Life Among the Apparatchiki
SHUB, ANATOLE
Life Among the Apparatchiki Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring By Fedor Burlatsky Translated from the Russian by Daphne Skillen Scribner's. 286 pp. $24.00. Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author,...
...These 1988 essays, written in the spirit of "Socialist pluralism," have been substantially supplemented by later...
...In 1987-89, Gorbachev's continued fondness for such perks became a powerful issue for Boris N. Yeltsin...
...Tsukanov could not stand the blow and suffered a stroke...
...Burlatsky rejects the Western image of Suslov as a latter-day Torquemada, depicting him rather as a survivor, "a double-dealing two-faced man who never said anything directly but always acted surreptitiously, afraid of slipping up...
...the active role of the mass media, polls, and the autonomy of the intellectuals...
...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "An Empire Loses Hope" For 23 years following Nikita S. Khrushchev's October 1964 ouster, official silence enveloped his name in the USSR...
...That may have been all to the good...
...Marxism-Leninism is proletarian internationalism...
...Not long before he died, Brezhnev took pity on him and presented him with a decoration on the occasion of his 60th birthday, but read the speech in a squeaky voice without looking at Tsukanov, who was shaking like a leaf...
...After 1964 Burlatsky was excluded from the Kremlin inner circle, but he remained within the broader establishment...
...He is most authoritative on the circumstances and immediate consequences of Khrushchev's ouster, and almost as solid on the background of the U-2 and Cuban missile crises...
...It was said that Anastas Mikoyan had his eye on this house even before the Revolution, when he used to visit the cook who worked for the owner...
...Burlatsky says he giggled at the sight of "the country's most prominent ideologue fingering his quotations as if they were" rosary beads...
...But they balked when, on three occasions, he threatened to close their "feeding trough" on Gran-ovsky Street...
...The cut-and-paste work has left some inconsistencies in the text...
...French Valka survived...
...Mikoyan and his children lived the sweet life there for about 60 years...
...Burlatsky infers from recent disclosures that Mikoyan deflected early warnings of the plot against Khrushchev...
...The apparatchiki let Khrushchev get away with abolishing the so-called "Stalin package," a secret pay envelope for top functionaries...
...In contrast to these scholastic exercises, the most human tale in the book concerns Georgi Tsukanov, Brezhnev's chief aide for a quarter of a century: "Brezhnev had a passion for a woman in the Central Committee apparatus who was nicknamed 'French Valka.' She worked in the shorthand office and had been in a multitude of beds in the apparatus before getting into the General Secretary's...
...Vladimir Shlapentokh's definitive study, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power: The Post-Stalin Era, classifies Burlatsky among the "realists" of the late 1980s who were convinced that the political leadership would never permit a multiparty system, and who argued that intellectuals should focus on promoting "accoutrements typical to an 'enlightened monarchy...
...A "Westernizing" liberal raised in an anti-Stalin Communist family, Burlatsky helped draft Khrushchev's 1961 Party program and later accompanied him on six foreign trips...
...With these caveats Burlatsky's book can be recommended to knowledgeable readers as a lively, thoughtful, well-rounded portrait of a flawed reformer...
...Burlatsky notes an estimate of half a million "official" cars for prominent individuals, with one or two drivers per car...
...Burlatsky launched Khrushchev's rehabilitation with three articles in Literaturnaya Gazeta, a 17-page contribution to Yuri Afanasyev's pro-perestroika anthology Inogo ne Dano (No Other Way), and a 44-page memoiressay on the post-Stalin era in Novy Mir...
...Against the many neo-Stalinists and the few anti-Stalinists remaining in the leadership, Andropov seems to have prevailed in insisting, from 1965 onward, on official silence on the issue...
...a three-story old brick house with several separate houses for the servants...
...At the 22nd Party Congress in 1961, Khrushchev "pushed through a decision in the Presidium that every member of the leadership should speak" in the renewed attack on Stalinism...
...Among the dachas occupied by Kremlin leaders, "the largest belonged to Anastas Mikoyan...
...A thumbnail sketch and a few telling anecdotes convey the essence of Leonid I. Brezhnev's governing style...
...Although he largely confirms the basic insights of Western biographies written in Khrushchev's day by Konrad Kellen, Lazar Pisztrak and Edward Crankshaw, Burlatsky adds much colorful detail, Kremlinological sophistication and shrewd political analysis of the Khrushchev decade and the reactionary period that ensued...
...to a pitiful room with pitiful furniture...
...some prince or oil baron from Baku...
...proletarian internationalism.' Every time we put in an 'and' Mikhail Andreyevich would neatly cross out the 'and' and put in a dash, because after all...
...Out of the small doors of this building ministers and academicians would emerge, bent down under the weight of their packages and boxes, which they dragged to their black cars on their way to and from work...
...While admiring Khrushchev's political courage and warm human qualities, the author also stresses the Soviet leader's impulsiveness and intellectual limitations, and is critical of much of his entourage (including son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei...
...Not surprisingly, therefore, his book, apparently completed before the August 1991 revolution, is marked by a certain prudence with regard to the Gorbachev period...
...In those early post-Stalin weeks, Georgi M. Malenkov delivered the main report at a conference of high officials, a scathing attack on bureaucracy...
...But Burlatsky was, indubitably, among the "best and brightest" young intellectuals recruited by Otto V. Kuusinen and Yuri V. Andropov in 1958-60 for the "Socialist countries" department of the Central Committee...
...Perhaps most revealing, cumulatively, are the vignettes scattered through the text that convey the tone of life among the primitive post-Stalin leaders and their often clever if fearful apparatchiki...
...A few examples: Shortly after Stalin's death in March 1953, Konstantin Simonov published a panegyric to the dictator...
...Our group was particularly amused by his remarks on whether to write 'Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism' or 'Marxism-Lenin-ism...
...Apres nous, le deluge, indeed...
...Brezhnev demoted her a rung down the ladder but did not reject her services, and even after his death she continued carrying papers along the same corridors...
...There is an interesting account of two conversations with Andrei D. Sakharov, in 1970 and 1988, on the prospects for world government...
...One may speculate whether that postponed the ultimate crisis for 20 (largely wasted) years, or made it inevitable...
...This was an apartment house with a "canteen for medicinal catering" that provided good food at subsidized prices: "a unique club for the upper ranks of the Communist Party including, without exception, all the central establishments...
...Restored to quasi-favor by Andropov in 1983, he became under Mikhail S. Gorbachev a prominent parliamentarian as well as the editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta until last September...
...An urbane, talented journalist with academic credentials, Burlatsky was first introduced to Khrushchev in 1962 and so was not quite (as his Introduction suggests) as close to him as Theodore C. Sor-enson was to John F. Kennedy...
...In mid-1963, Burlatsky and a colleague worked all night drafting a speech for Suslov...
...In his old age poor Leonid Ilyich became jealous of Tsukanov...
...material addressing broader themes and important disclosures on the politics of the 1960s (e.g., newly released memoirs of Khrushchev and Anastas I. Mikoyan, the reminiscences of their sons, the tripartite discussions of the Cuban missile crisis...
...When at last the time came to "rehabilitate" him in 1988, it was perhaps inevitable that his former speech-writer, Fedor Burlatsky, would lead that effort...
...Next morning, Suslov said: "We should strengthen it here with a quotation from Lenin,' and went to find one: "He rushed off in a sprightly way to a corner of his office and took down one of those boxes you find in libraries, put it on the table and with his long thin fingers very quickly began to flick through his cards of quotations...
...He promoted her...
...While all this was going on, an Academy of Sciences study found that only one in 10 decisions of the USSR Council of Ministers was ever implemented...
...gave her a flat, her own car and a large salary...
...Khrushchev angrily telephoned the Writers Union and demanded that Simonov be fired...
...even [Mikhail A.] Suslov was forced to do so...
...progressively less inhibited...
...If we mentioned the importance of democracy he would recommend discipline...
...Suslov was similarly forced to deliver an anti-Chinese report at the February 1964 Central Committee plenum, the one that provoked Romania's neutrality...
...It is not known whether there were grounds for this, but Tsukanov lost his post as chief aide and was transferred from his office opposite Brezhnev's...
...For the witting reader, however, such inconsistencies may be less important than Burlatsky's disclosure of Andropov's conviction, since 1956, that the issue of Stalin's crimes could destroy both the Soviet regime and the international Communist movement...
...In 1963-64, Suslov used to review papers drafted by Burlatsky and other members of Andropov's shop: "We would be writing a document on the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism in other countries and he would point out that it was also necessary to mention an armed uprising...
...Thus Andropov is spoken of adoringly in early sections, described as "snake-eyed" right after Khrushchev's fall and treated ruefully thereafter...
...even briefer tales illuminate Andrei A. Gromyko, Aleksandr N. Shelepin and other Kremlin bonzes...
...The "deathly silence" that followed "was broken by the lively, apparently cheerful voice of Khrushchev, who said: 'All this is true, of course, Georgi Maximili-anovich, but the apparatus is our buttress.'" ("Stormy, prolonged applause...
...For example, Burlatsky discusses many of his former Central Committee comrades, yet he does not mention Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, Andropov's deputy in the "Socialist countries" department, his ultimate successor at the KGB, and the chief organizer of the coup attempt...
...Nor does he hesitate to point out, for instance, that the persecution of dissidents, including their incarceration in psychiatric hospitals, began under Khrushchev in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution...
...or we would say that there was no fatalistic inevitability of a world war and he would note that we also had to mention that there was no fatalistic inevitability of peace...
Vol. 75 • June 1992 • No. 7
