The Atlantic and Its Enemies

September, first secretary of the Central Committee, and thereby controlled agendas and appointments, and so low did the others rate him that his nomination came only after several other apparently more pressing items on the Central Committee’s list of topics for the day. Meanwhile, Malenkov had his own ideas as to liberalization. Prices were cut, and peasant taxes also; he even proposed allowing peasants to have small plots of their own, whereas in Stalin’s time all of the land was supposedly collective in case peasants were tempted to work privately, for themselves. Other ideas came up. For instance, there had long been a tension between Party and State, in the sense that the machinery of the State did not have any independence, operating as the Party wanted, and through Party nominees (the nomenklatura of people ‘cleared’ by the Party). This had economic consequences, in that industry might be shaped by some powerful boss, to build up his own empire, regardless of economic sense, and there was similar trouble with appointments, as square pegs were put into round holes. Late in 1953 Malenkov told the Party that some government agencies must be removed from its control, and made himself very unpopular. Besides, Khrushchev set himself up as the agricultural specialist, and made little effort to conceal the truth — that Russians were eating less well than they had done before the Revolution itself. In 1954 Malenkov was gradually effaced, Party defeating government; early in 1955 he was formally demoted by the others. Khrushchev had won.

Nikita Khrushchev was of just the generation to think that Communism would triumph, worldwide. He was born of peasant stock in a small town of the Ukraine, Yuzovka (now Donetsk), his family straight from the land, mostly illiterate. Yuzovka took its very name from foreign capital, in that the man who developed its mines was a Welshman called Hughes, and the young Khrushchev went down the mines. But the family did not drink, his parents pushed him, he acquired an education because his mother enlisted the help of a priest (Khrushchev, like so many Bolsheviks, was a good mathematician), and when the Revolution came, he joined in and worked his way up. This was all quite standard for the USSR in the twenties and thirties: the peasant Khrushchevs displaced the Jewish intellectual Trotskys who had originally led the Revolution (a quarter of Party deaths in the early twenties were suicides). Stalin controlled whole waves of men like Khrushchev, and was very cunning in setting them against each other. He also made sure that they had to take their share of responsibility in his rule of murder and mass imprisonment, and Khrushchev’s own career shows that he joined in without demur. But he was himself quite cunning, and learned that, if you wanted to advance in Soviet politics, you needed not to be a threat to anyone, even not to be taken seriously at all. His role at the top level was to play the buffoon who nevertheless somehow got things done. In manner, Khrushchev was that Russian figure, the clown, but, as Arthur Koestler said, a clown can look very sinister, seen close to.

Khrushchev was not the type of man to have doubts about the eventual victory of Communism. It had catapulted him from Yuzovka to the Kremlin, of course, but it had also catapulted Russia. In the days of Yuzovka, she had counted as backward, filled with illiterate peasants, and she had lost a war against Germany. After the Revolution, she had become a great industrial country and defeated Germany. There was much wrong with this very simple picture, but that would not have crossed Khrushchev’s mind: Communism had started off with a meeting, of about forty people, in 1903, and now look where it was — dominating more of the world than the British Empire had done. Khrushchev himself, the former peasant and apprentice miner, now had an educated family, with a grand apartment overlooking the Moskva river, and grand offices in the Kremlin. He could snap his fingers, and the President of the USA would jump. Not bad for a boy from Yuzovka: the Revolution would win.

7. Khrushchev

In the middle fifties, when the American historian Richard Pipes was in Leningrad, and travelled by crowded tram through the rubbish-strewn and crumbling imperial quarter of the old Tsarist capital, a woman muttered to him, ‘We live like dogs, don’t we?’ They did. There were queues, filthy and overcrowded living quarters, a fatty diet, and beyond the palaces, St Isaac’s Cathedral, the Admiralty spire, there was foul smoke from the huge factories which disfigured the suburbs over the Neva. There was a plan even just to knock down the old city, to erase its memory. Meanwhile came propaganda from the regime to the effect that the Soviet Union was a model for the universe, and the city bosses rode along the boulevards in curtained black cars, at high speed, insured against the resentments of their subjects, though not against the envy and intrigues of their colleagues. With Nikita Khrushchev, this began to change. Russia entered upon what the St Petersburg poetess Anna Akhmatova called ‘one of our vegetarian periods’.

She herself had undergone the carnivorous ones, living in the urine-stinking corner of what had once been a grand mansion block, losing two husbands, murdered by the system, and having her son imprisoned by it for years. In 1914, when there had been life and hope in St Petersburg, she had been the subject of a superb portrait, by Nathan Altman, and there had been others, in the early twenties, in the period when the Revolution still allowed an innovative cultural life. These paintings, like so many others of that period, had been shoved into basements of the Russian Museum, stored by heroic men and women who knew the secret, and they reappeared only two generations later. Anna Akhmatova’s own poems only officially came back to life in 1987, though they were of course well-known by word of mouth before then. Around the time of Pipes’s visit, not long after Stalin’s death, victims of the system had begun to reappear: products of the camps that were dotted around the north and east of this enormous country, their faces gaunt and toothless, expressing ruined lives. There were tens and then hundreds of thousands of them, and everyone knew what had happened to them. Khrushchev was associated with their release, and in later years he took great pride in it, even regarding this as the main achievement of his life. That was right.

On 25 February 1956, at the 20th Party Congress, he gave one of the most famous speeches ever made. In it — it was put together at the last minute, was being scribbled even after the congress had started — he denounced the ‘cult of personality’. This was code for the monstrous crimes that Stalin had committed against the Party (the even more monstrous ones against society as a whole were ignored). He repeated this five years later, and this time together with the removal of Stalin’s corpse from the Kremlin Mausoleum. Lenin was to reign alone in it, though most of the corpse was made of wax, the original having been attacked by a fungus when it was wrapped in the flag of the Paris Commune, presented by the French government. Khrushchev wanted to get back to Lenin, and especially to the Lenin of 1921, who had carried through economic reform and a flexible response towards the West.

He himself hardly looked like one of Anna Akhmatova’s ‘vegetarians’: on the contrary, a coarse little man, bullying in style, embarrassingly ignorant of Russian culture. As Party boss in Moscow, he tore down old buildings with a vengeance, and when he ran Kiev or Lvov in the Ukraine, he behaved brutally and sometimes, as he himself admitted, murderously. He had survived in Stalin’s closest circle because he could act the peasant clown, and because he could handle the drink that Stalin poured into men, in the expectation that at some point their eyes would flash the truth, as to what they had in mind. His name was not on the mental list drawn up by Stalin for the last great purge, and he played his game carefully, not asserting himself too much and too early. He ostentatiously talked about reform in agriculture and in the Party, to which he wanted the secret police to be subordinated; and he showed willingness to talk to the West, with disarmament in the air. Then Khrushchev kept the powerful interests in check, because he maintained, as apparent equal as head of state in 1955, the blockheaded Nikolay Bulganin, in the name of conservatism and even friendship with China. It was not really until 1957, when he crushed a last-minute rebellion by the old guard, that Khrushchev had power enough to run the Party and the State, in the style of Stalin. But at least he was determined that the Soviet peoples should not have to go on living like dogs. He could show that Stalin had been grossly mistaken, that Communism could both go on developing its power and would also improve the Russians’ miserable standard of living. Why did they live like dogs, whereas their system could put a living dog into orbit round the Earth?

A Khrushchev would have things to think about. Aside from the grand apartment overlooking the Moskva river and offices in the Tsars’ Kremlin, he had elaborate semi-palaces to which he could retire, whether in the Moscow suburbs or at Pitsunda, on the Black Sea. The Pitsunda place had a huge swimming pool with a view out over the sea, and its glass front could be opened and shut at the touch of a button. Communism had proved itself: it had turned Russia into a superpower, able to defeat Germany at last. Again and again he would go back to this theme, and lectured the Americans that, when they had seized Alaska, they could only do so because the Russian army was feeble, its soldiers flapping in baste shoes. The whole Stalin epic had changed that, though he thought the cost