The Penguin History of Modern Russia

This was a forceful blend of patriotic and communist rhetoric. Yet the Programme also stated that mimicry of the USSR’s experience was no longer treated as compulsory. It was even conceded that, while the non-communist countries would have to come to socialism through a revolution of some kind, there was no inevitability about civil war. But there was a limit to Khrushchev’s ideological tolerance. Yugoslavia’s ‘revisionism’ was condemned. ‘Dogmatism’, too, was castigated: he did not name names here, but his obvious target was the People’s Republic of China. Even more odious, however, was the USA. The Americans were the bastion of imperialist oppression around the globe. Peaceful coexistence would prevent a Third World War taking place; but non-violent competition between the two systems would continue. Capitalism was entering its terminal crisis.

The reasoning behind this prognosis was not explained; and indeed there were incompletenesses and confusions throughout the Programme. This was especially obvious in the treatment of the ‘national question’. While one paragraph referred to ‘the Soviet people’ as a single unit, another noted that a large number of peoples lived in the USSR. By fudging the terminology, Khrushchev presumably had it in mind to avoid giving offence to national and ethnic groups. The Programme explicitly conceded that class distinctions took a shorter time to erase than national differences. Thus the convergence (sblizhenie) of the country’s nations would not happen in the near future; and Khrushchev, unlike Stalin, refrained from picking out the Russians for special praise. Unlike Lenin, however, he omitted to hail the ‘fusion’ (sliyanie) of all nations as an ultimate communist objective. Consequently the Programme left it unclear how it would be possible to build a communist society within just a few years.

But Khrushchev was undeterred by logical considerations of this kind. His aim was to carry his listeners and readers on the wave of his enthusiasm. He aimed to revive the political mood of the 1920s, when Bolsheviks had thought no task to be impossible. The Programme, at his insistence, boldly declared: ‘The party solemnly declares: today’s generation of Soviet people will live under communism!’¹⁴

Khrushchev had published a charter for Soviet patriotism, party authoritarianism, economic conservatism and mass participation. But he was mortified to find that most people were uninspired by it. Radical anti-Stalinists were worried by its silence about the KGB. Peasants were demoralized by its plan to turn kolkhozes into sovkhozes; and the emphasis on increased industrial productivity alarmed workers. Russians pondered why the Programme no longer gave them a higher status than the other nations of the USSR while the other nations — or at least sections of each of them — bridled at being classified as part of ‘the Soviet people’. Traditional communists were equally agitated: the Programme constituted a serious threat to their prerogatives if implemented in full. For nearly all sections of society, furthermore, Khrushchev’s ideas would involve an increase in the burden of work. Few people were happy about the prospect.

Khrushchev’s boastful projections were especially inappropriate in the light of the economic difficulties of 1961–2. Prices paid by the state since 1958 to the collective farms were below the cost of production. This was financial idiocy. Shortages of meat, butter and milk had resulted and the Presidium decided to raise the prices. In order to balance the budget it was also resolved, on 31 May 1962, to increase the prices charged to the urban consumers. It was officially pointed out that these prices had been held at the same level since the First Five-Year Plan;¹⁵ but the economic explanation did not interest most people. Life was hard and was about to get harder. Popular opinion was outraged.

There had been urban disturbances before, notably in Karaganda in 1958 where building workers protested against their dreadful living conditions. In 1962, popular disturbances broke out in Riga, Kiev and Chelyabinsk. The hostile mood existed in most major cities, and on 1 June 1962 an uprising took place in Novocherkassk. Several party and police officials were lynched before order was restored by Soviet Army units. The thousands of demonstrators were fired upon, and twenty-three were killed. Presidium members Mikoyan and Kozlov were dispatched to tell the city’s inhabitants that the Kremlin understood their feelings; but only the military action to put Novocherkassk in quarantine and suppress the ‘terroristic’ activity stopped the trouble spreading to the rest of the Soviet Union. KGB chairman Semichastny confidentially informed the Presidium that the majority of rebels were young male workers. Without such people on his side Khrushchev could never realize his dream of a consensus between government and the governed.¹⁶

For a time he had success with the intelligentsia. Under Khrushchev the creative arts flourished as at no time since the 1920s. Novelists, painters, poets and film-makers regarded themselves as Children of the Twentieth Congress. After his closed-session speech of 1956 Khrushchev was given the benefit of the doubt; for it was appreciated that he had a less oppressive attitude to high culture than his rivals in the Soviet political leadership at the time.

Certain works of art were published that, but for him, would never have seen the light of day. New words were written for the state anthem: at the Melbourne Olympic games in 1956 the previous version had had to be played without being sung, because of its eulogy to Stalin. The young Siberian poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko wrote Babi Yar, which denounced not only the Nazi mass murder of Jews in Ukraine but also the Stalinist terror-regime. Anti-Semitism re-emerged as a topic of debate. Andrei Voznesenski, another young writer, composed his Antiworlds cycle of poems which spoke to the emotions of educated teenagers and said nothing about Marxism-Leninism. Jazz was heard again in restaurants. Painters started to experiment with styles that clashed with the severely representational technique approved by the authorities. Poet-guitarists such as Bulat Okudzhava satirized bureaucratic practices. Yevtushenko and Voznesenski became famous, filling large theatres with audiences for their poetry recitations; they were treated by their fans as were pop stars in the West.

Easily the most explosive event in the arts was touched off by a middle-aged former Gulag inmate. In 1962 Alexander Solzhenitsyn brought out his story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This was a vivid account of twenty-four hours in the life of a construction worker in one of Stalin’s camps. Solzhenitsyn’s emphasis that his story was about a comparatively benign day in Ivan Denisovich Shukhov’s life enhanced the literary effect: readers were left wondering what the other days were like. Solzhenitsyn, a reclusive fellow, instantly acquired international renown.

Yet Ivan Denisovich was the peak of the concessions made to cultural freedom. Khrushchev continued to approve the ban placed upon writers such as Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. When Pasternak was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1958 for his Doctor Zhivago, Presidium member Suslov persuaded Khrushchev to compel the writer to refuse the honour. Thereafter political difficulties with his colleagues made the First Secretary regress towards even sterner censorship. In 1963 he visited a modern art exhibition on the Manege below the Kremlin. Wading among the artists’ stands, Khrushchev described their paintings as ‘shit’. On another occasion he lost his temper with Andrei Voznesenski and other writers. Khrushchev ranted: ‘Mr Voznesenski! Off you go! Comrade Shelepin [as KGB chairman] will issue you with a passport!’¹⁷

Subjects such as political science and sociology, moreover, were forbidden. The same was true of national studies; only the ‘ethnographic’ analysis of small, non-industrialized peoples could be undertaken. The machinery of censorship stayed in place. Type-scripts had to be submitted to Glavlit before being published; film rushes and even musical scores had to be similarly vetted. Writers of a politically critical bent had to content themselves with writing only ‘for their desk drawer’.

Yet the contrast with the Stalin period must not be overlooked. Until 1953 it had been dangerous even to write for desk drawers; there really had been a loosening of official ideological constraints under Khrushchev. The works of poet-troubadour Sergei Yesenin were published again. Novels by the nineteenth-century writer Fedor Dostoevski were reprinted and historians writing about tsarist Russia were also permitted a somewhat slacker framework of interpretation. Moreover, not all the intellectual critics of Khrushchev had entirely given up hope in him. Writers such as the historian Roy Medvedev, the physicist Andrei Sakharov and the journal editor Alexander Tvardovski hoped that Khrushchev might be persuaded to resume a more relaxed posture on the arts and scholarship. Even the novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who quickly took a dim view of Khrushchev, continued to submit manuscripts for publication.

Hopefulness was more evident in Russia than in the other Soviet republics, where nationalism complicated the situation. In the Baltic region the memory of pre-war independence and of post-war armed resistance was alive. Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians thought little of the industrial advance they made as parts of the Soviet economy. Instead they noticed the influx of Russians and other Slavs to the factories being built in their countries. Latvia was a prime example. By 1959 twenty-seven per cent of the republic’s population was Russian.¹⁸ The Baltic region was virtually being colonized by retired Russian generals and young