Khrushchev

by Edward Crankshaw

  There were other preparations, more oblique, but in retrospect evident for what they were. Before he stood up at the 20th Party Congress, not only to denounce Stalin, but also to give Soviet policy towards the West a decisive new turn, Khrushchev needed to accomplish two more things: he needed to establish himself further as an international figure and also to secure for himself a first-hand impression of the leaders of the “imperialist camp,” above all President Eisenhower of America.

  The first was achieved by the very much publicised visit with Bulganin to India, Burma and Afghanistan, during the course of which the Russian leaders allowed themselves to be garlanded and to be photographed in ways more reminiscent of vote-catching Western politicians than of Russian tyrants. They were indeed vote-catching. A new doctrine was being born, the doctrine of “peaceful competition.” Khrushchev was reversing Stalin’s policy which was based on the assumption that all newly independent nations, freed from Western imperial rule, but still preserving ties with their late masters, were in fact crypto-colonial lands, ruled by traitors (Ghandi, for instance, or Nehru) in the pay of the West. He was at the same time recognising a fact of life—the existence of a vast new area of political neutralism—and preparing to bid against the West with material aid, not so much for its active support as to keep it neutral. But all the time he fulminated against the West, certainly trying to please the lately down-trodden and exploited, but more particularly with an eye to presenting himself as a true disciple of the Lenin who had been betrayed by Stalin in his later years.

  The second aim he achieved by attending the first Summit meeting at Geneva and there meeting the Western leaders, Eisenhower, Eden, Faure. Molotov went too (he had not yet been publicly humiliated), and with him Bulganin and Marshal Zhukov who was to talk with Eisenhower as an old comrade in arms. Here Khrushchev set out to create an impression of becoming modesty and constitutional correctness. Since nothing was to be decided at the Summit meeting, he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by sitting quietly by while his Prime Minister did the talking. Indeed, he went out of his way to show that he was a man like other men. Not for him the noisy and flashy police-guards with motor-cycles and helicopters. He drifted about in a casual sort of way, kept his eyes and ears open, and for the first time in his life had a first-hand glimpse of what Western politicians were made of. He must have found it hard indeed to believe his eyes and ears.

  Chapter 17

  Old Dogmas, New Ideas

  The world statesman was now fledged and ready to take the stage. He had arrived. To all but a handful of specialists his name had been known outside Russia and Russian-occupied territory for only three years. Even to these specialists he had not appeared as a formidable pretender to the succession until late in 1954, so quietly had he been playing his hand. But now, by the end of 1955, he had established himself as the first among equals and also as a politician of a different breed from any known in Russia, Tsarist or Bolshevik—indeed, as the first Western style politician in Russian history. He was preparing for the great coup, which, if it succeeded, would at once establish him as the effective master of the Soviet Union, strong enough to break the survivors of the original Stalinists, who had been running the country in the days when he had been a modest District Secretary, as well as the most able of his own contemporaries. It was an extraordinary transformation from the bullet-headed young tough of Yuzokva into the quiet, watchful, modest little figure at Geneva who could afford to sit by and allow Bulganin, Molotov and Zhukov to argue with the President of the United States, knowing that if he chose he had only to raise a pudgy little hand to make them fall silent and listen to him.

  What did he believe? Until now what he believed had not mattered one way or the other. He had been fully occupied with the day to day problems of helping Stalin “build Socialism” and furthering his own career—interrupted but not set back while he fought the Germans on behalf of the people instead fighting the people on behalf of Stalin. Since Stalin’s death he had been even more feverishly occupied in helping his colleagues to hold the line while, at the same time, manoeuvring himself into the dominant position. He had not had much time for ideas. In any case, he was a man of action, not a thinker; even as a man of action he was a politician first, a balancer, a trimmer, an intriguer, a fixer, not in any way an intellectual or a theorist—an opportunist in the grand manner, operating within the rigid framework of a received ideology. But he was more than this: he was also a natural commander, as he had shown in Yuzovka, in Moscow, in Kiev; the characteristics of the ward politician had been developed out of all proportion by the circumstances of his career, the struggle for survival and advancement in the service of a brutal and pathologically suspicious tyrant. He was still more, he was a dreamer—the quality we have noted in his eyes even in some of the earliest photographs and which began to manifest itself on a national scale with his grandiose plans for the redemption of agriculture. He dreamt of power: from the earliest beginnings in Yuzovka the vision of power had been his great driving force; there could have been none other to carry him through the fearful strains and the hazards, the brutalities, the humiliations too, of the steady climb to the summit. Nobody forced him to embark on this fearful undertaking, and it is to his credit that he never for a moment bemoaned his lonely fate in the manner so familiar among Western politicians who, having schemed and plotted and manoeuvred and toiled for high office, then, while clinging to it tooth and nail, demand our sympathy because life at the top is rough and hard and, really, rather trying. Khrushchev wanted power, and he visibly enjoyed his power: he did not grumble because the responsibilities of office kept him from hunting and fishing; he enjoyed the responsibilities of office and used his power to see that he got the best hunting and fishing whenever he felt like it. He was a happy potentate.

  He also dreamed for Russia. He was very much a Russian with a profound instinctive patriotism which had its roots in the source of all Russian patriotism—Russian soil, the endless steppelands, the forests, the great, slow rivers, the marvellously fluid, unformed, embracing landscape and the vast Russian skies; the sense of togetherness and community on a quasi-mystical plane with a suffering people, which could also co-exist, as it co-existed in the hearts of so many outstanding Russian patriots through the centuries, with the severities and brutalities of the most ruthless task-masters when it came to sustaining the central autocracy—any autocracy save only that it functioned. Thus a Suvorov, who loved his men and cherished them while he drove them, who despised the higher command and the whole system of government, would put down peasant rebellions, using his peasant troops, with savage rigour, although the rebels had risen in desperation against the ruling society he loathed and despised and against which he fought all his life.

  Khrushchev was not a Suvorov. But he had a feeling for the dumb masses of Russia, from whom he had sprung and whom he exploited to the utmost in the interest of the central autocracy, first Stalin’s, then his own. At work, as individuals on the bench, they did not exist; they were automatons, and faulty and suspect automatons at that. As a class, seen from his office in the Kremlin, they were dangerous, to be subdued. But as manageable groups, visited off-duty, clustered round him in factories, on collective farms, in meeting-halls throughout the provinces, and drinking in his words, he drew strength from them and felt one with them. We are familiar with his manner of talk: he would tell them how to plant maize in squares instead of rows so that the stems would support each other and the pollen shaken loose from the branchy inflorescence would fall more surely to be caught in the silky beards of the swelling cobs below; he would urge them to plant potatoes and then turn pigs out among them to fatten themselves and at the same time churn up and fertilise the soil; he would announce with the air of a man who had discovered the second law of thermo-dynamics that the latest research had shown that two milkings a day was enough for any cow and paint in glowing colours the increase in milk-yield gained from leaving the animals in peace to chew their cud and th
e saving in man-power, or woman-power: the time-honoured custom, he said, was for “milk-maids” to milk their charges at least five times a day in the belief that the best milk came from the “last drop” of each milking. He enjoyed these homilies. He dotted them with ancient Russian proverbs and frequent invocations of the Almighty, whose existence at other times he scornfully denied. He was one with them, he was Little Father too—and then he went back to Moscow and issued decrees designed to detach his beloved peasants from the land, their own little bits of land, their own little acres and their cow, still further; to sack the peasant chairmen of thousands of collectives at a time and replace them with trusted Party workers from the towns—and then to sack these in their turn because they did not know how to make two blades of grass grow where none had grown before. It was all, of course, for everybody’s good; the Soviet Union, backward and oppressed, where millions lived on a bare subsistence level in potentially the richest land on earth, must be made to prosper in spite of the backwardness of the feckless millions who still clung to their dark superstitions and their drunken feast-days. To this end they must be driven in the traditional Russian way—but with a difference. They were driven, once upon a time, as serfs to enrich their masters. Now they were being driven to enrich themselves. The peasants had to provide the food to feed the factory-workers, the miners, the foundry-men, and the administrators. The factory-workers had to provide the material to build up a vast heavy industry which would look after arms to defy the outer world and the highly articulated skeleton of a modern industrial economy, which, in due course, would have machines to spare to multiply the amenities of the good life—when all would reap their reward.

  This was the Stalin system. It was a shock system: to invite the co-operation of the people by letting them enjoy parts of the fruit of their toil as they produced it was too dangerous and too slow—and too irregular. The rewards must be deferred, and since people will not work for rewards indefinitely deferred, they must be coerced. This was the system Khrushchev had lived with all his life. Malenkov had tried to win popularity by abandoning it, altogether prematurely: it could not, must not be abandoned while Russia was still lagging behind the West in productivity. Of course Stalin had driven too fast and too far. Of course in his last phase he had made further growth impossible by driving so hard and planning so rigidly, relying on forced labour as though the population of Russia was illimitable and all of it expendable, killing all initiative by terror. But the principle was correct, only the detailed application was wrong. The people were not to be trusted to know their own best interests; they must be chivvied, instructed and coerced sternly but no longer viciously.

  About other nations he had thought very little. Less than any of Stalin’s lieutenants had he been concerned with his country’s relations with the outside world. During all the period of the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Western Europe he had been occupied with purely domestic tasks in Moscow. He knew, at first hand, about German efficiency and method, and feared it. For the rest there is nothing to show that he had any ideas about the West more subtle and perceptive than the general view shared by the ordinary Party functionary.

  In this there was grafted on to the ancient Russian suspicion of all foreigners, mixed with envy and contempt, the received conviction that the Western powers, England above all before the war, America after it, would go to any lengths in their inevitable and implacable hostility to the first “socialist” state. They had tried in vain to strangle it at birth; monopoly capitalism, expressing itself in imperialism and Fascism of one kind and another, remained pledged to the destruction of the Soviet Union. Britain and France had tried to reach an accommodation with Nazi Germany at the expense of Russia, had been foiled, had, in 1941, been only too pleased to see Russia and Germany tearing each other to pieces and, at the same time, to exploit the heroism of the Red Army in their own interests. At the end of the war, relatively unscathed and stronger than ever before, America had profited by the prostration of Europe to impose herself on the West European powers, substituting her own imperialist designs in Asia above all and rearming West Germany to act as the powerful spearhead for a renewed drive against the Soviet Union. This is what Stalin believed, and Khrushchev took his foreign policy views from Stalin. When, after Stalin’s death, his successors sought to modify Soviet foreign policy in the light of the nuclear facts of life it is improbable in the extreme that Khrushchev had any new ideas to offer. In those early councils of 1953 and 1954 when Malenkov, abetted by Mikoyan, was attempting to ease the tension and achieve some sort of a working relationship with the West, seeing clearly enough what Stalin in his last days was only beginning to see, his ideas must have seemed heretical to the man from the Ukraine who had never had to give a thought to the complexities of co-existence in a catastrophic age. In this he was upheld by Molotov, the trusted expert on foreign policy, the aggressive and conservative stone-waller, as well as by many of his friends in the military hierarchy. But, as always, he learnt quickly; and by the end of 1955 he was preparing to advance the Malenkov view as his own. Some years were to go by before, in the teeth of the Chinese, he formally produced as his own idea the view he had condemned Malenkov for holding— that nuclear war would mean the end of Communism as well as capitalism. But in February 1956, when he advanced the thesis that war was no longer “fatally inevitable,” it was clear that a new understanding of the meaning of nuclear warfare was the reason for this reversal, not, as Khrushchev insisted at the time, a conviction of the overwhelming strength of the “socialist camp.”

  As far as the “socialist camp” itself was concerned, which then, of course, included China, here again there is no reason to suppose that in his early days as First Secretary Khrushchev thought of the European satellites as anything but obedient borderlands managed by indigenous Communist rulers loyal to Moscow and easily controllable in Moscow’s interests. His visits to Prague and Warsaw in 1954 could only confirm him in this view: the Czech and Polish Communist leaders, Stalin’s puppets, received him as their sovereign lord and provided him with the intoxicating experience of addressing in these proud and ancient capitals great meetings packed with local Communists and band-wagoners who applauded him wildly and in a thousand ways showed that they looked to Moscow for leadership and guidance—which seemed to him entirely right and proper. Only later, in Belgrade, did it begin to dawn on him that a régime which called itself Communist might seriously question the Moscow leadership.

  As for China, Khrushchev knew, as Stalin had known, that there could be no question of reducing Mao Tse-tung to the status of a puppet leader. Stalin, having done his best to prevent Mao from carrying out his revolution in 1948, had accepted it when it came and made the best of it, using China’s desperate need to impose terms which had to be accepted, deeply though they were resented, and profiting by the Chinese revolution to terrify America. Mao would accept from Stalin, the world’s senior revolutionary, treatment which he would accept neither from Malenkov nor Khrushchev, both small and parvenu compared with him. Khrushchev was the first to profit by establishing a new and personal relationship on his visit to Peking in 1954; but he could see by then that if unity between Moscow and Peking was to be maintained a difficult and tricky passage lay ahead. The whole problem of world revolution was at issue here. The ultimate triumph of what Khrushchev thought of as Communism—i.e. the Soviet governmental system—over what he thought of as capitalism—i.e. the hidden government of bankers and big industrialists—was taken for granted by him as a simple axiom of faith. But he, like Stalin, had no use for any revolution which could not be controlled by Moscow and exploited in the interests of the Soviet Union. The first challenge to the logic of this simple faith had been the Yugoslav defection. Would China pose a second, far more serious challenge? She would need extremely careful handling. But Marx was Marx and Lenin was Lenin and history was on their side. There might be storms, but in the end the “socialist camp” would hold together in face of the standing threat from Ame
rica and America’s European satellites: China would be retained, just as, quite soon, Yugoslavia would swallow her stiff-necked Balkan pride and return meekly to the fold.

  The task, meanwhile, was to carry on: to hold the satellites together and raise their economic and military potential in the Russian interest by intelligent handling; to sap the confidence and subvert the power of the West by playing on the differences between the Western allies, by encouraging class-warfare in the individual countries, by presenting the Soviet government as a steadfast force for peace in a world threatened by the irresponsible and malevolent “war-mongering” of the Pentagon generals and Mr. John Foster Dulles. There was a further activity which Khrushchev himself was the first to develop. Stalin had refused to have anything to do with the governments of ex-colonial countries, regarding them as “imperialist lackeys.” Khrushchev and his advisers saw that this was a mistaken view. Nehru, for example, was certainly anti-Communist, but he was also manifestly anti-imperialist too, except on his own account in such places as Kashmir. It was useless to expect India to carry out an immediate Communist revolution and throw out Nehru (anyway, who would control a revolution on these lines?) but it was criminal to throw her into the imperialist camp by refusing to treat with her. It was quite sufficient for the time being to make amicable noises and to grant with as much fuss as possible a modicum of material aid—aid without strings on long-term loans at a very low interest rate. Who would have dared to guess in 1953 that Moscow would soon be building dams for a country, Egypt, in which the Communist Party was illegal?

  As for ideas of socialism, or Communism, in domestic politics, these were what the central government, the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, said they were. And what they said they were was embodied in the system developed by Stalin. It stood for ultimate prosperity for all, abundance for all, to be achieved by the following out of measures prescribed minutely from above. Only two items of Lenin’s original concept of a Communist society survived. The first was that no individual, or quasi-autonomous group of individuals (e.g. a private or a joint stock company) was permitted to employ for its own financial gain any other individual. All were employed by the State, directly, as in industry, or indirectly as in the collective farms; and the State drew the profits, to reward the overseers as it chose—or to sack them or destroy them as it chose. The second was that, through universal education, talent could rise freely to its own level, provided it behaved itself politically. One day, when abundance had been achieved, there would be enough for all—and then the slogan “to each according to his ability, to each according to his work” would be changed to the glorious declaration of full Communism: “from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” But there was a long way to go and it was still too early to bother one’s head about what this really meant—if, indeed, if should prove to mean anything at all.