Mythology and Mechanics of a Coup

...The answer suggests itself: not because Zhukov prefers cows to steel mills, but because Khrushchev and the commissars already had won the day and had proved that the authority which holds the Soviet Union together is not the administration or the economists, but the Party...

...The implied rehabilitation of Zhdanov and of his avengers —the inventors of the "doctors' plot" frame-up—fits the return to their innerParty, non-judicial methods of meting out "justice": the defendants have not been heard from...

...Forcing the administration to "decentralize" Khrushchev loosened the ties between the local managers and their superiors, the central planners, undermired the central power-position of his rivals in Moscow, disrupted their apparatus or dislodged it from the local power positions...

...III To understand why success was inevitable, we need to remember some Soviet semantics...

...The Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia also used the totalitarian method of organizing the people into a mass movement with a savior ideology...

...Fortunately, a new hero was revealed: Malenkov was the man to watch...

...The next Four Year Plan again was a Five Year Plan to be fulfilled in four years, and consumer goods again constituted a disappointingly small percentage of total output...

...Nor is Khrushchev's own line anywhere in the middle between the two extremes...

...In a democracy, the next election corrects such a situation...

...But he should have been warned when he was assigned to be drillmaster of the young technocrats...

...He remains the center and relies on such old Stalinists as Aristov, Suslov, Shvernik, Kuusinen, who had been members of Stalin's Politburo...

...The Party practices "democratic centralism," the bureaucracy just authoritarianism...

...In a totalitarian state, the pendulum swings beween measures reflecting administrative interest in sectional problems or people, and restrictions of such liberalism...

...Malenkov, once given the choice between the position of Prime Minister and Secretary General of the Party, chose the former...

...Malenkov, Pervukhin, Shepilov, Kaganovich and even Molotov apparently were operating under the delusion that Stalin's death had removed the obstacle to Socialism...

...they were even taking votes in Presidium meetings...

...Like Eisenhower he found out that industrialists make poor politicians...

...Only the Party, instrument of decentralization, remained centralized—and in Khrushchev's hands...

...V Khrushchev's "amalgam" is as typically indiscriminate...

...The State was working properly—dictatorially and centralistically, of course...

...The Army" did not charge that the conspirators endangered national defense...

...A totalitarian party will not arbitrate between organized pressure groups...

...Nor will it be conquered permanently by its right or by its left wing which then would suppress the other...

...Thus spoke Tito the old Stalinist and Isaac Deutscher, a former Trotzkyist, as also the Menshevik New Leader and such new converts to the economic interpretation of history as Alan Dulles, his pious brother, and the Washington Post...

...its factions crystalize first around certain policies, but then may develop into "lines" which represent the interests of groups and classes...

...The army, on its part, was supposed to fear nothing but war...

...Penetrating all state and economic organizations on the local level, they maneuvered with the industrial managers, the officers of the army and the administrators of state governments...

...ly admitted that he did not quite understand the job, and went to the rear of the collective-leadership coach...

...Which, of course, proves that the satellites are as good as liberated and that with Eisenhower we are living in the best of all possible worlds, whereas the Russians live in the best of all coexisting (or cold-war) worlds...

...Molotov, it will be remembered, held the un-Leninistic view that Communism was as good as perfect in the Soviet Union...

...To be sure, at the end he was properly rebuked and repentant...

...The need for national roots generates a dialectical process which undermines the Party's independence vis-avis the masses...

...He banished industrial managers like Pervukhin and "liberals" like Malenkov on the one hand, old guard Stalinists like Molotov and Kaganovich on the other hand...

...It even was possible to write a novel in which a Party secretary was shown up for inefficiency and loose morals...

...Balkan or Latin American dictatorships, on the other hand, are run by a military junta which directs the civil service but is aloof from the people...

...Wake any Secretary of the State up, in the middle of the night or in the middle of a press conference, and he will recite three reasons why the Soviet Union is inevitably doomed to liberty...

...Having found rather poor enlightenment in the hour-byhour thrillers of Khrushchev's coup d'etat, we must admit that we prefer historical novelists to Russia experts when it comes to relating who did whom in...

...He may have flattered himself with the idea that he had reached the decisive command position in the new, post-Stalin Soviet state...

...Its pseudo-dem ocratic ambition is the cause of the constant purges...

...Meanwhile, the commissars whom Khrushchev sent speak for the flock which is still to come—a future Gogol will write "The Unborn Souls...

...The reader who has had some experience with union meetings or party conventions, and has lived through the agonizing, frustrating experience of resolutions rammed through and committeemen pushed up by an organized apparatus able and willing to terrorize the delegates, will know then why Molotov, Malenkov and Shepilov knew they were licked...

...Tolerating a number of them means to risk that they will take root and eventually develop all the characteristics of a pluralistic state...

...Their heroes have changed as often as the Krem lin's "line...

...At the bottom perhaps...

...Pervukhin—like Dulles—thought that economic power is power tout court...

...it charged, through the mouth of Zhukov, that they had broken the unity of the Party...

...He will also know why Marshal Zhukov felt moved to make the switch that seemed to tip the scales...

...By no means...

...Fascism was not dictatorship pure and simple, but pseudoparticipation of the nation in the ruling party...

...Hitler liquidated Schleicher and the Conservatives along with Roehm and the S.A...

...the hopesheets let him come as close to being a benefactor of mankind as any Russian will ever be, but, alas(, he fell from grace, not only in Moscow but in Western capitals, too...

...He is not concerned with principles (or, for that matter, with Leninism, as Molotov correctly remarked) but with organization...

...Khrushchev's decentralized commissars, coming back to Moscow as representatives of the provinces, dominated the Central Committee as spokesmen of "the people...

...Mus solini ordered a "change of guard" from time to time...

...it must suppress them and ostracize their spokesmen...

...344 Other apparatchiks also owe their jobs to Khrushchev...

...They were members of the Presidium arid, it appears, they sided with Malenkov...

...When the opposition has been liquidated, the scope of popular consent contracts, and is in danger of contracting further and further in spirals, as every opposition which represents some group or section is cut off...

...they found out it is insubordination...

...Delegates come from the virgin soil which Khrushchev is going to turn as soon as he finds enough people who will go there...

...These deviations often are dubbed "rightist" or "leftist...

...If the centrist organization then relies too much on its terror machinery, the danger of utter isolation raises its deadly head...

...He described this regime as one compelled to seek popularity through glory, acquiescence through benefits, and legitimacy through periodic plebiscites...

...Managers are centralistic...

...The Directoire continued the practice, beating down the Babouvistes and the jeunesse doree...

...He once had devised the "agro-towns," which might have liquidated all private plots, but now he gives the peasants more freedom to use the fruit of these plots...

...When Marx analyzed the system, he gave it the name of its inventor, "Bonapartism...

...Undismayed, the Russia experts trusted that Malenkovism would survive Malenkov...

...Breaking up the big departments and splitting them into districts, he created the need for more commissars...

...It was encouraging...

...Unwillingly, and unwittingly, they have provided an amazing story of their own —the story of their gyrations in evaluating and interpreting Russian history since Stalin's death...

...If one party looses touch with the people, the opposition will win the majority...

...IV Unless we go back to ancient Egypt and China, no country has ever been ruled by a civil service exclusively...

...Forgetful of their mission, at all times to represent the overriding future of the Party, they might become representatives of those people or be guided by objective considerations of technology and proper method...

...Shepilov thought that his transfer from Pravda to Foreign Affairs was a promotion...

...Functionaries who had been delegated to 'fulfill technical functions, or to take charge of certain population groups, would get interested in their jobs and in the people under them...

...They also expected the managers to conduct foreign policy more reasonably than the old-guard Stalinists...

...We firmly stand on the proposition that whatever happens, Russia is moving toward more freedom and more reasonableness...

...Those who believe that the Army's attitude was decisive in the power struggle must answer two questions: if Zhukov represented the Army's position, why not Bulganin or Voroshilov...

...He does not appear as a "moderate" from either's viewpoint, but is fanatically devoted to any line, today right and left tomorrow, which strengthens the Party and its hold on the country...

...Instead of aligning them firmly behind the Party, he sympathised with their desire to express themselves more freely...

...What is more democratic than an appeal from this autocratic body to a larger authority, such as the Central Committee, which is truly representative of the regions and districts and brings the Voice of the People to Moscow...

...and these were the people that counted...

...Either the dissidents will abjectly submit, or the Party will liquidate them because they were against the Party...

...Indeed, stoney Molotov was retired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (how did the man of the Ribbentrop Pact ever earn the reputation of being inflexible...

...Russia was on its way to democratization...

...its beloved leader Zhukov, Ike's pen pal and his better in philosophical debate, was the very image of pure, if Spartan, idealism...

...The device was called "amalgam" during the Jacobin terreur...

...revolt...

...Lashing out against "bureaucrats" and central planners, he gave his Party secretaries this assignment: take their jobs, acquire their skills, exercise their powers...

...This may take some persuasion (remember, the GPU no longer can do that) by the Party...

...In all these cases the state was not directed by an aristocracy, a usurping clique or bureaucracy, but by a party...

...If the "proletarian" state was not yet withering away, the dicta torship was...

...The Army even was forced, the day after, to adopt a resolution of its own, vowing loyalty to the new regime and accusing the outgoing members of—what...

...Malenkov himself public...

...Of course, it did not turn out that way...

...11 It is the consensus of the various experts that Khrushchev's leadership had been challenged in the Presidium...

...There was Kollektivnost in the Kremlin...

...He maintains in power the arch-Stalinist leaders in East Germany and Czechoslovakia...

...there is no need for a trial...

...but such labels are misleading...

...Oppositions are anti-Party almost by definition...

...Some people, maybe whole groups, must remain dissatisfied, their hopes for more "liberal" treatment frustrated...

...Strangely, or not so strangely, the word "amalgam" reappeared under Stalin when he sent to the isolator old revolutionary comrades along with "bourgeois" industrial managers...

...he promotes old GPU agents like Serov and Ignatiev, and, of all people, who would stage a comeback but Lysenko...

...They may have forgotten that this still was a Party state...

...Modern dictatorships are based on the active participation of the people...

...The managers were deposed because they tried to be managers...

...The discharged managers had conspired, we are told, to assassinate Zhdanov, a Stalinist hero if there ever was one, or to exonerate his murderers...

...Hungary showed where such fooling around was likely to end...

...He wished to give the Russian people a pause, to provide them with consumer goods after the Western fashion, and hence could not afford to be ag gressive in foreign affairs...

...Looking back at Khrushchev's actions during the last four years, one cannot but admire their consistency—they all now fall into a pattern...

...The political pendulum, therefore, oscillates between right and left policies as the parties alternate in power...

...Now, most of the honorable men in whom we put our trust have been overthrown, demoted, degraded, banished, disgraced...

...In the beginning Beria was touted as the "reasonable man" who might agree even to give up the Russian post-war conquests...

...he even tolerated subversive research: staffers on the magazine History Problems cast irreverent doubt on the canonical version of Party history...

...The nice managers had been overthrown by a peace-loving Red Army, the centralist dictators of Soviet efficiency by an almostJeffersonian republican...

...his successor Shepilov was an intellectual...

...But here is Khrushchev with his district secretaries come to Moscow in force so that the autocrats may hear from the grass roots...

...Every such crisis, therefore, narrows the popular basis of consent for the regime, at least temporarily...

...Neither of these extremes represents a "line" that is irreconcilably or unforgivably different from the one Khrushchev holds best for the Soviet Union...

...But we have been fascinated by the experts nevertheless...

...like God, he made as many of them as possible...

...For what matters is something else: they are partial views of a whole which always is represented by the Party...

...Better trust the "thaw" among the intelligentsia...

...Speaking of grass roots, there are districts represented where the grass still needs to be uprooted...

...an anti-Party attitude...

...surely not government by the people yet, but the beginning of democracy at the top...

...though it had become a cabinet council with departmental representation, it still wielded dictatorial powers...

...in a totalitarian government, the administration is a tool, the Party is its user...

...The Party then will try to grow new tentacles, renew its hold on the imagination and loyalty of the people, and the cycle of deviations and purges can begin anew...

...Do we, for that, interpret the demise of reasonableness as the victory of its opposite...

...A critic actually could say in Moscow that socialist realism was not the only possible form of art...

...it is the center that suppresses both in order to freely follow either course...

...Since it wants to be all, the Party becomes State and opposition...

...Where, after all, should it begin if not at the top...

...Pilsudki staged a coup d'etat whenever his colonels grew too fond of playing state...

...The managers could not help doing away with the dictatorship...

...Punishment fits the crime which the charge names: they thought conflict is a procedure of management...

...Stalin, of course, killed right and left, imitating Robespierre who also had been careful to place an "aristocrat" on the same charrette with a radical...

...Meanwhile, the intellectual engineered the Egyptian mess, and the philosopher personally brought his fist down on Hungary...

...A return to Stalin, so we were told, would be particularly obnoxious to the Army and to the managers...

...Would it not follow that the dictatorship of the Party no longer was necessary...

...nevertheless—these intellectual stirrings were presumed to show that other groups were raising their heads and their sights: not the Party alone but the army, the cultural elite, and above all the industrial managers were running the country...

...They were not of one mind, but they all were united against the police and personal dictatorship...

...Marx himself had proved it: the growing economic substruc ture would force changes in Russia's political superstructure...

...This body is nominally a successor of the old Politburo, Stalin's terror instrument...

...Centrifugal forces are cut off whenever an amalgam is sent to the guillotine...

...The Party always stands for "democracy," the state and economic authorities for "bureaucracy...

...He took Malenkov's view in some matters, Molotov's in others...

...With certain modifications its pattern also applied to Hitler and Mussolini, to Peron and to Nasser...

...The totalitarian party then must seek new ties with the people...

...The bureaucrats in the Presidium only know what their respective departments report...

...The only charge that so far has been preferred against Molotov, Shepilov, Malenkov and the other managers, is "anti-Party activity...

...One deviation not only justifies another, but actually engenders and needs it...

...like Harold Stassen nominating Nixon, the noble Marshal just made it in time to get a ticket for the victory ball...

...While we do not know how this question can be answered, we shall answer the other ourselves: Why did Zhukov—if his voice was decisive —favor Khrushchev over Malenkov...

...they debate their plan among themselves, then impose it on the country...