Johnson's Russia List
#7288
14 August 2003
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A CDI Project
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#14
Hoover Digest
Summer 2003
(Hoover Institution)
HISTORY AND CULTURE:
Loudmouth
Remembering Nikita Khrushchev, the crude, poorly educated peasant who laid
the groundwork for the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.
By Robert Conquest
Robert Conquest is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was the unquestioned leader of the Soviet
Union from 1957 to 1964. In this fairly short span, he managed to provoke
two major international crises, survive a coup (a second toppled him),
order two disastrous economic overhauls, and hold erratic confrontations
with nearly everyone in sight-the Chinese leadership, President Kennedy and
Vice President Nixon, the neo-Stalinists in his Presidium, and the Russian
intellectuals in his midst. On visits to the United States, he pounded his
shoe at the United Nations, ogled Marilyn Monroe's derri?re, and cheerily
shoveled manure in Iowa with the locals.

What was Khrushchev like? William Taubman, a professor of political science
at Amherst College, has now published Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, the
first comprehensive and scholarly biography of Stalin's successor. As part
of a painstaking attempt to answer the question, he quotes the psychologist
Nancy McWilliams on the "hypomanic" type: "Elated, energetic,
self-promoting . . . work-addicted . . . lacking a systematic approach. . .
. Grand schemes, racing thoughts . . . constantly 'up'-until exhaustion
eventually sets in." It's not everything, but it's a start.

When Stalin died, in March 1953, Khrushchev was still in the leadership
ranks of the Communist Party, despite a series of purges. Shortly before
his death, Stalin was preparing yet another purge. Khrushchev was not on
the list. What characteristics saved him? Among other things, no doubt, was
his very volubility-the impression of holding nothing back. More generally,
though, he had an air of being from the people, the narod. Khrushchev was
from Ukrainian peasant stock, and at 14 he went to work in the Ukrai-nian
coal mines. As Stalin's notorious foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, put
it, "Khrushchev was no accident. We are primarily a peasant country."

Khrushchev was born in 1894 in the Kursk region, and when he was 14 the
family moved to the proletarian mining city of Yuzovka (which was later
renamed Stalino and then Donetsk). He began reading Pravda in 1915, as a
metal fitter in the mines, but he didn't join the Bolshevik Party until
more than a year after the revolution. Khrushchev said that while working
at foreign-owned enterprises he "discovered something about capitalists.
They are all alike, whatever the nationality. All they wanted from me was
the most work for the least money that kept me alive. So I became a
Communist." He served in local party organizations in Ukraine, and in 1929
he went to Moscow, where he became involved in the city party committee.
During the early infighting in the party, Khrushchev sided first with the
Trotskyites-not, as it turned out, an ideal entry on one's Communist
curriculum vitae. For nearly any other Soviet politician of the 1930s, this
would have been a blemish worthy of execution. Stalin merely forced
Khrushchev to make a frank confession of it. Stalin's view of the matter
seems to have been that the true Trotskyites came from the older party
intelligentsia-the professional revolutionaries. A na?f, a semiliterate
worker member, likely appeared to Stalin an ignorant dupe, not a lost soul.
Khrushchev himself seems to have attributed his rise to luck: He met
Stalin's wife, Nadezhda, while taking a course at the Industrial Academy,
and she passed the name, and her approval, along to her husband.

In one sense, Taubman's chapters on the struggle for power, first under
Stalin and then among his competing successors, remind one of Saint-Simon
(the courtier, not the socialist). Ambition, intrigue, slander, temporary
alliances, and betrayals: The essentials are the same. The tone, however,
is rather different. In place of the well-turned, feline exchanges of
Versailles, there is a certain coarseness. Khrushchev, a prolific user of
profane language, was particularly adept in this regard. We find, too, the
secret-police chief Lavrenty Beria pinning on the back of Khrushchev's
jacket a label bearing the word "prick"-hard to imagine in the Bourbon court.

Taubman's biography gives a thorough account of Khrushchev's early career,
and he does not play down Khrushchev's role in the 1937-38 Great Terror.
When he was appointed head of the Ukrainian Party committee, in 1938, he
pledged to "spare no efforts in seizing and annihilating all agents of
fascism, Trotskyites, Bukharinites, and all those despicable bourgeois
nationalists." His suppression of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in the
mid-1940s was ruthless. Taubman notes that three-quarters of a million men,
aged 19 to 50, were conscripted, given eight days' training, and thrown
straight into battle against the Germans. All this is a reminder that the
huge Soviet mortality rate in the war cannot be presented simply as heroic
sacrifice.

After the prolonged power struggle that followed Stalin's death, Khrushchev
emerged as the leader of the Communist Party. Countless prisoners in the
Gulag camp system were freed. On February 25, 1956, Khrushchev went before
a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress and delivered a speech
that proved to be his most lasting legacy. He denounced Stalin's
"personality cult," his "capricious and despotic character," and the
"brutal violence" with which he ruled the country. Khrushchev, who was also
interested in lifting blame from his own generation and in continuing the
regime, delegitimized Stalin, yet, at the time, he did not seem to realize
what the results would be. The "secret speech," which was soon leaked to
the Western media, provided only limited details of the torture and
execution of leading party members, but it began the long process of
exposing and, eventually, undermining Communist authority in the Soviet
Union and abroad. The speech sparked rebellion in Poland and the Hungarian
revolution. It shocked into sanity a whole stratum of the Western
intelligentsia that had, to one degree or another, accepted the fairy tale
as painted by Stalin and his court historians. When Mikhail Gorbachev
resumed the Khrushchev initiative, 30 years later, he, too, began by
revealing suppressed secrets of party history, and he, too, began
hesitantly, fearful of attacking Lenin, lest it lead to the immediate
collapse of the entire Bolshevik project. But that would come.

Khrushchev's forays into foreign affairs were especially erratic,
incandescent. In his relations with foreigners, Khrushchev was always, and
openly, alert for any sign that he, or the Soviet regime, was being
"disrespected." And he was always prepared to respond with disrespect of
his own. In Paris, he thought (wrongly) that he was being hissed by West
German journalists, and he shouted about the "fascist bastards we didn't
finish off at Stalingrad." After a confrontation with British prime
minister Harold Macmillan in Moscow, he told an associate in the leadership
that he had "[expletive] him with a telephone pole." It was also a trifle
undiplomatic to tell the Americans that he had four or five bombs ready for
France and Britain. During a series of tense negotiations with the Chinese
Communist leadership in Beijing, Khrushchev, in a room that he certainly
knew was bugged, entertained his delegation with obscene rhymes about
various Chinese leaders and references to Mao as "old galoshes"-a term for
a used condom in both Russian and Chinese slang.

Taubman's chapter on the Cuban crisis of 1962 is a full accounting of
Khrushchev's huge and dangerous miscalculations. Even in this supposedly
planned venture, and with the possibility of worldwide destruction, a
remarkable level of incompetence prevailed. The general who was chosen to
be in charge, Issa Pliyev, was distinguished only for having put down a
rebellion of Soviet workers in the southern city of Novocherkassk earlier
that year. Described as knowing "more about horses than missiles," Pliyev
impressed no one in the Soviet hierarchy but, nevertheless, was given
authority to launch tactical nuclear missiles.

It is clear from Taubman's book that of the three parties involved the
Cubans were the most reckless. Taubman quotes the remarkable letter from
Castro to Moscow in effect arguing that the USSR must use a first strike
against the United States in the expected final crisis. The author suggests
that Castro's attitude was due, in part, to his belief that the Soviets
held nuclear superiority over the United States-and that they could destroy
it even if they suffered great damage themselves. That would mean that the
Cubans had accepted Soviet disinformation. Taubman describes well how
Castro was, in turn, enraged by the Soviet withdrawal, calling Khrushchev a
"son of a bitch . . . bastard . . . no cojones [balls] . . . maricón
[homosexual]."

How did Khrushchev keep power? The question persists not merely because of
the inanity or the collapse of his policies. He was also tactless with his
allies and subordinates. Brezhnev, who finally helped unseat him, recalled
that Khrushchev had once called his Kremlin colleagues "dogs peeing on
curbstones." Khrushchev described his loyal foreign minister, Andrei
Gromyko, as "a piece of [expletive]"-a favorite expression usually reserved
for rivals or foreigners.

The Soviet political machine, however, was so centralized that it took
years of such error and abuse to create an atmosphere in which a coup could
occur. Shortly after Khrushchev was removed from power, Pravda published an
editorial that referred indirectly to his policies as "harebrained,"
"half-baked," "hasty," "divorced from reality," "bragging and bluster,"
"attraction to rule by fiat." In fact, this was pretty mild compared with
some of the accompanying speeches-and all of it was true.

Perhaps it was necessary to be unreliable and inconsistent in order to
emerge from the ideological trap of Stalinism, and then the direction could
not be fully reversed. In retirement, Khrushchev was treated harshly by the
Brezhnev regime, but Brezhnev failed to prevent him from dictating his
memoirs and, eventually, publishing them in the West. The memoirs are vital
for Taubman's exhaustively and effectively researched opus, as are
countless pages of archival material that have emerged since the collapse
of the Soviet Union. Taubman is a voracious researcher, but I only hope,
for his sake, that his conscience did not force him to read through all
those volumes of Khrushchev's speeches on agriculture. Short of that, he
has tapped every available source for this veritable Volga of a book.

This essay appeared in the New Yorker on March 31, 2003.

********