He was not merely angered by political opposition, at home or abroad, he was angered by anything and everything that stood in the way of his personal vision of a decently ordered society, firmly guided and controlled from above, but engaging the active and devoted co-operation of the people at large. His anger would come out in all sorts of ways. He was angry with bad workmanship. “The joints between the pipes,” he said of a new show hotel in Sverdlovsk, “had been very badly made. And I, as a former fitter, was extremely indignant; even before the revolution pipe-joints in the mines were cleaner and better finished than in this hotel at Sverdlovsk!” (But this was a long way from the man who had been once used to charging bad workmen with deliberate sabotage.) He was angry with the writers and the painters who abused their splendid new freedom to work for the Cause by undermining the Cause, or by frivoling away their time on daubs that might have been made by donkeys’ tails. He was angry with parents of the younger generation who encouraged their children to look for white collar jobs instead of going to factories and construction sites to lend a hand and learn about life: “It is no secret, after all, that some parents reason thus: ‘But my daughter has completed the ten year course— she cannot possibly milk cows!’ She can drink milk, but she considers it beneath her dignity to milk cows!” He rejoiced when things went right: “There were some persons, even scientists, in the USSR who tried to prove that the Dutch have some breed of cows, better cows than our Moscow ones, and that our Moscow cows will never be able to compete with them. However, our Soviet cows have derided these scientists and have supported the Central Committee!”
And again, about a good crop of maize: “Here is sausage! Here is beefsteak! Here is fat bacon! What will these plants look like in a month and a half’s time, at harvest time? Then the cobs will be half a metre long! Now you will understand why I go on so about maize!”
And again: “We are getting richer, and when a person has more to eat he gets more democratic!”
But he was an uneasy democrat. He also had plenty of bad advisers. It is clear, if it was not clear before, that the majority of his senior colleagues had set their minds against any return to terror: these must often have restrained his own harsh impatience. He had at his side the remarkable figure of his wife, full of restraint and dignity and sense, who must, time and time again, have borne the brunt of violent explosions and calmed him down, diverted his wrath and headed him away from ill-considered actions; but she could not be with him all the time, and she could not stop him in full flight once he had started speaking. He had a son, twenty-one in 1956, a young engineering student who appeared to be the model of the most studious, politically disengaged new generation of students, and who could tell him what his contemporaries were thinking. He had a daughter, Rada, who was livelier, and through her he would have had a window into the mood of the rapidly growing and important class formed by the children of the élite with their total disenchantment with Party ways and Party maxims, their passion for foreign travel and foreign clothes and foreign ways. But there is no reason to suppose that Khrushchev understood his children any more perceptively than the run of busy, impatient Western fathers faced with the incomprehensible ways of children who reject everything they stand for: certainly he did not change his notions to fit theirs…. Moreover, Rada Khrushcheva was married to a young man called Adjubei, very much the sort of young man to marry the master’s daughter, talented, energetic, born to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, a most dubious mixture of the So-called “jet-set” at its most lurid and the ambitious, intriguing politician: a protector of the very young and talented when it suited him, but also fathomlessly cynical. There must have been times when the young writers, the young painters, economists and thinkers, would have been happier if Khrushchev had not had in his house a son-in-law who liked abstract painting and understood the problems of contemporary youth: they would have known better where they stood.
Khrushchev also had to rely very much for too long on some of the most depraved political climbers, as well as on some of the most vicious place-men. Whereas his senior colleagues, those, like Mikoyan, who were there before him, those who had come up with him or under his mantle, were wise in the ways of tyranny and firmly set against any return of terror, any accretion of arbitrary power on the part of any individual, there were others. These were the ones who had learnt their political manners under Stalin, who had climbed to the middle echelons by the very means Khrushchev had used (but they lacked Khrushchev’s largeness and humanity), who had survived by sycophancy or back-stabbing, or both, but who, when Stalin died, had by no means completed their climb and were not going to be put off by a little thing like the death of a tyrant and his subsequent disgrace. Khrushchev himself very much depended on a large number of these men for his final victory over the “Anti-Party Group.” Some of them disappeared into limbo when their usefulness expired; but there are, to this day, many of their kind still occupying vital positions in the Party apparatus throughout the Soviet Union. They were at their strongest in the two or three years after the defeat of the “Anti-Party Group.” And at the 21st Party Congress in February 1959, the most prominent among them made a vigorous attempt to have the case against the fallen leaders reopened. Spiridonov, the Leningrad chieftain, Ignatov, one of Khrushchev’s appointees to the Presidium and the Secretariat, and Shelepin, the recently promoted chief of State Security (later to be active in securing Khrushchev’s downfall), were particularly violent. In their speeches they hinted that what they were really working for was the trial and execution of the late Khrushchev opposition. But Shelepin’s speech, in a passage in which he accused the “Anti-Party Group” of behaving like “Trotskyists and Rightists,” was censored by Pravda; and the general tone of Khrushchev’s most powerful colleagues was to condemn the fallen in passing, as a blight which had now been removed.14
More dire still than the influence of these vicious young Turks who had been raised up by Khrushchev, who himself still depended on them, was the figure of Ilychev as head of Agitprop and Khrushchev’s cultural adviser—a narrow, crass, ill-tempered sectarian, who not only believed in strict Party control of the arts and the humanities (Khrushchev believed in that) but also that the only way to secure this was to place and retain in positions of authority prime specimens from among the old-guard Stalinist Party hacks. What seems to have happened, in effect, was that Khrushchev did not swallow Ilychev hook, line and sinker, but gave him his head when another touch of the whip seemed to be called for. Khrushchev himself knew very well that there could be no flourishing intellectual life in the Soviet Union, and no real change in the manners of the middle-rank Party leaders, unless on the one hand the men with ideas were encouraged and, on the other the Party hacks were shown again and again that the wind of change was real and not a sham. But he depended on the Party hacks, and, at the same time, he was still deeply suspicious of intellectuals and determined not to let them take him for a ride. Thus, at the height of the Pasternak scandal, after the Komsomol leader, Semichastny, had attacked this great and noble writer with the language of the gutter, Khrushchev let it be understood, without saying so explicity, that he was angry with the way the whole affair of Doctor Zhivago had been handled and had sharply blamed his subordinates for meddling in things they did not understand. But Semichastny survived and was later promoted to be chief of State Security. And when Pasternak’s enemies got together after the poet’s death to destroy his mistress, Khrushchev allowed it to happen; and it was his son-in-law, Adjubei, who came to England triumphantly bearing ridiculous documents which he said were proof of Madame Ivinskaya’s guilt as an embezzler—so arrogant was he that he was deeply affronted when these documents, which might have come out of a child’s home forgery kit, were regarded in London with raised eyebrows.
It is impossible to separate Khrushchev himself from this sort of thing. He could speak, as we know, with wisdom, moderation and even vision in his public utterances: on occasion he could make Western statesmen
look tawdry, narrow and tenth-rate. He could preside over a meeting of farmers, or builders, or writers, or Communist functionaries like an amiable and infinitely tolerant Father-God, interjecting occasional comments, salty or benign. He could talk to individuals, often of low rank, in a human and personal way so rare in a professional politician as to be almost unique, reminiscing about the past, regretting that he had been too busy to read more, regretting that his position in war-time had cut him off from all those who had to live under fire. He could be simple and spontaneous and in love with Russia— and still laugh at himself: “On New Year’s Eve I was coming back to Moscow from just outside. I spend the whole of 31st December, from early morning, in the woods. It was a poetic day, a most beautiful Russian winter’s day, and it could only have been a Russian winter’s day, because not everywhere are there such winters as we have in Russia. Of course, this is not something national but a phenomenon of the climate and of nature—I would not like you to misunderstand me. That day the forest was especially beautiful. Its beauty was in the trees covered by powdery hoar-frost. I remember, when I was young, reading a story in Ogonyek, I forget who the author of that story was. It contained such phrases as ‘dear silvery shadows.’ The story was probably well-written, but perhaps at that time I was less fastidious about writing. Never mind, I liked the story, and to-day I can still recall the impression it made on me. I liked especially the description of trees in their winter garb. The winter forest on New Year’s Eve was so beautiful that it impressed me strongly. Perhaps the shadows were not silvery, but words cannot express the deep impression the forest made on me.”15 And so on.
All this, and much more besides, was a prelude to an attack on abstract art. “And now the modernists, the abstractionists, want to paint these fir-trees upside down, and claim it as the new and progressive in art!”
He was not always so gentle, and in private he showed himself at home with the language of the Semichastnys and the Spiridonovs. Thus, on the occasion of his notorious visit to the abstract painting exhibition at the Manezh in Moscow: “Dmitry Stepanovich Polyansky [then Prime Minister of the RSFSR, now one of three or four outstanding figures of the Kosygin government] told me a couple of days ago that when his daughter got married she was given a picture of what was supposed to be a lemon. It consisted of some messy yellow lines which looked, if you will excuse me, as though some child had done his business on the canvas when his mother was away and then spread it around with his hands.”16 And to the young painter, Zheltovsky: “You’re a nice-looking lad, but how could you paint something like this? We should take down your pants and set you down in a clump of nettles until you understand your mistakes. You should be ashamed. Are you a pederast or a normal man? Do you want to go abroad? Go on then; we’ll take you free as far as the border. Live out there in the Tree world.’ Study in the school of capitalism, and then you’ll know what’s what. But we aren’t going to spend a kopek on this dogshit. We have the right to send you to cut down trees until you’ve paid back the money the State has spent on you. The people and government have taken a lot of trouble with you, and you pay them back with this shit. They say you like to associate with foreigners. A lot of them are our enemies, don’t forget !”17
The picture begins to emerge. It presents itself as an image not unlike the images of innumerable pillars of the Establishment in the Western world, with particular reference to self-made ones, oscillating uncertainly between sentimental and aggressive impulses, wishing they understood more but still frightened of what they do not understand, not wanting to be behind the times, but detesting the times all the same, longing to be loved but tempted by impatience into violence, enraptured by a sunset but half ashamed of their softness…. All this with a difference: Western pillars of the Establishment do not give tongue to every contradictory idea that comes into their heads, they do not rise to the top by actually shooting, or conniving at the shooting of, their rivals, and they do not enjoy the power of life and death over young painters, or anybody else, who defy them by wearing funny clothes and painting fir trees upside down. But all in all, it says a good deal for Khrushchev that he did not shoot.
Chapter 20
A Visionary Imprisoned by his Past
We left the main line of Khrushchev’s career at the moment of his triumph over the “Anti-Party Group”; but as far as his domestic situation is concerned there is little more to relate. In October 1957 he felt strong enough to break Marshal Zhukov, without whom he could not have weathered the June crisis, willingly assisted by certain generals who were either jealous of Zhukov or genuinely disagreed with his policies or had put their money on Khrushchev.1 It is generally supposed— Khrushchev himself let it be supposed—that Zhukov went because he was actively building up his own personality-cult (he had posed on a white stallion for a life-size portrait!) and was defying Party control of the Army. No doubt he was doing both these things, but it is likely that there was also a more specialised reason. Zhukov was removed only a few days before the successful launching of Russia’s, or the world’s, first spacecraft, which was to bring about a radical change in Soviet strategic thinking: Khrushchev personally was soon to emerge as the champion of rocket defence, of massive deterrents, as opposed to those conventional arms and armies which were Zhukov’s dream-toys.
In August 1958 the time had come to get rid of Bulganin: this was quite easy, since Bulganin had voted against Khrushchev in 1957 and had only been kept on as Prime Minister for reasons of expediency and decorum until such time as Khrushchev judged the time ripe to take the Premiership himself, and make himself formally the head of state.
It should not be thought, however, that all was plain sailing from the breaking of Zhukov and the calling of the Army to heel in October 1957 until the end, almost exactly seven years later. On the contrary, there was a running series of clashes in the higher reaches of the Party, and the composition of the Presidium and the Secretariat changed a good deal in those seven years. Khrushchev had reached his apogee and could climb no higher, but this was not true of the men who had supported him, either out of conviction or in return for promotion, or both. The sort of struggle which had engaged Khrushchev personally throughout his own career continued among his subordinates. Some fell by the wayside, some more or less held their own, some prospered. They clashed about domestic policy, about foreign policy, and about their own self-advancement. The Presidium which finally voted Khrushchev out of office in October 1964 was by no means the same Presidium with which he faced the Communist Parties of the world at the great Moscow Conference in November 1957, but it would be tedious and out of place to follow all the changes step by step: they tell us nothing about the master’s methods which we do not already know.
The Moscow Conference was Khrushchev’s first great occasion as the supreme victor, and it was a triumphant occasion. Mao Tse-tung attended the conference in person and, shoulder to shoulder with Khrushchev, laid down the law to the rest of the Communist world. The Chinese were deeply gratified because for the first time they were accepted by the Russians as equals: they were invited to assist in the drafting of the famous Moscow Declaration, intended as a reassertion of centralised Party discipline and of Communist militancy after the shattering consequences of the de-Stalinisation. Khrushchev was only too pleased to demonstrate to the outer world and to the unruly in the “socialist camp,” to Marshal Tito, too, who was presuming too much in his eyes, that Russia and China were one. But even as they celebrated their unbreakable unity and threatened the heretics in Poland, Yugoslavia, Italy and elsewhere, Khrushchev himself must have been aware of trouble soon to come.
In the first place, he himself was simply manoeuvring for temporary advantage and was concerned with tracing a hard line not from conviction, but only for reasons of expediency-— whereas Mao, he knew, reacting from his “Hundred Flowers” mood,2 was arguing from conviction. In the second place, more importantly, there was already in existence a profound misunderstanding. Khrushchev was naturally pleas
ed, to put it mildly, with the sputnik’s performance a month earlier. But he was less emotional about it than either the Americans, who were cast into the depths of despair and self-questioning, or the Chinese, who were besides themselves with joy—the Soviet Union, they said in effect, long master of the hydrogen bomb, now led America in inter-continental missiles. The socialist camp, headed by the Soviet Union, would now proceed in every way to demonstrate its military superiority over the imperialists. The East Wind, in Mao’s words, was prevailing over the West Wind. It was in his speech to this conference that Mao also lightly observed that nuclear war would mean the end of capitalism, but not of Communism: if 300 million Chinese were killed there would still be 300 million left alive.3 Khrushchev clearly listened to this sort of arithmetic with a sinking heart. He understood what nuclear warfare meant. He also knew that there were not 600 million Russians, but only 220 million. He had a more sophisticated appreciation, furthermore, of the capacities of the American deterrent and the long way the Soviet Union had to go between the appearance of a sputnik swallow and a thermo-nuclear summer. He was building up the Soviet Union, not inviting its destruction. His ballistic missiles were instruments of State power to be deployed with discretion in the interests of defence and power balance, not to be used as the spearhead of the revolutionary struggle for the benefit of remote countries of which he knew nothing and for which he cared less. Furthermore, he had not the least intention of placing either the atom bomb or his rockets at the disposal of the socialist camp, or of telling China how to make them: they formed part of the paraphernalia of his, of the Soviet Union’s, power relations with the United States, and that was the end of it. He was right to be gloomy. Within a month the Chinese, home from Moscow, were writing:
Khrushchev Page 29