Khrushchev

by Edward Crankshaw

  He defended himself and hit back. He had brought the Soviet Union through the great change; he had acted decisively and boldly when others had been afraid to act; he had secured peace and laid the foundations for prosperity. And in fact he had done all this. He may well have asked who else could have done as well. But, in doing all this, he had served his purpose. He had rushed the Soviet Union to the brink of a new era, which would have little to do with the assumptions of forty-seven years. The comrades knew this. They also knew that our hero, more than many of them a prisoner of his past—and what a past!— could never be the proper guide as they moved into the promised land. They needed time to think.

  Chronological Record

  Notes And Sources

  Index

  Chronological Record

  1894

  Born at Kalinovka in Kursk Province Accession of Tsar Nicholas II

  1903

  Lenin splits Russian Social Democratic Labour Party into Bolshevik and Menshevik wings at 2nd Congress in London

  1904-5

  Russo-Japanese War

  1905

  The 1905 Revolution; Moscow Rising

  1906

  First Duma, or Parliament

  1909

  Khrushchev moves to Yuzovka, later Stalino, now Donetsk

  1909—18

  Works in factories and at the pit-head

  1914

  Outbreak of First World War

  1917

  (April—old style March) Revolution; abdication of Tsar; formation of Provisional Government (November—old style, October) “October Revolution”; Lenin overthrows Provisional Government

  1918

  Khrushchev becomes a Bolshevik and joins Red Army

  1918-20

  Civil war and Allied Intervention

  1920

  Khrushchev back to Yuzovka as assistant-manager of a mine

  1921-2

  Famine, Death of Khrushchev’s first wife

  1921

  Introduction of New Economic Policy (NEP)

  1921 or 22

  Khrushchev to Yuzovka Mining Technical School

  1923

  Becomes a Politrook at Yuzovka Technical School

  1924

  (January) Death of Lenin, (May) Eclipse of Trotsky

  1925

  Khrushchev appointed Party Secretary of Petrovsko-Marinsky District in Stalino Region

  Attends 9th All-Ukrainian Party Congress with Kaganovich in Chair

  Attends 14th All-Union Party Congress. Defeat of Zinoviev and Kamenev

  1926

  First recorded public speech at Ukrainian Party Conference in Kharkov

  1927

  Promotion to Stalino Region Party apparatus

  1928

  Promotion to Kiev Party apparatus

  Exile of Trotsky

  First Five-year Plan. Start of Collectivisation.

  1929

  Transfer to Moscow as student in Stalin Industrial Academy

  Deportation of Trotsky

  1930-1

  Famine

  1931

  Promoted Party Secretary Baumann and Red Presnaya Districts, Moscow

  1932-4

  Second Secretary Moscow City Party Committee rising to First Secretary Moscow City Committee and Second Secretary Moscow Region (December) Murder of Kirov

  1935

  First Secretary Moscow City and Region; Candidate Member Politburo of Central Committee of All-Union Central Committee

  1935-8

  Tears of the Great Purge and the Treason Trials. Destruction of the Old Bolsheviks and most of the Red Army higher command

  1938

  Promoted to be First Secretary Ukrainian Central Committee

  1939

  (March) Full member of the All-Union Politburo (September) As First Secretary for the Ukraine and civilian member of the Kiev Military Council, moved into occupied Poland

  1940

  Supervised sovietisation of Eastern Poland

  1941-4

  War service as Politburo representative on various fronts. Lieutenant-General

  1944

  Appointed to be Chairman of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister) of the Ukraine, while retaining First Secretaryship of Ukrainian Central Committee

  1945

  To Warsaw as chairman of the commission of experts which planned the city’s reconstruction

  1946

  Famine in the Ukraine

  1947

  Temporary eclipse and demotion

  1948

  Restored to full powers in the Ukraine

  1949

  Called to Moscow as Secretary of the Party Central Committee and First Secretary of Moscow Region Party Committee

  1950

  Overlord for Agriculture

  1952

  (October) As Politburo member and Party Secretary delivered report on “Amendments to the Statutes of the All-Union Communist Party” to 19th Party Congress. Malenkov delivered the report on the state of the Party on behalf of Stalin

  1953

  (January) “Doctors’ Plot”

  (March) Death of Stalin. Malenkov Prime Minister and First Secretary. Khrushchev ranked after Malenkov, Molotov, Beria and Kaganovich

  (September) First Secretary of All-Union Communist Party

  1954

  Khrushchev to Peking, with Bulganin etc. Virgin Lands Campaign

  1955

  (February) Malenkov replaced by Bulganin as Prime Minister. Visits to Yugoslavia, Geneva, India, etc.

  1956

  (February) 20th Party Congress and Secret Speech Visit to London

  (Autumn) Defiance of Poland

  Hungarian Revolt

  1957

  (May) Recovers threatened position. Decentralisation of industry

  (June) Smashes opposition of Anti-Party Group (Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, Shepilov and others)

  (October) Dismissal of Marshal Zhukov

  (October) First man in space: Major Gagarin in

  Sputnik 1

  (November) Moscow Meeting of world Communist Parties, attended by Mao Tse-tung

  (March) Khrushchev takes over Premiership from Bulganin

  1958

  (Summer) Middle East Crisis. Concealed disagreement with China

  (Autumn) Berlin Crisis

  1959

  (Feb.) Macmillan to Moscow

  (November) First visit to the United States. Camp David

  1959-60

  Quarrel with China develops behind scenes. Khrushchev refuses to give China atomic know-how

  1960

  (May) Shooting down of the U2

  (June) Abortive Paris Summit Meeting

  (June) First direct attack on China behind closed doors at Rumanian Party Congress in Bucharest

  (November) Chinese quarrel publicised to 81 Communist Parties at Moscow Meeting, but still concealed from world

  1961

  (Summer) Vienna meeting with President Kennedy

  (Autumn) 22nd Party Congress. First public attack on Chinese policies (China disguised as Albania)

  1962

  (October) Cuba Crisis

  1962-3

  (Winter) Chinese quarrel finally brought out into the open

  1963

  Disciplinary action against writers, etc.

  (August) Nuclear Test-ban Treaty. Professor Liber-man’s debut. Disastrous harvest

  (November) Assassination of President Kennedy

  1964

  Preparations in teeth of world Communist Party resistance for a Conference of all the Parties (Preliminary Conference scheduled for 15 December) for a show-down with China

  (September) Adjubei to Bonn

  (October) Resigned all offices. Succeeded by Brezhnev (First Secretary) and Kosygin (Prime Minister)

  Notes and Sources

  Chapter 1 From Log Cabin to Red Square

  1 It is impossible to be certain of anything about the origins of Bolsheviks who joined the Pa
rty after 1917, so important was it for them to be able to claim a working-class or peasant background (as, increasingly, for English politicians to-day). But it is highly improbable that Khrushchev’s grandfather was a landowner fallen upon hard times, as has sometimes been stated. It takes more than two generations to achieve the quintessential peasant as exhibited in N. S. Khrushchev.

  2 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, London, 1958; p. 16.

  3 Madame Olga Ivinskaya and her daughter Irina. For the story of her arrest, trial and sentencing, see The Observer (London) for 1 October, 1961.

  Chapter 2 The Child, then the Man

  1 Khrushchev talking to a group of foreign visitors. Quoted by Harold H. Martin in The Sunday Times Magazine (London), 13 December, 1964.

  2 Both Khrushchev’s own remarks about his past and the statements in official hand-outs vary and contradict each other so much that one has to read between the lines. As Khrushchev approached his zenith the official biographies added more and more details calculated to glorify his revolutionary beginnings and also, more particularly, his activities in the Red Army during the Civil War. Since his fall these claims have been forgotten.

  3 Polytyka (Warsaw) no. 28, 11 July, 1959. Quoted by Lazar Pistrak in The Grand Tactician: Khrushchev’s Rise to Power, London, 1961; p. 10.

  4 The Provisional Government which was installed after the March Revolution and the abdication of Nicholas II was, of course, infinitely more democratic than anything hitherto dreamed of in Russia: hence its vulnerability to the undemocratic Bolsheviks. But it was not a government elected by the people. Lenin saw to it that it did not have time to sort itself out and appeal to the country.

  Chapter 3 Revolution, Chaos, Civil War

  1 See note 2 to chapter 2 above.

  2 Decree of 26 September, 1918.

  3 Harold H. Martin, op. cit.

  4 More confusion. Details of the death of Khrushchev’s first wife supplied largely by his second wife, but there are conflicting accounts.

  5 It has been said that Khrushchev and his children lived with his parents in Yuzovka before his second marriage. For a most harrowing eye-witness description of the workers’ quarter in Yuzovka on the eve of the 1914 war see the second volume of Konstantin Paustovsky’s autobiography, Slow Approach of Thundery London, 1965.

  Chapter 4 First Steps of a Very Long Climb

  1 It is commonly believed that police reports to the Centre conceal the nature and volume of discontent: the assumption is that it is in the interests of the provincial police to persuade the higher authorities that all is for the best in the best possible of worlds in their own areas. The contrary is true. It is in the interest of the police to convince the Government of the continued necessity for their existence. In fact, discontent has been so sharp and widespread that it is quite enough for them—or has been quite enough until very recently—to report the actual state of affairs. The Smolensk Archive (see below) bears this out to perfection. The people who were, and are, anxious to prove to the Government and Party headquarters that all is well are, above all, the local Party Secretaries, the planners and the economic ministries—as Khrushchev in later life was so often and so bitterly to complain.

  2 Merle Fainsod: Smolensk under Soviet Rule, London, 1959. This extremely well edited compilation gives a more vivid and factual insight into Soviet living conditions in the 1930s than all other books put together.

  3 ibid., p. 49.

  4 ibid.

  5 Partinoye Stroitelstvo, no. 2, 1930. This was not Malenkov’s solitary literary effort. He wrote a good deal.

  6 Pistrak, op. cit., p. 21.

  Chapter 5 More Stalinist than Stalin

  1 Pravda, 7 October, 1926, “Why is the Party Against Discussion?” a key article.

  2 Pistrak, op. cit., p. 29. Here I must acknowledge my debt to Mr. Pistrak. Although I do not agree with some of his views, the range and depth of his researches into Khrushchev’s early career, and particularly his reading of the Ukrainian Press etc., make his book, The Grand Tactician, indispensable for all who follow in his footsteps. I have drawn on him freely. Besides supplying a number of quotations otherwise inaccessible, he showed me where to look in the course of my own researches into the years of obscurity.

  3 Quoted by Pistrak, op. cit., p. 31, from Visti VTsVK (Kiev), 22 October, 1926.

  4 This may be seen as the first beginnings of a process which reached its logical conclusion after 1939, when Stalin ceased even to pretend to pay attention to the Central Committee itself and ruled through his Politburo and Secretariat in defiance of the Party Statutes. There was not even an Ail-Union Party Congress between the 18th, in 1939 (when Khrushchev became a full member of the Politburo), and the 19th, in 1952, a few months before Stalin’s death.

  Chapter 6 To Moscow! Perseverance and Intrigue

  1 15 Syezd VKP(b) Stenografichesky Otchet, Moscow, 1927, p. 1318.

  2 Pasternak, op. cit., p. 178.

  3 Churchill, Winston S.: The Hinge of Fate, London, 1951, pp. 447-8.

  4 Stalin, J. V.: Problems of Communism, English ed. Moscow 1947, p. 480. It is interesting to record that the comparable figures for 1851, before the emancipation of the serfs, and with a much smaller population, were: cattle, 20,962,000; sheep, 37,527,000; pigs, 886,000; horses (in 1882) 21,203,900.

  5 Djilas, Milovan: Conversations with Stalin, London, 1962, p. 98.

  6 This story does not appear in the standard version of the Secret Speech to the 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Communist Party; but it was in wide circulation in the Soviet Union before the speech was published in the West, and was certainly told by Khrushchev.

  7 The Secret Speech of 24 February, 1956, p. 240. This speech, in the version issued by the U.S. State Department, has never been challenged, and is tacitly accepted by Soviet officials when Stalin is under discussion. The version referred to throughout this book was printed by Bertram D. Wolfe, together with an exhaustive commentary and analysis, under the title: Khrushchev and Stalin’s Ghost, New York, 1957.

  8 For a brilliant account of this period, as for Stalin’s life and work in general, see I. Deutscher: Stalin, London, 1949.

  9 Pravda, 26 May, 1930.

  10 Pravda, 3 June, 1930.

  11 For the story of Nadezhda Allilulyeva see especially Deutscher, op. cit.; Pistrak op. cit.; Kravchenko, V: I Chose Freedom, London, 1947; and Barmine, A: One Who Survived, New York, 1945. Barmine says that he received the true story of her suicide from her brother, who was his friend.

  12 But he knew just what was going on, and not simply from hearsay. Indeed he was actively responsible, under Kaganovich, for the final collectivisation of Moscow Region in 1932. Early in 1933 he was sent out with Bulganin and Malenkov to finish off the good work.

  13 See in particular his remarks about Ilya Ehrenburg and his exchange with Yevgeny Yevtushenko at “cultural” meetings on 17 December, 1962, and 8 March, 1963. These are reported in extenso in Encounter Pamphlet no. 9, London, 1963 and Priscilla Johnson’s Khrushchev and the Arts, Cambridge, Mass., 1965.

  Chapter 7 City Politics, Moscow Style

  1 Tourists who may not find this building attractive are advised that its modest and perfect proportions were spoilt by the addition of extra stories at a later date.

  2 Stalin, J. V., op. cit., p. 502.

  3 ibid., p. 356.

  4 Lenin’s Testament, which may be read in Wolfe, op. cit., was quoted in the Secret Speech and published for the first time in the Soviet Union in Kommunist, no. 9, 1956. In it Lenin, on his death-bed, alarmed at Stalin’s growing power, characterised the General Secretary in terms which have since been echoed widely, and urged the comrades to removed him from his office. It was generally believed that this Testament had been discussed at a plenary session of the Central Committee in May 1924, when it was decided, in spite of protests from Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, to suppress it and not make it known to the delegates to the 13th Party Congress, then imminent. Khrush
chev, however, in his secret speech, said it had in fact been made known to that Congress (which he did not attend). Pistrak, op. cit., says it was actually distributed to the delegates in the Congress Bulletin of the 15th Party Congress in December 1927, which Khrushchev attended as a delegate from Stalino Region.