Khrushchev

by Edward Crankshaw

  He got his plenary session. It was the first appeal to any sort of inner-Party democracy since Stalin, aided by Molotov and Kaganovich, at long-range by Khrushchev too, had formally abolished it in 1925. While the comrades of the Presidium waited for their decision to be endorsed (Molotov was to be First Secretary, Malenkov Prime Minister, Khrushchev Minister of Agriculture!) the Khrushchev faction staged a spectacular operation. With the help of Marshal Zhukov and the Army’s transport planes, Khrushchev’s supporters were rushed into Moscow from the remotest provinces, while those who were already there staged a filibuster until the majority for Khrushchev was assured: Madame Furtseva is said to have held forth for six hours. On 22nd June the Central Committee met—in all 309 individuals, 215 of whom applied to speak. First they listened to the high-level attacks on Khrushchev; then they started replying. Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, reiterated their charges. They particularly attacked Khrushchev’s “milk and butter Communism”—he had lately taken to boasting rather wildly about “catching up and surpassing” America in food production within a very few years. They in their turn were accused of sabotaging the decisions of the 20th Party Congress. And then, according to Polish reports, Zhukov went a stage further: he directly attacked Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov for their behaviour during the great purge years and said that if they did not look out he would prove his point by publishing relevant documents of the period. This seems highly likely. Zhukov and all the Army marshals had been working very hard to secure the complete rehabilitation of the purged Army officers; and it is a fact that three weeks later, speaking to the workers at a Leningrad factory (one of hundreds of speeches being made up and down the land to brand the “Anti-Party Group”), he declared that Molotov and Kaganovich had been reluctant “to surrender the privileges they had enjoyed thirty years ago,” that they “had opposed the unmasking and calling to account of those individuals who bore the main responsibility for the violations of legality which used to occur.” And the reason for this, he said, was that they themselves “feared to accept responsibility … for their illegal actions before the Party and the people.” He then went on to give details which were only hinted at by Pravda, when it reported his speech next day.5

  Be that as it may, the Khrushchev faction triumphed. For a time it must have appeared touch and go, because during the course of the plenary session Khrushchev’s own most bright-eyed protégé, Shepilov, made an irreparable miscalculation and spoke against his master and protector. He, together with Khrushchev’s opponents in the Presidium, and all those who spoke against him in the Central Committee, were doomed. Of the eleven full members of the Presidium, Kirichenko, Mikoyan and, belatedly, Suslov supported Khrushchev. Of the seven attackers, Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, Saburov fell immediately; Pervukhin was reduced; Bulganin was spared for the time being for tactical reasons; Voroshilov was practically senile and did not count; he was also a distinguished figurehead and a link with the revolutionary past, worth preserving.6 The new Presidium, now fifteen full members instead of eleven, bristled with Khrushchev’s men. Furtseva, the first woman to achieve this honour (it did not last long) was elevated to full membership; so was Marshal Zhukov. Aristov, Belyaev, Ignatov and two old war-horses, Shvernik and Kuusinen, were brought in too to supplement Khrushchev himself, Kirichenko, Mikoyan, Suslov and Voroshilov. There were nine candidate members instead of five, rich in Khrushchev appointees, and including Kosygin, who had been a full member during Stalin’s last four years and then dropped from the Party machine to busy himself with economics. This flood of promotions gave an insight into the way Khrushchev had had to buy support. It is a point to bear in mind. The Council of Ministers was also given a major shake-up, still with Bulganin as nominal Prime Minister.

  The rout was complete. The old collective was destroyed, its leading members broken and humiliated—Malenkov sent to his power station in Siberia, Molotov to Outer Mongolia. Any further opposition to Khrushchev would have to come from among the people he himself had raised up, or whose support (e.g. Zhukov’s) he had bought. The only two immediately effective figures left from the pre-Khrushchev era were Mikoyan, “the great survivor,” and Suslov, not a personality to capture anyone’s imagination but a tough operator with a very long head, a natural eminence grise.

  The coup did not cause a great upset throughout the country. Nobody cared much about Malenkov and Kaganovich; Shepilov (rather unfairly) was regarded as a young man in a hurry who deserved his fate. But Khrushchev made a serious mistake in his treatment of Molotov: nobody loved Molotov, but almost everybody respected him; he was elderly and far from well, and for him to be sent off like a parcel to wear out his weak heart on the remote Mongolian heights was too much. Khrushchev had to pay attention to this feeling in due course: “Vyacheslav Mikhailovich finds the mountains unhealthy?” he is said to have remarked one day. “We can’t have that. We had better send him to the Hague. It’s low enough there even for him!”7 But he did not go to the Hague; he was diverted to Vienna, there to preside over the Soviet delegation to the Atomic Energy Commission, there to spend restful years attending occasional parties and taking gentle walks in the parks.

  But if there was no strong feeling about the coup, there was still a good deal to be done in bringing the country under control, particularly the intellectuals, and most particularly the young. The Russians were not struck dumb, as the West was struck dumb, by the spectacle of a Soviet leader deposing his colleagues without actually shooting them. They took this for granted. Indeed, they took a great deal for granted. And one of Khrushchev’s first acts as supreme master was to indicate very firmly that a line was to be drawn and that he would draw it.

  He staged an imposing offensive against the writers, who had been getting out of hand. But, in his eyes (and indeed, in fact), this was in no way a literary action: it was a high political action, for the writers represented nothing less than the spearhead of a political movement directed against the Party Establishment. The symbolic sacrifice was Vladimir Dudintsev, whose novel, Not by Bread Alone, published in instalments in Novy Mir in the late summer and early autumn of 1956, had attacked the corruption and the greed of the Party bureaucracy and had become the focus of innumerable feverish, entirely spontaneous student meetings in Moscow and elsewhere. “Tell me your attitude to this book, and I will tell you what you are!” one Moscow student declaimed. And another: “Our literature has been the literature of a great lie! At last it is becoming the literature of great truths.” During that winter all sorts of writers, mostly young, had been raising their voices in what amounted now no longer to criticism of individual wrongs, which was permitted, but in implicit criticism of the system which encouraged such wrongs. This had to be stopped. The writers and the artists had to be put back where they belonged, firmly under Party control: they were to be allowed to criticise, but only what the Party thought fit that they should criticise. Khrushchev himself intervened, the first of a long series of interventions which was to show the immense, perhaps the superstitious, value this peasant, who had never been to school, who had afterwards taught himself to read fairly widely, but who in his heart despised the intellectuals (whose weapons he nevertheless feared), set upon harnessing the intellectual life of the country to the Cause.

  After the writers had stubbornly and demonstratively refused to be overawed by the routine Party spokesmen, backed by the hated Party hacks among their own colleagues, who had been fulminating against them during the early part of 1957, in May the Central Committee itself had convened a special conference of writers, etc. with a grand reception in the Kremlin. At the conference Khrushchev himself laid down the law in a series of speeches which, when they were at last published in August, came to serve as the official line for years to come: the official line, of course, was freedom within strict limits.8 But at a celebrated garden-party at his own villa on the outskirts of Moscow, which was never officially reported, he showed the iron hand. He violently attacked so-called Communists among the writers who
showed themselves worse citizens than many who were not Party members. He attacked by name the poetess, Margaret Aliger, who fainted away under the shock. And he threatened. The Hungarian uprising, he said, would never have occurred if the Budapest Government had had the courage to shoot a few of the rebellious writers in good time. Should a similar situation begin to emerge in the Soviet Union, he said, he would show that he was made of sterner stuff. He would know what to do: “my hand would not tremble.”9 He was equating the unrest among the writers of the Soviet Union with the bold and reckless clamour of the Petöffi Circle in Budapest, which had in fact triggered the Hungarian revolt. His words shocked his audience in that cheerful villa garden.

  The shock was deeper than Khrushchev himself realised, although he had certainly intended to shock: it was the first time since Stalin’s death that shooting and terror had been mentioned. It was the first time, moreover, that any of the younger writers and all but a handful of the surviving old had been exposed directly to the atmosphere of careless violence, which for decades had been the natural air breathed by the Kremlin leadership. Khrushchev almost certainly had no intention of shooting anybody: what appalled his audience, except the most hard-boiled among them, was the cheerful way he talked about shooting after all he had said to discredit the Stalin terror. They had come to believe that the shootings, the sentences to living death in labour-camps, inflicted on so many of their vanished colleagues, had been the outcome of deliberate and solemn policy decisions arrived at by a harsh tyrant with proper, if frightful, gravity: so will men always seek dignity and significance in their own sufferings. Now they were face to face with a chunky little man in a panama hat, carelessly talking about shooting a few of them to encourage the others and clearly lacking the faintest appreciation of the real meaning of his own words. For the first time they understood that they did not count at all and that although, for very good reasons of state, their new master was not a killer and would almost certainly be very sparing of executions as long as he was in charge, casual violence was, and would be, very much a part of his nature.

  Milovan Djilas records his sense of outrage when, one evening in Moscow, Zhdanov told, “as if it were the latest joke,” what had happened to the Leningrad satirist Zoschenko, after he, Zhdanov, had attacked him viciously as a supreme example of the negative, “cosmopolitan” pedlar of Western decadence. “They simply confiscated Zoschenko’s ration coupons [that, in those days, meant starvation] and did not give them back until after Moscow’s magnanimous intervention.”10 The spirit of brutal, cheerful cynicism behind Zhdanov’s “joke” was what the Soviet intelligentsia saw for themselves that they had to reckon with after Khrushchev’s garden-party.

  It was largely because Khrushchev revealed this mood too candidly (Stalin had always been careful to conceal it behind the appearance of an aloof and taciturn regality) that he never won the respect in Russia that the West thought was his due. It came out in many ways, repeatedly: the ward politician who went hand in hand with the statesman in him came out, inside Russia, in a thousand ways—and frequently also marred his performance as a statesman. The violence came out more rarely. It came out with the wanton execution of poor Imre Nagy. It came out at another meeting with the writers (who went on fighting back) in 1963 when the young poet, Yevtushenko, was defending abstract art at a meeting of intellectuals. “I am certain,” Yevtushenko said, “that some of the formalistic tendencies in their work will be straightened out in time.” To which Khrushchev retorted: “The hunch-backed are straightened out by the grave!”

  But he had learnt a good deal between 1957 and 1963, and he allowed Yevtushenko to answer him with a straight rebuke: “Nikita Sergeievich, we have come a long way from the time when hunch-backs were only straightened out by the grave. Really, there are other ways!”11

  Remembering the climate in which he had lived for the whole of his adult life, we should not underestimate the effort it must have cost Khrushchev to restrain himself, as he succeeded in doing for a great deal of the time, from lapsing into violent solutions when confronted not only by intractable problems but also with active dissent among his colleagues. The violence was never far below the surface. The man who could stand in a rage before a meeting of Communist leaders and tell Peng Chen, the Mayor of Peking, that his venerated master, Mao Tse-tung, was nothing but another Stalin, “oblivious of any other interests than his own, spinning theories detached from the realities of the modern world,”12 must very often have regretted the passing of the days when anger could find immediate expression in personal violence. People have speculated, I myself have speculated in the past, about whether Khrushchev’s tirades really reflected lost temper, or whether they were coolly calculated acts—as, for example, his extraordinary performance in the Palais Chaillot after the fiasco of the Paris Summit Conference in 1960. Of course he knew precisely what he was saying in Paris when he banged the table and ranted like a man possessed about the perfidy of General Eisenhower; but he was also allowing himself to be carried away, and to one who was there it was clear that behind this act, and others like it, there was a very real welling up of rage, the rage of frustration above all: this man who stood at the head of one of the two great powers, who had intrigued and manoeuvred and slogged and murdered his way to the pinnacle of power, who was conditioned by thirty-five years of Stalinism to sweeping away all opposition, found it at times unbearable to discover himself in situations in which he could do nothing—nothing to the master of Communist China who defied him, nothing to a President of the United States who broke all the rules of international double-crossing by assuming personal responsibility for the activities of his absurd secret service in the matter of the U2—nothing, short of shooting or imprisonment, to artists who painted nonsense pictures or poets who said the Jews had had a bad deal. “I have not met people like you for thirty or forty years!” he burst out at the notorious dinner given by the Labour Party in 1956. This was one of the most revealing of all his remarks. He was, of course, partly thinking in terms of “ideology”: there had been no Gaitskells, no Bevans, no George Browns in Russia for all that time: Khrushchev had helped to kill off their Russian equivalents. And in half a dozen European countries too. But more personally, he meant that in all that time he had not met a group of men (outside his closest colleagues) who had the effrontery to answer back, even to heckle him. And faced by this situation he did not know what to do.

  There was another side. He could no longer shoot as a matter of course. This, as we have seen, was largely because he knew very well that the spirit of the times, the stage of development which the Soviet Union had now reached, ruled out arbitrary violence in the Stalin manner, ruled out, also, labour-camp solutions. More than this, however, it is perfectly clear that he himself dreamt of a Soviet Union, and worked hard for it, which should be rich and prosperous, sufficient unto itself and an example to the world. He did not want to shoot: his destiny forbade it. Lenin had been the great founder; Stalin had been the great consolidator and defender; Khrushchev was to be the great liberator and provider—and woe betide anyone who tried to stop him! He, none better, was aware of the immense changes that had been wrought in the Soviet Union since Stalin’s death, and he was bitterly aggrieved when the Soviet people did not thank him, or at once demanded more, or when foreigners quite failed to understand the nature of the changes. Thus, on his return to Moscow after his London visit in 1956, still harping on that Labour Party dinner which had produced so traumatic an effect, he said: “If these Labour Party leaders had had friendly intentions towards the Soviet Union, they would have found other questions to ask. After all, they know perfectly well that we are doing all we can to correct the mistakes made in a number of cases in the past, and that innocent people who were convicted are now being rehabilitated, and that not only in the USSR, but also in the people’s democracies, legal proceedings of doubtful validity are now being re-examined.”13

  He was speaking here with perfect sincerity. He had gone to London as t
he chief spokesman of a great power which was engaged most actively in putting its house in order and making Russia a country fit for Russians to live in. He and his colleagues, but most particularly he, had acted with extreme boldness at the 20th Party Congress only three months earlier, and at considerable personal risk, to prepare the ground for this transformation. He expected to be taken at his own face value. In a speech at Birmingham he had spoken with modesty and dignity, setting what he thought should be the tone of the visit: “We have come to your country with the very best intentions. We are very pleased with the hospitality shown us by the Government of Great Britain and the British people. Anyone can tell by looking at people’s eyes and the expression on their faces that the common people of Britain are happy about our visit. I do not want to exaggerate the significance of myself and N. A. Bulganin as persons. But we represent a great and interesting country— the Soviet Union. You can like us or not like us, but the Soviet Union will not cease to exist.”

  And from this great height the representative of 200 million people, already disposing of the hydrogen bomb, very soon to send the first man into space, feverishly coping with the problems of de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union and in the Satellites (which were soon almost to overwhelm him and sweep him away), was dragged down by a handful of so-called Socialist politicians to discuss the fate of 200 wretched little oppositionists who, if they were still alive in prison (in Rumania, in Hungary, in Bulgaria) could consider themselves lucky to be alive … ! This is not a criticism, far from it, of the British Labour leaders: Khrushchev had still a great deal to learn if he aspired to lead the Soviet Union to the sunny uplands, and this little matter of 200 imprisoned Social Democrats, all men of distinguished character and high position, imprisoned by Stalin, was one of the lessons in the course. It would have been a hard lesson for any politically minded Russian backed and enclosed by the tradition of authoritarian rule: “After the liquidation of the classes,” Khrushchev once said to a group of French Socialists questioning the premises of single party rule, “we have a monolithic society. Why, therefore, found another party? That would be like letting someone put a flea in your shirt.” For Khrushchev personally, with his particular background, it was impossibly hard, and he never quite learnt it. But he went on trying to the end. He also tolerated, even invited, criticism—something quite new in a Soviet leader,