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Overview
The book presents and interprets new information on Khrushchev’s struggle for power, public attitudes toward him, his role in agricultural reform and cultural politics, and such foreign policy issues as East-West relations, nuclear strategy, and relations with Germany. It also chronicles Khrushchev’s years in Ukraine where he grew up and began his political career, serving as Communist party boss from 1938 to 1949, and his role in mass repressions of the 1930s and in destalinization in the 1950s and 1960s. Two concluding chapters compare the regimes of Khrushchev and Gorbachev as they struggled to reform Communism, to humanize and modernize the Soviet system, and to answer the haunting question that persists today: Is Russia itself reformable?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300128093 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 542 KB |
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Nikita Khrushchev
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2000 Yale UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-300-07635-5
Chapter One
The Ukrainian Years, 1894-1949IURII SHAPOVAL
The Ukrainian pages of Nikita Khrushchev's biography remain among the least studied, even though a considerable part of his life was associated with Ukraine. He began his political career there, and his appointment in early 1938 as leader of the Ukrainian party organization turned out to be a peculiar sort of salvation for him. The English journalist and diplomat Edward Crankshaw correctly noted that it was in Ukraine that Khrushchev became as much his own boss as was possible under Stalin, developed his abilities and talents, and saw with his own eyes the horrible suffering through which people were forced to live, as well as how the same people rose up and fought against the Germans. He himself was changed as a result.
I have here attempted to give a short survey of Khrushchev's life and career from his birth until his second departure from Ukraine for Moscow in 1949, and to consider the formative influence of Khrushchev's Ukrainian experience on his criticism of Stalin's crimes, his agricultural policies, his way of choosing and handling the party cadres who worked for him, and other aspects of his political life.
The more involved one becomes in the study of Khrushchev's life and work, the more surprising the many facets of his character turn out to be. He was born in the village of Kalinovka, in the Dmitrievsk district of Kursk province, in 1894. Although his birthday is generally thought to be April 17, the village of Kalinovka's registration book shows that his parents, Sergei Nikanorovich and Aksinia Ivanovna, baptized their child on his birthday, April 15 (April 3, old style). He was the eleventh newborn registered on that day.
During winters Sergei Nikanorovich left his family, newly enlarged by Nikita's sister, Irina, and worked in the Donbass as a cabinetmaker and then as a miner at the Uspenskii mine. With the Khrushchev household struggling to make ends meet, Nikita started working himself, looking after the landowner Shaufusova's cows.
In 1908 Sergei Nikanorovich moved his family to the Donbass for good, living at the Uspenskii mine, five kilometers south of Iuzovka. Not far away were the Rutchenkov mine and the German Bosse ironworks factory. Until he was fifteen, Nikita worked as a farm laborer for the landowner Kirsh, and on days off he and other boys his age cleaned boilers at local mines. Soon he was accepted as a metalworker's apprentice at the Bosse factory. His first teachers were the old worker F. P. Golovach and the master craftsman T. S. Pukhno. Contemporaries recall that Nikita once astonished his teachers and friends by putting together a motorcycle from spare parts and riding it into the workers' quarters.
Roy Medvedev has noted that Khrushchev's closest friend was the miner and book lover Pantelei Makhinia. Panko, as the locals called him, a native of Cherkashchina, a quick-witted young man and a self-taught poet, had a fairly significant influence on Khrushchev. Makhinia died during the civil war, and as if trying to preserve the memory of his friend, Khrushchev would recite the amateurish but sincere lines of Makhinia's poetry at meetings of the creative intelligentsia in the late 1950s.
There is virtually no serious evidence of Nikita Khrushchev's revolutionary proclivities. We do know that he first participated in oppositional politics in the aftermath of the shooting of workers at the Lena gold fields on April 4, 1912; he helped gather provisions for the families of the executed workers. A May 28, 1912, dispatch from the head of the Ekaterinaslav provincial gendarme division mentions the name of a young metalworker from the Bosse factory, Nikita Khrushchev.
The young worker's behavior did not pass unnoticed; he soon had to leave the factory, eventually finding work again at Rutchenkov shaft 31, where he worked as a machinist. He distributed the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, and organized collective readings. The Rutchenkov mine belonged to the French capitalists Lebern, Ferier, and Company. With the intensification of labor unrest in Russia, the French soon sold the mine and the mechanical workshops. But working conditions were difficult under the new owners too, leading to workers' protests. In the fall of 1913, a new wave of political strikes swept the area. The old worker I. A. Pisarev's apartment became a meeting place for the discussion of burning social issues and stories about mines and miners in the press.
At the end of 1914, Khrushchev began working at the mechanical workshops, which served approximately ten shafts. He spent time in all of them and was thus able to extend his circle of acquaintances and contacts. In the same year, he married Pisarev's oldest daughter, Efrosinia Ivanovna. As Anna Ivanovna, her sister, remembers, Efrosinia and Khrushchev met in 1911. Not long after they married, two children were born: a son, Leonid, and a daughter, Iuliia.
In 1915, there were 113 strikes in Ukraine, in which approximately forty-eight thousand workers participated. The Rutchenkov mine was also shaken by disturbances in March 1915, and Khrushchev was one of the organizers. The police apparently wanted to arrest him, but the workers are said to have stepped forward in his defense and ejected the gendarmes from the workshops.
At the end of April and the beginning of May 1916, there were again strikes in the Donbass region, particularly in the coal-mining regions of Gorlovsko-Shcherbinovskii and in Iuzovka, where Khrushchev was one of the leaders. The former second secretary of the Ukrainian Communist party Central Committee, R. Ia. Terekhov, recalls how "Nikita Sergeevich came by our place more than once to discuss this or that question. It once happened that he spent the night at my house, and we sat up practically the entire night, talking about issues at the mine."
Following the February revolution of 1917, Khrushchev became even more involved in political activity. He was chosen first as a member of the Temporary Executive Committee and then, on May 29, 1917, as a representative of the Rutchenkov Union of Workers' Deputies. It was in this period that he met Lazar M. Kaganovich (whose pseudonym in Iuzovka was Boris Kosherovich) at a demonstration in Iuzovka. As Khrushchev later noted in his memoirs, "I did not know that he was Kaganovich; I knew him as Kosherovich. Not only did I trust and respect Kaganovich, but, as they say, I stood behind him completely." In his turn Kaganovich supported Khrushchev in every possible way.
The Iuzovka soviets were under the influence of the Mensheviks and the SRs. There is some evidence that Khrushchev sympathized with the Bolshevik faction, although he was not a formal member of the party. Khrushchev always gave 1918 as the year he entered the party. In his own words, "I became a Bolshevik and a member of the Communist Party after the revolution, and shortly thereafter joined the Red Army." During the Civil War, he was a Red Army soldier, chairman of a party cell, army political instructor, commissar of a battalion, and party instructor with the 9th Kuban Army.
In the book The Story of an Honored Miner, published in 1961, Khrushchev is described as "one of those under whose leadership the Red Army disrupted the sinister plans of the American, English, and French imperialists, who planned to save Denikin's army from complete ruin with the help of the Entente's fleet." The authors of the book further characterized Khrushchev as "one of the active creators of the Red Army and one of the organizers of the victories of the young Republic of Soviets over foreign interventionists and internal counterrevolution." Khrushchev's activity during the Civil War demands further careful study, but there are currently no grounds for such a lofty appraisal of his activity in 1918-20.
After the Civil War, Khrushchev returned to the Rutchenkov mine, which was managed by a leadership team consisting of a chairman and two deputies, one for technical and one for political work. As this second deputy, Khrushchev fulfilled his responsibilities so successfully that he was offered the post of manager of the Pastukhov mine. Instead, he decided to enter the rabfak, or worker's training school, at the Iuzovka Mining Institute. Several times he requested approval for the change from A. P. Zaveniagin, secretary of the mine, and finally received it. In filling out his application to Zaveniagin, Khrushchev described his reasons for pursuing his studies as follows: "To obtain technical knowledge for more productive work in the industry of the RSFSR." Even in the rabfak, however, he did not cease his involvement with politics. At the 9th Iuzovka district party conference on December 23, 1923, he was elected to the district party committee.
In February 1924 Khrushchev was elected a member of the Iuzovka district party committee bureau. This meant that the thirty-year-old Khrushchev's energetic work had been noticed. An important event in his personal life occurred that same year: he married for the second time. (His first wife had died of typhus during the Civil War.) His wife, Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk, recalled, "In the fall of 1922, I was sent to Iuzovka (now Donetsk) to the district party school as a teacher of political economy. There I met Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, who was studying in the rabfak in Iuzovka ... we married in 1924 and from then on worked together at the Petrov mine of the Iuzovka district." Khrushchev and Nina Petrovna had three children: Rada, Sergei, and Elena.
A little-known but very interesting event in Khrushchev's biography occurred around that time. Khrushchev relates the circumstances in his memoirs: "In 1923, while studying at the rabfak, I slipped into vacillations of a Trotskyist character.... I was fascinated at that time by Kharechko, a rather well-known Trotskyite.... I knew that he was a revolutionary, but I didn't know that he was a Social Democrat. At the time I knew absolutely nothing about the basic ideas of the Social Democratic Party, although I knew that this was a person who had fought for the people before the revolution.... When he arrived in Iuzovka, I naturally sympathized with Kharechko and supported him."
During the tragic year of 1937, Khrushchev told Kaganovich about this incident and asked him whether to inform Stalin. Kaganovich advised against doing so, but Khrushchev told Stalin everything and asked if he should inform delegates to a Moscow province party conference, who were electing province party leaders. Stalin at first suggested keeping quiet, but later advised telling the whole story, which Khrushchev did.
History arranged things in such a way, however, that nineteen years later, in June 1957, Khrushchev had to recall once again his youthful political "sin" during the famous Central Committee plenum that crushed the "anti-party" group of Kaganovich, Georgii Malenkov, and Viacheslav Molotov. Kaganovich accused Khrushchev of Trotskyism. Khrushchev explained his vacillations of 1923 as a response to violations of internal party democracy:
For those violations, the secretary of the district committee was eventually dismissed. Because I understood the urgency of struggling against those who distorted and violated internal party democracy, I actively and rather harshly denounced the secretary of the district party committee, Moiseenko, and other leading workers. But it turned out that my speeches came at the beginning of the discussion raised by the Trotskyites.... And so it turned out that my speeches ... objectively were in support of the Trotskyites. I soon understood that I had made a mistake.... When a plenum of the party Central Committee adopted a decision on internal party conditions in October 1923, I immediately took the correct positions.
Kaganovich publicly apologized to Khrushchev in June 1957 "for incorrect and uncomradely behavior, when I used Comrade Khrushchev's short-lived mistake of thirty years ago in our struggle." Much later, however, in conversation with the writer Feliks Chuev, he again called Khrushchev a Trotskyite and admitted that he told Stalin about Khrushchev's Trotskyism in 1937.
Khrushchev was not a Trotskyite, of course. His "vacillations" display T. I. Kharechko's influence, but they also reflect the fact that the Trotskyite opposition quite properly criticized bureaucratism in the party, the restriction of minority rights, and the degeneration of many party workers. In opposing these abuses, Khrushchev was not so much supporting the opposition as denouncing real shortcommings.
After his stint at the rabfak, Khrushchev worked as party secretary of the Petrov-Mariinsk district committee between July 1925 and December 1926. He was then transferred to Stalino (Iuzovka's new name) to head the party's organizational department there. In that capacity he in effect served as deputy to K. V. Moiseenko, the Stalino party committee secretary.
By that time Khrushchev had accumulated sufficient political experience to put an end to his admittedly slight but still dangerous "vacillations of a Trotskyist character." Now he consistently followed the Stalinist line. His experience as a delegate to the 14th and 15th party congresses of 1925 and 1927 played a key role in establishing this conformity. On January 11, 1926, in his report to a plenum of the Petrov-Mariinsk district committee on the work of the 14th Party Congress, he emphasized that Petrov-Mariinsk "will not follow in the footsteps of the Zinovievshchina, but will be strong in relation to the Central Committee."
At a plenum of the Stalino party committee in the fall of 1925, Khrushchev had said, "I remember Kamenev's speech at the all-union congress: I had the impression that he considered the dismissal of Comrade Stalin from the post of general secretary imperative." In criticizing the opposition for striving to demonstrate the difference between Leninist and Stalinist policies, Khrushchev offered the following "counter-argument": "We know that Stalin became the general secretary not after Lenin's death, but when he was still alive. It cannot be that Lenin would have promoted someone with an unclear political line as general secretary; that is why it is easy for us to beat back the attacks of the opposition." Thirty years later, Khrushchev would tell astonished delegates at a secret session of the 20th Party Congress the story of Lenin's final, deathbed conflict with Stalin over "those negative characteristics of Stalin that appeared only in embryonic form during Lenin's life but developed later into terrible abuses of power on Stalin's part."
Continues...
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