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 shit 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 today is 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 the Soviet economy was growing faster than any other country except Japan, Khrushchev was promising Soviet living standards would exceed the U.S. by 1980, and a fully planned, fully centralized economy, embracing the capabilities of the new field of computing made it seem attainable, before it all came crashing down resulting in the economic stagnation of the 70s and 80s, and the final collapse of the Evil Empire.

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 as he spins 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 and the gulag no longer hanging over everyone, the complete failure of the Soviet planing 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 unique aspects 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 political director at the Battle of Stalingrad, ruthlessly driving the military commanders, and not hesitating to demand executions.  Rising in the hierarchy after the war, he joined the Politburo, participating in the increasingly bizarre parties at the Supreme Leader's dacha where Stalin 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 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, he 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.  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 his unpredictable 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 who followed him 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 growing 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.