So that although Bulganin, as Prime Minister, made public obeisance to the Party, which, he said, it was his sole and proper task to serve (using the identical formula which Molotov had used when Stalin made him Prime Minister in 1931), the new Government and Party leadership were clearly intended to operate as a collective, concerned above all with putting heavy industry and agriculture on the right lines before trying to please the consumer. And very soon this was made specifically clear. Khrushchev might be First Secretary, and the First Secretary was clearly more important than the Prime Minister, but he was not to be as important as all that: there were to be no more decrees signed only by Khrushchev himself. “Lenin taught us,” wrote Pravda on 20th April, “the collective nature of work. He often reminded us that all members of the Politburo are equal [Malenkov was still a member of the Politburo, the Presidium] and that the Secretary is chosen to execute the resolutions of the Central Committee of the Party.” Khrushchev was thus constrained to publish in his own Party newspaper, edited by his own protégé, Shepilov, a solemn declaration of the limits of his own power. A few days later, the Party theoretical journal, Kommunist, was even more explicit: “Lenin repeatedly stressed the importance of collective leadership in the Party and the country. To avoid any misunderstanding, Lenin said … that only resolutions agreed on by the Central Committee after they had been sanctioned by the Orgburo, the Politburo, or the Central Committee in plenary session should be implemented by the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party. Otherwise the Central Committee cannot work efficiently.”2
All during 1955 Party and Government functioned outwardly as a tightly bound collective. It was for Khrushchev not a year of spectacular progress, but rather of consolidation and purposeful advance. He had put Malenkov down, but this deadly rival was still a powerful personality in his own right and still in a position to intrigue. He had not conceded final defeat, far from it; and in May 1957, over two years after his resignation as Prime Minister, he came within a hair’s breadth of final victory. He did not conceal his long-range intentions. When he came to England in the early summer of 1956, technically as the head of a delegation of power-station engineers, actually to prepare the way for the imminent state visit of Bulganin and Khrushchev, he talked like any Western political leader in opposition. In a short, quite private conversation, I asked him how he was enjoying his semi-retirement. He was not as retired as all that, he answered, there was plenty to be done. All the same, the change made a welcome rest; he had more time for reading and getting out into the open air (he was always, in spite of his poundage, a passionate hunter in the Continental manner). Did he still think his own views about the New Course and heavy industry had been right? Did he think some of his colleagues had been wrong? He smiled—and unlike most Western politicians, this man whose eyes could look like stones and who had behaved for so long with such an extremity of nastiness, could still smile, on occasion, with his eyes—he smiled and said: “I know that I was right and that some of my colleagues were wrong. They will see this in due course. But we have a collective government, and I am part of that collective.”
It is necessary to remember the continued existence of Malenkov as a very real threat when considering the actions of Khrushchev between 1955 and 1957. Khrushchev had to go very carefully indeed.
He did not take a very active part in the real domestic business of 1955. This was concerned with the overhaul of industry, and it was presided over, not ineffectively, by Bulganin working with and through the strong team referred to above. Bulganin, though weakened by drink and soft living, though never a power politically, was by no means a negligible figure. He had shown himself as a first-class industrialist in the days when these were few and far between; he had, as chairman of the State Bank, exhibited financial acumen and familiarised himself with the ins and outs of the creaking economy; as Minister of Defence he had got on well enough with the soldiers; he knew how to talk to foreigners. At the plenary session of the Central Committee in July 1955 he made a most important speech which expounded the shortcomings of the industrial system, the waste, the bottlenecks due to rigid and over-centralised planning, the way in which Soviet industry as a whole was far behind the West.3 His speech was no less dramatic, and a good deal more constructive, than Khrushchev’s own speech about the shortcomings of agriculture in September 1953. Bulganin worked very hard that year, and achieved a good deal: Khrushchev let him get on with it, he had his eye on other things.
He might not any more issue personal decrees, but he continued to hold the limelight. This was the year in which he finally made his name as the fountain of innumerable ideas. It was clear that he had decided that his best policy was to keep moving at all costs, ceaselessly making the headlines, nagging, exhorting, cajoling and passing on to a new idea before the last one had time to get stale. Now he was going to save Russian agriculture by teaching the peasants to plant maize, maize everywhere, above all as a fodder crop, even where maize had never grown before and could not grow. The fodder was to increase the livestock population, and thus the meat supply. When it was not maize it was concrete—reinforced concrete was the hope of the future: he would teach the Russians to construct their buildings out of pre-fabricated concrete units, which made for economy and durability and overcame the shortage of bricks in the vast areas where there was no timber: but he failed to make corresponding provision for the manufacture of cement. When it was not maize or concrete it was architecture: he launched with great panache a campaign against Stalin’s over-ornamented, monumental architecture. There were to be no more of the Christmas cake piles which dotted the skyline of Moscow: apartment buildings were to be severe, economical and functional: he made great fun of the lavish decoration of the Moscow Underground, of the ponderous vulgarity of the rebuilt Krestyachik in Kiev—evidently quite forgetting that the Moscow Underground had been his personal creation, and that, as first Secretary of the Ukraine, he had personally presided over the planning of the new Krestyachik.
While in public he sustained a non-stop performance on these lines, which did nobody any harm, but which did not do much good either, privately he continued with his slow and skilful rebuilding of the Communist Party in his own image. But he was also applying his mind, for the first time, to foreign affairs. Sooner or later, if his progress was to continue, he would have to turn himself into the spokesman of the Soviet Union vis-à-vis the outer world: it had better be sooner than later. In the process he would have to do to Molotov, still very much Russia’s elder statesman, what he had already done to Malenkov. Here he had all the comrades on his side, including Malenkov himself, already committed to an anti-Molotov line. Just as Stalin had made Molotov Foreign Minister in 1939 to bring home to the world that he was about to abandon all ideas of collective security and make a deal with Hitler, so, if the Soviet Union was to make a new start, Molotov would now have to go.
The pretext was the rapprochement with Marshal Tito. Although this did not turn out as Khrushchev had expected, the fact that it took place at all was a defeat for Molotov, who still believed that by weakening in face of Yugoslavia the Soviet Union would invite severe difficulties in her satellites, above all in Poland. He was quite overborne. When, in May 1955, it was decided to send a delegation to Yugoslavia Molotov was already fighting a rearguard action. Some sort of a rapprochement was necessary, it was generally agreed, if only to put an end to a situation (the defiance of the Soviet Union by a relatively tiny power) which made Moscow look increasingly ridiculous. Molotov said, in effect, all right; but limit the occasion to a formal meeting of heads of state. Khrushchev, and others, argued that only by bringing the Yugoslav Communist Party back into the fold, thus neutralising it, could the danger of the example of the Titoist heresy be overcome. The majority of the comrades agreed. The delegation was to be led by Khrushchev, as First Secretary of the Communist Party, not by Bulganin as Prime Minister. Khrushchev’s personal aim was to secure an international success for the Party he led and to make his fi
rst appearance on the international scene as the spokesman of the Soviet Union. In the first essay he failed: in the latter, more important immediately to him, he succeeded.
We have already glimpsed the man as he appeared in Belgrade, his first excursion into a land where he had to meet a foreign leader who was master in his own house. He made many mistakes, filed them in his mind for future reference, and did not repeat them. But, always accompanied by Bulganin and Mikoyan (who usually walked just behind him), he was evidently and absolutely in command on all public appearances and in most private ones too. Whether he was rudely hectoring the astonished and embarrassed Ambassador of a minor power in a private room at a vast public reception, whether he was holding forth about State relations (Bulganin’s province) or industry and trade (Mikoyan’s province), nobody contradicted him and, as observed earlier in this narrative, he made felt, with no sign of conscious effort, the personal authority and power which dominated any assembly and helped to explain why a collection of the hardest and most ruthless opportunists in the world were accepting him as their figurehead, their spokesman, their dynamo too. He was positive. He did not mind speaking out and making mistakes. It was highly necessary for the Soviet Union to speak with a positive voice: the colleagues, even the cleverest among them, were so conditioned by fear—fear of Stalin—that they seemed wholly incapable of speaking in public with positive commitment—even though, like Mikoyan or Molotov or Malenkov or Kaganovich, they might be downright and aggressive in their own closed sessions with the Central Committee and in their smaller cabinet.
Some of Khrushchev’s mistakes were personal to him and spoke volumes about his authoritarian background vis-à-vis his subordinates—as when he ignored the existence of the workers on the bench at the turbine factory in Ljubljana: he had sprung from the workers and knew their weakness and how they had to be bullied and cowed; now he exploited that weakness, not troubling to conceal the fact that he regarded them as dirt— until he discovered that the Yugoslavs were members of a prouder, more upstanding race than his own.
But the greatest of all his mistakes was clearly a collective affair, and, by itself, would have been enough to cause the failure of his own special mission—to bring Marshal Tito and the Yugoslav Communists into fraternal (i.e. servile) relations with the Soviet Party. At Belgrade airport he made what he took to be the most handsome apology for past Soviet policy towards Yugoslavia. It was intended as an earth-shaking gesture of a magnanimity beyond compare: Russia the Great was not accustomed to making apologies to minor powers—or, for that matter, major ones. It was an obviously prepared statement, agreed by the Presidium in Moscow. Not only Khrushchev, but also his senior colleagues, took it unquestioningly for granted that Marshal Tito would be so overwhelmed by the magnitude of this gesture that he would be rushed off his feet into agreeing to anything Khrushchev asked of him. It did not work out like that. This is what Khrushchev said:
“We sincerely regret what has occurred and are determinedly removing all those obstacles which have accumulated during this period. In this we, for our part, must include the provocative role played in the relations between Yugoslavia and the USSR by the enemies of the people, Beria, Abakumov and others, who have now been unmasked. We have carefully examined the material upon which those grave accusations and insults aimed then at the Yugoslav leaders were based. The facts have shown that this material was concocted by enemies of the people, despicable agents of imperialism who had joined the ranks of our Party by underhand means.”
This kind of thing was good enough for Russians. In the eyes of the country which Stalin and his closest colleagues (Khrushchev himself, Bulganin and Mikoyan standing with him on the airport apron) had tried to batter into submission by all means short of military invasion, it was worse than no apology at all. As Tito raised his hand to stop the interpreter it must have seemed to him that this apology was not only adding insult to injury but was also sinister. There had been a good deal of evidence that the new leadership was trying to move away from Stalinist policies, but here they were in the very act of reversing one of his “mistakes” and quite unable to prevent themselves from reverting, as to the manner born, to Stalinist phraseology and lies. During all the conversations which followed there was little warmth on either side. State relations were resumed (Bulganin signed the agreement for the Soviet State), but inter-Party relations were not so much as mentioned in the communiqué. More than this, the communiqué contained a little phrase which was to prove epoch-making in the history of Moscow’s relations with Communist parties everywhere—which was, indeed, to herald the disintegration of the Communist monolith: “differences in practical forms of socialism are exclusively the affair of individual countries.” It was a trick sentence, as designed by Khrushchev. But it was the first trick in a long-drawn-out game which he was to lose in the end.
It was a trick phrase because, although it conceded “different paths to socialism,” Khrushchev was already planning his next move. This was to be nothing less than the formal announcement that the Soviet Union had already achieved socialism and was now actively engaged in the “transition to Communism.” This formulation was intended to put the Soviet Union into a different class from the aspiring satellites and Yugoslavia, and from China too: she was still the mentor and the guide, because a stage further on the journey to Utopia. This formulation, what is more, was taken by Khrushchev very seriously indeed: in years to come, the aspect of the Chinese challenge which enraged him above all others was Mao’s claim that by the invention of the Communist system and his Great Leap Forward he had found a short cut to Communism which (by implication) the Russians had never had the wit to discover for themselves. More immediately, in putting forward this formulation, Khrushchev encompassed the humiliation of Molotov who, in one of his speeches (to the Supreme Soviet on 8th February, 1955), had delivered himself of the harmless-seeming remark that in the Soviet Union “the foundations of the socialist society have already been built.” He was not then challenged. Nobody publicly objected. But Khrushchev hugged it to himself. Seven months later the grand old man was forced to make a public apology in Kommunist and explain at length where he had been wrong.4 This recantation, besides serving to discredit Molotov and to emphasise his isolation, also gave Khrushchev a dramatic way of posing as a Party ideologist— for the first but not at all for the last time! The Party, and Khrushchev, needed an opportunity to show that it was still an ideological force: Communist theory for some time past had been so swamped by economic and tactical expedients that it was beginning to look as though there was no reason for the Party’s existence except as an apparatus of personal rule.
By that time (September 1955) Khrushchev had extended his power considerably. The Belgrade experience had taught him, and his colleagues, a good deal. They understood, as they had not understood before, that Moscow had a long and difficult row to hoe before it could gain the confidence not only of Yugoslavia but also of the remaining satellites. In this they were helped by Mikoyan, the Armenian, with his lively understanding of the feelings of subject races, who had so gloomily watched Khrushchev’s efforts to make friends with Tito. At that Central Committee plenum in July, at which Bulganin exposed the failures of Soviet industry, he insisted forcibly that if the Soviet Union was to get anywhere at all in its relations with the other Communist countries, except by force, it must make an end of the ruthless economic exploitation of the satellites, the attempted and foredoomed exploitation of China too, and start treating them as partners.5
At that meeting, too, in spite of Khrushchev’s indiscretions in Belgrade, which included his last public appearance when drunk, it was effectively decided that Khrushchev had better be given as much rope, within reason, as he asked. This was nothing less than a recognition of his personal force and the need for personal force. At the end of the session he was able to strengthen his influence in the Presidium by importing to it one of his toughest and most vigorous aides, Kirichenko, who had served with him in the Ukraine a
nd taken over the First Secretaryship of the Ukrainian Party after Stalin’s death. To an enlarged Secretariat he brought three of his supporters, two from the provinces: Aristov, who had once run the great steel works at Magnitogorsk, and Belyaev, who had been in charge of the Virgin Lands campaign; with them came Shepilov, the young editor of Pravda, who was later to take over Molotov’s job as Foreign Minister.
Also, behind the scenes, there was very active preparation for the first Party Congress of the post-Stalin era, which was to be the famous 20th Party Congress of February, 1956. The isolation and neutralisation of Molotov was part of this exercise. So, in that same month of September, was the trial of a number of senior officials of the Georgian (Beria’s own) security services. This was in effect a preview of the sort of charges Khrushchev was preparing to bring against Stalin in his secret speech. It involved the rehabilitation of a number of Stalin’s most distinguished victims, notably Ordzhonikidze, the Georgian Party chieftain, one of Stalin’s stoutest aides, who had been driven to suicide by his master. Nothing was said about this trial until November. Nothing was ever said about a speech which Khrushchev made in Sofia on his way back from Belgrade in June. Here, it was later discovered, only ten days after he had invited Tito to join him in blaming everything on Beria, he for the first time attacked Stalin openly (though in secret Party conclave) bringing out some of the charges which were to be elaborated in the secret speech.6 This Sofia affair provides the direct answer to those who maintained that in some way Khrushchev was forced by his colleagues to make the secret speech: he was leading them and making it inevitable.
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