I have described elsewhere the mood in which this immense campaign was carried out, the muddles and the hardships, the suffering, of the scores of thousands set down in the middle of the empty steppe and told to get on with it. But in spite of all this the scheme initially succeeded. The prophecies that the Virgin Lands would be turned into a dust-bowl, that much of the acreage was too arid or too contaminated with salt to grow wheat, turned out in due course to be true. But the first limited harvest of 1954 was a success, which was what Khrushchev immediately needed.
He was very much alone in this venture. Malenkov would have nothing to do with it. Later, Khrushchev was to say that Mikoyan and others had also opposed it. In allowing him to put it forward in his own name, the collective no doubt felt that if it turned out to be a fiasco it would be Khrushchev’s personal failure, and he would pay. But Khrushchev felt otherwise. He had produced the solution; it was a solution, thus, sponsored by the Communist Party and by the Young Communist League (the Komsomol), which, under Shelepin, was providing the volunteers and, in the process, trying to whip up the sort of modo among the young which had not been seen since the early days of the Five-year Plans and the building of Magnitogorsk and Komsomolsk. But he intended to take no blame. The conception was his: the drive was his and the Party’s. Any failures that happened would be due not to him, not to the Party, but to the Government, Malenkov’s government. And, indeed, he was soon attacking the governmental Ministries for obstruction, lack of foresight, lack of imagination. The Ministry of Agriculture was to blame for everything under the sun; the industrial Ministries were to blame for not providing tractors, ploughs, combines, spare parts; the Ministry of Housing was to blame for lack of houses and building materials; the Ministry of Transport was to blame for failure to move machinery in time; other departments were to blame for inadequate piped water and electricity. Never once did he attack the Prime Minister, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Comrade Malenkov, personally: he simply went on and on about the individual Ministries, all of them responsible to Malenkov. And he made it appear that at every turn the Party, keen and self-sacrificing and dynamic, was being frustrated and obstructed by the State bureaucracy, the source of all evil.
Nineteen fifty-four was Khrushchev’s great year. Having got himself into the centre of the limelight with the Virgin Lands campaign, he never moved out of it. Soon he was laying down the law, as First Secretary, on every aspect of Soviet policy. By the summer of 1954 he had vociferously toured the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, a human dynamo, talking endlessly in marathon public speeches, projecting himself as the practical, downright man who knew how to get things done, establishing the image which was to sustain him for the rest of his reign. He had gone outside Russia too, attending the Czech and Polish Party Congresses. He had his ablest supporters firmly established, sometimes as key individuals, sometimes—as in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan—in great depth, in all the key Party posts, and in some important Republican Government posts as well: Belyaev, Brezhnev and Ponomarenko in Kazakhstan; Kirichenko as First Secretary and Korotchenko as Prime Minister of the Ukraine; Mukhitdinov as Prime Minister of Uzbekistan, the seat of the invaluable cotton crop. Aristov was in Khaborovsk; Kirilenko in Dnepropetrovsk; Polyansky in the Crimea. Shelepin was running the Komsomol. Madame Furtseva, with whom he had the closest personal ties, ran Moscow (her husband was soon sent abroad as Ambassador to Belgrade). Kozlov ran Leningrad. Shepilov, whom he was soon to make Foreign Minister, edited Pravda. In July he achieved a major coup by getting his atrocious old ally, Serov, made head of the new Committee of State Security: Serov was nominally responsible to the Council of Ministers—i.e. to Malenkov, but he was Khrushchev’s man. He was even able to save from destruction the sinister Ignatiev, who should have been shot, with others who were, for playing the leading part in faking the notorious “doctors’ plot”: Ignatiev had to leave the Secretariat of the Central Committee, but he was given a decent job in the provinces—by Khrushchev. In July he started interfering in foreign affairs: he was now undermining Molotov. Career Foreign Office diplomats were replaced in half a dozen Communist countries, including China, by Khrushchev’s Party officials, who were thus controlled not by the Foreign Office at all, but by the foreign affairs section of the Central Committee, responsible to Khrushchev.
His endless travelling about the Soviet Union was paying off. It had taken him into regions he had never visited before and where his character was unknown. The world heard all about his public speeches, in which he addressed himself to the lower echelons in mass audiences, bullying, cajoling, exhorting, explaining with obsessive detail how collective farmers should go about their cultivations. This created the public image. But his talks behind the scenes were even more to the point. There he addressed in private the Party workers and with his extraordinary persuasiveness and authority convinced them that he was the man to win. He was fighting the chair-borne Ministerial bureaucracy; he was fighting for Party rights, for the very careers of those who listened to him. Malenkov sat in Moscow apparently powerless to compete on his own ground with this tornado of a rival, who, with no consistency of purpose, dashed about the country selling panacea after panacea like a glorified cheap-jack. Malenkov had sat too long in offices, operating the levers of power in the name of Stalin. He was used to manipulation and intrigue, knowing that if he could please Stalin he had only a handful of men to outmanoeuvre: he had never in his life had to compete, as it were, in the market-place for popularity. He relied on reason and intelligence, backed by absolute power. Now his power was far from absolute, and reason and intelligence, the appeal to the sophisticated, was not enough. He had attracted to him, among the technocrats and industrial managers, some of the keenest brains in the country; but these were not enough either. He had treated the Party apparatus, the middle and lower echelons of it, with the contempt it deserved; but he had not realised the power of the vested interests in these men who were still indispensable to the management of the country and who, manifestly inferior to the managers and the makers, were desperately afraid of the growing power of these and were ready to rally round Khrushchev, as the man who would defend and exalt them. They could be coerced by only one force, an all powerful political police, and with the breaking of the power of Beria’s police and the rehabilitations, the amnesties, the dissolution of the labour-camp economy, this force no longer existed. Malenkov appealed to the technocrats and the intelligentsia through reason and moderation, to the peasants by bribes and concessions. But the technocracy and the intelligentsia did not represent an organised force and the peasants did not care, any more than the mass of the workers, who among the indistinguishable row of bosses was top and who was not. They took their concessions, their bribes, grumbled because they were not larger, and cried a plague upon all Communists. The only coherent force, apart from the Army (a-political), was the Party apparatus. Khrushchev knew how to woo it. The senior Army officers, who, for the most part, detested the civilian leaders, as all soldiers detest politicians everywhere, had no particular love for Khrushchev. But they disliked Malenkov with particular intensity for his very active part in the great Army purge of 1937. More immediately, they were apprehensive about the new emphasis on consumer goods and services; they wanted guns and tanks and rockets: like so many generals, more guns, more tanks, more rockets, than any of them would ever have the skill to deploy.
In any case, Malenkov’s promises of an easier life, more consumer goods, more amenities, were almost impossible to fulfil. In the first place the food was not there. Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands scheme, represented as a means to produce more food quickly, therefore a step up in the standard of living, actually worked the other way. The factories which should have been turning over to consumer goods had to turn out agricultural machinery instead. It was an ingenious exercise in sabotage on the part of our hero. Sabotage in this context may seem a strong word: it is justified. In December of 1954 Khrushchev went to China on a supremely important mission. He was
determined to win Mao Tse-tung to his side. In person, he handed over to China Port Arthur and the Chinese Eastern Railway. In person he negotiated an important agreement whereby Russia was to supply China with imposing supplies of capital goods—a commitment which finally put an end to the New Course. This was an extraordinary occasion. This great mission, which should have been conducted between Prime Ministers on an inter-state basis, was conducted between Party Secretaries, on an inter-Party basis. Malenkov stayed behind. More remarkably too, so did the Foreign Minister, Molotov. Khrushchev took with him Bulganin as a Deputy Prime Minister and Mikoyan as the expert on trade. The argument was won.
Malenkov had not given in without a struggle. Until August 1954, just a year after the formal inauguration of the New Course, he had been able to exercise a certain control over Khrushchev. As early as March 1954 he had received a public snubbing, being forced to retract his statement that atomic war would mean the end of civilisation and to reassert the traditional line that it would only mean the end of capitalism. But he was still strong enough in July to cause Pravda to delete certain reckless statements about Soviet atomic superiority from an outstandingly bellicose speech delivered by Khrushchev in Prague.12 By the autumn, however, Khrushchev was ready for the kill. The turning-point was in mid-August when a great extension of the Virgin Lands campaign was announced, and announced in a manner that showed that the Party had won formal as well as actual command of the government apparatus. For the first time since Stalin’s death the Central Committee came before the Council of Ministers in the promulgation of a joint decree.13 Less than a fortnight later Pravda in a leading article exhorted the Party organisations to intensify their supervisory activity in all government departments.
When Khrushchev returned from Peking in October things moved very fast indeed. Saburov, once a Malenkov man, in his speech on the eve of the anniversary of the October Revolution announced that heavy industry was the very corner-stone of the Soviet economy. A few days later Khrushchev issued his first personal decree, signed by himself alone (it was about the need to find more subtle ways of conducting anti-religious propaganda!). On 23rd December a very deadly blow was struck at Malenkov by the report in Pravda of the trial and execution of Abakumkov, ex-Minister of State Security, Malenkov’s close collaborator in the past, for his part in the “Leningrad Affair,” the purge of Zhdanov’s supporters, which had been organised by Malenkov. On 24th January, 1955, Khrushchev signed his second personal decree, a very symbolic one, changing the date of the memorial day for Lenin: here he was showing his power, but in a matter which was hard to criticise; the Lenin anniversary was henceforth to be celebrated on the anniversary of Lenin’s birth, not, as hitherto, his death—a sunny thought. Exactly a fortnight later Shepilov, editor of Pravda, wrote over his own name a resounding article demanding priority for heavy industry, and on that day Mikoyan, one of the most ardent and radical advocates of Malenkov’s New Course (he had wanted to import food and consumer goods to raise the standard of living quickly, and to learn and profit by Western trading methods) lost his job as Minister for Internal Trade. On 25th January Khrushchev himself told the Central Committee that certain “vulgarisers of Marxism” had been committing the heresy of putting consumer goods before heavy industry. Using the sort of language that had been out of fashion, in public at least, since Stalin’s death he stigmatised this heresy as a right-wing deviation and compared its exponents with Rykov and Bukharin.14
On 8th February, Malenkov ceased to be Prime Minister.
The occasion was a meeting of the Supreme Soviet, but all the members of the Central Committee Presidium were on the platform in the great Kremlin hall. Malenkov, the man whom Stalin had groomed for so long, sat there too and listened impassively while, to the shocked surprise of the 1,300 delegates, the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Union read out his request to be allowed to resign. He asked, of all things, to be replaced “by another comrade with greater administrative experience.” He went on: “I recognise clearly that my insufficient experience in local work has an unfavourable effect on the fulfilment of the complicated and responsible duties of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, as well as the fact that I have not had the opportunity of being directly responsible for individual branches of the economy in another Ministry or in any other economic body.”15 He went on to make his apology for agricultural shortcomings, for which he said he held himself responsible, and finished with a statement of his faith in the primacy of heavy industry.
What Malenkov in effect was saying was that he had played the role of eminence grise too long and was now paying for it. There was no argument about policy, only the statement that this genius of an administrator knew nothing about administration, and that this industrial overlord who had never had anything to do with agriculture had failed in his agricultural policies. His message was clearly taken, but it made no difference what the comrades thought. He had lost power, therefore virtue. The man with power, therefore virtue, was Comrade N. S. Khrushchev, who now took the stage. He was making a new Prime Minister on behalf of the Central Committee of the Party. He proposed Nikolai Bulganin for the job, praising his “great experience in the political, state, economic, and military fields.” Bulganin had indeed been a good administrator: it was his solitary talent. The Central Committee was foisting a puppet Prime Minister on to the Council of Ministers, which Malenkov had tried to make supreme.
But Malenkov was still very much a figure to be reckoned with. Although he ceased to be Prime Minister, he was still a member of the Party Presidium, and it was not until the early summer of 1957 that he was finally crushed in the very moment when it looked as though he had triumphed over Khrushchev.
Chapter 16
The Chieftain Finds his Voice
Khrushchev was sixty-one and bursting out all over with a vitality which seemed only to have gathered strength from a lifetime of strain and stress and peril and from the complex and taxing manoeuvres through which, less than two years after Stalin’s death, he had subdued his seniors as well as his only dangerous rival. He was not yet undisputed master of the Soviet Union (was he ever to be that?), but for a decade to come the Khrushchev story was to be the story of his country and also, to a very large degree, of the world.
This is not a history of the Soviet Union, or of the world. It is the story of one man’s rise and fall. To recount all his activities as the spokesman and accepted leader of one of the two great powers would call for many volumes. Many volumes have indeed been engaged themselves with aspects of this teeming subject, and I myself have written three of them.1 In these pages I have tried to show the sort of man he was, his background, his changing environment, his path to the summit. It remains to be shown how he ruled, how he himself was ruled by the combination of his own past and the forces engendered by a changing Russia and a changing world, and how he fell.
He was never to be the supreme autocrat, as Stalin was the supreme autocrat, though at times he came very near to it. This is not hindsight: during the whole of his period of ascendancy, in a continuous running commentary on his extraordinary and multifarious activity, it was my own persistent contention that the men who had raised him up could, and one day might, pull him down. In the end they did just this. They did more: by the timing of his fall and by their subsequent actions they demonstrated which aspects of the policies enunciated by Khrushchev had been in fact collectively agreed and which had been imposed on them by Khrushchev. The most important were then seen to have been agreed: they were continued after Khrushchev’s eclipse.
It is important to be clear on this immediately, and for two reasons which interlock: it is the key to our understanding of Khrushchev’s own rule, and it is the key to our understanding of the country over which he ruled, which is still with us to-day, and of the men who ruled with him, the survivors of whom destroyed him when he tried too hard to make himself an autocrat, and who continue to rule without him.
In February 1955 they agreed to the dethronement
of Malenkov not because they thought Khrushchev would make a better Tsar but partly for personal reasons and partly because they believed that the New Course was heading for trouble. The irony of the situation was that the economists and the technocrats who had been nurtured by Malenkov temporarily gained from the fall of their champion. Saburov and Pervukhin were both promoted to be First Deputy Premiers under Bulganin, as was Mikoyan, a fervent advocate of the New Course. Four other heads of production industries were also made Deputy Premiers, so that the Government team, with Malenkov only one of eight Deputy Premiers, was extremely strong. Soon afterwards the Army, too, showed that it had a hand in Malenkov’s fall. In March eleven new marshals were appointed, and of these the majority had worked with Khrushchev in the war. They stood, obviously, for the swift development of heavy industry, and very soon they showed that they were also interested in the rewriting of the history of the war in a way which would give the generals a decent share of the credit.
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