Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
By William Taubman
Norton, 876 pages, $35
Our baby, like most, looked a lot like former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev: bald head, chubby jowls. Happy, his grin was guileless; displeased, he roared and bullied. When we lived in Moscow we used the baby as a prop to thaw out icy bureaucrats. We dandled him and called him Nikita Sergeyevich. The bureaucrats thawed, for the baby’s sake, but they seemed to feel that the joke was in poor taste.
By then, a decade or so after his fall from power, Khrushchev was an unperson, written out of official histories and textbooks. Russians remembered him mostly with shame. They said, “He was so crude.”
Crude he was. He derided his Politburo colleagues as “‘male dogs peeing on curbstones'” (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). He analyzed sculptor Ernst Neizvestny’s artistic view as looking up from inside a toilet (in somewhat more colorful terms). Then-Sen. Hubert Humphrey reported after meeting him that Khrushchev’s two favorite words were “stupid” and “fool.”
But he also liked people, and they liked him. He loved to talk; he was full of jokes and earthy proverbs. According to “Khrushchev: The Man and His Era,” William Taubman’s splendid new biography:
“He conceived himself to be, and compared with his Kremlin cronies, he actually was, a nice guy. There seems no better way to say it.”
A nice guy who participated with apparent enthusiasm in the bloody purges of his communist colleagues in the 1930s. A nice guy who threatened to unleash nuclear war. A nice guy who, as an older generation of Russians and Americans remembers, reinforced his bluster by banging his shoe on the table while addressing the United Nations in 1960. For Russians, the shoe-banging incident helped to define his crudeness, and himself as an embarrassment to a Soviet people that longed for the world’s respect. It was cited against him four years later when his Politburo colleagues conspired to depose him.
But did he really remove his shoe and bang it on the table? That’s the way it is remembered, but Taubman has found witnesses who say he removed the shoe and waved it but did not bang it, and another who says he did not remove the shoe at all but had it slip off when a journalist accidentally stepped on his foot. This witness says she handed the shoe back to Khrushchev, who indeed pounded the table with it.
Unable to resolve the conflicting accounts, Taubman had to make up his mind. “I have adopted the view,” he writes, “that the shoe was not only brandished but banged.”
Note the conflicting testimony on a highly dramatic incident that happened in full view of the world. Now imagine Taubman’s 15-year labors in trying to reconstruct the truth about decades-old Politburo intrigues or foreign-policy crises, informed only by incomplete or tendentious contemporary records and the slippery or self-serving memories of participants and their confidants.
Taubman’s biography of Khrushchev benefits from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In addition to newly opened archives, he has been able to interview Khrushchev’s children and grandchildren, cooks and drivers, former Kremlin power brokers and their aides. After so many years of enforced silence about an unperson, Taubman’s sources were eager to talk, but often their accounts could not be reconciled. Khrushchev’s own voluminous memoirs, dictated from memory, both revealed and obscured. They were, Taubman writes, a “stunning blend of deception and self-deception.” Time and again, Taubman had to make up his mind. He explains his sources and the reasons for his choices in 134 pages of notes that follow his 648-page text.
But if the multiple perspectives make facts difficult to nail down, they make for a fascinating narrative. Taubman’s account of a Soviet-Polish crisis in October 1956, which almost led to a Soviet invasion of its communist ally, takes up only a taut page-and-a-half. Worried about the possibility of a Polish breakaway, Khrushchev demands to be invited to Warsaw. The Poles refuse, so Khrushchev assembles four top Kremlin figures and 12 uniformed generals and flies there anyway. As soon as his plane touches down, he starts berating the Polish leadership in terms that ” ‘even the chauffeurs’ ” can hear. The Soviet army starts to move toward Warsaw. The new Polish leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, “so tense . . . that ‘foam appeared on his lips,’ ” manages to calm Khrushchev, who halts the troop movements and flies back to Moscow–only to change his mind twice more in the next two days, first ordering the army to occupy Warsaw after all, then rescinding the order.
By my count, nine sources provided details for this story–four Soviet, four Polish and one Czech. Such set pieces occur throughout the book, reconstructing Politburo meetings, confrontations with artists and writers, the origins of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, family vacations by the Black Sea and other events great and small.
Of course, they all happened long ago. Who, apart from specialists, still cares about the Soviet-Polish confrontation of 1956? A number of studies and conferences in the past decade have examined the Cuban crisis in greater detail than the 48 pages Taubman devotes to it. Will non-specialists want to read this book?
They should, for in skillful, supple prose Taubman tells an important story. The 74-year Soviet experiment in creating a social utopia is one of the 20th Century’s most dramatic, and tragic, themes. Khrushchev dominated the middle years of this span.
He was a complex man, intelligent but uneducated, boastful but insecure. He rose to power because his Kremlin colleagues, beguiled by his garrulity and bumpkin ways, underestimated him as a threat to their own careers. Stalin made a pet of him, called him ” ‘my little Marx’ ” to mock his ideological fumbles, and knocked the dottle from his pipe by tapping it against Khrushchev’s bald head.
Khrushchev identified with Pinya, a character in a Ukrainian short story. The weakest and stupidest of a group of prison inmates, Pinya was mockingly made their leader, but he grew into his responsibility and became a hero. At triumphal moments in his life, Khrushchev never tired of regaling audiences with the story of the humiliated underdog who earned respect.
It is hard to remember now, but when Khrushchev said, “We will bury you,” and, “Your grandchildren will live under communism,” some Americans thought he might be right. Communism, for all its terrors, had moved a backward, peasant Russia an enormous distance. Khrushchev’s Soviet Union ended the terror and became the first nation to put an astronaut into space, the first to send a rocket to the moon. It seemed to have the barbarian vigor to deal ruthlessly with obstacles, yet it was bursting with focused, problem-solving energy.
Khrushchev, the builder of the Moscow subway before World War II, the apostle of American-style corn husbandry, was a fountain of ideas, boasts and audacity. He did denounce Stalin and rehabilitate many of his victims. But many of Khrushchev’s grandiose visions were triumphs of rhetoric only: doubling milk and meat production in five years; matching the U.S. in industrial production by 1980; splitting the Communist Party in two and setting accountability benchmarks for officials; harnessing the idealism of the young to till the “virgin lands” of Kazakhstan; intimidating the Americans into accepting peaceful coexistence in the Cold War so he could release Soviet military resources into civilian production.
Nothing was too minor for his micro-management. Shortly before his ouster in 1964, Khrushchev detoured his motorcade to drop in on the mayor of Moscow and harangue him for failing to install plastic toilet seats in the new apartment buildings ringing the city.
Eventually, most of this ” ‘harebrained scheming’ ” was added to the litany of denunciations that accompanied Khrushchev’s downfall. The wonder is that his Kremlin colleagues put up with his erratic enthusiasms, abusive tongue and embarrassing performances as long as they did.
When they eventually turned on their leader, they turned on his policies too. De-Stalinization stopped, and so did the cultural thaw. Economic reforms withered. Detente with the U.S. was postponed. Boorish public spectacles gave way to stilted dignity.
In the 1970s, Muscovites told a joke that placed Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, in a train compartment, traveling to communism. Lenin shot the engineer, but the train did not move. Stalin shot the crew, but the train did not move. Khrushchev rehabilitated the crew, but still the train was immobile. Brezhnev calmly drew the window curtain and said, “Comrades, pretend that the train is moving.” By the time Mikhail Gorbachev came along two decades after Khrushchev and forced through some of the reforms and policies he had tried to implement, it was too late. The Soviet train derailed finally in 1991.
Khrushchev was the last chance for the Soviet Union to succeed. He was undone by his own limitations, but also, Taubman says, by “the infernal unreformability of Russia.” To Fidel Castro, no less, he groused:
” ‘You’d think I, as first secretary, could change anything in this country. Like hell I can! . . . Russia’s like a tub full of dough, you put your hand in it, down to the bottom, and think you’re the master of the situation. When you first pull out your hand, a little hole remains, but then, before your very eyes, the dough expands into a spongy, puffy mass. That’s what Russia is like !’ “
Was Khrushchev, then, a sympathetic, even an admirable, figure? He had too much blood on his hands for that. Taubman documents the numerous innocent men he sent to their deaths in the great purges. His foreign-policy impulsiveness nearly plunged the world into nuclear war. And he was, as Russians recall, crude.
But his reforms, particularly his de-Stalinization and cultural opening, inspired a generation of Russians to believe that their country could be redeemed. Some became the brave dissidents of the Brezhnev years; one, Gorbachev, became leader of the country.
In 1998 a survey asked young Russian adults to evaluate their country’s 20th Century leaders. Almost all were thought to have done more harm than good; only Czar Nicholas II got a positive rating. And on Khrushchev, Taubman tells us, “opinion was evenly divided.”
