The next time Yegor heard something like this said about Stalin was in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death, and this time the words were spoken by Nikita Khrushchev in the Grand Kremlin Palace.
Stalin’s death in 1953 was a watershed as great as his coming to power: it marked the end of one country and the beginning of another. But the realization of this did not come overnight. In the first days after Stalin’s death the country seemed numb, as if holding its breath. His death was greeted with a mixture of disbelief, fear and grief. Gods cannot die the way mortals do. His cult had hypnotized the brightest minds. Andrei Sakharov, one of the world’s greatest physicists and humanists, wrote to his first wife at the time: ‘I am under a spell from the death of a great man. Thinking about his humanity.’21 Sakharov cited this letter in his memoirs, struggling to explain his own reaction.
Nikita Khrushchev, who succeeded Stalin, was a man who started to lift this spell. His own appearance – short, round, bald, with sticking-out ears – evoked laughter rather than terror. His national Ukrainian collarless shirt was an antithesis to Stalin’s buttoned-up, high-necked, military-style tunic. Khrushchev loosened the suffocating collar. ‘I like him ever so much,’ enthused Sakharov.22 ‘After all he differs so much from Stalin.’ A wild, uneducated, capricious man, complicit in Stalin’s Terror, with blood on his hands, Khrushchev nonetheless displayed some human features. Like a folk-tale hero who slays the dragon and opens up the castle, one of Khrushchev’s first acts was to open up the Kremlin to the public. The paralysing fear which enveloped the country during the years of Stalinist rule began to lift. ‘People were still scared to make any sharp move, but the nooses around their necks suddenly got looser.’23
Yegor Yakovlev, who joined the Communist Party just before Stalin’s death, was working as a low-level party official. A few months after Stalin’s death, he organized street patrols in central Moscow to help the police to catch drunks and prostitutes. Yegor remembered the sensation of walking back at night along Moscow’s main streets. ‘For the first time, we walked the Moscow streets like masters, aware of our strength.’24 Only a few months earlier, the nocturnal streets of Moscow had been ruled by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs – the secret police) who whisked people away from their homes. Trade returned to Red Square. Three weeks after Stalin’s death, the nineteenth-century trading galleries facing the Kremlin, which had been occupied by state offices in the 1930s, became the main department store in the country – GUM. Yegor’s first journalistic job was in a small-circulation newspaper called Za obraztsovuiu torgovliu (For the Exemplary Trade), published by GUM.
The main marker of Yegor’s generation was Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 in which he denounced Stalin’s cult of personality and revealed the scale of purges within the party. It had the impact of an exploded bomb. ‘Everything seemed unreal, even the fact that I was in the Kremlin… Everything [I lived by] was blown up into small pieces – like shrapnel in war,’ Alexander Yakovlev recalled.25 The speech was delivered at an unscheduled secret session held on the last day of the Congress and lasted nearly four hours. It was not printed in newspapers or broadcast by television and radio. The most important events in the Kremlin that defined the fate of millions of people occurred with the media outlets being ‘switched off’.
Just like newspapers that were glued over windows during the war as protection against flying shards, the role of newspapers in the Soviet political system was to block out information and protect the façade of the state. (A few hundred copies of Khrushchev’s speech were printed for internal use and marked ‘strictly secret’. The first public text appeared in English a few weeks later in the New York Times but did not make it into the Russian press until 1989.) Instead of using the media, the party resorted to the most arcane and direct way of delivering information – through messengers by word of mouth. Perhaps one reason was that the spoken word was meant to have a greater impression on the listener than the printed one. (After all, people go to church to hear the Bible, not to read it.)
Yegor was one of the messengers charged with reading out the text of Khrushchev’s speech to the rank and file of the party. He did not like what he read. He remembered his feeling of protest at and rejection of the speech. When he came home that day and saw that his wife had taken Stalin’s portrait down, he touched the nail in disbelief. Yegor got angry and demanded that the portrait should be put back. Soon, he took it down himself – this time for good. The portrait of Dzerzhinsky, which the founder of Ch.K had given to his father, remained on the wall. Yegor was not alone in his initial reaction: many of the party activists felt the same way. As Gorbachev recalled, while those who directly encountered Stalin’s repressions welcomed Khrushchev’s speech, many either refused tobelieve it or rejected the need to bring it up, even if the facts cited by Khrushchev were true. ‘Whom will that benefit?’ Vyacheslav Molotov, one of Stalin’s senior henchmen, asked. ‘What will that give us? Why stir up the past?’26 After all, the Soviet Union could have developed the same way as China after Mao. Swearing their allegiance to Stalin, his followers could have moved the country’s economy into a different direction. Lavrentiy Beria, the most feared boss of the NKVD, who primed himself as Stalin’s successor, could have played the role that Deng Xiaoping played in China. So why did Khrushchev do it?
Partly, it was an instinct of self-preservation. Khrushchev, like most of the high-ranking party nomenclatura, was exhausted by the constant fear and expectation of another super-purge which Stalin had probably been planning. The main reason, however, was not rational but emotionaclass="underline" he denounced Stalin because he could and because he wanted to. As William Taubman, Khrushchev’s biographer, wrote, it was partly ‘a way of reclaiming his identity as a decent man by telling the truth. On the night he gave the speech, he later recalled he could “hear the voices of comrades who perished”.’27
Khrushchev’s speech had several vital implications. One was that it removed the fear of being murdered, particularly among the elite. After the execution of Beria in true Stalinist fashion in 1953 (Beria was accused of being a British spy and promptly shot), Khrushchev effectively called a halt to the use of violence against political rivals. The first test of the new rule came a year after the speech, in 1957, when a group of hard-line Stalinists, including Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov, fearing that Khrushchev was undermining the foundation of the regime, attempted to overthrow him. The media once again were silent.[1] The conspirators were labelled as an ‘anti-party’ group – a charge which a few years earlier had carried a death sentence. This time none of the plotters was executed or even jailed. The same rule saved Khrushchev’s own life when he was finally toppled in 1964, and it was observed by his successors. In 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev spared those who led a coup against him and in 1993, although Boris Yeltsin jailed those who took up arms against him, he quickly let them out again.
In fact, the main reason the plotters lost in 1957 was a significant mood shift within the elite. As Alexander Yakovlev wrote, the new generation, which supported Khrushchev in 1957 and then turned against him in 1964, did not want a return to the hyper-tension of Stalinist times. It was striving for a measured, safe and comfortable life. Its main goal was to stay in lifelong power without the fear of being purged. This pact applied not only to the top political ranks but to the Soviet elite more generally. Members of the ruling class who fell out of favour could be pushed aside, ‘exiled’ into far-flung embassies or put under house arrest, but they were not physically eliminated.
1
The crucial role in thwarting the coup was played by the minister of defence, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who lent Khrushchev a hand (and military planes that briskly delivered members of the Central Committee to Moscow).