Whereas the authorities could still sustain their one-party, one-ideology state, they were increasingly unable to secure acquiescence in their more mundane demands on a daily basis – and the extent of non-collaboration was worrisomely broad in a society wherein no social, economic or cultural activity was officially considered innocent of political implications.
Non-compliance rather than direct resistance was the norm and many social malaises survived from the 1920s. Turnover of workers at the country’s factories peaked at one fifth of the labour-force per annum, and official invocations to stay at an enterprise for one’s working life were despised.8 Financial deals struck to dissuade persons from leaving were the convention. This was illegal, but the economy would have come to a halt if such deals had been eradicated. Enterprises, district councils and local party organizations gave the appearance solely of subservience to the central political authorities. Misinformation remained a pervasive feature of the Soviet order: the trend remained to supply inaccurate data to higher bodies in order to obtain low production targets in the following year. Cliental groups and local nests of officials conspired to impede the Kremlin’s decrees. The frequent sackings of party, governmental and police officials served only to bind their successors together in a campaign to save their new jobs.
These phenomena were well known to Khrushchëv, who fitfully tried to eliminate them. But at best, a sullen acceptance of his policies was replacing the initial enthusiasm he had evoked. The difficulty was that the Soviet order did not and could not welcome autonomous initiative in political, social and economic life: spontaneity of thought and behaviour would threaten the entire structure of the state. How, then, could he inspire people again?
In facing up to this problem, he saw that he had to propound his own positive vision of communism. The closed-session speech of 1956 was a denunciation of Stalin, not a delineation of new and inspiring ideas. Before the Twenty-Second Party Congress in Moscow in October 1961 he began to address the task by rewriting the Party Programme, which had been the communist political credo under Stalin (and indeed under Lenin, since it had been accepted in 1919). A team of theorists, editors and journalists had been assembled under B. N. Ponomarëv to produce a draft. Khrushchëv edited its contents.9 He insisted that it should avoid incomprehensible abstraction: ordinary people had to be able to understand its wording and its goals. More dubiously, he overrode his advisers’ objection to the inclusion in the Programme of precise quantitative predictions and ideological schedules that were ludicrously over-ambitious.10
The proceedings of the Twenty-Second Congress were ructious. A verbal barrage was aimed at Stalin’s record, and this time there was no sparing of those among the deceased dictator’s associates who had belonged to the so-called Anti-Party Group: Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich were reviled for their complicity in mass murder. An Old Bolshevik, D. A. Lazurkina, took the platform to recount a dream she had had the previous night in which Lenin had appeared to her saying how unpleasant it was for him to lie next to Stalin’s corpse.11 This stage-managed sentimentality led to a decision to remove Stalin from the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum and to bury him under a simple plinth and bust outside the Kremlin Wall.
The Party Programme accepted by the Congress described the USSR as an ‘all-people’s state’ which no longer needed to use dictatorial methods.12 Data were adduced on Soviet achievements in production, consumption and welfare. Massive future attainments were heralded: by the end of the 1960s, according to the Programme’s prediction, the per capita output of the USA would be overtaken; by 1980 the ‘material-technical basis’ of a communist society would have been laid down. Full communism would be in prospect. Khrushchëv asserted that the USSR had already reached a point where the ‘all-out construction’ of such a society could begin.13 Thus there would be complete freedom for individuals to develop their talents to the full along with the complete satisfaction of every person’s needs. The Soviet Union would enter an age of unparalleled human happiness.
Khrushchëv’s ideas were jumbled. Under communism as projected by Lenin’s The State and Revolution, the state would wither away and society would become entirely self-administering; and Lenin implied political organizations would cease to exist once the dictatorship of the proletariat came to an end. Khrushchëv by contrast expected that the party would increase in influence as the communist epoch came nearer; he never revealed how and why the party would ever give up being the vanguard of communism. Furthermore, it was difficult to see the logic in his argument that dictatorship had ended if freedom of belief, publication, assembly and organization had yet to be realized.
He was less exercised by theory and logic than by the desire to issue an effective summons to action. He called upon all Soviet citizens to participate in public life. The lower organizational units of the party, the Komsomol and the trade unions were to meet more regularly, and new voluntary associations were to be formed. (Interestingly, there was no reference to the KGB.) The most notable innovation was the so-called druzhinniki, which were groups of citizens acting as a vigilante force for law and order on urban streets. Needless to add, Khrushchëv’s summons was delivered on the strict condition that the authority of himself, the Presidium and the entire Soviet order was respected. Mass participation, he assumed, had to be heavily circumscribed. It was consequently hardly surprising that most citizens felt that the main result of his policy was to encourage the busybodies in each town and city to become still more intrusive than ever.
But Khrushchëv’s optimism was unabated, and the Programme eulogized the achievements of the ‘Soviet People’. The opening section proclaimed the October Revolution as the first breach in the wall of imperialism and stressed that the vast majority of workers, peasants and soldiers had supported the Bolsheviks through the years of the Civil War and the NEP. The Five-Year Plans were depicted as the crucible of unrivalled industrial, cultural and even agricultural progress; and the resilience of the Soviet order was said to have been proven by the USSR’s destruction of Nazism in the Second World War.
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 Khrushchëv’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, Khrushchëv 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 Khrushchëv, 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 Khrushchëv 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 b
e impossible. The Programme, at his insistence, boldly declared: ‘The party solemnly declares: today’s generation of Soviet people will live under communism!’14
Khrushchëv 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, Khrushchëv’s ideas would involve an increase in the burden of work. Few people were happy about the prospect.
Khrushchëv’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 this attempt at 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 large 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 Khrushchëv could never realize his dream of a consensus between government and the governed.16
For a time he had success with the intelligentsia. Under Khrushchëv 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 Khrushchëv 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. Khrushchëv 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 Khrushchëv 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 Manège below the Kremlin. Wading among the artists’ stands, Khrushchëv described their paintings as ‘shit’. On another occasion he lost his temper with Andrei Voznesenski and other writers. Khrushchëv 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. Typescripts 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 Khrushchëv. The works of poet-troubadour Sergei Yesenin were published again. Novels by the nineteenth-century writer Fëdor 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 Khrushchëv 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 Khrushchëv 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 Khrushchëv, 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 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. Khrushchëv, unlike Stalin, did not put Russian officials in charge practically everywhere. But Russians were none the less in key positions of authority and control. Khrushchëv 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.
Khrushchëv 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 Khrushchëv 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, Khrushchëv 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 Khrushchëv’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 Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 43
