Khrushchev

by Edward Crankshaw

  “The absolute superiority of the Soviet Union in intercontinental ballistic missiles has placed the striking capabilities of the United States in an inferior position…. The Soviet inter-continental ballistic missiles can not only reach any military base in Central Europe, Asia or Africa, but they can also force the United States, for the first time in history, into a position from which it can neither escape nor strike back.”4

  Within six months of that the Middle East crisis had blown up. Anglo-American troops had made their landings in Lebanon and Jordan, and the Chinese were demanding, and seeming to expect, an apocalyptic reaction from the Russians: “… if the U.S. British aggressors refuse to withdraw from Lebanon and Jordan, and insist on extending their aggression, then the only course left to the people of the world is to hit the aggressors on the head! … The imperialists have always bullied the weak and been afraid of the strong. The only language they understand is that of force.”5

  Khrushchev thought otherwise. Although Bulganin was still nominally Prime Minister, he addressed himself personally to President Eisenhower as one head of State to another with an appeal for an immediate Summit meeting “before the guns begin to fire.” He wrote: “We address you not from a position of intimidation but from a position of reason. We believe at this momentous hour that it would be more reasonable not to bring the heated atmosphere to boiling point; it is sufficiently inflammable as it is.”6 A little later, when the immediate panic had subsided and it was clear that the Anglo-American troops were not going to move on into Iraq, he withdrew his acceptance of Eisenhower’s counter-offer of a Summit within the framework of the Security Council—whether to appease the Chinese or for other reasons we do not know. But the stage was set for the grand movement which was to transform the peasant from Kalinovka, the District Party official, the city boss, Stalin’s lieutenant, the victor in deadly conflict with the toughest and most uninhibited set of politicians in the world, into a major statesman, into the great peacemaker who brought the Soviet Union to the thresh-hold of a new age into which he himself could not enter.

  The irony was that for all his wisdom and vision, the one instinctive and deep, the other far but vague, he was moving where he did not want to go. He moved backwards into the future, trying to stand at bay, but always giving ground, to the forces he himself, to his own greater glory, had unloosed. Or, because he was all those things, a peasant, a ward-politician, a power-seeker on a grand and ruthless scale as well as a dreamer and, towards the end, a statesman, he was incapable of an all-embracing and coherent design. He wanted to bring prosperity and glory to Russia, but his temperament was too opportunistic and his received ideas were too limiting to allow him to see the prerequisites for this. Instead of sitting down with his advisers and saying, in effect, the times have changed since Lenin gave us our direction, what must we do to escape from our own past? Let us experiment, carefully, systematically and always on a small scale, with radical ways and means of revising the whole system which is so rusty in the joints—the industrial system with its rigid and over-centralised planning; the collective farm system which deprives the peasants of a personal interest in the land; the social system subordinated, in effect, to the interests of Party careerists and placemen—instead of doing this (which is now what his successors are in fact trying to do) he constantly sought dramatic and personal solutions which were going to change the face of the Soviet Union overnight without, wonder of wonders, disturbing the existing, the Stalinist, framework—’Solutions which were almost always ill-considered and frequently irrelevant. Just as he believed until after the Cuba crisis in 1962 that he could have things both ways in his relations with the West, achieving peaceable State relations with governments which he strove restlessly to embarrass and undermine, so at home he believed until the very end that he could have things both ways by inventing magical panaceas to be applied within the basic framework. Thus, once it had been agro-towns, then the cultivation of maize, then the Virgin Lands, then putting townees in charge of the farms—now it was abolishing the Machine Tractor Stations, suddenly investing millions in artificial fertilisers, encouraging the theories of Professor Liberman7—and then drawing back when he looked at the details. It was sending half a million people to develop Siberia. It was catching up with America in the production of meat, butter, milk and eggs in five years by trying one expedient after another to discipline or bribe the peasants into growing more fodder crops to feed and fatten more beasts. But nothing was basically changed: the great ideas man was now in a position to put his ideas at once into practice; but the ideas were apt to contradict each other, and they were often jettisoned for new ones before they had been properly tried. With the ideas went people, who were dropped or promoted, often for no visible cause, but clearly because they opposed the master’s ideas. For there was indeed frequent opposition, some of it from Khrushchev’s closest supporters, as when Madame Furtseva, Khrushchev’s most faithful protégée (until she plummetted from the heights in the winter of 1961— to be restored later on a lower level as Minister of Culture), reproached him angrily for denuding Moscow, her Moscow now, of skilled builders to send them on a wild-goose chase into deep Siberia (they soon drifted back).8 Nothing was co-ordinated, nothing harmonised. But the same applied to the opposition: some opposed Khrushchev on one count, others on another, others on another still. After Cuba, at the end of 1962, there was a great coming together of all who differed from him about anything, and for a few months his position was more shaky than it had been at any time since the early summer of 1957. But he survived, and 1963 was the year of the great disciplinary action against the writers and artists referred to earlier—against the independent minded élite, in effect; all those, whether engineers, soldiers, lawyers, scientists, technicians—to say nothing of students— whose way of thinking was made articulate by the writers. This was the last occasion on which Khrushchev sought strength from the Stalinists. This attempt, too, petered out. And in the autumn of the following year he went.

  He went not because he was reactionary and not because he was liberal, but because he was erratic, unpredictable, unmanageable, now increasingly dictatorial; because after a solid decade of incessant uproar about agriculture, food production was once more static and showed no signs of rising; because, after all his economic plunging, industrial growth was slowing down most dangerously, consumer goods were still in short supply, and the quality of what was being turned out was often atrocious;9 because the country was confused and bewildered, not stimulated any more, by his restless dynamism; because in pushing the very necessary quarrel with China to extreme lengths, and concentrating now not on ideological differences, not any longer on China’s reckless belligerence, but on the great power aspects of the dispute, he was shattering to small pieces what was left of Communist unity; because in pursuing his understanding with America he was giving too many hostages to fortune; because, in the end, he was showing signs of megalomania—as, for example, his essay in personal and private diplomacy, through his son-in-law Adjubei, aimed at coming to an understanding with West Germany.

  All this was true. Khrushchev was not a tidy and efficient administrator—we have seen enough of his career to understand why this was so—and the Soviet Union desperately needed tidy, efficient and systematically experimental administration above all else. He was not a coherent policy-maker: as observed earlier on, his great strength was his swift and bold reaction to events; he was not a moulder of events. And the Soviet Union needed badly a coherent line of policy, many-headed, domestic and external. He was impatient in action : patience he had to a very marked degree, but it was the patience of the man who is prepared to watch and wait until he is in a position to act: once the opportunity for action had come he was impulsive. He was authoritarian and intolerant of opposition and also vengeful: hence the bitterness of his quarrel with Mao Tse-tung and his determination to push to the uttermost extreme his vendetta against the man who dared try to supplant him as the father-figure of the Commu
nist movement, who said that through his communes he had found a short-cut to full Communism, who worked determinedly and deviously for the ruin of the Soviet rapprochement with America, who pursued policies which could all too easily lead to nuclear war and the destruction of all the Russians had built up (and then complained because Khrushchev would not give him an atom bomb), who accused the Soviet Union of betraying the Revolution by working to make herself prosperous and strong—who, on top of all this, hinted that the day might come when China would demand the return of large areas of Siberia, including Vladivostock, which had been ceded to a strong Russia by a weak China under a series of “unequal” treaties with the Tsars.10

  It was not until after the Cuban crisis that Khrushchev finally made up his mind that there was one object to which all else must be sacrificed, and that this was peace, first for the preservation of the Soviet Union, then for the preservation of the world; peace to be achieved by an understanding with the United States which would also strengthen the Soviet Union in face of China. He had, indeed, desired this above everything else for some years, but he had been unable to bring himself to face the full implications. When he put those rockets into Cuba it was the last kick against his destiny. Until then he had convinced himself that he could still reach an understanding with America without losing his freedom of action. It had been a long and thorny progress. He had abandoned Stalin’s collision-course with the West, once and for all, at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, had been affronted because the West did not understand what he was doing, and felt injured because it objected to the rules of his new game: physical co-existence, ideological war à outrance. In 1958, at the time of the Middle Eastern crisis, he had made his first appeal to the West—but he was unable to perceive that so long as he proposed to use ugly weapons, like Berlin or megaton bombs, to intimidate the West whenever, for whatever reason, it seemed expedient, there was not much hope of an ardent response to his appeals. In 1959 he defied Mao Tse-tung and consummated what to his mind was without a doubt the climax of his career, the invitation to him, Nikita Sergeievich Khrushchev, the peasant leader of backward Russia, to visit the President of the United States as an equal—from log cabin to White House in its twentieth-century variation…. But even then, because of his determination to have things both ways, he was unable to gain the full benefit of this apotheosis— for the very good reason that nobody then, or for some time afterwards, knew what it had cost him: the deliberate break with Communist China, which for long remained a most carefully guarded secret.

  He held to his course, none the less, and made ail preparations for a triumphant Summit meeting to take place in Paris in June of the following year. He held on although he was under the greatest pressure from China, and also from those of his colleagues in Moscow whose appreciation of the Sino-Soviet situation differed from his own—until the spectacular incident of the shooting down of the U2 spy-plane in May 1960. The U2 was there because, in spite of the spirit of Camp David, in spite of Khrushchev’s warm and flattering references to Eisenhower’s peace-loving and statesmanlike qualities, he was still unable to bring himself to abandon his freedom of action as the leader, challenged now (but few people knew this) by Mao Tse-tung, of a world-wide revolutionary movement—even though the responsibilities involved in leadership of any revolutionary movement had for some time been nothing but a hindrance to the peaceful development of the Soviet Union.

  It is impossible to tell Khrushchev’s real attitude to the U2 incident. The signs are that he was at first prepared to take it in his stride, exploiting it for propaganda purposes to the top of his bent (the way in which he at first concealed the fact that the Russians had captured the pilot alive, thus leading the Americans to make ridiculous statements which were at once proved false, was a choice example of his cheerful cynicism). The tone changed only when President Eisenhower broke all the rules of diplomatic protocol by assuming personal responsibility for the flight. This clearly bewildered and angered Khrushchev, making him look a fool for having so loudly insisted on his “trust” in Eisenhower. On the other hand, there was reason to suppose, even before the U2 incident, that Khrushchev’s attitude to the Paris meeting had changed. What had gone on between Mao and Khrushchev at the Peking meeting late in 1959 was known only to the two principles and their inner cabinets. The fact that Khrushchev had refused to give the Chinese samples of atomic bombs and know-how in the summer of 1959 was not published to the world until very much later.11 The withdrawal of Soviet technicians from China in the winter of 1959 was also only partly understood by the outer world which, in any case, had no knowledge of the scale of this operation, its catastrophic effect on the Chinese economy, and the bitterness and rancour which it aroused. But in April 1960, with the publication in Peking of the celebrated articles for Lenin’s anniversary,12 Khrushchev had to reckon with the fact that the Chinese were beginning to hit back— though in a way still calculated to conceal the real issues from the outside world—and that very soon Communist leaders all over the world would be asking for an explanation. Was this a good time to pursue, regardless of the rumblings from his great southern neighbour and the alarm in the “socialist camp,” his policy of conciliation with the United States? It seems likely that the U2 incident was perfectly timed to give him a breathing space, to supply a pretext for cooling off towards America, to allow him to appear no less anti-imperialist than the Chinese—and then to turn round and settle with the Chinese and all the doubters on his own side.

  At any rate, this is what he did. In Paris, in June, he broke up the Summit conference with the maximum of publicity and brouhaha and treated the world, on television, to the spectacle of a man beside himself with fury and outraged indignation. As already suggested, he was acting, and he knew what he was saying; but the genuine anger was there. All his pent-up frustrations came welling out in a carefully contrived show of violence—he was angry with President Eisenhower, by all means; but he was angry with Mao Tse-tung, with all those on his side who were not wholehearted in their support, with Comrade Ulbricht who was going on about a German peace-treaty, with life itself, which was perversely preventing him from having all things his own way.

  It all came out in this display which made responsible onlookers think he had gone off his head. And then he went off to Berlin to tell Ulbricht he would have to wait for his treaty, and then to Bucharest, to the Rumanian Party Congress, to insult the Chinese delegates, to attack Mao Tse-tung in the sort of terms he had once used in attacking Trotsky, and, before the astonished gaze of Communist leaders from East Europe and elsewhere, to reveal that for some months past relations between China and the Soviet Union had been working up to the point of cold war.13

  From 1960 until the end the course of Khrushchev’s career was dominated by the Chinese quarrel. This was made public to the Communist parties of all the world at the secret Moscow Conference of November 1960, at which he repeated his Bucharest performance, this time in face of much tougher opposition in the person of Teng Hsiao-ping, who stood up in the Kremlin hall in the heart of Moscow to accuse Khrushchev of betraying the Revolution and to declare in so many words that China proposed to take the leadership from Russia.14 The differences were papered over in the formal “declaration” at the end of the conference, which was all the outside world knew about it. But the leaders of eighty-one Communist parties had seen for themselves that it was war to the knife between Khrushchev and Mao, between the two great Communist allies—and although many of them deeply resented the way in which Khrushchev, aided above all by Suslov, had rail-roaded them into declaring their support (in the grand Stalin manner not even permitting the various delegations to consult together in their hotels), they were so shocked by the shrillness and bitterness of the Chinese counterattack that all came to Russia’s support, save for two or three equivocators in South-East Asia and the British Dominions, and Albania, that tiny country cut off from the European Communist bloc by Yugoslavia, whose dictator, Enver Hoxha, glorified Stalin and declared in
round terms that Khrushchev was a traitor.

  From 1960 onwards it was quite impossible to understand Khrushchev’s foreign policy, and a good deal of his domestic policy too, except in the light of his life and death struggle with China, but it was not until the winter of 1962-3 that the deadly reality of the conflict was at last revealed by both sides to the world: one day it will make an interesting and instructive exercise for somebody to make a detailed study of Soviet foreign policy between 1958 and 1963 in the light of what everyone now knows about the Sino-Soviet quarrel—a period which includes the meeting between Khrushchev and President Kennedy in Vienna in the summer of 1961 and the Cuban crisis in October 1962.

  During all these years Khrushchev had China on his back, but it was not until after Cuba that he felt able to abandon all pretence, and it was not until the signing of the nuclear test-ban treaty in August 1963 that he publicly acted in defiance of Peking. Even at the 22nd Party Congress in October 1961 he refused to attack China by name, using Albania as a cover-name for the great Asian power, just as the Chinese used Yugoslavia as a cover-name for the Soviet Union. He had then had his chance to take the measure of the new American President at the Vienna meeting which cast President Kennedy into gloom.

  From Khrushchev’s point of view this meeting was in no way a climacteric: it was no more than a useful exploration. An aged and amiable national figure whom nobody would accuse of either dynamism or power-mania had been succeeded by an extremely young and brash-looking professional politician with no experience at all of large affairs of state. The scion of a family which was a caricature of American reaction, backed by his father’s millions and an immensely powerful political machine, Kennedy had only just managed to defeat Nixon who, on his earlier visit to Moscow, had failed to impress Khrushchev (and not only Khrushchev) as a proper Presidential candidate. With this narrow victory, the new young President looked like being the prisoner of Congress, and yet the most striking thing about him to the outsider in those early days was his patent ambition and his self-assurance. Our hero, who was himself not noticeably diffident and uncertain, may well have echoed Lord Melbourne’s observation about Macaulay: “I wish I was as cock-sure about anything as Macaulay is about everything!” He needed to see this young man with the tooth-paste advertisement smile and a very youthful head of hair. He needed to decide whether he really was a President, or only a personable figure manipulated by unseen hands—and, if so, whose hands. In Vienna he did not set himself out to be unpleasant to Kennedy, far from it. He made what he took to be a number of friendly overtures. He said, for example, that he had nothing against Eisenhower: he was quite sure that Eisenhower had not in fact known about the U2 flight, but had only assumed responsibility “in a spirit of chivalry.” He assured the young man that the invitation to the President of the United States to visit Moscow was still open. He contrived a small, token agreement on Laos. To demonstrate his good intentions and his power over the Stalinists, he pointed out that he, Khrushchev, after all, had pushed through the Austrian peace treaty, overruling Molotov to this end. But he was adamant about Berlin and he contemptuously scouted the idea, pressed by the President, that the Soviet Union should sit back and contract out of ideological warfare, refusing to lend encouragement and aid to revolutionary movements in other parts of the world.15 There could be no immunisation against the spread of ideas, he insisted. He was also negative on the question of a nuclear test-ban: he still had tests to make.