Molotov was Stalin’s indispensable chief of staff, counsellor, technical adviser on foreign affairs and formal spokesman for the Soviet Union to the outside world, a man of considerable personal dignity, though coarse and sly when unbuttoned, who had won the respect of the Soviet people by his public demeanour; but he was also Stalin’s butt and bottle-washer, and he had to suffer uncomplainingly the arrest and imprisonment of his own extremely gifted and ambitious wife. Malenkov looked after the Party for Stalin, manipulated the great apparatus of rule in the immediate interest of his master and, with an eye to his own advancement, worked hand in glove with the police in purge after purge. He was, after Zhdanov, the best informed man in the Politburo, after Voznessensky the keenest brain; beyond all question, behind the rolls of fat, the most cultivated as well as the most deadly. Beria, with the immense power of the police apparatus at his back, the ruler of a state within a state, disposing not only of millions in his labour-camps but also of hundreds of thousands of the finest brains and craftsmen, a great proportion of them German, in the precision enterprises, ranging from the development of atomic energy to the manufacturing of cameras (the celebrated Dynamo football team was an NKVD enterprise), held his post only by flattering Stalin outrageously. This man, with his pince-nez, his cold blue eyes, the compressed lips in the square mouth, the Kremlin pallor, who shared with so many secret police chiefs, Communist and anti-Communist, the look of a dedicated schoolmaster, held in his possession dossiers not only of every Party member but also of each of his own colleagues, which could have led to the downfall of each and all of them. But he himself, like all the others, was subject to a higher power in the shape of a certain General Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s personal and confidential secretary, about whom nobody knew anything, the commander of Stalin’s personal guard on whom the master could call with no fuss at all if, for example, he decided to have Beria shot between tea and dinner.
“You are blind like little kittens,” Stalin once chided his closest colleagues when they were not, he thought, conscious enough of certain threats to the security of the government.3 They might have retorted: “We are as helpless as blind kittens, so long as Comrade Poskrebyshev still lives.” On the night that Stalin died Poskrebyshev disappeared from view and was never heard of again. So they held together; and Khrushchev, though Malenkov and no doubt others did their level best to undermine his growing influence, was part of the cement. We can see him with his far-away look, his air of calm detachment to the fore, balancing among the murderous forces and calculating, behind all his noisy talk about revolutions in agriculture, the next step and who was needed on his side to make it possible for him to take it.
By now, in 1950, at fifty-six, he was very much the man the world was soon to know, drunken and coarse and alternately savage and jolly in his moments of relaxation, bullying and cajoling and jeering at his own subordinates, ever watchful among his equals, a compulsive talker, a compulsive schemer, a compulsive worker. He was highly presentable. In the Ukraine he had enjoyed being king and he had started grooming himself to look the part. Marshal McDuffie, the head of the UNRRA mission to the Ukraine at the time of the 1946 drought, was one of the first foreigners ever to meet Khrushchev—perhaps indeed, the very first American Khrushchev had ever met. They met again in 1953, and McDuffie reported that during those seven years there was no visible change in the man. Only he was more used to foreigners. Of Khrushchev in 1946, McDuffie reported: “he stared at me quizzically and with great curiosity, like a man studying a bug on a rock.”4 But he had not been at a loss. He had not been afraid to display his personal sense of humour. He made the sort of impromptu jokes, teasing his own entourage and McDuffie too, which were to become so familiar later on. He had talked with perfect authority. And he was individual enough to do what no Soviet leader had done for decades: when it was time for the UNRRA mission to leave he gave a farewell party at a country villa outside Kiev for the mission members and their wives, and after the party “sat on the porch with them until long past midnight, discussing their personal lives and plans.”5 Here was the man, recognisably, who later, at the height of his power, would spend innumerable hours stolen from the working days of one of the busiest men in the world to chatter discursively to foreigners who had gone unprepared for anything but a brief and formal audience—the man who kept Mr. Lipmann talking for fourteen hours, the man who was deeply and dangerously affronted when, at his first exploratory meeting with the young Kennedy in Vienna, the brand-new American President made the fatal mistake of approaching him in a brisk and businesslike manner, unthinkingly holding this rambling conversationalist, so very much his senior, to the sort of time-schedule which would have suited the head of an American corporation.
In other words, by 1950 when Khrushchev moved in to work with the Molotovs, the Berias, the Malenkovs, he was very much recognisably the Khrushchev we soon came to know. Between 1938 when he had left Moscow for Kiev, and 1950 when he returned, he had been transformed from the outstandingly able boss of a closed apparatus, the Moscow apparatus, taking his cue from a tyrant whom he abased himself to glorify, into a personality in his own right who was prepared to take risks of a strictly calculated kind in order to impress that personality on a far wider public than any of his colleagues dared appeal to. It is not too much, I think, to say that at this stage he understood that the man who had the best chance of succeeding Stalin was the man who could establish himself as a human being of a certain boldness and a certain independence of mind, a man who had broken out of the tight, self-regarding circle of the higher Party leadership and could go among the people and show a certain awareness of the country’s needs. Malenkov was also a personality in his own right and he too possessed some awareness of the country’s needs, as was shown by his behaviour immediately after Stalin’s death. But, though possessed of a keener mind than Khrushchev, he made what we can now see to be the mistake of relying absolutely on his control of the levers of power within the closed circle of the ruling class—which, admittedly, he sought to extend beyond the professional Party apparatus by his patronage of the new industrial and managerial bureaucracy, exemplified by the leading figures, technocrats before they were Party members, of the great centralised production ministries. In a word, he sought to base his ascendancy on a continuation of precisely the sort of conspiratorial manoeuvring which had brought him to the top under Stalin (and which had brought Khrushchev himself very close to the top in Moscow before 1938), not perceiving that there were other forces at work throughout the Soviet Union as a whole which would be bound to make themselves felt decisively once Stalin was removed from the scene. These other forces, in very broad terms, were the product of a widespread and growing dissatisfaction on the part of all the ablest men in the land—industrialists, technocrats, soldiers, managers, the more intelligent Party functionaries, scientists, engineers and the broader intelligentsia—with the pass to which Stalin had brought the country since 1945. The whole immense machine was in imminent danger of running itself into the ground. By brute force the Five-year Plan for national reconstruction was succeeding: the Soviet Union was being rebuilt. Nothing else was succeeding. Stalin, in decay, had not only lost all creative force: he was persecuting with paranoic savagery all those who in their work and their ideas dared show the least glimmer of creative force. The Soviet people, having come of age in the vast crucible of war, were being treated as prisoners in a vast slave-camp, and Beria, Stalin’s agent, was the chief warder. Repression and arbitrary violence carried to lunatic lengths had worked—though at the cost of great suffering, great inefficiency, great waste, great distortions of the fabric of society—while the Soviet Union had been intent on creating at all costs the crude foundations of her industrial and military might, very much as the cruelties and savagery of the English industrial revolution had worked a hundred years before in the era of the enclosures, child labour, starvation wages and the dark satanic mills. It could work no longer. The very machine which Stalin in his brutal way h
ad fashioned required for its servicing and development a labour-force reasonably intelligent, reasonably nourished, reasonably hopeful, organised by ambitious, able and skilful men who could put their heart into their work and use their initiative and brains without the almost certain knowledge that they would be shot, or at best sent to Siberia, as a result of the least exercise of individual judgment. Malenkov saw this and Khrushchev saw it; but Malenkov decided to direct his concealed appeal too narrowly, to the men in industry and technology who had already reached the top, and, as such, were themselves suspect. He was now beginning to favour them at the expense of the Party functionaries, corrupt and useless, whom he thought he held, as their master, in the hollow of his hand: let the Party bureaucracy do what it was told and go on being corrupt; the industrialists, the engineers, given their heads, would provide the required dynamic when the time came to release it. Khrushchev, wrinkling his little eyes and seeing into the future in his queer instinctive way, knew that this was not enough. Like Malenkov, like all his colleagues from Molotov and Beria downwards, he knew very well that there could be no immediate appeal to the Russian people as such, whose traditional alienation from their government, an alienation which also appealed to their deepest instincts of self-preservation, had been sharpened immeasurably by Stalin’s personal methods of rule. But, unlike Malenkov, he understood that between the official managers entrenched in their swollen ministries and the mass of the Russian people there was in the making a vast new class of some millions who were seeking forms of self-fulfilment. These, under Stalin, occupied a sort of limbo, but they themselves by the nature of their work (let us call them for short a new bourgeoisie) were no less cut off from the people than their masters, and would thus be driven, willy-nilly, to co-operating with any government which permitted itself to invite their co-operation.
Khrushchev’s first dramatic flourish in the dangerous field of agriculture was intended to call the attention of all these to the existence of a man who could generate practical ideas of his own, a dynamic figure standing out, miraculously, from the faceless chieftains united in a defensive and offensive conspiracy against the people over whom they ruled.
Chapter 15
Stalin’s End; Malenkov’s Challenge
His choice of agriculture as his first field of operations was, as we have seen, a risky one; but risks had to be accepted. His plan for agriculture was, in the circumstances, inspired. Stalin was running the industrial economy to destruction. He had succeeded, in return for little concrete gain, in raising the outside world in arms against him. He had reduced the Soviet people to the level of prisoners in one vast labour-camp: the only exceptions were those engineers and physicists working on nuclear physics and the problems of rocket-propulsion—and these, paradoxically, forming highly privileged enclaves living comfortably and given their heads in a scientific world otherwise dominated by Lysenko figures, were the personal responsibility of—of all people—Beria. Stalin doodled dreams of immense and grandiose schemes to transform nature by diverting great rivers, by planting millions of acres of forest belts in the arid steppe, by inaugurating irrigation schemes calculated to pay off in fifty years if they did not bankrupt the country first—all at a time when the existing farm-lands, neglected and decayed, could not produce enough bread to carry Russia through from day to day. But he was aware, even though he never left Moscow except in armoured cars or armoured trains, that agriculture was, to put it mildly, stagnant, and he was ready to try for a breakthrough, provided it did not cost money. Khrushchev provided the plan for just such a break-through, which had about it the sort of megalomaniac grandeur which was calculated to appeal to Stalin as the man who transformed nature. And it cost nothing at all.
The first part of the plan, which was carried through, was the amalgamation of thousands of small collectives to make fewer large ones. This was a logical extension of the change-over from Andreyev’s system of cultivations by small groups, or “links” to the more impersonal “brigade system.” The campaign was conducted and publicised by Khrushchev personally in a manner unprecedented, and he went about it with the greatest possible noise. By June 1950 he triumphantly announced that the number of collectives in Moscow province, where he started operations, had been reduced from 6,069 to 1,668.
This was a reasonable movement, except that, as always, hereafter, Khrushchev went too far. Except on the rich black earth of the Ukraine, many of the collectives had indeed been too small to produce the best results in the most economical manner. Khrushchev himself gave some extremely revealing figures about the size of the farms in Moscow province. Over a quarter of the collectives, he said, owned less than 250 acres; forty per cent had between 250 and 500 acres. Only sixteen per cent had more than 750 acres. Even more startling and to the point, in the course of his argument he let fall the remark that on the smallest collective farms (i.e. below the 250 acres) there were “not more than ten to fifteen able-bodied workers.”1 This is one of the key figures to an appreciation of Soviet agriculture: in England a 250 acre arable farm producing five times more per acre than in the Soviet Union, would be run by the farmer himself and two able-bodied workers, three at most. The smallest collective in the USSR in 1950 would have been run by a “chairman,” who would do no field-work at all, helped by an accountant, also chair-borne. On top of this there would be ten to fifteen workers. Even then what machinery there was would be worked and serviced by tractor-drivers and mechanics from the neighbouring Machine Tractor Station. There was indeed room for rationalisation.
A digression about Soviet farming is necessary if only because in years to come Khrushchev was to stake his reputation on a revolution in Soviet farming methods: in the days of his ascendancy he was to make more speeches to farmers and about farmers than about all other interests put together. Year in, year out, he was to instruct the peasants with obsessional detail—and to bully and harry and break the responsible officials, from the highest to the lowest, without cease. He started off in 1950 by taking the first step towards rationalisation that had been taken by anybody since the collectivisation twenty years earlier.
The important point about the collectivisation was that it did nothing to bring Soviet agriculture into the twentieth century. Propaganda in the thirties, particularly films showing deliriously happy peasants careering about in their new tractors over the vast rolling fields of the black earth zone, produced the impression in the West that the ordinary collective farm was a balanced, highly mechanised unit worked in the names of Lenin and Stalin by a peasantry which had miraculously freed itself from its immemorial bondage to the earth. Reality was very different.
Before the revolution, and after the liberation of the serfs in 1861, the big estates of the landowners—some enlightened and experimental, most not—had produced the bulk of the cash crops, the food for the towns. The peasants themselves, grouped together in their primitive villages, either hired themselves out as labourers to the great landowners, or to their more enterprising or grasping neighbours, or worked their own inadequate holdings for a meagre subsistence—as Khrushchev’s father had worked. It was part of Lenin’s programme that these same peasants should seize the possessions of the landlords and divide them up among themselves: this was to ensure that the peasantry, in 1917 four-fifths of the total population, would range themselves on the side of the Bolsheviks—until such time as Lenin and his friends were ready to bring them under control. They got on so well that by 1928 the Soviet Union was producing more food than Tsarist Russia had produced before 1914.
The collectivisation, when it came, in no way altered the physical appearance of the countryside. The most able, enterprising or grasping peasants, as we have seen, were forcibly dispossessed and shot or deported to Siberia. In the more prosperous areas innumerable villages were burnt out and left derelict. But in those villages that remained the feebler and poorer peasants went on living as they had always lived, in their wooden or mud houses lining both sides of a long, very broad, deeply rutted vi
llage street. But now the land they had won in 1917 was taken from them, pooled, assumed by the State, and given back on statutary conditions as a block to the inhabitants of the village as a block, to be worked by them as a block, under a chairman, or manager, appointed by the State. Each householder, each member of the collective, was granted a small plot of land, usually adjoining his dwelling, which he might in his spare time cultivate for his own sustenance. The size of the plot varied from time to time, as did the number of cows or pigs the individual might keep, as did the conditions under which he might sell the surplus produce on the open market at free prices. Spare time was time over and above the obligatory norm of “work-days” spent on the collective land. As for the produce from the collective land, the State had first claim, demanding for artificially low prices a quota of grain, and other produce, which usually swallowed up, often exceeded, the whole produce of the collective. The three fundamental points were that there was no magic about a collective farm: except in the richest regions it consisted of a street of huts with the land which had once belonged to the individual owners of those huts. The land was worked collectively under a chairman or manager. And compulsory deliveries to the State at less than cost made it impossible for the average farm to make enough either to reward its members adequately or to build up funds for investment in farm buildings, livestock, fertilisers, and so on.
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