SOURCE. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Main and His Era. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003, ch. 5-9 (1)
Professor Taubman of Amherst College has produced a brilliant biography of Khrushchev, the fruit of many years' work. But this is not a review of the book -- I'll do that later. It's my attempt, inspired mainly by the biography, at answering a question that puzzled Khrushchev himself. Why did he survive to challenge Stalin's legacy (or part of it at least) when so many Soviet officials perished at Stalin's hand?
Did he survive because he had no doubts about Stalin or disagreements with his policies until after Stalin died? Or because he succeeded in concealing from Stalin any such doubts or disagreements? Was it because even Stalin could see that Khrushchev was totally loyal, obedient, and reliable?
The evidence supports none of these hypotheses. True, it was as a supporter of Stalin that Khrushchev rose in the hierarchy, and he rendered Stalin numerous services:
-- He caught Stalin's eye in 1929 by leading a campaign to expel oppositionists from the Industrial Academy, where he was a student.
-- As party boss of Moscow in the early 1930s, he pushed ahead with the building of the Metro, a high-priority project of Stalin's, sparing neither the workers nor himself. (1)
-- In the purges of the late 1930s, he assisted in the arrest and liquidation of colleagues in both Moscow and Kiev, making no effort to save even close friends. (He was party boss in Ukraine in 1938-41 and again in 1944-49.)
-- In the late 1940s, he oversaw the suppression of the Ukrainian nationalist rebellion in newly incorporated western Ukraine, insisting on the harshest measures, including assassination and the massacre of entire villages.
Yet Khrushchev's loyalty to Stalin had its limits. While he accepted "necessary" suffering, he felt an inner protest at suffering that he considered unnecessary. Nor did he always keep that feeling to himself. Taubman mentions incidents in which Khrushchev gave voice to his bitterness at the purges:
* On a surprise visit to an old friend in April 1938, he swore: "When I can I'll settle with that Mudakshvili in full" (a wordplay on Jugashvili, Stalin's original name, and mudak = prick).
* "They destroyed people for no reason" he lamented in early 1943. This time he was confiding not in an old friend but in a Komsomol official whom he did not know well.
Luckily for Khrushchev, nobody with whom he shared such thoughts turned out to be an informer.
Khrushchev also expressed opposition to "unjustified" repression at party gatherings. Here he blamed not Stalin but lower-level officials. At a 1945 plenum of the Ukrainian Central Committee, he rebuked an NKVD man for arresting a peasant woman who complained about the shortage of salt and kerosene -- quite reasonable complaints, he said, and not in the least anti-Soviet. In April 1944 he told a meeting of party personnel specialists not to distrust or smear people who had remained behind under German occupation -- an attitude that sharply contrasted with Stalin's. He hinted that he was against sending former Soviet prisoners of war to the camps.
On a number of occasions in the 1940s and early 1950s, Khrushchev stood up to Stalin or thwarted his wishes on an important matter of policy:
* In May 1942, as political commissar on the southern front, he appealed to Stalin (in vain) to halt a counteroffensive to retake Kharkov after he realized that Soviet troops were falling into enemy encirclement. He persisted in his appeals even after he was told that Stalin had made up his mind. (2)
* In October 1946, when war-devastated and drought-stricken Ukraine faced famine, Khrushchev insistently appealed to Stalin to send emergency aid and reduce grain delivery quotas. Stalin replied that Khrushchev was allowing hostile elements to manipulate his "sentimentality" in order to waste state reserves. This time Khrushchev's appeals were not totally in vain, as some aid was sent to Ukraine. But they prompted Stalin to doubt Khrushchev's reliability. Then at a Central Committee plenum in February 1947 Khrushchev urged a general shift in state policy on grain procurement, so that it would no longer take priority over storage of seed for the next year's harvest. (3) The next month he was removed from his party positions, though remaining chairman of Ukraine's council of ministers. However, by the end of 1947 he was back in Stalin's good books and his demotion was reversed.
This may have been Khrushchev's closest escape. Apparently Stalin suspected that Khrushchev had come under the influence of Ukrainian nationalists, but his suspicions dissipated before he reached the point of resolving to act on them.
* Following the purge of the Leningrad party apparatus in 1949 (which led to several executions), Stalin told Khrushchev -- now again party boss in Moscow -- that "Moscow too is teeming with antiparty elements" and handed him a list of alleged "conspirators" among his subordinates. Khrushchev locked the document in his safe and quietly transferred the "conspirators" to provincial towns where they would be out of harm's way.
So why did Khrushchev survive? Many were shot for lesser sins. One clue lies in the title of chapter 5 of Taubman's biography: "Stalin's pet: 1929-1937." Khrushchev was indeed known in Kremlin circles as a pet of Stalin's -- in Russian, liubimchik, a derivative of liubit', to love. (4) It may sound ridiculous to suppose that a monster like Stalin was capable of love, but even a monster may have the capacity to love after his own fashion, expressing affection in a perversely cruel form. Stalin seems to have felt this way about his daughter, about his wife (whom he drove to suicide) -- and about Khrushchev, in whose company the lonesome dictator spent as much time as he could. Perhaps Stalin, disappointed in his own son, even looked on Khrushchev as a kind of son.
What made Khrushchev so loveable to Stalin? It was not his flattery: everyone flattered Stalin. From his youth Khrushchev wanted above all else to be liked by others, and he made himself liked mainly by joking and clowning. Even when he got to the top he went on clowning, oblivious to the effect on his dignity as a statesman. He put a special effort into amusing Stalin, and was probably a lot more entertaining than the cowboy movies to which Stalin was addicted. He was the court jester, who by tradition is allowed to take liberties with the king that for anyone else would constitute lèse majesté.
It was in general risky to argue with Stalin but not necessarily fatal. Stalin's attitude to being argued with seems contradictory. On the one hand, he loved a joke Khrushchev had told him about a general who silences a colonel with whom he is losing an argument by barking: "Comrade Colonel, do not forget yourself!" Later he would use the same phrase "with a smile" in similar situations. On the other hand, he once complained to two wartime interlocutors: "No matter what I say, you'll reply 'Yes, Comrade Stalin,' 'Of course, Comrade Stalin,' 'A wise decision, Comrade Stalin.' Only Zhukov sometimes argues with me" (p. 152). Taubman corrects Stalin: Molotov and Khrushchev too sometimes argued with him. All three survived, though toward the end of his life Stalin imagined that Molotov had sold himself to the Americans.
The contradiction may not be a real one. When Stalin knew what he wanted he did not want anyone to argue. But sometimes he was not sure what to do and a good argument might help him decide. Perhaps also this was a vestige of the Leninist principle of democratic centralism, which required open discussion before taking decisions but unwavering discipline in carrying out decisions once made.
NOTES
(1) The Metro was built by over 70,000 workers. Khrushchev demanded that they work 48 hours without respite and ignored engineers who forewarned him of accidents.
(2) Taubman points out that Khrushchev shared responsibility for the ensuing disaster, as it was he who suggested the ill-judged operation in the first place. Stalin punished Khrushchev for the error by emptying his pipe onto Khrushchev's bald pate, explaining that it was the custom in ancient Rome for a defeated general to pour ashes on his head.
(3) Khrushchev gives a detailed account of the controversy in the first section of Vol. 2 of his memoirs (N. S. Khrushchev: Vremia. Liudi. Vlast'. Moscow: Moskovskie novosti, 1999).
(4) Before Khrushchev, the sobriquet of "[the party's] liubimchik" had belonged to Bukharin.