The Penguin History of Modern Russia

by Robert Service

  The reasons for Khrushchëv’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.

  Khrushchëv 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 Khrushchëv’s attacks. Yet not even Khrushchëv 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.

  Khrushchëv also increased the persecution of non-Christian belief. 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. Khrushchëv 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.

  Khrushchëv 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 Gorbachëv – 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. Khrushchëv 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 Khrushchëv 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 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.

  Khrushchëv 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 Khrushchëv 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, Khrushchëv 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. Khrushchëv, 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. Khrushchëv, 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. Khrushchëv 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. Khrushchëv 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 Khrushchëv that even Marshal Moskalenko, one of Khrushchëv’s favourites, had been talking about the desirability of a coup d’état.27 But Khrushchëv refused to be bullied by such talk. He was totally confident that power at last lay firmly in the hands of the civilian politicians.

  His willingness to think the unthinkable was proved in September 1962 when he permitted a debate in Pravda on economic reform. The main participant, Yevsei Liberman, urged the desirability of according greater autonomy to factory managers in decisions about production, sales and labour inputs. This project would have impinged upon the prerogatives of Gosplan and the entire police-party-military-industrial complex. Not since the 1920s had managers enjoyed the authority proposed by Liberman.

  Whether Khrushchëv’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, Khrushchëv 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 élite to their posts: Frol Kozlov, Leonid Brezhnev and Nikolai Podgorny were his protégés; and other figures who had built careers independently of him, notably Mikhail Suslov and Alexei 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.

  Khrushchëv 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. Khrushchëv 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. Khrushchëv 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 Khrushchëv 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. Khrushchëv 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 Khrushchëv by promising both to dismantle its Turkish missile batteries 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 Khrushchëv 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. Khrushchëv 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 Khrushchëv. 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 Khrushchëv’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 att
empted 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 Stalin. But they fell greatly short of the country’s needs.

  19

  Stabilization (1964–1970)

  The Soviet political system since 1917 had developed few fixed regulations. When Lenin died there was no assumption that a single successor should be selected. The same was true at Stalin’s death. No effort had yet been made to establish rules about the succession even though it was by then taken for granted that whoever was appointed to lead the Secretariat would rule the country. In mid-1964, as Khrushchëv’s colleagues wondered what to do about him, this uncertainty persisted and they also had the problem that the Party First Secretary was not dead but alive and capable of retaliating.

  Khrushchëv returned from trips to Scandinavia and Czechoslovakia in summer. Sensing nothing afoot, he took a break at Pitsunda by the Black Sea in October. He was still fit for a man of seventy. His Presidium colleagues had recently congratulated him at his birthday celebrations and wished him well in political office, and the First Secretary took them at their word. Mikoyan popped over to chat with him and hinted to him not to be complacent. But Khrushchëv ignored the allusion; instead he waited with bated breath for news that the latest team of Soviet cosmonauts had returned safely to earth. As was his wont, he arranged to greet them in person. Everything seemed well to him despite an alarm raised by a chauffeur who had overheard details of a plot to oust the First Secretary.1 He who had outplayed Beria refused to believe that he might one day meet his match.