Khrushchev Read online

  KHRUSHCHEV

  Edward Crankshaw

  Contents

  1 From Log Cabin to Red Square

  2 The Child, then the Man

  3 Revolution, Chaos, Civil War

  4 First Steps of a Very Long Climb

  5 More Stalinist than Stalin

  6 To Moscow! Perseverance and Intrigue

  7 City Politics, Moscow Style

  8 “We Have a Beautiful Metro!”

  9 The Great Purge

  10 Viceroy of the Ukraine

  11 1939: Invader of Poland

  12 The Great Patriotic War

  13 Reconstruction, Russification

  14 Overture to the Struggle for Supremacy

  15 Stalin’s End; Malenkov’s Challenge

  16 The Chieftain Finds his Voice

  17 Old Dogmas, New Ideas

  18 The Secret Speech and the World Stage

  19 Victory: the Dictator by Consent

  20 A Visionary Imprisoned by his Past

  Chronological record

  Notes and sources

  Chapter 1

  From Log Cabin to Red Square

  One evening when Khrushchev was at the summit of his power he was holding forth in one of his more ebullient moods to a group of Western diplomatists at a reception in Moscow. Suddenly, irritated by their professional coolness and evasiveness, he checked himself and exclaimed: “When I find myself talking to you gentlemen, I also find myself wondering. … You all went to great schools, to famous universities—to Harvard, to Oxford, to the Sorbonne. I never had any proper schooling. I went about barefoot and in rags. When you were in the nursery I was herding cows for two kopeks. I had no diplomatic training … And yet here we are, and I can make rings round you all…. Tell me, gentlemen, why?”

  That story is no doubt partly apocryphal, like most good stories. But like most apocryphal stories it strikes at the heart of the matter. Nobody in that little circle cared to hazard an answer to Khrushchev’s interesting question. It is worth trying to answer it now.

  He was born in 1894, the child of peasants who were later driven from the land, the family home, by poverty. The family home belonged to his grandfather: it was a mud hut, or izba, with a ragged thatched roof, in Kalinovka, a poor village in the very rich Government of Kursk, where Great Russia borders the Ukraine. The grandfather had been born a serf, the absolute chattel of his master, who could sell him, or exchange him for a pony or a gun-dog, without anybody asking why.1 His son, Sergei Khrushchev, was one of those many peasants who were defeated by the consequences of the abolition of serfdom by Alexander II in 1861, soon after the Crimean War. There was not enough land to go round: only the strongest, the cleverest, the most predatory among them could make a decent living from their own land; the rest scraped a subsistence, got hopelessly into debt to the inevitable greedy and acquisitive village kulak, spent their energies toiling for a pittance on the big landowners’ fields, or drifted to the towns to better themselves. Sergei Nicaronovich was one of these. Leaving his wife and children behind in his father’s izba he went seasonally to work for the winter as a carpenter in the coalfields of the Donets valley, returning in the spring to work on the land. His great ambition, Khrushchev was much later to say, was to buy himself a horse, but he never saved enough for this, and, in the end, the whole family moved for good.

  Thus the infant Khrushchev was one of a vast family of nearly 100 million peasants, mainly illiterate, lately liberated from serfdom, who then formed four-fifths of the population of Imperial Russia. Nobody knows where the name Khrushchev came from. But there was a wealthy landowning family of Khrushchevs in the eastern Ukraine, and it is likely that Nikita’s own forebears lived as serfs on the Khrushchev estate, taking their name from the master, as was common in those days. Nikita himself was christened Nikita Sergeievich, Nikita son of Sergei, after his father. He was a child without a history, and as an infant he was lucky to survive. There was nothing in his background to distinguish him from a hundred million other peasants so primitive and backward in their attitudes and standards that they belonged effectively to another world from ours. Sixty years later, nevertheless, he was to become the autocrat of the Soviet Empire, now the home of 220 million souls, disposing of a massive and complex economy, a vast and modern army, navy and air force, and presiding over the launching of the first man into space.

  His opportunity was the Revolution of 1917, which shattered the framework of Russian society and threw the field open to all the talents, heavily favouring the workers in the towns. But there were still more than a hundred million peasants and workers for Khrushchev to compete with. He was twenty-three at the time of the Revolution and his education had been limited to two or three years in the village school. He did not join the Bolsheviks until 1918, when he was twenty-four. It would be evident from this brief record alone that Khrushchev was a man of extraordinary gifts and also of obvious limitations. Yet when he began to emerge as the supreme leader of the Soviet Union in 1954 there were many who could not bring themselves to believe that he was a man with the secret of leadership and power. He was contrasted unfavourably with his predecessor, Stalin: a pygmy, it was said, had succeeded a giant.

  To understand how this mistake could be made and to appreciate the character of Khrushchev it is necessary to range far and wide over the landscape of Russian society, moving away from the record of the man’s immediate activities, and back again: he was formed by the Russia which he himself sought to mould, and because in a book of this limited size it is out of the question to bring alive the whole country, for so long terribly convulsed, we must, from time to time, select certain keys to the general situation.

  For example, it is useful to bear in mind that Nikita Sergeievich Khrushchev was born at almost precisely the same moment in time as the fictional hero of Pasternak’s great novel, Doctor Zhivago; the Russia into which he was born and the times through which he lived were thus the Russia and the times of Yuri Zhivago. But Zhivago was a bourgeois and Khrushchev was a peasant. When Yuri Zhivago was riding about the Russian countryside in an open carriage with his uncle, visiting wealthy and cultivated rural notabilities, the young Khrushchev, nine years old, had already left school and was herding the village cows.

  Uncle Kolya was interested in the land-problem, and on one of his excursions, with Yuri Zhivago at his side, he reflected aloud to the driver on the dangerous mood of the peasants:

  “‘People are getting pretty rough here,’” he said: “‘A merchant has had his throat slit and the stud-farm of the Zemsky has been burned down. What do you think of it all? What are they saying in your village?’

  “‘What do you expect them to say? The peasants have got out of hand. They’ve been treated too well. That’s no good for the likes of us. Give the peasants rope and God knows we’ll all be at each other’s throats’.”2

  Uncle Kolya’s driver was a jumped-up hanger-on of the Russian intelligentsia, himself precariously separated from the immemorial masses by a veneer of education. Nikita Khrushchev was a child of those peasants. The year was 1903.

  Again, in the civil war after the Revolution, that fearful, confused, anarchic, treacherous struggle in which Zhivago found himself unable to aim his rifle to shoot a fellow-countryman, even when under fire himself, Nikita Khrushchev, now twenty-five, a new Bolshevik, was a Red Army man, ready to fight ruthlessly and violently and urging ruthlessness and violence on his softer comrades.

  Much later, when Lara, Pasternak’s beloved heroine, was taken away by the political police to perish miserably, Nikita Khrushchev stood at the right hand of the man who caused her to be sent away:

  “One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she
died or vanished somewhere, forgotten, a nameless number on a list which was later mislaid, in one of the innumerable … concentration camps in the north.”

  Those are the closing words of Doctor Zhivago, except for the Epilogue. Khrushchev was later to do away with many of those concentration camps, but, when he attained supreme power, he retained a number of them. And it was he who allowed Pasternak, the creator of Yuri Zhivago and Lara, to be persecuted to death; and when Pasternak was dead he allowed the real Lara, one of the models for Pasternak’s heroine, who had in fact survived the labour-camps, to be picked up and arrested on a trumped-up charge and sent away again, this time with her young daughter.3

  He also brought Russia into the twentieth century, though even now, over large areas of the country, peasant life is as wretched as it was when he himself was a child.

  Chapter 2

  The Child, then the Man

  At the turn of the century, when Khrushchev was six years old, the revolutionary ferment among the students, the intelligentsia and in innumerable families of the nobility was building up to a dangerous head of force. There were two main revolutionary parties: by far the largest were the Social Revolutionaries, who believed in violence and individual acts of terror, and exhibited their main strength in the provinces and the countryside; smaller, but more coherent and cohesive, were the Social Democrats, who took their inspiration from Karl Marx and, eschewing violence and assassination, looked for support among the urban proletariat. These had no faith in the ability of the peasants, overwhelming in numbers though they were, to effect by violence any useful change: revolution must come, but it could come only when the town workers, the urban proletariat, had grown numerous, strong and desperate enough to turn against their masters and seize for themselves the means of industrial production. It was this party which, in 1903, was split by Lenin into two wings; his own, the Bolsheviks on the one hand; on the other, the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks, like Lenin himself, were opportunists; the Mensheviks, more theoretical, were better Marxists.

  The lives of the villagers deep in the interior, often hundreds of miles from any railway, connected with the outer world only by rivers, frozen in winter, and by dirt tracks, monstrously rutted in the heat of summer, impassable because of mud for long periods during the spring thaws and the autumn rains, were hardly affected by this ferment. They had their waves of violence and then subsided into brooding. When Khrushchev’s father was a young man there was a great movement among the students and the intelligentsia of Russia to go to the peasants, to educate them by precept and example, to prepare them for the day when they could rise up in an organised manner and demand for themselves a decent life. But these missionary efforts were not well received. It was not for nothing that the peasants were called the Dark People: cunning, sly, inured to a centuries-old burden of suffering, primitive in their cultivations, they had a profound instinct for ultimate self-preservation and they regarded with hostility, suspicion and contempt the efforts of the starry-eyed idealists to help them to better ways. In famine years they were stricken, and this was the will of God: what could man do about it when week in, week out, the sun blazed down from a brassy sky and withered, then scorched and burnt to nothing the crops that were to sustain them for another year? In years when there was no famine they were so accustomed to hunger as a routine affliction before the new crops could be gathered in that they accepted this as part of the rhythm of life. Ridden by priests, but not helped by them, superstitious in their religion to the point of idolatry, living to themselves in tight family networks, often drunk on cheap vodka, treating their wives like cattle, but submitting to the absolute rule of the grandmother, the babushka, they resisted all interference from outside. Their revolutionary feelings, which sometimes fitted in with the programme of the social-revolutionaries, were limited in expression to sudden, unco-ordinated outbursts of terrifying violence, when, usually drunk, they would “slit the throat of a merchant,” or burn down the landlord’s house. Many an ardent political and educational missionary from the towns was also set on in this way. For the rest, they lived in their izbas with mud or wooden walls, their animals under the same roof, spending interminable hours and days and weeks of the long dark winters on the wooden benches which were the only furniture, with the grandparents and the children stretched out on the stifling heat of the big flat surface of the cooking stove of clay or brick. It was not all misery. Long spells of idleness would alternate with bursts of pent-up energy as they set about their cultivations and harvesting, trying to cram a year’s work into the all too short season during which the land could be worked. They used wooden ploughs and mowed and harvested with primitive scythes and sickles and threshed with flails. In the forested areas they were clever with the adze and the axe, which were also deadly weapons. Their feast days were frequent and long-drawn-out and full of song and drunken horse-play. Every funeral was the occasion for a village wake.

  Yet Khrushchev, like many more besides, became a revolutionary, and, in due course, found himself first working with and for the intelligentsia whom he as a peasant despised, then turning on them and helping to kill them off, then triumphantly ruling over their successors whom he needed for his rockets and sputniks and other ornaments of high civilisation.

  The bridge between Khrushchev and the active revolutionaries was the industrial town. Russia under Alexander III and Nicholas II was beginning to industrialise itself, largely with the aid of foreign capital and under the direction of foreign entrepreneurs; but except in certain quite exceptional centres, above all Petersburg, there was nothing yet in the way of a settled artisan class: most of the factories and the mines in the new centres were worked by peasants, like Khrushchev’s father, whose hearts were still with the land, who kept their places in the village communes warm, and who drifted purposefully to and fro, on foot, by sledge, by unsprung peasant cart, over quite surprisingly long distances between their remote villages and the new industrial centres. The feeling of attachment to the land was so deep and compelling that it was a common thing for men who had risen high in the government service and were permanently resident in Petersburg, Moscow or Odessa, whose children were born in city apartments, to pay their dues to the mir of their native village and thus keep open for themselves their claim on their tiny share of the land—which, one day, in a country run by arbitrary force, might suddenly come to be their only means of support. This ambivalence, this absence of a hard line between countryside and town, persists even to this day after the transformation of the country by the Five-year Plans into a largely industrial society: officials in dark suits, with briefcases, who spend their days in city offices, still keep their preciousties with the collectives, the kolkhozy, which work the land where they, or their fathers, were born.

  Khrushchev’s father, as we have seen, made his way regularly each autumn to the coal-mines in the valley of the Donets, the Donbas, where he lived hard, with thousands of others like him, separated from his family, and sleeping in odd corners or in the crowded dormitories of bleak and ugly workers’ barracks. This seasonal segregation of the sexes was one of the peculiar features of the Russian industrial revolution, and it had a good deal to do with the slow growth of industrial towns. There were fewer than thirty towns with a population of 100,000. Except, as in Petersburg, Moscow, and a few other places, where industry was tacked on to an existing city, there was an air of the provisional about all Russian industrial centres, an air, indeed, of the camp, with a marked absence of all those amenities— churches, chapels, public-houses, meeting-halls, music-halls— which are the expression, however seedy and inadequate, of a settled communal life. And, indeed, this tradition persisted in post-revolutionary Russia: the workers’ barracks were very much a feature of the new industrial centres of the Five-year Plan period. During the great reconstruction after the second world war segregation was so marked that for a period of years the fields were worked almost exclusively by women, boys and very old men; millions of the able-bodied men were
dead; millions more were hard at work rebuilding industry.

  In the early days of this process the young Khrushchev (he was fifteen at the time) was transplanted from the countryside to become a settled urban worker. His boyhood had been rough, but poverty and hunger and long hours in the fields were mitigated by the deep satisfactions of country life. The boy had no boots, but at least he could feel the hot sand of the dirt roads and the spongy grass of the pastures between his toes. He could fish, even if it meant poaching and being caught and beaten by keepers; he could drink in the sounds and smells of the broad, the ever fluid Russian plain. Kalinovka was not far from the Turgeniev country: it, too, had its nightingales, its long summer twilights and early dawns. At fifteen all this was finally behind him, and for the rest of his life he was to be a dweller in towns. But he never escaped from the countryside and his peasant background was to move right into the foreground of all his activity when, now a world statesman, he showed himself happiest talking to farmers, littering his speeches with peasant wit, and, out of his own deep understanding of peasant backwardness and stubbornness, conservatism above all, knocking peasant heads together and telling them what to do to make a better living for themselves.

  His childhood days had been rough, but they had the glow of life. His adolescence was rough with no redeeming feature. It was lived out in a squalid mining town, or encampment, called Yuzovka in the Donbas.

  Yuzovka was later to become Stalino, the very heart and capital of the Donbas industrial complex: the German occupation of it in 1941 marked the destruction of the whole vast industrial area of the Ukraine upon which, until that date, the economy of the Soviet Union very much depended. After the war it was rebuilt as an urgent priority, in spite of the great transfer of industry to the Urals and beyond, and it is now a large city of massive buildings and a strong, if rough, communal life—renamed, since Stalin’s posthumous destruction, Donetsk.