by Norman Stone
To all of this there was a nuclear background: the USSR was weak in that respect, and needed respite from Stalin’s warring, his turning every neighbour into an enemy. The essential question remained Germany, and here there were divisions, with Molotov following the Party line, to the effect that a Communist East Germany was a necessity. Beria had other ideas, and probably regarded the Party with contempt. Why not try a new tactic altogether: prepare to get rid of East Germany, Walter Ulbricht and all, in exchange for a Germany that would collaborate economically and politically? Such was the model of Rapallo, the Italian town where, in 1922, the USSR and Republican Germany, bizarrely represented by elderly homosexuals in pyjamas, had entered upon semi-alliance. Then, the two countries, isolated, made an agreement that even included considerable German help for Soviet industry and for that matter Soviet help for the German military. A normal and parliamentary Germany, detached from the West? A sort of Finland? And if it meant getting rid of little Ulbricht, why not?
Of course, in the then Soviet system, such things were not written down, and when eventually ‘revelations’ from the archives emerged, they did not really reveal anything more than would have been known to readers of the Reader’s Digest at its purest. Even Walter Pieck, a lieutenant of Ulbricht’s, kept a diary in a code of a code of a summary. Stray lines in memoirs alone ensured that something of the truth emerged. Once Beria started to suggest sacrificing East Germany for a new Rapallo, a strange episode followed. East Germany had been whipped into following the Soviet course, and half a million of her people left, through Berlin. Walter Ulbricht was asking for Soviet economic assistance and was told to move more slowly with ‘the construction of socialism’. The Praesidium discussed this on 27 May and sent a Note to the East Germans. Such documents had a character all their own. There would be a thick framework of ‘wooden language’, unreadable if you were not initiated. Men who sat through six-hour speeches of industrial statistics at enormous Party gatherings, applauding at the right moments, with stewards lining the wall, holding stopwatches, and indicating ‘stop’ when the designated speaker’s designated applause had been completed, were indeed initiated. If they just listened, they would find that at some point there would be a passage meaning something. This was a way of demonstrating the leaders’ power (similarly, if one of them gave an interview, the technique was to answer a question at enormous length, boring the interviewer into the ground).
On 2 June the Soviet Note said the East German leadership should, ‘to make the present political situation more healthy and to consolidate our position in Germany and the international arena, act over the German question such as to create a united, democratic, peaceful and independent Germany’. This was referred to as a ‘new course’ and there was to be some liberalization in East Germany; some of the ‘construction of socialism’ measures were to be cancelled, and the Soviet Control Commission would be replaced by a civilian, Vladimir Semyonov, political adviser to the Control Commission, a member of the NKVD and close to Beria. He was to replace Ulbricht with more pliable figures — Rudolf Herrnstadt, editor of the Party newspaper, and Wilhelm Zaisser, head of East German security, also close to Beria. After all, even East German Communists were sometimes uncomfortable with being hated and lied to. At the same time reparations were ended, and the Soviet firms set up to exploit East Germany were disbanded. Beria was in effect giving some sense to the Stalin Note of March 1952 — not intending full-scale Communization of Germany but, instead, looking for co-operation or ‘Finlandization’. From 2 to 4 June there was a conference at Berlin, ‘the new course’ being explained to Ulbricht. He went ahead with some concessions as far as small trade and farmers were concerned, and he released a few hundred political prisoners, but he did nothing to lessen the load on the industrial workers. His goal was a Communist Germany. That had been the whole purpose of his life, and he probably had some sort of encouragement from within Moscow. Ulbricht knew how the system worked. He resisted the pressure, and instead launched a ‘provocation’ (meaning, in Continental and Communist parlance, an action designed to produce its opposite). He decreed at once, in mid-May, that each worker must produce 10 per cent more, while rations went down — equivalent to a drop in wages and an increase in hours worked. The provocation duly provoked trouble. On 16 June there were demonstrations in the very centre of ‘the construction of socialism’, by builders working on the grotesque Stalin-Allee. Did Beria’s enemies stage a provocation, to discredit ‘the new course’ and Beria, in collusion with Ulbricht and Pieck, who had been trotting in and out of Soviet offices? Or were the demonstrations just what they purported to be, a rising against exploitation? On 17 June the unrest spread, with workers in the big factories in other centres of industry joining in. That day, the Soviet authorities declared martial law and sent in tanks; some 200 people were killed. The whole episode gave the West, and West Germany in particular, excellent propaganda.
It also discredited Beria. A conspiracy now grew against him, and it was inspired by Nikita Khrushchev. He had the very useful talent, in that system, of threatening no-one. He had risen through the Party, some of the time as manager of Moscow (where he tore down many old buildings). He was fat and piggy-eyedly jovial, and had a rustic air: his colleagues wrote him off as second-rate. When they agreed on the post-Stalin arrangements, their idea was to return to the days when the secretary of the Central Committee was just a technician, drowning in files. But Stalin himself had used that administrative post to great effect, because the other men in the Politburo ignored him while they fought among themselves; he controlled appointments to this or that Party function, and knew who was who. Khrushchev also knew how to do this, promoting men who would later be very useful allies. Meanwhile, given the fear of Beria that existed among the others, there was some response to Khrushchev’s prompting when he told them that Beria must be overthrown. The Berlin affair gave him a very good excuse. He had another useful ally. The war hero Marshall Georgy Zhukov had been sidelined by Stalin, and the successors brought him back as deputy defence minister: that meant troops on their side. The plotters were careful never to talk openly, there being informants or ‘bugs’ all around; they behaved towards Beria as if all were normal, even chaffing him about his spies, and in Khrushchev’s case accepting lifts in his car.
On 26 June a meeting of the Praesidium of the Council of Ministers had been called by Malenkov, who had been left in the chair. He was programmed to say at some stage that Party matters should be discussed, and that Beria’s office needed to be rationalized. Beria’s men were sitting outside the room as usual, and they had to be neutralized: that was done by Zhukov’s men, who had had weapons smuggled in. Beria arrived (as usual) self-important and late, with a briefcase. Malenkov opened up, questioning Beria’s role, and when Beria opened the briefcase, intending to take out papers, the conspirators feared that he would produce a gun and called in Zhukov’s men. They arrested him and, when dusk fell, smuggled him out of the Kremlin, wrapped in a carpet. He went off to a military prison, where he was soon joined by his closest collaborators, the torturer Viktor Abakumov especially. Written pleas, hysterical in tone, went out from the cells to Malenkov, but after a secret trial Beria was executed the following December. His crimes were publicly denounced by his ex-colleagues. Indirectly, he was taking the blame for what Stalin had done, and they were distancing themselves as best they could from the tyrant: Communism was to have a human face.
Khrushchev, the least regarded of these colleagues, did indeed have a human face, though pachydermic, and he was now asserting himself. In appearance, Malenkov had the chief role, but he had been Beria’s associate, and the next stage was for him to be eliminated. Yet again, Khrushchev was underestimated: he now became, in 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, Ma
lenkov 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 p
ut 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 was unnecessarily, cruelly high. Khrushchev therefore had some cards to play and he could look the American President in the eye. In October 1957, timed for the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution, there was a symbol: Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, fired into orbit round the Earth. That little spot of light, moving visibly at night at some speed in the sky, was the calling card of Communism and of Russia’s emergence at last. The Americans had tried to compete, but had failed, farcically, to put even a football-sized one into space: their rocket had risen for a few yards and then settled back on its socket. In other matters, again, the USSR impressed. The violinist David Oistrakh and the pianist Svyatoslav Richter were household names in western Europe and at the Brussels Exhibition of 1958 the Soviet pavilion, with its recordings, caused spines to tingle, whereas the American one just showed off creature-comforts. Khrushchev beamed, and a 21st Party Congress solemnly announced in January 1959 that the USSR would ‘catch up’ by 1970. In October 1961 that turned into ‘1966’; by 1980 there was supposed to be ‘super-abundance’, a claim answered by an historical laugh when the time came. But there were many people in the West who agreed, including the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan (in his diary).
