The Khrushchev Era-Three Articles:
BRUMBERG, WOLFGANG LEONHARD \ ANATOLE SHUB \ ABRAHAM
The Khrushchev Era-Three Articles The Politician from Kalinovka By Wolfgang Leonhard Nikita Khrushchev's recent 70th birthday suddenly makes one realize how old the leaders of the Communist...
...In assessing the disintegration of the Communist empire, one may cite numerous "objective" causes: Western firmness in various crises (Berlin, Formosa, Cuba), the failure of China's "great leap," the success of the Common Market and the U.S...
...Though still a relatively subordinate official, he was now at the center of power...
...But surely it is fitting to remind ourselves that for the bulk of his life Khrushchev was not merely a passive onlooker, but a highly active and vociferous co-architect of the Stalin era...
...Similarly, Stalin's relations with the East European satellites could no longer be implemented by his successors, and so Khrushchev, in an attempt to establish some kind of bloc discipline without outright terror and coercion, mended his fences with Yugoslavia, acquiesced at Poland's "quiet revolution" (though at the same time brutally crushing the Hungarian revolt)— and thus opened himself to the extraordinary definancc not only of tiny, far-away Albania, but of neighboring Rumania as well...
...And praise was similarly bestowed by the cultural elite: "The Ukrainian writers will never forget...
...Nor should we, in our assessment of Khrushchev, forget to mention a few other salient characteristics of his tenure: the revival of the death penalty for economic crimes and the institution of mob-justice (antiparasite laws, comrades' courts, etc...
...With the more accommodating foreign policy line that the Soviet Union has adopted since the Cuban crisis of October 1962 and the approaching succession crisis within the Kremlin, there has been a tendency in the non-Communist world to view Khrushchev in an increasingly favorable light—indeed, with something almost bordering on affection...
...It read: "Congratulations on your 70th birthday"—period...
...So, apparently, were the other leaders of the largest Communist party of the West...
...The international position of the USSR was also enhanced...
...His misgivings were not at the outset ideological or even fundamentally political...
...In 1923 he became a member of the district leadership of the Party in Yusokva, and in December 1925 he attended the 14th Party Congress in Moscow as a delegate from the Donets Basin...
...This was his "optimistic period...
...At home, they resulted in the elaboration of economic plans which far surpassed the actual possibilities of development...
...Should the bellicose imperialist maniacs venture, regardless of anything, to unleash a war, imperialism will doom itself to destruction...
...Large sections of the population found new hope, and Khrushchev himself achieved considerable popularity...
...Khrushchev spent the War years 1941-45 with the rank of Lieutenant-General as a political commissar and agent of the Party leadership, first in the Kiev military district and later as a member of the military council on the southwest front—the Stalingrad and first Ukrainian front...
...In the world at large, to be sure, there are always crises: Indo-China remains a running sore, suppurating now under American stewardship as it did under the French 10, and the Japanese 20, years ago...
...the intention, mentioned by Khrushchev more than 50 times, of overtaking the U.S...
...The comparison was, in fact, put to the test and shown to be spurious in the Cuban crisis: De Gaulle backed Kennedy, unconditionally, while Mao Tse-tung denounced Khrushchev and invaded India...
...by 1970 in the most important branches of production...
...Nothing was to be done without the consent of the Party and the Party machine...
...And what about the grandiose promises to overtake the United States in the production of meat and butter, and to usher in "full Communism" within the lifetime of the present generation—a promise now superseded by the more mundane advocacy of a hearty portion of goulash in every proletarian plate...
...In fact, Togliatti had proclaimed eight years ago the birth of a "polycentric system" for world Communism, with "various points or centers of development and orientation...
...While Khrushchev was continuing to indulge in his optimism and looking at everything through rose-colored spectacles, as early as 1959-60 there were signs that his over-ambitious targets would be unattainable...
...the Party machine needed him...
...Khrushchev, who now belonged to both supreme centers of power, the Politburo and Secretariat of the Central Committee, was responsible for agriculture and also for internal Party questions within the Kremlin leadership...
...He supported Stalin for nearly 30 years, yet after his death he became one of his sharpest critics...
...Yet the problem is being posed now from two sides: by the breakup of the Communist system in the East, and by the approaching expiration (in 1969) of the North Atlantic Treaty...
...Gheorgiu-Dej had found time, however, just a week before Khrushchev's birthday, to receive the new Chinese Ambassador in Bucharest, and to hail China's progress "under the leadership of Comrade Mao Tse-tung...
...He has taken quite a few wrong turns, but has had both the intelligence and the nerve to reverse course in the light of realities...
...Quite recently, a U.S...
...the persistence and actual rise of officially sanctioned anti-Semitism...
...Even in 1959, when Khrushchev last visited China immediately following his American tour, many observers had the impression that he felt more comfortable in Washington, Des Moines and San Francisco than he did in Peking...
...A problem of this delicacy and complexity certainly cannot be solved by the pious reiteration of "unconditional surrender" formulas coined, for the most part, when Chinese legions were streaming across the Yalu, Stalin was exploding his first atomic bombs, and the late Senator McCarthy was terrorizing the State Department...
...The cold war is won...
...There is surely something symptomatic about the fact that, having referred so often in recent years to his youth and his early work for the Party, he has nevertheless so far said nothing about his role during the great purge...
...while between Russia and many of its present East European allies (notably Poland, Hungary and Rumania) there has been, over the centuries, deep mutual hatred...
...How does one make sense of all this...
...Khrushchev's conduct on the world stage has been notable not so much for what he has positively achieved (although the Austrian Treaty and the nuclear test-ban were certainly welcome), as for what he has refused to do...
...But what good are these tributes when it becomes clearer with every passing day that the previously monolithic movement is being torn asunder, and that Moscow's position in it is being successfully questioned, ignored, and defied...
...There was little time for schooling, though the young Nikita did enjoy school, especially in 1907 when a new teacher named Lidia Michailova Shevtchenko took over his class (incidentally, she is still alive today...
...Khrushchev has also shown himself particularly bumbling and crude in the cultural sphere, where his own philistinism and ignorance have borne bitter fruit...
...Even Gomulka—next to Kadar, Khrushchev's most reliable ally— indicated in his speech at the Kremlin Palace that Khrushchev's proposed solution was distasteful to him...
...He has steadfastly declined to risk war in a long series of crises over the decade, and he denied China both nuclear weapons and political support in the two assaults against India—which were, potentially, the gravest crises of all...
...And what of Khrushchev's claim to historical truthfulness —the "revelations" about Stalin's crimes and lies...
...After a short spell as regional Party secretary in Petrovo-Marinsk...
...There are those, of course, who see the current disarray as much the result of the Sino-Soviet conflict (which the Soviet Communist party had assuredly not wished to precipitate) as of Khrushchev's deliberate attempt to infuse a greater degree of flexibility and even democracy in a once totally regimented and hence ineffectual political movement...
...Although he had not thus far joined any particular party, he came forward as a speaker and agitator and as a member of various local revolutionary committees...
...The Sputniks, rockets and summit conferences testified to the ascent of the Soviet to world power in these various spheres...
...As the son of an impoverished peasant family—his parents, Sergei and Xenia Khrushchev, had to give up their farm in Kalinovka in 1900 and moved to the mining district of Rutchenkovo in the Don Basin—the young Nikita had a difficult childhood...
...Ion Gheorghe Maurer and Chivu Stoica, to keep up appearances...
...Khrushchev had recognized some of the abuses and weaknesses of the Stalin regime and believed that once some of the particularly blatant "errors" had been corrected, all problems would be solved at one blow...
...His eulogies of Stalin knew no bounds...
...But here he was up against Stalin's imperviousness, his abysmal suspicions, and his refusal to allow even his closest colleagues to inform him about the realities of the situation and to put in effect even the most modest alterations and reforms...
...Was it perhaps the fault of the local authorities and the failure of the civil servants...
...While his prepared texts have reeled off the obligatory diplomatic formulas and ideological cliches, his extemporaneous speeches, improvisations and offthe-cuff remarks have concentrated on one simple message: Equal the West by emulating it...
...Thus, the Moscow-Belgrade rapprochement of 1962-63, which some panicky Western observers had described as Yugoslavia's "return to the Soviet bloc," was seen to be hedged with qualifications, reservations and unremoved suspicions on both sides...
...but chances are that Nikita Sergeievich, no novice to bombast, knows better...
...In fact, in recent years Khrushchev has repeatedly referred to a seemingly unimportant event which deeply impressed and disturbed him: his visit to his native village of Kalinovka immediately after the War...
...Aware of the plight of Soviet culture under Stalin, he loosened the reigns of Party control and offered the artist and the intellectual a greater amount of leeway...
...Kinder to intellectuals, delightfully "human" and "earthy," more respectful of truth—he is, in short, about the best Communist leader the world could possibly expect...
...The military, too, whatever their disagreements with the Party's First Secretary, were filled to the brim with enthusiasm and proper historical perspective: Writing in the April 17 issue of Izvestia, Marshal of the Soviet Union Andrei A. Grcchko recalled Khrushchev's "enormous personal contributions to the achievement of the victory over German fascism...
...It was during Khrushchev's time as Moscow Party secretary that the great purge of 1936-38 took place...
...The difficult situation he has had to face in the last five years has been due very largely to the contradiction between his over-ambitious aims and the failure of the actual situation to keep pace with them—a contradiction which Khrushchev himself has found incomprehensible...
...The contrast between the two diplomats is not so much one between pessimism and optimism as between two views of the task which faced American diplomacy after the War...
...the production of Sputniks and the purchase of wheat to avoid breadrationing—the list is long and impressive...
...it has instead been considerably extended...
...His reply has been to crush this trend, to enforce discipline, to restore the predominant position of the USSR...
...Moreover, there was an upward trend in the economy during these years...
...Throughout the area, the old generation of Communist militants, reared in the underground circles of the Comintern, faces the dismaying prospect of transferring power to a youth utterly indifferent to Marxist eschatology and anxious to rejoin Europe...
...and in April in Hungary, Khrushchev was quoting it to local agronomists...
...This time, there was no joint declaration or statement at all—merely a collection of individual airport speeches and dinner toasts of varying nuance and intensity...
...interests than Peronism or several other brands of anti-Yanqui demagogy...
...No Communist leader in any country or at any time has been so outspoken about his own life as has Khrushchev...
...And it is no accident, therefore, that he has been so reluctant to tell the true story of the purges and the terror of the '30s, that he has attempted to shift the blame for complicity in Stalin's crime to others while intimating that he himself was cither ignorant of them, or helpless, or—most fraudulent of all—actually opposed to them...
...And the Japanese party sent a message of brevity unheard of in the annals of Communist rhetoric...
...One reorganization followed the other— but without the hoped for results...
...In March 1961 he rather sadly mentioned that he was already a great-grandfather and, in July 1962, on one of his many visits to his native village of Kalinovka, he remarked that he had already reached "the pensionable age...
...This view is but a part of a larger school of thought which has recently grown in strength, and this may be a good time to subject it to some critical scrutiny...
...This instinct combined with his relish for startling projects when he promoted the far-fetched undertaking of sowing the Siberian Virgin Lands with grain, which turned these natural pasture lands into a dust bowl...
...The contrast between the 1957 meeting and last month's Moscow celebration of Khrushchev's 70th birthday is striking...
...But of Khrushchev, who did not even know Lenin, there are no more and no less than 18 pictures, including a carefully cropped photograph showing Khrushchev (sans Bulganin) laying a wreath at Karl Marx's grave in London in April 1956...
...Khrushchev was in favor of reforms but at the same time he was determined to keep them within bounds...
...But the Chinese are right in at least one respect: With regard to the orthodox Leninism-Stalinism of 1952, he has been, and remains, the greatest "revisionist" of them all...
...The Cubans, still not fully accepted as members of the club, are governed by their unique obsession with the American colossus...
...The stagnant waters of Soviet art have been stirred slightly, but for the most part have returned to their torpid state...
...Yet, stamped by his past career as he is, and continuing to hold fast to certain long outmoded articles of belief, he has hitherto shrunk from making a public admission and from effecting the reforms which should follow from a realization of the reasons for the failure of his projects...
...North Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh...
...economic recovery, the disastrous Soviet grain harvest last fall...
...Once they had succeeded in removing the "brake-blocks," the Soviet economy would develop like wildfire...
...Khrushchev, one hears, is "reasonable...
...In no area is this prestige any lower, of course, than in that of international Communism...
...Above all, two factors have to be taken into account: first, Khrushchev's younger days and his rise to power under Stalin...
...But what is so easily forgotten and misunderstood is that the changes in Russia were long overdue in 1953 and that any political leader inheriting Stalin's mantle would have been forced, if only by objective imperatives, to rescue the country from the catastrophic situation to which the paranoic dictator had brought it (a sagging agriculture, a malfunctioning industry, a petrified bureaucracy, a sterile culture, a stultifying political atmosphere, to mention only some of the most salient characteristics...
...Again and again Khrushchev returned to his native village, to the people among whom he had once lived as a shepherd, locksmith and miner...
...the conquest of Stalinist isolationism and the widest possible adoption of the technical experience of the Western industrial states — such were (and are) Khrushchev's principal ideas...
...Stalin's death on March 5, 1953, a good many details of which have still to be cleared up, must have been received with relief by Khrushchev as well as by the other leaders...
...East Germany, the very symbol of the cold-war division, remains politically unstable and diplomatically isolated...
...and in deciding last February, without prior Soviet approval, to send a "mediation" mission to Mao and Khrushchev, he had carefully entrusted the mission—and the possibility of a showdown meeting with Khrushchev—to others...
...The strengthening of the leading role of the Party...
...Those who have watched him on the stump more recently—in Yugoslavia last summer, in Hungary last month—have been struck by the essential single-mindedness of his appeal...
...The historic unity of the Western peoples, transcending fits of French nationalism, American isolationism and British insularity, preceded the creation of the North Atlantic military pact, and would doubtless survive its transformation or even demise...
...Russia and China, linked briefly by the unstable, anachronistic Communist dogma, have never had such deep ties...
...Some of the struggles he has begun, such as reorientation of the Soviet economy toward consumer industry and agriculture, he has yet to win...
...Exhausted by his unflagging activities, his enthusiasm seems lately to have worn off...
...the United States was entering its most serious postwar recession and was still estranged from its major allies by the recent trauma of Suez...
...Like Tito in 1957, he sent a pair of deputies...
...At the end of 1917, the then 23year-old Nikita joined the proletarian Donets regiment as a volunteer and took part in the fighting against the White General Kaledin...
...This was the congress at which for the last time Zinoviev, Kamenev and Krupskaya, Lenin's widow, warned in public against the danger of Stalin attaining absolute power—but they were silenced amid the acclamations for Stalin...
...There is considerable evidence that at the end of the '30s Khrushchev was still a convinced Stalinist...
...Khrushchev has a strong gambler's instinct...
...Is de Gaulle the only one who realizes it...
...Having become First Party Secretary in September 1953, Khrushchev succeeded increasingly in enforcing his ideas, making the Party the main instrument of the transformation, systematically eliminating his opponents (Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, Bulganin) and climbing to the summit of power himself...
...and, finally, the proclamation of the new Party Program at the 22nd Party Congress in October 1961, with the promise that the present generation in Soviet Russia would live to see the final achievement of Communism, are all eloquent tokens of his over-optimism...
...In Budapest, Khrushchev attempted to draw "Marxist" consolation from the fact that political mapmakers can no longer paint Africa and Asia in two or three colors, representing the old colonial powers...
...The clearer this became, the more doggedly Khrushchev stuck to his intentions...
...But a uniform red is obviously no longer sufficient, either, to depict the territories between the Elbe River and the China Sea—or even the East European nations still formally loyal to Moscow...
...The Yugoslav press paid measured tribute to Khrushchev as a "man of peace," but Moscow responded coolly...
...Whatever his power, Khrushchev's prestige, when all is said and done, cannot be very high...
...For us, Soviet composers, the great attention and solicitude shown by Nikita Sergeievich to our musical art has always been particularly dear" (Dimitri Shostakovich...
...Like most leaders, Khrushchev has both led and followed...
...to managers, the need to match the West in quality as well as quantity...
...In foreign affairs Khrushchev's over-optimistic miscalculations were evident in the Berlin ultimatum, in the Congo affair, and in the sending of rockets to Cuba...
...The 1917 Revolution took place while he was there...
...And what of Khrushchev's ostensible "moderation" and "caution" in foreign policy...
...all the good Nikita Sergeievich has done for Ukrainian literature" (Yuri Zbanatski, a Ukrainian writer...
...What is true for the East European Communist bloc is true for the Communist movement as a whole...
...No one can question which method is preferable: but neither is consonant with the values of a civilized society...
...Calling the Chinese "idiots," "children," "racists" and worse, he reserved such terms as "reasonable," "realistic" and "common sense" for American leaders...
...Was the slow rate of progress due perhaps to the inadequate knowledge of the experts...
...He has aged, and is probably very conscious of this fact...
...The Soviet press failed to publish the Yugoslavs' official birthday greeting along with those of their allies, or even along with the ironic greeting sent by the Chinese...
...There is Cuba, so extraordinarily disturbing to U.S...
...Instead of 12 Communist rulers, there were only seven...
...And the fact remains that, in his present straits, Khrushchev may be uniquely disposed to deal...
...Deeply convinced of the leading role of the Party, he has nevertheless set practical economic problems at the center of its operations and conceded considerable influence to the experts...
...Soviet anti-Semitism has also been given considerable play, as the continuing economic trials and the recent official antiSemitic book, Judaism without Embellishment, issued by the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (the Ukraine is Khrushchev's native region), clearly demonstrate...
...His undoubted achievement consists in having obtained considerable alleviations for the Soviet people during his term of office...
...The contest is over, decided —the problem now is how to end it in an orderly way...
...Tirelessly, never sparing himself, Khrushchev traveled to the remotest corners of the land, inspecting the local authorities, removing incompetent officiais and appointing others—but the anticipated successes failed to appear...
...The problem of "how to end it in an orderly way" is not an easy one...
...He would no doubt like to avoid similar disturbances in the future, yet he also knows that in the Soviet Union there is no institutional provision whatever for the transition and even his own nomination of a successor would not solve the problem...
...In addition, Izvestia published a "rare photograph" dating back to September 1920 and showing about 30 participants in a "meeting of political workers of the 9th Kuban Army"—among them Khrushchev, then an instructor in the political department of the Army...
...This event he refers to very rarely, and then only with great reluctance...
...The frequent references to his age are probably influenced by his concern over the problem of his successor in the Kremlin...
...They had now not only escaped the personal danger to themselves, but had at long last been presented with an opportunity to realize the changes to which the leaders in Stalin's immediate entourage had in recent years given so much thought...
...This was evident at the time he brought the world dangerously close to nuclear destruction when he tried to ship missiles into Cuba, an act which resulted in his greatest diplomatic failure...
...The reconstruction of the Don Basin, and above all the training of new technicians and specialists from the working classes, was now the main task...
...As on a previous occasion—the spring of 1935—Stalin made him secretary of the Party organization in Moscow but he also made him a member of the Central Committee...
...The Indonesian party sent a message pointedly reminding the celebrant that "in a situation characterized by differences of opinion in the world peoples' revolutionary movement, the Indonesian Communists have no other thought than that this situation should be of a temporary nature and that it should be settled by our unceasing and common efforts" —this after Khrushchev had made it quite clear, during his tour of Hungary earlier in the month, that he would like nothing better than to have an international Communist conference that would excommunicate the Chinese comrades once and for all...
...The Sino-Soviet conflict, the firm reaction of the United States, and last perhaps but not least, Khrushchev's advancing age may force the Soviet Union onto a more rational and moderate course in its relations with the West—but again, not because of a lack of the kind of "adventurism" which in the West is so frequently and incorrectly ascribed to Khrushchev's predecessor...
...Mao Tse-tung and his three ruling allies (Enver Hoxha of Albania, Kim II Sung of North Korea and Ho Chi Minh of North Vietnam) were clearly beyond the pale, as a result of Moscow's publication of the Suslov report and other documents condemning Red China...
...He knows only too well that twice already, after the death of Lenin in 1924 and after the death of Stalin in 1953, the struggle for the succession has led to serious convulsions...
...With eyes open, he has accepted the schism with China, and the disarray of the entire "movement," rather than abandon his goals of Russian wellbeing and an eventual modus vivendi with the nation he clearly respects most—the United States...
...the big Party man...
...to all and sundry, the virtues of higher living standards—"goulash" and "rice"— as contrasted with the horrors of nuclear war...
...Nor was Tito the only prominent "convalescent...
...Gheorgiu-Dej had also boycotted the last rally of East European leaders, in Berlin in January 1963...
...Unlike the various (unnamed) "Stalinists" in his entourage—and, to be sure, unlike his rivals in Peking—he wishes to be at peace with the rest of the world...
...From here on it is now possible to reconstruct Khrushchev's ideas fairly exactly...
...Khrushchev will probably be the last leader of Soviet Communism to have spent his childhood under Tsarism, the last to have lived through the revolutionary years as a Red Army soldier and simple member of the Party, the last who has acquired his knowledge not in a modern university but under the most difficult circumstances during the hungry years of the first FiveYear Plan...
...Why then was the rate of progress not quicker...
...better professional training of civil servants...
...He is a liberal: viz., his de-Stalinization campaign, his denunciation of terror, his benign treatment of his opponents...
...And he thereby came to realize how far removed Stalin was from the realities of life...
...Of all the exponents of the Communist movement who have now passed their 70th year, Khrushchev is not only the most powerful but in many respects the most inconsistent leader...
...and secondly, the contradictory interim stage in which the Soviet Union finds itself at present—that is, the surroundings in which Khrushchev operates today...
...however, in international Communism: there his failures have not only brought a lowering of his personal and his Party's prestige, but a virtual destruction of his (and the CPSU'S) once unquestionable right to lead, to rule, to dictate...
...Yet, if the West wishes to begin laying the groundwork for an eventual European settlement, it must begin thinking about a realistic set of terms...
...voters (although Castroism has probably inflicted less tangible damage to actual U.S...
...Was it perhaps the structure of the ministries and the local government organs that was at fault...
...Again and again he has called for detailed practical knowledge and has pushed the "principle of material incentives" (i.e., the profit motive), and yet he profoundly believes in a future ideal Communist society in the USSR as well as in the inevitable triumph of Communism throughout the world...
...Marshal J. B. Tito of Yugoslavia had also been invited to Moscow but, after seeing a draft of the declaration, pleaded illness and remained at home...
...everything was to be directed and supervised by the Party...
...He invited the relevant experts, issued appeals and instructions on hundreds of detailed questions, and held Party conferences which brought memories of courses at industrial and agricultural technical schools— but the consequences of all these tireless efforts still lagged far behind Khrushchev's expectations...
...These may lie on the table for half a dozen years, as with the test-ban and the Austrian Treaty, but they must be proposed in order ever to be accepted...
...Yugoslavia's President Tito: Walter Ulbricht in East Berlin...
...The postStalinist reforms of these years—the condemnation of Stalin and many of his methods, the relative repression of the State security service, the rehabilitations and the releases from the camps, alterations in the economic system and the training of new, more up-to-date officials—all these doubtless had some effect...
...It may be that Khrushchev has by now admitted to himself that his over-ambitious aims are no longer attainable...
...He was not able to finish his course at the Industrial Academy...
...Even within this scheme, however, there are odd cases which defy easy classification...
...Not that there was a shortage of florid speeches and messages of the type one would expect to have disappeared with the proclaimed end of the "personality cult...
...But it is highly probable that the first misgivings about Stalin and his policies arose in Khrushchev's mind only during and above all after the end of World War II...
...In fact, were it not for Khrushchev's attempt to force Rumania into a subservient economic position vis-à-vis Russia, that country might still be on his side in the struggle against Communist China...
...The Poles, "revisionist" in domestic practice and "autonomist" in principle, remain tied by geo-political necessity to Russia...
...In Hungary particularly, he delivered this message not boastfully or even confidently, but with a modesty bordering on sadness...
...After much fruitless wandering, he was finally taken on as a miner and later as a locksmith by the then French firm of Lebrun, Ferrier and Company...
...Yet, beyond all these factors and others, there stands the squat, bearish figure of Khrushchev who has, despite many a tactical zig-zag, maintained a remarkable consistency of outlook since he first shattered the Stalin myth in 1956...
...more up to date and more elastic methods in the exercise of its power...
...The Rumanians, boldly striking out for national independence, remain comparatively orthodox on the home front...
...There seems little reason to believe that now—with the Chinese albatross off his neck, with the "fraternal parties" scattering in all directions, with major Russian economic problems still unresolved— he will suddenly abandon his efforts to square Soviet policies with the realities of the contemporary world...
...In a realm where freedom is indivisible, he has operated a stop-and-go policy, and the periods of clamp-down have included the persecution of Pasternak for Dr...
...The system that gives man more material benefits will win," he declared flatly in Budapest...
...Some of the largest parties did not send any delegations at all...
...The lessons of such statements are assuredly not lost upon Khrushchev...
...Khrushchev attempted to minimize the gravity of the crisis in world Communism by comparing it with the differences among the Western Allies—specifically, by likening the Sino-Soviet schism to Washington's disagreements with General de Gaulle...
...To workers, Khrushchev extolled the blessings of higher productivity...
...Western Europe is today more confident, prosperous and united than in half a century, and is gradually drawing into its economic and cultural orbit even such Communist nations as Yugoslavia and now Rumania...
...Like the other Party leaders, he was no doubt still a Stalinist in principle...
...Besides the now 70-year-old Soviet Party chief, there is his Chinese antagonist Mao Tse-tung, who reached the same age last November...
...nor perhaps will it ever be...
...STALIN AND KHRUSHCHEV Remembrance of Things Past By Abraham Brumberg Had Premier Khrushchev had his way, his 70th birthday would probably have been celebrated with more pomp and circumstance than was the case at the Great Kremlin Palace on April 17...
...Not so...
...And therein may lie new opportunities for the West...
...In the Communist movement they led to a fateful underestimate of the actions of the rulers in Peking...
...Khrushchev spent the decisive period of his life and of his rise to power—and this too will not be true of his successors—under Stalin, and after Stalin's death he rose to the summit of power...
...How can all the contradictions be explained...
...And hasn't Khrushchev adopted virtually the entire program of Georgi Malenkov after stripping him of all his power and then— ignominiously — ousting him from the Party...
...This impressive demonstration of apparent Communist unity was marred by only a single abstention...
...Still, 1964 is not 1949 (when the USSR celebrated Stalin's 70th birthday), nor even 1959, when Khrushchev was credited by speakers at the 21st Party Congress for, among other things, "pointing a clear road for Soviet biology," and for the successes in "building and launching artificial earth satellites and cosmic rockets," in the "development of the chemical industry," and in the "building of electric power plants and power lines...
...Khrushchev joined in the cheering...
...The Khrushchev Era-Three Articles The Politician from Kalinovka By Wolfgang Leonhard Nikita Khrushchev's recent 70th birthday suddenly makes one realize how old the leaders of the Communist movement have become...
...announced: "The world Socialist system, which is growing and becoming stronger, is exerting ever greater influence upon the world situation...
...to planners, the indispensability of material incentives...
...To begin with, the meetings were purely social, but gradually the young workers were drawn into politics...
...a year later he edited a small paper published by the Technical School, with the characteristic title "Technics and Communism...
...Of the more than 100 references to his own life with which his speeches have been interlarded, the majority concern his young days...
...Having seen the principal Western countries over the years, he can have few illusions as to who is winning on that score...
...He has continued to preach his gospel of "economic competition with capitalism" even as it has become increasingly evident that Communism, in its present forms, cannot possibly hope to win such a competition in his own lifetime...
...barely a fortnight later he was ruefully admitting in Moscow that the era of "infallible teachers and obedient pupils" was over...
...His reforms go too far for the Stalinist bureaucrats, though they are too slight in view of the pressing problems of Soviet industrial society...
...Once again, as in 1957, Tito publicly announced that he was ill —this time a full month in advance of Khrushchev's birthday...
...It was to be a "transformation from above...
...If the aim has been to organize the entire world into a harmonious system insuring permanent peace, then, indeed, the end is nowhere in sight...
...closer contacts with reality...
...the advocacy of a principle ("peaceful coexistence") which demands the right to propagate the Soviet view all over the world while making it a crime to disseminate Western views within the USSR...
...From January 1934 he was also a member of the Central Committee...
...Nothing, indeed, illustrates this sad state of affairs more saliently than the behavior of some of the Communist parties during Khrushchev's birthday celebrations...
...Khrushchev's work in this first training establishment for techninicians and engineers in the Donets region did not go unnoticed in higher Party circles...
...He is a "pragmatist" and, as such, contemptuous of the kind of ideological rigidity that characterized his predecessor...
...In March 1922 he published his first article in the local paper, on the "Dictatorship of Labor...
...Finally, it is no accident that in so many ways Khrushchev's actions are reminiscent of his predecessor's...
...Two or mree times a year Khrushchev convened the Central Committee to discuss economic problems...
...It is, essentially, the problem of bringing the two halves of Europe together again without violent upheavals and without thereby establishing a Russian, a German or a combined Russo-German hegemony over the Continent...
...Even a rump conference of the anti-Chinese parties has been vetoed by the clear opposition of the Poles, Hungarians, Italians and Yugoslavs—not to mention the Rumanians with their shifty game of "mediation...
...Whether, and to what extent, this is correct is not known...
...Khrushchev was appointed Party secretary of a newly established technical school for the training of mining technicians in Yusokva, where under difficult conditions—there was no heating and no textbooks, the students slept in overcrowded rooms on primitive iron beds and Khrushchev himself had to share his room with two of the lecturers—he was responsible for the political work and at the same time he also studied himself in the workers' faculty (Rabfak...
...While Stalin's death provided an opportunity to put these ideas into effect, it soon became clear that quite different conceptions prevailed among the late dictator's successors —above all Molotov, Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev and Bulganin—as to how, by what means, at what rate and under whose leadership the longed for changes should be effected...
...Castro's takeover in Cuba, the power vacuum created by decolonialization and the difficulties of the underdeveloped countries — all contributed to Khrushchev's belief in the future triumph of Communism throughout the world...
...There can be no doubt that at the time Khrushchev supported the Stalinist "vigilance" campaign and the waves of arrests, and that he made inflammatory speeches against the "enemies of the people...
...True, he was awarded the Order of Lenin, the Gold Star medal and the title of Hero of the Soviet Union...
...Small wonder, then, that the formal "world conference of Communist parties," for which the Chinese first called last year, and which the Soviet Party finally demanded at its February plenum, remains a project for the unforeseeable future...
...Few would deny that, on balance, Russia is the healthier for his efforts—and that thereby the long-range prospects for an accommodation between Russia and the West have been improved...
...He also played a leading part in organizing the partisans behind the German lines...
...The inherent disunity of the erstwhile Soviet bloc, on the other hand, has not been appreciably checked either by the Warsaw Pact (in which even Albania still claims membership), by the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (which Rumania has reduced to a dead letter), or by the famous programmatic declarations of 1957 and 1960...
...Had he not eliminated Stalin's errors vigorously and resolutely and removed the brake-blocks...
...Khrushchev entered the Party machine at Kharkov, proceeded to Kiev and finally, in 1929, to the Industrial Academy in Moscow...
...It may be argued—and with good reason— that despite his incredible setbacks Khrushchev's personal power in the Soviet party and State remains as firm as ever...
...To claim—as some still do— that the Soviet Union of 1964 is the same as that of Stalin's day is to indulge in an absurdity unworthy of any serious consideration...
...It depends largely on one's perspective, on one's vision of the aims of Western (and particularly American) foreign policy...
...It was "not by accident" —to use a favorite Marxist phrase —that Khrushchev not only survived the Stalin years, but rose, during that time, to ever more prominent and powerful positions...
...Poland and Czechoslovakia base their links to Russia in large measure on the fear of possible German irredentism, but this fear has been perceptively slackening over the years (and could be further reduced by more understanding American and West German policies...
...After some intermediary posts as regional Party secretary of the Baumann—and later of the "Krasnaya Prenya" districts of Moscow— helped by his then patron and present-day "Party enemy," Lazar Kaganovich, he rose in 1932 to the position of Second, and, in March 1935, then First Secretary of the Moscow Party organization...
...EVOLUTION OF THE SOVIET EMPIRE Now There Are Seven By Anatole Shub Belgrade On November 7, 1957, when the chiefs of 12 ruling Communist parties gathered in the Kremlin for the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the mood was one of confidence and belligerence: The Soviet Union, having weathered the Hungarian Revolution and the MalenkovMolotov crisis, had just launched the first Sputnik...
...In the midst of the February plenum that decisively condemned Peking, Pravda was publishing the advice to Russian farmers of his Iowa friend, the corn-grower Roswell Garst...
...It was after all none other than Lavrenty Beria, the dreaded head of the secret police, who—as we now know—wished to reach an understanding with the West even at the expense of abandoning East Germany...
...And why dwell on his remarkable administrative talents when all his successive reorganizations in industry, agriculture, and the Party have yielded such meager results...
...Zhivago, and the imprisonment of Pasternak's companion Olga Ivinskaya, who is still languishing in jail on trumped-up charges...
...But the "objective imperatives" go beyond these bequeathed to his successors by Stalin: they also lie in the consequences of some of Khrushchev's actions...
...But the small detachment was forced to retreat before the advancing German troops who occupied Rutchenkovo in April 1918...
...And it is true, too, that a large share of the credit for the basic political, economic and cultural transformations that have taken place in the Soviet Union over the past decade does belong to Khrushchev...
...If there is any image Khrushchev would like to imprint upon posterity, it is no doubt that of a fearless and consistent anti-Stalinist...
...they were the last to arrive in Moscow and among the first, less than 48 hours later, to leave...
...He was one of the Party's few regional secretaries who not only survived the great purge of 1936-38 but actually received further promotion during this period...
...He was lauded as, among other things, the "closest friend and dearest brother" of "all the industrious people of the Soviet East...
...the Communist leaders in France and Italy, Maurice Thorez and Palmiro Togliatti...
...In April 1909, when he was 15, he entered the (at that time German-owned) mining machinery works of Bosse as an apprentice locksmith...
...At that period he hardly thought in terms of far-reaching reforms, but he may well have considered the need for changes in the methods of government, for closer contacts between leaders and local officials, for solutions to certain urgent practical problems...
...This was not surprising, since the mining settlement was poor, the wages pitiful, the working conditions appalling...
...Or the missile gamble in Cuba—something which the super-cautious Stalin would probably be aghast at...
...and "sincerely loved and deeply respected" by the people of Azervaijan, Armenia, Georgia, and Bclorussia...
...Perhaps most significant, he appears to have shared the hope, widespread at the time, that there would be some changes in the Soviet Union after the War—a hope that was to prove illusory...
...Another diplomat—this one stationed in Eastern Europe—read his colleague's remarks and expressed astonishment: "Hasn't he heard...
...If he has not succeeded, it has not been for want of effort...
...Indeed, virtually all of his policies may be viewed as attempts to cope with the unruly forces which he himself had so inadvertently unleashed...
...They made Khrushchev the present of a "Socialist Realist" painting—a portrait of the Soviet Premier by Renato Guttuso—but left it at the Soviet Embassy in Rome for delivery...
...Having joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918, he took part in the fighting against Deniken as commissar of the 2nd Battalion of the 74th Regiment of the 9th Division, in the course of which the White General was expelled from the Don valley to the Northern Caucasus...
...He has several times vividly described the terrible poverty of the village, the hopelessness of the kolkhoz peasants and the hostility with which they received him...
...A canny conservative (in Communist terms) and a Russia-firster, he resembles the cosmopolitan Lenin or the malevolent Stalin less than he does Peter Stolypin, the selfmade "strong man" who nearly managed to resuscitate the Tsarist Empire before the holocaust of World War I. Inheriting not only the dead weight of Stalinist practice but a generation of colleagues formed by Stalin, Khrushchev has perforce undertaken the large-scale reform of Soviet society "without surgical operations but by therapeutic methods" (as he put it on his birthday...
...By May 1920, the Civil War was at an end as far as Khrushchev was concerned...
...to farmers, the necessity of learning from the United States...
...Most of his spare time was spent with his friend Pentelei Machiniya, a Ukrainian at whose house the young factory workers used to meet...
...Perhaps he has even come to realize that the problems of the developing Soviet industrial society can no longer be solved by mere amendments to the current system but only by fundamental changes in its whole structure...
...It is academic to speculate whether Khrushchev's course has been determined primarily "from above"—by the impasse which the Kremlin has faced in attempts to extend its power since 1949—or "from below," by the Russian people's deep fear of war and longing for a better life...
...But if one recalls the precise historical origins of the cold war—Stalin's drive to Communize a prostrate Europe, and America's determination to contain that drive—the issue has largely been decided...
...He came to believe that once it had been liberated from "Stalin's errors," Soviet Communism would be able to do anything and achieve everything...
...Though a pragmatist, ideological training has not been reduced during his regime...
...It is further observed that unlike Stalin, whose pursuit of power overshadowed all other considerations, Khrushchev is sincerely interested in improving the lot of the Soviet citizen...
...1912 —and he had to leave the works...
...He spent the day itself, however, busily touring earth-quake-stricken villages in Slavonia, and returned to Belgrade looking remarkably fit...
...It is not easy, after all, to shed inclinations and habits acquired in a lifetime...
...Stalin's complete ignorance of the actual situation, his isolation and his autocratic outlook made an unfavorable impression on Khrushchev and aroused his critical faculty...
...Or Soviet actions in the Congo...
...In a joint declaration, the 12 Communist chiefs, headed by Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung...
...There is some evidence that his misgivings were initially aroused by the Soviet Union's inadequate preparations for the War and by Stalin's arbitrary decisions, which often ran counter to the actual situation...
...Where does the West stand now, with Communism at the great divide...
...The Proclamation at the 21st Party Congress (at the beginning of 1959) of the Seven-Year Plan...
...But these have been small pickings, indeed, for Communism over a period of 15 years during which the West has both modernized itself and dismantled the greatest colonial empires in history...
...It is, perhaps, too much to expect that diplomatic nettles so long evaded will suddenly be grasped now, when there are elections in the United States and Britain this fall, and in West Germany and France next year...
...All the attention he has given to the recalcitrant problem of Soviet agriculture has hardly afected its backwardness and inefficiency, a fact that was underlined by the vast purchases of grain made from the West earlier this year...
...In trying to revive a moribund movement, Khrushchev succeeded in creating chaos and an unhealthy striving for independence...
...He was only nine years old when he took a job as shepherd with the landowner Shauffuss...
...Paradoxical though it may at first sight appear, the successes of these early post-Stalinist years had fateful consequences for Khrushchev...
...a party member with an eclectic style that doesn't always sit well with the Russian leaders...
...The present political attitudes of these men differ in many respects but they all have at least one thing in common: they all derive from the Comintern era, mostly began their revolutionary activities during the '30s, attained leading positions in their respective Communist parties and operated for one or two decades as disciplined followers of Stalin...
...His absence now underscored the fact that polycentrism, perhaps a mere wish in 1956, had become effective reality in 1964...
...The German Party may assure their "dear Nikita Sergeievich" that he has been "responsible for making "the Communist world movement . . . the most influential political force of our time" (Neues Deutschland, April 17...
...he was a faithful Stalinist and thus achieved rapid promotion in the Party...
...His deputies Aleksandar Rankovic and Edvard Kardelj came instead, endorsed a vague appeal for peace and disarmament, but refused to sign the joint declaration—which, indeed, as the price of Chinese support, had sharply attacked Yugoslav "revisionism...
...In FrancoAmerican relations, there has been nothing remotely resembling the Sino-Soviet frontier incidents, expulsions of technicians, reduction of trade, subversive appeals to ethnic minorities and open disputing of the national boundaries...
...but his personal inclinations have been apparent for years...
...The first years following the death of Stalin—from 1953 to roughly the end of 1958 — seemed to confirm Khrushchev's hopes...
...So dispiriting was the reaction of the "fraternal parties" that, whereas Khrushchev was proposing, in Budapest on April 3, "new forms of organization" to "strengthen unity...
...How does "saberrattling" during, say, the Suez crisis in 1956 fit into this mold...
...For in place of one, there are now at least three distinct Communist movements: the Eastern or "dogmatist" group headed by China, the Western or "revisionist" faction including Tito and Togliatti, and the shifting center led by Moscow...
...Khrushchev's misgivings were probably intensified after he gave up his post as First Party Secretary in the Ukraine and was ordered to leave Kiev and go to Moscow...
...It would be rather indelicate, after all, to say much about Khrushchev's contributions to Soviet agriculture when virtually all of his campaigns, from massive corn cultivation to inundating the Siberian Virgin Lands with grain, have turned out to be miserable fiascos...
...For an answer he looked to the organizational sphere...
...Unlike Lenin or even Stalin, Khrushchev was not a professional revolutionary from his earliest youth...
...A fortnight before the birthday...
...Gheorghe Gheorgiu-Dej of Rumania also chose to absent himself...
...The Lenin Museum in Moscow, which had at one time been devoted more to Lenin's "most faithful disciple" than to Lenin himself, has now been completely denuded of any references to Stalin: he has become another "non-person...
...It is only in recent years, since Stalin's death, that they have acquired profiles of their own...
...but then came the Pasternak affair in 1958, and his vulgar and violent diatribes against liberal artists and intellectuals in 1962 and 1963...
...diplomat in Paris declared with great passion that failure to create a NATO multinational nuclear contingent would mean "the break-up of the Western alliance and defeat in the cold war...
...There is so little genuine historical perspective in this view—admittedly oversimplified in this version—and so much questionable logic that one is almost at a loss in trying to cope with it...
...The Italians had been declaring publicly for more than a year that they opposed a new world Communist conference or, indeed, any attempt to frame a common "general line" binding on all parties...
...His tragedy is that, being very largely shaped by the Stalin period, he has not yet been able to envisage the deeper and decisive transformations of which the Soviet system stands so urgently in need...
...Operating amid Stalin's immediate entourage it could hardly escape him that in the last years of his life Stalin was preparing a great new purge, a repetition of the terror of 1936-38, including new show trials directed against his closest colleagues—a purge that would certainly have affected Khrushchev himself...
...Khrushchev hid first in the house of the worker Korolyova and then, after various difficulties, rejoined the Red troops...
...In addition, of course, there are the parties of Asia, Africa and Latin America which have already split—the Indian party foremost among them...
...Quite apart from the three Balkan dissidents—Yugoslavia, Albania and Rumania—Soviet power in Eastern Europe rests on notably shaky foundations...
...When a strike broke out in the spring of 1912, the barely 18-year-old Nikita helped collect money for the strikers—as is proved by a Tsarist police report which is before me now, dated May 28...
...In any case, France and the United States have been united over the decades by traditions and usages stronger and more binding than any personalities, whether in the Elysée or Foggy Bottom...
...Khrushchev's treatment of his opponents does indeed differ from that of Stalin's: while the latter cropped off heads, Khrushchev crops photographs—after destroying his adversaries politically...
...They lured him into a mood of overoptimism from the end of 1958 onward, and into an over-estimate of his own opportunities...
...The photograph was accompanied by the text of a certificate issued to him in connection with a certain military mission—a rather ordinary document, but bolstered by an editorial reference to the memoirs of "old Communists who worked together with Khrushchev" at that time, and who remember him as a "militant commissar, a skillful organizer, a man thirsty for knowledge, and a responsive comrade...
...In January 1938 he was made First Secretary of the Party in the Ukraine (which meant an up-grading), and in March 1939 he also became a full member of the Politburo (what is now the Party Presidium), thus reaching the highest level of power in the USSR...
...the leading Communist representatives of Latin America, Luiz Carlos Prestes in Brazil and Vittorio Codovila in the Argentine —all these are over 70...
...But he differed from the others in one particular: he liked travelling, he liked talking to people, he wanted to see the real situation with his own eyes, he was interested in practical problems...
...No doubt the relatively sparse mention of Khrushchev's more concrete achievements is due, at least in part, to the fact that so many of his pet projects over the past 10 years have come to grief...
...Palmiro Togliatti of Italy also saw fit to announce that he was too ill to travel...
...On one single occasion he did claim that as Moscow Party secretary he prevented Stalin from unleashing a still greater wave of arrests during the years of terror from 1936-38...
...concentration on practical economic problems...
...Let us, then, admit first of all that there is undoubtedly a great deal of truth to it...
...The Italian CP, for example, contented itself with dispatching as a present a portrait of Khrushchev, executed by Guttuson...
Vol. 47 • May 1964 • No. 11
