But Khrushchev fought back, and Kaganovich, instead of finishing him off, almost certainly helped him—to such effect that in December 1947, when Kaganovich went back to Moscow, Khrushchev resumed his old position as Ukrainian viceroy. He then threw out Malenkov’s Patolichev and sent him off into the wilderness to be Party boss of Rostov-on-Don, and appointed as Prime Minister his own most faithful henchman, Demyan Korotchenko, who had been his shadow since early Moscow days. He was so strong now that not only could he resume packing the Ukrainian Party with his own supporters— Korotchenko, Kirilenko, Kirichenko, Podgorny and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all—who were later to serve as the base of his own position in the successful bid for supreme power—but he also, a year later, on the occasion of the Ukrainian 16th Party Congress, was accorded special praise by Pravda, in an editorial quite remarkably (even by Pravda’s standards) full of lies, for all sorts of wholly imaginary achievements in agriculture and industry. That was in January 1949. At the end of that year, in December, Khrushchev finally said farewell to his Ukraine. He was called to Moscow, this time for good, once more to take over the Moscow Region and City organisations, but also, more importantly, to be a Secretary of the All-Union Central Committee. Almost at once he started to make himself felt as a new force in the land.
Chapter 14
Overture to the Struggle for Supremacy
We are now moving into the edge of the pattern, the acute and long-drawn-out conflict of forces, which was to produce what we think of as the Khrushchev era. From now on Khrushchev was to use the conflicts of others, as in the past he had used the misfortunes of others, as a means of self-advancement which was to culminate in his absolute supremacy. The key event which made this pattern possible was the death of Zhdanov in August 1948.
Zhdanov had been more actively bound up with the development of Stalinism in its final phase than any other individual. Compared with this remarkable creature, still only fifty-two when he died suddenly and in circumstances which are still mysterious, the fellow members of the Politburo, including in their different ways Molotov, Beria and Malenkov, were instruments in the hands of Stalin: Zhdanov was a creative force. Plainly he could only function as such because his ideas were in the closest possible accord with the ideas of Stalin himself at that critical time. But he could express those ideas, as Stalin could not, and he was characterised by a personal dynamism and energy of conviction which was unique in the Soviet Union (Khrushchev had dynamism, but not, at that time, noticeably the conviction). Zhdanov passionately believed that the Soviet people had to be saved from the corruption of the West, to which far too many innocent citizens, in the shape of the soldiery, had been and still were exposed as the result of their eruption into Europe (returned soldiers had to be virtually quarantined when they got back to Russia for fear—well justified—that they would infect their friends and relatives with their tales of what they had seen in the way of material wealth even in war-ravaged eastern and central Europe). He passionately believed that there must be a fight to the finish with the United States over the still largely prostrate body of Europe and all his actions were informed by a savage rejection of Western influence and by an equally savage belief in Russian messianism expressed in Marxist terms. He was the best educated man in the Politburo, and he passed as the great intellectual at the court of Stalin because his interests ranged far and wide, because he neither drank himself silly every night nor shared the bottomless coarseness of Molotov, Beria, Andreyev, Voroshilov—or Stalin himself. “Despite his well-known narrowness and dogmatism,” wrote Djilas, who had had to deal with him, “I would say that his knowledge was not inconsiderable. Although he had some knowledge of nearly everything, even music, I would not say that there was a single field he knew thoroughly—a typical intellectual who became acquainted with and picked up knowledge of other fields through Marxist literature.” He liked to present himself, whether to the Finns, whose country he bestrode, or to the writers and musicians and painters broken by his decrees, as the stern but magnanimous patron-prince.1
This was the man who, at Stalin’s right hand, set the tone of the Soviet attitude towards the outer world from 1946 to 1948. While at home he took it upon himself to organise and prosecute the great purge of the arts, the struggle against “cosmopolitanism” and for “socialist realism,” abroad he set up as an anti-Western crusader. It was he who in Warsaw in September 1947 presided over the creation of the Cominform, a direct response to the Marshall Plan, and in his speech on that occasion branded America, so recently Russia’s ally in her life and death struggle with Germany, as the active enemy. It was he who disciplined most rigidly Russia’s new satellites in Eastern and Central Europe. It was he who encouraged Dimitrov of Bulgaria in what Pravda was soon to call his “problematic and fantastic federations and confederations” and customs unions. It was he, a little later, in the summer of 1948, who advised Stalin to cast Marshal Tito into the outer darkness, unable to understand that the Yugoslav Communist Party might dare to rally round their own excommunicated leader and defy the might of Russia. It was undoubtedly his intolerant dynamism which brought Stalin to try conclusions with the Western Allies by trying to starve them out of Berlin. He was the dynamo of the cold war and the scourge of the satellites and foreign Communist parties. During all the time that Khrushchev was in the Ukraine, watched jealously by his close colleagues in Moscow (including Zhdanov, who would have had nothing but contempt for what he would regard as the oafish and servile ways and low cunning of the peasant from Kalinovka), the real battle for influence over Stalin was being fought out between Zhdanov and Malenkov, both of whom had arrived in the Politburo after Khrushchev. Early in 1948, after Khrushchev’s rehabilitation at Stalin’s hands, Malenkov appeared to be winning, his cautious, chess-playing, unemotional skill at manoeuvre and organisation wearing down his talkative and energetic rival. Zhdanov certainly had begun to lose favour in January 1948, when Pravda attacked the federation plans for S.E. Europe which he had been sponsoring behind the scenes. His reputation took a heavy fall when Yugoslavia rallied behind Tito in defiance of Stalin. It was not helped when the inauguration of the Allied airlift began to make nonsense of the blockade of Berlin. In July 1948 he was dead. He may have been poisoned—not by the Kremlin doctors, as Stalin later insisted, but by agents of Malenkov. But it was known that he had a bad heart, and it is far more likely that he died of heart failure after a stormy scene with his master.
At any rate, he died, and Malenkov exploited his death up to the hilt, purging the Soviet Union of all his supporters and protégés, above all in Leningrad but also in Moscow and elsewhere, and so fixing things that a number of the most important of these were shot (this was the mysterious “Leningrad Affair” which Khrushchev, in his secret speech, used as a point of attack against Stalin: but the attack was really directed at Malenkov). It was certainly as an immediate result of Zhdanov’s death that Stalin, in January 1949, brought Khrushchev up to Moscow as a counter-weight to Malenkov’s too formidable concentration of power.
And it is likely that Malenkov, far from opposing this move, actively welcomed it. Khrushchev in the Ukraine was a power in his own right; in Moscow, where Malenkov held all the Party strings, he was a newcomer. Furthermore, the actual occasion of Khrushchev’s advent was the relegation of Andreyev from his position as agricultural overlord. Khrushchev, Andreyev’s victim in the Ukraine, now assumed responsibility for agriculture throughout the Soviet Union. In 1949, four years after the war, food production in the Soviet Union, which had been scandalously low ever since the collectivisation twenty years before, was in as bad a state as it had ever been. Even in 1940, on the eve of the German invasion, production was still lower than it had been in 1928, on the eve of the collectivisation, and this in spite of a large increase of population throughout the Soviet Union and the addition of rich new lands in the West (part of Poland, the Baltic States and Bessarabia). Russia, under the Tsars a great exporter of grain, was reduced after 23 years of the Soviet syste
m, to a bare subsistence. This was partly due to the peasants’ continued detestation of the collective system, partly to the drain of the most intelligent peasants to the towns, partly to Stalin’s flat refusal to invest in agriculture, which suffered from a chronic shortage of machines, fertilisers and farm buildings. What had been scandalous in 1940 became catastrophic with the German invasion. After the war, with the reconstruction of heavy industry once more Stalin’s obsession, no attempt was made to re-equip the farms, let alone improve them. The shortage of able-bodied and intelligent man-power went hand in hand with an almost incredibly wasteful use of the women and children and idiots and old men who still remained on the farms. Andreyev’s only achievement, with the help of the NKVD, was to get the collectives organised again and to see that the State got more than its share of the collective produce at absurdly low prices, thus pauperising the farms and ensuring that the peasants spent all their energies on cultivating their own small private plots, off which they lived and the surplus produce of which they could sell at high prices on the open market, a kind of official black market.
The actual issue which led to the relegation of Andreyev was a sudden reversal of a ten year old policy: since the 18th Party Congress the collectives had been worked on what was known as the link system—small gangs of peasants under a leader were responsible for certain cultivations, assisted by what machinery there was, which was centralised in Machine Tractor Stations, the members of which lived apart and were used by Party and police as unofficial overseers and informers; sharing no common life with the villagers, the mechanics of the MTS regarded themselves as belonging to a superior class (as, indeed, they did), and it was one of their duties, in return for certain privileges, to know which peasants were slacking and which families were concealing hoarded grain. The advantage of the link system was that small groups of peasants were at least given the feeling of limited responsibility for the land they worked. The main disadvantage was that this system militated against the development of large-scale mechanical cultivations; but since machines were few and far between and most of the work in the forties was still being done by hand, except on the so-called millionaire collectives in the rich grain areas of the Ukraine, this was no great disadvantage. Primitive it was, but the whole agricultural economy was also primitive.
Nevertheless, during his last years in the Ukraine, Khrushchev had been preaching, and in a very limited way putting into effect, a different system. Instead of being worked by small groups, the land was to be cultivated by large and comparatively impersonal brigades under a “brigadier,” and since the attack on Andreyev when it came took the form of an attack on the link system and a glorification of the brigade system which had been denounced by Andreyev, with the approval of the Party in full Congress, in 1939, it was obvious that big changes were expected. And the reason why Khrushchev’s rivals, above all Malenkov, no doubt welcomed his return to Moscow was that they all knew very well that the surest path to ruin for any ambitious individual was to be associated with agriculture, which, under Stalin, was bound to fail and go on failing. Khrushchev himself must have known this as well as anyone. He not only took the job on; he at once began to make a great noise about it, the sort of noise that no subordinate of Stalin’s had dared make about anything in all the long years of Stalin’s rule. Instead of hedging his bets he started to gamble very heavily indeed in this most vulnerable and hopeless of all fields. And a year or two later he very nearly did fall: that is to say, he suffered a public rebuff which looked at first like being as disastrous as his rebuff in the Ukraine in 1947. But again he did not fall, and just when it looked as though Malenkov was closing in for the kill, he executed the first of those brilliant manoeuvres of disengagement which were to distinguish his subsequent career. Other people were hurt, but not Khrushchev.
Ironically, all those who congratulated themselves in the conviction that by accepting public responsibility for agriculture Khrushchev was riding for a fall were, in principle, correct. It was in their timing that they showed how disastrously they had underestimated this extraordinary man. In the end, fourteen years later, one of the main elements in Khrushchev’s downfall was to be, precisely, his agricultural failure. But by that time Malenkov and others had all been put down—and, for the fun of it, Malenkov himself was made to confess that he himself had shown his incompetence largely because of the failure of his agricultural policies: Malenkov never had anything to do with agriculture; the policies for whose failure he apologised were Khrushchev’s policies.
In the early 1950s things looked very different. Another of Khrushchev’s Ukrainian schemes had been to increase the size of the collectives by amalgamating a number of small ones to make large units. And his great dream was the abolition of the traditional Russian village in favour of large and up-to-date settlements to be called agro-towns. This amalgamation scheme he was now to apply to the whole of the Soviet Union; the agro-town dream was to be advanced as practical policy. It was this that got him into serious trouble only a little more than a year after his noisy return to Moscow. This, also, was the first of those nation-wide “hare-brained” schemes which were, for better or for worse, to become the distinguishing feature of the Khrushchev era. He was launched firmly on the Khrushchevite road even while Stalin was still alive.
But Stalin, while still very much alive in 1950, was already senile. The mood in the Kremlin had deteriorated beyond all measure since the proud last days of the war when Stalin had been able to impose his character and will in, as it were, hand to hand personal combat with the champions of the West. Now he avoided all personal confrontations and, since the death of Zhdanov in 1948, even his foreign policies had been wholly negative. His last great initiative was to be the Korean War, beginning in June 1950, unprepared, ill-considered, hopelessly misguided, which raised against him the embattled might of the United States and forced him into a stalemate. As far back as 1948 Milovan Djilas, still an ardent Communist, still a Stalin worshipper, had been unpleasantly impressed by the swift decay of Stalin’s faculties. Here he is on a high state occasion:
“The dinner began with someone—I think it was Stalin himself—proposing that everyone guess how many degrees below zero it was, and that everyone be punished by being made to drink as many glasses of vodka as the number of degrees he guessed wrong. … I remember that Beria missed by three and remarked that he had done so on purpose so that he might drink more glasses of vodka.
“Such a beginning to a dinner forced upon me a heretical thought: these men shut up in their narrow circle might well go on inventing even more senseless reasons for drinking vodka— the length of the dining-room in feet, or of the table in inches. And, who knows, perhaps that’s what they do! At any rate, this allocation of glasses of vodka according to the temperature reading suddenly made me clearly aware of the confinement, the inanity and senselessness of the life these Soviet leaders were living gathered about their superannuated chief even as they played a role that was decisive for the human race.…
“The impression of the vacuity of such a life did not recede, but kept on recurring during the course of the dinner despite my attempts to suppress it. It was especially strengthened by Stalin’s age, by conspicuous signs of his senility. No amount of respect and love for his person, which I stubbornly nurtured inside myself, was able to erase that realisation from my mind.
“There was something both tragic and ugly in his senility. The tragic was invisible…. The ugly kept cropping up all the time. Though he had always enjoyed eating well, Stalin was now quite gluttonous, as though he feared that there would not be enough of the food he wanted left for him. On the other hand, he drank less and more cautiously, as though measuring every drop—to avoid ill effects.
“His intellect was in even more apparent decline. He liked to recall incidents from his youth—his exile in Siberia, his childhood in the Caucasus; and he would compare everything recent with something that had happened long ago: ‘Yes, I remember, the same thing … ‘
“I could hardly believe how much he had changed in two or three years. When I had last seen him, in 1945, he was still lively, quick-witted, and had a pointed sense of humour…. Now he laughed at inanities and shallow jokes….
“In one thing, though, he was still the Stalin of old: stubborn, sharp, suspicious whenever anyone disagreed with him. He even cut Molotov, and one could feel the tension between them. Everyone paid court to him, avoiding any expression of opinion before he expressed his, and then hastening to agree with him.”2
Khrushchev was not there. He was well out of it—still in the Ukraine. The men who mattered when Djilas last met Stalin were Zhdanov, dead within six months, Voznessensky, the young planning genius, who impressed Djilas above all others, and whom Stalin was to have shot out of hand a year later for venturing to disagree with him, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov and Mikoyan. Kaganovich was still a power, but losing ground; Andreyev was soon to lose it. Voroshilov was not much more than Stalin’s old drinking companion, senile too.
Two years after that dinner, Khrushchev came to Moscow; the men who mattered, under Stalin, were only Molotov, Beria and Malenkov—with Mikoyan in the wings. Khrushchev was junior to half a dozen others—to Shvernik, Andreyev and Kaganovich. But the men he had to reckon with were, above all, Malenkov and Beria, who ran the Party and police on behalf of Stalin, each therefore being a potentate in his own right, disposing of vast forces answerable directly to him. Beria’s forces had the guns and the prisons, but Malenkov’s ran the Government and Party machine. Molotov was all important to Stalin, though he was bullied outrageously, and had become a national figure in his own right; but he was nothing without Stalin. Kaganovich was still used as a gifted and tough organiser, the man to get things done. Mikoyan, the Armenian with the mind of a great man of business, his understanding of Western ways, his invaluable detachment, had his very specialised uses. Bulganin was moving up as a useful stooge and organiser. These, and other members of the Politburo and the Secretariat, could combine and counter-combine among themselves against each other—never against Stalin. But with Zhdanov gone the only two individual powers were Malenkov and Beria, working now with, now against, each other, and regarding the new arrival, Nikita Sergeievich, as easy game and not in their class at all. Khrushchev had nothing behind him in the way of forces, except the elaborate Party apparatus he had built up in the Ukraine, the friendship of a number of military commanders whom he had worked with and helped to get promoted during the war, Stalin’s personal favour, and his unique experience of governing a huge and rich territory for a great many years as effective dictator. On the face of it, Malenkov as the supreme Party manager under Stalin should have been able to wreck the apparatus Khrushchev left behind him in the Ukraine by purging Khrushchev’s men and substituting his own. Beria, for his part, could have conducted his own purge. But things did not work out like that. In 1950, just three years before Stalin’s death, the men who were jockeying for position with an eye to the succession might, and did, intrigue against each other, but they dared not go too far; they were also compelled to maintain some sort of common front against Stalin —just as later, for a time, they were compelled to maintain a common front against the Soviet people—and each was above all interested in curtailing the power of the others while, at the same time, maintaining a certain solidarity. For all were vulnerable.
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