and then for reconstructing the whole of the Soviet transport system—to say nothing of his work on the great Dnieper dam, involving co-operation with foreign engineers—was highly conscious of America, Germany, France and Britain as great industrial
powers. Zhdanov, as the master of Leningrad, Russia’s exposed outpost immediately vulnerable to Western attack, had thought a great deal about the European power balance, and, in any case, within his unusually rigid Marxist framework, had a lively, inquiring and constructive mind. Malenkov made it his business, sitting hard against the centre of power, to acquaint himself with all the problems of his master; and his mind was strong and supple enough to master them. Compared with all these. Khrushchev’s interests were wholly parochial, but his parish, nominally the Ukraine and large enough, was extended in his mind to comprehend the whole of the Soviet Union. He cast his vote at those critical meetings of the Politburo which called for a vote. But while his colleagues, with Stalin, manoeuvred between Germany on the one hand and Britain and France on the other, he, characteristically, had an immediately practical job to do.
One very important aspect of his final purge of the Ukraine was, as we have observed, to transform a dubious, partly alien borderland into an integral part of the Soviet Union, fit to bear the first impact of invasion from the West. With the signing of the notorious non-aggression pact with Germany he had to be ready for a further move: he was responsible for extending the Goverment of the Soviet Union to Eastern Poland.
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