The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Khrushchev did what he could to make the boast come true. The most visible signs of change were the thousands of new low-rise apartment buildings in the towns. They were small and cheaply built – they soon acquired the nickname ‘khrushchoby’, merging ‘Khrushchev’ with the word trushchoby (‘slums’). But this was an enormous advance on Stalinist housing policy, which had poured resources into a few high-prestige skyscrapers, leaving ordinary people to live in cramped communal apartments, sharing kitchens and bathrooms. Khrushchev’s goal was to give every family (admittedly often multi-generational) its own apartment. Yet he was insistent that greater consumption should not engender petty-bourgeois individualism. The authorities encouraged public dining rooms, neighbourhood committees, apartment-block wall newspapers and ‘open-door days’, when families would invite anybody from the building to drop in and engage in wholesome sociability. Sewing and knitting were discouraged as dangerously individualistic activities.59

  The modernist buildings themselves were an implicit attack on old High Stalinism. The USSR now endorsed a version of the modernism of the 1920s and 1930s – the high point of international Communism. It was engaged in an ideological competition with the West, and needed to present a more modern and cosmopolitan image.60 The fussy, elaborate style of late Stalinism was regarded as ‘petty-bourgeois’, philistine kitsch – the type of art liked by the crass Drozdov and his philistine chums. Officials even launched campaigns to persuade ordinary Soviet people to throw out their sets of miniature carved white elephants – an ornament as popular amongst Soviet households as the china flying ducks that populated Western living rooms in the 1960s.61

  The greatest symbol of the modernity of the Communist project, however, lay not in the boxy apartments that clustered around the metropolises of Eastern Europe, but in the sputnik satellite floating in the vastness of outer space. The Soviet space project had its origins in early scientific utopianism, and especially in the work of the pioneering theorist of space travel Konstantin Tsiolkovskii and his Society for Studies of Interplanetary Travel founded in 1924. In the 1930s Marshal Tukhachevskii championed the cause of rocket science. But with his disgrace in 1937, many of his scientist protégés were imprisoned and some even executed. In the early 1940s the baton of the space project passed to Malenkov, and the scientists – including several previously arrested as ‘enemies of the people’ – were now recruited for the atomic missile project. By the 1950s the entire programme, which had benefited enormously from hardware and expertise developed by the Nazis, had come under the protection of Khrushchev, who hoped to transform the Soviet armed forces and end its reliance on soldiers and tanks. The world became aware of the first spectacular success of the Soviet rocket programme when, on 4 October 1957, radios broadcast the beeps from the first sputnik artificial satellite. More triumphs were to follow: the first journey into space by an animal (a dog – ‘Laika’) and then, most impressively, the first human space journey by the pilot Iurii Gagarin in April 1961.

  Khrushchev marked Gagarin’s mission with the most lavish public celebrations since 1945 and could not hold back his tears at the ceremony. For him, the success of Gagarin’s ‘Vostok-1’ (‘East-1’) rocket was proof that the USSR had become a modern country. The Americans were rattled. The Democratic Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, a militant Cold Warrior, declared that the sputnik launch was a ‘devastating blow’ to American power and called on President Eisenhower to announce a ‘week of shame and danger’. Convinced that there was a huge ‘manpower gap’ between Soviet and American scientists, Jackson and his allies persuaded a tight-fisted president to sign the National Defense Education Act into law. Federal spending on education doubled and included massive funds for science and the study of the Communist and developing world – laying the foundations for American pre-eminence in higher education and advanced research.

  The space programme might have planted in the minds of its enemies the idea of the USSR as a land of enlightened, rational citizens, but the transformation of image into reality proved a far greater challenge. After a period of relative tolerance during wartime and the late Stalinist period, Khrushchev returned to the atheism of the 1920s and 1930s, closing churches and introducing new courses on ‘scientific atheism’ into universities. Party propagandists, in their efforts to spread atheism, declared the Gagarin journey proof-positive of God’s non-existence.

  The Soviet Union, then, had spectacularly reclaimed its earlier status as the acme of modernity after the ‘dark ages’ of post-war obscurantism. But how was modernization – of both defence and living standards – to be paid for? Khrushchev’s solution lay in his new, more inclusive and non-violent form of mobilization. He was convinced that would achieve much more than either Stalin’s bullying or capitalism’s incentives. He relaxed the old disciplinarian regime in factories, and workers were given more freedoms in the hope they would work harder. He was also determined to shake up complacent officialdom. But this emphasis on inclusivity and participation did not amount to the end of the privileged position of the Communist Party. Indeed, he expected the party to take a leading role in mobilizing the masses. One of his first initiatives was to scrap the industrial ministries – the home of the arrogant Drozdovs as he saw it – and give power to local party bosses through new regional economic councils. Khrushchev expected that party people, as ideological enthusiasts, would be much better able to enthuse the masses than the staid state bureaucrats. The old 1930s campaign style was back. Party officials, desperate for promotion, made impractical promises to achieve economic miracles. Even the disgraced Lysenko returned, as Khrushchev believed his promises to improve wheat output.

  Predictably, Khrushchev’s faith in the rapid ‘leaps’ was sadly misplaced. His first campaign – the Virgin Lands grain programme – had run aground by 1963, as the land planted was prone to drought, and was less fertile than average. Promises of enormous feats of production were shown to be fraudulent. The party leader of the Riazan region promised to triple meat production, and was made a Hero of Socialist Labour on the strength of his utopian plans. But it was then shown that he was actually buying meat from neighbouring regions and passing it off as his own. When exposed, he committed suicide in shame.

  Nor did Khrushchev’s attempts to recast the relationship between officials and workers meet with success. He replaced Stalinist repression and individual ‘piece rates’ with new collective incentives (linking wages to the factory’s overall success), but with little success: workers did not feel inspired to work harder when they, individually, had little control over the performance of the factory as a whole.62 Meanwhile, Khrushchev found that party bosses were no more capable of inspiring heroism in ordinary people than state bureaucrats. A disillusioned Khrushchev – like Stalin in the 1930s and Gorbachev in the 1980s – increasingly moved from seeing party bosses as allies against a recalcitrant state bureaucracy, to blaming them for the failures of his grand projects. These party men were as conservative as the Drozdovs in the old economic apparatus, he complained, arguing that the answer was an infusion of new blood. He ordered that a fixed proportion of officials be compulsorily replaced at each party election, and divided the party apparatus into two – one in charge of agriculture and one industry. Both of these reforms were deeply unpopular amongst party officials, who understandably saw them as a threat to their jobs and status.

  Khrushchev’s early popularity also declined as he failed to meet his economic promises. Food price-rises in 1962, designed to improve incentives and living standards for the peasants, hit workers, triggering strikes and unrest in many Soviet cities. Most serious was a strike at the Budennyi Electric Locomotive Plant in the Caucasus town of Novocherkassk. Workers complained that they could no longer afford meat and sausage. One official told them, in an inversion of Marie Antoinette’s advice, they should be satisfied with cheap liver pasties, and the workers replied with a new slogan: ‘Make sausage out of Khrushchev’.63 Echoing Bloody Sunday in 1905, the strikers marched t
o the town centre, loyally bearing portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and were confronted by soldiers. Shooting started when they refused to leave, and twenty-three were killed. Khrushchev was worried that the unrest would spread if it was left unchecked.64

  Novocherkassk had brutally illustrated how conditional workers’ support was. The urban educated classes – Khrushchev’s most fervent early supporters – also soon fell out of love with their hero. Ludmilla Alekseeva, a teacher who was later to become a dissident, remembered the circle of friends of her youth, her kompaniia. They saw themselves as descendants of the intelligentsia of Chernyshevskii’s era, but unlike them ‘weren’t burdened by guilt before the common people, since we were just as poor and deprived of rights as our compatriots who hadn’t reached our level of education’. Alekseeva pointed to an increasing split between the educated, urban middle classes and the party. She recalled how her friends were divided into two groups: the ‘physicists’ were the descendants of the Modernist Marxists, but were now deeply sceptical of all ideology: ‘all this blather about social justice, democracy, equality, “the people”, proletarians-of-the-world unite. Look where it got us: there’s nothing to eat. We are up to our throats in shit, and you are still chitchatting.’65 The ‘lyricists’, in contrast, were scornful of this obsession with atoms and neutrons. These Romantics wanted to know about the meaning of life and ‘how to live’. Amongst this group a few remaining enthusiasts for Marxism could be found, though theirs was an eclectic unofficial Marxism – a mish-mash of Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse.

  Both Alekseeva’s physicists and lyricists had initially found much in Khrushchev’s ‘de-Stalinization’ to admire, but they were soon disillusioned. Khrushchev, like Beria and Malenkov, accepted that the rigid dogmatism of the Stalinist era had been destructive, and that the regime had to have a more inclusive attitude towards the technical intelligentsia. He allowed work to be published which would never have seen the light of day before, like Solzhenitsyn’s powerfully bleak account of a Gulag prisoner’s life, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. But the rehabilitation of Lysenko and the criticism of Dudintsev disappointed his erstwhile supporters. In his memoirs, Khrushchev regretted that he had not courted the intelligentsia more, but the problem was in part a cultural and generational one: the poorly educated party official of the 1920s and 1930s had little in common with the urban sophisticates of the 1960s. The clash of cultures is well illustrated by his tirade at an exhibition of modern art in Moscow:

  ‘You’re a nice-looking lad, but how could you paint something like this? We should take down your trousers and set you in a clump of nettles until you understand your mistakes. You should be ashamed. Are you a queer or a normal man?… We have a right to send you to cut trees until you’ve paid back the money the state has spent on you. The people and the government have taken a lot of trouble with you, and you pay them back with this shit.’66

  More dangerous for Khrushchev than the relatively quiescent intelligentsia, though, were his fellow leaders. They found his ambitious goals, ideological enthusiasm and impulsive behaviour deeply threatening. His behaviour on the foreign stage was especially unsettling and embarrassing. Khrushchev had promised to convert the old East–West military confrontation into peaceful ideological competition, but he presided over the most tense and dangerous period of the Cold War. His leadership was marked by a series of crises: Hungary in 1956; his attempts to drive the West out of Berlin in 1958, culminating in the construction of one of the greatest symbols of the Cold War confrontation – the Berlin Wall of 1961; and, most serious of all, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

  It would be unfair to place all of the blame for the warming of the Cold War at Khrushchev’s door. The world of the early 1960s had become much more ideologically charged than that of a decade earlier. The true believer Mao was snapping at Khrushchev’s heels, whilst Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution of 1959 announced the arrival of a new generation of Third-World Communists. Meanwhile, though the policies of President John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960, were marked by a great deal of flexibility, he was determined to negotiate from strength. He also injected a new energy into the struggle against Communism in the Third World, and was willing to use covert military action. Khrushchev, determined to retain the ideological leadership of world Communism, responded to these challenges impulsively, with none of Stalin’s fearful caution.

  Khrushchev was also trying to mount an ambitious foreign policy on the cheap, reluctant as he was to cut living standards, and he hoped to reduce spending on the conventional military whilst building up nuclear weapons. Yet his plans did not go smoothly. Red Army officers were naturally unhappy at the proposed cuts in manpower, whilst the construction of long-range Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) proved much more expensive and difficult than he had expected. In 1962 – a year of disappointing economic performance, price rises and social unrest – Khrushchev had to find a cheap and quick way of improving the strategic balance, at a time when the United States was installing missiles in Italy and Turkey. His solution was to put ‘one of our hedgehogs down the Americans’ trousers’, as he vividly put it: placing intermediate and medium-range missiles in newly Communist Cuba.67 It was American technological superiority, though, that unravelled Khrushchev’s plan. Spy planes revealed the build-up, and American and Soviet ships confronted each other in the Caribbean. The superpowers were ‘eyeball to eyeball’, as Dean Rusk said, and the world was the closest it has ever been to nuclear catastrophe. Khrushchev blinked first, and the ships retreated. He extracted some concessions from the Americans: they withdrew the missiles from Turkey and promised, informally, not to attempt another Cuban invasion. But Kennedy insisted that the Turkish missile deal not be made public, and so Khrushchev was unable to rebuff criticisms that he had humiliated the USSR. He had lost face within the Soviet leadership, before the Americans and the Chinese, and faced the anger of the Cubans.

  The Cuban Missile Crisis proved to be a turning point in the Cold War. Warnings of the dangers of nuclear weapons, made by Malenkov and others in the mid-1950s, could no longer be ignored. Meanwhile Khrushchev, and the USSR’s leadership of world Communism, was deeply damaged, and within two years he was facing a plot against him. Yet his foreign-policy failures were not the only reason for his weakness. His conflicts with party bosses were also important. Khrushchev believed that his policies were not working because they were being undermined by self-interested officials. His colleagues suspected, probably rightly, that he was planning a purge of party bosses by organizing elections to which they would have to submit.

  On 13 October 1964 Khrushchev returned from the Caucasus to a meeting of the Presidium, where his colleagues condemned him for his unreliability and voluntarism, and called for his removal. Khrushchev did not fight, and even tearfully accepted some of the criticisms. He peacefully went into retirement on ‘health’ grounds. His successors, led by party boss Leonid Brezhnev, Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin and Nikolai Podgornyi changed course. Promises of imminent Communism were abandoned. Populism gave way to the power of officials, and Khrushchev’s term for the USSR – the ‘All-People’s State’ – was abandoned. Brezhnev returned life-time job security to insecure officials. Khrushchev’s non-violent version of the radicalism of the 1930s had failed; Dudintsev’s ‘invisible empire’ had struck back.

  As the Lenin Hills Pioneer Palace was opening its doors in 1962, it was already clear that the peaceful version of Radical Marxism it expressed was failing. The Communist Party was clearly not going to enthuse the people and drive them to work harder. It was no longer the messianic organization of the late 1920s, and the declaration of class peace at home and abroad ensured it was even more difficult to engage popular enthusiasm. Confronted with an enemy – whether within or without – people are often willing to make sacrifices, but Khrushchev did not want violent class struggle, and the West was not an immediate threat. Khrushchev was increasingly forced to behave
like a Soviet Father Christmas, promising treats and abundant consumption, rather than as a Marxist Moses, leading his people to a land of justice and equality. The early 1960s was still a time of optimism and faith in socialism. But by throwing down the gauntlet (or rubber glove) to Nixon at the kitchen debates and explicitly setting out to compete with the West over living standards, Khrushchev had only succeeded in planting the seeds of future ideological decay.

  Khrushchev always saw himself as a radical, and his disgruntled Central Committee colleagues agreed. But to Communists forging a new wave of revolutions in the developing world, Khrushchev seemed to have lost his revolutionary élan. He had backed down over Cuba, and by rejecting class struggle he had deprived Communism of its moral and emotional energy. The most vocal critic of Khrushchev’s ‘revisionism’ was Mao, for the Chinese party still believed that it was building socialism, and harsh measures were still required. Also China had not suffered anything as traumatic as the Soviet ‘Great Break’ or Terror of the 1930s, and class struggle still seemed virtuous and necessary. China, though, was soon to make up for its lack of experience. In the following decade it was to suffer disasters unprecedented in the Communist world.