From 1908 until the late 1920s, Khrushchev lived and worked mostly in the Donbass. Until the revolution, he laboured as a metalworker whose ambition was to become an engineer. The revolution and civil war 'distracted' him into Bolshevik politics (he joined the party in 1918), witness the fact that he twice returned to an educational path that seemed designed to lead to an industrial career. Strange as it may sound, Khrushchev might have made a better manager than a political leader whose native gifts sustained him during his rise to the top, but failed him when he reached the summit of power. Both in 1925 and 1930, he chose careers in the Communist Party apparatus, first in Ukraine, then in Moscow, where he quickly became Moscow party boss. Returning to Ukraine as party leader in 1938, he remained there (except for the war years) until Stalin summoned him back to Moscow in 1949.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Khrushchev played a central role in Stalinism. His positive contributions included supervising construction of the Moscow metro, energising Ukrainian agriculture and industry after the Great Purges, and attempting to ameliorate the post-war famine which Stalin's draconian policies caused. On the other hand, as he himselflater admitted, his arms were 'up to the elbows in blood' of those who perished in the purges. 'That', he continued shortly before he died, 'is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul'.[116] Khrushchev believed in socialism and took great pride in his role in 'building' it. But he also felt a deep guilt about his complicity in Stalinism, guilt that helps to explain both his anti-Stalin campaign and why he retreated from it lest his own complicity be fully revealed.
The 'secret speech' was a sign of Khrushchev's repentance. As early as 1940 he confided his sense of anger about Stalin's terror to a childhood friend in the Donbass: 'Don't blame me for all that. I'm not involved in that. When I can, I'll settle with that "Mudakshvili" [Khrushchev altered Stalin's real name, Dzhugashvili, by playing on the Russian word for 'prick', mudak] in full. I don't forgive him any of them - not Kirov, not Iakir, not Tukhachevskii, not the simplest worker or peasant.'[117]
Stalin was Khrushchev's mentor and tormentor, the man who raised him to the heights, but mocked him for his limitations as he did so. Khrushchev managed to survive and succeed Stalin by playing the simple peasant slogger, the very role which he aspired to transcend. But despite his miraculous rise, his doubts about both his capacities and his sins remained, exacerbated by the domestic and foreign-policy troubles that came crowding in on him, troubles to which he responded with increasingly desperate and reckless actions which, rather than consolidating and extending his achievements, ultimately ensured his defeat.
Succession struggle
The battle to succeed Stalin was largely about power (and the personalities who competed for it), but it was also about policies which his would-be heirs wielded as weapons against each other. Stalin's legacy created his successors' agenda. What was to be done about some 2.5 million prisoners still languishing in labour camps, and about those who had imprisoned them? How to give the party elite and the intelligentsia, which had been particularly terrorised, an increased sense of security? How to allow a cultural thaw without unleashing a flood? How to revive agriculture, which had virtually been ruined by Stalin, while boosting the production of housing and consumer goods which the dictator had so badly neglected? How to breach the isolation in which the USSR found itself after Stalin managed to alienate almost the whole world - not just the capitalist West, and influential neutrals like India, but key Communist allies like Yugoslavia, and even China, whose leader, Mao Zedung, paid Stalin public obeisance but nursed resentments that would soon boil over? How to counter American nuclear superiority? How to prevent the strains of the succession struggle itself from sapping Soviet strength in the Cold War? The capitalists knew, Khrushchev later recalled, 'that the leadership that Stalin left behind was no good because it was composed of people who had too many differences among them'.[118]
Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's former secret police chief, was hardly a closet liberal. Had he prevailed, he would almost certainly have exterminated his colleagues, but in the first months after Stalin's death, he played the reformer in a vain effort to cleanse his image. He proposed a mass amnesty of non- political prisoners, and revealed that the Doctors' Plot, which had allegedly prepared to assassinate the Soviet leaders, was a fabrication. He condemned the predominance ofRussians and Russian language in non-Russian republics. Confronted with a flood of East Germans fleeing westward, itself a response to Walter Ulbricht's hyper-Stalinist rule, Beria apparently toyed with the idea of abandoning East German Communism, allowing reunification of a neutral Germany in exchange for substantial Western compensation.[119]
It was not deep policy differences that turned his colleagues against Beria; although they rejected his East German proposal, they later adopted other reforms of the sort he had proposed. Their main fear was that he would get them if they did not get him first. Khrushchev led a conspiracy that culminated in Beria's arrest on 26 June 1953. In December, Beria was executed. With him out of the way, Georgii Malenkov, who had succeeded Stalin as head of the Soviet government, and Khrushchev, who had taken the late dictator's other job as party boss, shared the leadership. The two men complemented each other in other ways: Khrushchev was impulsive; Malenkov was steadier. Khrushchev craved the limelight; Malenkov might have settled for a lesser role. The Khrushchev and Malenkov families had socialised frequently since the 1930s. However, Kremlin political culture bred mutual suspicions, and personal resentments sharpened them.
In August 1953, Malenkov proposed a reduction in stifling agricultural taxes, an increase in procurement prices which the state paid for obligatory collective- farm deliveries, and encouragement of individual peasant plots, which produced much of the nation's vegetables and milk. Khrushchev had wanted to announce the new policy, and, according to Presidium colleague Anastas Mikoyan, he was 'indignant' when Malenkov stole the mantle of reformer. Khrushchev tried to grab it back with a speech of his own to the Central Committee in September, but he 'could neither forget nor forgive' Malenkov for 'getting the glory'.[120] The reforms Malenkov proposed involved land already under cultivation, and as such they would take time to boost output. So Khrushchev's next proposal called for a crash programme to develop the so- called Virgin Lands of Kazakhstan and western Siberia. Over the next few years, as Khrushchev precipitously increased the area brought under new cultivation, his gamble raised overall output far above that of Stalin's last years. But it also became a source of dissension between him and Viach- eslav Molotov, and by the early 1960s, Virgin Lands output proved to be disappointing.
For both Khrushchev and Malenkov, a prime obstacle to change was the Stalinist image of the outside world. If capitalist states were irredeemably hostile, and new world war was therefore inevitable, then the USSR could hardly afford the luxury of domestic reform. Malenkov challenged these axioms when he insisted there were 'no contested issues in US-Soviet relations that cannot be solved by peaceful means', and warned that a nuclear war could destroy not just capitalism, but 'world civilization'. Khrushchev himself would eventually adopt similar stances, but seeking to attract the arch-Stalinist Molotov into an anti-Malenkov alliance, he attacked the latter's heresies, charging that Malenkov's alarm about nuclear war had 'confused the comrades'.[121]
116
p. 39.
118
Nikita S. Khrushchev,
121
Malenkov cited in Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov