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The Penguin History of Modern Russia

Page 45

by Robert Service


  The Presidium had in fact put together a peaceful plot involving older colleagues like Brezhnev and Suslov as well as the younger ones such as Shelepin and Semichastny. KGB chief Semichastny’s betrayal was crucial since it was properly his duty to inform Khrushchëv of any such conspiracy. The plotters had also used former Central Committee Secretary Nikolai Ignatov, who had been sacked by Khrushchëv, to take discreet soundings among Central Committee members. Nothing was left to chance.

  The only thing left to decide was about the timing. After several false starts, Suslov made a phone call to Khrushchëv on 12 October 1964 and requested that he fly to Moscow for an unscheduled Presidium discussion of agriculture. At last Khrushchëv guessed what was in store; for he said to Mikoyan: ‘If it’s me who is the question, I won’t make a fight of it.’ Next day, when his plane landed at Vnukovo 2 Airport, Semichastny’s men isolated him and rushed him to a Presidium meeting in the Kremlin. Initially Mikoyan worked for a compromise whereby Khrushchëv would lose the First Secretaryship but remain Chairman of the Council of Ministers. But the rest of the Presidium wanted Khrushchëv completely retired. Eventually the old man buckled under the strain and tearfully requested: ‘Comrades, forgive me if I’m guilty of anything. We worked together. True, we didn’t accomplish everything.’ Unconditional surrender followed: ‘Obviously it will now be as you wish. What can I say? I’ve got what I deserved.’2

  On 14 October, an emergency Central Committee plenum was held. It was attended by 153 out of 169 members. Brezhnev was in the chair since the Presidium had already agreed that he should become Party First Secretary. After briefly referring to Khrushchëv’s ‘cult of the individual’ and ‘voluntaristic actions’, he vacated the podium so that Suslov might make a report. The Central Committee needed to hear from someone who had no close association with Khrushchëv.3

  Suslov asserted that what Lenin had said about Stalin’s crudity and capriciousness was also applicable to Khrushchëv. The principles of collective leadership had been infringed, and Khrushchëv had intrigued to set colleague against colleague. Policy had been changed without consultation. Khrushchëv had arbitrarily introduced outsiders to Central Committee meetings. He had promoted members of his family and taken them on expensive foreign trips. His interventions in industry were bad, in agriculture even worse. His reorganizations had damaged the party, and he had behaved high-handedly towards the countries of the Warsaw Pact. He had replaced the Stalin cult with a Khrushchëv cult. ‘So there you have it,’ declaimed Suslov. ‘Not leadership but a complete merry-go-round!’ Suslov’s tone was softened only towards the end when he read out a letter from Khrushchëv recognizing the validity of the criticisms.4

  Emotions in the audience were highly charged and several Central Committee members shouted out that Khrushchëv should undergo punishment of some sort. But Brezhnev was already assured of victory, and ignored such demands. Khrushchëv, depressed and contrite, was shunted into comfortable retirement. He was hardly mentioned in the press again in his lifetime. In the contemporary Western term, he became a ‘non-person’ overnight.

  Khrushchëv none the less came to regard the manner of his going with some satisfaction. No guns, no executions. Not even many sackings apart from his own. Brezhnev would head the Central Committee Secretariat and Kosygin the Council of Ministers; Podgorny, as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was to become head of state. They and their associates approved of the general line taken by the party since 1953; but they wished to introduce greater stability to policies and institutions. New themes appeared in Pravda: collective leadership, scientific planning, consultation with expert opinion, organizational regularity and no light-headed schemes. At Khrushchëv’s going there was no popular commotion. On the contrary, there was a widespread feeling of relief; even the dour image cultivated by Brezhnev, Kosygin and Podgorny seemed admirable after Khrushchëv’s unsettling ebullience. Most Soviet citizens, including the intellectuals, anticipated a period of steady development for Soviet economy and society.

  Certain early decisions on policy were predictable. The Central Committee plenum in October 1964 forbade any single person from holding the two supreme posts in the party and government simultaneously. In November the bipartition of local party committees was rescinded. In the winter of 1964–5 overtures were made to Mao Zedong to close the breach between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. In October 1965 the sovnarkhozes were abolished and the old central ministries were restored.

  Yet there was no consensus about what substantial innovations should be made. Shelepin, who was made Presidium member after helping to organize Khrushchëv’s dismissal, made a bid for the supreme leadership in February 1965 by calling for a restoration of obedience and order. He disliked the concept of the ‘all-people’s state’; he wanted to resume an ideological offensive against Yugoslavia; and he showed a fondness for the good old days in his confidential support for the rehabilitation of Stalin’s reputation.5 ‘Iron Shurik’, as he was nicknamed, got nowhere in the Presidium. He did not help himself by parading his contempt for his older colleagues and by proposing to cut back the perks enjoyed by party office-holders. Brezhnev was not yet strong enough to remove him from the Presidium; but in 1967 he directed him out of harm’s way by moving him from the Committee of Party-State Control to the USSR Central Council of Trade Unions.

  The Presidium member who struggled the hardest for any positive sort of reform was Kosygin. Brezhnev had kept up an interest in agriculture since guiding the virgin lands campaign in Kazakhstan; but mainly he busied himself with internal party affairs. It was Kosygin who initiated a reconsideration of economic policy. Yevsei Liberman’s proposal of 1962 for an increase in the rights of factory managers was dusted down and presented by Kosygin to the Central Committee in September 1965.6

  Kosygin did not open the door to complete managerial freedom: even Liberman had avoided that, and Kosygin as a practising politician was yet more cautious. Yet the implications of his reforms were large. If the heads of enterprises were to operate with reduced interference by Gosplan, then the authority of economic ministries and the party would decline. Kosygin’s long-standing advocacy of the consumer-goods sector of industrial investment increased his colleagues’ suspicion of him. Party officials were especially annoyed at his proposal to reduce the authority of economic-branch departments in the Central Committee Secretariat. The post-war organizational dispute between Malenkov and Zhdanov was re-emerging as Kosygin challenged the interests of the central party apparatus. If Kosygin had had his way, the premisses of economic policy would stealthily be shifted towards profit-making, managerial initiative and ministerial freedom from the party’s interference.

  Brezhnev decided that his best stratagem was not to confront Kosygin but to position himself between Kosygin and Shelepin until he could bring his own appointees into the Presidium. With Brezhnev’s approval, the Central Committee gave formal permission to Kosygin to go ahead with the reforms; but all the while Brezhnev, both at the plenum and afterwards, impeded him with unhelpful modifications.

  He quietly went about enhancing his own authority, ringing up provincial party secretaries for their opinion at each stage. He often spent a couple of hours each day on such conversations. His modesty seemed impressive. On the Kremlin Wall he was indistinguishable from the other late middle-aged men in staid suits and staider hats. At the March 1965 Central Committee plenum he displayed his preferences in policy by getting a larger share of the budget for agriculture (which was another sign that Kosygin’s industrial proposals were not going to be allowed to work). Brezhnev regarded chemical fertilizers and advanced mechanical equipment as the main solution to the grain shortage. He had concluded that budgetary redistribution rather than Khrushchëvian rhetoric and reorganization was the most effective instrument of progress. His primary objective was to make the existing system work better and work harder.

  Brezhnev’s stabilization of politics and administration after the upsets of
Khrushchëv also led him to clamp down on cultural freedom. As Khrushchëv had become more illiberal, many intellectuals had taken to meeting in little groups and circulating typescripts of poems, novels and manifestos that were certain to be refused publication. This method of communication was known as samizdat (or self-publishing); and it was to acquire a broader technical range when tape-recorder cassettes became available. The latter method was known as magnitizdat.

  The participants in such groupings grew in number as access to official publication narrowed. Roy Medvedev’s book on the Great Terror, which itemized previously unknown details of Stalin’s activity, was banned from the press. The same fate befell Viktor Danilov’s opus on agricultural collectivization at the end of the 1920s. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote two lengthy novels, The First Circle and Cancer Ward, describing the lower levels of the political and social hierarchy under Stalin. The censors rejected them and the KGB even ‘arrested’ them. Andrei Sakharov wrote letters to the Presidium requesting freedom of opinion and self-expression, but to no avail. A lesson was given to them that the avenues of consultation with the country’s supreme political leadership that had been kept semi-open under Khrushchëv were being closed. The cultural spring turned to autumn without an intermediate summer.

  And a chilly winter was imminent. In September 1965 the KGB arrested two writers, Andrei Sinyavski and Yuli Daniel, who had circulated some satirical tales in samizdat about the Soviet state. They were put on trial in the following February and charged under Article No. 70 of the Criminal Code with spreading ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’. Sinyavski and Daniel were unyielding, and sympathizers demonstrated on their behalf outside the Moscow court building. Yet they were found guilty and sentenced to forced labour in the Gulag.7

  The principal embarrassment to the Presidium was that the trial had lasted so long. New articles were therefore added to the Code so as to expedite matters in the future. The result was that dissenters could quickly be branded as common criminals, parasites or even traitors. The dissenters referred to themselves as ‘other-thinkers’ (inakomyshlyashchie). This was a neat term which encapsulated the origin of their predicament: namely that they disagreed with the postulates of the ruling ideology. Certainly it was more accurate than the word favoured in the West, ‘dissidents’. The etymological root of dissidence implies a sitting apart; but Soviet ‘other-thinkers’ were by no means distant from the rest of society: indeed they shared the living conditions of ordinary citizens; even a leading scientist such as Sakharov had most of his comforts withdrawn as soon as he became a dissenter. What was different about the dissenters was their willingness to make an overt challenge to the regime.

  Starting in 1968, the samizdat journal The Chronicle of Current Events appeared. It was produced on typewriters with sheaves of carbon paper tucked into them. In 1970 a Human Rights Committee was formed by Andrei Sakharov, Valeri Chalidze and Andrei Tverdokhlebov. In 1971 an Estonian National Front was created in Tallinn. In Moscow, the priests Gleb Yakunin and Dmitri Dudko gathered Christian followers who demanded freedom of faith. Jewish organizations were established for the purpose of gaining visas to emigrate to Israel.

  By the mid-1970s there were reckoned to be about 10,000 political and religious prisoners across the Soviet Union. They were held in grievous conditions, most of them being given less than the intake of calories and proteins sufficient to prevent malnutrition. Punishments for disobedience in the camps were severe and the guards were both venal and brutal. But labour camps were not the sole methods used by the KGB. Punitive psychiatry, which had been used under Khrushchëv, was extended after 1964. Medicine became an arm of coercive state control as doctors were instructed to expect an influx of cases of ‘paranoiac schizophrenia’ shortly before public festivals; and many persistent dissenters were confined for years in mental asylums. Meanwhile the KGB maintained a vast network of informers and agents provocateurs. No group operated for long without being infiltrated by them, and the security police also tried to demoralize camp inmates into repenting their past.

  Yet Brezhnev and his colleagues refrained from all-out violent suppression. They had not forgotten how the Great Terror had affected party leaders such as they had now become. Furthermore, they did not want to incur greater hostility from the intelligentsia than was absolutely necessary; they continually stressed that they would treat the opinions of professional experts seriously. Consequently dissent was not eliminated, but was held at a low level of intensity.

  Brezhnev himself had a kindly reputation among political colleagues and in his family; and he can hardly have been consistently anti-Semitic since his wife Viktoria was Jewish.8 But first and foremost he was an apparatchik, a functionary of the party apparatus, and an ambitious, energetic one at that. When appointed as First Secretary, he was fifty-eight years old. He had been born to a Russian working-class family in Ukraine in 1906 and had no involvement in the October Revolution or Civil War. He became a communist party member towards the end of the First Five-Year Plan and qualified as an engineer in 1935. He had just the background to enter politics in Dneprodzherzhinsk as the Great Terror raged. By 1939 he was working in the party apparatus in Dnepropetrovsk in Ukraine. In the Second World War he served as a commissar on both the Southern and Ukrainian fronts. Attaining the rank of Major-General, he made impression enough on Khrushchëv to be taken under his patronage and marked out for rapid promotion.

  No one who had held this succession of posts could have been over-endowed with moral sensitivity. Collusion in repression was a job specification. So, too, was an ability to trim to the changing winds of official policy; and most functionaries of the pre-war generation were more like Brezhnev than Khrushchëv: they had learned to avoid being seen to have independent opinions. Brezhnev’s guiding aim was to avoid getting himself into trouble with higher authority.

  He therefore stamped ruthlessly upon the ‘bourgeois nationalism’ of Romanian speakers when appointed as the Moldavian Communist Party First Secretary in 1950. He was put on the Presidium by Stalin in 1952 as a member of the younger generation of Soviet leaders. Losing this status on Stalin’s death, he rejoined the Presidium after the Twentieth Party Congress. By then he had played a prominent part in the virgin lands campaign, and photographs of him by Khrushchëv’s side became frequent in Pravda. Meanwhile he built up his own power-base by recruiting personnel from among his associates from his time as Dnepropetrovsk Province Party Secretary. He had a handsome look with his generous grin and his shock of black hair – and he was proud of his appearance. Only his pragmatic need to subsume his personality under the demands of ‘collective leadership’ stopped him from shining in the glare of the world’s media.

  And yet it would have been a brightness of style, not of substance; and the style, too, would have been dulled by Brezhnev’s defects as a public speaker. He had no oral panache. He was also very limited intellectually, as he acknowledged in private: ‘I can’t grasp all this. On the whole, to be frank, this isn’t my field. My strong point is organization and psychology.’9 This comment hit the mark. For indeed Brezhnev was masterly at planning an agenda so as to maximize consensus. Always he strove to circumvent direct conflict with colleagues. Even when he decided to get rid of someone, he carried out the task with charm.

  Such qualities were embarrassingly narrow for the leader of one of the world’s superpowers. And Brezhnev’s vanity was extraordinary. For instance, he shunted the Moscow City Party Secretary N. G. Yegorychev into an obscure ambassadorship for refusing to sing his praises.10 Moreover, he was indifferent to problems of corruption. ‘Nobody,’ he casually opined, ‘lives just on his wages.’11 He permitted his family to set a grotesque example. His daughter Galina was a promiscuous alcoholic who took up with a circus director running a gold-bullion fraud gang. Brezhnev himself outdid Khrushchëv in the nepotism for which he had criticized him. Nor did he forget to be generous to himself. His passion was to add to his fleet of foreign limousines donated to him by the leaders of states abroa
d. He drove them on the roads between his dacha and the Kremlin with flagrant disregard for public safety.

  Yet it was initially a distinct point of attraction for his central party colleagues that Brezhnev was so undistinguished. Each Presidium member expected to be able to guide the First Secretary in policy-making. They had underestimated him. Shelepin and Kosygin were steadily being worn down. Podgorny, who wanted Brezhnev kept in check, had no personal following in the Presidium; and Suslov apparently had no ambition to become the supreme leader, preferring to exercise influence behind the scenes.12 Brezhnev’s fellow leaders perceived that he was becoming more than primus inter pares among them only when it was too late to reverse the process.

  Brezhnev had helped to make his own luck. But he was also assisted by the trends of current economic data. Khrushchëv had lost his political offices partly as a result of the poor grain harvest of 1963. He was sacked just before the encouraging news of the harvest of 1964 had become fully available. The improvement continued in the immediately following years. Between 1960 and 1970 Soviet agricultural output increased at an annual average of three per cent.13 Industry, too, enhanced its performance. At the end of the Eighth Five-Year Plan period of 1966–70 the output of factories and mines was 138 per cent greater than in 1960.14 At the same time the regime was effective in maintaining strict political control. There were several disparate strikes, but nothing remotely akin to the Novocherkassk uprising of 1962. The authorities had a tight grip on society, and Brezhnev’s prestige grew among members of the Soviet political élite.

  The Twenty-Third Party Congress, which began on 29 March 1966, changed the name of the Presidium back to the Politburo and allocated eleven members to it. The post held by Brezhnev was redesignated as the General Secretaryship (as it had been known in the 1920s). This hint at continuity with the Stalin era was meant to emphasize that the disruptions of Khrushchëv’s rule were at an end. Since Brezhnev wanted to avoid the Politburo turning on him as he and his colleagues had turned upon Khrushchëv, very few sackings occurred in the central party leadership. For a while only the most dangerous opponents were removed. In particular, Shelepin’s ally Semichastny was replaced by Yuri Andropov as KGB chairman in May 1967; and Shelepin himself was moved out of the Committee of Party-State Control in June and out of the Party Secretariat in September.

 

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