When the Red Army moved into Poland on 17th September, 1939, stabbing in the back the proud and difficult nation still fighting forlornly against the weight and savagery of the first German Blitzkrieg, the Soviet commander-in-chief was Timo-shenko, commander of the Kiev Special Military District. Khrushchev was his civilian counterpart, and, with Timoshenko, he signed the proclamation informing the Red Army divisions that they were marching into the “Western Ukraine” (i.e. Poland) “not as conquerors but as liberators of our Ukrainian and Byelorussian brothers.”3 To be on the safe side, however, the troops were instructed to “wipe from the surface of the earth anyone and everyone who seeks to obstruct the realisation of this great historical cause of the emancipation of our brothers.” It was a great moment for our hero, who no doubt believed that the Polish masses would indeed rejoice to be freed from the rule of “landlords and capitalists.” To make sure that this was so, as the Party boss of the Ukraine (to which the new territories were added) and as Stalin’s Politburo nominee, he was supported by the whole propaganda machine of the Ukrainian Party and by the Ukrainian NKVD under a very young and boundlessly promising professional thug, Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov. This was the beginning of an extremely sinister friendship.
After Yezhov, Serov, with his charm and physical courage, must have seemed the height of presentability. In fact he turned out to be Beria’s cruellest and most ruthless agent: he did not scream at the top of his voice like Yezhov, he was not driven by personal resentments and hatreds, nor was he, like both Yezhov and Beria, politically ambitious. He was quite simply good at his work and happy in it, one of the few Russian villains with a sunny nature through and through. After an Army training he was switched to the NKVD and at thirty-four found himself promoted to be Deputy Commissar for State Security. In this job he was responsible for drafting and signing the atrocious Order No. 001223, dated nth October, 1939, which detailed the procedure and the categories for the proposed deportations from the Baltic States—which he himself was to have the honour of organising eight months later.4 Immediately after this came his appointment to the Ukraine and the beginning of his long and fruitful association with Khrushchev. The work in which he was so happy consisted, above all, in the mass deportation of foreigners to the Soviet far North and the deep interior of Siberia: it made a splendid change from deporting Russians.
Nobody knows how many Poles he deported, operating under Khrushchev’s wing, during the first occupation of the Polish Ukraine which lasted from September 1939 until June 1941. They numbered well into a million—above all of members of the socialist parties, Jews, priests, petty-bourgeois shopkeepers, bourgeois business-men, and all conceivable “enemies of the people.” Nobody knows what proportion of the hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers, who had retreated into Eastern Poland in face of the Germans, only to be captured by the Russians, fell to the NKVD as distinct from the Red Army. But these prisoners, each and every one, owed their fate either to Timoshenko or to Serov and always to Khrushchev as the chief civilian administrator, who presided over the sovietisation of the unfortunate lands. Among them were the many thousands who, decimated by starvation and typhus, made their painful way southwards towards Kuibyshev to join General Anders’s Army after the amnesty settled by the Stalin-Sikorsky agreement of 1941. Among them were the 10,000 Polish Army officers, shot by the NKVD, most of them in the Katyn Woods near Smolensk as the Germans approached, an incident which was to have such a dire effect on subsequent Soviet-Polish relations.5 Besides these, and most particularly Khrushchev’s concern, were the remnants of the Polish Communist Party, which had been “abolished” by Stalin in 1938, after its senior leaders had been summoned to Moscow “for consultations,” there to be arrested and shot by Yezhov’s men, as part of Stalin’s deliberate plan to destroy all those foreign Communists (above all Germans and Poles and Spaniards) whose survival might embarrass him in his long-range political manoeuvres.
It was not all destruction. Stalin and Khrushchev wished to take over their part of Poland in working order, so that a great number of Poles had to be left alive and at work. Khrushchev’s job was to see that these were properly sovietised. He threw himself into this task with characteristic zeal. And, as usual, he went out among his people.
A man of his responsibilities might have been forgiven for following his master’s example and conducting his campaign of deportation, expropriation, extermination and terror at long range from his splendid office in Kiev. But this was not good enough for Khrushchev, the man who in the old days at Yuzovka used to wrap himself up in sheep-skins against the cold and travel on a sledge the length and breadth of his tiny realm, the man who was later to get out among the workers in the filthy shafts and tunnels of the Moscow Underground. His boundless energy, his increasing delight in publicity, drove him out once more into the field, this time the foreign field. As the Red Army moved into Poland with scarcely a check from the bewildered Poles who hardly knew what was hitting them, Khrushchev was there, just behind the “front-line” troops. As the Soviet tanks moved into Podvolochisk, into Kamenka, Tarnopol, Trembovl and Skalat, Khrushchev was just behind them to receive the submission of the civil governments. Quite a drama was made of his investing and seizure of the great city of Lvov, capital of the Polish Ukraine, which in fact surrendered (it had no choice) with scarcely a shot fired. His private propaganda army sent back lunatic reports to the Moscow papers about the heroism of the Soviet troops in general and Comrade Khrushchev in particular: he was represented as being received as a liberating angel with flowers and tears of gratitude and joy. The whole occupation was presented as one glorious fiesta, or jamboree, of thanksgiving. And Khrushchev did his best to lend colour to these reports by organising a mass importation of representatives of Soviet culture to entertain and elevate their liberated brothers: ballet-dancers from Kiev and Moscow, theatre companies, opera-singers, poets and film-makers flooded the seized territories to show the Poles what they had been missing through being sundered from paternal Russia. To prepare for the inevitable rigged elections, Khrushchev’s very first elections, the country was flooded with portrait-posters of the Soviet leaders—800,000 of these in one week—and leaflets and brochures by the million explaining the joys of life in the Soviet Union, and the millennium that awaited the peasantry and the workers reunited with their Russian brothers whom they had last seen under the Tsars.6 The elections were a great success. The Soviet invasion started on 17th September, the elections for the new Peoples’ Assembly took place on 22 nd October. Khrushchev in person was here, there and everywhere, and as a result of his labours over ninety per cent of the liberated brethren voted the Party ticket.
There were plenty, of course, who did not vote. They could not vote because they were in the process of deportation as enemies of the people. The election campaign, short as it was, provided Khrushchev, Serov and the NKVD with a splendid opportunity to sort out in advance the sheep from the goats: any individual who showed signs of reluctance to vote as Khrushchev told him to vote instantly qualified as an enemy of the people and, as such, was transferred to the next slow train of cattle trucks heading for the Soviet far North.
Later there were further elections—this time to the Supreme Soviet in Moscow: the Polish Ukraine had come of age. It had also become very Russian: there was just on 100 per cent vote for the Party ticket. That was in March 1940. The last round of elections was for the local Soviets, and these took much longer to prepare. It was one thing to find 113 collaborators to install as deputies to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the Supreme Soviet of the Ukraine; it was quite another to find enough loyal brethren to fill the 79,000 seats in the local Soviets drawn up on the Russian model—a task made no easier by the previous destruction of the Polish Communist Party. But Khrushchev did it, even though it meant importing a considerable number of hard cases from the Soviet Ukraine.
It was made no easier, too, by the process of sovietisation in industry and agriculture. The liberated brethren soon found that
life under the Russians was not all ballet and super-films. They were called almost immediately to follow in the footsteps of their more fortunate brothers from the Motherland. In the shortest possible time the factories and shops were taken over by the State and the peasants were collectivised. By the winter of 1940 the peace of the grave had descended on the land. Khrushchev was back in Kiev, lord now of an additional eight million people, who had been forcibly and, by Russian standards, highly efficiently gleichgeschaltet and absorbed body and soul into the pattern of Soviet life. It was a formidable satrapy—a population almost as great as the population of Great Britain, the best part of Soviet industry, the best part of Soviet food production. The magnitude of this aggrandisement, and the suffering it caused, was concealed from the West by the fog of war. We had no thought for anyone but Hitler and the terrible things the Germans were doing to the Poles. We watched, sick at heart and outraged, the Soviet invasion of Finland in the winter of 1939 (Zhdanov’s new province), but we saw nothing beyond the bare fact of Soviet occupation of what was going on in eastern Poland. Had the view been clear the name of Khrushchev would have become a household word fifteen years sooner than it did. This was his background, this the nature of his rise, this his early achievement. And this was the man who, with an air of bland innocence, was to ask his diplomatic guests, years later in Moscow, how it was that he managed to make rings round them, although they had been to better schools….
This, also, was a man who could later say that he had no responsibility for Stalin’s crimes. It depends what one means by a crime. The invasion of Poland and the deportation in atrocious circumstances of over a million Poles (some, of course, particularly Jews, were thereby saved a worse fate under the Germans; some were not) was not one of the crimes he listed. Nor was Serov’s next operation, the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians, Esthonians, Latvians and Bessarabians when Russia took their countries by agreement with the Germans. Nor was the collectivisation, first of Russia, then of Eastern Poland. Nor was the killing of the real opposition leaders. Nor, for that matter, was the normal rule (as distinct from the Yezhov terror and certain selected acts of Beria) of the secret police.
Chapter 12
The Great Patriotic War
In june 1941 the Germans who for months past had been massing their crack troops, armoured divisions and air force formations along the frontiers of Russian-occupied Europe— Eastern Poland and the Baltic States—launched their greatest Blitzkrieg of all, striking in a single night of flame and terror deep into Khrushchev’s new empire, then, cutting through the Soviet armies, carving them up and enveloping them with terrifying ease, far into Byelorussia and the Russian Ukraine. “Do you believe that we deserved this?” stammered Molotov to the German Ambassador in Moscow, at midnight on 21st June when the tanks were already over the border and the Luftwaffe was pounding railway stations, airfields and troop concentrations far behind the lines.1 For once this tight little man was thinking as a Russian, not as the spokesman of a gangster tyranny. In the end it was the Russians, paradoxically, who were to save him and his fellow gangsters from the destruction which they had brought on Russia.
At some stage in this terrible war Khrushchev, who was the first among the Soviet leaders to feel the direct impact of it, and who was never to be far from the front-line and the desolation of the threatened areas, underwent a change of heart. It is impossible to tell just when and how: it was a thing he never mentioned.2 But the Khrushchev who emerged from the war in 1945 was not at all the same man as the Khrushchev who was all but overwhelmed and swept away by it in the summer of 1941. He was to suffer from this change.
This is not to say that he had a sudden revelation and turned into a saint: far from it. He remained to the end the consummate career politician, the opportunist, the actor and the natural bully. But whereas before the war, as we have seen, he had come to identify himself wholly with the tiny boss class, a sycophant, a boot-licker, a most accomplished hypocrite in the service of his master, the conscience-less intriguer against all potential rivals and the scourge of those above whom he was set in authority, afterwards he showed that he had remembered what it was to be a human being—and a Russian. More than any of his colleagues, with the single exception of Zhdanov who organised and lived through the defence of Leningrad, where 600,000 civilians starved to death, Khrushchev saw at first-hand the whole story of the people’s reaction to the German invasion,3 and it is not fantastic to suppose that long before it was all over he had reached the conclusion that violence and coercion were not enough, that Russia was more than the precious Communist Party. Judging by what we know of his behaviour immediately after the war, he was then closer to the great mass of his fellow-Russians, who believed that they had earned with their suffering and blood trust and consideration from their government, than to Stalin, Beria, Molotov and Kaganovich, Malenkov too, who seized the first opportunity to blight the newly blossoming national consciousness which, though necessary for defeating the Germans, could be nothing but a threat to the established tyranny.
Khrushchev’s war record is impossible to unravel, so many contradictory reports have been put out in official publications. It is to his credit that he was never one of the inner council, the State Defence Committee, established under Stalin’s chairmanship to supervise the conduct of the war. Molotov was vice-chairman, and the other members of the original council were Voroshilov, Malenkov and Beria. This was the remote body which controlled the military conduct of the war, presiding in the first two years over the complete breakdown of the great Soviet war-machine which Stalin had created, then, in 1938 wrecked, then, in 1941 deployed in the most lunatic manner which could not have helped Hitler more had he been in Hitler’s pay. Time and time again this unpleasant gang of unrepresentative thugs, at first huddled together in despondency, later, as things began to go better, recovering their native arrogance, were saved by the Zhukovs, the Vatutins, the Rokossowskys (Rokossowsky straight from one of Beria’s own prisons; Zhukov to be disgraced the moment his services were no longer needed; Vatutin, one of the ablest of them all, killed in an ambush by Ukrainian rebels) were saved, above all, by the volunteers and conscripts from all the nations of the Soviet Union, whom they had oppressed for so long, and whom they were soon to oppress again.
Khrushchev was not among them. He was out in the field. Later, in 1944, after Stalingrad, after the tremendous tank battle for the Kursk salient in the high summer of 1943, with more than 3,000 tanks meeting each other head-on in the steppe (the forgotten battle that finally tore the heart of the Reichswehr), the State Defence Committee was enlarged to include members whose experience was going to be needed in reorganising, in subduing, the reconquered territories: Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Bulganin, and the brilliant young economist Voznessensky, who was later to be shot out of hand for venturing to disagree with Stalin.4 But Khrushchev was still not included. He was kept at the job of working actively with the soldiers so long as they fought on Russian or Ukrainian soil, and it was Malenkov, not Khrushchev, who was first sent out to the Ukraine to begin, while the fighting was still going on, the rehabilitation of the Ukrainian economy.
Khrushchev, throughout the war, was in uniform. In the words of Oleg Penkovsky, whose hatred of him was pathological, “his uniform fitted him as a saddle fits a cow.”5 He was not, of course, a front-line soldier. He was, in effect, the supreme Political Commissar, master of all the Army, Corps, Regimental and Battalion Commissars, and, as such, a highly suspect character with the troops. As the civilian chief on the Military Councils of a variety of fronts, including the Stalingrad Front, his main task was to ensure that the Kremlin’s orders were carried out, to watch over the loyalty and obedience of the generals, to co-operate with the NKVD troops (Beria’s specials) in standing between the front-line troops and retreat. (At certain stages of the great campaign, those who retreated were shot down by the machine-guns of the NKVD and special punishment battalions were organised, driven on from behind, to make pa
ths through minefields with their own shattered bodies, or to storm, by sheer weight of numbers, at no matter what cost, impregnable positions.) He had also to watch over the loyalty of Party members.
Later on in the war Party membership was conferred, as an honour, on all soldiers who had done well; but in the early days, the days of shame and chaos, the Party men belonged, one and all, to the ruling élite, and were hated as such. The Germans were under standing orders to shoot them at sight6; if they sought succour from the enemy with the Russian peasants, these were scarcely more merciful. In the confusion of retreat tens of thousands of Party members were tempted to tear up their Party cards and throw them away. If they survived and sought to make contact with their own units in the rear, they were either shot or reduced to the ranks. Konstantin Simonov’s monumental war novel, Victims and Heroes, written after the de-Stalinisation, gives the most vivid picture yet (though still understated) of the fearful confusion of the retreats and the encirclements in the early months of the war, and the looting of Moscow in November 1941 when the police had fled to the back areas and the Germans were just down the road. The personal drama of this book is supplied by the injustices suffered by Simonov’s hero who, wounded and caught behind the German lines, loses, through no fault of his own, his Party card. Khrushchev was the man responsible for the restoration of iron discipline after the terrible late summer months when dazed and bewildered troops, betrayed by inefficient commanders at the front and by Stalin’s inadequacy in the rear, found themselves caught between the German tanks and stukas and a hostile peasantry, which all too often welcomed the Germans as deliverers from oppression.
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