Khrushchev

by Edward Crankshaw

  When in 1950 Khrushchev undertook to enlarge the collectives by amalgamation he was doing a number of things simultaneously. He was breaking up the old village economy by throwing a number of villages together to work a single farm. He was reducing the number of chairmen, or managers, and seeking to create a situation in which one efficient manager could do the work of half a dozen or a dozen inferior ones. He was throwing fields together so that they could be more conveniently worked by modern machinery—but there was next to no modern machinery, except on the great Ukrainian farms and in the cotton fields of Soviet Central Asia. He was creating units large enough to support trained technical advisers—agronomists and so on. All this was splendid in theory, but the units, having been too small, were now too large. Six thousand acres as a unit is too large to be managed in detail by any individual—unless in the simplest style of prairie farming: in England on the big farms of East Anglia and Lincolnshire it is customary to break up a 5000 acre holding into separate 1000 acre blocks for management purposes; and here the managers are highly trained with a long tradition of first-class farming behind them. The number of Russians who could efficiently manage 1000 acres were few and far between. Six thousand acres were altogether beyond their powers. They had also to deal with a backward, hostile, obscurantist, illiterate, drunken and superstitious peasantry.2

  Khrushchev knew about the peasantry, none better. He was born one of them. He had lived among them in his early days as a District Party Secretary. And they had not much changed since then—unless for the worse. For the worse, because the best of them had been wiped out during the collectivisation, and the best of the survivors, and their children, had either been drawn into the towns or killed in war. Those that remained—and it was the able-bodied women who still, in 1950, bore the brunt of the work—had no incentive to work for the collective and, unless they lived within 30 miles of a town, no incentive to work even on their private plots to produce a surplus. They had to be educated and they had to be ordered about. It was hard either to educate them or to order them about when they were scattered in small and primitive village groups.

  The real Khrushchev dream was the agrogorod, the agro-town. In the Soviet illustrated magazines highly coloured drawings appeared showing smiling garden cities, which would have done credit to the Rowntree family, blossoming in the illimitable steppe. These cities had everything—swimming pools, cinemas, theatres, lecture halls, schools, restaurants, municipal offices and modestly splendid apartment blocks, set among trees. These cities were to house the peasants of the future, and the peasants of the future were not to be peasants at all, they were to be skilled agrarian workers, no different in mentality from their cousins in the factories, forming a new agrarian working-class who simply worked in the fields instead of at the bench. They would be conveyed to the fields in public transport, do their stint in highly organised brigades, and return at dusk to take off their muddy boots, wash themselves down, put on a clean shirt and pass the evening watching television, attending evening classes, cinemas, amateur dramatics, and so on—enjoying, in a word, the sort of civilised evening which was not then available even to the most favoured factory hands. These agro-towns, dotting the steppes and the forest had, as presented in Ogonyek and other publications, the air of a Wellsian Utopia. It was impossible for the outsider to imagine what Khrushchev was up to—for the agro-towns were presented as Khrushchev’s, not Stalin’s, personal conception: none of Stalin’s closest colleagues had ever been allowed to publicise a personal dream before. To-day, knowing far more about Khrushchev than we knew then, it is possible to see what he was up to.

  He was flattering Stalin and getting in his good books by dreaming up the sort of wholly unreal scheme that Stalin himself in those days was personally fathering. He was also appealing to Stalin’s obsession with regimentation: the factory workers had always been easier to control than the peasants, if only because they were concentrated under the eyes of strong forces of police and Party functionaries and depended wholly on the state for their wages and means of subsistence. The uprooting of the peasants from their immemorial villages and their concentration in agro-towns, where there would be no question of their retaining their private plots, their two acres and a cow, where family and village ties would be destroyed for ever, would achieve the same effect. The industrialisation of farming techniques would, given adequate investment in machines, farm-buildings, stock-breeding and fertilisers, lead to efficiency in the production of food. All this would have gone down well with Stalin in those closing years of his life. He knew, as Khrushchev knew, that the descriptions and “artist’s projections” were nothing but the blue-prints of a Utopian dream. There was no conceivable possibility of achieving anything faintly resembling the agro-town scheme to replace the rotting and broken-down villages of the great Russian plain. But, as far as Khrushchev was concerned, it made a splendid talking-point and it publicised Khrushchev as an individual to millions who had never heard of him, as a man of far horizons to hundreds of thousands of able officials frustrated by the negatives of Stalin. Malenkov, no doubt, gladly permitted this publicity: Comrade Khrushchev was sticking his neck out, soon he was due for a fall. But, by some rare instinct, Khrushchev knew what Malenkov and his colleagues did not know: that any publicity is better in the long run than no publicity. He had established himself as the only man in the country beside Stalin who could act, apparently, on his own initiative and get away with it. He had also sown the seeds of an idea, which was to recur again and again after his enlargement and flower briefly in the spectacular opening of the Virgin Lands in 1954.

  The agro-town scheme, of course, soon came to grief. All through the summer of 1950 Khrushchev hammered away at it. In June he demanded the start of a pilot scheme in Moscow province. But the pilot scheme had no relation to the tuppence-coloured dream. By the spring of 1951, he said, collective farmers must themselves “take the necessary measures” to move house from their small villages to quite new sites where “large, comfortable houses will be gradually constructed later.”3 He did not say how the uprooted families, their traditional homes abandoned, were to live on their bare new sites until these new houses were “gradually constructed later.” In fact there were a few trials, and what happened was that the unfortunate guinea-pigs were expected to pay for their own move and put up temporary huts for themselves, using their own labour, their own resources and their own material.

  This experiment produced a predictable reaction. Early in 1951 there appeared an article in Izvestia signed by the chairman of one of the guinea-pig collectives, who bitterly complained of the hardships caused by the Khrushchev new deal. What this amounted to in practice, he said, was that 112 households were uprooted from four villages and moved, at their own cost, to a fifth, where they had to build their own huts—nothing else.4 The same sort of thing had been going on elsewhere, but the Izvestia article was a signal for high-level attack. A month later Pravda, over which Khrushchev had some control as a Party Secretary, Socialist Agriculture, which, as agricultural overlord, he could control, and Moscow Pravda, which as the Moscow Party chieftain was effectively his own organ, published a definitive article signed by Khrushchev, “The Construction and Organisation of Public Services on Collective Farms.”5 Next day all three papers carried an “Editor’s Note,” saying that there should have been a footnote beneath Comrade Khrushchev’s article explaining that his schemes were “open for discussion.” After that there was no more mention in any newspaper of the whole affair. But soon it was under public attack from certain lesser Party functionaries, and at the end of 1952, at the 19th Party Congress, Malenkov himself sharply denounced the whole conception. But that was part of another struggle. In the interval Khrushchev had changed his employment. No announcement was made, but he faded out of the agricultural picture and began to emerge as a Party organiser. A very interesting situation indeed was in the making.

  Stalin’s main objects during the last three years of his life, until in Decembe
r 1952 he finally went off his head, were to curb Malenkov while nevertheless presenting him as his most obvious successor—up to a point—and also to reduce the enormous personal power wielded by Beria, without wrecking his indispensable police apparatus. Both Malenkov and Khrushchev had to be strengthened vis-à-vis Beria, and Khrushchev was used at the same time as the counterweight to Malenkov. Another man who had his part to play in this complicated manoeuvre was Bulganin, nominally responsible for the Armed Forces, and brought forward into unexpected prominence in November 1950 when he delivered the annual “State of the Union” address in the Bolshoi Theatre on the eve of the thirty-third anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Beria was being quietly undermined by the purging of certain of his key men, notably Abakumov, Minister of State Security, who was replaced in 1951 by S. D. Ignatiev. Malenkov’s situation was more complicated.

  For a long time he had run the Party more or less as he liked. As a member of the Politburo, the Party Secretariat and as chairman of the Orgburo he was strategically placed to control everything that went on. But although he had packed the Party with his yes-men he had neglected it as a living force. For a long time he had shown a dangerous contempt for the Party bureaucracy, which consisted too largely of corrupt place-seekers and doctrinaire dead-beats. He had been showing an evergrowing interest instead in quite a new set of people—the gifted industrial managers and technocrats on whom the economy of the country depended, and whose contempt for the Party apparatchiki was absolute. Most of these, of course, were nominal Communists: they had to be for the sake of their careers; but they were like those Western Christians who maintain their stake in the next world by attending church at Christmas and Easter and having their infants baptised. Malenkov saw that the future belonged to these men, and, in general, he was right. As Deputy Prime Minister concerned with production ministries he ran the ordinary Party bureaucracy with one hand, while with the other he worked hard to bring into the higher councils of the Central Committee these a-political figures, each of whom was worth a thousand Party functionaries: men like Tevosyan, the great iron-master; Malyshev with his passion for automation; Saburov, an economist, who succeeded the unfortunate Voznessensky as the Chief Planner; Pervukhin, Russia’s most distinguished electrical engineer. What he was doing, in effect, was manoeuvring to regenerate the highest level of the Party, while using the bulk of the Party—for which he was right to feel contempt—as a docile instrument.

  Did he blame himself for the degeneration of the Party? He should have done. It had become corrupt and horrible because Stalin with his endless purges had killed all the decent individuals in it; but he, Malenkov, working with the political police, had acted as Stalin’s main instrument.

  Now in 1951-2, Khrushchev, almost certainly in alliance with Mikoyan, who was interested only in efficiency, and the comparative newcomer to the Party Secretariat, Mikhail Suslov (who really believed in the Party, in which he had laboured more or less obscurely for decades, as an ideological force), Bulganin as well, who knew all about the hatred and contempt of the military higher command for the Party which simply got in its way, managed to persuade Stalin that something had to be done. The Party, Malenkov’s special preserve, had to be sorted out, purified, rejuvenated, reorganised, and he, Khrushchev, with his healthy Ukrainian background, uncontaminated by the Moscow rat-race, was the man to do it. From now on it was war to the knife with Malenkov, who had to co-operate with Khrushchev and pretend to like it. It was also a very nasty blow at Malenkov, who could not escape responsibility for the scandalous state of affairs—all the more because he himself had rather demonstratively on more than one occasion spoken out against Party corruption, declaring that there were better Bolsheviks outside the Party than many who were in it. What had he done, besides sponsoring half a dozen outstandingly able operators in industry, to ensure that these “better Bolshevik” non-Party men were brought into the fold and the corrupt and inefficient thrown out?

  All through 1952, with very little personal display on Khrushchev’s part (he was now at the core of the machine and did not need display), the preparations for a major Party purge went on. And in October 1952, at the 19th Party Congress, delayed for so many years (there should have been a Congress every three or four years: Stalin had preferred to rule without calling one since 1939), he appeared publicly, on a level with Malenkov, as the key figure. Malenkov delivered the formal report; Khrushchev gave a special report on the Party reorganisation. The struggle between the two men, one a most familiar figure, fancied by those in the know for Stalin’s heir, the other only recently emerged from the obscurity of the Ukraine, blunt and comparatively uncouth, was now conducted on the platform under the gaze of the whole world, which did not understand what it saw. Even as he had to welcome Khrushchev as the man who was rejuvenating the Party which he had controlled for so long, even as he had to join in Khrushchev’s violent attacks on corruption, idleness, nepotism and general decay, Malenkov managed to get in a vicious jab at his dear colleague by condemning out of hand those agricultural policies sponsored by “certain of our leading officials” which were Khrushchev’s own: “The mistake these comrades made was that they overlooked the major task of the collective farms—the business of production.”6

  Stalin was amusing himself. The 19th Party Congress was physically dominated by Malenkov, generally thought of as the heir presumptive, and by Khrushchev, for the first time publicly presented as the counter-weight to Malenkov. But from the beginning Stalin himself overshadowed the stage, and at the end he produced a coup de théâtre of a formidable and sinister kind.

  Everybody now knew that he was old and was not up to the strain of speaking at length. He did speak, but briefly and perfunctorily. His great contribution was a document of imposing size which had been presented to the Congress delegates for consideration on the eve of the Congress: a long theoretical disquisition which was, in effect, a progress report on the advance towards Communism, on the Soviet Union’s relations with the capitalist world, and on methods to be used on the last stages of the journey from socialism to Communism. Stalin’s “Economic Theses,” as the document was called, was to form the basis of the thinking of the Congress, and it did in fact contain a few new ideas—enough to show that Stalin himself was at last beginning to acknowledge the facts of life in the new technological and nuclear age. His most important contribution, which the world never acknowledged, because the “Theses” were almost immediately overshadowed by more spectacular happenings, was the tortuously arrived at, tortuously expressed, pedantically qualified side-stepping of Lenin’s cheerful notion that so long as capitalism existed wars were inevitable and to be welcomed, since only as a result of wars could the proper conditions for the spread of world revolution be created. This had been a fundamental part of the Leninist canon, to which Stalin had clung stubbornly until eight years after the advent of the atomic bomb had made nonsense of it—with unhappy consequences to the Soviet economy and to Soviet strategy in Europe. Stalin would not abandon it wholly even now: wars were still inevitable, he declared, but with good luck and good judgment the Soviet Union would be able to keep out of them, leaving the capitalist powers to tear each other to pieces in their fight for markets.

  On the last day of the Congress everything Stalin had said in his famous “Theses” was overlaid and forgotten in the excitement, speculation and alarm produced by a dramatic reshaping of the superior echelons of the Soviet Communist Party—no longer to be called Bolshevik. At the very moment when Malenkov and Khrushchev were enjoying their disputed triumph, both were reduced in a most extraordinary way.

  For decades, as we know, the Soviet Party had been ruled by Stalin operating through the small Politburo and the Party Secretariat, consisting of about a dozen and half a dozen men respectively. These men looked very large, so large that some of them at times seemed to wield scarcely less power than Stalin himself—and because in recent years the effective Politburo had been even smaller than the official list suggested,
the obvious deduction was that Stalin had been engaged in short-listing his possible successors. Suddenly all this was changed. The Politburo, renamed the Party Presidium, was suddenly enlarged from a total of eleven to twenty five full members and eleven candidates. The Secretariat was pushed up from five to ten members. What had been a tiny ruling body with most of its members very close to Stalin was transformed overnight into an unwieldy and absurd committee of 36, named, under Stalin, in alphabetical order—so that untried newcomers found themselves elevated to stand, to all appearances, on a level with the most senior Party chieftains in the land. The only comfort for Malenkov was that his own protégés formed the majority of the new intake; but Khrushchev, too, had been able to recommend a handful of his own most loyal supporters. There were others who owed nothing either to Malenkov or to Khrushchev. Between them, on the face of it, they made a queer, self-cancelling mixture, with Stalin demonstratively supreme, in a class entirely of his own. The old pattern of power was shattered: out of this melting-pot—there is no other name for it—a new pattern must inevitably emerge.