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Quote of the Day: Khrushchev Reflects
“Most of all the blood. My arms are up to the elbows in blood.”
– Nikita Khrushchev’s (1894-1971) response to playwright Mikhail Shatrov when asked during his retirement what he regretted.“Paradise is a place where people want to end up, not a place they run from. What kind of socialism is that? What kind of [redacted] is that, when you have to keep people in chains? What kind of social order? What kind of paradise?”
– From tapes recorded by Khrushchev in his retirement. This passage was not included in the transcribed memoir his son helped to smuggle to the West and published in 1970 as Khrushchev Remembers; it came to light in 1990 when the full tapes became available.
Both quotes are from Red Plenty, one of two outstanding books I’ve read in recent years on the post-Stalin Soviet Union. I thought it an appropriate day to post this since yesterday was International Workers Day; first proclaimed in 1904 by the Sixth Conference of the Second International, a convening of European socialist and communist parties.
Red Plenty (2010), by the English novelist Francis Spufford, is set in the years between Stalin’s death (1953) and the end of the Khrushchev “thaw” in the late 1960s. It tells the story of the brief era when, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet economy was growing faster than any other country except Japan, Khrushchev promised that Soviet living standards would exceed those in the US by 1980, and a fully planned, fully centralized economy embracing the capabilities of the new field of computing made it seem possible, before it all came crashing down.
The brilliant accomplishment of Red Plenty stems from Spufford being a fine writer who concocted what he calls “faction,” a mixture of fact and fiction. We meet fictional young idealists, factory managers, and party strivers, along with Khrushchev, Alexei Kosygin, and other apparatchiks of the time, which allows him to tell a story with heavy doses of economic theory in an entertaining and instructive way. Because it is set in the post-Stalin era with The Terror and specter of mass murder or the gulag no longer hanging over everyone, the complete failure of the Soviet planning system makes for an even more powerful tale.
Through his deft storytelling, Spufford demonstrates that the more centralized a society is at the top, the more vulnerable it is to small mishaps at the bottom which can ripple back through the entire system. And he sums up the deterioration of the system:
Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khrushchev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.
The book is only 300 pages and also has 50 pages of the best footnotes I’ve ever read (one of the quotes is from there).
These reviews capture the uniqueness of Red Plenty:
“I finished it in awe, not merely at Spufford’s Stakhanovite research, but at his skill as a novelist, his judgement as a historian and his sheer guts in attempting something simultaneously so weird and yet so wonderful.” – The Sunday Times (UK)
“Everyone knows the economic central planning in the Soviet Union was a failure … Few will expect to pick up a longish book on the topic by a non-economist and devour it almost in a sitting. But that is what you have in store with Red Plenty. It is part detective story – who or what is killing the Soviet economy? – and part a brilliantly clear explanation of some very intricate history and economics.” – The Economist
Khrushchev personified the new generation raised by Stalin after he wiped out the old Bolsheviks and anyone else with broader intellectual horizons and experience of the world outside the Soviet Union. Poorly educated, resentful of the bosses, crude and violent, Nikita initially brought into Stalin’s view of the world. During the Great Purge, he personally oversaw the actions in the Ukraine, approving close to 50,000 executions. During the war, he was the political director in Stalingrad during the battle ruthlessly driving the military commanders and not hesitating to demand executions. As he rose after the war, he joined the Politburo, participating in the increasingly bizarre parties at the Supreme Leader’s dacha where he demanded his subordinates dance with each other as he ridiculed them, constantly reminding them that when he was gone, “the capitalists will drown you like little kittens.”
Underestimated by his opponents, he outmaneuvered them all after Stalin’s death and by 1957 was the new Supreme Leader. Most surprisingly, in March 1956 he denounced Stalin and his crimes (though not Lenin’s) at the Party Congress while later that year he ruthlessly suppressed the rebellion in Hungary. But within the Soviet Union, the last of the gulag prisoners were released and some literature critical of Stalin was allowed to be published.
Unlike both his predecessors and successors he believed a nuclear war was unwinnable, but his recklessness provoked crises in Berlin and Cuba. He seemed to have some sense that changes were needed in the system but, like Stalin, was a devotee of Lysenko’s crackpot theories on genetics and agriculture. While a continued apostle of centralized planning he was prone to frequent temperamental eruptions as his own thinking was disorganized and chaotic.
He strikes me as a man with some insight into the problems inherent in the Soviet system but without the intellectual tools to figure out a solution. Driven by his increasing frustration, it was as much his increasingly erratic behavior as his anti-Stalinism that lead to his removal in October 1964. Even some of those who supported his limited opening of society approved the Politburo action because of the unpredictability of his behavior. In a change from Stalin times, instead of being exiled or jailed, Khrushchev was merely moved to a smaller dacha, given a smaller car, and watched carefully.
The other book I’d strongly recommend is Russia And The Idea Of The West (2000) by Robert English, the story of the evolution of Soviet reformers in the post-Stalin era and the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev. Stalin’s isolation of the Soviet Union was so effective that the ignorance of the rest of the world by those in power and the next rising generation during the 1950s and 1960s is quite striking. English shows how the “new thinking” allowed under Khrushchev continued to evolve even during the more repressive regime that followed his overthrow and the determination of Gorbachev and others to end the confrontation with the West which they, unlike the Left in Europe and America, viewed as the fault of the Soviet Union.
Published in General
Thank you/
Wow a great post.
Awesome quotes.
Fantastic post. Thanks.
A Russian friend once told me that the higher up in the Communist Party a man was, the less likely it was that he would actually believe in socialism or communism. Here’s a quote from him explaining this apparent disparity: “Only a simple minded fool could believe something so simple minded and foolish as socialism.”
Expect to see the same argument being made today, just substitute ‘Big Data’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’ for “the capabilities of the new field of computing.”
That’s because there is no solution.
I doubt this very much. The Soviets may have said their economy was growing rapidly, but had no way to measure that growth. When you manufacture the figures based on the lies of the lower level managers, you can have any growth rate you want.
The Soviet Union’s collapse was an economic collapse, which surprised the Western intelligence agencies who thought the Soviet economy was much stronger than it was based on Soviet figures which turned out to be either lies or wishful thinking, but which the intelligence agencies had no way to assess.
Actually during that brief period (late 50s-early 60s) the Soviet economy was growing rapidly, even with the information we now have available. By the mid 1960s it had stagnated and continued like that until its fall. It was the failure to understand the full extent of that stagnation that led Western intelligence to overestimate the strength of the Soviet economy.
To add to my comment above – the Soviets achieved that brief burst of growth through poor capital investing and use of resources which it why it could not be sustained.
Sounds like a very interesting book; I’ve downloaded the Kindle sample & will probably read the whole thing.
A great book on the Soviet economic system, as seen from the inside, is ‘Bitter Waters’, by a man who was deputy manager of a Stalin-era Soviet factory. I reviewed it here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/31715.html
This is a great post. Khrushchev is a fascinating historical figure.
Bitters Waters looks fascinating. Will track it down in paper, because the Kindle is too expensive!
I’m making my way through The ABC of Communism by Bukharin which was the primary educational textbook between 1920 and the introduction of Stalin’s Short Course in the late 1930s. What a bizarro view of economics and of how the world works in general! No wonder those educated after the Revolution never understood how distorted their worldview was.
The best summary of the problems that Gennady found with the Soviet economic system can be found in his comments about the chaos into which the Soviets had reduced the lumber industry—the key input to his factory, and the industry in which his father had worked before the revolution.
The free and “unplanned” and therefore ostensibly chaotic character of lumber production before the revolution in reality possessed a definite order. As the season approached, hundreds of thousands of forest workers gathered in small artels of loggers, rafters, and floaters, hired themselves out to entrepreneurs through their foremen, and got all the work done. The Bolsheviks, concerned with “putting order” into life and organizing it according to their single scheme, destroyed that order and introduced their own–and arrived at complete chaos in lumbering.
As Gennady says:
Such in the immutable law. The forceful subordination of life’s variety into a single mold will be avenged by that variety’s becoming nothing but chaos and disorder.
And that remains the contrast today. I think characterizing it as the individual versus the collective is not quite right. The market is the unguided actions of individuals acting to provide collective feedback. The planners can’t stand that and only tolerate the guided actions of individuals to ensure a preselected collective feedback.
My mind rebels at the thought of reading a book that shows a human side of such a monster. I guess that makes a good reason to read it.
It isn’t just the Communists. When I was at the Cork Film Festival in 1992, I was on a panel about film production in Ireland, which had been going gangbusters for a while but had recently hit a severe slump. With American optimism and impeccable economic logic I said “Not ideal, but at least here’s an opportunity to cut prices (on local talent and sound stages) and bring new independents in who couldn’t afford it before”. My metaphorical Irish cousins were baffled. “Why, it’s just the opposite!”, they exclaimed. “There’s less work to go around, so you have to charge more for it to make up the difference!”
Don’t worry, it’s shows a lot of his inhumanity as well. As you can see from the quote in the post, the author sees him as a gangster.
The Russian documentaries and docudramas on YouTube are getting more and more explicit: Russia’s troubles started with Khrushchev. It’s very different from what was produced in the 1990s.
That’s a bit rich. Their troubles started long ago, long before the communists.
Not if you’re positioning yourself as the heir to Stalin and Beria who is Making Russia Great Again.
These are ones produced by the current government?
By the government or with the encouragement of the government.
One of the films of the 90s was Grey Wolves, which portrays the 1964 coup against Khrushchev. It portrays him questioning what had become of socialism in the USSR. It was interesting to read those quotes in the OP from his tapes, as I had sometimes wondered whether he really ever talked that way.
I have not read the memoir by Nikita Sergeivich, but have read one of the biographical books written by his son, Sergei. The film was produced with the son’s assistance, but more recently, presumably under pressure from the Putin regime, Sergei has been induced to back away from the film, saying his father would not have talked like that. I don’t understand enough Russian to follow all of this on my own, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Sergei’s words were ambiguous enough for the Russian media to take advantage of them, just as the U.S. media take advantage of any opportunity to set Republican against Republican.
Grey Wolves was still available on YouTube, with English subtitles, last time I looked (a few months ago).
Yevgeny Yevtushenko once told me that Khrushchev was drunk and indiscreet at a New Year’s party, probably 1960 or ’61. He shocked the guests into nervous, giggling confusion by proposing to abolish the Party, as so many in it were opportunists who’d lost the trust of the people.
Definitely sounds like Khrushchev! Yevtushenko is referenced in both the books I mention. What was your impression of him?
One of the ironies is that Soviet (and Eastern European) economies were so inefficient in their use of resources that the single largest reduction of man-made CO2 emissions in human history occurred with the collapse of those economies in the early 1990s. Without the “hot-air” credits generated for Russia due to that collapse it would never have signed the Kyoto Accords, and it was the crucial signatory putting the agreement over the needed participation % to make it effective. Climate change campaigners owe a big thanks to Reagan and Thatcher.
A real character, to be sure, but in his own way something of a hero. Yevtushenko could be compared to a worldly, slightly corrupted former priest in a Graham Greene novel; not the pure hearted idealist of his twenties, but still capable of moral good. Khrushchev was famously pissed off at an abstract art show in Moscow. It took guts to say to him, “Nikita Sergeyevitch, the time is done when Russia is ruled by a man with an axe”. To his credit, Khrushchev nodded and shrugged and merely said “The grave straightens out even the hunchback”.
I visited Zhenya at his dacha in Peredelkino, where the Party brass had their homes, not far from Stalin’s old place. It was quite an evening. They say we Irish know how to drink, but the Russians make us look like Christian Scientists.
A goal in my corporate life was to avoid a business trip to Russia, one of the few goals I achieved! I am a pretty light drinker and heard the stories from my colleagues who’d been there. My closest experience was a conference I attended in the Slovak Republic in 1994. The Western Europeans drank a decent amount of wine. The East Europeans drank a lot of hard liquor. But both also ate the huge meal we were served. Seated across the table from me were two Russians. They never touched a bit of food and drank everything that came within 10 feet of them.
In the 19th century, the mayor of Moscow and his friends had champagne at every lunch. He’d put his top hat on the table, and when it was full of corks, it was time to go.
I hadn’t known about him. I see that his film Kindergarten is on YouTube with English subtitles. It’ll have to wait until I’m at a better place to watch it, but I took a quick peek. This one may require a couple of rewatchings in order to understand it.
Back in the Eighties I told one of the Soviets that I had a certain appreciation for blustery old Khrushchev, the dictator who could have been so, so much worse. He made a funny comparison, and although I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Nixon fan, I have to admit I see some truth in it. “Our Khrushchev was like your Nixon. A genius outside of the country, an ass inside of it.”