It was all in vain. Inside Russia the qualified rehabilitation of Stalin, which Khrushchev himself had initiated, proceeded fast. Already in September Kaganovich, long out of the picture, had been given an important ministerial post. In Poland and Hungary events were moving the other way. Gomulka, imprisoned by Stalin and lucky to be alive, was now put forward in Poland as the man who was going to take over the leadership and do away with the Polish Stalinists for ever. This was going too far. It had to be stopped. On 19th October, the eve of the critical meeting of the Polish Central Committee at which Gomulka was to be elected First Secretary, Moscow acted. Without warning, the Poles in Moscow found themselves confronted by an unprecedented and terrifying threat: Khrushchev and Mikoyan, flanked by Molotov and Kaganovich breathing fury, arrived by air to say that this nonsense must stop. Khrushchev did most of the talking, ranting and threatening outrageously.9 But it was a different Khrushchev, now tacitly acknowledging that he was one with the Stalinist faction he had fought so hard for so long. The threats were backed by force. Warships of the Soviet fleet stood off Gdynia; tanks of the Soviet Army moved to encircle Warsaw. But Gomulka and his supporters stood firm. Rather than surrender to Soviet demands they would appeal to the people of Poland to fight. The Russians recognised defeat when they saw it and went home. But for days it was touch and go. The Soviet troops still stood in readiness and Warsaw felt itself a beleagured city: it was during these days that Gomulka, dedicated Communist as he was, managed to rally behind him all patriotic Poles, including the spiritual leaders (themselves lately let out of prison) of a nation that was still bitterly anti-Communist and almost wholly Roman Catholic.
Worse was to come. On 24th October Hungary went up in flames. Still shocked by the experience in Warsaw, the Moscow comrades wavered. Until their confrontation with the Poles, the Stalinists could fairly say to Khrushchev: “We told you so, this is where your policies have led us!” After the Polish act of defiance Khrushchev, though very much on the defensive, could retort: “I told you so! A show of force by us will only lead to counter-force.”
Now Hungary. … It was a difficult situation. How to give way before the Poles in order to maintain a certain basic unity and yet not give way before the Hungarians? For eleven days the argument in Moscow went on. In Budapest the rebels seemed to be having things all their own way. Imre Nagy had become Prime Minister on 24th October, on 30th October single party rule was formally abolished, and it was announced that the Russians had been asked to take their troops out of Budapest and had agreed to do so. It was clear, it is still clear, that the collective in Moscow had decided to recognise the government of Imre Nagy. The turn-round occurred on the 29th. There was a curious crossing of the wires. Fresh troops were marched into Hungary on that date, even while a Soviet declaration of co-existence was being drafted, to be published three days later, on the very day that poor Nagy proclaimed Hungary’s neutrality and asked the Great Powers to guarantee it.10 On 3rd November Soviet troops were in position round Budapest and the frontier was closed. Next day, while Hungarian leaders still negotiating with the Russians were treacherously seized and sequestrated, Soviet troops attacked. The Soviet Press had already declared the line which was to be maintained for a long time to come: the Hungarian rising had nothing to do with popular discontent: it had been staged by counter-revolutionary forces directed by Fascist elements in West Germany and Austria. Nagy himself was an active accomplice of these elements—or, alternatively, his government had collapsed. No matter, the rising was put down in blood with total and concentrated savagery.11
We do not know the precise role played by Khrushchev throughout this affair, which will for ever be associated with his name. We do know that while Soviet troops were still poised to strike at Warsaw, and while Moscow was still trying to decide what to do in Budapest, there was a very peculiar intervention: Chou-En-lai, the Chinese Prime Minister, interrupted a journey to Burma to fly first to Moscow, then to Warsaw, where he greatly reassured the Poles. He could not have done this without a direct invitation from Moscow, and the invitation could only have come from Khrushchev. Khrushchev had lately shown a certain recklessness in appealing to Marshal Tito for help; he now appealed to Chou-En-lai and thus had the distinction of being the first man in history to invite China into Europe.
There was an interesting postscript to this affair. Some years later, at the Moscow Conference of all the Communist Parties in November 1960 (and, later still, more publicly), the Chinese, savagely working for Khrushchev’s overthrow, were to claim that the Russians had been cast into total confusion in the autumn of 1956, and that they, the Chinese, had themselves persuaded Moscow on the one hand to refrain from using force in Poland, on the other to employ it decisively in Hungary12—their argument being that military intervention in Poland would have meant war between two Communist governments, whereas in Hungary military intervention was necessary to destroy a counterrevolutionary government (also Poland was hemmed in between Russia, East Germany and Czechoslovakia and could not hope, as Hungary could hope, to link up with the West—or Tito’s Yugoslavia). This may or may not be true. It sounds probable. Certainly some Poles believed they owed their salvation to the Chinese. Certainly Gomulka believed he had established a special relationship with Mao Tse-tung, seen by him as a moderating influence, and was to be bitterly affronted when, just a year later, at the Moscow Conference of November 1957, he was coldly told by his hero to toe the new, hard, Soviet line.13 Certainly Khrushchev stood in need of help and high protection: already in 1954 he had established his own special relationship with Mao. October 1956 was a dangerous month for him and it is deducible from all sorts of internal evidence that he then owed his survival as First Secretary to the man who was so soon to be his bitterest foe. From the point of view of China in 1956 it would have been disastrous for the Communist world to be cast into still greater confusion by the public dethronement of the man who had just dethroned Stalin.
It came very close to it. From October 1956 until February 1957 the world was to hear little of Khrushchev, who spoke out only to condemn Soviet students who had been demonstrating against the Budapest massacre and to make a number of statements not merely designed to check criticism of Stalin but, further, to reverse his own line. Thus on New Year’s Eve, at a Kremlin reception, he declared: “When it is a question of fighting against imperialism we can state with conviction that we are all Stalinists. We can take pride that we have taken part in the fight for the advance of our great cause against our enemies. From that point of view I am proud that we are Stalinists.”14 And again, a fortnight later: “… in our opinion Stalinism, like Stalin himself, is inseparable from Communism…. God grant, as the saying goes, that every Communist may fight as Stalin fought.”15
Molotov, meanwhile, very quietly had been appointed to be Minister of State Control. Furthermore, a plenary session of the Central Committee just before Christmas was a most remarkable occasion. Neither Khrushchev, the First Secretary, nor any of his closest supporters spoke at all. The higher Party apparatus as laboriously built up by Khrushchev might not have existed. And the chief decisions of this Central Committee, meeting without its proper leadership, was to set up what could only be called an anti-government, a body of economic and technological leaders who might have been chosen by Malenkov, presided over by Malenkov’s Pervukhin.
Chapter 19
Victory: the Dictator by Consent
It was a shattering reversal of fortune. Within ten months of the triumphant 20th Party Congress Khrushchev had raised against himself and his new Party machine a most powerful coalition of the old Stalinists, symbolised by Molotov and Kaganovich, and Malenkov with his economists and technocrats. They did not at once attempt to purge the Party: leaving it intact for the time being to act as a stabilising force in the satellites, at home they simply by-passed it, reducing it to ignominy. In so far as it existed as an ideological force, Mikhail Suslov acted as its spokesman. But the real government of the Soviet Union was alrea
dy in the hands of the men who were soon to be denounced as the “Anti-Party Group.” In so far as the Party now quite legitimately consisted of Khrushchev and his personal supporters, this is precisely what they were. During November and December 1956 and January 1957 they were victorious. In February Khrushchev started to fight back. In June he triumphed and his enemies were scattered and crushed.
The battleground was the whole of the Soviet Union; the campaign reproduced in essentials, but on a bigger scale and with an urgency born of desperation, the features of the campaign which had ended in Malenkov’s resignation from the premiership in 1955. Then he had been fighting Malenkov’s governmental machine, committed to the New Course, and had won the support, or at least the benevolent neutrality, of the old Stalinists. Now the new men and the old were united for the sole purpose of putting Khrushchev down, for the time being shelving the differences between them. But the new and unlikely coalition repeated the mistake made by Malenkov three years earlier: they relied on the power of the central government organs to impose their will on the country as a whole, neglecting the country. Once again they were to pay for the total inability, shared by all those who had helped Stalin run Russia from the centre, to understand the mood outside Moscow. Once again the man who, so many years ago, had put on his sheep-skin and moved about the Donbas in a sledge, was able to mobilise the provinces against the Centre.
He did not, of course, appeal to the people over the heads of his colleagues in the Presidium. The people did not enter into this struggle at all, although it was fought out over the whole of Russia. He appealed, as always, to the vested interests in the Party apparatus, tens of thousands of individuals in enviable jobs, who saw their positions threatened by the new government bureaucracy embodied in Pervukhin’s State Economic Commission. This was comparatively easy. He did more. He broadened his appeal to attract all those provincial ministerial officials and industrial leaders who had suffered so long from the dead hand of Stalinism, and from the clumsiness, the red-tape, the arbitrariness and the sheer inefficiency of rigid control by monstrously swollen central Ministries. He was not content to appeal: he thought up a scheme which was designed to achieve the impossible, to win the support of both the provincial Party officials and the provincial State officials, to say nothing of the factory directors. And this scheme he presented at a new plenary session of the Central Committee in Moscow which met on 13th February. There must be an end, he said, of these giant Ministries which were trying to run from their offices in Moscow the entire productive forces and the entire administration of an immense country which sprawled over one-sixth of the land-surface of the globe: 200,000 enterprises, 100,000 administrative organisations scattered throughout this vast territory from Brest-Litovsk to Vladivostock, from Murmansk and Kamchatka to Baku and the borders of Afghanistan, all with widely differing problems, had to look to Moscow for the detailed direction of their operations. It was an impossible situation. What he proposed was to divide up the USSR into a number of administrative regions each run by an economic body which would control and co-ordinate its whole productive life, industry and agriculture too: Sovnarkhozy, People’s Economic Councils, which would smash through the network of centralised red-tape, bring an air of reality to planning, and fully engage the talents of all gifted men on the spot, at present frustrated at every turn by the Moscow bureaucracy.1
This scheme was presented to the world, which had not yet understood how close to destruction the great Khrushchev stood, as a coolly calculated economic reform with decentralisation in the interests of efficiency as its aim. Reform it certainly was; but the new proposals raised more questions than they answered. What was really being brought forward was yet another instalment in the drama of Khrushchev’s survival. By stumping the country, by sending out the message via his own Party network, he had, while his colleagues glumly schemed against him in Moscow, offered to key men of all kinds throughout the provinces the promise of undreamt of advancement, increased scope and promotion for tens of thousands. And it was with the knowledge of their support that he faced his enemies at the Central Committee meeting—to such effect that instead of rejecting out of hand the plan which, if carried out, would wreck their careful schemings, the Central Committee voted that the Party Presidium and the Council of Ministers should draw up a detailed series of proposals. The Party, Khrushchev’s Party, was back in strength. Shepilov, who had been dropped from the Secretariat in December, was restored to office, and Frol Kozlov, Khrushchev’s Leningrad right-hand, was brought to Moscow to strengthen the Secretariat.
He had made a remarkable come-back, but he had not won the campaign. Khrushchev’s Central Committee speech was not published until six weeks after it had been delivered, and even then it was offered only as a guide to “a general popular debate,” not as a laying down of the law. The debate went on from 31st March to 4th May, and during the whole of April the Soviet Press had little space for anything else. According to Khrushchev himself, who continued to stump the country instead of staying in Moscow to keep an eye on those who were working against him, no less than half a million meetings were held throughout the land.2 But on no solitary occasion did the opposition, which now included Bulganin and Mikoyan as well as the Stalinists and Malenkov, make a public reference to the reforms, either for them or against them. During the debate all sorts of pressures came to light. In appealing to the provincial figures Khrushchev, inevitably, affronted the very powerful Republican Party Secretaries, all his own creation. At the same time, in the excitement over new “spoils,” the leading figures in every district demanded their own Economic Council—and, indeed, in the end Khrushchev had to break up the country into more and smaller fractions than he had originally proposed. At the same time, also to win support where it was vitally needed, he had to exempt certain Ministries from the general process of destruction. He had a new ally, however, and derived much strength from it— none other than the Army under Zhukov as Minister of Defence. What personal reasons decided Zhukov to back Khrushchev, what promises he was given about the curbing of Party interference in Army affairs, we do not know. But the breaking down of the vast, unwieldy economy into quasi-self-sufficient areas was, on the face of it, an idea that would have appealed strongly to the marshals with their territorial and frontier commands. It meant that these commands would themselves gain in self-sufficiency, comprehending within their areas complete cross-sections of industry, presided over by local officials who could be directly influenced by the local Army commanders.
In May the reform became law. Pervukhin gave up his post as economic overlord. The new State Committee for long-term planning, the only State-wide economic organisation left, was set up under an obscure but reliable back-room member of Khrushchev’s Party machine. The opposition to Khrushchev had its back to the wall.
But it was still, as far as Moscow went, very powerful; and it was desperate. Khrushchev and his Secretariat were once more in full control of the Party, and the Party had snatched economic power from the men who had thought most about it. But the men who had been displeased by the break-up of the central Ministries made a formidable array of malcontents, and although the candidate, or non-voting, members of the Presidium were Khrushchev’s creatures, the senior members of that Presidium remained. Khrushchev left them where they were and took Bulganin on a trip to Finland. During their absence—during the absence also of Kirichenko, Khrushchev’s only entirely dependable supporter among the voting members of the Presidium, Malenkov and Molotov convened a meeting of the Presidium for 18th June. On 14th June practically the whole Presidium turned out to meet Khrushchev and Bulganin on their return from Finland, and one of the most fascinating documents of the time is the photograph which appeared on the front page of Pravda, showing Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Suslov and all clustering round the returned heroes, beaming joy and goodwill, half smothered with flowers.3 All was made up. The comrades, recently at daggers drawn, were all boys together. The collective was restored. Dear
Nikita Khrushchev, beaming too, was even more equal than the rest. It was an act to end all acts, even in Russia. It was inconceivable that these cloudlessly happy warriors could be plotting against their leader, so lately restored to his proper authority.
Only four days later, at the Presidium meeting, Khrushchev, who had undoubtedly believed that it was only a matter of quite a short time before he could finally rid himself of his old comrades, found himself isolated. He was attacked with savagery, not only for playing ducks and drakes with the economy but also for trying to jettison the principle of collective leadership. “Talk less and give the people more to eat!” said Molotov. There were to be plenty of stories like this circulating round Moscow during the months to come; but all we know with any degree of certainty comes from Khrushchev’s own admission that he was voted out of the First Secretaryship by a strong majority in the Presidium, that he then confounded the victors by refusing to resign until this verdict had been confirmed by the Central Committee in full session. “But we are seven and you are four,” exclaimed Bulganin; to which Khrushchev retorted: “Certainly in arithmetic two and two make four. But politics are not arithmetic. They are something different.”4
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