And this, of course, played into the hands of the real rebels referred to above. The Ukrainians overrun by the German armies fell into four categories—those who got on with life as best they could, thus laying themselves open to being treated as collaborators; those who joined the partisans, more or less organised, co-operating with the Soviet armies; those who formed nationalist partisan bands, fighting for their own land, the Ukraine, impartially against the Red Army and the Germans (a very large number); and those (mainly soldiers taken prisoner or cut off from their units, or deserters) who volunteered to fight for the Germans against the Red Army under General Vlassov. Many of these, in due course, were sent back to Russia by the Western Allies to meet a certain death. Some, together with prisoners of war, managed to escape, and these joined the independent partisan bands who, with the Germans out of the war, now concentrated on fighting the Russians for their own survival. There were many of these bands operating in the Western Ukraine, but they were gradually mopped up by Beria’s NKVD troops (who had aircraft, river gun-boats, heavy artillery, as well as rifles and machine-guns). Those who were left, some scores of thousands, coalesced in the foothills of the Carpathians under a legendary leader, whether brigand or patriot it is impossible to tell, called Stepan Bandera. On occasion Soviet Army formations had to be called out to reinforce the paramilitary police in major pitched battles. In due course Bandera was killed. But several years went by before the whole of the Ukraine was pacified.
This was the chaotic background against which Khrushchev had to establish his authority. This authority had to be established not only in the old Russian Ukraine, but still more in the Polish Ukraine, which had been overrun by the Germans less than two years after its seizure by the Russians. The whole cruel business of sovietisation had to be gone through a second time, including the re-collectivisation of the land.
It was not only the very freshly formed collectives in Russian occupied Poland that had fallen apart under the German occupation. Throughout vast areas of the Soviet Union where no Germans had penetrated the collectives had dwindled to nothing, for lack of police and Party power. When Khrushchev’s colleague in the Politburo, Andreyev, took on the task of re-disciplining the peasants, he found that in thousands of collectives all but the feeblest members had virtually contracted out, as often as not with the active connivance of the farm-managers who, in return for a consideration, would let individuals off their “work-days” on the collective land, and would even sell them parcels of that land. In the Ukraine matters were far worse than elsewhere, and Khrushchev, as master of the Ukraine, had to use an iron fist or abdicate. There seems to me no doubt at all that his war-time experiences had indeed opened his eyes to some at least of the evils of Stalinist rule; but he was caught in a trap, the prisoner of his own past—a situation to be repeated time and time again during the years to come right up to his downfall. Stalin in Moscow had no other thought than to restore the status quo and to rebuild heavy industry in the shortest possible time by the uninhibited employment of violence and terror. This did not happen immediately. At first it seemed that he, too, touched by the sacrificial heroism of the Soviet peoples during the war, was to reward them with his confidence, withdrawing them, as it were, behind a curtain of iron to lick their wounds and gather new strength. But by the start of 1946 all that was over. Germany was defeated and lay prostrate, but the Russians were told that they must prepare for yet another war: they could not rest until pre-war output had been trebled:
“We must achieve a situation whereby our industry is able to produce each year up to 50 million tons of pig-iron, up to 60 million tons of steel, up to 500 million tons of coal, and up to 60 million tons of oil. Only under such conditions can we regard our country as guaranteed against any accidents. This, I think, will require perhaps three more Five-year Plans, if not more.”2
Very soon after that, through his obdurate and criminal challenge to the West, Stalin had succeeded in provoking the United States—to say nothing of Britain and Europe, including West Germany—into such a mighty rate of material growth as to make nonsense of these heroic figures.
They were to be achieved by the old, old way: by slave labour, by the rigid implementation of the draconian Labour Laws of 1933, by Party threats and naggings backed by the force of the NKVD. Slave labour was vastly augmented by the arrest of hundreds of thousands of “deserters” and “collaborators,” above all from the Ukraine, and by the extraordinary action —extraordinary even for Stalin—of obliterating from the map of the Soviet Union a number of complete nationalities. In the words of Khrushchev, who was telling the unadorned truth: “the mass deportations from their native places of whole nations, together with all Communists and Komsomols without any exception; those deportations were not dictated by any military considerations.”
The peoples in question, as listed by Khrushchev, were the Karachi; the whole population of the Autonomous Kalmuck Republic; the whole population of the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic; all the Balkars from the Kabardino Autonomous Republic. These events took place in 1943 and 1944. These unfortunates were deported because some of them had exhibited disloyalty to the Soviet Union while under German occupation. “The Ukrainians,” added Khrushchev, “escaped this fate only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them. Otherwise he would have deported them also.”3
Khrushchev did not say that these deportations had been supervised by his favourite policeman, Serov, whose men had surrounded village after village in the night and marched away the inhabitants at the point of the gun, separating men, women and children, and shooting those who resisted or tried to escape. Nor did he mention that at this time Stalin had also deported the Tartars from the Crimea, abolishing their own Autonomous Republic, which later became a part of the Ukraine, a part of Khrushchev’s own empire. It goes without saying that he had nothing to say about his own deportations of innumerable Poles from the Polish Ukraine or the deportation in 1940 of hundreds of thousands of Latvians, Esthonians, Lithuanians, also by Serov (this time working under Zhdanov), when Russia occupied the Baltic States.
Later still, of course, it was the turn of the Jews—such as had survived the German occupation and returned to their homeland: curiously, quite a number of Jews from Eastern Poland and the Baltic States owed their lives to Khrushchev, Zhdanov and Serov, who had sent them to Siberia (where, also, many died) before the Germans could get at them and murder them. Khrushchev showed himself to be a fairly crude anti-Semite in later years; violent anti-Semitism was also endemic in the Ukraine: there were many Ukrainians, Baits too, among the rank-and-file of the notorious Einsatzgruppen, special formations belonging to Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst, which were responsible for the rounding up and extermination of the Jews in occupied Russia. The gas-chambers of Auschwitz, Madjanek, Treblinka and elsewhere were fed mainly with Jews deported by the Germans from Western Europe, including Germany itself. In Russia the usual procedure was for the Einsatzgruppen to round-up all the Jews found in a given area, or a city, march them out to a selected spot, force them to dig a great trench, then to undress and stand on the edge of the trench to be sprayed with machine-gun fire. One of the largest of these massacres took place immediately outside Khrushchev’s own city, Kiev, in a ravine known as Babi Yar on 29th and 30th September, 1941, where 33,771 Jews, men, women and children, were killed in two days, the shooting clearly audible in the centre of the city.4 As the Soviet Army approached Kiev to retake it in 1943 the Germans took fright and decided to dig up the corpses and burn them. A certain SS Colonel Blobel, a failed architect in civilian life, who had himself supervised the shooting, had since fallen into disfavour and was himself forced by Heydrich to conduct the exhumation and the burning. But the Germans need not have worried. The four Einsatzgruppen, according to their own official returns to Heydrich, killed more than a million human beings in this manner, mostly Jews, in the course of two years, very largely in Khrushchev’s Ukraine.5 The Russians, natural
ly enough, had a great deal to say about German atrocities in general, but they never made the Jews an issue. For years after the war, during all Khrushchev’s time and later still, Kiev was a forbidden city: the only foreigners allowed to go there were a handful of UNRRA officials, but I remember very well when I was first allowed to go there in 1955 asking the local director of Intourist to direct me to Babi Yar. At first he pretended he had never heard of Babi Yar. But when I insisted he said: “Why do you want to go and look at a lot of dead Jews? If you’re interested in Jews you’ll see more than enough on the streets!”
There was no monument at Babi Yar—or, for that matter, at any other places where the Jews had been massacred. There was nothing to show that anything out of the way had ever happened there. Babi Yar remained a forbidden word, until the young poet Yevtushenko in 1963 incurred Khrushchev’s intense displeasure by writing his celebrated poem, “Babi Yar,” in which, as a Russian, he proclaimed his share of the guilt. It will be remembered that Shostakovich set the Babi Yar poem for voices and orchestra in the last movement of his 13th Symphony, performance of which was forbidden at the last moment.6
It may well be that these last pages have a planless and inconsequent appearance: this is intended. It is impossible to make a neat pattern of the complex violence that drove Nikita Khrushchev and haunted him and hemmed him in when, after living through the fearful sufferings of the war and the German occupation with his own people—his eldest son was killed at Stalingrad—he sought to turn himself into their benevolent and respected father, under Stalin. It was then that he let his shaven hair grow for a short period: it was an elegant silver grey, and the portraits of him at this period show a gentle, modest, father-figure, beautifully turned out. He fostered a minor personality cult of his own. Whereas all over Russia the official portraits, hung in every office, in every factory, in every shop—and on holidays plastered over every building, ten times life-size— showed always Stalin, usually Lenin, sometimes on holidays the other members of the Politburo, in the Ukraine, above all in Kiev and Kharkov, the portrait of Khrushchev alone would appear alongside Stalin’s. There were poems, too. In 1944 Khrushchev caused a collective of thirteen Ukrainian writers to compose a long poem to the glory of Stalin. It was called “To the Great Stalin from the Ukrainian People,” and it started:
Today and forever, oh, Stalin, be praised
For the light that the plants and the fields do emit!
Thou art the heart of the people, the truth and the faith!
We give Thee our thanks for the sun Thou hast lit!
The poem was submitted to Stalin together with an immense roll containing 9,316,973 signatures. In this unique memorial Khrushchev caused a niche for himself to be carved:
We’re united and solid, and no one will dare
To touch our young land which is clean as first love,
As fresh and as young with his silver-grey hair
Is Stalin’s companion, Nikita Khrushchev.7
Stalin’s companion was beginning to build up trouble for himself. As already observed, he was not quite alone in the Ukraine. Malenkov had business there as chairman of the committee for the rehabilitation of the liberated lands; Andreyev, dour and unsympathetic, had business there as agricultural overlord of the Soviet Union. Both these men watched Khrushchev’s ascendancy with jealous eyes. It is inconceivable that neither of them, above all Malenkov with his special relationship with Stalin, omitted to report unfavourably on this viceroy who was getting too big for his boots and starting to behave as though he, not Stalin, was the ruler of the Ukraine. And it is clear that for some time Stalin, who could put a stop to any nonsense when he cared to, had his own reasons for tolerating Khrushchev so long as he was useful, as he was. Khrushchev knew his Ukraine and was getting results. It would have amused Stalin, too, to watch Malenkov and Andreyev showing jealousy. Andreyev was a bore and humourless; Malenkov with his needle-sharp brain, his eyes everywhere, his tremendous natural gifts, his unrivalled inside knowledge of everyone who counted in the Party—unrivalled except for Beria’s—was indispensable; but he was also young and a little too ready to presume on his gifts: it would do him no harm to think of Nikita Sergeievich as a rival to be watched. And no matter what sort of an empire Khrushchev was able to hammer out of the Ukraine, with his tight group of devoted lieutenants headed by Demyan Korotchenko, the whole thing could be blotted out in a moment if need be.
It all depended on Khrushchev continuing to do well and keeping in his place. Suddenly, in 1947, something went wrong. It could have been the famine of 1946. Just as Khrushchev was beginning to get agriculture moving the Ukraine was smitten by one of its classic droughts. Not a word was said about this in the Soviet Press, and I remember how, when I wrote about it early in 1947 and, shortly afterwards, visited the Soviet Union, I was almost violently set upon not only by Soviet officials but also by British and American correspondents. What did I mean by making up stories about a famine in the Ukraine? Things had never been better. But the story was not made up. There had been in fact a most appalling famine: the Ukraine was virtually sealed off. And at the end of 1947, shortly before his own death, Zhdanov spoke in Moscow and announced that there had indeed been a setback to food production, which had postponed the end of bread rationing. In 1946 the Ukraine, he said, had suffered the worst drought since 1890. Once more Kiev was starving.
In February 1947 Andreyev, not referring to the drought, announced to the Central Committee in Moscow that there had been serious failures in Ukrainian agriculture, caused mainly by the omission over a number of years to sow spring wheat. Immediately after this Kaganovich was sent to Kiev to take over the Ukrainian Party from Khrushchev, ostensibly because it was expedient and desirable that the posts of First Party Secretary and Prime Minister should be separated. This was the sort of blow which, in the past, had been the certain presage of a Party functionary’s imminent extinction. To Khrushchev it must have seemed the end of the world, the first disastrous step in a process which would swiftly lead to his being stripped of all important offices, then moved to a derisory post, and then to his final liquidation. It had happened to so many of the individuals he himself had supplanted on his way to the top. It was inevitable and natural and deserved. But it had nothing to do with the failure of Ukrainian agriculture: that, as Zhdanov was to admit much later, was due to the drought. And the talk about spring wheat was almost insolently absurd. What it had to do with was certainly Khrushchev getting too big for his boots in the eyes of his rivals, almost certainly his failure to re-sovietise with sufficient conviction and speed the Polish Ukraine, which he had subdued so swiftly and masterfully in 1939-40. From October 1944, when the Polish Ukraine was re-occupied by the Soviet Army, until March 1947, when Kaganovich came from Moscow to take over from Khrushchev, only 504 collective farms had been set up. In the next ten months, under Kaganovich’s aegis, the tempo was accelerated in a really startling way: another 1,150 collectives were set up. At the same time the NKVD were strengthened and given their heads in the business of putting down the insurgent armies, or bands. During the greater part of 1947, which was precisely the period during which Stalin was starting up the cold war in earnest and needed to re-establish absolute discipline in his Western borderlands, the Western Ukraine was virtually in a state of siege. By the time Kaganovich was recalled to Moscow in January 1948 resistance was finally broken, and the re-sovietisation, the collectivisation, continued virtually unopposed, until, a year later, the new First Secretary could announce that the collectives had been increased by another 3,500, making over 5,000 all told.
The new First Secretary was none other than N. S. Khrushchev.
It was an extraordinary episode, unprecedented in the history of Stalin’s Russia. For over six months Khrushchev had simply disappeared from sight. The Ukrainian Press, his own Press, had no word to say about him. He had relinquished the First Secretaryship to Kaganovich in the first week of March. In the second week of March he bobbed up in a special se
ssion of the Ukrainian Central Committee and, admitting the Ukraine’s agricultural shortcomings, blamed them on his own Minister of Agriculture. Ten days later he took a further downward plunge, being relieved “at his own request” of the secretaryship of the Kiev Region Party Committee. Two days after that, on 24th March, he lost his secretaryship of the Kiev City Party Committee. It looked like the end. In June 1947 he did not even appear at the plenary session of the Ukrainian Central Committee. Yet throughout this period of eclipse he nominally retained the premiership of the Ukraine and at no time was he officially dropped from the Moscow Politburo.
That Malenkov had a great deal to do with this train of events was demonstrated when one of his own Moscow protégés, Nikolai Semonovich Patolichev, who, at thirty-eight, had served under him on the Orgburo in Moscow, and had been promoted to the All-Union Party Secretariat, was sent to Kiev to be Second Secretary of the Ukrainian Party under Kaganovich: since Kaganovich clearly would not stay in Kiev for ever it was a natural assumption that Patolichev would take over the First Secretaryship in due course—a consummation which would, in effect, have made Malenkov master of the Ukraine.
Khrushchev Page 17