drank and ate; they used the special shops which were barred to the general public. They were chauffeured everywhere. They took well-appointed holidays by the Black Sea and participated in official Soviet delegations to the countries of Eastern Europe. They grabbed access to higher education and to professional jobs for members of their families regardless of their qualifications. They lived in cantonments separate from the common run of humanity.
Khrushchev himself delighted in occupying his palatial dacha at Pitsunda; he gladly received gifts from foreign statesmen, especially if they were rifles or scientific instruments.25 (How he would have loved hand-held computer games!) Nor did he refrain from dispensing jobs, titles and privileges to close relatives. This proponent of communism would never have liked communist egalitarianism in reality, and he was so accustomed to the luxuries of office that he was incapable of recognizing his hypocrisy.
What irked Khrushchev was not so much the morality of officials in the provinces as their uncontrollability. But his own measures in fact contributed to the problem. The combination of economic decentralization and political consultation served to strengthen localist tendencies. Aping Lenin and Stalin, Khrushchev set up special supervisory bodies. One such was the Committee of Party-State Control; but this was no more able to bring institutions and their officials to heel than any of its predecessors. The custom of fudging figures on industrial and agricultural output according to self-interest was ineliminable. Khrushchev, like his predecessors, reacted with campaigns of mass mobilization. Ordinary party members and the general public were encouraged to blow the whistle on illegalities and disobedience. The difficulty was that the entire Soviet order exerted a pressure on everyone to be deceitful in everyday life. Eradication of all the fiddles would really have necessitated a revolution.
At the lowest levels of society the joke went the rounds: ‘They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work!’ Soviet workers saw no point in being more punctual, co-operative and conscientious than they absolutely had to be. Theft from farms and factories was not regarded with popular disapproval. Individuals looked after themselves, their families and their close friends. Khrushchev, who had expected that people would toil tirelessly for the communist common weal, was deeply frustrated; but the Novocherkassk uprising had shown that, unless he slackened his demands on society, the entire political status quo might be challenged.
An ever-growing menace to his position and his plans came from higher levels. Ostensibly he was unchallengeable. The ministries, the KGB, the trade unions and the party shared his commitment to maintaining the Soviet order; and these same institutions were subject to the Party Presidium. They could select representatives to put their case to the Presidium. Khrushchev could even brow-beat the Soviet Army. He not only sacked Zhukov in 1957 but also reduced the number of troops from 5.8 million to 3.7 million in the second half of the decade.26 His justification was that the USSR’s nuclear weaponry provided a more adequate base for the country’s defence than conventional land and air forces. Khrushchev had depended upon the Soviet Army’s assistance in his struggle against the Anti-Party Group; and Zhukov, at the moment of his sacking, had warned Khrushchev that even Marshal Moskalenko, one of Khrushchev’s favourites, had been talking about the desirability of a
His willingness to think the unthinkable was proved in September 1962 when he permitted a debate in
Whether Khrushchev’s heart lay in so basic a reform is questionable. As Stalin’s legatee, he never seriously tried to lower the proportion of the country’s gross investment in the capital-goods sector. Resources were poured into defence production in particular. Rather than offer autonomy to managers, he suggested yet another institutional reorganization in September 1962. The agency he picked to mobilize economic advance was the party. In a note written to the Presidium, Khrushchev suggested that each local party committee should be split into two separate committees to deal respectively with industry and agriculture. This bipartition, he argued, would concentrate attention upon both sectors of economic production in each province. His colleagues regarded it as a bureaucratic nonsense which would make demarcation of responsibilities even more complicated than at present; but they yielded to him when he insisted on implementing the scheme.
He had raised most members of the central political elite to their posts: Frol Kozlov, Leonid Brezhnev and Nikolai Podgorny were his proteges; and other figures who had built careers independently of him, notably Mikhail Suslov and Aleksei Kosygin, had gained additional promotion through his efforts. He grossly underestimated their dislike of his interminable reorganizations, a dislike that was shared at lower levels of the party’s hierarchy. The scheme for the party’s bipartition caused particular irritation in the localities. Each provincial party secretary who had previously run the party throughout a province was being asked to choose between industry and agriculture in his province. No official welcomed this abrupt reduction in power.
Khrushchev had become too isolated to discern this. Certainly he was careful to consult colleagues on foreign policy. In August 1961, for example, he obtained the preliminary sanction of the Presidium for the building of a wall between the Soviet and Western sectors of Berlin. For years there had been an exodus of the German Democratic Republic’s citizens to West Germany, and one of the results had been the loss of doctors, engineers and other professional people. Khrushchev rather shamefacedly argued that the German Democratic Republic ‘had yet to reach a level of moral and material development where competition with the West was possible’;28 but the building of the Berlin Wall was disastrous for Soviet prestige around the world. In trying to put pressure on the NATO governments, moreover, he resumed the testing of Soviet nuclear bombs. He wanted to show that the USSR was capable of defending its interests under his guidance.
He also had the Presidium’s consent in trying to extend the country’s influence elsewhere in the world. Soviet leaders had always been angry about the USA’s placement of nuclear missile facilities in Turkey on the USSR’s borders. The communist revolution under Fidel Castro gave rise to a plan for the Soviet Union to construct similar facilities on the Caribbean island of Cuba, not far from the Florida coast. Khrushchev and his advisers, with Castro’s enthusiastic participation, made the necessary preparations in 1962.
American spy-planes picked out the unusual construction-work being carried out in Cuba. In October 1962 President Kennedy, before the Soviet missiles could complete their voyage to the Caribbean, declared that Cuba would be placed in military quarantine. Soviet ships would be stopped and searched for missiles. Castro recklessly urged Khrushchev to bomb American cities, but was brushed aside as a madman.29 For a few days the diplomats of the USSR and the USA faced the possibility of a Third World War. Khrushchev had badly underestimated Kennedy’s will. The old dog, far from intimidating the young pup, had to give way. The ships were turned back, and the Soviet regime was humbled in the eyes of the world. In fact Kennedy had made a substantial concession to Khrushchev by promising both to dismantle the Turkish facilities and never to invade Cuba. The snag was that this compromise was to be a secret between the American and Soviet administrations.
Presidium members had been consulted by Khrushchev throughout the crisis; but it was he who had brought the Cuban proposal to their attention, and therefore it was he alone who was blamed by them for the USSR’s humiliation. Khrushchev had run out of luck. All the main economic data indicated that his policies were running into trouble. The harvest of 1963 was nine per cent lower than in the previous year. The fodder crop was so inadequate that imports had to take place for the first time — a deeply-annoying development at a time when the Presidium needed to use its hard-currency funds for the purchase of Western industrial technology.30
There was scarcely a group, organization or institution that did not hate Khrushchev. He had offended the party, the economic ministries, the generals, the diplomatic service, the intelligentsia, the managers and the security police. His achievements were undeniable, especially in the ending of terror and the raising of the general standard of living. But further improvement was not forthcoming; and Khrushchev’s futurological boasts, his idiosyncratic bossiness and his obsessive reorganizations had taken their toll on the patience of practically everyone. He was a complex leader. At once he was a Stalinist and anti-Stalinist, a communist believer and cynic, a self-publicizing poltroon and a crusty philanthropist, a trouble-maker and a peacemaker, a stimulating colleague and domineering bore, a statesman and a politicker who was out of his intellectual depth. His contradictions were the product of an extraordinary personality and a lifetime of extraordinary experiences.
Yet it must be appreciated that his eccentricities in high office also resulted from the immense, conflicting pressures upon him. Unlike his successors, he was willing to try to respond to them by seeking long-term solutions. But the attempted solutions were insufficient to effect the renovation of the kind of state and society he espoused. Reforms were long overdue. His political, economic and cultural accomplishments were a great improvement over
