In the Soviet Union Khrushchev got his way: among his colleagues because he was clearly the only man with the boldness and resource not only to cast down the Stalin idol but also to ride the storm created by this act;3 among the Party as a whole because he put the Party unequivocally first; in the country because he was clearly the new master. But even at the summit of his power he was never respected, as Stalin had been respected. The only man who inherited a shadow of this respect was Molotov, who kept clear of the pack and who retained a certain dignity through all the humiliations soon to be heaped on him.
The composition of the new Party machine showed clearly enough where Khrushchev’s strength lay and also where he sought support. The voting membership of the old Presidium remained unchanged, indicating that Khrushchev’s ascendancy was the outcome of a fairly delicate balance of forces; but promotions to candidate membership and to the enlarged Secretariat of a number of his strongest supporters showed that he was losing no time in consolidating that ascendancy. He now had, on one or other body, or both, a number of figures who owed their advancement to him and to nobody else—most notably Aristov, Brezhnev, Belyaev, Madame Furtseva, Mukhitdinov and Shepilov. Most significant of all was the elevation of Marshal Zhukov to be a candidate member of the Presidium. This was a clear indication that Khrushchev had swung the Army behind him in return for its first share in high policy making. The composition of the new, and enlarged, Central Committee made this quite plain. Zhukov, as Minister of Defence, Vassilievsky and Koniev as Deputy Ministers of Defence, Sokolovsky as chief of the General Staff and two generals occupying key commands, Malinovsky and Moskalenko, made a formidable showing among the ranks of the senior apparatchiki.
Immediately after the 20th Party Congress Khrushchev made an innovation of some importance. He established for the first time a special bureau of the All-Union Central Committee for the Russian Union Republic. He himself was chief of this bureau, which was staffed for all practical purposes with his own creatures. This gave him a double hold over the vast Russian Republic which stretched all the way from the Ukraine and Byelorussia to the Pacific Coast, from the Central Asian Republics and Caucasia to the Baltic and the Arctic Ocean. But the main purpose of the bureau was to create a series of new jobs to reward men whose support Khrushchev needed. He was to need all the underpinning he could devise and all the support he could muster before a year had gone by.
When the history of twentieth-century Russia comes to be written, if people are still interested in history a hundred years from now, I think it will be seen that it was in February 1956 that Khrushchev achieved the summit of his career. The Soviet Union lay at his feet: there was nothing he might not do, and this was never again to be true. For sixty-two years we have followed the growth and development of an individual making his way by devious means, with the aid of good qualities and bad, to the loftiest and most exposed position in the land. He was now in the position to rule.
But he could not rule. Stalin had been stronger than Russia and had moulded Soviet society in his own image. The image was now broken, and by Khrushchev; but Russia was stronger than Khrushchev, who could only survive at the top by submitting innumerable hostages to fortune and by trying to ride the whirlwind which he himself had unloosed. For eight years and more he was to succeed in this, but then it became too much for him and he fell. After the 20th Party Congress he was no longer in any way a free agent: for the rest of his career he was feverishly reacting to events which he could not control. Russia was taking charge.
This may seem a paradoxical view, even a perverse one. The natural view, I suppose, is that after the 20th Party Congress Khrushchev still had a long way to go before he had achieved supremacy, that the moment of total victory was when, in the autumn of 1957, he broke Marshal Zhukov and brought to heel the Army which had helped him destroy his old comrades and rivals, the “Anti-Party Group,” earlier that year—Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and others; that the moment of supreme triumph was in the autumn of 1959 when, as the acknowledged master of the Soviet Union, he achieved his apotheosis by visiting as an equal the President of the United States. Then he returned to Moscow to say in effect: I, Khrushchev, as the strongest man in the old world, have come to an understanding with the head of the new world: between us, General Eisenhower having demonstrated his goodwill and his genuine desire for peace, we can police the world and ensure prosperity and peace for all mankind. “Our country and the United States,” he had said at Dnepropetrovsk in July 1958, “are the two most mighty powers in the world. If other countries fight among themselves they can be separated; but if war breaks out between America and our country, no one will be able to stop it. It will be a catastrophe on a colossal scale.”4 This was the promise. The meeting at Camp David was the seal.
But already when Khrushchev destroyed his old comrades, the “Anti-Party Group,” he depended utterly for his victory not only on Marshal Zhukov, whom he was soon able to put down, but also on a host of individuals in the great Party machine (far more than ever Stalin had depended on), many of whom had views of their own, some of whom were seven and a half years later to take over the Government and the Party from him, nearly all of whom were to survive his fall. And already in 1959 he was under the heaviest pressure from a third power of immense potential and disconcerting proximity, the China of Mao Tse-tung. The greatest pressure of all, however, came from the people of the Soviet Union—some highly articulate, the mass not articulate at all, but hostile all the same.
He was doomed to go on learning. And if we compare what he wanted and hoped to do in 1956 with what he in fact did do between 1956 and 1964 we shall see how much he had to learn and how every lesson learnt entailed some sort of a retreat interrupted by ugly counter-attacks and covered by noisy alarms —but always retreat.
What he set himself to do for all practical purposes was this: at home to preserve the Stalinist system purged of its grosser excesses, to ease the central tyranny just enough to win the co-operation of the people on lines laid down from above; abroad to achieve a political détente with the West which would ensure the avoidance of a major nuclear war, while at the same time leaving him free to exploit revolutionary movements directed against Western interests, to undermine by all possible means Western positions and Western unity, to woo the neutralists and wean them away from the West, to threaten with nuclear arms which he did not intend to use; within the Communist world to regenerate the socialist camp by easing police pressure and Soviet demands, while ensuring that the consequent increase in economic efficiency should be harnessed to Soviet interests. What he set out to achieve, in a word, was Stalinism without tears. And just as much later, at the height of the quarrel with China, he was to defend his tenderness towards Nehru’s India by declaring with all his old brutality: “Certainly we are supporting Nehru; but we support him as the rope supports a man to be hung!”5—so he might have said: “Certainly we are allowing more freedom; but the freedom we allow is the freedom of the regiment.”
He did not see the insuperable contradictions latent in all his policies. It is to be questioned whether he ever saw them. His mind was agile to a degree, strong and even supple: but it was not lucid and it was not subtle. Like the minds of so many able politicians it was not creative and it was the reverse of contemplative. It was essentially a mind swift in reaction to exterior pressures and stimuli, and when the pressures and stimuli were contradictory, as frequently they were, his reactions were contradictory too. This need not surprise us. The philosopher-politician is a rare phenomenon; and when a national hero does emerge of the kind who creates his own framework of reference in the interests of a coherent and organic body of thought and action, the philosophic level is usually pretty inferior, producing a Bonaparte, a Bismarck, a Hitler—or a Stalin. It was Khrushchev’s overwhelming vitality and drive which, coupled with his quickness and ingenuity, produced the impression that he was really going somewhere—and thus obscured the truth; namely that his mind was a politician’s mind,
the sort of mind found in all men who rise to power by persuasion and intrigue and who repose their power on the consent of the persuaded. Khrushchev did not restore Stalinism without tears, driving the Soviet Union on to an ever-rising level of prosperity, shattering the unity and strength in the West and presiding from Moscow over a regenerated socialist camp and an increasingly active and successful world revolutionary movement. Far from it: he did away with most of the tears, but the system he established also did away with the strongest elements of Stalinism while retaining some of the weakest; after a quick rise in productivity and prosperity when the sluice-gates were first opened, continued and unsystematic and often contradictory interference from the Centre put a stop to the increase in food production and seriously slowed down industrial production too; he left the West at least as strong as he found it; the socialist camp was not regenerated at all, but fragmented; the world revolutionary movement was thrown overboard; the neutralists were forced into disillusionment; and if vast areas of the world will one day come to look to China for salvation, this will only be because the leaders of the free world are as hopelessly bound by their own preconceptions as Khrushchev was by his.
With all this, our hero will go down in history as Khrushchev the peacemaker.
This was not an easy title to win, and probably not the one he most coveted. Even of that he was not sure until October 1962, when he took his rockets out of Cuba.
The first lesson came quite soon after the 20th Party Congress when, with Bulganin, Khrushchev visited London. It was his first excursion into an enemy headquarters (Geneva was neutral ground), and he was very much on the defensive, as well he might have been: the peasant boy from Kalinovka, still not formally confirmed as the head of a great power whose strength he himself hardly appreciated and whose backwardness and muddle he himself had lately been exposing for all to see, was meeting face to face, on his own ground, the Prime Minister of a people notorious for their old-world perfidious diplomatic skills and implacable hostility to Communism. The Prime Minister was Mr. Eden. At that time, as part of the general practice of subversion, Russia was being unusually active in stirring up trouble in the Middle East. As far as Khrushchev was concerned the Middle East was Tom Tiddler’s ground, a promising theatre for essays in “competitive co-existence.” He discovered, with a sense of shock, that to London the Middle East was not Tom Tiddler’s ground at all: it was oil, and the oil from the Middle East was vital to the life of Britain, so vital that if the Soviet Union started serious trouble it would lead to war. Khrushchev, of course, knew all about Middle Eastern oil and Britain’s interest in it, but he had seen it as just one of those interests of the capitalist brigands which he could quite happily and safely work to undermine—as he was working to undermine, without creating any particularly sharp reaction, what was left of the British position in India. He absorbed the shock: Russia’s freedom of action was not quite so complete as he had been led to believe. It was a pity.
On the same visit he had another shock: this was at a dinner given in his honour by the Labour Party at the House of Commons. Mr. Gaitskell produced a list of 200 Social Democrats held in prison in the various European satellites and asked him for his personal intervention in their interest. Very much on the defensive indeed, he took this as a calculated insult. There were no Social Democrats in Russia, he said (in fact they were all dead), and what went on in other countries was no concern of his. He refused to have anything to do with the list. It had been well enough for him, at that same meeting, to hold forth to Labour leaders about the iniquities of British policy before the second world war, policy which Labour had often opposed; but the slightest question of his own good faith could only be a calculated insult: the man whom nobody he had had to deal with in forty years had ever dared answer back was finding it difficult to accommodate himself in a world in which Gaitskells and George Browns could openly attack him.
This particular attack must also have seemed part of a plot. He knew, as the West at that moment did not, that, under the impact of de-Stalinisation, the satellites were beginning to boil over. Instead of being grateful for the new mood in Moscow and rallying round the Kremlin with a will, base elements were preparing to exploit this new mood in the interests of nothing less than counter-revolution. There is not the least doubt that Khrushchev did believe in a plot. He had, when all was said, the authority of Mr. Dulles. When the factory workers in Poznan started rioting on 28th June the Poles themselves for a moment spoke of imperialist provocation, but almost immediately changed their minds when they realised that the country was on the edge of going up in flames. Moscow, however, would have nothing of the revised Polish view that police tyranny and atrocious working and living conditions lay behind the rioting. A month later Bulganin himself went to Poland to stiffen the Government’s resistance, insisting with total conviction that the Poznan riots had been “provoked by enemy agents” and speaking of the “lunatic plans of international revolutionary agents.”6 Even if Bulganin, or Khrushchev, did not believe this to be the whole truth, it was the thing to say: the Polish Party leaders were expected to say it. They were expected to fall into line with the Stalinist tradition, the Khrushchev tradition. But the tradition was broken. The Polish leaders whose total subservience had been taken perfectly for granted by Khrushchev, went out of their way to dwell on the social causes of the revolt; they drew the conclusion that the only way to put an end to an inflammable situation was by further “democratisation,” not by a stepping up of repression. When the Soviet Press demanded severe punishment for the rioters7 the Polish leadership paid no attention, released many of those who had been arrested, and gave lenient sentences to the rest—with not a word about imperialist agents or enemies of the people.
Democratisation was not a word that had occurred in Khrushchev’s speech. He was alarmed. He was also very much on the defensive, this time against some of his own colleagues. Wild things had been said at home under the impact of the assault on Stalin; but these had been checked by one or two leading articles in Pravda laying down with some precision just what it was safe to criticise Stalin for:8 the Russians knew how to take a hint. Wilder things had been said in Hungary; but then the Hungarians were notoriously wild, and they had a new leader, Gerö, who was no less loyal, or obedient, to the Kremlin than Rakosi, his predecessor, who had been sacrificed as an earnest of better things to come. Wild things had been said and done at Poznan: these were a matter for the Polish Party and police. But the wildest, most outrageous, most dangerous of all the things said and done during those turbulent months was the quiet, unemphatic refusal of the Polish Party leadership to do what Moscow told them. It was in September that Khrushchev decided to appeal to Tito to redress the balance. He was in imminent danger of being overthrown by the Stalinist faction in the Kremlin, headed by Molotov and Kaganovich, who, if the East European empire continued exploding, would soon win the support of many more. For the first (but not the last) time a Russian Communist leader was appealing to a foreign statesman to come to his aid in a fight with his own colleagues. It was an extraordinary situation. Tito had become an example and a symbol to all those satellite leaders who, no longer wholly subservient to Moscow, wished to ingratiate themselves with their own peoples while achieving a measure of independence for themselves. Khrushchev sought to exploit his extraordinary authority by getting Tito to convey to the satellite Parties that if they went too far with their own de-Stalinisation he, Khrushchev, their true friend and protector, would be overthrown by reactionary elements—e.g. Molotov—who would soon put an end to more liberal policies. Tito, for his part, already had dreams of appearing as the accepted leader of a new sort of European Communist movement, independent of Moscow, and co-operation with Khrushchev seemed to be his best hope. The situation at times verged on the farcical—as when Khrushchev insisted on summoning the wretched new Hungarian First Secretary, Gero, to meet Tito in Yalta and thus make himself acceptable to the Hungarian dissidents. But how deadly serious it was for Khr
ushchev himself was shown at this same Yalta meeting when Tito himself and a high-ranking Yugoslav delegation were received not only by Voroshilov as titular President of the USSR and Bulganin as Prime Minister, but also by a group of Khrushchev’s closest personal supporters —Kirichenko, Madame Furtseva, Brezhnev, General Serov of the police, and the highly political General Grechko and Admiral Gorshkov. This reception committee amounted to a demonstration. Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich kept away; even Mikoyan was not there.
Khrushchev Page 26