Khrushchev Unburied
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
Writers & Writing Khrushchev Unburied By Robert V Daniels Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, the Soviet Union's mid-20th-century leader, was a man of deep paradox. He was Josef Stalin's willing...
...He admits that prior to his assignment in Moscow, "Like most Americans, I first considered Khrushchev to be a colorful bully, a wily adversary determined to enlarge the Soviet empire...
...If we don't condemn the abuses of power, if we don't analyze our mistakes, the danger will arise that history may repeat itself...
...Sergei, now an American citizen and Senior Fellow at Brown University's Thomas J. Watson Jr...
...The new English edition will consist of three volumes...
...In the missile crisis Kennedy displayed an extraordinary combination of toughness and restraint, coolly rising above Khrushchev's threats and the war cries of his own Congress and military...
...Khrushchev's son, Sergei Nikitich Khrushchev, described at length how the memoirs were recorded and published in a chapter in his own account of his father's last years (Khrushchev on Khrushchev, 1990), and in an Appendix to the new enterprise he carries the tale through the 1990s...
...Though he reluctantly approved publication abroad to prevent the record's being erased forever, Sergei Khrushchev was not altogether happy with the foreign editions of the memoirs...
...While Frankel's narrative is at least three-fourths Kennedy and only onefourth Khrushchev, he makes some astute points about Nikita Sergeyevich...
...hence his ultimate agreement to a withdrawal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba in return for a U.S...
...Readers and viewers of William Craig's Enemy at the Gates will recall Khrushchev's hortatory appearance at Stalingrad...
...Yet he emptied most of the Gulag, toppled the dead Stalin from his pedestal of infallibility, curbed his own riskiest impulses, and ultimately held out olive branches to his foreign adversaries...
...But his personal slant, conveyed in the World War II memoirs that make up almost half of this huge book, is important for understanding the political atmosphere during that colossal struggle...
...Khrushchev makes no secret of his role as a dedicated Stalinist, and his rather sanguine view at the time toward Stalin's consolidation of power and purging of enemies real or imagined...
...He ruled with a deep sense of inferiority...
...Khrushchev claims that even as a top Party official he was kept in the dark about what was really going on around the country under Stalin...
...But Max Frankel's High Noon in the Cold War helps us further understand this man whom he found "ambiguity incarnate...
...Thus it came to pass that Little, Brown was able to bring out three volumes of Khrushchev's words...
...Frankel takes the revisionist position on the dialectic of the arms race and American-Soviet relations: Political pressure prompted President John F. Kennedy's exaggerated pursuit of military superiority, forcing Khrushchev to push the Soviet buildup...
...promise not to invade the island coupled with the removal of obsolete American missiles in Turkey...
...Yet through all this Khrushchev somehow kept the faith: "In those days I looked at things idealistically...
...Robert V. Daniels, a frequenti NL contributor, is professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont...
...His narrative, fast-paced and quite gripping, combines personal recollection with all the new material that has come out on the crisis (including Khrushchev's memoirs and the Kennedy tapes...
...The memoirist takes some of the credit for the strategy of cutting off the German forces besieging the city, truly the turning point of the War...
...Frankel enjoyed a unique vantage point as the Times' correspondent in Moscow during Khrushchev's heyday in the late 1950s, back in Washington during the Cuban missile crisis, and then for a time in Havana in the aftermath of those scary events...
...Soon afterward, the collapse of the Communist regime and the partial opening of secret archives uncovered Khrushchev's original tapes and the transcripts thereof, taken into custody by the KGB back in 1970...
...They appeared initially in the United States and Western Europe under the title Khrushchev Remembers (1970...
...Having restored all that was deleted and rearranged the rest, this volume is likely to prove as interesting as anything to follow...
...Rebuffing demands from both his own entourage and Fidel Castro for forceful countermoves to Kennedy's ordering the blockade of Cuba, Khrushchev warned (according to his interpreter's memoirs), "We don't know how to get out of one predicament and you drag us into another...
...Sergei looked forward to the day when the whole original version could be published in Russia...
...Eventually the skeptics were disabused and another volume appeared, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (1974), covering his years in power...
...He seems to feel that his denunciation of Stalin's crimes at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 exonerated him of responsibility for his own actions in the 1930s...
...Khrushchev understood Stalin's fear of Hitler and his state of denial about war even after the first German attacks...
...On the assassination of Leningrad Party boss and Stalin heir apparent Sergei M. Kirov in December 1934 that set the stage for the purges, Khrushchev sticks to the position that Stalin somehow arranged the deed...
...The Soviet dictator left it to Prime Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov to rally the country: "Stalin . . . was completely paralyzed, unable to act, and couldn't collect his thoughts...
...The publication was authenticated by its editor-translator, a subsequently well-known journalist and aide to President Bill Clinton, Strobe Talbott...
...He had a key patron in Lazar M. Kaganovich, one of Stalin's chief hatchet men (and continued to rate him positively even after Kaganovich joined the anti-Khrushchev plot of 1957...
...Institute for International Studies, was the force behind the creation of his father's memoirs, pushing the tape recording and transcribing during the late 1960s in the face of harassment by the all-knowing yet somehow inhibited secret police...
...As a Party functionary in the Ukraine in the late 1920s and then at the Moscow Industrial Academy in 1929-31, he lined up with the Stalin faction against the Trotskyists and then against the Bukharinist "Right Opposition...
...These positions gave him a bird's-eye view of the entire history of retreat in 1941, victory at Stalingrad in 1942, and rollback of the Germans from 1943 on...
...Single-handedly, it appears, he saved the world from plunging into general war...
...The first is the virtually unabridged Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Volume I: Commissar, 1918-1945, edited by his son Sergei Khrushchev (Penn State, 1,008 pp., $55.00...
...Khrushchev's merit as a chronicler of wartime events is a question for the experts in military history...
...Would that qualities like his could have guided us in the 1990s and today...
...Khrushchev's recollections are necessarily a central source for fathoming his career, self-serving and tendentious though they may be...
...His words had been taped, transcribed and smuggled out of the USSR, despite the vigilance of Communist Party General Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev's regime toward any manifestation of dissident activity, even by a former Soviet leader...
...Their different time frames and contrasting provenance notwithstanding, the two works complement each other in casting new light on the colorful but elusive Soviet leader who had a critical impact on his country and the world...
...It was not until the system's total collapse in 1991 that Sergei was finally able to arrange publication of a nearly full version in serialized form by the journal Voprosy Istorii ("Questions of History...
...He rattled his missiles and threatened the worst when the occasion prompted him...
...Khrushchev's Cuba policy, like his policy toward Germany and indeed his entire approach to the outside world, was colored by his World War II experience: He was wary of a pre-emptive attack by a superior adversary, and hoped to redress Soviet inferiority without being unduly provocative...
...In 1970 the material on Khrushchev's rise was condensed by nearly 50 per cent, evidently with an eye to what the Anglophone reader could presumably absorb, but that sacrificed much of historical value—such as the inner workings of the Party apparatus and its personalities...
...who had engaged in the great and glorious struggle to transform society along Socialist lines...
...He was also a "member of the Military Council" for the forces in the southern sector—in effect the chief political commissar looking over the shoulders of the generals in that whole region...
...In fact, the whole gambit to install Soviet nukes in Cuba was an impulsive effort to salvage the strategic balance when Soviet experts realized they were losing the arms race to the U.S...
...In my view we were all bound by the invisible threads of ideological struggle, the idea of building Communism, which was something elevated and holy...
...The section on World War II was shrunk even more drastically...
...Still, at the outset he saw Stalin as "very simple and accessible," a man of "Oriental perfidiousness" but "often quite attentive and sensitive...
...Khrushchev told the new Soviet ambassador to Washington, Anatoly F. Dobrynin, shortly before the crisis, "Don't ask for trouble," and cautioned, according to Dobrynin, that "war with the United States was inadmissible—this was above all...
...It was not the same as now among Communists...
...He does not explain his own survival...
...Nevertheless, skepticism was the instinctive reaction of many historians, burned as they had been by the spurious writings attributed to luminaries ranging from Adolf Hitler to the one-time Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim M. Litvinov...
...He was Josef Stalin's willing executioner, and one of the few top Soviet officials over the age of 35 to elude the purges in the late 1930s...
...He vividly describes the decisive tank battle of Kursk in July 1943, where "the enemy lost the strategic initiative once and for all...
...he only berates himself for believing Stalin's denunciations of one-time friends as "enemies of the people...
...He barely mentions the "Moscow Trials" of 1936-38 when the old oppositionists uttered their forced confessions, but does recount in some detail Stalin's purge of the military and the Party hierarchy...
...In a dictatorship such as the Soviet Union, after all, there is room only for one individual to be himself as apublic person, and that individual is the dictator...
...One wonders how the Soviet forces ever prevailed, though even Stalin privately admitted at the time the importance of aid from the Soviet Union's Western allies: "He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war...
...Transmission of the material abroad, Sergei reveals, was accomplished by the mysterious journalist and double agent Victor Louis, with the benevolent neutrality (so Louis claimed) of none other than KGB chief and future Soviet leader Yuri V. Andropov...
...To the end of his days he remained a devout Communist, the "last true believer," some said...
...To the contrary, "Hardly any of his contemporaries recognized the defensive essence of his aggressive maneuvers...
...Which was the real Khrushchev, and what in his life experience explains him...
...They had been rehashed and truncated in the editorial process, the extensive omissions were not noted, and some egregious errors had crept in...
...He recognized after the fact that Stalin was conducting "a purge of everyone who had been close to Lenin," and "committed atrocities against his cothinkers...
...Withal, Frankel's real hero is JFK...
...Two new books dealing with Khrushchev offer further understanding of their complicated subject...
...Only in 1999 did a complete Russian text finally appear, in four volumes issued by the Moscow News Publishing Company as Vremia, Liudi, Vlast' ("Time, People, Power"), and it is the basis for the new, authoritative translation by George Shriver...
...Commissar comprises Nikita Khrushchev's recollections of his ascent in the 1920s and '30s to the top echelon of Soviet politics, and his experiences during the "Great Patriotic War...
...One thing led to another, almost spinning out of control in the crisis over Cuba...
...And the detail of his recall, without notes or references, is extraordinary...
...Khrushchev agrees that Stalin meddled disastrously in military decisions, now demanding futile resistance, now ordering pointless retreats...
...But even after Mikhail S. Gorbachev took over the Soviet leadership in 1985, the wheels of the rusting Communist system ground slowly...
...This at the expense of domestic progress, to which Khrushchev had hoped to shift his resources...
...His numerous books include Russia's Transformation and The Soviet Trajectory...
...To justify his later condemnation of Stalin, he appeals to history: "The evil that Stalin committed did great harm to our country, and every evil should be denounced...
...He was capable of flexibility, provided he could save face...
...He describes unapologetically his role in the arrests and deportations carried out in the Western Ukraine when the Red Army seized this area from Poland in 1939 and subjected it abruptly to the rigors of the Communist system...
...This was supplemented by the publication in 1990 of Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes, actually material omitted from the earlier editions because it was deemed too sensitive or provocative...
...IT IS NOT EASY to make the connection between the early Khrushchev and his character as Soviet leader in the 1950s and '60s...
...The second is High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Ballantine, 187 pp., $23.95), a memoir-history by former New York Times Executive Editor Max Frankel that addresses its two protagonists from a fresh perspective...
...Throughout the War, Khrushchev was a member of the ruling Politburo, boss of the Communist Party organization in the Ukraine, as well as overseer of guerrilla operations in the region when it was under German occupation...
...Frankel depicts Khrushchev as a Soviet leader who "masked weakness with swagger" and really aimed for "peaceful coexistence," despite his promises to "bury" capitalism...
...Many are the historians and biographers who have tried to answer those questions...
Vol. 87 • September 2004 • No. 5
