I first encountered Nikita Khrushchev when I traveled to the Soviet Union to open the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959, and I met with him again when he visited the United States later in the same year.
Shortly before I left for Moscow in July 1959, Congress passed the Captive Nations Resolution, as it had every year since 1950. Eisenhower issued the proclamation provided for in the resolution urging Americans to “study the plight of the Soviet-dominated nations and recommit themselves to the support of the just aspirations of those captive nations.”
Khrushchev had returned to Moscow from a trip to Poland only ninety minutes before I arrived from the United States. The Polish people had treated him with cool contempt, and Soviet relations with their satellite countries in general were strained. On his return Khrushchev went directly from the airport to give a speech furiously denouncing the Captive Nations Resolution. When my plane touched down, the reception was cool and correct. The Deputy Premier, Frol Kozlov, delivered a long, loud welcoming speech, but there were no bands, anthems, or crowds. The Captive Nations Resolution obviously had rubbed an open sore.
The next morning at ten o’clock I arrived at Khrushchev’s office in the Kremlin for our first meeting. As I entered, Khrushchev was standing in the far corner of the room, examining a model of the Lunik satellite that the Soviets had fired at the moon several months before. It looked like an oversize baseball in his small hands as he put it back in its place.
He approached me in an unrhythmic stride. He was shorter than I expected, standing at no more than five feet six inches. His wide girth, stumpy legs, and Stakhanovite shoulders gave him a stocky, awkward build. When we shook hands for the photographers, the sixty-five-year-old Soviet leader’s clasp was robust, giving me the impression of a man with enormous vitality, great physical strength, and bull-like energy.
While the reporters and photographers were present, Khrushchev chatted amiably, his tiny, sharp eyes darting around the room. His round face, with its heavy lips, firmly set jaw, pug nose, and high cheekbones, was animated. He praised the address I had delivered at the Guildhall in London about eight months before. He said that he welcomed the kind of peaceful competition I had described in it. Then he waved the photographers out and gestured for me to take a place opposite him at a long conference table.
Abruptly the atmosphere changed. Speaking in a high-pitched voice and frequently pounding his fist on the table, Khrushchev launched into a tirade about the Captive Nations Resolution, declaring it a serious “provocation” and a stupid, frightening decision. He demanded to know whether war would be our next step. “Heretofore, the Soviet government thought Congress could never adopt a decision to start a war,” he said. “But now it appears that, although Senator McCarthy is dead, his spirit still lives. For this reason the Soviet Union has to keep its powder dry.”
I explained to him that the resolution was an expression of American opinion and not a call to action. I tried to go on to other subjects, but Khrushchev would have none of it. Finally I said, “At the White House we have a procedure for breaking off long discussions that seem to go nowhere. President Eisenhower says, ‘We have beaten this horse to death; let’s change to another.’ Perhaps that is what you and I should do now.”
Khrushchev remained impassive during the translation, but he decided to have one more go at it. “I agree with the President’s saying that we should not beat one horse too much,” he said, “but I still cannot understand why your Congress would adopt such a resolution on the eve of such an important state visit.” By now he was flushed with anger. He shouted some words that I could sense were rather rough. Oleg Troyanovsky, his translator, who later became Soviet Ambassador to the United Nations, blushed. Obviously embarrassed, he looked at Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, who knew Russian and was smiling broadly. After a few seconds he finally made the translation: “This resolution stinks. It stinks like fresh horse shit, and nothing smells worse than that!”
Khrushchev eyed me during the translation. I decided to call his bluff, and in his own terms. I recalled from my briefing materials that Khrushchev had worked as a pig herder in his youth. I also remembered from my childhood that horse manure was commonly used as fertilizer—but that a neighbor had once used a load of pig manure, and the stench was overpowering. Looking straight into Khrushchev’s eyes, I replied in a conversational tone: “I am afraid that the Chairman is mistaken. There is something that smells worse than horse shit—and that is pig shit.”
For a split second after the translation, Khrushchev hovered on the borderline of rage, the veins at his temples seemingly ready to burst. Then he suddenly broke into a broad smile. “You are right there,” he said, “so perhaps you are right that we should talk about something else now. However, I must warn you that you will hear about this resolution during your visit here.” On this subject, if on few others, Khrushchev kept his word.
• • •
I seldom prepared myself so thoroughly for a series of high-level meetings as I did for those with Khrushchev in 1959. But after our first encounter in his Kremlin office, I realized that no amount of work would have completely readied me for Nikita Khrushchev. He was totally unpredictable. Courtesy, protocol, and itineraries meant nothing to him. Through the course of my visit, he would harangue me and ridicule the United States before the cameras of a model of an American television studio, threaten the West with nuclear missiles before the washing machine of a model American kitchen, and transform a social lunch into a five-and-a-half-hour foreign policy debate before the astonished eyes of Mrs. Nixon, Mrs. Khrushchev, and the other guests.
When I reflected on my encounters with him just after they ended, a picture of Khrushchev, the man, formed in my mind. Always on the offensive, he combined an instinctive feeling for his adversary’s weaknesses with an almost compulsive tendency to press an advantage—to take a mile when his opponent gave an inch and to run over anyone who showed even the slightest sign of timidity. He was colorful in word and deed and had a tendency to be a show-off, especially when he had a gallery.
He was a man who did his homework and prided himself on knowing as much about his opponent’s position as he did about his own. He was particularly effective in debate because of his resourcefulness, his ability to twist and turn and change the subject when he was forced into a corner or an untenable position. Despite the appearance of being highly emotional, he demonstrated to me that when anything of importance was being discussed, he was sober, cold, unemotional, and analytical.
• • •
Khrushchev amused and bemused the world for eleven years. He came up quietly from the ranks of Stalin’s lieutenants in 1953 and went out with a bang when his colleagues unexpectedly deposed him in 1964. The world was left with three images of Khrushchev in power: the bombastic clown, who had been publicly drunk more often than any other Russian leader of modern times; the gambling pragmatist, who had not been bound by dogma but who had tried to solve his country’s problems with ill-considered panaceas instead of long-term remedies; and the Communist totalitarian, who had climbed to power over the corpses of his rivals and countrymen and had stayed there by exiling all who challenged him—until he himself fell victim to his own methods.
• • •
In my encounters with Khrushchev I found that the clown in him wore two faces. At one moment he could be boisterous, jolly, outgoing, exuding friendship and an almost seductive charm. With a broad grin on his face, he came with a peasant’s saying ready for every occasion. He sometimes grabbed my lapel when addressing me as if to ensure himself a similar grip on my attention. He would often lean over toward me, checking discreetly to both sides to see who might overhear him, and then in a hushed voice divulge some “secret” about Soviet military plans.
A moment later, particularly if he had an audience, he could become rude, domineering, tempestuous, the master of a very personal brand of high-decibel diplomacy. During his harangues he came toe-to-toe with me and poked me in
the ribs with his index finger, as if his verbal needling required this physical needling for emphasis. He would narrow his eyes as a machine gunner does in lining his sights. He then would let fly a barrage of argument, bombast, and profanity. After my meetings with him ended, I could not help thinking that many of the things Khrushchev had said in his flashes of rage would have been sufficient to provoke a declaration of war in the age of polite diplomacy. In our age they only made the translator blush.
The clown in Khrushchev could use his histrionics expertly, as I discovered when the two of us came to the display of a model television studio on our tour of the American National Exhibition. A young technician asked us to record greetings that could be played back to visitors throughout the run of the exhibition. Khrushchev seemed suspicious at first, but the sight of a crowd of Soviet workmen emboldened him. In no time he had clambered onto the platform and was talking for the cameras and playing to the audience.
“How long has America existed? Three hundred years?” he asked me. I replied that the United States was about one hundred eighty years old. “Well, then, we will say America has been in existence for one hundred and eighty years, and this is the level she has reached,” he said, taking in the whole exhibition hall with a broad wave of his arm. “We have existed not quite forty-two years, and in another seven years we will be on the same level as America.” The audience was enthralled with his boasting, and their delight seemed to egg Khrushchev on. “When we catch up with you, in passing you by, we will wave to you,” Khrushchev said. Carrying off this final taunt with flamboyant gestures, he peered over his shoulder with wide-eyed earnestness as he waved good-bye with his chubby little hand to an imaginary America fading in the distance.
A photo album of some of Khrushchev’s other antics would be not only fascinating but also revealing. The snapshots would catch him at his best and at his worst. For instance he could use his clowning to show remarkable sensitivity to the national and personal prestige of his hosts. When his official car got a flat tire during a tour of the Yugoslavian countryside in 1956, the sixty-one-year-old Khrushchev sportively challenged his fifty-nine-year-old deputy, Anastas Mikoyan, to an impromptu roadside wrestling match. The playful contest created a diversion for newsmen while Tito’s men worked on the car. Flabbergasted by the spectacle, the reporters all led their dispatches with accounts of the roadside bout between the Communist heavyweights instead of the embarrassing flat.
But most of the photographs would be unflattering, for they would show Khrushchev to be a shameless bully. During the crisis over Berlin in 1959, British Prime Minister Macmillan visited Moscow and proposed that the Berlin dispute be taken up at a foreign ministers’ meeting. These meetings were futile in Khrushchev’s mind because foreign ministers lacked the necessary decision-making authority. To illustrate how inconsequential foreign ministers were, he blurted out to Macmillan that if he told his chief diplomat, Andrei Gromyko, to take off his trousers and sit on a block of ice, Gromyko would have to do so.
Macmillan had not heard the last of Khrushchev’s crudity. In a speech to the United Nations in 1960, Khrushchev proposed several reforms for the international organization, including one to move its headquarters to Switzerland, Austria, or the Soviet Union. When the General Assembly rejected his suggestions, he began harassing other delegates by shouting and laughing during their speeches. He reached the height of his boorish behavior during Macmillan’s address. Before representatives of almost all the countries of the world, the Soviet leader took off a shoe and pounded it on his desk like a gavel.
Khrushchev was a crude bear of a man, an earthy chunk of mother Russia, a typical muzhik who was short-tempered and long-winded. But while his clowning came naturally, he was a clown only when he wanted to be. He used indiscretion and bombast as tactics.
During Khrushchev’s rule the Soviet Union was vastly inferior to the United States in power. What Khrushchev lacked in military power he sought to make up for with willpower. He rattled his nuclear sabers and proclaimed that “your grandchildren will live under communism” in order to make the West fear Soviet might. He did not fool most western leaders, but his bellicosity made much of the public believe that while he professed to want “peaceful coexistence,” he would have no qualms about unleashing a world war.
He was in typical form for a speech he made while visiting Britain in 1956. He told the audience that from his motorcade he had seen a few people protesting his visit, but had noticed one man in particular who shook his fist at him. “My return gesture was this,” he said, shaking his fist for effect, “and we understood each other.” The audience laughed, but Khrushchev added placidly, “I would remind that man of the fact that attempts have been made in the past to speak to us in those terms. . . . Hitler shook a clenched fist at us. He is in the grave now. Is it not time that we become more intelligent and not shake our fists at each other?”
• • •
History also probably will remember Khrushchev as a pragmatist of sorts. He was not a theoretician of the Marxist-Leninist creed who knew by rote every dit and twiddle of the Communist scriptures. He believed in the cause of communism and the inevitability of its victory, but he worshiped at the altar of theory on Sundays only. I find it difficult to imagine him ever actually reading all three burdensome volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital. In this respect he differed from Stalin, who read widely and wrote copiously about Communist theory.
Khrushchev prided himself on his pragmatism. He and I were once discussing his Deputy Premier, Frol Kozlov, whom I had welcomed to New York when he opened the Soviet National Exhibition. Kozlov was an apparatchik who slavishly followed every twist and turn of the party line. Khrushchev commented with obvious contempt, “Comrade Kozlov is a hopeless Communist.” Khrushchev was also an irredeemable Communist, but he refused to be bound by the dogma itself.
He frequently chastised the “rhetoricians” of Marxism-Leninism, whom he considered “parrots” who “learned by heart” archaic theoretical passages “not worth a kopek” in the modern age. “If Marx, Engels, and Lenin could rise from their graves,” he once exclaimed, “they would ridicule these bookworms and quoters who, instead of studying modern society and creatively developing theory, are attempting to find among the classics a quotation on what to do with a machine-tractor station.”
His belief in the tenets of Communist doctrine was not acquired but instinctive. He carried in his mind the stereotypes that derive from Communist ideology, yet he paid little heed to its intricacies. He did not go along with Stalin’s dictum that “if the facts and the theory don’t agree, change the facts.” But no one could ever accuse him of missing any opportunities to forward his cause or, as he might put it, “to give history a push.”
Khrushchev was in top form as he took me for a boat ride on the Moscow River during my visit to the Soviet Union. On eight occasions he stopped the boat to greet nearby swimmers with handshakes and to shout to them, “Are you captives? Are you slaves?” The bathers, obviously all members of the Communist elite, would answer with a chorus of nyet’s. He would then elbow me in the ribs and exclaim, “See how our slaves live!” Meanwhile Soviet newsmen took down every word. When we disembarked, Khrushchev was beaming. “You know, I really must admire you,” I told him. “You never miss a chance to make propaganda.” “No, no, I don’t make propaganda, I tell the truth,” he retorted—though he had never in his life told the truth when a lie would serve his purpose.
He continued to peddle his version of the truth throughout my travels in the Soviet Union. The thousands of people Mrs. Nixon and I met in Leningrad, in Sverdlovsk, and in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk greeted us with exceptional warmth. We were impressed by the fact that the Russian people were strong, hardworking, and friendly, and that the great majority seemed genuinely to like Americans. But at every stop at a factory or a marketplace Khrushchev had arranged for a Communist functionary to harass me with a well-rehearsed political question. The questioner would step forward and in
troduce himself as “a plain Soviet citizen.” Then, almost by rote, he would ask, “Why is the United States blocking efforts to stop atomic testing?” or “Why does America want war?” or “Why does the United States threaten us with military bases on foreign soil?”
Harrison Salisbury, the dean of American correspondents in the Soviet Union, summarized Khrushchev’s orchestrated heckling in The New York Times: “Vice President Richard M. Nixon preached the virtues of free speech to several hecklers. It was one of the rarest experiences in Soviet life—a free and easy interchange between a leading personality and challengers who appeared from the crowd. The similarity of the questions directed at Mr. Nixon and the tactics of the questioners suggested a central source of inspiration.”
A pragmatist in the sense that he did not let dogma constrict him, Khrushchev was a strangely impractical one. He approached the problems of the Soviet Union as a reckless gambler does a roulette wheel, with less forethought than enthusiasm. Impatient with strategy and susceptible to hunches, he wagered his assets with daring abandon, and more often than not he left empty-handed.
Quick in thought but quicker in action, he often let the latter run ahead of the former. He delighted in trying to solve major national problems with a single adventuresome stroke. He pushed through one grandiose program after another. He opened up vast tracts of marginal land to cultivation, only to have them ravaged by dust storms; he expanded the planting of corn for fodder, only to waste tens of thousands of acres whose soil was unsuited to it; he exalted in the virtues of using reinforced concrete and prefabricated construction, only to neglect to increase the production of cement.
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