Khrushchev

by Edward Crankshaw

  Khrushchev is supposed to have done other things. He is supposed, for example, to have been responsible for the destruction in the Ukraine of all crops, buildings and immovable engineering works which might be useful to the enemy, and for the evacuation of whole factories, machinery and workers, from the mines and factories of the Donbas to the safety of the Urals. A great legend has been built up and elaborated about the ruthless execution of Stalin’s scorched earth policy and the miraculous transfer of machinery. In fact it was not like that at all. After the war the earth was scorched indeed; but this was largely the work of the Germans.

  By far the greater part of the destruction occurred either during the active fighting or, later, in the course of the German retreat. For example, we heard a great deal of the blowing up of Kaganovich’s great Dnieper Dam, Dneprostroy, the show-piece of the thirties, by retreating Red Army troops. But at the time it was not critically damaged, and it went on manufacturing electricity for the Germans. It was the Germans who blew it up before they left—as they blew up everything, with a patient, meticulous exactitude wholly foreign to the Russians. To travel, painfully slowly, by train on the newly opened railway from Moscow to the new frontier at Brest-Litovsk in the days after the war was a nightmare experience. For hundreds of miles, for thousands, there was not a standing or a living object to be seen. Every town was flat, every city. There were no barns. There was no machinery. There were no stations, no watertowers. There was not a solitary telegraph-pole left standing in all that vast landscape, and broad swathes of forest had been cut down all along the line as a protection against ambushes by partisans. All along the line lay the twisted rails pulled up by the Germans, who had worked with special trains fitted with great drag-hooks as they moved West. In the fields, unkempt, nobody but women, children, very old men could be seen— and these worked only with hand tools. In winter it was even more uncanny. Then the blanket of snow quite concealed what tiny vestiges of life remained. Mozhaisk, Borodino, Gzhatsk, Vyasma,—nothing could be seen of these famous towns that were but the brick chimney stacks, relics of wooden houses, sticking up above the snow like surrealist graveyards. Smolensk stood, a ruin, on its hill. Minsk, the great capital of Byelorussia, simply was not there—only a plain of snow, broken by meaningless hummocks. As for White Russia, so it was for the Ukraine.

  Certainly immense efforts were made to evacuate machinery, factory by factory, to the East, and Khrushchev, among other more urgent responsibilities concerned with trying desperately to hold the line, was technically responsible for this. But his overseer was Malenkov, in charge of war production, and for every factory whose machinery was moved, many were left intact. The workers, more often than not, were got away, but, in the Urals, they had to build new factories and new machines. At the height of the German threat to Moscow, when the city was all but surrounded, the train carrying the diplomatic corps and military missions away from danger, took five days to cover the 600 miles from Moscow to Kuibyshev. Most of that time was spent in sidings. And my most vivid memory is of the endless trains moving West from Siberia, carrying up fresh troops, fresh guns, fresh equipment to fight under Zhukov in that last desperate battle for Moscow, quite blocking the lines to the East. While all along the line, in sidings, or tumbled into fields, were trainloads of machinery, rusting under the snow, machinery which had been wrenched from concrete beds, breaking the mountings which bolted them down, scattered uselessly and aimlessly all over that desolate landscape under the first early snow—and regiment after regiment of derelict and rusting locomotives, brought thus far from the West and left standing idle for want of men to drive them and to service them, for want of tracks to move them farther West. Even then, when the lines were jammed with troops being brought up from the rear, when every machine that could be got to the East was urgently needed, the State Defence Committee (Beria’s special branch of it) could think of nothing better to do than to clutter the lines still further with trains of deportees, including inoffensive Volga Germans from the trim and immemorial colonies below Saratov, being conveyed by heaven knew what roundabout routes, and dying on the way as they waited in their cattle trucks, unwarmed, unfed, on their interminable journey to the deep Siberian interior. And with the deportees were political prisoners of all kinds, picked up by Beria’s men—because they had lost their identity cards in the flight from burning villages, because somebody had denounced them, because Beria’s men in their smart and plushy uniforms, the only well-fed, well clothed men in that vast suffering country on the edge of disintegration, still had their quota of arrests to fulfil.

  Khrushchev was away from all this, though still very much part of the machine.

  He is also officially said to have been the prime organiser of partisan warfare behind the German lines. He must, by virtue of his position, certainly have had something to do with this; but the great centre of partisan warfare, which was the scourge and terror of the German soldiery hanging on in those immense and brooding forests a thousand miles away from home, was not in the Ukraine but in Byelorussia to the North, and it was organised from the civilian point of view above all by Pantaleimon Ponomarenko, Khrushchev’s opposite number in Minsk, who was to rise high and then be reduced by Khrushchev in 1955. It is inconceivable that Khrushchev, spending all his time at the H.Q. of fronts and armies, could have given more than the broadest oversight to the raising and training of partisan units and their dispatch to join the resistance workers in German occupied territory. There were not many resistance workers in the Ukraine and the open steppe was no place for guerrilla warfare; there Khrushchev’s main concern was with collaborators, who swarmed. With Red Army deserters they went over to the Germans in organised units, never properly employed, under the supreme command of General Vlassov, one of the heroes of the defence of Moscow. Despairing of equity and justice for the Russian people, he tried in vain to get the Germans to use him intelligently with the whole object of overthrowing that leadership. Nevertheless, Khrushchev must have been very much aware of the heroism of the partisans, as of the detestation of the régime on the part of the majority of his own Ukrainian flock. For just as hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians seized the opportunity of the war to revolt against their own régime, and hundreds of thousands more all over the fighting area refused even elementary co-operation with their own troops, so there were millions who fought to the death for Russia, their own people and their own soil. Because they needed a symbol, and because Stalin in November 1941, when one and all believed that he had fled from Moscow with his Government and the police, had delivered from the Mayakovsky Underground station his great rallying speech, calling the Russian people his brothers and sisters, and because he had allowed the churches to reopen and had enlisted God, or at least the Orthodox hierarchy, on his side, and because he now talked about Russia and patriotism instead of Lenin and Bolshevism, and because increasingly he was presented as a hero figure, stern, remote, but loving and wise—because of all this they died with the words Stalinu!” on their lips, invoking the man who had been their scourge for so long and who, without turning a hair, as soon as the war was over and victory won, was to become once again the scourge of the survivors.

  The partisans, quite often desperately young, quite often girls in their teens equipped like men with grenades and pistols and tommy-guns, trained in back areas and then brought forward to infiltrate through the dark forests behind the enemy lines, were everything that legend says they were. A British general, upstanding and tough, on one of the rare occasions when a representative of the Western allies was allowed anywhere near the front, was asked to inspect a detachment of partisans who had just finished their final training at a divisional headquarters and were due to go over into no-man’s-land, and beyond, that very night. Among these ranks of young and solemn faces, standing rigidly to attention, there were three or four girls in their teens, their hair cut short, loaded down with lethal ironmongery. They saluted with the rest, answering questions in clipped and formal tones: the Engli
shman, remembering his own daughters, had to turn away and weep.7

  Khrushchev, for all his preoccupation with the higher strategy and the higher discipline, was deeply involved in these scenes. He knew that his people were fighting for Russia, not for Communism. For the first time he was not going among them to bully them; he was there to bless them and encourage them— fighting as they were, incidentally, to save him and to save Russia, which he also loved. He saw, too, the way in which the able commanders were being muddled about by orders from Moscow, and the way in which the sycophantic and inefficient commanders were being rewarded with decorations for their subservience to Stalin—to whom he had been utterly subservient for so long. He saw at first hand the heroism of Stalingrad.8

  He also carried out unspeakable actions, forcing commanders to persist in attacks against their professional judgment, so that they committed suicide when they failed. We need not believe all his self-praising anecdotes in the secret speech: he was denigrating Stalin, smearing Malenkov, exalting himself. But a modicum we may believe. It is the likeliest thing in the world that at the time of the ill-conceived and luckless Kharkov offensive in 1942 he did in fact telephone the Kremlin for permission to call the operation off before it led to a major encirclement of the attacking Red Army. No doubt Stalin did say, either in person or (as Khrushchev insisted) through Malenkov: “Let things stand as they are.”9 Khrushchev somehow implies that he fought against this decision, but there is nothing in his actual words to show that he did anything of the kind, and it would have been improbable. In those days Khrushchev still touched his cap to Stalin and did what he was told. The only point to be made here is that Khrushchev would have had to be an emotionless monster to live through the experiences he undoubtedly shared without asking himself whether Stalin, whether he as Stalin’s loyal agent, had been on the right course. He was the representative of the Politburo on the critical fronts. He was directly responsible for every political Commissar throughout the vast commands which operated within his territories. More than any other man he must have been aware of the suspicion, the detestation, of the fighting troops for these men who could, at will, and without understanding either strategy or tactics or the simplest logistics, interfere with their commander’s orders in obedience to their rule-of-thumb understanding of general directives from the Kremlin. It is inconceivable that he did not vow to himself to order things better himself if ever he got the chance.

  He got the chance in 1944. The Ukraine was free of Germans. Stalin at once reappointed him First Secretary of the Ukraine, and more besides: he was made chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Commissars into the bargain, thus duplicating Stalin’s own dual position as head of the Party and head of the administration of the Soviet Union. It was an extraordinary accumulation of power, unprecedented under Stalin. It meant that although Khrushchev had been excluded from the Defence Council, the inner cabinet, and although he had not been promoted beyond lieutenant-general (not bad for a civilian, but Zhdanov was a colonel-general), Stalin had been impressed by his practical performance in the field and was convinced of his total loyalty.

  It also meant jealousy among his colleagues. It was not a question of them asking who this jumped-up Khrushchev was, with his absolute power over the richest land of the Soviet Union: they knew just who he was, overbearing, loud, boastful, and yet cunning. And this man had been turned into a miniature Stalin, free, as none of them were, to run in his own way the affairs of a vast territory with a population almost as large as France.

  But not quite free. Apart from Stalin, who was now far more concerned with his international activities, with shining as a world statesman, than with what went on at home, there were two other men who had a lively and practical interest in what Khrushchev was doing, both dedicated to cutting him down to size. One was Malenkov, the other Andreyev. Malenkov had by now made his name as the drive behind Soviet war production. He was still only a candidate member of the Politburo, but his membership of the State Defence Committee from the beginning had marked him out as a special case. In 1944 he was put in charge of the rehabilitation of the liberated areas: the greatest and most important liberated area was Khrushchev’s Ukraine. Andreyev, the dim but tough administrator, a member not only of the Politburo but also of the Secretariat, had been in charge of agriculture since 1943: the richest agricultural area in the whole of the Soviet Union was Khrushchev’s Ukraine. Thus both these men could legitimately concern themselves with Khrushchev’s activities, could keep Stalin informed about him in detail, and were in an ideal position for conspiring against him. At first things were too desperate to permit indulgence in the usual power-game of intrigue and counter-intrigue: the liberated areas had to be put into running order, and jealous comrades were compelled by the sheer weight of events to work together in harness. But before long, Khrushchev’s rivals were to get their chance.

  Chapter 13

  Reconstruction, Russification

  The reason why for some years after the war the whole of Western Russia, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine seemed empty of people in winter was that, the houses all being gone, the people were living in dugouts: pits dug into the earth and roofed over with fir branches, wattle and earth—as a rule a length of stovepipe stuck out of the humped roof scarcely lifted above the ground. Hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, lived like this, not only all over the countryside but also amid the ruins of the great cities, Minsk, Stalingrad, Kiev. The people were not only without houses, they were dressed in rags: for four years, from 1941 until 1945, there had been no clothes of any description to be bought throughout the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. There were no boots or shoes. The peasants went about barefoot or in bast shoes, or, if they were very lucky indeed, in winter, the traditional felt valenky, worn to almost nothing. Men and women could not go to work in the factories for lack of boots or shoes; children, for the same reason, had to be kept from school. There was very little food: the starvation years of 1941-2 were over, but nearly everyone was hungry. Cattle in immense numbers had been slaughtered, or had died of hunger while being moved back ahead of the advancing Germans. Crops were unsown. The whole country, apart from the tremendous new war industries in the East, was derelict and at a standstill. The Ukraine was ravaged, burnt and blasted too.1

  This was Khrushchev’s inheritance. The first job was to get the factories rebuilt, the mines pumped dry, the land under the plough. But there were no ploughs, let alone tractors. Instead of appealing to the world for help, Stalin had made his great decision to conceal Russia’s wounds and exploit the might and success of the Soviet Army in order effectively to annex a great part of Eastern and Central Europe. It was a game of blackmail and bluff. It was called exploiting the revolutionary situation. The Russian people were the ones who had to pay. No rest for them, no thanks, no rewards. For the first time since 1914 the Russian peoples were united and ready to salute their government. The greatest of all Stalin’s crimes was to throw away, apparently with perfect disdain, this unique chance, to ignore this miraculous conjuncture, and to revert at once to his pre-war tyranny, to exploiting the Russian people to the limit and beyond in the interests of Muscovite imperialism: Russians in their millions had to suffer and die in order that the hammer and sickle should still fly over Warsaw, Prague, Sofia, Bucharest, East Berlin….

  In the early stages it was all done by bluff and blackmail. The Soviet Union was exhausted, the great Red Army extended to breaking point. Ten million soldiers had died—ten million of the strongest and most able-bodied. At least ten million civilians had died—massacred by the Germans, worn-out in German slave-camps, starved to death throughout the Soviet Union. Russia had shot her bolt. But the bluff was not called. The Western Allies disarmed. Stalin’s Five-year Plan for reconstruction got under way. As the Allies grew weaker Russia grew stronger and Stalin gained in confidence—until, by pushing too far, he roused the West against him in a vast rearmament drive. Rearmament now included immense expenditure on nuclear weapons, which S
talin had at first neglected. The Russians had to go hungry again while Stalin concentrated all their best brains, all their energies, all their treasure on the fabrication of atom and hydrogen bombs and rockets. Until the country which did not know how to feed itself (though once Russia had been one of the world’s greatest exporters of grain), the country which could not support a single public filling-station throughout its vastness—which had no roads for motorcars anyway—the country which, ten years after the war, still had not shod all its people, was the first to put a man in space.

  Khrushchev, in his list of Stalin’s crimes, had nothing to say about his deliberate crushing of the Soviet people in his lust for territorial gain—territorial gain so soon to be made useless by the developments of modern weapons. He could not denounce this, because he was up to his neck in it.

  To begin with in Kiev he had not only to assist in the reconstruction of his devastated empire, not only to re-establish Party rule and Soviet institutions, he had also to cope with insurrection on a very large scale indeed. The rebels were quite distinct from the collaborationists, whose rounding up and execution was also his responsibility. Those who recall the vicious witch-hunts which went on all over German-occupied Europe, above all in France, when the Germans were pushed back can all too easily imagine the atmosphere of hysterical vindictiveness in which, in the Ukraine, all those who had come to any sort of terms whatsoever with the Germans were pursued. Individuals paid off old scores; the malicious and malevolent rejoiced in the role of informer; the frustrated and covetous saw the way to better jobs by denouncing their superiors. It was a situation very much after the hearts of the NKVD, which, under the wing of the Ukrainian First Secretary and Prime Minister, took full advantage of it. They had not only the collaborators, actual and imaginery, on the spot to deal with: all those Russians, men, women, children in their teens, who had been shipped off to Germany by Dr. Speer to work in the war factories, and who survived to make their way home, were treated in principle as traitors and deserters—just as escaped prisoners of war were treated as deserters—unless they could bring the firmest proof to the contrary. At a time when the Soviet Union was desperately short of man-power, when Stalin, by a single imaginative act of grace could have transformed his people into eager followers, he chose instead to organise another blood-bath, to shoot or deport hundreds of thousands of potentially loyal citizens.