But in the midst of it all came a sinister warning from military intelligence. Reports indicated that while the emphasis of “soft” policies toward the democracies was being promoted abroad a tough, imperialistic policy was being fed to the troops at home. Soviet troops were being taught that the “importance of the surprise factor in contemporary war has increased enormously,” and “the Communist Party demands that the whole personnel of our Army and Navy should be imbued with the spirit of maximum vigilance and constant and high military preparedness, so as to be able to wrest the initiative from the hands of the enemy, and, having delivered smashing blows against him, finally defeat him completely.”{93}
All this had a familiar spirit. It reminded alert Americans of a significant statement made by Dimitry Z. Manuilsky who represented the USSR in presiding over the Security Council of the United Nations in 1949. At the Lenin School of Political Warfare in Moscow he had taught:
“War to the hilt between communism and capitalism is inevitable. Today, of course, we are not strong enough to attack…. To win we shall need the element of surprise. The bourgeoisie will have to be put to sleep. So we shall begin by launching the most spectacular peace movements on record. There will be electrifying overtures and unheard of concessions. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to cooperate in their own destruction. They will leap at another chance to be friends. As soon as their guard is down, we shall smash them with our clenched fist!”{94}
CHAPTER TEN
Communism Under Khrushchev
By 1955 it was vividly apparent that the most vicious kind of political in-fighting was being waged in Moscow by the Communist contestants for Stalin’s throne. Already Beria and his aides had been shot. There were signs of vast power shifts behind the scenes and out of the rancor and roar of the secret battle in the Kremlin the personality which seemed to be emerging on top of the conspiratorial heap was Nikita Khrushchev.
Of all the contenders for power in Russia, Khrushchev was probably the least well known in the West. Therefore, a U.S. Congressional committee decided to get the Khrushchev story. They invited anyone who had known Khrushchev to come in and testify. A stream of witnesses responded, but the story they told was gruesome and ugly. The hopes of many Western diplomats for improved Russian relations collapsed as they heard the record of the Red leader with whom free men would now have to deal. Here was no ordinary Communist politician or party hack. Khrushchev was revealed to be a creature of criminal cunning with an all-consuming passion for power.
Khrushchev as the Dictator of the Ukraine
Many of the witnesses told of the early days when Khrushchev was first grasping for power and recognition. They revealed that his loyalty to Communism was the blind, senseless kind. Having been raised almost an illiterate; Khrushchev did not get his elementary education until after he had become a full-grown adult. As a boy he had been a shepherd, later learning the trade of blacksmith and locksmith.
At 17 he ran away from the obscure Ukrainian village of Kalinovka where he had been born April 17, 1894. For several years Khrushchev was a roaming itinerant worker but in 1918 he joined the Communist Party and fought with the Red Army during the Russian civil war. In 1922 he commenced his first formal education which lasted three years. By 1929 his dogged party loyalty had won him a berth in the Joseph Stalin Industrial Academy, and by 1931 he had become a local party official in Moscow.
Khrushchev soon won favor with Stalin by joining in a drive to purge Stalin’s enemies from the local party machinery. More than 500 men and women were turned over to the secret police for execution. Later Stalin said that while Khrushchev was repulsive to him, he was impressed with the Ukrainian’s capacity to kill or turn on old friends when party policy demanded it. Stalin therefore assigned Khrushchev the task of going back to the Ukraine and forcing his own people to live under the lash of total Communist suppression. The Red leaders had been using wholesale executions to stifle resistance. Khrushchev said he had a better way. He would use mass starvation! Witnesses to this man-made famine told of the suffering and death:
Nicholas Prychodoko: I observed covered wagons moving along the street on which I lived and also on other streets in Kiev. They were hauling corpses for disposal…. These were peasants who flocked to the cities for some crust of bread…. My personal friend… was a surgeon at a hospital in the Ukraine…. He put a white frock on me, just as he was in a white frock, and we went outside to a very large garage in the hospital area. He and I entered it. When he switched on the light, I saw 2,000 to 3,000 corpses laid along the walls.
Mr. Arens: What caused the death of these people?
Mr. Prychodoko: Starvation.
Mr. Arens: What caused the starvation?
Mr. Prychodoko: …We found some statistics in hiding places in the cellar of the Academy of Sciences. They revealed that the food in 1932 was sufficient to feed all Ukrainians for 2 years and 4 months. But except for about 10 percent, the crop was immediately dispatched from the threshing machines for export to parts outside of Ukraine. That was the cause of the hunger.
Mr. Arens: Why did the Communist regime seize the crops in Ukraine during this period?
Mr. Prychodoko: Because at all times there was… various kinds of resistance to the Communist government in Ukraine and the collectivization drive in Moscow….
Mr. Arens: How many people were starved to death by this man-made famine in Ukraine in the thirties?
Mr. Prychodoko: It is estimated to be 6 to 7 million, most of them peasants.{95}
Witnesses testified that after millions of lives had been destroyed under Khrushchev’s administration, the collectivized farms were finally set up. Khrushchev was rewarded in 1934 when Stalin appointed him to the powerful Central Committee of the Communist hierarchy in Moscow.
However, because of continued unrest and resistance to Communism, Khrushchev was sent back to the Ukraine as its political dictator in 1938. Once again the people were subjected to a vast purge. So violently did they react to this new barbarity that when World War II broke out and the Nazis moved in the Germans were welcomed by the Ukrainians as liberators. Nikita Khrushchev never forgave them for that. Before fleeing toward Moscow, he poured out his vengeance against them. Official reports show that when the Nazis arrived, they found numerous mass graves. In one area alone there were over 90 mammoth burial plots containing approximately 10,000 bodies of “peasants, workers and priests,” each with hands tied behind the back and a bullet in the head.
After the Germans were driven out in 1944, Khrushchev once more returned to the Ukraine grimly determined to annihilate “all collaborationists.” Whole segments of the population were deported, a complete liquidation of the principal Christian churches was launched, “people’s leaders” were arrested and executed, and the NKVD was turned loose on the populace with a terrible ferocity intended to terrorize the people and eliminate all resistance to the Communist reoccupation. “Hangman of the Ukraine” became the people’s title for Nikita Khrushchev.