This, very roughly, was the position of Nikita Khrushchev as he prepared himself for the 20th Party Congress to take place in February 1956. He had done all he could, and it was a great deal, to secure the renewed supremacy of the Party and to consolidate his own ascendancy in it. But he was still part of the collective. More than this, neither the Party itself, nor he, nor anybody else, could begin to aspire to the absolute authority which Stalin had enjoyed. The Soviet Union had changed, and Stalin himself had changed it. This was a point which was never grasped by all those (there are still many) who believed in general that at any moment there could be a full-scale reversion to the Stalinist terror and, in particular, that Khrushchev, once he had achieved supremacy (in June 1957), was an unquestioned and untouchable autocrat in the sense that Stalin was an autocrat from the moment of Kirov’s murder in 1934 until his death in 1953.
The Soviet system was Stalin’s own creation. He had imposed it by the force of his personality on a land which, until 1928, had no system at all. Heavy industry was then under State control; trade and light industry, under the NEP, were run by private entrepreneurs; the peasants, still in an overwhelming majority, were masters of their own land and determined to stay that way. Stalin, assisted by his own growing band of supporters, owing all they had to him, and using the old revolutionaries whom he later killed, operating through a monstrous and highly privileged political police force, built up the system where none had been before at a time when the relative simplicities of the demands of industry and agriculture demanded no more than cheap, or forced, labour provided by a backward and largely illiterate population which seemed then infinite and infinitely expendable. The men he raised up to run this brutal, wasteful system were his own creatures. He could make them and he could destroy them. They, too, were expendable.
It may be argued until Domesday, and doubtless will be so argued, whether or not Stalin, or anybody else, could have transformed backward, agrarian, anarchic Russia into a modern industrial power more swiftly and effectively by other means. We do not know, because he did not try, and neither did anybody else. Could Peter the Great, or anybody else, have brought Russia into Europe in the seventeenth century by any other means than total brutality and slave-driving? We do not know: no other means were tried. Could the West, could America, in the twentieth century, have “contained” Communism by any other means than by lumping all “Communist” countries together and holding the line by force of arms at the cost of welding so many discordant elements into an apparently monolithic threat? We do not know: no other means were tried….
What Stalin did he did. And what he did in fact was, however wastefully, to transform the face of Russia, creating in the process not only a large force of skilled and semi-skilled workers but also an entirely new class of managers, administrators, technologists, scientists and engineers necessary for the detailed running of the increasingly complex economy—in a word, a bourgeois society with, latent within it, the demands and aspirations of all bourgeois societies everywhere—if, in this case, with a strong Russian accent. It is this, far more than the industrialisation of the Soviet Union, which will be remembered as Stalin’s greatest positive achievement. He brought education on the grand scale to this vast, backward, illiterate land. He introduced the idea and the possibility of self-improvement, and so brought self-respect to a people with a servile tradition. The tragedy was that he did not know what to do with this new society when he had made it: even as he created a literate people, he corrupted them with terror. To the end of his days Stalin treated this society, which he had himself conjured up, like dirt, unable to perceive that in so doing he was defeating his own purpose and depriving the State of the benefits which could accrue only from the full extension of its gifts and talents. But the literacy remains, a lasting monument, and, as terror wanes, corruption very slowly fades.
This was the situation which Stalin’s heir inherited. Stalin with his police could maintain the pressure, even if it led to a slowing down of the economy. His surviving colleagues could not. Malenkov, and Khrushchev too, all the pretenders indeed, perfectly understood that unless one among them were given supreme authority, including absolute control of the police, there was no way of maintaining the Stalinist terror. But in surrendering all authority to one of their number they would be putting their own lives into hands which they could not control. Some of them had escaped with their own lives only by the providential timing of Stalin’s death: never again were any of them prepared to see the powers wielded by Stalin transferred to any other individual. There was no question at all of anything but a collective government, though Malenkov tried to seize, and for a few days held, more than his share of power. There was no question, therefore, of the resumption of full-scale terror. And even if this had been on the board they knew very well that it could not work. Soviet society had become too complex, too highly articulated, much too dependant upon the services of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of highly gifted individuals. Terror might work when only a handful of men were effectively running the country in the crude early stages of a belated industrial revolution. That stage was now past, and terror could not work in an age when, if the economy was to progress, men of talent had to be recognised and given their heads. All this meant, inevitably, a relaxation of police rule. But the men who were forced to preside over this relaxation knew, none better, that when people are given a little they at once demand more, that revolutions are made not when tyranny is confident and absolute, but when it begins to weaken. If they did not know this as a generalisation about human behaviour, they knew it very well from their reading of Russian history. And they all had read Russian history.
This was their dilemma: how to liberate the productive forces from the Stalinist ice-age without calling into being such a torrential thaw that they themselves would be swept away by it? They had been playing with this problem, without coming to grips with it, for nearly three years, blowing now hot, now cold, on the first painful, bewildered, ill-directed stirrings of the sleeping giant. Decisive action could not be delayed much longer. One great difficulty was the intricate network of vested interests represented by the members of the Party machine running their satrapies and sub-satrapies throughout the vast land, who did not believe, often did not want to believe, that the relaxation was serious. They constantly worked against the new mood being propagated from the Centre. And, paradoxically, they were encouraged in this by the actions of Khrushchev himself, who, in his manoeuvring against Malenkov and the government bureaucracy had, with his stress on the primacy of heavy industry and the need for Party discipline and the more active interference of Party functionaries in the running of the economy, encouraged them to believe that they were very much the masters. They were all the stronger too now that the political police had been called to heel and curbed. It was not only the people, above all the intelligentsia, who had to be told that indeed the Soviet Union was emerging from the Stalinist night; even more, the conservative but wholly indispensable Communist Party membership had to be made to understand that a wind of change was blowing and that they must bow to it, or lose their jobs.
The argument in the Kremlin went on and on. We have seen that as early as June 1955 Khrushchev had committed himself in his speech to the Bulgarian Party leaders in Sofia, if nowhere else, to an exposure of at least a part of the iniquity of Stalinism. But as late as 21st December the collective had not finally made up its mind. Although all sorts of implicit criticisms of the Stalin system had been permitted and even encouraged; although many aspects of the consequences of that system, the hushing up of the truth, the active lies and the corruption, had been denounced by gifted writers, who had not been shot (but some had been reprimanded and certain editors had been disgraced); although the Kremlin fortress, the very symbol of an occupying power in an alien land, had been thrown open to the public; although a thousand other things had happened and Stalin’s name was under a cloud, no direct attack on him personally had been made: Beria was
his scapegoat still. And on the anniversary of Stalin’s birthday, 21st December, 1955, he was given a special commemorative article in Pravda, with his familiar photograph on the front page.
But within a month, Khrushchev had got his way: at a meeting of leaders from all the Communist countries which took place on 27th and 28th January, 1956, the assembled comrades were told a little of what was to come; Stalin, in certain of his aspects, was about to be repudiated. They had just a month to compose themselves and get their explanations ready (later the Chinese were to insist that they had not been warned, but this was not true). The hour had come, and it was to be Khrushchev’s hour.
Chapter 18
The Secret Speech and the World Stage
The 20th Party Congress and Khrushchev’s two speeches are part of history. For the Western world the most important matter was contained in those parts of Khrushchev’s public speech—in the speeches of others too—which announced quite epoch-making modifications to the Leninist canon. These, formally embodied in Congress resolutions, inaugurated a new era in Soviet foreign policy. Peaceful co-existence, different paths to socialism, revolution without violence and the abandonment of the doctrine of the inevitability of war: the Soviet Union had formally renounced her role as the spearhead of violent revolution and the single-minded destroyer of the bourgeois world. The importance of these modifications—which amounted to a rewriting of Leninism—was not grasped in the West at the time because of the not unnatural tendency to regard all Soviet statements of policy as exercises in deception: the vital differences between propaganda—e.g. Stalin’s peace propaganda—designed to deceive in line with Lenin’s formula, and doctrine solemnly laid down as part of received truth was not easily distinguishable. This aspect of the Congress, which was a collective act, was also obscured by the excitement aroused by the criticism of Stalin started by Mikoyan and Suslov, moderate enough in tone, but radical in content, and then by the violence of Khrushchev’s denunciation in secret session.
Because of certain peculiarities of timing, because, too, Khrushchev was not forward among those who criticised Stalin publicly, a legend grew up that it was only at the very last minute decided that the speech should be delivered and that the role of Stalin’s prosecutor was either wished on a reluctant Khrushchev by his colleagues or else that, on impulse, he suddenly decided to steal the limelight for himself. Both explanations are improbable, if not impossible.
In the first place the speech was over 20,000 words long— nearly a fifth of the length of this book—and was put together in a most careful and calculated way. Out of the huge mass of material available to Khrushchev a very great deal was left out, and what was chosen was very carefully chosen to display Stalin, from 1934 onwards, as an enemy not of the Soviet people, but of the Communist Party—and Stalin’s own anti-Trotsky, anti-Bukharin Party at that. This was a difficult undertaking because there was no clear-cut division in time: the judicial murders of different sorts of Party members overlapped. Stalin was denounced for the torture and murder of many of those who had themselves murdered for him and who had triumphed with him at the Congress of the Victors in 1934. But he was emphatically not denounced for his action against the Trotskyites and the Bukharinites, the old Left and Right Oppositions—even though the most distinguished of those were not finally tried and shot until deep into the period of the “personality cult.” Nothing was to be said against the excesses of the collectivisation or of the great terror in so far as it affected ordinary, non-Party citizens. A little had to be said about the great Army purge of 1937 because the marshals were demanding a formal restoration of the Army’s good name (in fact Khrushchev did not satisfy them: later he had to go a good deal further in the way of rehabilitating the murdered generals). In short, the speech was a smokescreen as well as an exposure. It could not conceivably have been prepared at the last minute: months of thought and discussion had gone into it.
Nor could the speech have been wished on Khrushchev by his colleagues. If it was to be made at all it had to be made by the First Secretary of the Party. As we know, Khrushchev was already holding forth against Stalin’s crimes in Sofia in June 1955. It was he who was making the pace. The emphasis on the personality cult may well have been insisted on by others, seeking to find ways and means of convicting Khrushchev out of his own mouth should he ever look like developing a personality cult of his own. If this was so, Khrushchev himself, and his allies, got their own back. Some of the cleverest passages in the speech were aimed at the discrediting of Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov and Voroshilov—Malenkov above all—by associating them in various ways, obliquely but unambiguously, with certain of Stalin’s “mistakes” and excesses. It is possible that Khrushchev inserted certain of these short passages at the last minute, or impromptu, as he read. But whether he did this or not, there was no subsequent retraction. And this meant that support was strong enough, even in February 1956, to enable him to associate Malenkov, for example, with Stalin’s refusal to listen to the man at the front, Khrushchev, at the time of the Kharkov encirclement and to hold up the “Leningrad Affair” (which everybody knew was Malenkov’s vicious purge of Zhdanov’s men) as an example of Stalin’s behaviour at his worst. Similarly, in his equivocal remarks about the murder of Kirov he was going out of his way to suggest the complicity of Molotov and Kaganovich.
The immediate outcome of the Congress as a whole and the secret speech in particular was all in Khrushchev’s favour. With his formal and public announcement of the co-existence, no-more-war, revolution-without-violence theses; with his endorsement, through Mikoyan, of a more flexible attitude to economic problems and his overdue recognition of the very evident fact that the capitalist walls of Jericho would not fall at the flourish of a trumpet, he had stolen Malenkov’s thunder and established himself as the man who was committed to easing the fearful international pressures which had the effect of cutting the Soviet Union off from the outside world, burdening her with excessive arms expenditure, and inhibiting her development as a modern power among other modern powers. With his denunciation of the Stalin terror, selective as it was, he was telling the Soviet people that they might start living like human beings instead of sustaining a sort of underground existence in a land occupied and controlled by a hostile power; at the same time he was serving notice on the dyed-in-the-wool Stalinists that they must reckon seriously with the wind of change and adapt themselves to it, or perish. But by his strong emphasis on Leninist revivalism and the power of the Party he was making it quite clear that the march to better times would be conducted under strict Party leadership. Even as he was drastically modifying the most sacrosanct of Lenin’s remaining precepts (Stalin had long ago done away with the rest) he needed Lenin—he and his supporters all needed Lenin as never before. Stalin had been his own authority. What authority had Khrushchev? He could only hope to legitimise himself by presenting himself as the proper heir of Lenin and the defender of the true faith. This was a complicating factor and was to remain so. It was to be the direct cause of many of the waverings and contradictions of the next decade. The further Khrushchev moved away from Leninism, and it was to be very far indeed, the more he needed to invoke Lenin in support of his revisionist or, not to put too fine a point on it, anti-Leninist policies. The Chinese, later, were to make the most of this.
Meanwhile, in February 1956, Khrushchev had said the right things: all that was now needed was to produce policies to match his words. This was harder.
The Soviet Union was in turmoil; so, soon, were the European satellites; so, a little later, were the Communist parties of the world. The secret speech, as such, was never published. But enough had been said by Mikoyan, Suslov, and Malenkov too, in their public speeches to throw the Communist world into a tumult of half-incredulous excitement. And soon, long before the State Department issued to the world the version of the speech we all know (a version never contradicted and, in any case, confirmed piece-meal in months and years to come), it was all over the Soviet Union.1 What
happened was that at tens of thousands of Party meetings, all down the scale, the speech was read out and then discussed. I have never met a rank and file Party member who had ever had the speech in his hands and been able to read and ponder it for himself. But within a matter of weeks all had had it read to them—and, as can be imagined, none retained more than a general idea of its contents, luridly lit up by flashes of detail, differing from individual to individual. The shock was immense. As the monuments came tumbling down, as streets and factories and cities were renamed—in the end not even Stalingrad, the hero city, now Volgograd, was excepted—people tried to take stock, and failed. The experience was traumatic, especially among the young, who had not suffered at first-hand from Stalin (though most of their parents had) and had been brought up to think of him as their idol, the fixed point round which the universe revolved. I remember asking a correct, well-groomed and very young Soviet diplomat to tell me what it meant to him personally. He had just poured me out a drink at one of those immense formal parties. He stared at me and his eyes were suddenly stricken: “How can you ask me that!” he exclaimed. “How can you possibly ask me that?” Tears stood in his eyes, he swung away violently to hide them, tried to put his glass down on the table behind him but smashed it against another—and fled from the room. The questioning was intense. It ranged from the violent revolt of the students at Tiflis University, rebelling against the destruction of the greatest of all their countrymen, to the insistent, nagging doubts of millions. “Very well, Stalin did terrible things; we knew that, though we did not understand how terrible. But what about those others, what about Khrushchev? They told us to worship Stalin. They shared in his tyranny and profited by it. How can they hope to be respected now when they turn against their dead leader, when he cannot answer? At least he was great and strong and not afraid of anyone. Harsh and cruel he may have been, but harshness was what Russia needed, and how difficult to draw the line between cruelty and necessary harshness. How he would make this lot run like rabbits, if he could suddenly appear among them!” Others, more thoughtful, asked what was wrong with a system which could allow such a tyranny to establish itself. Khrushchev had not said a word in criticism of the system. But none of these criticisms were ever publicly voiced until much later. It was left to Togliatti, the Italian Communist leader, to suggest that the Russian comrades should surely, in the light of Khrushchev’s revelations, be asking themselves some heart-searching questions about the very nature of the Soviet system and, in all humility, seeking ways and means of changing it.2
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