It was through these and similar programs, Khrushchev boasted, that the Soviet Union would surpass American production levels in seven years. But like anyone else who traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, I noted that its primitive transportation system alone rendered Khrushchev’s statement hopelessly unrealistic.
Khrushchev genuinely sought to bring prosperity to the Soviet Union. But he failed to understand, or perhaps understood all too well, what this would require. He would have had to drastically overhaul the entire Soviet economic and political system in ways that would have loosened the Communist party’s control over the people—something he was unwilling and unable to do. Instead he put his hopes into grand schemes that were more like a magician’s tricks than an economist’s programs. When none of the tricks seemed to work, his audience in the Presidium grew restless and finally yanked him off the stage, condemning him among other things for blind pursuit of “harebrained schemes.” Khrushchev had tried to have his cake and eat it, too—to retain complete control over the economy and to seek prosperity as well—but in the end lost the chance to do either.
• • •
The bombastic clown and the misdirected pragmatist were important aspects of Khrushchev’s personality, but after my first encounter with him I could tell that the totalitarian in him dwelled at the core and animated his being. Only thinly veiled even in his good moods, his cold ruthlessness was always present in his merciless dark-blue eyes, which seemed to turn coal black when he was emphasizing a point.
Odd though it may seem, the totalitarian in him was very much apparent in his sense of humor. The jokes he told at diplomatic receptions often had unmistakably sinister overtones. Many were about the activities of the Cheka, the earlier Russian secret police agency. He seemed to enjoy these in particular because of the obvious parallels between the Cheka and his own police apparatus.
One of his favorites was an old joke about a review of troops in Moscow. A soldier in the ranks sneezed. The Cheka officer present asked whoever it was to step forward. No one responded. The first row of soldiers was lined up and shot. The officer asked again who sneezed. No one replied, so the second row of troops was executed. The officer asked a third time who sneezed. “I did,” answered the timid voice of a soldier in the back. “Gesundheit,” said the Chekist.
Khrushchev also appreciated macabre humor in others. During our lunch at Khrushchev’s dacha outside Moscow in 1959, Mikoyan commented on Stalin’s peculiar work habits, saying that Stalin often summoned his subordinates in the middle of the night. “We sleep much better,” Mikoyan said, “now that Comrade Khrushchev is our Premier.” After doing a double take at what he had said, Mikoyan commented with a smile, “I guess you can take that in more ways than one.” Khrushchev, who was seated across the table from Mikoyan, beamed with pleasure over the double entendre.
Khrushchev was renowned for his colorful quips and sharp retorts. It would have taken a Churchill in his prime to match him in this respect. But Khrushchev’s humor, unlike Churchill’s, was almost always combative, aggressive, intimidating, designed not so much to evoke laughter as to issue an unspoken challenge or threat. Churchill’s wit was sharp, but Khrushchev’s was always brutally blunt.
To Khrushchev, humor was a bludgeon for clobbering adversaries. While scolding a group of farmers for not selling their livestock for slaughter, he told them that they were “not zoo keepers who collect animals for show.” Asked if Russia would remain Communist forever, he said that it would not abandon Marxism-Leninism “until the shrimp learns to whistle” or until “you can see your ears without a mirror.” At an art exhibition Khrushchev, whose dislike for modem art was intense, listened impatiently as a poet explained to him that the “formalistic tendencies” in certain abstract art would “be straightened out in time.” To this Khrushchev shot back indignantly, “The hunchbacked are straightened out by the grave!”
After Khrushchev and I left the American National Exhibition’s model television studio, he kept needling me about my background as a lawyer, implying that I was a slick and dishonest manipulator of words, while he was an honest miner and worker. As we passed a model American grocery store, I mentioned to him that my father had owned a small general store in which my brothers and I had worked while going to school. “All shopkeepers are thieves,” Khrushchev snorted with a wave of his arm. “Thieving happens everywhere,” I responded. “Even in the market I visited this morning, I saw people weighing food after they had bought it from the state.” For once Khrushchev was stumped and sought to change the subject.
Khrushchev seldom indulged in self-deprecating humor, but when he did, he almost always used it to make a point he truly did not believe. After the kitchen confrontation I was walking with Kliment Voroshilov, who was serving in the figurehead office of President of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev was walking a few steps behind, and I beckoned him to join us. “No, you walk with the President,” he told me. “I know my place.”
• • •
Khrushchev’s sinister jokes and insulting jibes provided a glimpse of the man who had learned to rule as an apprentice to Joseph Stalin. Under Stalin, the cruelest of taskmasters, only the fittest survived. His understudies had to be not only ruthless but clever. Former Ambassador Foy Kohler, one of America’s few top Soviet experts, described Khrushchev as the embodiment of the Russian adjective khitryi. “According to the dictionary,” he wrote, “it means sly, cunning, artful, intricate, or wily. But it really means more than this; it also means unscrupulous, smart, clever, quick-witted. Roll all these adjectives into one and you have the khitryi Khrushchev—a bootlicker or a bully as circumstances required, a demagogue and opportunist always.”
Khrushchev joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 at the age of twenty-four. In 1928, while working as a minor party official in Kiev, he caught the eye of Lazar Kaganovich, the Communist party boss of the Ukraine. When Kaganovich returned to Moscow in 1929, he took Khrushchev with him as his loyal first lieutenant. In the 1930s the two benefited greatly from the purges. They were more Stalinist than Stalin and their political stars streaked upward. As construction supervisor of the Moscow subway, Khrushchev won a reputation for being a tough, reliable functionary who was not afraid to get mud on his boots or blood on his hands. With that on his résumé Khrushchev was appointed the boss of the Ukrainian Communist party in 1938.
No assignment in the Soviet Union was more difficult. The embers of Ukrainian nationalism still glowed, and fanned by Stalin’s farm collectivization, during which several million Ukrainian peasants had been killed, they could ignite at any moment. Khrushchev’s mission was to extinguish them by purging the Ukrainian Communist party of any members with nationalist sympathies and by accelerating the Russification and communization of the province’s forty million inhabitants.
The Great Purges were at their height when Khrushchev became Stalin’s viceroy. In six months his predecessor had liquidated almost seventy percent of the Ukrainian Central Committee that was selected in 1937. Stalin replaced him with Khrushchev in order to step up the pace. Khrushchev did not disappoint his boss. Soon only three of the 166 members of the 1937 committee remained. He also purged a fifth of the local party secretaries and thousands of rank-and-file members.
When Hitler’s armies invaded the Ukraine in the Second World War, its people joyously welcomed them as liberators. It was Khrushchev from whom they were being freed. In 1943 German Occupation forces excavated ninety-five mass graves containing a total of ten thousand corpses. Artifacts found with the bodies identified them as victims of the Communist political purges from 1937 to 1939.
In 1940 Khrushchev supervised the Soviet takeover of eastern Poland when it was partitioned in accordance with the Hitler-Stalin pact. After the Germans attacked the Soviet Union, he served as a lieutenant general—not as front-line officer, but as a political commissar whose task it was to ensure that Stalin’s orders were being followed. After the war he returned to the Ukraine to kill those who had collaborated w
ith the Germans. He was soon boasting to Stalin that “half the leading workers have been done away with.”
Stalin died in March 1953, but his influence did not die with him. It lived on through the imprint his years in power had left on the men who had helped him rule and who were now taking over. The lessons of Stalinism were brutally simple. Instinct counseled Khrushchev that if he was not at the top or moving toward it, he would be at the mercy of those who were. Wisdom advised him to compromise with an adversary only if he did not have the power to crush him or if he needed his help to vanquish someone else. Experience taught him the value of one of Lenin’s sayings: “The important thing is not to defeat the enemy, but to finish him off.”
The struggle for succession began immediately after Stalin’s death. When Khrushchev secured the position of First Secretary of the Communist party, other members of the Presidium scorned him. Lavrenti Beria, the head of the secret police, called him “our potato politician.” Kaganovich was known to dislike his lieutenant’s rise to prominence. Georgi Malenkov, the Prime Minister, and Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s formidable Foreign Minister, dubbed Khrushchev “nedostoiny”—“unworthy.”
Khrushchev remembered everything and forgave nothing. He set about using the patronage powers of his office to undermine his rivals much as Stalin had done to his thirty years before. Khrushchev combined his intimate knowledge of the party machinery with an uncanny gift for timing, a ferocious tenacity of purpose, and a ruthless approach to power, and he won preeminence by 1957.
He vanquished his competitors for power. As a result, Beria, the man most feared after Stalin’s death, was arrested and executed. Kaganovich, the man who most advanced Khrushchev’s career, labored at an unspecified post in the provinces. Malenkov, the man Stalin had designated as his successor, managed a small power plant in Siberia. And Molotov, the man who had negotiated the Hitler-Stalin pact, clinked glasses with the diplomats of Ulan Bator in Outer Mongolia.
• • •
Stalinism had made Khrushchev a totalitarian by temperament as well as conviction. He was wholly intolerant of opposition, whether it came from his colleagues in a struggle for power or from me in a debate. He would bide his time if confronted with equal force. But the moment he sensed that he had gained an advantage, he pressed it to the limit.
In all my discussions with him he was totally inflexible, never giving an inch of ground or leaving any room for negotiation. In his mind he was always completely right and I was always irredeemably wrong. When I responded in his own terms at our Kremlin meeting, he backed off. When I let his bombast go unanswered at the model television studio, he took this restraint as a sign of weakness and exploited it to the maximum.
After his aggressive performance before the television cameras, our next stop on the tour was the model American home. As we walked up the center hall of the house, looking into the rooms on both sides, he continued to push on the offensive. We stopped at the kitchen, where we began discussing, of all things, washing machines. After he delivered a rambling statement about why having only one model of a washing machine was better than having many, I said, “Isn’t it better to be talking about the relative merits of our washing machines than the relative strengths of our rockets? Isn’t this the kind of competition you want?”
When he heard the translation, Khrushchev appeared to turn angry, jammed his thumb into my chest, and shouted, “Yes, that’s the kind of competition we want, but your generals say they are so powerful, they can destroy us. We can also show you something so that you will know the Russian spirit. We are strong, we can beat you. But in this respect, we can also show you something.”
He had thrown down the gauntlet. It was time to call his bluff. “To me you are strong and we are strong,” I said, pointing my finger at him to drive my message across. “In this day and age to argue who is stronger completely misses the point. If war comes, we both lose.” Khrushchev tried to laugh off my point, but I pressed it home. “I hope the Prime Minister understands all the implications of what I have just said,” I went on. “When you place either one of our powerful nations in such a position that it has no choice but to accept dictation or fight, then you are playing with the most destructive thing in the world.”
He struck back furiously, seeming at times to lose control of his emotions. But as I noted later, Khrushchev “never loses his temper—he uses it.” Now he was using it to try to make me look like a villain, sternly warning me not to threaten him and vehemently denying that he had ever issued an ultimatum himself. “It sounds to me like a threat,” he shouted. “We, too, are giants. You want to threaten—we will answer threats with threats.”
I said that our side would never engage in threats. He then accused me of threatening him indirectly. “You are talking about implications,” he said, deliberately misconstruing the way I used the word. “I have not been. We have the means at our disposal. Ours are better than yours. It is you who want to compete. Da, da, da . . .”
I said that we were well aware of the power of the Soviet Union, but emphasized that in the nuclear age marginal differences either way were immaterial. Khrushchev soon realized that he could gain nothing more by these means and sought to end the discussion. Halfheartedly he said, “We want peace and friendship with all nations, especially with America.”
Suspicion was central to his nature. After we left the model house, Donald Kendall, international president of Pepsi-Cola, offered him a glass of his company’s product. He eyed it suspiciously and would not drink it until I tried it first. After I tasted it, he gulped down a glassful without taking a breath.
My encounter with Khrushchev in this so-called “kitchen debate” convinced me that he was a brutal totalitarian to the bone. He was never content simply to say his piece and to let me say mine. He compulsively created disputes in order to try to bully me into submission and intimidate me into silence, not through the logic of his arguments or the eloquence of his words but through the power of his bombast and the gravity of his threats.
This characterization may seem harsh to those who best remember Khrushchev as the man who initiated the period of slightly relaxed censorship known as the “thaw” and who exposed the unjust killings of the Stalin years. But neither of these episodes disproved the characterization. They both reaffirmed it.
During the “thaw” Khrushchev permitted greater freedom of expression in literature and the arts, but reserved for himself the privilege of determining what could be criticized and what could not. Many of the horrors of the Stalin era were fair game, but those that continued into the Khrushchev era were not. Khrushchev enforced his literary rules strictly; he knew how difficult it was to allow the intelligentsia a little bit of freedom without the process snowballing. He once told a group of writers that the revolution in Hungary in 1956 could have been forestalled if the government had simply shot a few writers who were stirring up discontent. If a similar situation arose in the Soviet Union, he said as he eyed the writers stonily, “my hands would not tremble.”
Similarly, in his “secret speech” delivered at the Communist party congress in 1956, Khrushchev did not denounce Stalin’s reign of terror because of some newly discovered moral revulsion. He did so as part of a calculated political gamble. Choosing his words carefully, Khrushchev never condemned Stalin’s brutality itself. He noted approvingly that Lenin “resorted ruthlessly and without hesitation . . . to the most extreme methods.” He even went so far as to list the liquidation of the “right deviationists” as one of Stalin’s great “services” to communism. He denounced only those crimes in which his political rivals could be implicated. In effect, by skewing the history of Stalin’s purges, he was able to use it to conduct his own.
Exiled dissident Vladimir Bukovsky reported that while Khrushchev was denouncing Stalin’s crimes in a speech at a Communist party meeting, a note from someone in the audience was handed to him. It asked, “Where were you at the time?” Khrushchev read the note over the public address system and
shouted, “Who wrote this note? Please stand up!” After a moment or two it was clear that no one was going to come forward. “All right,” Khrushchev said, resolving to answer the question, “I was where you are now.”
The anecdote may well be apocryphal. Whether fact or fiction, it poignantly illustrates that Khrushchev kept the Stalinist system basically intact even as he defrocked Stalin himself. And though he exorcised Stalin from the nation’s soul, he never succeeded in cleansing Stalinism from his own.
• • •
After our heated debate in the model kitchen, Khrushchev transformed himself into a friendly, convivial host. At a luncheon in the Kremlin he urged us to join him in the Russian tradition of throwing our champagne glasses into the fireplace after drinking our toasts. He also stopped insisting that we fly on Russian airplanes for the remainder of our trip and offered to allow us to use our own.
These incidents were examples of Khrushchev’s disarming change of pace. Though he never gave an inch on substantive issues, he could be very generous in personal relations. He considered this a small price to pay if he believed it could give him even a slight edge in the discussions of major issues. He was a living testament to one of the ironclad rules of statesmanship: Good personal relations do not necessarily lead to better state relations.
But Khrushchev knew that this was all show. In using geniality and charm as weapons, one of the most coldly brutal leaders of all time, Joseph Stalin, could be effusive. When Khrushchev, and later Brezhnev, treated me similarly, I better understood how Harry Truman could have once referred to Stalin as “good old Joe.” With none of them, however, did these calculated displays of warmth mean that substantive concessions would follow.
Khrushchev continued to ply me with his charm during the official dinner the American Ambassador gave for him. Midway through the evening he began describing in eloquent detail the beauties of the Russian countryside. Suddenly he insisted that we must not wait to see them. Our schedule called for us to go to his dacha in the morning, but he quickly arranged for us to make the twenty-two-mile drive after dinner so that we could spend all of the next day there.
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