working-class Russian men and women who refused to learn the local language.
The Kremlin leaders proclaimed that this national intermingling was simply a sign of socialist internationalism at work; but they were being disingenuous. In reality they were pumping Russians into the other republics as a means of holding together the vast multi-national state. Russian people, more than any other nation, were capable of identifying their own aspirations with the interests of the USSR. Khrushchev, unlike Stalin, did not put Russian officials in charge practically everywhere. But Russians were none the less in key positions of authority and control. Khrushchev customarily appointed them to posts such as second party secretaryships; and nearly always the KGB chiefs in the non-Russian republics were Russians. He also set up a Bureau for the RSFSR within the Party Central Committee; it had little autonomous authority, but its existence was a quiet signal that Russian interests were never overlooked in the Kremlin. Above all, he punished any cases of anti-Russian discrimination. Thus he conducted a large peaceful purge of the Communist Party of Latvia in 1959–61 on the grounds that functionaries had been promoted there purely because they happened to be Latvians. This was a warning to other republics that crypto-nationalist tendencies would not be tolerated.
Khrushchev consolidated his approach educationally. Going further than Stalin, he stipulated that parents had the right to exempt their children from native-language classes in the non-Russian Soviet republics. This reform, carried through in 1958–9, fortified the attempt to promote the study of Russian in schools. Among non-Russian nationalists, consequently, the name of Khrushchev was mud. In Kiev, where he had spent many years, he was detested for restricting the expression of Ukrainian national pride.
Even so, the traffic of policy was not unidirectional. In 1954 he transferred Crimea from the RSFSR to Ukraine on the grounds that the local links of transport and economic co-operation were closer with Kiev than with Moscow;19 but he also aimed to give honour to Ukraine and to increase its interest in the maintenance of the Soviet order. Crimea, which had been seized by the Russians from the Turks in the eighteenth century, was prominent in the annals of Russian military valour. Furthermore, Khrushchev expressed regret for the abuses suffered by the deported nationalities in 1943–4, and sanctioned the repatriation of the Balkars, Chechens, Ingushi, Kalmyks and Karachai. It must be added that Khrushchev’s magnanimity was not comprehensive. Not only the Volga Germans but also the Crimean Tatars and the Meshketian Turks were refused permission to return home from Kazakhstan. Probably he was unwilling to show friendliness to Germans so soon after the war; the Meshketians, moreover, lived near the Turkish border and were presumably regarded as a menace to Soviet security.
The reasons for Khrushchev’s overtures to Ukrainian popular opinion are not hard to guess. It was already obvious that, if current trends prevailed, the Russians would cease to constitute a majority of the USSR’s society. The Presidium assumed that common linguistic origins, culture and history united the Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians. These three peoples were seventy-six per cent of the population in 1959 and were tacitly regarded as the backbone of the Soviet state.20
Yet the authorities curtailed and controlled the public expression of nationhood; for Ukraine was a hindrance as well as a help to the Soviet supreme leadership. Too much concession to national feeling might encourage separatist aspirations, and Ukraine’s very size — it contained the largest non-independent nation in Europe — would endanger the USSR’s integrity if a national movement got out of hand. Consequently only a limited celebration of the nineteenth-century poet Taras Shevchenko was permitted. The policy was the same elsewhere. The anti-tsarist Muslim rebel Shamil, who had been defamed in Stalin’s last years, became a respectable historical figure again in the north Caucasus — but only up to a certain point: emphasis was still given to the benefits brought to the Muslim peoples after their conquest by the Russian Imperial Army. The Presidium knew that the USSR had many deep, ethnically-based enmities; but these had been put into the freezer by the communist party dictatorship: they were not seen boiling in the pot. And, as the regime’s advocates untiringly pointed out, the incidence of national intermarriages had reached ten per cent and was therefore not insignificant.21
Most wedding ceremonies, furthermore, were civil affairs conducted by local government functionaries. Encouragement was given to newly-weds to follow their ceremony with visits to monuments to the dead of the Second World War. Soviet patriotism and secular ceremony were meant to supplant religious practice. For the persistence of belief in God was displeasing to the atheistic state and was also regarded as a potential instrument for covert political opposition.
Khrushchev mounted a crude assault upon religion. On his instructions Christian churches of all denominations were demolished across the country. Only 7,560 were left standing by the mid- 1960s.22 The Russian Orthodox Church, which Stalin had exempted from his earlier excesses after the Second World War, suffered from Khrushchev’s attacks. Yet not even Khrushchev could do without the Russian Orthodox Church as a tool of foreign and domestic policy. The State Committee of Religious Affairs interfered in its appointments and organization; and the KGB kept dozens of bishops as informers. The Patriarch Aleksi was compelled to travel the world on behalf of the Soviet campaign for ‘peaceful coexistence’. Furthermore, the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church remained corrupted by its continued occupation of cathedrals previously owned by other denominations. This ecclesiastical imperialism was flagrant in Ukraine where both the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church were kept locked out of their own buildings.
Not only in the Baltic region but also in Moldavia, Georgia and Armenia the official authorities reinforced persecution and suborned, demoralized and exploited the priesthood as in Russia. But not all the religious groups succumbed. Certain of them gathered adherents precisely because they were unwilling to collaborate with the regime. The Catholic Church in Latvia and Lithuania was indomitable, and in Russia the Baptists gained in popularity.
Khrushchev was also ruthless towards non-Christian believers. He allowed only 12,000 mosques and 60 synagogues to survive, and the Buddhists in Siberia were harassed. The anti-religious campaign of the regime involved a further undermining of social morale and cohesion, especially in rural areas. Khrushchev was not the sole threat to religion: urbanization in the USSR strengthened secularist tendencies in Soviet society just as it did in other advanced industrial countries. What saved these faiths from extinction was the reluctance of local party and government officials to be quite as brutal to people of their own ethnic group as central party policy demanded. In Tajikistan and in the villages of Azerbaijan there was general revulsion at the intrusion of militant Marxism- Leninism. Many functionaries themselves continued to practise Islam in the privacy of their homes.
This situation makes it impossible to know how many religious believers existed. A later survey carried out in Moscow province in 1970 suggested that 16 per cent of men and 45 per cent of women held a faith in God.23 The younger generation believed less than the older. Furthermore, people lower down the social hierarchy believed more than those higher up, and villagers believed more than urban inhabitants. If this was the pattern of religious belief in a highly-urbanized province such as Moscow, it must be assumed that religion was much more densely practised elsewhere.
Khrushchev was furious. While lowering the number of political prisoners in the Gulag, he showed no mercy to religious activists: 1,500 of them, at the very lowest estimate, were locked up by the early 1960s. A troublesome pair of Orthodox archbishops, Andrei of Chernigov and Iov of Kazan, were put to forced labour.24 That so many harmless Soviet citizens were subjected to such maltreatment is a sign that the state was very far from succeeding in indoctrinating society. There is a paradox here. Enthusiastic Marxist-Leninists tended to be newcomers — including Mikhail Gorbachev — to the positions of power. But most of the sons and daughters of the current generation of high-ranking central officials did not give a fig for the Party Programme; and when such youngsters of privileged backgrounds had an opportunity to visit foreign parts, many of them returned with a hankering for Western jeans and pop music. The language of Marxism-Leninism was used by them in furtherance of careers; but in their homes they avoided such verbiage. The worm had entered the apple: the offspring of the nomenklatura despised the state ideology.
Meanwhile all was not well within officialdom itself. The pre-war and wartime cohort of functionaries in party, police, army and government were disoriented by the recent innovations; they were uncomfortable, too, with the recurrent attacks on Stalin, who was venerated by many of them. As the years passed, they tended to forget that Stalin had killed a large number of persons like themselves. Khrushchev increasingly annoyed them. While they desired certainty and reassurance, he brought them only disturbance.
This was true not only in Moscow but also in the provinces. Few party secretaries had more than a brief party-school education. Local politicians flattered Khrushchev at Congresses and fawned upon him whenever he paid a visit to their locality. No ruler in Russian history, not even the energetic Peter the Great, had gone to so many parts of his country. But once out of the range of his surveillance, they gave priority to their personal comforts. They
