Khrushchev

Geoffrey Swain

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781350307759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Russische Geschichte

This concise, approachable introduction to Khrushchev explores the innovative theme of Khrushchev as reformer, arguing that the 'bumbling' nature of those reforms only partly reflected Khrushchev's uncertainty about how to act. Swain provides a cogent account of Khrushchev's political career and of his wider role in Soviet and world politics.

Chapter 1: Becoming a Party Apparatchik, 1894–1929

Youth as a Legal Activist

Nikita Khrushchev was typical of the radicalised workers of his generation. He was born on 15 April 1894 in the village of Kalinovka, situated some way to the west of the Russian town of Kursk but scarcely 10 miles from what would become, as the Russian Empire disintegrated, the border with Ukraine. Owing to a clerical error when the Russian calendar was changed on 1 February 1918, his birthdate was recorded as 17 April and that is the date which he celebrated. The Khrushchev family home was primitive, an earth floor, an area where the livestock were brought in and a stove without a chimney. “When the fire was burning and the food was being cooked, you could not stay inside; the smoke went out the door”, he recalled. Kalinovka was big enough to have a school run by the local administrative council but Khrushchev was frequently absent from school because he was needed in the fields – one summer he joined his mother and father in working on the estate of a wealthy local landowner, Khrushchev being put in charge of the oxen team used for ploughing. However, like so many peasants of that era, Khrushchev’s father supplemented his income with migrant work in the growing network of mines and ironworks on the River Donets, the Donets Basin or Donbas. As he grew older, Khrushchev often accompanied his father in his search for temporary work and so he supplemented his village education in a school close to one of the miners’ settlements. His first spell of work “as a kid” was to help a Jewish metal fitter employed in a Donbas factory, fetching and carrying for him. In this way Khrushchev had only some four years of intermittent education.¹

Even as a youngster, Khrushchev was exposed to the political turmoil of Imperial Russia. In 1905 he was with his father in Yuzovka, the largest town in the Donbas, later known as Stalino and ultimately as Donetsk named after its founder, the Welsh engineer John Hughes. Khrushchev was returning from a local school when he heard rumours that a pogrom had taken place against the Jews; he later recalled witnessing “rows of corpses” laid out on a street. Not surprisingly, his father sent him back to his grandfather’s village so he missed the wave of strikes which subsequently shook the Donbas in that revolutionary year which almost saw the Tsar overthrown. However, in 1905 even village life was far from quiet: as happened throughout much of Southern Russia, the villagers of his native Kalinovka were involved in a rebellion against the local landlords, attacking and pillaging the local estates.²

In 1908 the family decided to move lock, stock and barrel to Yuzovka. At that time the town had 55,000 inhabitants: the centre of town, known as the “English Colony”, was where local society gathered; but to the north, south-east and west were settlements of workers’ shacks. The Uspenovskii mine where the family settled was some three miles to the south and here they squeezed into the two rooms of a one-storey barrack-like flat. Unlike his father, Khrushchev did not work in the mine itself but, aged 14, took an apprenticeship with the nearby German firm Bosse and Genefeld Engineering, which repaired and maintained the machinery used in the local mines – hoists, conveyors and the like. Khrushchev trained as a metalworking fitter, a skilled and relatively well-paid occupation which he chose deliberately in the knowledge that “in the proletarian circles in which I spent my youth, the skilled metal workers enjoyed the highest authority”.³

Linking that authority to political action began for Khrushchev in 1911. His exposure to the Social Democrats began while he was still an apprentice with Bosse and Genefeld. His initial mentor was Artem Skachko, a political activist who had moved from Petersburg to the Donbas to avoid arrest. Under Skachko’s guidance, Khrushchev became an avid reader first of the weekly Zvezda and then of the daily Pravda, the newspapers of the Social Democratic deputies in the Imperial Duma, the legislative assembly established by the Tsar after 1905; Khrushchev used to follow the accounts of their work with interest. When on 17 April 1912 troops in Siberia opened fire on unarmed workers of the Lena Goldfields Company who were protesting that they had received no pay for several weeks, killing at least 150 of them, the whole of Russia experienced a wave of protest strikes. Khrushchev’s plant was one of those to be affected, and he helped organise the one-day protest strike called by Skachko and other militants. Khrushchev was assigned two roles, first to ensure his fellow apprentices took part and second to organise a group of comrades who would prepare to resist the possible use of strike breakers. He also organised a collection to support the families of those killed, and it was this action which brought him to the attention of the authorities.⁴

As a result of his actions organising the protest against the killings at the Lena he was promptly sacked from Bosse and Genefeld. However, as a skilled metalworker at a time of rapid industrial expansion on the eve of the First World War, Khrushchev was not out of work for long. He moved from Yuzovka and sought work unsuccessfully in Mariupol, then for a short time he moved to Kharkov and worked in the Berlizov plant there but before the end of the year, old friends had found him a job and he was back in the Yuzovka mining complex, working at the French owned Rutchenkovo mines. Since this new job was some distance from his father’s mine, he moved in with the family of a friend.⁵

Recalling his first political act during the Lena protest, Khrushchev noted that the local strike organiser was someone respected within the factory not only for his activism “but also because he was a highly skilled worker”. Khrushchev was rapidly adopting the mind-set and lifestyle of an aristocratic worker. “Skilled metal workers”, he remembered, “tended to look down on construction workers”, who rarely took part in strikes; their class consciousness “was not at a high level”. Khrushchev’s own class consciousness, however, was developing as his contacts with other Social Democrats grew. When in 1913 the Social Democrat Duma Deputy for the local Ekaterinoslav Province, Grigorii Petrovskii, came to visit Yuzovka, Khrushchev was one of those informed where a secret meeting of activists would take place, a meeting which, in the event, had to be cancelled when the police found out about it. Khrushchev was thus one of the many “legal activists” of the years between 1905 and 1917 who were key players in the Social Democrat movement, but operated on the fringes of the underground Social Democratic Party.⁶

Like many such “legal activists”, Khrushchev both distributed the Bolshevik daily Pravda before it was closed down with the start of the First World War, and organised readings of the newspaper in workers’ circles. He became chairman of the local Sobriety Society, a frequent cover for workers’ educational activity in Imperial Russia, and during the First World War, from which he was excused as a skilled essential worker, Khrushchev became active in the local workers’ trading co-operative, being a member of its ruling board and accounting commission as well as sometimes serving in the shop. He was also involved in what he later called “workers’ self-defence”: because the only local policeman was a Cossack who liked to drink, workers kept order themselves, “beating up” those who transgressed accepted norms – “I grew up among hooligans”, he later recalled in 1961. Like many “legal activists”, Khrushchev was rather proud that he could sing the workers’ version of the Marseillaise, but was “rather weak” on the theoretical fundamentals of Marxist doctrine; what mattered for him was “understanding the need for workers to unite against the factory owners”.⁷

Equally, as a skilled metalworker Khrushchev was moderately well off. He would often recall that he had been better off in material terms as a skilled worker on the eve of the First World War than he was as Moscow party secretary in the 1930s. When he got married in 1914, he could afford a flat with a separate bedroom and living room-kitchen, and he could afford to stock it with the fruit and vegetables which grew in abundance nearby. There were even small bourgeois affectations: lemons were cheap, so tea with lemon was regularly consumed in the Khrushchev household, which soon grew as first daughter Yulia was born in 1916 and then son Leonid in 1917. Khrushchev was particularly proud of the camera he bought at this time, but after his marriage there were no more references to the motorcycle he had assembled from spare parts to impress his laddish friends.⁸

During the war, he moved jobs fairly often, but always within the same complex; this was partly to increase his salary, but also because he was engaged in strike activity in 1915 and 1916. In March 1915 he was involved in a strike in the Rutchenkovo complex, which began in the mechanical workshop; according to later accounts, he made a speech denouncing the war and when the authorities tried to detain him, a crowd of supporters protected him, enabling him to make good his escape. The 1916 strike took place in May and this time Khrushchev’s role was a major one: Khrushchev “came to our shop and talked to the workers for a long time”, one later recalled, remembering the preparations for the strike. Between these two wartime strikes, in October 1915, Khrushchev attended a miners’ meeting addressed by the Bolshevik underground activist Lazar Kaganovich, a central figure in the Bolshevik underground hierarchy in the Donbas and someone with whom Khrushchev’s career would become closely entwined.⁹

Kaganovich also addressed a local rally not long after the Tsar’s overthrow in February 1917, which Khrushchev again attended, but the Bolshevik Party did not have much support in Yuzovka. When Khrushchev chaired a session of the newly formed Rutchenkovo Soviet on 29 May 1917, the agenda was thoroughly reformist: the eight-hour day, the housing shortage and whether administrative buildings could be used for housing, the free coal allocation to miners and medical services; these were the issues discussed, along with criticism of a worker for refusing to return to his military unit, an awkward topic for the anti-war Khrushchev. Those who met him at that time referred to his “popularity” and “authority”: he was the only Bolshevik elected to the soviet, and he often had to explain why he was opposed to the war and the “capitalist” ministers in the Provisional Government, and why the Bolsheviks believed the mines and factories really belonged to the workers. During the July Days – summer demonstrations in the capital when the Bolsheviks were both accused of trying to seize power and condemned as German agents – Khrushchev forced his way onto the platform at a local meeting and, against objections from the Bolsheviks’ Menshevik opponents, put the Bolshevik case.¹⁰

In the August 1917 elections for the Yuzovka town council, the Bolsheviks won only 6 seats out of 73, while in the September local soviet elections the Bolsheviks gained only a third of the seats. Khrushchev was still the classic “legal activist” of the Bolshevik cause, identifying more with class than party. Although he defended Bolshevik policies, he saw no need to join the party, while always acting in its interests. When in August 1917 General Lavr Kornilov, the Supreme Commander of the Army, tried to stage a counter-revolutionary military coup in the capital, Khrushchev was immediately elected to the local military revolutionary committee established to defend the revolution in Yuzovka; significantly, the local military revolutionary committee was entitled the United Military Revolutionary Committee, reflecting the strong presence in it not only of Mensheviks but of the Bolsheviks’ other socialist opponents, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs).¹¹

As elsewhere in the Donbas, the Bolsheviks’ October seizure of power was not immediately welcomed and Khrushchev later recalled his clashes with the SRs at this time. The Yuzovka Soviet opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power and Khrushchev was part of a workers’ lobby which urged the soviet to change its stance. On 31 October, the Yuzovka Soviet backed a Menshevik resolution calling for the formation of a coalition soviet government rather than one formed by Bolsheviks alone, and as late as February 1918 the Bolsheviks controlled only 45% of the seats on the Yuzovka Soviet. Khrushchev moved his activity from the soviet to the trade unions and by December 1917 he was chair of the Council of the Mining and Metalworkers Unions which sought to co-ordinate the growing factory committee movement; the leadership of the union as a whole, however, remained in SR hands.¹²

Red Army Commissar

It was when the Donbas sank into a cycle of civil war, foreign occupation and more civil war, that Khrushchev decided to join the Bolshevik Party. He explained his motivation in his memoirs: “Then came the civil war. It drew a line of demarcation between people and simplified the struggle. Who was on what side, where the Whites were, and where the Reds, were all immediately evident. Life itself drew a clear class line of demarcation.”¹³ And following that class line, Khrushchev sided with the Reds. On 22 December 1917 General Aleksei Kaledin began a counter-revolutionary advance from the Don region of South-East Russia, across the River Donets and towards the Bolshevik heartland of Russia; the miners of the Donbas formed a Red Guard to help the newly formed Red Army stop Kaledin in his tracks; the counter-revolutionary threat was real; in nearby Makeevka, Kaledin’s bands had dissolved the workers’ soviet and murdered 20 workers, dumping their bodies in cesspools. Khrushchev was one of the leaders of the Rutchenkovo Mine Workers’ Detachment, which joined the First Donetsk Proletarian Regiment and on 31 December engaged Kaledin’s forces near the Yasinovskii mine.¹⁴

In March 1918, Lenin’s Government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Imperial Germany and under its terms the German Army was deployed to secure and effectively occupy the newly declared independent state of Ukraine. Yuzovka came under German administration and one of the first acts of the new authorities was to restore the pre-revolutionary managers to the mines, exacting revenge on labour militants like Khrushchev. As a result, Khrushchev and his family decided to return to Kalinovka where in April 1918 he finally joined the Bolshevik Party.¹⁵ His first party assignment was to join a “committee of the poor”. Although the Bolsheviks had seized power alone in October 1917, their action had forced a split among the SRs and by the start of December the Bolsheviks had agreed to form a coalition government with the newly established Left SR Party; the Left SRs, a peasant party to the core, were tasked with introducing a land reform. The Bolshevik–Left SR coalition broke down when only the Bolsheviks were willing to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Alone in government once more, the Bolsheviks decided to abandon the land policy of the Left SRs and introduce what they called a “socialist” policy for the land.

In February 1918, while the Bolshevik–Left SR coalition still held, the Bolsheviks had introduced the first “bourgeois” stage of the land reform, dividing land among the peasantry; from April 1918 the second, “socialist” stage would begin when individual peasant farmers would form large, collectively owned farms. Reflecting Lenin’s class analysis of the countryside, the Bolsheviks argued that the poor peasants would be the key element in such a transformation of the countryside, carrying out a class war against the richer “kulak” peasants who would resist such a change. Reminiscing in 1960 when his Chinese rival Mao Zedong was busy establishing a network of agricultural communes, Khrushchev recalled how in 1918 he too “agitated for communes”, but things had not gone well. Like many members of the committees of the poor, established at this time to undertake class struggle in the countryside, Khrushchev had precious little real agricultural experience, and class struggle proved difficult to ignite. The chairman of the local committee of the poor was soon “drinking with the kulaks” and had to be brought before a revolutionary tribunal. In practice the sole purpose of these committees of the poor was to co-operate with grain requisitioning brigades sent from the towns to seize grain desperately needed to feed the urban population. The strength of peasant resistance to this “socialist” policy forced Lenin to wind up the committees of the poor in December 1918.¹⁶

Mobilised into the Red Army towards the end of 1918, Khrushchev joined the Ninth Army in Tsaristyn and was soon a battalion-level political commissar. Initially he was based near Kursk, and involved in fighting half way between Kursk and Orel. This was not a battle with counter-revolutionary White forces, but action against the Bolsheviks’ former ally, one of the many armed groups of Left SR insurgents which operated at this time; Khrushchev later recalled how difficult it was to combat the Left SR slogan “we are for soviets, but soviets without communists”. Another early duty was to monitor the border with Ukraine, which remained under German control until early 1919; his task was to ensure that those wishing to leave Soviet Russia only took with them the limited number of possessions t...