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L’Homme Nikita May 1,
2003 NYRB Robert
Cottrell Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
by William Taubman Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the
Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism
by Mikhail Gorbachev and Zdenek Mlynár, translated from
the Russian by George Shriver, with a foreword by Archie Brown A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia
by Alexander N. Yakovlev,translated from the Russian by Anthony Austin,
with a foreword by Paul Hollander William Taubman’s monumental, long-awaited biography of Nikita
Khrushchev is the most important book on Khrushchev to appear in English
since the deposed Soviet leader’s own memoirs in 1970. It is rich in analysis
and factual detail, shedding new light both on Khrushchev’s life and on the
Soviet state. Taubman says he feels “both a special
affection and special disdain” for Khrushchev. The affection is more evident
in his early pages where he shows the young Khrushchev, born in 1894, as a
boy toughened by a hardscrabble peasant childhood in the Russian village of Kalinovka, near the eastern Ukraine border. He leaves
school young, works in dirty and dangerous jobs in the plants and mines of
Ukraine, struggles to raise a family, joins the Bolshevik Party in pursuit of
social justice, and becomes an intense admirer of Stalin. If it wanted to
choose a representative figure of his generation, the Party itself could
hardly find a better man. Taubman’s disdain becomes more apparent
as he shows Khrushchev rising through the Party ranks, drawing closer to
Stalin, and surviving the events of three turbulent decades: Stalin’s great
terror in the late 1930s, the war against Hitler, the post-Stalin power
struggle which Khrushchev wins, the cold war, and, finally, his own ousting
from power in 1964. The portrait Taubman gives of
Khrushchev and his Kremlin colleagues at the height of their power is
dismaying but persuasive. Even for politicians, they spend a disproportionate
amount of their time drinking, plotting, lying, swearing, and insulting one
another, caught between anger and despair. (Taubman
describes Khrushchev as drunk on public occasions, or seeming to be drunk, at
least ten times in three successive chapters.) But for
learning about the qualities needed for leadership of a large country, we had
better look elsewhere. The more that is revealed about the inner workings of
the Soviet Union—and Taubman’s book is a strong
contribution to that process of discovery—the more the Soviet system proves
to have involved a squandering of people and resources on a scale that is
almost impossible to imagine. The aspects of Soviet life that seemed absurd
or perverse or cruel at the time—the Marxist-Leninist slogans, the purges,
the obsessive secrecy, the central planning—look even worse with hindsight.
They were indeed just as perverse and cruel as they had seemed, if not more
so. What Lenin left his heirs was not so much a system of government as an
excuse for bad behavior that lasted seventy-five years, sustained by a
combination of wars and oil revenues. 1. Taubman tells us that he intended to
deliver the manuscript of his book in 1989. Instead, he kept working on it
for another decade, profiting from the access to sources that came with the
collapse of Communist rule. It is a remarkable achievement on his part that
his book sounds so fresh after a decade of rewriting. Had he kept to his
first deadline, Taubman says, “the result would
probably have been very different.” For one thing it would have been a book
more favorable to Khrushchev. There would have been less scope for
cross-checking and challenging the account in Khrushchev’s own memoirs. There
would have been more occasions on which he would have given Khrushchev and
the system around him the benefit of the doubt. Instead,
Taubman’s exhaustive exploration of a life already
well known in its main elements will reinforce the widely held view of
Khrushchev as a political failure. Khrushchev’s shortcomings as a politician
are chronicled here with a candor that is all the more disarming in view of
the author’s sympathy for Khrushchev as a man. The Khrushchev shown in Taubman’s finished portrait is driven and tormented at
the height of his career by the contradiction that must have afflicted many
other Communists of the day: the contradiction between his naive but
authentic desire that the Communist system should yield its promised utopia
and his shame at what that same system had already produced under Stalin,
with his own participation. In Khrushchev’s case, the assistance to Stalin
had been immense. Stalin had made him a Central Committee member in 1934 and
a candidate member of the ruling Politburo three years later. He ran the
Moscow Party organization, and later the Ukrainian Central Committee, during
Stalin’s great terror of 1937–1938. Of the thirty-eight top officials working
under him in Moscow, only three survived. From this alone he must have
guessed the scale of the repression. He “assisted,” Taubman
writes, in the “arrest and liquidation of his own colleagues and friends.” So, as Taubman makes clear, the defining moment of Khrushchev’s
early leadership, the secret speech he made in 1956 attacking Stalin for his
personality cult and the use of terror, was not simply a bold gesture. It was
a finely balanced piece of opportunism, an act of concealment as well as
revelation. It acknowledged what had been done, but ducked the question of who, save for Stalin alone, had done it. Khrushchev was
leading the attack on Stalin in large part to ensure that the attack stayed
well away from himself. Khrushchev depicted Stalin
as having acted alone in directing the terror. He “ignored the norms of Party
life and trampled on the Leninist principle of collective Party leadership,”
Khrushchev said. Anticipating
the obvious next question, Khrushchev posed it himself: “Why did we not do
something earlier, during Stalin’s life, in order to prevent the loss of
innocent lives?” The answer, he said, was that “the majority of the Politburo
members did not, at that time, know all of the circumstances in these matters
and could not therefore intervene.” This was nonsense, of course, not least
in its suggestion that mass murder could somehow be justified if one knew
“all of the circumstances.” But the only people who could confidently have
challenged Khrushchev were other Politburo members who would thereby have
incriminated themselves. The
effects of Khrushchev’s speech, given at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet
Communist Party in February 1956, were far-reaching. The speech was a signal
of the Party’s retreat from mass murder and assassination as ordinary means
to intimidate the public and sort out leadership squabbles. It marked the
beginning of the end of the gulag prison camps, and the moment at which
entire ethnic groups exiled by Stalin from one part of the Soviet Union to
another could begin their trek home. It inspired a new generation of
liberals, including Alexander Yakovlev, who would
later find their champion in Mikhail Gorbachev. It also brought about a
cultural thaw that made possible the publication in 1962 of Alexander
Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich. Even so,
as a sign of de-Stalinization rather than of general liberalization,
Khrushchev’s speech went only so far. He made it behind closed doors, to a Party elite. He limited its circulation, fearing to
provoke popular unrest—which did follow in Eastern Europe. As far as the
general public was concerned, Stalin retained a leading position in the
history of the Party and could still be admired. Within months of the speech
he was being praised publicly again, even by Khrushchev himself. More
fundamentally, Khrushchev insisted on Stalin’s terror as a betrayal or
perversion of the Soviet Communist project. He refused to see it as a
logical, even an inevitable extension of Communist methods, the
interpretation favored later by harsher critics of Bolshevism such as Yakovlev. Khrushchev talked as though the main thing was
to recover and restore Leninist truths from beneath the debris of Stalinism.
In that quixotic hope he anticipated Gorbachev, who also thought Soviet
communism could be reformed into something worth having, and who went even
further in proving himself wrong. We can
further diminish the nobility of Khrushchev’s great speech, if we want to, by
arguing that some measure of de-Stalinization was an economic and political
necessity. Khrushchev dwelled mainly on the Party officials who had been
killed by Stalin in the mid-1930s (it was, after all, a speech made to other
Party officials), but Stalin’s policies over the decades of his rule had
caused millions of more ordinary people to be executed or starved or
imprisoned. Geoffrey Hosking, a British historian, argues that
totalitarianism was reaching its limits during Stalin’s last years. A tenth
or even a fifth of the entire adult male Soviet population was being
incarcerated and worked to death. The labor camps were cheap to run in the
short term, while the inmates were docile, but Khrushchev realized that
disorder there would be expensive and even impossible to contain.
Alternatively, the camps could be shut and the millions released. That is
what Khrushchev began doing. But a way still had to be found of confronting
what had happened. Blaming it all on Stalin personally was the least bad
option. The
denunciation of Stalin may have been a prudent political act. But it was also
an extraordinary personal act by Khrushchev. We can hardly imagine any other
Soviet leader of the period daring to do it. Taubman
sees the speech as “an act of repentance, a way of [Khrushchev’s] reclaiming
his identity as a decent man by telling his truth.” But the forceful language
of the speech suggests to me something closer to a venting of anger. Imagine
the bitterness and betrayal Khrushchev must have felt in 1956, as he looked
back on his relations with Stalin. He had thought Stalin a genius, albeit a
murderous one. Now he saw that Stalin had been half insane—and that he,
Khrushchev, had been a useful idiot. The Russian psychiatrist Aron Belkin has characterized
Khrushchev as an “Oedipus who had lived in the shadow of his father, Stalin,
and passionately loved ‘mother’ Russia. Later, with sadistic satisfaction, he
had committed parricide at the Twentieth Party Congress.” The
“secret speech” and the thaw that followed it remain the events most readily
associated by Russians with Khrushchev’s name—though his cavalier
handing-over of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 has been much criticized in recent
years, and his persecution of the Church may be recalled more bitterly as
Orthodox Christianity regains a prominent part in Russian life. The
West, on the other hand, remembers Khrushchev best for the vigor with which
he prosecuted the cold war—invading Hungary, dividing Berlin, banging his
shoe on a table at the United Nations, and shipping missiles to Cuba. On the
shoe-banging incident, which appalled other delegates, Khrushchev was
“delighted with his own performance,” Taubman
reports. It was “necessary to inject a little life into the stuffy atmosphere
of the UN,” the Russian leader said. The outburst ensured him a reputation in
the West as an aggressive man, though he was in fact more of an impulsive
one. As with his schemes to give Berlin to East Germany, and keep missiles in
Cuba (though not, sadly, with his invasion of Hungary, an easier target),
Khrushchev often threatened things that, in the event, he would not or could
not do. Taubman thinks Khrushchev hurled
threats of nuclear war around so liberally because this was his idea of
deterrence. He saw the threatening of war as the best way of avoiding it, on
the grounds that his opponents (especially in the United States) would be
even more afraid of it than he was. But Khrushchev blustered more from
instinct than from calculation, and besides, he had very few long-range
rockets. His lack of them was what caused him to start shipping medium-range
missiles into Cuba, the better to threaten American cities, and there his
bluff was finally called. Taubman traces the Cuban adventure back
to a walk Khrushchev took by the Black Sea with his defense minister, Rodion Malinovsky, in April
1962. Khrushchev reflected on the nearness of US missiles in Turkey, and on
how clever he would be to match them with some Soviet missiles in Cuba. “What
if we throw a hedgehog down Uncle Sam’s pants?” he said to Malinovsky. Once
those missiles were in place, Khrushchev thought, they would threaten the
United States, and the two countries would be even. What happened instead was
that the US detected and photographed the Russian missiles in transit. It
seems astonishing now that Khrushchev had neither anticipated this
contingency nor prepared for it, but, as Taubman
shows, he had not. Instead he launched into panicky negotiations with
Washington aimed at securing a face-saving formula for taking the missiles
away again; after flirting with nuclear war, he got a deal involving secret
removal of US missiles from Turkey. Khrushchev
was hampered at such times by the dictatorial nature of his regime. The
arrival of nuclear weapons changed the rules of warfare and of international
relations in ways too big for any politician to understand unaided. But since
the “science” of Marxism-Leninism was supposed to transcend all other
knowledge, a Communist Party boss was expected to formulate policy for
nuclear warfare as well as for everything else of public interest, from the
fine arts to economic planning. The nuclear strategy of the Soviet Union did
not evolve from a broadly based consensus of informed opinion about what was
desirable and possible: it followed from Khrushchev’s intuitions, discounted
by the uneven capacities of his economy and army to deliver. The
mixture of provocation and experimentation in Khrushchev’s foreign policy
helped to stir opposition to him within the Soviet Politburo. His colleagues
thought Khrushchev might tip Russia into an unnecessary war. They also
thought he lacked the necessary dignity for representing the USSR. He was too
prone to long rambling speeches, loud vulgar jokes, and strong drink, the
sort of behavior that was common in politics at home but not meant for
export. But it
was domestic failures that sealed Khrushchev’s fate. The harvests were
smaller. His obsession with growing corn became a national joke. He rashly
proclaimed targets for industry and farming that were specific but
impossible, such as his call in 1957 for a tripling of meat production within
three years. He seemed scarcely to consider either the political consequences
of being seen to miss such targets or the practical implications for the rest
of the economy if an industry seriously tried to meet them. Taubman recounts the sad story of Aleksei
Larionov, a Party boss in Ryazan, to the south of
Moscow, who tried to triple meat production as Khrushchev required. Ryazan
slaughtered dairy herds, bought or rustled cattle from neighboring regions,
and tried to raise taxes from peasants in the form of more meat. In the end
the province produced a sixth of what it had promised, and Larionov committed suicide. Khrushchev
did the greatest damage to his support within the bureaucracy by trying to
shake up government and industry with ill-considered reorganization plans
that achieved nothing save confusion and anger. In 1957 he abolished
government ministries in charge of specific industries, and redistributed
their power to regional committees. The change was stealthily reversed over
the next five years. In 1962 he ordered the Communist Party itself to be
split into separate industrial and agricultural branches, but he was deposed
before the split was completed. This was just as well for Party theorists,
who would have been hard pressed to explain how a party that famously claimed
to unite workers and peasants had instead become one party for each. 2. Mikhail
Gorbachev identifies some of Khrushchev’s errors in a series of conversations
with the veteran Czech dissident Zdenek Mlynár, now available in English as Conversations with Gorbachev: On Perestroika, the Prague Spring, and
the Crossroads of Socialism. Gorbachev’s expert aim is hardly surprising,
since he reenacted some of Khrushchev’s frustrations when in power
himself—though you sense he would prefer not to have the parallels drawn. He
recalls: At first Khrushchev enjoyed
tremendous authority. But the system resisted change. And when the reforms
got into tight straits and began to be accompanied by instability in society
and increased discontent, Khrushchev began to rush back and forth in
different directions in search of measures to save the day and in the process
committed errors and made miscalculations. Mlynár politely refrains from
observing that this comment could also sum up Gorbachev’s record in power. In
Gorbachev’s view, Khrushchev made a fundamental mistake in setting some of
his growth targets with reference to the United States. Khrushchev promised
to “catch up with and surpass” the US, first in food production and later in
general prosperity. Stalin, says Gorbachev, would never have done such a
thing: Stalin never permitted
comparisons of socialism or communism with capitalist reality because he
argued that an entirely new world was being built here that could not be
compared with any preceding system…. Our successes could be measured only by
our own standards of measurement…. Khrushchev, with his slogan “Catch up with
and surpass America,” changed the situation fundamentally for the ordinary
Soviet citizen. It’s as though he were saying that now the aim was to live
the way they do over there. But
Khrushchev may have had little choice. Nuclear weapons had brought Russia and
the US into a direct and seemingly permanent confrontation. People on both
sides had to believe they were defending the only model of society worth
living for. Living standards, inevitably, were part of the propaganda battle.
By claiming that the Soviet model would make people richer in the future,
Khrushchev could at least distract attention from the fact that they were
poorer at present. Khrushchev’s
use of economic propaganda also had the effect of making the Soviet Union
seem more comprehensible to the West, even an example to it. Partly because
the Soviets inflated their claimed achievements, and Westerners could not
easily check the figures, the idea began taking hold in the West that the
Soviet model of growth was worth studying for its accomplishments. By 1960,
analyses of Russia’s economic growth rate, and its appeal to underdeveloped
countries, received, according to the historian Martin Malia,
“considerably more attention in Western scholarship and journals than did her
system of political controls or the techniques of purge and brainwashing.”
The West was “de-Stalinizing” its view of Russia too. And
there, roughly speaking, things rested for twenty-five years, until the
combination of a falling oil price and a disastrous Afghan war forced Russia
to admit near bankruptcy in both economic and foreign policy. Mikhail
Gorbachev struggled to change his country, only to see it collapse with a
suddenness and totality that amazed most specialists of the day and most
Russians too, Gorbachev among them. A line from his Conversations with Zdenek Mlynár should be preserved as a masterpiece of
understatement. “Naturally,” says Gorbachev, “I feel troubled by the fact
that I did not succeed in keeping the entire process of perestroika within
the framework of my intentions.” The
conversations make up a slight book, and it comes a little late, but in
Gorbachev’s talk with Mlynár you can sense the strengths
that once made him the most admired politician in the world, and you can
sense also the limitations that left him so confounded by his own failure. He
still talks as though the collapse of communism was a greater tragedy than
communism itself. Even in 1993, Gorbachev could speak of “the essence of
Leninism as an attempt to develop in practice the ‘living creative activity
of the masses.’” He could call Stalinism “a system for mobilizing society
under extreme conditions.” He means this as a criticism, but even so misses
the point that Stalinism was a system for creating catastrophes, not
responding to them. Mlynár, a friend of Gorbachev’s since
their student days together in Moscow, is a tactful interviewer. A mutual
affection and respect is evident throughout the discussion, but the two men
have deep differences over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968,
when Mlynár was a leading figure in the Czech
dissident movement. Gorbachev recalls the invasion as a “dramatic and painful
event, but one I thought necessary for the defense of socialism against
subversive activities on the part of the Western powers.” Mlynár
remembers standing alongside Alexander Dubcek in Prague when the Red Army
burst into the city: “One’s concept of socialism at such a moment moves to
last place,” Mlynár says, “but unconsciously at the
same time you know that it has a direct connection of some sort with the
automatic weapon pointing at your back.” 3. If one’s
concept of Soviet socialism needs further clarification, Alexander Yakovlev’s volume of essays, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, helps supply it.
Published in Russian two years ago, it appears now in a fine translation
preserving the author’s angry, sad, often despairing voice. Yakovlev, a veteran diplomat and
Gorbachev adviser, has since 1989 run a commission formed with government
backing to review the repression of the Soviet era. These essays are a
distillation of his findings. He makes no pretense of academic detachment. He
wants, as publicly as he can, to vent the rage that he calls “the only
response to those who march up and down our land braying that ‘Stalin didn’t
go far enough.’” After
years working at the top of the Soviet bureaucracy, and years more on the
records of its victims, Yakovlev has no residual
uncertainties, no moments of hesitation or indulgence. He has pronounced innocent
more than four million people who were executed, jailed, or deported. He
calculates that some 35 million people were killed by political terror, or
deliberate starvation, throughout the Soviet era, a conclusion that takes on
special authority in view of the documents that have been available to him.
His judgments have a devastating finality. Here is his short summary of the
career of Lenin, the man whose eye for creativity Gorbachev so admired: Exponent of mass terror,
violence, the dictatorship of the proletariat, class struggle, and other
inhuman concepts. Organizer of the fratricidal Russian civil war and
concentration camps, including camps for children. Incessant in his demands
for arrests and capital punishment by bullet or rope. Personally responsible
for the deaths of millions of Russian citizens. By every norm of
international law, posthumously indictable for crimes against humanity. Those
who feel these words may be a little hard on the Bolsheviks should consider Yakovlev’s summary of the way they treated the clergy: Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev
was mutilated, castrated, and shot, and his corpse was left naked for the
public to desecrate. Metropolitan Veniamin of St.
Petersburg, in line to succeed the patriarch, was turned into a pillar of
ice: he was doused with cold water in the freezing cold. Bishop Germogen of Tobolsk, who had
voluntarily accompanied the Czar into exile, was strapped alive to the
paddlewheel of a steamboat and mangled by the rotating blades. Archbishop Andronnik of Perm, who had been renowned earlier as a
missionary and had worked as such in Japan, was buried alive. Archbishop Vasily was crucified and burned…. Priests, monks and
nuns…were crucified on the central doors of iconostases, thrown into
cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled with
priestly stoles, given Communion with melted lead, drowned in holes in the
ice. Yakovlev has a keen ear for voices—a
gift that must haunt him as he plows through yet another terrible account of
death or suffering. Here he quotes from a child explaining what it meant to
be persecuted in the 1930s as a well-off peasant: “Our huge family…had
nowhere to live, nothing to eat, no place to work…. We scraped along until
spring; with the thaw we dug a pit in the courtyard, and the whole family
lived in this pit.” Yakovlev cites an eyewitness’s account
of Koreans deported from the far-eastern provinces of Russia to Kazakhstan in
1937: Losing all self-control and
dignity, people in white dresses and gray padded jackets clasped their
drivers and guards by the knees, begging to be taken to some inhabited place,
because in the freezing cold and wind, without shelter or a roof over their
heads, the little children and the old would die, and even the young would
hardly make it till morning. Once I
asked Yakovlev how he found the strength to plow
through the records of so much torment. He replied: It is really very difficult.
Sometimes I do want to give this thing up. I think,
why does it have to be me who does this? Very often when I read these
documents I become scared. But I become even more scared when I think there
are millions of people who are absolutely indifferent to this information. But as Yakovlev points out in his book: To this day the country
proliferates with monuments to Lenin and streets named after him; many a
local government leader has Lenin’s portrait hanging in his office; hundreds
of Bolshevik and frankly Fascist newspapers are being published; monstrous
speeches defending Stalin and attacking the victims of the evil regime are
delivered in the Duma. The
fiftieth anniversary of Stalin’s death, on March 5 this year, was an occasion
for many public figures to insist that the late dictator should be remembered
with at least some measure of respect. An opinion poll by the Public Opinion
Foundation found that 36 percent of Russians thought Stalin “did more good
than bad for the country,” while only 29 percent thought the reverse. From
which it can only be inferred that many Russians have strange ideas about
what is good, and bad, for their country. 1. Khrushchev said almost this on March 7,
1963, at a meeting for artists and intellectuals at the Kremlin, though he
was probably drunk at the time. "You think it was easy for us?" he
said, speaking of his time with Stalin. "Well, just between us, just
between us, the man was insane in his last years, IN-SANE, I tell you. A
madman on the throne. Can you imagine that?... And
you think it was easy? Our nerves were strained to the limit, and we had to
drink vodka all the time. And we always had to be on the alert."↩ 2. The
Crimean transaction is one of the few points at which Taubman's
book sins by omission: the affair merits more than a single glancing
reference. I wish, too, that Taubman had found more
time to dwell on Russia's relations with Japan. Under Khrushchev, arguments
over the disputed Kurile Islands and over the terms of a peace treaty took
crucial turns which color relations to this day. But on relations with China,
and the schism between Soviet and Chinese Communists that occurred under
Khrushchev, Taubman is particularly insightful. His
book is worth reading for its portrait of Mao Zedong alone. Mao and
Khrushchev came to hate each other because each considered himself the
world's preeminent Communist after Stalin. This lent a devastating candor
even to their public exchanges. By 1960 Khrushchev was publicly calling Mao a
"scumbag" and "a Buddha who gets his theory out of his
nose." ↩ 3. Nuclear
threats entered into his small talk. Once at the Bolshoi Theater Khrushchev
called the British ambassador, Sir Frank Roberts, to his box and told him
that if nuclear war came then six hydrogen bombs would be "quite
enough" for Britain and nine would do for France. ↩ 4. The
conversations were recorded in 1993–1994. Mlynár
died in 1997.↩ |