Marquis Adolphe de Custine wrote that a closer look at one’s destiny shows it to be an evolution of one’s character.
However, let me first explain the heading. Joseph Stalin called Nikita Khrushchev jokingly a Polish spy. Khrushchev, when retired from Soviet leadership, told playwright Mikhail Shatrov, “Stalin treated me better than the others. Some at the Politburo even believed I was his favorite. Indeed, only my son’s (i.e., Leonid Khrushchev’s — Author) wife was arrested. Sometimes he would call me Polish spy Khrushchevski and order me to dance. That’s about all. No comparison to how he treated the others or the things he made them do.”
At this point, one is tempted to exclaim, O tempora! O mores! However, those familiar with the epoch in which Khrushchev lived and made his career, are not likely to be surprised to know that the wife of the son of a favorite of the Red dictator was serving a term in a prison camp, and that the father-in-law considered himself lucky. Or that he, a noted political figure, did not mind being addressed as a Polish spy or dancing during all-night parties at Stalin’s dacha with vodka flowing and the table groaning under food. Nor would he utter a word of protest when his daughter-in-law was arrested on trumped-up charges, telling himself he was lucky not to be implicated, that nothing had happened to his wife (unlike the wives of Molotov and Kalinin).
BIOGRAPHY
After the Stalin epoch, Khrushchev was the first Communist leader to try to destroy the stereotype image of a grim-faced reticent Bolshevik ruler. He proceeded to cultivate an open lifestyle, appearing in public with his wife and family members, sharing memories. September 27, 1959, appearing on NBC during his official visit to the United States, he said that his grandfather was an illiterate serf, his landlord’s property could be sold and even traded for a dog, as often happened at the time; that his father was a coal miner, and that he had also worked at a mine, as a metalworker; that he had taken part in the civil war; later, the Soviet government had sent him to study at a rabfak [educational establishment in existence during the first years after the Russian Revolution, set up to prepare workers and peasants for higher education]. After that he had enrolled in the Industrial Academy, and that now he was entrusted by the people with the high post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers.
Needless to say, the above statement betrays a number of simplifications and demagoguery (which Khrushchev often resorted to). His biography, nevertheless, continues to reveal little-known facts if not mysteries. Thus, numerous biographers and authors of encyclopedia articles still believe that he was born April 17, 1894. No exactly. At one time I succeeded in establishing that, proceeding from the certificate of birth, he was actually born on April 15. I shared the discovery with Sergei Khrushchev, his son with whom we have been good friends and cooperated for many years. He and his son, Nikita Khrushchev’s grandson, that is, checked my information when visiting Kalynivka (Khrushchev’s home village) and confirmed it.
Nikita Khrushchev cuts an interesting historical figure. Nor it seems coincidental that noted personalities like Nikolai Gumiliov, Kim Il Sung, Dzhokhar Dudayev, even Alla Pugacheva were born on the same date, albeit in different years. These names are surrounded with myths and all kinds of stories. At one time, publications appeared to the effect that Nikita Khrushchev came from the Romanov dynasty of Russia. Even now many believe that Khrushchev was of Ukrainian parentage, that he was also a Bolshevik hard-liner, and that he almost always hated Stalin.
Untrue. He came from a Russian family, although he lived in Ukraine, from January 1938 to December 1949, heading the local party organization. In February 1944, he was appointed Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars [government] of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. However, it was some time before he had joined the Bolsheviks. Moreover, in the 1920s, while in Yuzovka, in the Donbas, marking the start of his political career, he supported the Trotskyites for a while. He had to state the fact in an official questionnaire, in 1937, at the peak of the Great Purges, and then mentioned it in his memoirs.
His attitude to Stalin also varied. He worshipped him at first, he owed him his career which soared in the mid-1930s, after meeting his wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva at the Industrial Academy in Moscow. She told Stalin about Khrushchev and arranged for their meeting. Earlier in 1917, Khrushchev happened to meet Lazar Kaganovich, who would also put in a good word for his old friend with the General Secretary of the Communist Party (VKP{b}).
Without doubt, Khrushchev’s place and role in political history cannot be fully comprehended, using the so-called fragmentary approach. Different periods in his life and career are like pieces of a historical and political mosaic that must be placed in a certain way to form a complete picture. Otherwise there is a high risk of snatching certain elements to construe something someone wants to have instead of the truth.
He was certainly among those responsible for the crimes committed during the Stalin epoch. Khrushchev tried to hide his complicity after coming to power. In particular, he instructed Ivan Serov, head of the KGB (his post was formally Chairman of the Committee for State Security under the Council of Ministers of the USSR), to remove all incriminating records from Ukraine. In February 1965, Leonid Brezhnev received a letter to the effect that a large number of files had been withdrawn from the archives of the Institute of Party History under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine; and that the said files “described how ruthlessly Nikita Khrushchev dealt with Party cadres and Soviet Ukrainian intellectuals.” Although the letter appeared after Khrushchev’s ousting, it was truthful enough even on the crest of the anti-Khrushchev wave. Such documents were removed in several phases. Thus, a cover letter dated December 31, 1949, has an appendage listing 52 pages of documents. After Khrushchev’s forced retirement, all such documents were transferred to the Politburo archives, and later became part of the closed Russian presidential archives where they remain.
Of course, Khrushchev could not remove all of the documents. Many are still in Ukraine, providing sufficient evidence that during Stalin’s lifetime Khrushchev was an obedient subordinate, and that his loyalty won him the dictator’s trust lasting until Stalin’s death in March 1953. Khrushchev was responsible for the implementation of Stalin’s political course in Ukraine. He was still there during the last year of Yezhov’s campaign of purges, also when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed, and when Halychyna, Volyn, and Bukovyna were made part of Soviet Ukraine, respectively, in 1939 and 1940, followed by a Bolshevik terror in those western territories; he was there during the postwar famine of 1946-47 and the campaign against “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.” At that period, he was directly involved in the complicated issue of Polish-Ukrainian relationships.
POLISH MOTIFS
Khrushchev remained convinced to his dying day that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was historically inevitable. Under the pact, Soviet troops entered Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. Nikita Khrushchev took part in the campaign, although he felt bad about the dictators’ conspiracy and feared its consequences
He wrote in his memoirs that he felt the same way about Stalin’s campaign against the Communist Party of Poland and its components in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. In 1938, these parties were disbanded as resolved by the Executive Committee of the Communist International (a.k.a. Komintern). Recalling his stay in Western Ukraine, Khrushchev wrote, “Mostly good people from among the local Poles cooperated with us. They were time-tested Communists... Very many of them, after being liberated by our Soviet Army, found themselves in Soviet prison camps. Sad but true.”
Pressured by Khrushchev, the Ukrainian Politburo passed a resolution on October 2, 1940, titled “On the Facts of Erroneous Attitude to Former Members of the CP of Poland.” The document instructed the party authorities in the western regions to overcome “indiscriminate political distrust” of former Polish Communists, and to more actively enlist them in public activities. Khrushchev, of course, meant to defend his people among the Polish party members, yet doing so under the circumstances took quite some courage.
In 1944, Polish motifs became once again evident in Khrushchev’s endeavors. In June, he addressed Stalin, proposing the formation of Cholm oblast. “I believe that, after liberation, our Soviet administration should be organized in the regions populated mostly by Ukrainians and Russians, so we could proclaim these territories part of the Soviet Union and join them to Soviet Ukraine, at the right time.
“The following regions should be joined to Soviet Ukraine: Chelm, Grubeszow, Zamoscie, Tomaszow, Jaroslaw, and several other populated areas adjacent to the above territories. They could eventually constitute Kholm oblast as part of the Ukrainian SSR, with Kholm becoming the regional center.”
Khrushchev knew Stalin’s character very well; forestalling accusations of Ukrainian nationalism, he explained that the addition of these territories to Ukraine would make it possible to even out the frontier. No accusations were forthcoming, but he did not receive the authorization, either. Instead, the Kremlin decided, in the interests of big-time politics, have the Ukrainians living in the territories going to Poland “voluntarily” move to Soviet Ukraine, and the Poles living in the Soviet Union move to Poland. Under the circumstances, it would be too dangerous for Khrushchev to insist on his proposal, so once again he acted as a “devoted pupil of Comrade Stalin.”
Formally, the resettlement was to begin September 9, 1944, in Lublin where the Soviet Ukrainian government and the Polish National Liberation Committee had signed an agreement on the evacuation of the Ukrainian population from Poland and the Polish from Ukraine. Nikita Khrushchev signed it on behalf of the Soviet Ukrainian government, and Edward Osubka-Morawski did on behalf of the PNLC.
A number of researchers regard this as strange, considering that the Soviet Union had never entrusted Ukraine with signing any other such agreements (including the one on Transcarpathian Ukraine, signed by the Soviet and the Czechoslovak government in 1945). Actually, it was a time bomb which is still armed. The 1944 agreement simulated the establishment of the Ukrainian-Polish frontier, with Moscow outwardly looking on. In addition, the Soviet Union reserved room for maneuver; if the anti-Hitler coalition countries turned out too principled, Moscow would say it did not sign the agreement. Ukraine did. At the same time, the Kremlin had actually provoked an aggravation in Polish-Ukrainian relationships, but was not legally responsible.
As it was, Khrushchev had to handle the resettlement campaign. He responded sharply to the Polish side procrastinating evacuation arrangements. September 29, 1944, he reported to Stalin: “The Poles, especially in Lvov [current Lviv] and mostly intellectuals being in contact with the Polish emigre government in London, have spread word that the frontier issue remains to be finally resolved; therefore, people should not leave the country. We know that the emigre government in London has instructed its organizations in Lvov and other cities in Western Ukraine to refrain from evacuating, promising that it will arrange for Lvov and other cities to be made part of the Polish state at the peace conference.”
In view of this, Khrushchev suggested the following political course with regard to the Poles in the western Ukrainian region: “Instruction and the textbooks at all higher and secondary educational establishments must be only in Ukrainian and Russian. In the Soviet Union, schools were organized for Polish children with instruction in Polish, using Polish textbooks, meaning that these children are brought up in the spirit of the Polish bourgeois democratic state. The Poles raised the matter of setting up such schools in Lvov . We refused and proposed to institute in all Ukrainian and Polish schools the curriculum adopted by the People’s Commissar [minister] of Education of the Ukrainian SSR. We further consider it necessary to nullify the Resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR ‘On the Prohibition of Enlistment of Polish Residents of the Western Region in the Industries of the Eastern Regions of the Ukr. SSR and Other Republics of the Soviet Union.’ It is necessary to enlist the Polish population in the fulfillment of all obligations imposed on the rest of the population of Soviet Ukraine. This means that we will enlist Polish residents, men as well as women living in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR, in the industries, defense construction, and other projects, on a par with the Ukrainian population.”
Resettlements dating from the Treaty of Lublin rate a different story. Suffice it to say that, according to statistics, 812,688 persons were transferred from Ukraine to Poland in October 1945, while 472,635 had moved from Poland to Soviet Ukraine by March 1947.
Khrushchev’s plan to join ethnic territories to Ukraine fell through, although he did not insist on it. This is another fact contradicting his image as a Polish spy.
SURVIVING HUMANENESS
Khrushchev was a different man after World War II. He had served as a member of the military councils of the special Kyiv military district and five fronts, and had helped organize the Red partisan movement. None of this should be overstated, as was the case in the early 1960s, with countless official eulogies addressing Beloved Nikita Sergeyevich.
The fact remains, however, that he did not sit behind the Kremlin walls but witnessed human suffering. He also suffered a personal tragedy when his son Leonid was killed in action at Stalingrad, in March 1943. Leonid’s wife Liubov Sizykh (mentioned above; she still lives in Kyiv, by the way, a fact known to few) was arrested shortly afterward. True, he did nothing to help the poor woman (her son was institutionalized), but he did not forget it, adding it to the anti-Stalin material accumulating within him, which would be able to make public only decades later.
Also, his arrival in Ukraine, in 1938, coincided with a shifting of the emphasis in the struggle against the “enemies of the people.” At the time, the infernal consequences of the purges had become so obvious that the Party Central Committee resolved at a plenary meeting (January 1938) to correct what was described as “serious errors and distortions.” Indeed, some were returned their party membership cards, some were even released from jail and prison camps. Khrushchev took an active part in that campaign. During the 1946-47 famine in Ukraine, he wrote letters and called Stalin, warning him about the difficult situation in Ukraine. This infuriated the tyrant and he sent his brother-in-arms Lazar Kaganovich to “reinforce the rear.”
Khrushchev knew everything about the hypocrisy, cruelty, and inhuman essence of the system posing as the most just in the world. This encouraged him to persuade his conservative entourage that it was necessary to criticize Stalin’s personality cult, starting in 1953, formally voicing it [albeit behind closed doors] at the XX Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, and adding to it at the XXII Congress in 1961. This criticism, however soft-pedaled and limited, was an attempt to reform that society, marking the beginning of changes. People convicted on false charges were acquitted, passports started to be issued to peasants, meaning cancellation of Stalin’s serfdom-like system of agricultural management. Khrushchev gave a powerful impetus to the housing reform, so that the Soviet Union took the lead in the world per capita housing competition in the second half of the 1950s and in the 1960s. It is easy to laugh at his five-story blocks of apartments [lacking elevators, garbage chutes, fire escapes, and ill-planned] now. At the time, they were a solution to the painful and lasting housing issue of the Communist system, as millions of people moved into their own apartments for the first time in their life.
He initiated the exploration of virgin soils (although it would remain uncultivated), tried to upgrade industrial and agricultural management, and to reduce the bureaucratic machine; he sanctioned the appearance of new books and works of art with emancipated, critical ideas (suffice it to mention Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn). As the leader of a superpower, Khrushchev did much to destroy the Cold War atmosphere. During the Cuban Missile crisis, he and John Kennedy demonstrated restraint and actually saved the world from a nuclear disaster.
His unconventional, unpredictable, at times eccentric conduct (as when banging his shoe on the desk at the UN General Assembly Session in 1959), and his numerous initiatives irritated the Soviet leadership, for this was against the rules of the game set under Stalin. Also, quite a few of his initiatives failed and proved markedly inconsistent. He mustered the courage to describe certain acts on the part of Stalin and his associates as not mistakes but crimes. At the same time, he lacked the realism to admit the fallacy of his corn experiment (forcing plantations on soils unfit for the crop), the shortcomings of the administrative reform (restructuring technical party organizations on the industrial principle), the utopia of plans to provide the material preconditions of communism within twenty years, the impracticality of solving new problems using old methods (in the early 1960s, Khrushchev lectured men of the arts, sometimes very rudely, telling them what they should portray and how; it was at that period that a ruthless campaign was unleashed against the Church), and worse still, relying on old cadres.
That cadre took advantage of his blunders. In 1957, he was in a position to rebuff a Stalinist attack (e.g., the “anti-Party group of Molotov, Kaganovich, and Malenkov) and even remove them from office. In October 1964, the situation was different. Those same people that had warmly greeted him with his seventieth anniversary in April, secretly prepared an emergency CC CPSU plenum and accused him of voluntarism and subjectivism. In fact, they had enough damaging evidence and all he could do was ask them why they had not told him any of this before. However, they did not kill him physically, as Stalin would surely have, just as Khrushchev had not killed Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, and his other adversaries (except Beria). And he could have! The fact that he did not is another lesson ought to learn from Khrushchev’s period of “thaw” and from his life.
In 1964, forty years ago (a special anniversary!), ended the political career of a Communist reformer. It was convincing evidence that the Communist system is immune to reform, even if ordered from on high.
He lived for seven years in retirement, a period of forced isolation and bitter reflections. He taped his memoirs, sharing facts he had kept to himself for all those long years, and which appeared in print in the West in the year of his death (Khrushchev passed away September 11, 1971). In the late 1990s, the complete text (four volumes) was published thanks to Sergei Khrushchev. This author also took part in its preparation.
US researcher Strobe Talbot [translator of Khrushchev Remembers] said the memoirs belong to a statesman who knew and remembered many things, and who must have had inexhaustible reserves of pretentiousness, intellect, cutthroat cruelty, and instinctive humane character; that his memoirs are an important historical document, especially in terms of testimony given by Khrushchev for the history trial over Stalin.
Granted, except that this history trial should also be over Khrushchev and the system whose product he was — and which he tried to make more humane, inasmuch as he understood it.
