Khrushchev in Power: Unfinished Reforms, 1961-1964 9781626373761

Citation preview

Khrushchev in Power

KHRUSHCHEV IN POWER Unfinished Reforms, 1961–1964 Sergei Khrushchev Translated by George Shriver

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

The English translation of this book was made possible by the support of the Martha and Artemis Joukowsky Family Foundation (United States) and the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation (Ukraine). Published in the United States of America in 2014 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2014 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Khrushchev, Sergei, author. [Nikita Khrushchev. Reformator. English] Khrushchev in power : unfinished reforms, 1961–1964 / Sergei Khrushchev ; translated by George Shriver. pages ; cm Translation of the first volume of the author’s trilogy “Nikita Khrushchev” (Moskva : Vremia, 2010). “The English translation of this book was made possible by the support of the Martha and Artemis Joukowsky Family Foundation (United States) and the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation (Ukraine).” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62637-032-6 (hb : alk. paper) 1. Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich, 1894–1971. 2. Heads of state—Soviet Union. 3. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1953–1985. I. Shriver, George, 1936– translator. II. Title. DK275.K5K488513 2013 947.085'2092—dc23 2013022093 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5

4

3

2

1

Contents

xi

Preface

Part 1 At a Crossroads: 1961 1 The New Ruble

3

2 “If You Don’t Oversee It Yourself . . .”

7

3 Kozlov “in Charge”

19

4 Grisha Faibishenko and Petya Rokotov

23

5 Kozlov “in Charge,” Continued

25

6 Day by Day

26

7 The Film Our Nikita Sergeyevich and the Personality Cult

34

8 Family Matters

41

9 Communism

44

10 Again About Stalin

56

11 Term Limits for Everyone

64

12 Kozlov Makes His Move

68

13 A Dangerous Partnership

71

14 Disputes over Agricultural Methods

74

15 A Lesson in Diplomacy

80

16 A Canal from the Baltic to the Black Sea

84

17 What Will Our Lives Be Like?

85

Part 2 Time for Change: 1962 18 A Speech in Minsk

93

19 How to Fill the Government Granaries?

94

v

vi

Contents

20 Production Administrations Replace Regional Party Committees

96

21 Day by Day

98

22 The Dawn of Microelectronics

104

23 From a Price System Based on a Single Standard, to the Novocherkassk Tragedy

113

24 Dwindling Reserves of Trust

127

25 The Bill from Ashkhabad

130

26 On Vacation with Zahir Shah

135

27 Liberman, Khrushchev, Zasyadko

138

28 Still More Power to the Regions and Reliance on Younger People

156

29 Burning the Bridges

157

30 The Burden of Being a Superpower

159

31 A Literary “Treasure Island”

171

32 The Khrushchev Constitution

172

33 Day by Day

176

34 The Yugoslav Model

180

35 How People Were Living

183

36 Problems, Problems, Problems

184

37 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, July–October 1962

191

38 Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Novy Mir, and Censorship, November 1962

200

39 The New Generation in Art and Politics, April–November 1962

209

40 Suslov Goes on the Offensive, December 1, 1962

220

41 Strike While the Iron Is Hot, December 17, 1962

249

42 Suslov Advances Further, December 24 and 26, 1962

256

43 The Film Outpost of Ilyich, February 1963

261

44 The Decisive Battle, March 1963

269

Contents

vii

45 The Thunderstorm Fizzles Out, April 25–June 18, 1963

288

46 Last Attempt at a Counterattack, July 7–21, 1963

291

47 Back on Track, July–August 1963

293

48 After the Storm

299

Part 3 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 49 The Year Began As Usual

309

50 Mathematics in Economics

311

51 The Council on Science

316

52 Fresh Vegetables for the Winter Table

327

53 What We Managed to Accomplish in the Chemical Industry

330

54 End of the Era of Five-Story Apartment Buildings

332

55 Day by Day

344

56 Horizontal vs. Vertical

349

57 What If?

352

58 Dust Storm

367

59 From Chemistry to Agrochemistry

376

60 Orville Freeman and the American Chicken

378

61 “Our Farms Don’t Supply Meat and Milk to Their Own Workers”

379

62 Irrigation and Rice Cultivation

382

63 Tomatoes and Superphosphate Instead of Grenade Launchers and Phosgene

385

64 “Times Have Changed”

388

65 “The East Wind”

389

66 John Kenneth Galbraith

393

67 “The Same Thing, Painted a Different Color”

396

68 Tourists and Unlocking the Border

399

69 Send Them to Prison or Give Them an Award?

400

viii

Contents

70 Day by Day

402

71 Time to Decide

406

Part 4 Downfall: 1964 72 The Last New Year

413

73 Not Yet a Conspiracy

414

74 Day by Day

418

75 “Specialists Build Our Rockets, but Who Grows Our Potatoes?”

420

76 Day by Day

424

77 Moscow Street Lights

428

78 Day by Day

432

79 The Scandinavian “Miracle”

439

80 “We’ll Break Up the Academy of Sciences and Chase It Off to the Devil’s Grandmother,” or “Whoever Has Science Has the Future”

441

81 The Eight-Year School

456

82 Spelling Reform

458

83 “In General Everyone Is Busy, but in Particular No One Is”

459

84 Pensions, Salaries, Two Days Off

466

85 Not Tightening the Screws

472

86 “Why Just One Party?”

474

87 Khrushchev’s Last Act of Sedition

477

88 A Fateful Leadership Change

478

89 Day by Day

480

90 All Power to the Director!

481

91 July 24, 1964: Looking to the Future

495

92 The Farewell

497

93 Barayev Continues to Argue Against Nalivaiko

504

94 The CC Presidium Meeting of August 19, 1964

509

95 Big Oil of Siberia

512

Contents

ix

96 Antonin Novotny and Alexander Dubček

514

97 Richard Sorge, Vasily Porik, and Fritz Schmerkel

516

98 Day by Day

519

99 What Kind of Army Do We Need?

521

100 Day by Day

524

101 “We’ve Talked and Talked, but We Cannot Get Anything Done”

525

102 Galyukov Calls Me

530

103 Vacation in October

535

104 What’s This All About?

540

105 The Denouement

543

106 After Khrushchev

560

Part 5 Epilogue 107 Summing Up

579

Biographical Notes on the Cast of Characters Endnotes Index About the Book

591 639 661 680

Preface

Khrushchev in Power: Unfinished Reforms is the last book in my trilogy

about my father. Logically it should have been the first, but chronologically it was the last to be written. And there is a certain sense to that. The first book, Khrushchev on Khrushchev, was published in the United States in 1991. It was based purely on my memories, telling the story of the last seven years in the life of my father—about his forced political retirement, his work on his memoirs, his death and funeral. At the time I very much wanted to speak out, to describe what we had been forbidden to talk about until shortly before. I discovered, to my surprise, that I could do this successfully. Until then, nothing but reports and official memoranda had issued from my pen. Now suddenly a book—and a successful one. Besides English, it was translated into Chinese, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Czech, and Hungarian. In some countries it was a best seller. Inspired by the success of Khrushchev on Khrushchev, I sat down to write another book, this one not only about my father and his actions, but also about myself and my rocket scientist colleagues. It gradually grew into the story of how the Soviet Union achieved the status of superpower and about my father’s role in the process, his concept of the country’s security, his relationships with rocket designers and scientists, generals and admirals, the West and the East. The book grew longer and longer, over 700 pages, and became half memoir and half historical study. In the process of working on it, I myself gained a clearer picture of much in our past, of how events related to each other and formed logical links. I increasingly felt myself to be not simply an amateur historian but a real historian, the historian of a superpower. That second book, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, was published in 2000. It appeared not only in the United States and Russia but also in China and Germany. In 2000 I began a third book about my father, the present one. I had actually conceived of it long before, but had never sat down to write it. Even in my mind, the changes beginning in the 1990s in Russia at first overshadowed the times of Khrushchev. But my illusions gradually faded. It became increasingly apparent that the supposedly constructive nature of the Gaidar “shock therapy” xi

xii

Preface

was illusory. I lost interest in Gaidar’s reforms and returned to “my own” period in Russian history. No one before me had taken a serious look at Khrushchev’s domestic policies. His reform program held little interest in the West, particularly in the United States, where most books about my father appeared. Those were foreign reforms in a foreign country. To Americans, Khrushchev always remained a dangerous rival on the international scene, and they did not care about how he tried to revitalize the Soviet economy, transform agriculture, and feed, clothe, and house the Soviet people. In the Soviet Union, Brezhnev immediately placed a taboo on everything connected with Khrushchev, even on his name. When the Soviet regime ended, Russians, including historians, had no time for history. Later they were intrigued by what was called “the Stalin era.” Russian publications about my father are few. At best they consist mostly of superficial anecdotes, often false and tendentious. Their authors chew over “facts” that have nothing to do with reality. Such “historians” are not drawn to archives. As a result, knowledge about the Khrushchev era does not extend very far beyond such anecdotes. As with my previous books, the present one does contain a certain number of personal stories. But from the very beginning, I planned to construct a logical account of the period 1961–1964, based not so much on my own recollections but on research in the archives, on published documents, and on memoirs, which were more often hostile than friendly toward Khrushchev. The book is chronological. Year by year, I describe the attempts to reorganize the Soviet economy and the government itself. I write about my father and the inventor of prefabricated-panel housing construction, about agrarian reform, about his friends such as academicians Kurchatov, Lavrentyev, Semyonov, and many others, about the struggle for power and intrigues among those at the top. Brezhnev, Suslov, Malenkov, Bulganin, and many others were to me neither symbols nor portraits, but real people. So what was the Khrushchev era really like? There is no simple answer. Having achieved a certain peak in economic growth after the first wave of reforms, between 1953 and 1958, by partially decentralizing the economy, in 1959 the country began to spin its wheels. For three years (1959–1961) my father searched for a way out. In 1961 he thought of a new and more radical reform based on three elements: liberating the producers, the industrial and agricultural enterprises, from petty supervision by higher authorities; reducing the relationship between enterprises and the government to calculating the amount of profit they owed—in other words, reducing the relationship to paying taxes; and reorganizing the government with the aim of democratizing society and transferring governmental powers from the ruling Communist Party to the Soviets at all levels. My father did not have enough time to carry out his plan, but after his retirement in 1964 the so-called Kosygin reforms of 1965, though far less ambitious, showed that he had been on the right track.

Preface

xiii

If we examine the pluses and minuses of the Khrushchev era, we see that my father’s reforms had a measurable effect, despite the inevitable costs and confusion in a time of change. Statistics, both Soviet and non-Soviet, prove that in the twentieth century Russians lived better during the Khrushchev decade than they did before or after. I can’t claim that everyone in the Soviet Union lived well at that time, but they were not destined to live better in subsequent years. This is confirmed by statistics on life expectancy: it reached a peak in 1964–1965, when the Soviet Union surpassed the United States in this index, but then it declined. Such are the facts. However, despite these facts, for some reason my father’s program of reforms is judged, even in the academic world, to have been unsuccessful. Twenty years after my father lost power, at the beginning of the 1980s in China, Deng Xiaoping carried out essentially the same program that my father had failed to implement in the Soviet Union, and with resounding success. But in our country, everything fell apart after a brief transitional period between 1964 and 1968. Why did that happen? I attempt to answer that question in this book. The deterioration in the Soviet Union, both economically and politically, after the peak years of 1954–1965 seems to me not historically pre-programmed, not inevitable. Our country could have continued on the upswing if only the leaders who came after my father had not halted the reforms he initiated, but had allowed them to proceed, allowed further movement both toward a more normal, decentralized economy (a market economy, if you will) based on respect for the laws of economics and, if they had worked, toward establishing democracy. But they preferred “stability” and fell into the age-old Russian lethargy, into stagnation, and thus consumed the gains accumulated by the preceding generation. The hangover after awakening was terrible. Society demanded instant change, the immediate destruction of everything built up earlier. Of course everyone wanted the best, yet there was always the “but.” How many times Russia has stumbled on that fateful word. Cycles of reform and counter-reform (or stagnation) have haunted Russia for centuries, like some evil fate. We witnessed the latest of them in the second half of the twentieth century, which differed from the second half of the nineteenth century only in details, basically of an ideological nature. The reforms of Tsar Alexander II (the abolition of serfdom in 1861, etc.) were replaced by “stability” and stagnation under Alexander III and Nicholas II, followed by an awakening, an outburst of dissatisfaction and, as a result, revolution and destruction. A new cycle of reform and counter-reform at the end of the twentieth century led to equally catastrophic consequences for our country: the counterrevolution of 1991, decline, and economic ruin. With the beginning of the twenty-first century, Russia enters a new cycle, emerging from the wreckage of counter-revolutionary convulsions and striving for a new reformation, for change from an oligarchic, profiteering economy

xiv

Preface

into a productive one and the introduction of democratic principles into civil society. In this process it is vitally important not to stumble over the same old obstacles. An accurate knowledge of history is very important, since our future grows out of our past. The “quality” of our future depends directly on the “quality” of our history, on its veracity. Historical figures, our fathers and grandfathers, no longer exist. They are indifferent to what is written about them and how they are judged. And we, their closest descendants, will soon follow our parents. The coming generation is the one that truly has an interest in history without distortions. How they live, now and in the future, depends in large part on an understanding of the past. Every new generation of Russians has involuntarily and repeatedly rewritten history, and in doing so chopped off the historical roots of their own lives in order to begin everything anew. But what is life without roots? The correct interpretation of the Russian past is important not only to Russians but to our country’s neighbors as well, since we all must live and work together—I hope as partners and not as enemies. Understanding the reasons behind the behavior of partners, their historical motivations, is a key to every kind of fruitful cooperation. It was not easy and took some time for me to understand what happened in that tumultuous decade of 1953–1964, especially in the last four years, on which this book focuses, but I faced an even bigger challenge than other writers would: I am a son of the protagonist of my book and not a historian by training, and thus a newcomer to a territory vigilantly guarded by professionals. I tried to overcome this barrier—I hope with some success. History, like any other discipline, is constructed from two components: facts and the interpretation of them. Although I cannot change any prejudice arising from my family origin, neither can such prejudice change the facts. Interpretation is a different matter. Here both writers and readers can choose whatever interpretation they wish. I often ask myself how objective I am. I think nobody can be completely objective; even the most detached historian brings some prejudgment to the task of interpretation. That is just part of human nature. Readers follow their own logic and reach a final judgment. As to facts, everything depends on personal honesty. While one person may be able to steal valuables from another’s pocket, others cannot even consider doing such a thing. The same is true of writing history: some historians would not hesitate to tamper with the facts (here I refer to Russian “historians”), whereas others regard facts as sacred. I count myself among the latter group. I very much hope that my book will help readers to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past—even if only to a small extent. * * * I want to thank all who have helped me in the writing of this book. First, thanks go to my wife, Valentina Golenko. She typed and retyped the seemingly endless

Preface

xv

number of pages of text, searching out and correcting errors, and contributed in many other ways so that an actual book resulted. I want to make special note of the invaluable assistance given by my son, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (the second), who provided me with indispensable archival material. I owe a separate debt of gratitude to the late academician Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fursenko for his advice and assistance in selecting and obtaining printed and archival materials. Many thanks also to my friend Yuri Panov, who has always helped me in every way, especially in working with computers and searching for information through the vast expanses of the Internet. I am indebted to Sanford Thatcher for his assistance in arranging for publication of the book and for his suggestions about editing, and also to the staff at Lynne Rienner Publishers for their hard work. My old friend George Shriver spent almost two years translating the text from Russian to English, striving for a translation that would be not only accurate but also accessible. I would not have been able to accomplish anything without the constant support of Mark Garrison, director of the Center for Foreign Policy Development, and of the directors of the Thomas Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies at Brown University—Thomas Biersteker, Barbara Stallings, David Kennedy, and Michael Kennedy—as well as many others on the staff of the institute. My special thanks go to the Martha and Artemis Joukowsky Family Foundation and to the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation for their support, which made possible the translation of my book into English. I also wish to express my gratitude to all my other friends who, though not named here, have offered their support and have long maintained their patience and positive attitude toward me and my work.

Part 1 At a Crossroads: 1961

1 The New Ruble On January 1, 1961, a new kind of money appeared.

As early as May 5, 1960, newspapers had announced the forthcoming exchange of currency, scheduled for the beginning of the next year: one new ruble for ten old rubles, as had been done in the monetary reform of 1947 under Stalin. Unlike 1947, however, any amount of money could be exchanged, without restriction. It should be recalled that in 1947 people were allowed to exchange some rubles on a one-to-one basis—but only in insignificant amounts. Sums of up to three thousand rubles, it seems, could be exchanged at a rate of three old rubles for one new ruble, and any amount above that was at the rate of ten to one. In 1947, moreover, store prices had remained the same as before the monetary reform. Thus the 1947 reform was purely confiscatory. Rubles that had been printed during World War II, not secured by any real value, were thus removed from circulation. In 1947, the explanation for the excess quantity of rubles circulating before the reform was that the German invaders had printed and circulated counterfeit rubles. But the real source of the inflation in the Soviet Union and the consequent reform of 1947 was that our own printing presses for paper money had been working full blast. Preparations for the 1947 reform proceeded under the strictest secrecy, because the authorities rightly feared that if people heard about it, they would rush to the stores to get rid of their “old” money and strip the shelves bare. But now, in 1960, the exchange of rubles was announced in advance. The government tried to convince the people that the reform would not hurt anyone, that they could exchange their money without any restrictions. They could bring as much as they wanted to the exchange offices with no questions asked. Of course, inexplicably large sums, in the millions, would not go unnoticed. One’s rubles would be exchanged, but the “rich people” whose existence was thus disclosed would come under the thumb of police and prosecutors. However, during the half-year between the announcement of the reform and the actual beginning of the exchange of rubles, the “rich” had time to get organized. Their money was exchanged for them in small amounts by “friends” whose means were modest—in some cases this was done as a personal favor, but more commonly in return for a commission. 3

4 At a Crossroads: 1961 Despite the government’s claims that the operation would be harmless, the exchange of currency caused a massive amount of confusion. People wondered: Why go to all this bother if there really is no change in the value of the ruble? Well, they thought, the government must be pulling a fast one, keeping us in the dark. No one doubted they were being deceived, but exactly how? In what way? There was no end to the gossip and rumors. Naturally I too pestered Father with questions: “Why this escapade with the exchange of rubles?” He explained that the reason was purely technical. The monetary reform was the brainchild of Father’s new deputy premier, Aleksei Kosygin, who was in charge of finances. He liked things to be orderly; I would even say he idolized order, Bureaucracy (with a capital B), with everything numbered and catalogued and filed neatly on the shelves. The “old” ruble annoyed him. It was unsuited for operating with a budget in the hundreds of billions, and soon to be in the trillions. There was more and more trouble trying to reconcile debit and credit. I remember that in those days the keepers of financial records couldn’t even dream of computers. They clicked their abacuses and pressed the handles of their adding machines. Twelve digits were almost beyond the capacity of equipment like that. Either the calculating machines had to be redesigned or—more practically—the large numbers, which were already rounded off, should be rounded off further. But that could cause unjustifiable losses, and also abuses. In that era of mechanical accounting equipment, an extra digit meant a great deal. Kosygin decided that the last digit had to be removed. Only one digit. More than that was impossible. If two digits were removed, the prices for bread and other basic products would go sky high. It would be necessary to calculate in terms of kopecks, and even the long-forgotten half-kopeck coins. Removing “only one digit” seemed to Kosygin the ideal solution. The work of the financial record keepers would become easier, and the exchange of old banknotes for new ones would not be a problem for most people. They wouldn’t even notice it. In fact, they would benefit from it. The old paper rubles—which were inordinately large, making pockets bulge—would be replaced by new, miniature bills. It would be easy to fit them into any wallet. The government would also benefit from the smaller size of the paper money. It would require less of the costly special paper used for printing currency. Kosygin cited the example of France. In March 1960, he had accompanied Father on a visit to France and had lengthy discussions with the financial people there. On January 1, 1960, they had introduced the “new franc,” worth a hundred times more than the old one. That had also been done for purely “technical” reasons, although considerations of prestige entered into it somewhat. The French example definitely convinced Father that revaluation of the ruble was no threat to us. Capitalists never ventured into anything that might be harmful to themselves. He gave his “okay” for the monetary reform. On January 1, 1961, lines formed at the local offices of the State Bank, but dissipated very quickly. Simultaneously, new and ridiculously low prices appeared in the stores. The illusion that everything had become cheaper lasted until the first

The New Ruble

5

payday. The pay that people received was also ridiculously low. The former thousand-ruble bill was now a hundred-ruble bill. People had to get used to counting not in rubles, but in ten-kopeck pieces. Another curious detail. The original plan had provided not only for an exchange of paper money but also for the minting of new coins. The zealous Kosygin proposed to economize on copper. Before the reform, kopecks were worth almost nothing; the same was true of two-kopeck and three-kopeck pieces. If you dropped one of those coins, no one bent down to pick it up. The decision was made to keep these coins in circulation, but not to announce this in advance. But it did not remain a secret for long. Small coins instantly stopped circulating. Yesterday’s good-for-nothing one-kopeck piece would soon be worth ten. It was good for a box of matches. And in the pay phones on the street you could now use a two-kopeck piece instead of the old fifteen-kopeck coin. When Father received word that small change had disappeared, he took it calmly. In terms of the budget, this was only a drop in the bucket. The cost of minting new coins would be greater than the possible loss resulting from their being withdrawn from circulation. It was also true that from mere kopecks no one could make wrongful gains worth millions of rubles. So things were left unchanged. After the old rubles had been traded for new ones, kopecks quickly reappeared in the cash registers at the stores. I don’t know how it was in France, but in our country the ten-for-one exchange of currency did not happen without difficulties. It was not just that the government “fudged a bit,” taking advantage of the currency reform to round off prices to the next highest number, whenever there was a fraction of a kopeck at the “tail end” of an old price. The “market” sector of the economy, which was not under direct government control, ignored the reform. The little old ladies at the peasants’ markets, who sold parsley for ten kopecks a bunch, continued to sell at that price, even though a kopeck was worth ten times more.1 Kosygin had not taken this factor into account, had simply paid no attention to it, since it “didn’t affect the weather” concerning monetary turnover for the country as a whole. From his bureaucratic standpoint he had evaluated everything correctly. The only problem was that in the personal budgets of Soviet citizens the “peasants’ market” factor played a significant role. You couldn’t buy a bunch of parsley in the government stores, even for one kopeck. They didn’t have any. But you couldn’t haggle with the “grandmothers” at the peasants’ markets. If you want it, pay the price. If not, go without. In Kosygin’s view, the government ought to control prices not only in the stores; it should also ensure the implementation of its decrees in the peasants’ markets. But you can’t assign a policeman to check up on every little old lady. That’s why they were called “markets.” After Father had retired and was on a pension, some chance visitors got into conversation with him. They complained that the monetary reform of 1961 opened the way to inflation. He was sincerely puzzled by this accusation. As he saw it, the state commercial system was obliged to follow the rules set by the government. As for the “peasants’ markets,” Father justified himself by saying

6 At a Crossroads: 1961 that the authorities had failed to take them into account. A kopeck for a bunch of parsley was one thing, but meat or fruit costing rubles—that was something else altogether. The prices in the peasants’ markets did go down after prices dropped in the government stores, not ten times lower, to be sure, but to whatever level the sellers felt comfortable with. In other words, prices had risen after all. But in Father’s opinion, they had been rising even before 1961. “They would change the color [of the packaging] or make some other insignificant change and then raise the price,” my father-the-pensioner explained to the especially insistent pensioners who were talking with him. “In my time we caught many people doing this, especially in local industry. They were trying to increase income for local budgets. We punished local leaders for doing this. This is an abuse of power. It discredits the Soviet government. . . . Any increase in prices has nothing to do with [the revaluation] of the ruble.”2 Father’s interlocutors did not agree with him then, and today people who write about economics don’t agree with him either. The hidden inflation, they say, must be dated from January 1, 1961. Both Father and his opponents are right in their own way. Father was blamed not so much for his own mistakes as for those of his successors. The hidden inflation reached its peak in the period after his retirement, coinciding with increased military spending. At that time the top leadership no longer regarded playing tricks with prices as “an abuse of power” that “discredits the Soviet government.” But in the minds of ordinary people, it was Khrushchev who had carried out the revaluation of the ruble. Therefore he was to blame for everything. A final comment. The great monetary reform was preceded by a minireform. On November 15, 1960, the ruble-to-dollar ratio was changed. They changed the exchange rate of four old rubles to the dollar to parity—that is, one ruble for one dollar, or to be more exact, ninety kopecks for a dollar. For most of the population this mini-reform had practically no significance. Soviet citizens simply did not exchange dollars for rubles or vice versa. To me it’s a mystery how people could calculate the real value of different types of currency in the absence of free exchange. An acquaintance of mine, the economist Viktor Belkin, considers this possible if one uses “the GilbertKravis method, which conceives of a parity between the currencies of the United States and the Soviet Union based on calculations of gross national products of those two countries.”3 After the 1947 reform, Belkin and his associates, on the basis of this method, calculated fourteen rubles to the dollar. They submitted this estimate to Stalin, but according to Vladimir Starovsky, who headed the Soviet government’s Central Statistical Administration, which had done the work on this problem, and who delivered the documents to the Kremlin, Stalin took a blue pencil and crossed out the number “1” in the “14.” Thus it came about that four rubles equaled one dollar. That was all the science he applied.4 In March 1950, this four-to-one rate was officially announced. Foreign diplomats began to grumble, but this change in the ruble-to-dollar rate affected

“If You Don’t Oversee It Yourself . . .”

7

practically no one but them. At the Soviet Foreign Ministry they simply laughed at the diplomats: “Serves the capitalists right!” This “Stalin” rate of exchange had no effect whatever on the miserly amount of foreign trade. Trade was calculated not in rubles, but in gold, and not on the basis of an exchange rate, but of weight. When after Stalin’s death there was a cautious beginning of increased travel across the “Iron Curtain,” it turned out that the four-to-one exchange rate of rubles to dollars actually did approximate to reality. In 1957, a special exchange rate of ten rubles to the dollar was introduced for “noncommercial operations”—that is, for tourists and diplomats. To make the ruble even cheaper was considered politically incorrect, “the work of the devil.” In 1961, the exchange rate was mechanically “brought into line.” That is, ten old rubles were replaced with one ruble as being equal to a dollar. But then, the rate was changed to ninety kopecks for a dollar. Why was that? It’s completely beyond me, something I simply don’t understand.

2 “If You Don’t Oversee It Yourself . . .” As soon as all the fuss over New Year’s was past, Father set off to travel

around the country again. The experience of the previous two years had convinced him: do it yourself, or you’ll get no results, and “don’t let the grass grow under your feet.” What counted was not to keep trying to rouse the party’s province committees from a distance, while trying to spur on the grain-procurement agencies and whip the Moscow bureaucrats into action, because immediately after such efforts all those people slacked off again. The harvests were brought in just any old way, without any firm supervision, and officials at all levels replied to inquiries from the central government with answers that were written for form only. In other words, entropy was spreading irresistibly. At this point I should give an explanation of the concept of “entropy,” because I will return to it a number of times in this book. The American Heritage Science Dictionary defines entropy as “a measure of the amount of energy in a physical system not available to do work. As a physical system becomes more disordered, and its energy becomes more evenly distributed, that energy becomes less able to do work. For example, a car rolling

“If You Don’t Oversee It Yourself . . .”

7

practically no one but them. At the Soviet Foreign Ministry they simply laughed at the diplomats: “Serves the capitalists right!” This “Stalin” rate of exchange had no effect whatever on the miserly amount of foreign trade. Trade was calculated not in rubles, but in gold, and not on the basis of an exchange rate, but of weight. When after Stalin’s death there was a cautious beginning of increased travel across the “Iron Curtain,” it turned out that the four-to-one exchange rate of rubles to dollars actually did approximate to reality. In 1957, a special exchange rate of ten rubles to the dollar was introduced for “noncommercial operations”—that is, for tourists and diplomats. To make the ruble even cheaper was considered politically incorrect, “the work of the devil.” In 1961, the exchange rate was mechanically “brought into line.” That is, ten old rubles were replaced with one ruble as being equal to a dollar. But then, the rate was changed to ninety kopecks for a dollar. Why was that? It’s completely beyond me, something I simply don’t understand.

2 “If You Don’t Oversee It Yourself . . .” As soon as all the fuss over New Year’s was past, Father set off to travel

around the country again. The experience of the previous two years had convinced him: do it yourself, or you’ll get no results, and “don’t let the grass grow under your feet.” What counted was not to keep trying to rouse the party’s province committees from a distance, while trying to spur on the grain-procurement agencies and whip the Moscow bureaucrats into action, because immediately after such efforts all those people slacked off again. The harvests were brought in just any old way, without any firm supervision, and officials at all levels replied to inquiries from the central government with answers that were written for form only. In other words, entropy was spreading irresistibly. At this point I should give an explanation of the concept of “entropy,” because I will return to it a number of times in this book. The American Heritage Science Dictionary defines entropy as “a measure of the amount of energy in a physical system not available to do work. As a physical system becomes more disordered, and its energy becomes more evenly distributed, that energy becomes less able to do work. For example, a car rolling

8 At a Crossroads: 1961 along a road has kinetic energy that could do work (by carrying something, for example); [but] as friction slows it down and its energy is distributed to its surroundings as heat, it loses this ability. The amount of entropy is often thought of as the amount of disorder in a system.” Similarly, the American Heritage Cultural Dictionary states that entropy is a “measure of the disorder of any system, or of the unavailability of its heat energy for work. One way of stating the second law of thermodynamics—the principle that heat will not flow from a cold to a hot object spontaneously [i.e., without energy being added from outside the system]—is to say that the entropy of an isolated system must increase. Entropy is often used loosely to refer to the breakdown or disorganization of any system.” In the world of atoms and molecules, entropy dominates. If some force does not hold them together, they fly apart. In the human community, the same thing happens if things are left to go their own way. Entropy rules the world, and we human beings must constantly fight against it, but we will never defeat it. We are able to counteract it only for a time, locally. It is entropy that makes ruins of ancient cities that were left to the will of fate. And untended fields become overgrown with weeds because of the law of entropy. For a reformer, the capacity to add energy to the system is a necessary quality—that is, to inspire people with one’s ideas and to support their perseverance not just for a day, and not just for a year, but continually and consistently. The constant addition, or pumping in, of energy to the system is necessary to maintain the existing order (and I’m not even talking about purposeful change of the system). In a decentralized market economy, the addition of energy—that is, the assertion of will by a human individual—occurs at many local points. For example, businessmen exert effort in seeking to run their businesses to their own advantage and thereby pump energy into the social and economic system. Likewise, local government bodies impose order as they see fit in their areas of jurisdiction. Such dispersed systems are usually stable. If one link in the chain breaks, or if there is a failure in one instance, or even in several, that does not lead to the collapse of the whole. In the place of businesses that go bankrupt because of poor management, where the energy exerted has been insufficient or incorrectly oriented, new businesses arise, and with them new centers from which energy is added, new local sources providing order and organization. And this goes on endlessly. The government and other central authorities do not participate directly in adding energy to the system; they establish rules that help make the adding of energy more efficient and keep it consistent with the interests of the whole society. Things are different in a highly centralized society, such as Russia or, let’s say, the Soviet Union, where everything is dependent on the good will or the not-so-good will of the Number One person—whether that be “the sovereign of all the Russias,” as the tsar was called, the “general secretary of the Communist Party,” as Stalin was called, or a post-Soviet president “elected by all

“If You Don’t Oversee It Yourself . . .”

9

the people.” The change of names did not affect the vertical, top-down nature of the power structure. In such a structure, ensuring orderliness or increasing efficiency depends entirely on the desire, will, resolve, and intuition of the top leader, and only on that leader. The pumping of energy goes from that one center at the very top and flows down, overcoming greater or lesser resistance, through the administrative channels of an inflexible bureaucratic machine that resists change. In the conditions of a centralized and monopolized economy, directors of enterprises for the most part are not inclined to risk their positions by introducing innovations. (An innovation is always a risk.) Local leaders are not interested in altering the accustomed rhythm of life. The only person, it turns out, who might have an interest in reforming the system is “him,” the one who sits at the very peak of the pyramid (along with his team, if such a thing exists). As long as “he” possesses sufficient energy and willpower, he issues decrees, travels around the country, shakes up the local officials, replaces “retrograde elements” with reformers (who after occupying their seats in the leadership quickly turn retrograde), promotes technological innovations borrowed from more dynamic neighboring structures—or even homegrown ones, if the inventors succeed in winning favor at the highest level. Statistics show that no more than 5 percent of all patented inventions win recognition, bringing success to the inventor, rather than disappointment and loss. And of those 5 percent, only a small number gain support from the whole society. But how are those few identified? Every inventor is convinced of his own genius, has no doubt of his success, and seeks to persuade others to invest in his project with the expectation of mountains of gold in the future. Those willing to take the risk can always be found. In the case of a decentralized economy, the risk-taker may lose everything, which is what usually happens, but that has no negative consequences for society. A local source that might have pumped energy into the system disappears without a trace. Another appears in its place, and so on without end, until finally someone is successful, the invention is worthwhile, and in some cases—even more rarely—it will have fateful significance not only for the individual but also for the whole society. That’s how it has been with all inventors, from Archimedes to Thomas Edison, from the Wright brothers to Bill Gates. Their names become fixed in our memories, but we never recall the failures. Evolution threw them on the scrap heap, and they passed into oblivion. In a centralized system, however, most inventions, whether worthwhile or not, receive no support and perish. The system keeps functioning in the same old way, and has no need for innovations. If someone does succeed in breaking through to the very top, we find the same kind of lottery: a worthwhile invention may find support, but so may a worthless one, or an outright swindle. The leader of the state, even if he is highly inquisitive by nature, might support any invention or innovative idea as long as it inspires more confidence. But since the leader has much greater resources at his disposal, the risk of loss grows enormously if he makes a poor choice.

10 At a Crossroads: 1961 A centralized structure, as long as the leader has enough strength to keep pumping energy into it, somehow manages to keep functioning. And of course, even in a centralized system, there do exist some local sources adding energy and reducing entropy in a particular area or factory or collective farm. They begin to change or break down the old and implant new elements, but that happens only as long as energy is being pumped in from the very top, when an energetic and enterprising leader sits at the top, one who is not indifferent to the interests of the country and its people. He has only to disappear due to natural causes or be overthrown, and everything stops. Entropy increases, trickling down from the summits of an inactive, do-nothing government, enveloping all of society, swallowing up any innovation and leaving no trace of it. A time of great peace and quiet sets in. Society falls into a state of lethargy, or what we now call “stagnation.” But let us return to the events of 1961. Personnel reassignments also continued. On January 20, Averky Aristov, a secretary of the Central Committee (CC), was removed from his posts. He had been one of Father’s deputies in the CC Bureau for the Russian Federation, a party body that substituted in the Russian Federation for the full-fledged central committees that existed in the Communist Parties of the other union republics. Aristov had not paid sufficient attention to troublesome situations in certain provinces of the Russian Federation. “Aristov has proved to be a man who is too placid” for work in the Central Committee, Father stated (at a Presidium meeting), “too easygoing. He’ll give a speech and be satisfied with that. He’s a good, honorable person, but not a strong worker.”1 The quotation from Khrushchev about Aristov comes from the rough notes taken down at CC Presidium meetings by Vladimir Nikiforovich Malin, head of the General Department of the party’s Central Committee. The most important and most confidential documents were preserved in the inner depths of that Central Committee subdivision, and because of his position as its head, beginning in 1954 Malin attended most if not all CC Presidium meetings (and started taking notes at them). This arrangement was made by Khrushchev. Under Stalin, no regular records were kept of what went on at meetings of the top leadership. Stalin did not like to have witnesses and did not want to leave certain traces in the historical record that might not be desirable. Sometimes he allowed Vyacheslav Molotov, or later on Georgy Malenkov, to take brief notes on a subject that he, Stalin, selected, but we do not know what happened to those notes. That kind of practice continued after Stalin’s death until the arrival of Malin, who began taking brief notes on small notepads, writing down statements that, from his point of view, were the most interesting. Malin’s initiative did not go unnoticed, but Father did not object. Toward the end of Khrushchev’s time in office, a stenographer was even present at some Presidium meetings, though not all, and she recorded everything “from A to Z.” Malin’s rough notes and the minutes taken by the stenographer were gathered together and published by academician Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fursenko in the Prezidium. Three weighty volumes resulted, each consisting of about a thousand pages.

“If You Don’t Oversee It Yourself . . .”

11

The information contained in those volumes is unique, and my book is studded with quotations from Malin’s rough notes. To return to the subject of Aristov, he was sent off to be ambassador to Poland and was replaced on the CC Bureau for the Russian Federation by Gennady Voronov, secretary of the Orenburg province committee. In Father’s opinion, Voronov was an energetic and knowledgeable man. And there was no fooling around where he was concerned. His province was one of the front-runners for results achieved in 1960. On January 24, 1961, Father was in Kiev. There he met with agricultural officials, raking them over the coals for the previous year’s inadequacies. In reply, Nikolai Podgorny, a secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, vowed that mistakes would be corrected and that in 1961 Ukraine would not let the country down. After that meeting, Father inspected the Kiev subway system. Its first line had opened on New Year’s. Everyone knew that Father was not indifferent to Kiev, but he, more than anyone else, had opposed the building of the Kiev subway. The construction of a subway system was very costly. For the same amount of money, thousands of apartments could be built, providing housing for tens of thousands of Kievans. Besides, it couldn’t be said that the city’s streets were overloaded. Nevertheless, Kiev’s officials finally persuaded Father: the city was growing, they said, and in another decade the surface traffic would be too much. They presented the relevant statistics to prove their point. And so, in January 1961, there was Father, surrounded by a crowd of local leaders and ordinary people. It really was a crowd, because he had forbidden the secret service from “clearing the area” before his arrival. Father, with his entourage, went jumping from train to train (one car was always kept empty to receive the important guests) and inspecting the new underground stations, of which there were not very many at the time. Father was satisfied with what he saw. The subway stations were broad, well lighted, and free of any purely decorative, nonfunctional architectural elements. Father knew firsthand, and not by hearsay, how much the palatial subway stations in Moscow had cost our hungry country in the 1930s. At that time, on orders from Stalin, construction of the first part of the Moscow subway system was Father’s full-time assignment. Orders for marble to decorate the subway stations went through Khrushchev. For the Krasnye Vorota subway station, special blood-red marble, the color of freshly sliced roast beef, had been ordered from Shrosha, a quarry near a railroad station in Georgia.2 For other subway stations they used a kind of gray marble, quarried in a small town in Chelyabinsk province called Verkhny Ufolei. Some sculptures at the Revolution Square subway station were cast from bronze, which was in short supply. For that money, how many people could have been relocated from barracks into decent housing! Now that Father was in power he demanded that both architects and builders think about costs and keep in mind that this was the people’s money, rather than think about their own immortal fame from what

12 At a Crossroads: 1961 they designed or built. The subway stations in Kiev turned out to be decentlooking and not overly expensive. By February 1, Father was already in Rostov, looking into the question of how well prepared the Northern Caucasus region was for the spring sowing. He was not satisfied with the reports and traveled around in the fields surrounding Rostov, trying to see everything for himself. If not everything, then as much as he could. These “surprise” inspection tours caused the neighboring farms to “shape up” as well. Even if Khrushchev hadn’t come bursting in on them this time, on another occasion he might. On February 2, he inspected some new agricultural machinery. One of the best combine factories in the country was located in Rostov. On February 4, Father was in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. Again there was a meeting, and he traveled around to the state and collective farms and visited exhibitions of equipment that had been developed for use at vineyards and tea plantations. From Tbilisi, Father took a train, so that he could see more from its windows, and made a stop in Voronezh. There on February 11, another meeting with agricultural officials took place, involving not only people from the Black Earth districts but also representatives from the Volga region. They talked about the spring sowing and also about the new, large stock-raising and poultry-farming operations that had been purchased from capitalist countries, and they talked about how many units of feed were used in proportion to the increased body weight of the animals—in other words, how much more meat was being produced. Stepan Dmitryevich Khitrov, who had recently been elected first secretary of the Voronezh province party committee, “prepared himself with special care” for Khrushchev’s arrival. Probably “too much care.” At the conference, Father read a letter from a housewife telling about the fact that the city had been prettied up hastily in preparation for his coming. Extra quantities of milk and meat had been delivered to the stores, and cheap sausage appeared. “But when you listen to the gossip,” the letter concluded, “you hear that after the departure of Comrade Khrushchev everything is going to disappear, and people will again have to stand in waiting lines, not knowing whether they’ll take home what they need or leave empty-handed.”3 Father received such letters regularly, and he regularly “reprimanded” the secretaries of the party’s province committees, both privately and publicly, although he understood perfectly well that his reprimands were in vain, because only abundance would put an end to this tendency for officials to “build Potemkin villages.” But then there was another letter that he received on the day he left Tbilisi. It seriously angered and upset him. “Before your arrival in Voronezh,” some anonymous authors wrote to him, “the director of the poultry farm in the Novousmansky district, Comrade Zevin, and the head of the state-farm division, Comrade Kroshka, acquired a metal rail [as used on a railroad] twenty-five meters long, and they got it from Comrade

“If You Don’t Oversee It Yourself . . .”

13

Khrenov, who was the station master at Boyevo on the South-Western Rail Line. They used steel cables to attach this long metal rail to a tractor and began flattening corn plants down to the ground. This was corn that had not been harvested in time from land covering 300 hectares. Other local leaders followed their example. A lot of the harvest was lost in our province. “We workers at the Boyevo railroad station count on it that you, Nikita Sergeyevich (Khrushchev), will punish them for trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.” The letter was dated February 8, 1961. The road to the Voronezh nuclear power plant, which was then under construction, happened to pass through this ill-starred cornfield. The local officials had no doubt that Khrushchev would go through without stopping on his way to have a look at this technological wonder (the nuclear plant). And so they had put everything in “order” for themselves. Father read the letter while he was on the train. He believed it, but he didn’t want to believe it. He asked Pavel Satyukov, the editor of Pravda, who was accompanying him, to assign his local Voronezh correspondent to inquire quietly, to find out “on the Q.T.” whether what they wrote in the letter was the truth. At the next stop, as soon as Father’s railroad car was connected to the telephone system, Satyukov made a call to Voronezh. But looking into it “on the Q.T.” didn’t work out. People reported to the party’s province committee immediately that some journalist was sniffing around in the cornfields. On his return to the city the police grabbed him and took him to Khitrov. Khitrov didn’t dare to give an angry dressing-down to this correspondent from the party’s main newspaper, but he tried to find out from him why he had gone into the cornfields. The journalist, following Satyukov’s instructions, did not reveal the truth but explained that he was on his way to the nuclear plant and his car had broken down. While the driver was fixing it, he had gone for a walk around the area. Khitrov of course did not believe him, but couldn’t do anything about it. When Father arrived in Voronezh he demanded an explanation from Khitrov. “And what do you think?” Speaking from the rostrum at the conference, Father became indignant: “Khitrov did not deny it. It was true that the tractor had a rail attached to it, but supposedly the reason for that was not as had been described. The director of the state farm had had all the corncobs picked at the right time, but he had asked for this length of railroad track in order to clear away the stubble that was left over. This is something new in agricultural technology.”4 Father was angry not so much over the fact that in our country, every year, snow would fall and cover fields of wheat, corn, potatoes, and carrots that had not been harvested—sometimes because winter came early in some places, and out of sheer negligence in other places. What disturbed Father was the blatant lying by a secretary of the party’s province committee. Lying right in your face. And lying to whom? To him, the Number One person in the government. But Father restrained himself; he did not make a big scandal out of it. What would have been the point? The crafty Khitrov was not the problem. The problem was

14

At a Crossroads: 1961

that the system of party province committees was not working; that would have to be dealt with. Khitrov survived. Keeping his seat as secretary of the party’s Voronezh province committee, he outlasted Father. Then in 1967, after the Kosygin reforms, when government ministries were revived, Khitrov became minister of construction in rural areas. In 1982 he retired on a pension. Father returned from Voronezh to Moscow on February 13, 1961. On February 16, at a meeting of the CC Presidium, he shared his impressions while they were fresh in his mind. He began with the successes, but very quickly came down to the problem he was really concerned about: the administration of the provinces, the party province committees, and their first secretaries. Future success or lack of success depended on them. To Father the prospects did not look rosy. Father told the story about the twenty-five-meter length of railroad track and scolded Polyansky. He was the one who had pushed Khitrov to be made the head of the province committee. “This is straight out of Gogol’s time!” Father exclaimed. It was true that very little had changed in the Russian hinterland in the hundred years that had passed since Gogol. The monarchy had crumbled to dust. The revolution had thundered forth. And what was the result? The place of the local official of the tsarist era, the mayor, had been taken by the secretary of the party’s province committee, in this case Khitrov. It was as though in The Government Inspector, Gogol’s famous play, the chief of police had been shadowing the “scribbler” Khlestakov, as though he were a journalist from the capital, so that he wouldn’t “spread the story to the four corners of the Earth.” There was a difference, though. In the present case, Father was the government inspector, and he was a real one. (In Gogol’s play, the main character, Khlestakov, is mistakenly believed to be a visiting inspector.)5 And Khitrov was not the only one. “I had a very poor impression of the Rostov secretary, [Aleksandr Vasilyevich] Basov.” Father was continuing to share his impressions from his trip. “In my opinion, he doesn’t know his business well enough; he’s a phrase monger. He read from a previously written speech. Whatever had been written down for him, he read it. Tsar Peter I [Peter the Great] issued a decree forbidding the boyars from reading speeches that had previously been written, so that their stupidity would not be so obvious. It’s true that my encounter with him was only a fleeting one,” Father said as though to excuse himself. He did not need to excuse himself. His impression was quite correct. A year later, in June 1962, at Novocherkassk, Basov showed what he was worth— or more exactly, showed that he was worthless. Father could not help being upset about this. “People complained to me in the Kuban region that workers on the state farms there had been deceived,” he said, “that their cows had been taken away and the milk was not sold.” On the whole, the idea of concentrating all cows in one place to create a kind of dairy farm was a very sensible idea of Father’s. It would be more efficient,

“If You Don’t Oversee It Yourself . . .”

15

with mechanized feeding of the animals, the use of milking machines, and other innovations. Such operations had already been in existence for a long time in both Europe and North America, where a farmer commonly specialized in a particular crop or type of agricultural product. Such a farmer purchased other necessities from neighboring farms or from stores in nearby towns. Everyone benefited as a result. The quality of the product improved, and its price decreased. But the experience of farmers in Western Europe and North America did not catch on in our country. That is, only the first step was taken. Under pressure from above, cows were removed from the household plots, placed in central locations on collective or state farms, and then forgotten about. They got thin and sickly, and soon were sent off to the slaughterhouse. No one remembered the idea that cheaper milk, of better quality, was supposed to be sold to the cows’ former owners. “The party secretary of the Krasnoyarsk territory executive committee, Matyushkin,” said Father, “must be called to account. He took a hundred thousand cows from the state-farm workers and slaughtered them all, overfulfilling the plan for meat production. Now he’s been sent to be party secretary in Kaluga. [After these remarks by Khrushchev, Matyushkin did not go to Kaluga after all.] Is he going to be a better person there? A man has failed and again he’s sent to do party work. But generally speaking, where should he be sent? He’s only going to keep blabbing with his tongue, and he’s not good for anything else. “Another primitive person is [Sergei Mikhailovich] Butusov, secretary of the party’s Penza province committee,” Father continued. “Right in the conference room he took away the ticket to the conference held by the man who takes care of the pigs because he had given me a letter.” When Father made this comment shaming Butusov, the latter began to justify himself by saying that “he had accidentally put someone else’s ticket in his pocket” and that, after the intervention by Father, he had supposedly, just as accidentally, “found this ticket in my pocket.” “And then there’s the secretary of the party’s Tambov province committee, [Grigory Sergeyevich] Zolotukhin. He kept asking that he be given a whipping, that we take his pants down and give him a whipping.” To Father this was another character out of Gogol, someone like the “widow of the noncommissioned officer.” Zolotukhin kept admitting he was guilty and kept saying: “Yes, Comrade Khrushchev, you need to take my pants down and give me a whipping.” He repeated this three times. “I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I replied: ‘What is this? Are you getting ready to take your pants off and show us your rear end?’ And this was a secretary of a province committee talking!” It’s true that not everyone was like Khitrov and Zolotukhin. A better impression was made on Father by the secretary of the party’s Oryol province committee, Nikolai Fyodorovich Ignatov, and the secretary of the Belgorod

16 At a Crossroads: 1961 province committee, Aleksandr Vlasovich Kovalenko. The latter was a “man who understands what he’s doing, who is certain about his own capabilities and inspires confidence.” The secretary of the Gorky province committee, Leonid Nikolayevich Yefremov, was “an energetic man who never rests.” Father was left with a good impression of four other province committee secretaries: the ones from Dagestan, from Kabardino-Balkaria, from Azerbaijan, and from Armenia. Also, in the Adygei autonomous republic, “matters were not going badly,” in Father’s opinion. But his general impression was gloomy. Most of the secretaries of the party’s province committees “were old, decrepit, and ruined. Not that their health was ruined, but their tongues were worn out from too much flapping. If our ancestral lands were entrusted to them, they’d run them—until they ran them into the ground. Then we’d simply have to say: ‘We’ve gone bankrupt.’ What kind of communism would that be with nothing to eat? We have to change the personnel; there’s no other way out. Any other way would mean collapse.”6 Inwardly, Father understood that “personnel changes” were nothing more than a half-measure, but for the time being he could not suggest anything else. In 1960 and 1961, 57 out of 101 secretaries of the party’s province committees had been changed, but even after the change in leadership, matters in the provinces did not improve fundamentally. The new people proved to be no better than the old ones. What about replacing the province committees with regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy), which he had created in 1957 as a reform measure to decentralize the Moscow-dominated economy and reduce the power of the central ministries? The party secretaries of the province committees could be replaced with professional managers from the regional economic councils. Khrushchev hinted at such a variant. He had made such an attempt earlier. But he ran into the resistance of all his closest colleagues; the province committees were the backbone of the governmental system—not just of the party, but of the whole system of power. Consequently, he approached the problem from a different angle. The province committees had to be professionalized. That was easy to say, but how could it be done? And in fact that was only part of the problem. A reorganization was required not only in the upper echelons. Things had to be done in such a way that at the lower level, involving the rank and file, the collective farms and state farms would function without constantly having to be urged along from above. These problems tormented Father unceasingly. Questions without answers. So far at least. At the same time, on February 23, 1961, Father had a meeting in the Kremlin with agricultural officials from the non–Black Earth regions to discuss preparations for the spring sowing. Then he set off on further travels, flying to the east. On March 1 he was in Sverdlovsk, on March 4 in Kurgan, on March 8 in Novosibirsk, and on March 14 in Akmolinsk in Kazakhstan. Everywhere he

“If You Don’t Oversee It Yourself . . .”

17

held meetings with local officials, listened closely to reports and speeches, investigated thoroughly, and looked into specific local details. In Akmolinsk, Father suggested that the city’s name be changed, for example to Tselinograd (which means “Virgin Lands City”). “In the Kazakh language, Akmolinsk means ‘White Grave,’ which probably corresponded to reality in the olden times, the days of nomadic sheep-herders,” Father argued, “but today this is the capital of a very rich granary, and its name ought to correspond to that.” At the same time, he recommended that the Kazakhs move the capital of their republic from Alma-Ata to the center of the Virgin Lands region, so that it would be in the thick of things.7 As early as March 20, 1961, Akmolinsk was renamed Tselinograd, but the Kazakhs were in no hurry to move from the eternal springtime they enjoyed in the paradise-like foothills of the Ala-Tau mountain range to the flat plains of the Virgin Lands region with its unbearable heat in the summer and savage frosts in the winter. Father did not insist. At the end of the twentieth century, Tselinograd was renamed Astana and became the capital of the independent republic of Kazakhstan. From Tselinograd, Father flew to Alma-Ata. There he busied himself looking into cotton production and irrigation in the Fergana Valley and the Golodnaya Steppe region. On March 24, after nearly two months of travel, Father returned to Moscow. On March 31, he submitted to the CC Presidium a forty-page memorandum in which he shared his impressions.8 He began by talking about personnel. He compared the speeches of people he had met several years earlier with those of the present. “You can see how people have matured on the collective and state farms.” At the same time he said, “Among first secretaries of party province committees, people with a poor knowledge of agriculture have not disappeared, nor have they undertaken a real study of economics.” The party cadres were a real headache for Father, but in his memorandum he drew no far-reaching conclusions. He noted that even after the plowing up of the Virgin Lands in Kazakhstan, there still remained up to 90 million hectares of pastureland, so that there was room for raising more livestock. He was concerned about the lag in housing construction in the Virgin Lands. In the preceding two years, not quite 7.7 million square meters of housing had been built, and what was worse, there was an increasing disparity. In 1959 there was a need for 1.9 million more square meters, and in 1960 the figure had risen already to 5.8 million. What was to blame? Capital investment in housing had been reduced and modern prefabricated housing construction methods disregarded. “We cannot rely solely on the enthusiasm of people,” Father wrote. “The houses have a poor, unpleasant appearance; there are too few modern buildings,

18 At a Crossroads: 1961 constructed with the latest materials. There are a lot of barracks. There is disregard of standard designs in the building of schools, kindergartens, and childcare centers. Settlements for factory workers give an unpleasant impression. The buildings are only one story high, and the settlements stretch out for several kilometers. “I make a motion that we adopt a resolution to reorganize housing construction in the Virgin Lands.”9 The resolution was adopted, and matters improved somewhat. This showed the truth of a certain concept: it is better to see something once with your own eyes than to hear about it a hundred times. Father concluded his memorandum with some discussion of economics. He spoke about multicomponent work brigades operating on a self-sustaining basis. He conceived of these as virtually independent units, producing goods on their own account and being paid out of their own resources. However, he was also not in a hurry with these proposals. He suggested that “learned economists should seriously analyze the new phenomena, draw scientific conclusions, and recommend more efficient and rational ways of engaging in agriculture.”10 In his memorandum, Father took a lot of space for details, wrote about specific innovations that interested him, and shared his impressions about people he had met. With that, his work on preparing for the spring sowing was finished, but he did not feel like sitting around in Moscow. The year 1961 marked the anniversary of the establishment of Soviet power in Armenia, which had occurred forty years earlier, on May 5, 1921. Khrushchev was an honored guest in Armenia. He gave a speech of congratulations, and after the official ceremonies were completed he made a trip to the most celebrated observatory in those years, the Byurakan Astronomical Observatory (on the southern slope of Mount Ararat, near Armenia’s capital, Yerevan). He took a look at the stars, and spoke with the founder of the observatory, no less celebrated an astrophysicist than academician Viktor Amazaspovich Ambartsumyan, a specialist in nonstationary stars and gaseous nebulae. He was the first to discover a new astronomical phenomenon—“associated” stars. Father spent almost an entire day with Ambartsumyan: carried out an official tapecutting ceremony for a new telescope that had just been installed by Leningraders, which he inspected; listened to a lecture on the most recent advances in star science; and had tea with the astronomers. On the next day, Father could not deny himself the pleasure of driving around the countryside, and without going into Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, he departed directly for Tbilisi. The Georgians, following right after the Armenians, also celebrated the fortieth anniversary of Soviet power in their country. Father had already visited Georgia in February, but how could he be in Yerevan and not stop in at Tbilisi?! Again there were speeches honoring the anniversary, and after that a visit to a factory that produced electric locomotives, the most

Kozlov “in Charge”

19

modern such plant in the country at the time. He also visited the tea plantations of Kakhetia. On May 15, 1961, Father returned to Moscow and on May 28 he took a train to Vienna to meet with US president John F. Kennedy. Difficult discussions between the two leaders took place on June 3 and 4 in Vienna. They were hardly able to agree on anything, but—more important—they did get to know one another.

3 Kozlov “in Charge” In Father’s absence his first deputy, Frol Kozlov, conducted the affairs

of state. Of course he called Khrushchev regularly and consulted with him on the most important matters, based on his own interpretation and selection of what those were. Father received mail from Moscow daily and signed decrees and resolutions, but the Moscow chefs cooked up their dishes without him and, to some extent, without his knowledge. There is a contradiction here that exists not only for authoritarian governments but also for democracies. If a leader stays in the capital all the time, he won’t know the truth about the life of his country. But lengthy absence from the center of government could endanger his hold on power. Humanity has not developed a universal recipe for solving this problem. Each leader works it out using his own judgment and following the inclinations of his personality. Those who care more about power stick to their seats in the capital, while those more concerned about their country travel around it constantly. Father had complete confidence in Kozlov. In fact he soon began to introduce Kozlov to foreign guests on a semiofficial basis as his successor. Kozlov acted accordingly and soon was holding the other members of the Presidium firmly in his fist. Some resisted, and some willingly submitted to Kozlov. Anastas Mikoyan found the advancement of Kozlov particularly painful. Mikoyan was one of two first deputies to the chairman of the Council of Ministers—that is, to Khrushchev, whose post was the equivalent of a prime minister in Western countries. Mikoyan was a veteran of the revolution, a wise old patriarch, and he himself aspired to a leading role. Then along came this nobody, Kozlov. But Mikoyan was not by nature capable of being the top leader. Father valued and respected Mikoyan, sincerely sympathized with him, and considered him his

Kozlov “in Charge”

19

modern such plant in the country at the time. He also visited the tea plantations of Kakhetia. On May 15, 1961, Father returned to Moscow and on May 28 he took a train to Vienna to meet with US president John F. Kennedy. Difficult discussions between the two leaders took place on June 3 and 4 in Vienna. They were hardly able to agree on anything, but—more important—they did get to know one another.

3 Kozlov “in Charge” In Father’s absence his first deputy, Frol Kozlov, conducted the affairs

of state. Of course he called Khrushchev regularly and consulted with him on the most important matters, based on his own interpretation and selection of what those were. Father received mail from Moscow daily and signed decrees and resolutions, but the Moscow chefs cooked up their dishes without him and, to some extent, without his knowledge. There is a contradiction here that exists not only for authoritarian governments but also for democracies. If a leader stays in the capital all the time, he won’t know the truth about the life of his country. But lengthy absence from the center of government could endanger his hold on power. Humanity has not developed a universal recipe for solving this problem. Each leader works it out using his own judgment and following the inclinations of his personality. Those who care more about power stick to their seats in the capital, while those more concerned about their country travel around it constantly. Father had complete confidence in Kozlov. In fact he soon began to introduce Kozlov to foreign guests on a semiofficial basis as his successor. Kozlov acted accordingly and soon was holding the other members of the Presidium firmly in his fist. Some resisted, and some willingly submitted to Kozlov. Anastas Mikoyan found the advancement of Kozlov particularly painful. Mikoyan was one of two first deputies to the chairman of the Council of Ministers—that is, to Khrushchev, whose post was the equivalent of a prime minister in Western countries. Mikoyan was a veteran of the revolution, a wise old patriarch, and he himself aspired to a leading role. Then along came this nobody, Kozlov. But Mikoyan was not by nature capable of being the top leader. Father valued and respected Mikoyan, sincerely sympathized with him, and considered him his

20 At a Crossroads: 1961 friend, but he was apprehensive about entrusting full power to him. He understood that Mikoyan was a resourceful negotiator, but that Mikoyan would do everything he could to avoid making a decision at a difficult moment. Mikoyan would second-guess himself and get lost in his own thoughts. By the time he came to, it would be too late. Thus, in Hungary in 1956, when Mikoyan represented the Soviet leadership at a time of crisis, his endless compromising finally resulted in bloodshed. Mikoyan treated Kozlov as an equal and even had a friendly attitude toward him, as did Kozlov toward Mikoyan, but everyone around them understood that all this was only for the sake of appearances. Mikoyan was jealous. When he was alone with Father he would try to influence Father against Kozlov. He would say that Kozlov was a Stalinist and a toady and that he was corrupt. Father understood what was motivating Mikoyan and did not respond to what he said. And when Mikoyan became especially insistent he would remark heatedly: “Don’t try to make a scapegoat out of Kozlov.”1 Kozlov, having become the Number Two man in the government, and when Father was absent, the Number One man, began to “introduce order” with an iron hand. Where Father might hesitate or Mikoyan go off on a sidetrack, Kozlov would forge ahead like a tank. He also wanted to carry out reforms, but in his own way. With Kozlov’s arrival at this key position in the Central Committee, punitive and prohibitive decrees, couched in the harshest terms, came pouring out like peas from a torn sack. Of course he did not pass these decrees unilaterally, but he initiated them, persuaded Father to go along with them, and pushed for votes on them to be taken at the CC Presidium. It seemed as though each new draft of a law imposed a little more order, which seemed so necessary, in some particular area, often a very localized one. But all together, they took the form of a vertical line of increased government repression that was more in keeping with Stalin’s time than Khrushchev’s. Here are just a few examples from 1961 and early 1962. On May 4, 1961, a decree was issued by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union titled “On strengthening the struggle against especially dangerous crimes for which the use of the death penalty is permitted, including theft of state property on an especially large scale.” Soviet citizens had been freed from the Stalin-era terror, when they could be sentenced to many years in the prison camps for stealing even a handful of grain from a government field, but now they were stealing from each other more and more, and above all were stealing from the state. After all, government property didn’t belong to anyone; it was the property “of all the people.” People stole from government enterprises, stores, collective farms, and cooperatives. Ordinary people stole on a small scale but the officials, not all of them, but a significant number, stole on a large scale. Theft and embezzlement accounted for 44.5 percent of the total number of crimes committed in 1960.2 In Kozlov’s view, only the severest measure could nip this growing process in the bud while it could still be stopped—a measure that would send chills

Kozlov “in Charge”

21

down people’s spines at the very thought of stealing anything. Among the people, the new decree met with approval. Another decree was adopted on that same day, on May 4, 1961, but in this case by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation. It was titled “On strengthening the struggle against persons disinclined to participate in useful social labor and pursuing an antisocial, parasitical mode of life.” This decree made it obligatory for the police and for the courts of all kinds to warn, to reeducate, and even to send into internal exile, for terms of two to five years, all “parasites” and everyone whom the police or public opinion considered in need of reeducation. This was the decree applied to poet and future Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Brodsky, who was exiled from Leningrad in 1964 on the grounds of being a “parasite.” Immediately, countless numbers of people appeared who wanted to reeducate others or have people reeducated or, more important, to make a show of force. Like the enforcer gangs of Ivan the Terrible (the so-called Oprichniki), they terrorized people who for one reason or another did not have regular work or who did not have a certificate proving such employment. Approximately 200,000 people, in 1961 alone, were sent off to be “reeducated,” and not all of them were alcoholics.3 Writers or painters, for example, were automatically classified as “parasites” if the union representing their profession, in this case the Writers Union or the Artists Union, had not issued them the appropriate document showing proof of membership, which happened in the case of Brodsky. This decree caused a lot of harm to our country, just as the Oprichniki had done in the time of Ivan the Terrible. On May 24, 1961, a new decree was issued titled “Responsibility for unauthorized insertions and other violations of proper bookkeeping in the fulfillment of economic plans.” Here there was no room for explanation: “If you lie, the thunder of prison will come down on you.” On June 7, 1961, a decree was adopted that caused a great sensation. This was the decree about increasing the extent of criminal responsibility for those who violated regulations governing currency operations. This decree is linked with the names of two forerunners of today’s “new Russians.” These were virtually the first Soviet speculators in foreign currency, Pyotr Rokotov and Grigory Faibishenko. Their case was also a sign of the changing times. Previously, neither the government nor its citizens had possessed any foreign currency. But now the hotels were filled, and foreigners were allowed to wander around Moscow, and not only Moscow, on their own without people keeping close track of them. They quickly realized it was foolish to exchange dollars at the ridiculous rate of ninety kopecks to the dollar when there were nice and capable-seeming young people hovering around them all the time and offering to exchange no less than four rubles to the dollar. Under the laws existing at the time, a person could be jailed for the illegal exchange of foreign currency. However, in a few months, through illegal

22 At a Crossroads: 1961 speculation in foreign currency, such large sums could be accumulated that a few years in prison were not frightening. The situation was getting out of hand. A halt had to be called before it was too late, and it had to be done in such a way as to teach people not to do it again. At that point the case of Pyotr Rokotov and Grigory Faibishenko occurred. These two men were highly skillful speculators in foreign currency who had recently been arrested. They were sentenced to fifteen years in prison under the laws in effect at the time. On June 16, 1961, their sentence was published in the newspapers. Those who read the papers considered the sentence too lenient, and letters came pouring in to the Central Committee. Father found out about the sentence on June 16, from the newspapers like everyone else. It also made him angry, but his indignation carried more weight than that of ordinary readers. On the next day he brought the question up at a CC Presidium meeting. The stenographic record of that Presidium meeting has been preserved. Father spoke about people’s dissatisfaction with the lenient sentences being given to murderers, thieves, and rapists. In his opinion, Rokotov and Faibishenko belonged to the same category. They had been “robbing the workers and peasants” for so many years, yet with time off for good behavior they would probably be in prison only about five years, then they would go free and start doing the same old thing again. In confirmation of his remarks, Father cited many letters he had received from local areas. Those present at the meeting approved the strengthening of enforcement measures for robbery and serious economic crimes, up to and including the death penalty.4 Soon the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet adopted a revised law that corresponded to this situation. The law was made effective retroactively, and Rokotov and Faibishenko were executed. As I recall, in the social circles where I moved, this form of retribution was considered just. I did not find the sentence repugnant then, nor do I today. Unlike me, after the passage of half a century, there are a fairly large number of people who sympathize with these skillful and somehow really very nice entrepreneurs, Petya Rokotov and Grisha Faibishenko (to use their nicknames). And these people now condemn the government for its excessively severe sentence, especially since the law was made retroactive. There’s no point arguing about people’s sympathies, and we could end the discussion at this point. However, it turns out that ending the discussion here would be premature. It seems that foreign currency speculation was not actually the central issue in the life and death of Rokotov and Faibishenko. But back then we did not know about their main form of activity.

Grisha Faibishenko and Petya Rokotov

23

4 Grisha Faibishenko and Petya Rokotov What had happened earlier in the careers of Rokotov and Faibishenko

is related by Nina Voronel in her exceptionally interesting memoirs.1 Nina Voronel’s husband was the “dissident” Aleksandr Voronel. In her memoirs she writes about her own life and about numerous friends and acquaintances, including Petya Rokotov and Grisha Faibishenko. It turns out that in 1961, people preferred to keep quiet about the main entrepreneurial activity of Petya and Grisha. I had never heard this story before from anyone, but I have no reason to doubt Voronel. “In the family album of my mother-in-law,” Voronel writes, “there was preserved for many years a photograph of three young women. Without even looking at the caption in white ink, ‘Yevpatoria 1928,’ which cuts off a corner of the photograph diagonally, one could say unerringly that it had been taken some time in the 1920s.”2 Voronel continues: The fate of two of the women in the photo does not concern us. I turn to the third one, a dark-haired, sharp-eyed girl named Tusya. She fell in love with and married a very handsome Jewish lad named Grisha [Faibishenko], who feared neither God nor the devil nor Soviet power. Tusya’s dashing husband, Grisha, was one of the owners of a knittedwear garment business worth many millions [an illegal business]. It’s true that Grisha was not the head of the business. The ingenious entrepreneur who headed it was Petya Rokotov. I speak of him in this familiar way, using his nickname, because that’s what he was called at Tusya’s house. And that was of course after his exposure and trial. Before that no one among us ever mentioned Rokotov by name or the knitted-wear garment operation. It was amazingly simple the way it was set up. Numerous agents of this enormous and well-conceived organization traveled around from village to village and bought from the peasants wool that they had sheared from their own sheep. The bales of sheep’s wool were delivered by truck to several mental hospitals specially contracted for this purpose, and there the patients were put to work spinning woolen yarn as a form of work therapy. The mental hospitals themselves and the doctors involved in the business made substantial profits, and the woolen yarn was shipped from them to government knitted-wear factories. There when the workday was over the machines continued to operate. An unofficial shift of garment workers who were willing to earn a few more pennies on top of their miserable wage set to work on the machines. The blouses and sweaters produced unofficially were

24 At a Crossroads: 1961 prettier and of higher quality than the government-made ones, because they were made according to a special design ordered from really good designers of clothing. The finished product appeared in the same shops and stores as the government product. The whole business was ruined, as usual, by an absurd human weakness—Rokotov took a lover. It’s hard to condemn him for this. What good is so much money to a man if he can’t allow himself a small pleasure like that? His wife accepted the existence of this mistress. Who knows? Maybe she had been interested in him from way back not so much as a husband, but as a “good provider.” But a minor miscalculation by the husband made her furious: as a New Year’s gift he bought his mistress a mink coat, but all he gave his wife was a synthetic fur coat. In her fury the woman lost her good sense. She went to the police and wrote out a denunciation of her husband. Rokotov was arrested. Grisha was also arrested. They were both sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The ingenious Rokotov’s fate took a tragic turn. At first he was just sent to prison. It’s possible that, having some savings, he could have arranged a comfortable life for himself even there, but a year after his imprisonment a new law was adopted in the USSR providing for the death penalty for economic crimes.3 Rokotov was the first to whom this law was applied, and of course it was done retroactively. His case was reviewed and he was shot in violation of all international legal standards. After Grisha’s arrest at Tusya’s home some sort of people [Secret Police], broke in and began tapping on the walls and pulling up planks from the parquet floor. Police also arrived at Tusya’s dacha outside the city, although as a precaution it had been registered not in the name of Grisha or Tusya but in that of her older sister, an artist. A special team with many investigators arrived, and they methodically dug up the whole expansive wood lot, searching for hidden gold. But the dashing Grisha was not such a fool as to keep his gold at home, and so the police had to leave empty-handed. Of course Grisha had gold. Where could he stash his fairly substantial earnings of many years’ time? Certainly not in a savings bank, right? Undoubtedly he bought both gold and jewelry and hid them in a secret place, known to no one, at the house of Tusya’s brother Izzy. Before his arrest Grisha kept this stash secret as a precaution. If no one but him knew about it, no one would blurt out the information. And he was sure of himself. Grisha served nine of the fifteen years in prison, after which he was released for reasons of health. He came out of prison a total invalid. Before his imprisonment he was openhearted and cheerful, but after his release from prison his personality changed drastically for the worse. He often got angry for no reason, and the secret of the treasure was revealed to no one, not even Tusya. Very soon afterward Grisha died of a heart attack, leaving Tusya a widow. A few years after Grisha’s death, Tusya’s brother Izzy was hospitalized for some sort of simple operation. The operation went well, and Izzy was about to be released. But just before his release he had either a heart attack or an embolism in a coronary artery, and he died suddenly without revealing to anyone the location of the hidden treasure. The entire family, the brothers and sisters who remained alive, along with their offspring and spouses, flew to the place where Grisha had been born in a provincial city (which we will call M). After weeping a little at Izzy’s funeral the relatives began searching for the hidden treasure. Hiding their activity from the neighbors, they spent an entire month pulling up the parquet floors and

Kozlov “in Charge,” Continued

25

putting them back, and they dug up the whole garden area, but they didn’t find anything. Once again the gold remained somewhere unknown, either buried in our Mother Earth or immured in stone in the depths of some cellar.

That is the story she tells, although, as I recall, it was not only Rokotov who was executed but also Faibishenko. My recollection is that in the newspaper reports there was a hyphenated name, “Rokotov-Faibishenko.” But my recollection could be wrong. To me they were aliens, people I did not know, but for the Voronels they were close acquaintances.

5 Kozlov “in Charge,” Continued After the Rokotov-Faibishenko case there was a brief lull. Kozlov went

on vacation, during which he prepared his report for the Twenty-Second Party Congress, held in October 1961. After that congress, on November 11, 1961, Father again took a trip around the country to investigate how the harvesting was going. Once again, as though from a horn of plenty, decrees and resolutions came pouring forth. They imposed strict punishments for various infractions and regulated all aspects of life. On November 29, 1961, for example, a new law was introduced on “criminal responsibility for negligence in maintaining agricultural equipment.” Such a large number of laws, decrees, and regulations followed that I limit myself to simply listing some of them: “On organizing the sale of timber from collective-farm forests”; “On standards for the maintenance of livestock by the workers of state-owned agricultural enterprises, as well as by citizens living on the territory of such enterprises”; “On the standards for plots of land used as gardens and plots next to the homes of workers at state-owned agricultural enterprises, as well as of other citizens living on the territory of such enterprises”; “On the prohibition against keeping horses and oxen as the private property of citizens”; “On measures to improve the marketing of agricultural products by collective farms and commissions”; “On measures to improve commerce by commissions”; “On bringing proper order into the sale of agricultural products, building materials, and roofing materials to private individuals”; “On measures to reinforce the struggle against theft of state property and abuses in commerce”; “On making a special count, on a one-time basis, of that part of the population

Kozlov “in Charge,” Continued

25

putting them back, and they dug up the whole garden area, but they didn’t find anything. Once again the gold remained somewhere unknown, either buried in our Mother Earth or immured in stone in the depths of some cellar.

That is the story she tells, although, as I recall, it was not only Rokotov who was executed but also Faibishenko. My recollection is that in the newspaper reports there was a hyphenated name, “Rokotov-Faibishenko.” But my recollection could be wrong. To me they were aliens, people I did not know, but for the Voronels they were close acquaintances.

5 Kozlov “in Charge,” Continued After the Rokotov-Faibishenko case there was a brief lull. Kozlov went

on vacation, during which he prepared his report for the Twenty-Second Party Congress, held in October 1961. After that congress, on November 11, 1961, Father again took a trip around the country to investigate how the harvesting was going. Once again, as though from a horn of plenty, decrees and resolutions came pouring forth. They imposed strict punishments for various infractions and regulated all aspects of life. On November 29, 1961, for example, a new law was introduced on “criminal responsibility for negligence in maintaining agricultural equipment.” Such a large number of laws, decrees, and regulations followed that I limit myself to simply listing some of them: “On organizing the sale of timber from collective-farm forests”; “On standards for the maintenance of livestock by the workers of state-owned agricultural enterprises, as well as by citizens living on the territory of such enterprises”; “On the standards for plots of land used as gardens and plots next to the homes of workers at state-owned agricultural enterprises, as well as of other citizens living on the territory of such enterprises”; “On the prohibition against keeping horses and oxen as the private property of citizens”; “On measures to improve the marketing of agricultural products by collective farms and commissions”; “On measures to improve commerce by commissions”; “On bringing proper order into the sale of agricultural products, building materials, and roofing materials to private individuals”; “On measures to reinforce the struggle against theft of state property and abuses in commerce”; “On making a special count, on a one-time basis, of that part of the population

26 At a Crossroads: 1961 which is capable of working but is avoiding social labor and is living on unearned income.”1 And that was only during the remainder of 1961. New laws poured forth in 1962: on February 2, a decree “on increasing criminal penalties for attempts made on the life and health of police officers and members of the people’s volunteer police-assistance brigades”; on February 20, a decree “on increasing criminal penalties for bribe-taking”; and on April 4, a decree “on taking measures to bring pressure to bear for malicious refusal to obey lawful orders or demands by police officers or members of the people’s volunteer police-assistance brigades.” And those are not all the new laws by far. I am simply tired of listing all the laws that embody reform in the Kozlov style. The last in the series of Kozlov laws was titled “Increasing criminal responsibility for arbitrarily stopping a railroad train for no reason.” It was dated October 21, 1963. It was issued “after Kozlov” but it was entirely in his spirit. The flood of prohibitive and excessively punitive laws began with Kozlov’s arrival as Number Two man in May 1960, and it began to dry up after April 11, 1963, when a very severe stroke ended his capacity for government work. That was how Kozlov understood the concept of serving his country, and he served it according to that concept.

6 Day by Day In January 1961 the press, radio, and television trumpeted a new de-

velopment: a Moscow railroad yard had decided to become a “communist labor enterprise.” What exactly that meant I don’t recall very well now. And even then there was hardly any precise definition of the term. Otherwise, it would have been necessary also to define “communism” just as precisely. Everyone who wrote and read knew one thing about communism: it was our bright future. In addition, everyone understood or pretended to understand that at a “communist labor enterprise” people did better work than at other enterprises, and without special urging. On top of that, they didn’t drink or get rowdy. They participated in activities of some sort and made visits to this place or that. Everyone else was supposed to rise to their level. So everyone tried to do that, competing for the title of “communist labor brigade.” When someone somewhere decided that the mission had been accomplished, or the target had

26 At a Crossroads: 1961 which is capable of working but is avoiding social labor and is living on unearned income.”1 And that was only during the remainder of 1961. New laws poured forth in 1962: on February 2, a decree “on increasing criminal penalties for attempts made on the life and health of police officers and members of the people’s volunteer police-assistance brigades”; on February 20, a decree “on increasing criminal penalties for bribe-taking”; and on April 4, a decree “on taking measures to bring pressure to bear for malicious refusal to obey lawful orders or demands by police officers or members of the people’s volunteer police-assistance brigades.” And those are not all the new laws by far. I am simply tired of listing all the laws that embody reform in the Kozlov style. The last in the series of Kozlov laws was titled “Increasing criminal responsibility for arbitrarily stopping a railroad train for no reason.” It was dated October 21, 1963. It was issued “after Kozlov” but it was entirely in his spirit. The flood of prohibitive and excessively punitive laws began with Kozlov’s arrival as Number Two man in May 1960, and it began to dry up after April 11, 1963, when a very severe stroke ended his capacity for government work. That was how Kozlov understood the concept of serving his country, and he served it according to that concept.

6 Day by Day In January 1961 the press, radio, and television trumpeted a new de-

velopment: a Moscow railroad yard had decided to become a “communist labor enterprise.” What exactly that meant I don’t recall very well now. And even then there was hardly any precise definition of the term. Otherwise, it would have been necessary also to define “communism” just as precisely. Everyone who wrote and read knew one thing about communism: it was our bright future. In addition, everyone understood or pretended to understand that at a “communist labor enterprise” people did better work than at other enterprises, and without special urging. On top of that, they didn’t drink or get rowdy. They participated in activities of some sort and made visits to this place or that. Everyone else was supposed to rise to their level. So everyone tried to do that, competing for the title of “communist labor brigade.” When someone somewhere decided that the mission had been accomplished, or the target had

Day by Day

27

been met, the winners were given a banner with the appropriate inscription certifying their “accomplishment,” and people who especially distinguished themselves were given badges, which also certified that they were “people of distinguished service in communist labor.” Then they had to fight to keep their honorary titles, because otherwise they would never live down the shame. To drop the sarcasm for a moment, it was true that people at such enterprises worked more harmoniously, kept their work areas clean, and helped one another. In every society, throughout the ages, it has been necessary to have some sort of goal for people to strive for. That’s how people are made. On January 22, 1961, the first apartment building made of complete prefabricated units, not just individual panels, was put together in Kuzminki, a suburb of Moscow. In other words, instead of putting up wall panels, one after another, an entire prefabricated room could be brought from the factory and installed. All that was lacking was the ceiling. At the construction site, a row of room units would be set in place, then another row would be set on top of them, and soon an entire apartment building resulted. Who invented that construction technique I don’t remember now, but it was a great achievement in that field. The quality of construction improved, and the gaps between wall panels were eliminated. Simultaneously, less time was required for constructing such a building. That meant more housing was available and more people were settled into the new apartments. On January 24, 1961, the newspapers told about a Soviet scholar named Yuri Knorozov who had managed to decipher the previously insoluble hieroglyphics of the Mayas, whose civilization in Central America disappeared after the arrival of the Spaniards. I remember being very proud of Knorozov, especially because he had solved the problem using his own mental powers—unlike the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion, who decoded ancient Egyptian writing with the help of the Rosetta Stone, upon which a message was inscribed in two languages: Greek, which everyone knew, and Egyptian, which had previously been unknown. On January 30, 1961, the papers reported a phenomenal high jump of more than two meters by Valery Brumel. I was absolutely astounded. In gym classes at the Electric Power Institute, where I was a student, we also practiced the high jump, but I could never jump higher than a meter and a half, and here Brumel had jumped nearly as high as the ceiling of a standard apartment unit in a fivestory building. After Father’s retirement, I happened to meet Brumel and got to know him. He turned out to be a very nice fellow. On February 2, 1961, a natural-gas pipeline linking Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), Ivanovo, and Yaroslav was completed. Natural gas was being brought to the region around Moscow at top speed. Previously, gas had been a rare privilege for residents of the capital. It’s easy to experience what this meant for people: just turn off the gas in your apartment for one week. On February 21, 1961, the Novosti Press Agency was born. Nominally independent of the Soviet government, it was founded by three organizations on

28 At a Crossroads: 1961 an equal footing: the Union of Journalists, the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, and the educational association Znanie (Knowledge). Until then, monopoly control over the news was exercised by TASS (Russian acronym for Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union), which would announce from time to time that it was “authorized to state” something that the government did not wish to say openly. It also supplied all Soviet newspapers, without exception, with uniform information about life inside and outside our country. And day after day, on a timely basis, it delivered translations of news from foreign papers to Khrushchev and other top officials. Now there was an alternative to TASS. Let the Novosti agency tell in a “more human” way about life abroad and at home. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt for TASS to have some competition. Boris Burkov, editor of the trade-union newspaper Trud (Labor), was put in charge of Novosti. He was a decent person and not a bad journalist. My niece Yuliya (daughter of my brother Leonid, who died in the war), after she graduated from Moscow University, went to work at Novosti. Later, arrangements were also made for Leonid Brezhnev’s ne’er-do-well daughter, Galya, to work under Burkov. On March 10, 1961, an article appeared in Izvestia, the main government newspaper, under the headline “You’re Not from Our Economic Council.” The plague of local chauvinism was becoming increasingly evident. Each regional economic council tended to gather everything it could into its own nest and avoid cooperating with its neighbors as much as possible. It happily took anything given to it, but was painfully slow about handing out anything of its own. Something had to be done about this before it was too late. Since their founding in 1957, the regional economic councils had been functioning fairly well, but now some new reforms had to be introduced so that things wouldn’t go wrong. The only question was how. By intensifying control from above? Or by encouraging initiative from below, allowing more freedom to the directors of enterprises? In Moscow, people had been talking more and more persistently about the Yugoslav experience, about the workers’ councils in Yugoslavia, which did their work “independently” of the government and had been highly successful in doing so. People were constantly buzzing in Father’s ears about the Yugoslavs. Young reform-minded economists advocated the introduction of the Yugoslav form of economic management in our country. To me as well, those workers’ councils seemed very attractive. On every appropriate occasion I would start talking to Father about them. He listened, but was in no hurry to act. For him, unlike for me, the real essence of those councils remained unclear. He tried to question the Yugoslav ambassador, Veljko Mićunović, about them in greater detail. In the previous few years the two men had virtually become friends. Still, Father did not feel he had achieved clarity. He decided he would make a special trip to Yugoslavia to see them with his own eyes and get a firsthand feel for the situation. But not now. There was time enough for that later.

Day by Day

29

At the same time, pressure was being put on Father from the opposite direction. The pressure was very energetic, with strong argumentation. The former heads of ministries, which had been replaced by the regional economic councils in the decentralization reform of 1957, were worried that, supposedly, the regional economic councils had completely given up on trying new technology or undertaking further development; they were not interested in tomorrow or in our country’s overall needs. The only solution was tighter control over the regions, which ought to feel the guiding hand of “the Center.” The ministers did not demand immediate restoration of the ministries. They understood that this was not acceptable to Khrushchev. Instead, as a first step, they proposed that the regional economic councils be grouped into larger units, that several be merged into one, and that they be placed under the proper chain of command—that is, under the control of the central leadership structures. Thus it would be easier to oversee them from Moscow. Four top officials who differed on all other questions took a position in common on this one. They were Kozlov, Kosygin, Vladimir Novikov, head of the State Planning Committee, and Dmitry Ustinov, head of the Military-Industrial Commission. On May 28, Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta (Economic Gazette, the chief Soviet economic newspaper) gave voice to the opinion of those who favored a return to strict vertical control, from the top down, who wanted to rein in the selfwilled regional councils, and who proposed that the number of those councils (of which there were more than a hundred) be reduced to seventeen. Father read the article carefully, and when I pestered him with questions (why was everyone suddenly complaining about the local-mindedness of the regional councils?), he replied that the issue was not so simple; it had to be given some thought. And he repeated: “There’s time enough for that later.” In 1961, two groups regarding toward the further transformation of the economy were taking more and more distinct shape: the traditionalists, the supporters of centralization; and the innovators, who saw decentralization as the solution. Father leaned toward the latter, but for the time being maintained his neutrality. On March 13, 1961, at 9:30 in the morning, a disaster occurred. A dam broke in Kiev, at Babi Yar, a ravine in that city where during World War II the Nazis had executed more than 100,000 Kievans, mostly Jews. The ravine descends from the hills of Kiev to the floodplain of the Dnieper River. The municipal authorities had decided to level the ravine, to fill it in. Some people said a monument should be erected at the site to preserve forever the memory of those who had been killed; others said that the sooner the tragedy was forgotten, the better. As a first step a wall of earth had been built, and the silting of this earthen dam had begun when the rains came. The dam could not withstand the pressure of more than 3 million tons of liquid mud. It burst, and the viscous mass flooded over Podol, a lowland district of Kiev along the river. Houses were submerged; 145 people lost their lives and 143 were hospitalized. In those days, natural disasters and other such tragedies were not reported. Our society, and Father, had not yet matured to the point of understanding that

30 At a Crossroads: 1961 it is better to talk about things than hide them. In that instance, silence was maintained. But rumors spread even without the assistance of TASS or Novosti. Within a week, all of Moscow was talking about what had happened. Some people got angry, suspecting that hidden anti-Semitism was behind the official silence. Others had no such suspicions, but were also indignant. It just so happened that around the time of this second tragedy at Babi Yar, by sheer coincidence, Yevgeny Yevtushenko had completed his poem “Babi Yar,” about the killings during World War II and the absence of a monument at the site. Behind this coincidence the vigilant ideologists managed to detect an ideological provocation. That’s what their powers of vigilance were for. The underground anti-Semites also began to stir. In Russia, at all times in its history, there have been plenty of such people. Although the Germans shot not only Jews at Babi Yar, most of their victims were Jews, but for some reason it was considered shameful to talk about that. Be that as it may, as soon as the poem “Babi Yar” was published, in Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette) on September 19, 1961, a scandal erupted around it. Some denounced Yevtushenko; others extolled him. Among his detractors were official ideologists of the party’s Central Committee, and thus for many people Yevtushenko became a hero who suffered for the sake of the truth. He was praised to the skies. On March 20, 1961, a “fateful” event took place—censorship was abolished. Not all censorship, but censorship of telegraphic dispatches sent from Moscow by foreign journalists to their agencies and newspapers. In the Stalin era, the following practice had been introduced: before a dispatch from a foreign correspondent could be sent from a Moscow telegraph office, a censor stationed there read through it carefully and, after crossing things out with a red pencil, finally placed his personal stamp of authorization on it. Nothing resulted from this but inconvenience for the foreign journalists and more damage to our country’s reputation. The foreign journalists sent their uncensored articles by diplomatic pouches or took the “Red Arrow” express train to Leningrad and from there to Helsinki, in Finland, where there was no such thing as censorship at the telegraph offices. It’s true that in cases of “especially vicious slander of the Soviet Union” the journalists might not be allowed back into our country, but after Stalin’s death that kind of thing became increasingly rare. Nevertheless, this form of censorship was maintained. At some reception a foreign journalist complained about this to Father, who ordered: “Abolish this.” And it was abolished. At first the journalists could not believe their luck and cautiously handed in their carefully edited articles at the familiar window of the telegraph office in Moscow and then looked with surprise at the receipt showing that the dispatch had been sent without any stamp of authorization by the censor. But soon everyone got used to it. When good things happen, people get used to them quickly. As for Father, he needled the ideologists whenever the occasion arose: “We abolished the censorship and nothing happened; our country didn’t collapse.” The ideologists preserved a gloomy silence. They didn’t agree with Father, but they didn’t dare oppose him.

Day by Day

31

On March 30, 1961, the Russian Orthodox Church joined the World Council of Churches. It was a step of no small significance. Under Stalin and after him, the church, just like our whole country, lived in complete isolation from the rest of the world. Now foreign contacts were gradually being established. Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Russian Orthodox Church had never stood above the government. It was a component part, an important one, in the structure of the Russian state machinery. If patriarchs of the church proved refractory, the tsars banished them to monasteries. And one of the tsars, Peter the Great, eliminated the Patriarchate altogether. He made the head of the church one of his government ministers. From that time on, the Russian rulers used their authority to appoint or remove hierarchs of the Orthodox Church. The Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church was revived after the October 1917 revolution, and separation of church and state was established. But the church was revived only to be hurled into the abyss soon afterward. Every revolution rejects the religion that had served the previous government. That’s how the French behaved at the end of the eighteenth century, replacing the Catholic God with their own revolutionary deity, the Cult of Supreme Reason. The Bolsheviks behaved in a similar way. They confiscated the worldly goods of the church, and in the requisitioned church buildings they organized clubs in one place, movie theaters in another, and warehouses somewhere else. God was gradually replaced by Karl Marx and later by Lenin. The new religion did not take root easily. Although in peasant huts the icons in the “sacred corner” were replaced by portraits of the leaders, people continued to pray to the old God they were used to. The only thing was, there was no particular place you could go to pray, and hardly any priests remained. But they still had their congregations, even though they were not officially employed. In the 1930s, Stalin sent them off to the prison camps to cut down trees. During the war, frightened by the German invasion, he took back his harsh treatment of the church, appealed for unity of all the people against the foe, brought the clergymen who were still alive back from the camps, and allowed them to pray to God for the victory of Russian arms and a long, long life for Stalin. They could lead these prayers in whatever churches still remained. Both my parents were avowed atheists all their adult lives and did not believe in God. Of course that did not prevent Father from mentioning God now and then in his speeches or everyday conversations. He recalled that their village priest had taught them grammar in a church school, which had only first and second grade. That did not prevent him from asserting rather willfully that the time would come when he would shake the hand of the last priest on our Soviet soil. But he did not manage to do that. Father’s statement about “the last handshake” gave rise to a new wave of persecution of the church. No clergymen were sent to prison camps this time, but churches were closed wherever that could be done on seemingly plausible pretexts, mainly on the grounds that there was “no congregation.” Father did not encourage the new wave of “militant atheists” who were doing this. I never

32 At a Crossroads: 1961 heard any statements like that from him. But he did not restrain them. He thought that religion was dying as part of a spontaneous process, and that these people were just acting as its gravediggers. Nevertheless, the Number One person in a government is responsible for everything. To this day, religious believers use terribly impolite terms in referring to Father—because of the churches that were closed in his day. On May 20, 1961, the foreign journalists, now freed from the censorship, trumpeted to the whole world that Khrushchev no longer considered heavy industry a priority. He was calling for more attention to consumer goods. There were political implications in the discussion about the balance between heavy and light industry. Father’s words were taken as a step in the direction of liberalism, and quite a daring step at that. The priority of heavy industry was a sacred cow in the Stalinist version of Marxism. But the dispute over heavy versus light industry in my opinion was a scholastic one. Neither sector of industry can exist without the other, and the proportions and priorities between them must be chosen in accordance with circumstances. On the Fourth of July, 1961, accompanied by other top leaders of our country, Father visited the residence of the US ambassador on Spaso-Nalivkovsky Lane for a reception in honor of Independence Day. Such visits had become standard practice, since 1955, and no longer surprised anyone. There was something else that everyone noticed at the reception: Father did not allow even a drop of champagne to touch his lips, citing reasons of health. That was his reaction to speculation in the Western press about his excessive use of alcohol. Father was not a drinker, and now he had decided to refrain demonstratively from drinking in the presence of foreigners. On July 6, 1961, Izvestia began a discussion about what kind of housing we needed. The previous year, at a meeting of the Moscow City Council on August 18, 1960, everyone, including Father, agreed that the era of five-story apartment buildings without elevators was coming to an end. The needs resulting from a severe shortage of housing had been met. Putting in streets and utility lines was becoming more expensive, and elevators were becoming cheaper. The construction organizations were reorienting toward eight-story buildings and even higher ones. However, this obvious solution turned out not to be so obvious at all. We lacked the necessary resources. In particular, there was a steel shortage. Only with great effort were the planning targets met for new housing. Increasing the height of apartment buildings resulted in a greater need for metal, but the metallurgical industry’s plans had been decided long before that, and so there was no way that the necessary amount of metal could be produced. This meant that while we were trying to build higher, we were falling short of our goal by many square meters of living space. Thus, thousands of apartments remained uncompleted, and thousands of potential new apartment dwellers were left holding the bag. A report to this effect reached Khrushchev’s desk from the Central Committee department in charge of construction. Father summoned some economists

Day by Day

33

to meet with him. After detailed discussion with them, he canceled the speech he was going to give at the third unionwide Congress of Architects, which gathered in Moscow on May 18–20, 1961. In that speech he had planned to announce an end to the era of five-story apartment buildings. Instead he placed the question of the economics of housing construction on the agenda for the Presidium meeting of June 17, 1961. Opinions differed. Vladimir Kucherenko, head of the State Committee for Construction, agreed with the opinion of the Central Committee department in charge of construction that the number of stories should be increased and that it was necessary to use elevators. Although that would increase the cost of construction, the increase would not be significant, only 8 percent. In his opinion, if we continued to build five-story apartment buildings, it would cost us more to put in streets, utility lines, and other infrastructure. “One new kilometer of the subway system costs more than a billion rubles.” With this statement, Yekaterina Furtseva, member of the CC Presidium and former first secretary of Moscow City Party Committee, expressed her support for Kucherenko. “And if we take into account transportation costs, for Muscovites the increased height is justifiable.” Father joined in the discussion. “The Moscow authorities are demanding an increase in the height of construction, but with the exception of the major cities, two-story buildings are still being put up everywhere. This is simply criminal, and a tremendous waste of resources. If we increase the number of stories in apartment building construction throughout the country, the cost per square meter is reduced, and the quantity of new housing thus made available increases.” As reported by Kucherenko in his report: “In five-story buildings the costs per square meter are 49 percent less in comparison to two-story buildings.” Another means of economizing was to allow private construction by individuals at their own expense. Of course no one objected to that as long as the builders used their own money. “But if they’re using government credit,” stated Father, “it is more rational not to spend resources in that way, but to invest them in multi-story cooperative apartment buildings.” In the end, no decision was reached. The Presidium agreed to listen further to what Muscovites, Leningraders, and Kievans had to say. Maybe then a unionwide conference on municipal construction could be held. “Everything has to be analyzed very carefully,” said Father, summing up the discussion. “We want to build more housing. The important thing is to seek out any and all possibilities for that, but only with the proviso that conditions for the residents are made better, not worse.”1 Of course, Aleksei Adzhubei, chief editor of Izvestia and husband of my sister Rada, knew about the discussion at the Central Committee Presidium and decided to join the conversation about what kind of buildings should be put up and where. He opened the pages of Izvestia to the public and asked readers to express their opinions on the subject.

34 At a Crossroads: 1961 On August 10, 1961, Father inspected the nearly completed Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin. The forthcoming party congress was to be held in that building in the middle of October. Father was satisfied. With its lightness and whiteness, the building contrasted nicely with the dark-red brick of the Kremlin, but at the same time it did not detract from the older structures. The Palace of Congresses seemed to complement, to add to and complete, the Grand Palace of the Kremlin, both functionally and architecturally, becoming a symbol of the way in which the Kremlin was constantly being renewed. On August 18, 1961, a Stalin-era law requiring that citizens register all individual radios with the police was revoked. At the same time the fee was abolished for individual use of radios. On August 23, 1961, a new Central Committee resolution was publicized by all the mass media. It was titled “On the incorrect practice of manufacturing memorial gifts for the Twenty-Second Party Congress.” People had been doing that kind of thing ever since the 1930s and possibly even earlier. Thousands of factories, plants, mines, collective farms, and the like would report to the latest party congress about their successes and accomplishments, and as proof of those they would send to Moscow countless individual specimens of machinery, ships, blast furnaces, and so forth. Of course, these were produced at government expense during work hours. Father was trying to nip this bacchanalia of gift-giving in the bud. The Central Committee resolution suggested: “Instead of this unnecessary waste of resources on gifts, fulfill the plans for production. That is the best gift that can be given to the congress.” On September 9, 1961, the newspapers reported the founding of a research institute on Soviet-American relations. This was the forerunner of an institution that would become quite celebrated later on—the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada.

7 The Film Our Nikita Sergeyevich and the Personality Cult At the beginning of June 1961, Our Nikita Sergeyevich, a documentary

film by Vasily Zakharchenko, made its appearance in Soviet movie theaters. Then on June 17, for the third time, Father was given the Hero of Socialist Labor award, a gold star medal. The first such medal he received was on his

34 At a Crossroads: 1961 On August 10, 1961, Father inspected the nearly completed Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin. The forthcoming party congress was to be held in that building in the middle of October. Father was satisfied. With its lightness and whiteness, the building contrasted nicely with the dark-red brick of the Kremlin, but at the same time it did not detract from the older structures. The Palace of Congresses seemed to complement, to add to and complete, the Grand Palace of the Kremlin, both functionally and architecturally, becoming a symbol of the way in which the Kremlin was constantly being renewed. On August 18, 1961, a Stalin-era law requiring that citizens register all individual radios with the police was revoked. At the same time the fee was abolished for individual use of radios. On August 23, 1961, a new Central Committee resolution was publicized by all the mass media. It was titled “On the incorrect practice of manufacturing memorial gifts for the Twenty-Second Party Congress.” People had been doing that kind of thing ever since the 1930s and possibly even earlier. Thousands of factories, plants, mines, collective farms, and the like would report to the latest party congress about their successes and accomplishments, and as proof of those they would send to Moscow countless individual specimens of machinery, ships, blast furnaces, and so forth. Of course, these were produced at government expense during work hours. Father was trying to nip this bacchanalia of gift-giving in the bud. The Central Committee resolution suggested: “Instead of this unnecessary waste of resources on gifts, fulfill the plans for production. That is the best gift that can be given to the congress.” On September 9, 1961, the newspapers reported the founding of a research institute on Soviet-American relations. This was the forerunner of an institution that would become quite celebrated later on—the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada.

7 The Film Our Nikita Sergeyevich and the Personality Cult At the beginning of June 1961, Our Nikita Sergeyevich, a documentary

film by Vasily Zakharchenko, made its appearance in Soviet movie theaters. Then on June 17, for the third time, Father was given the Hero of Socialist Labor award, a gold star medal. The first such medal he received was on his

The Film Our Nikita Sergeyevich and the Personality Cult

35

sixtieth birthday, in 1954, and the second was in 1957, for achievements in developing the Virgin Lands. In 1961, awards were given to more than 5,000 missile designers and missile builders, from ordinary workers to chief designer Sergei Korolyov, and from ordinary lieutenants to the commander of Soviet missile forces, Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin. Two hundred, or perhaps three hundred, other people also became Heroes of Socialist Labor, including from among the top leadership Frol Kozlov and Leonid Brezhnev, who were the Central Committee secretaries overseeing military production; Dmitry Ustinov, a deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and leading figure in the military-industrial sphere; two government ministers, Valery Kalmykov, who was responsible for developing electronics for military and nonmilitary use, and Konstantin Rudnev, who was in charge of the designing of missiles; also, the “theoretical cosmonaut” Mstislav Keldysh, president of the Academy of Sciences. In this context, because of achievements in space, and in rockets and missiles, and because he chose the strategy of a more rational and economically justified means of ensuring our country’s security, the award to Father was logical and fully merited. That is true only if you stick to logic. But public opinion is guided by emotion, not logic. It had an extremely negative response to this third “Hero” star for Khrushchev in six years. He should have rejected it, but he didn’t. Man is weak . . . Today, when many documents have been declassified, one can see that in fact Father did decline. In response to Frol Kozlov’s proposal that he be included in the list of award recipients, he said: “. . . it’s hardly necessary. . . . I don’t think that should be done.” But the “comrades” insisted, and Khrushchev “gave in.”1 He tried to refuse but in the end he accepted. However, heads of government are accountable in a special way. Even I felt embarrassed about this award, although as his son and a rocket scientist myself, I knew how much he had done in this field. But I didn’t say anything to him. I considered it “none of my business.” Then there was the film. On the one hand, it honestly reflected what had been accomplished in recent years: the cultivation of the Virgin Lands, construction of new housing, Father’s trips abroad and around our country, his welcoming of Yuri Gagarin after the first successful space flight, his speeches and press conferences. It’s amazing that he found the strength to do all that he did at his age. But no one thought about that aspect of what was shown in the documentary. What annoyed everyone was that Khrushchev appeared constantly, in almost every frame of the film. Our Nikita Sergeyevich not only annoyed people; it provoked them to turn against him. Equally “provocative” was the repeated appearance of his photos, along with speeches by him, on the front pages of newspapers. No one was interested in what he said, but his constant newspaper presence was taken not as proof of the enormous activity of a leader working himself to exhaustion, but as the revival of a “personality cult” on the ruins of the Stalin cult, which he himself had overthrown.

36 At a Crossroads: 1961 I do not know who came up with the term “personality cult.” Most likely, Mikhail Suslov dug out an appropriate quotation from somewhere in Karl Marx’s writings. As I recall in the summer of 1956, along with other papers and documents, a folder titled “Karl Marx on the Culture [sic] of the personality” was on Father’s desk at the Gorki-9 dacha. The typists and officials at the Central Committee were not yet used to the term “cult”; hence the mistake in calling it “culture.” When applied to a politician or to politics, “personality cult” is not an apt phrase. It does not explain where the tyrannical despotism of Stalin came from or how it arose. The glorification of a supreme ruler—and in that sense the “cult” around him—is a consequence, not a cause. The cult that grows up around a singer, ballerina, poet, or other artist is something altogether different. One may speak of the personality cult around the operatic bass singer Fyodor Chaliapin, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, or more recently the cults around such stars of stage or screen as Michael Jackson or Elvis Presley or the Russian singer Alla Pugachova. Here you have boundless idolization of someone’s talent, with people spending their last penny for a fancy bouquet to present to their object of worship or standing around all night under his or her window. This is truly a “personality cult,” the extravagant worship of some talent that the crowd has placed high on a pedestal. The organized glorification of a ruler, initiated by that ruler himself or by his entourage, is carried out for absolutely specific “secular” purposes and can hardly be called a “cult” in the sense of religious worship. But what kind of “cult” is it if at mass rallies and demonstrations the slogans are broadcast by powerful loudspeakers, accompanied by a roar that is not at all spontaneous, but fully rehearsed in advance, with applause prerecorded on tape? People standing in a city square in the midst of such a mass demonstration only accompany these officially broadcast slogans with clapping and shouts that are barely heard. Also, there is the practice of seating special claques in an auditorium on particular occasions, people who are trained to clap and shout at specific moments in order to stir up applause from others present and to express enthusiasm in other ways, when needed and as much as needed. People may object that the idols of the stage during live performances make use of similar methods, whereas political leaders by their very presence attract crowds of people eager to catch a glimpse of the president or the prime minister. That is true, but a singer or actor who does not have a cult following cannot be helped by any claque paid in advance. They may clap, but it won’t catch on, and that will be the end of it. In the case of a president, for the crowds that gather when his cortège drives through a city, he is more the object of curiosity than of ecstatic worship. Of course, among politicians there do occur situations in which crowds express cultlike devotion. Scenes from documentary films have recorded crowds of Germans and Italians at city squares in Berlin and Rome going into ecstasies of devotion over Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. Their sincerity cannot be

The Film Our Nikita Sergeyevich and the Personality Cult

37

doubted. To a certain extent, Stalin can be classified as such a leader. But only to a certain extent, because unlike Mussolini and Hitler, Stalin did not take the risk, especially in his later years, of appearing before large crowds of people who had not been “cleared by security.” By nature he was a coward; he was afraid of crowds. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that there was a kind of worship of Stalin among the people. All of them, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, were talented actors who carefully rehearsed their roles on occasions when they appeared before the public. They weighed every word, every gesture, every pause, worrying about how the spectators would perceive these, what effect their acting techniques would have. It’s amazing how much time Stalin spent editing and re-editing even the most ordinary toasts that he made at banquets before their publication in Pravda. He rehearsed the toasts as many as ten times each.2 I’m not even talking about his serious speeches. When he gave those, very careful scenarios were worked out for the Leader’s appearances before the masses. Political leaders of this type do not differ from idols of the stage in the gestures and other devices they use. At the same time, they are indeed very different. Unlike ordinary actors, the rulers do not trust the changeable sympathies of the crowd. They keep careful track of the spectators and remove from their ranks not only discontented elements but also those who do not display the appropriate enthusiasm. The “cult” in their case is based not only on worship but also on fear—and that fear, with the passage of time, is transformed into an even more slavish and desperate bowing and scraping. Only when harmony has been achieved between “the little nuts and bolts in the machine” and the “master with the wrench in his hand,” a harmony between slave and master, when slavery is perceived no longer as a heavy burden and the master is perceived as the personification of divinity—only then can you speak of a real “personality cult” around an individual politician. People are not being serious if they talk about the “cult” of a politician when such “worship” is organized by his own inner circle, when he is praised to the skies by his own press, and yet at the same time he becomes the butt of jokes circulating among the people. A political joke that does not bring in its wake harsh and unavoidable punishment actually makes any “personality cult” impossible. A joke like that, if it goes unpunished, is the first step toward liberation—toward democracy, if you will. Democracy and a “personality cult” are incompatible, in the same way that, as Pushkin wrote, genius and villainy are incompatible. And so, in the Soviet Union, the Twentieth Party Congress did in fact put an end to the “personality cult” of Stalin. The “cult” was ended, but the regime remained essentially the same: an authoritarian, monarchical regime with the ritual glorification of power, and of the ruler, which is typical of such a regime. The servile attitude toward the ruler in the Russian authoritarian tradition was built up over centuries. The tsar, the emperor, the autocrat was glorified; it was proclaimed that he was anointed by God. To put it in modern language, the “personality cult” was maintained until there came a time when Russians lost

38 At a Crossroads: 1961 faith in the infallibility of the tsars. The revolution erupted and put an end to both their “divinity” and their “infallibility.” While rejecting the specific representatives of absolutism at that time—the Romanov dynasty—the revolution did not eliminate the existence of absolute power nor the way Russians perceived such power. The person sitting in the Kremlin in Moscow felt inwardly that he was a tsar, anointed not by God, but by the people. Most of his subjects perceived him that way too. After they had overthrown the worthless tsar Nicholas II, they had placed a real tsar on the throne, a proletarian one, Vladimir Lenin. And he was buried in a mausoleum as befit a tsar, or even more, as befit a pharaoh of ancient Egypt. And Stalin went further. He deliberately likened himself to a tsar, sometimes to Tsar Ivan the Terrible, sometimes to Tsar Peter the Great. To the question asked by his aged mother: “What are you now, Joseph?” Stalin answered without hesitation: “Tsar.” And Father inherited that “title.” His fellow countrymen called him “Tsar Nikita.” For his part, if he felt himself to be a tsar, it was a tsar-liberator, like the reformer Tsar Alexander II, who ended serfdom and reformed Russia. Here of course a question arises: What tsar? What monarchy? Khrushchev and Stalin and Lenin, for all their differences, were revolutionaries, who openly professed Marxist theory and cut the cloth of our future from that pattern. How can you rank Marxism and monarchy together? Well, that is true, but at the same time it is not true. Theory by itself, however correct it might be, even the most Marxist or the most democratic, is not capable of instantly changing the way of thinking, the mentality, of the people. Marx’s theory did not transform Russia, but rather Marxism underwent a mutation. It was adapted to Russian national consciousness, whose roots went back to the Byzantine Empire with its deification of the caesar, the emperor. Stalin’s Oriental despotism, the liberal authoritarianism of Khrushchev the reformer, the lazy inertia of Brezhnev’s authoritarianism—if you scratch the surface, it becomes evident that they all rest on the same foundation, one seemingly long since destroyed, the old foundation of ByzantineRussian monarchism, and not on the theoretical precepts of Marxism. And this is not just a Russian phenomenon. People’s China reinterpreted Marxism in its own manner, adapting it to Confucianism and the Chinese imperial tradition. Likewise, the “Marxism” of the North Koreans—they even have their own name for it, chu-chkhe—was a reflection of purely Korean national consciousness, just as remote from “true” Marxism as from the Russian interpretation. In the case of the Cubans, the customary features of Latin American military dictatorship peek out from under the Marxist slogans. From time immemorial, in Byzantium and then in Russia, any word uttered by the Sovereign had incomparably more weight than the law. That is understandable because laws were made, then they were changed or repealed, were adapted or not, according to the will of the Sovereign. Both the rulers and their subjects were accustomed to this. The “good will” of the Sovereign was what

The Film Our Nikita Sergeyevich and the Personality Cult

39

people depended on, not the written law. After all, who knew who had written it, or when? “All laws in Russia are bad,” said the nineteenth-century writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. “The only good thing is that no one pays any attention to them.” That’s how things were, and unfortunately, that’s how they have remained. In Russia the will of the Sovereign, whatever name he is given, has held sway in the past and still holds sway, having priority over any written law. And that is true even when the Sovereign demands respect for the law and the constitution. As long as it is the will of the Sovereign that the law be respected, it will be, but only for that long. This differs fundamentally from democracy, where the constitution and the law take precedence over everything. And in a democratic system, even with the best intentions, any actions of the Sovereign, if they violate the written law—granted that the law might be outdated—are a priori criminal. First you have to change the law—not unilaterally, but by going through a parliamentary legislative process—and only then can you do the good things you want to do. Russia has long since ceased to be a Byzantine-type monarchy. In our country, formally, a constitution holds sway. The president is elected on the basis of universal suffrage. Laws are voted on by parliament. Law courts at all levels, including a constitutional court, see that the laws are observed and enforced, not to mention the scrutiny of television and the press. How can one speak of the omnipotence of the Sovereign under such circumstances? In fact, all the attributes of democracy are present, but they are precisely that—attributes. As long as the Party of Power prevails in parliament, the party of the Sovereign, which depends completely on him, which has appeared on the political scene together with him and together with him will vanish, one can only speak of imitation democracy, imitation democratic procedures. The real power remains in the hands of the Sovereign. Remember that every new Russian leader, beginning with the first one in the twentieth century, Lenin, felt obliged to adopt a constitution of his own. It was not that the Sovereign lived according to the constitution, but that the constitution was adapted to the whims of the Sovereign. It depended only on the Sovereign’s will whether he wanted to rule forever or confine himself to certain limits. Only on the Sovereign did it depend whether he would “win” a majority of the votes in elections or would allow his opponent to win. In other words, only on the will of the Sovereign did the future of our country depend, and it depended on him alone whether he would subject himself through his own good will to the primacy of the law. It depended on him alone whether the country would move toward democracy or turn back toward monarchy. The majority of the people, conservative by nature, more readily support a return to the familiar past than toward changes bringing something new. The national consciousness does alter, but it alters slowly, over the course of

40 At a Crossroads: 1961 decades, and it does not alter of its own accord but as a consequence of changes in the power structure and under purposefully applied pressure from it. Russia is not unique in this. At the dawn of American democracy, the future of the United States also depended on the will of a single individual. The United States offered a king’s crown to General George Washington, but he found the strength within himself to refuse the crown, and thereby decided his country’s destiny. As we now know, it was an enviable destiny. That choice gave freedom of initiative to the people in all spheres—political, economic, technological, and so on—and it predetermined the world leadership of the United States. If George Washington had not gone against tradition at that time, there would have appeared in the world just one more ordinary monarchy. And nothing else. And so I repeat, the future of Russia depends entirely on the role of the Sovereign. One-man rule has been preserved in its primitive form, no matter what you call it: tsar-autocrat, first secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, or president “elected by all the people.” This predetermines the atmosphere in which sweet-sounding praise of the Sovereign prevails. The wellbeing of his retinue, of the circles immediately around him, is entirely dependent on his favor. Every word of the Sovereign is accompanied by sincere approval, or not very sincere (who can really tell?). As a result, the Sovereign remains isolated, unto himself alone. He is his own prosecutor and his own judge, and he must act as his own “checks and balances.” But this is contrary to nature in general and to human nature in particular. A person is not capable of criticizing himself objectively or of rejecting innovations that he himself has conjured up after long reflection, doubts, and hesitations. Otherwise he would simply not propose such innovations. When there is “unanimous” approval from his “comrades-in-arms,” it would go against nature for him to suddenly cry: “Watch out! It looks like I’m being carried in the wrong direction.” Things are made still worse by the fact that under the conditions of oneman rule, any disagreements with the Sovereign inevitably transform the critic from being a comrade-in-arms into an opponent and later into an adversary. After that it depends on the personal qualities of the Sovereign. One ruler may limit himself to relieving the opponent of his duties. To another, imprisonment of the opponent will seem not enough. Thus there is no predicting how things may turn out. There is only one antidote: a democratic division of powers, in which the Sovereign is no longer a Sovereign, but a temporary ruler, the length of whose term upon Mount Olympus is limited, and he himself is surrounded by independent institutions that are equal in power to himself, not just on paper but in reality: a parliament, a court system, and the press. The opposition closely follows every step taken by the “ruling” Sovereign, taking note of every wrong move and every blunder, placing them under the spotlight, and thus preventing the governmental system from going off track. The wise ruler will take account of such warnings and correct his policies in good time, but if the ruler is unwise and stubborn, he will be threatened by . . .

Family Matters

41

Actually nothing will threaten him. It is simply that when the time limit provided under the law is reached, he will not be reelected. He will be replaced by an opponent, and he himself may become the new legal opposition to the new ruler. And so on, world without end. Well now, see how far afield I have strayed from my reminiscences about the film Our Nikita Sergeyevich. I still have a copy of this ill-starred film. When you watch it now, the impression you get is quite different. It was made in an interesting way, with passion and power. And in it Father seems different now, more like a Western politician, dashing from place to place around our country, not avoiding people or movie cameras, trying to look into everything and understand it all. A normal leader, then, one who does not avoid publicity, but not one who is trying to build a cult. In order to perceive the past in that light, however, one had to live through half a century. Back then the film and the “Hero” award did more harm to Khrushchev than all his enemies combined.

8 Family Matters On October 8, 1961, my aunt Irina died. For some reason I called her

“Auntie,” but my older sisters and everyone else in the family called her by a nickname, Arisha. Born on April 26, 1897, she was three years younger than Father. The two of them differed greatly. He was purposeful and forceful, with great powers of concentration. She was soft and gentle, loved to sing (although she didn’t have a good voice), and from an early age she seemed like a little old lady. Father loved his sister, but never talked about anything serious with her. Between them there was no “meeting of minds.” They were on different wavelengths. Father was concerned with affairs of state, but she was caught up with her family life, her home, her neighbors, and their problems. After moving from Kalinovka to Moscow she married Avraam Mironovich Kobyak, a Byelorussian who was strong in both mind and body. Even today I can feel the strength of his handshake. He was eleven years older than Auntie, born on April 2, 1886, and outlived her by three years, dying on December 18, 1964. They had two daughters: the clever but unfortunate Irma, who suffered from childhood meningitis, which resulted in deafness; and then there was

Family Matters

41

Actually nothing will threaten him. It is simply that when the time limit provided under the law is reached, he will not be reelected. He will be replaced by an opponent, and he himself may become the new legal opposition to the new ruler. And so on, world without end. Well now, see how far afield I have strayed from my reminiscences about the film Our Nikita Sergeyevich. I still have a copy of this ill-starred film. When you watch it now, the impression you get is quite different. It was made in an interesting way, with passion and power. And in it Father seems different now, more like a Western politician, dashing from place to place around our country, not avoiding people or movie cameras, trying to look into everything and understand it all. A normal leader, then, one who does not avoid publicity, but not one who is trying to build a cult. In order to perceive the past in that light, however, one had to live through half a century. Back then the film and the “Hero” award did more harm to Khrushchev than all his enemies combined.

8 Family Matters On October 8, 1961, my aunt Irina died. For some reason I called her

“Auntie,” but my older sisters and everyone else in the family called her by a nickname, Arisha. Born on April 26, 1897, she was three years younger than Father. The two of them differed greatly. He was purposeful and forceful, with great powers of concentration. She was soft and gentle, loved to sing (although she didn’t have a good voice), and from an early age she seemed like a little old lady. Father loved his sister, but never talked about anything serious with her. Between them there was no “meeting of minds.” They were on different wavelengths. Father was concerned with affairs of state, but she was caught up with her family life, her home, her neighbors, and their problems. After moving from Kalinovka to Moscow she married Avraam Mironovich Kobyak, a Byelorussian who was strong in both mind and body. Even today I can feel the strength of his handshake. He was eleven years older than Auntie, born on April 2, 1886, and outlived her by three years, dying on December 18, 1964. They had two daughters: the clever but unfortunate Irma, who suffered from childhood meningitis, which resulted in deafness; and then there was

42 At a Crossroads: 1961 Rona, who had no talents but was filled to the brim with snobbishness. Rona grew up healthy, strong, peremptory, and implacable. She became a teacher of English, which she was extraordinarily proud of, and she married a military man who with the passage of time became a general. To the best of my recollection, Auntie Irina spent most of her days off with us at our apartment or dacha. Often she stayed over for a week or more and constantly gave advice about the household to Mama, who listened resignedly to her admonitions, and Auntie always had something edifying to say to us children and later to the grandchildren. I remember her persistently trying to persuade me, when I finished high school, not to go to the Electric Power Institute: I would not receive a proper education there; a son of her neighbor’s had graduated from there, and when she asked him to help her hang a chandelier, he twisted all the wires around incorrectly, the light went out, some fuses were blown, and she had to call a “real” electrician. Mama had raised us to be respectful toward our elders, and we listened without murmuring as she rambled on and on, but we did not take her exhortations seriously; after all, with her second-grade education, how could she give us advice? Auntie Irina, like Father, was educated in a village parochial school, the only one in the whole district (around Kalinovka), but unlike Father she did not try to continue her education after the revolution. Both Mama and the rest of us did as we saw fit, and Auntie did not take offense. She loved to give advice, but whether people took it or not didn’t really matter to her. Thus our family lived in harmony for decades, and I don’t remember a single argument. But each of us lived in his or her own world. Lonely little Irma regularly came with her mother to visit us, and we learned how to communicate with her, getting used to her abrupt and throaty way of talking, common to most deaf people, and she easily read our lips. Meanwhile, Rona lived her own separate life. One filled with girlfriends, dances, and fancy clothes. She had no particular regard for her elderly Uncle Nikita, even if he was the head of the country. After Father’s retirement, Irma continued to visit him at the dacha from time to time, but in the case of Rona, she cut herself off from us completely. Apparently she felt that her relatives, who had now become “dubious people,” would hinder her husband’s career, as well as her own, since she was already a college-level teacher. As time went on, it penetrated even her thick skull that her own behavior was actually discrediting to her. People like that can assuage their consciences with extraordinary quickness. Rona thought up the idea that the reason for everything was that the relations between my parents and Auntie Irina were bad. How much she believed her own words only she can tell, but she complained to others unceasingly. In response, her close acquaintances laughed at her, while chance acquaintances nodded sympathetically, since such disagreements in families are not rare. Avraam Kobyak rarely came to visit us. He worked as a deputy economics director at an airplane factory in Moscow, and was always up to his ears in work, and spent Sundays digging in his garden and building a little dacha. He

Family Matters

43

was often short of money, and Father gave him loans that did not have to be repaid. Sometimes it was 200 rubles, sometimes 500. He didn’t ask for more than that, and considered half a thousand to be an enormous sum. Kobyak loved to talk with Father. In the summer they usually sat in wicker chairs on the porch of the dacha with a view of the Moscow River, and in the winter they would sit in the dining room next to the fireplace, which never had a fire in it (the guards were afraid of a house fire, and persistently urged us not to use the fireplace). Kobyak would start asking Father about politics and current affairs. Father would answer in detail, and they invariably parted feeling satisfied and friendly with one another. Irina died at the Gorki-9 dacha, in the dining room. She had suffered from diabetes for many long years. That day she was sitting in a corner of the sofa and talking as usual to Mama, who was busy doing something and only halflistening to Irina. I was also in the dining room, sitting at the table, reading a newspaper and not listening to them at all. Father was next to me, working on his official papers. Suddenly Auntie stopped short in mid-sentence. I looked up from my reading and saw her sliding down from an upright position against the back of the sofa onto its seat. She had fallen into a coma, and by the time the ambulance arrived it was all over. In those days no doctors were on duty at the head of government’s country residence, nor did special vehicles with “reanimation” equipment follow him around. On Father’s trips abroad a doctor did accompany him, but not on trips to cities inside our country. It was felt that, in case of need, local medics could assist him. My aunt’s death gave me an awful scare. I soon suggested in a conversation with Father the idea of having a doctor nearby. I feared for Father. What if something similar happened to him? He was well on in years. I did not say specifically that there ought to be a doctor permanently on duty at the dacha, but Father understood what I was getting at. He would not let me continue. He said that no doctor could have helped Auntie Irina and that it would be foolish to keep a doctor permanently on hand for a healthy person. Moscow was not off in the distance somewhere, and the government sanatorium at Barvikha was quite nearby. If something happened, people could be at our dacha within half an hour. The Gorki-9 dacha was a government residence west of Moscow, near the location where the Istra River flows into the Moscow River, positioned between the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Highway and the Moscow River. It was built in the late 1920s for Aleksei Rykov, who was then head of the Soviet government in his capacity as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. After Rykov, most of his successors in that post, the equivalent of prime minister, lived at Gorki-9. On the day of our discussion about having a doctor at the dacha, I did not agree with Father, but no one was asking me to agree. Later, on another occasion, I tried once more to bring up this “medical subject,” but again it went nowhere. He cut me off with unusual abruptness and advised me to mind my

44 At a Crossroads: 1961 own business. I tried to win over the head of the guards, Colonel Leonid Litovchenko, but he only spread his hands as if to say that everything depended on the person being guarded. Without an order from Father, no one would lift a finger. Nevertheless, my remarks did have some effect. A little while after that, whenever Father went on long trips inside our country, his personal physician, Vladimir Bezzubik, accompanied him.

9 Communism On October 7, 1961, the builders turned over the new Palace of Con-

gresses in the Kremlin to the appropriate government commission, and as early as October 17, in the main hall of this building, with a seating capacity of 5,000, the Twenty-Second Party Congress opened. At this congress Father planned to report on the new party program, a program for building communism—that is, for building a society of universal abundance, a paradise on Earth, where all people would receive according to their needs and give according to their abilities, as they themselves defined them. Everyone had his or her own conception of “communism,” just as they did of paradise, and it was extremely vague; but everyone wanted to live under communism. By completing this program, the Communist Party would, for all intents and purposes, have completed its task, because the founders of the doctrine did not talk about the need for a party after communist society had been attained. I will begin with some history. The first program of the party, whose name was then the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, called for a revolution. Later that party divided into a more moderate wing, the Mensheviks, and a more radical wing, the Bolsheviks. In 1917 the revolution was victorious, and the Bolsheviks, after coming to power, adopted a second program, for the building of socialism. By the end of the 1930s, socialism had been built, at least in the form understood by the leadership at that time. In 1939 at the Eighteenth Party Congress, Stalin began to talk about a new, third party program that would outline the path “from socialism to communism.” A commission was established for this purpose, headed by Stalin himself. But then World War II erupted, and the building of communism became irrelevant. Right after the victory, in 1946, the commission that would pave the way for the building of communism started its work again, but this time it was

44 At a Crossroads: 1961 own business. I tried to win over the head of the guards, Colonel Leonid Litovchenko, but he only spread his hands as if to say that everything depended on the person being guarded. Without an order from Father, no one would lift a finger. Nevertheless, my remarks did have some effect. A little while after that, whenever Father went on long trips inside our country, his personal physician, Vladimir Bezzubik, accompanied him.

9 Communism On October 7, 1961, the builders turned over the new Palace of Con-

gresses in the Kremlin to the appropriate government commission, and as early as October 17, in the main hall of this building, with a seating capacity of 5,000, the Twenty-Second Party Congress opened. At this congress Father planned to report on the new party program, a program for building communism—that is, for building a society of universal abundance, a paradise on Earth, where all people would receive according to their needs and give according to their abilities, as they themselves defined them. Everyone had his or her own conception of “communism,” just as they did of paradise, and it was extremely vague; but everyone wanted to live under communism. By completing this program, the Communist Party would, for all intents and purposes, have completed its task, because the founders of the doctrine did not talk about the need for a party after communist society had been attained. I will begin with some history. The first program of the party, whose name was then the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, called for a revolution. Later that party divided into a more moderate wing, the Mensheviks, and a more radical wing, the Bolsheviks. In 1917 the revolution was victorious, and the Bolsheviks, after coming to power, adopted a second program, for the building of socialism. By the end of the 1930s, socialism had been built, at least in the form understood by the leadership at that time. In 1939 at the Eighteenth Party Congress, Stalin began to talk about a new, third party program that would outline the path “from socialism to communism.” A commission was established for this purpose, headed by Stalin himself. But then World War II erupted, and the building of communism became irrelevant. Right after the victory, in 1946, the commission that would pave the way for the building of communism started its work again, but this time it was

Communism

45

headed by Andrei Zhdanov, who was then one of Stalin’s favorites. At the same time, the State Planning Commission finished working out a plan of economic development up to 1965. This plan was supposed to carry out “the practical task of transforming socialism into communism.” By 1948 the commission had worked something out; they estimated the building of communism would take about twenty years. Its arrival was set for 1965. But Zhdanov won no fame for this prediction. The Cold War intervened, and all resources were thrown into developing the atomic bomb. Stalin also became preoccupied with new repressive campaigns and operations against what he saw as actual or potential opponents—for example, in Leningrad, in the republic of Georgia, and among the “rootless cosmopolitans,” meaning the Soviet Jews. Thus the issue of building communism again became irrelevant. In 1949 the first Soviet atomic bomb was tested, then came another test and a third, and at the Nineteenth Party Congress, in October 1952, the leaders finally returned to the prospects for building communism. Again a commission was established. But it never met. Stalin died soon after, on March 5, 1953, and the building of communism, for the umpteenth time, was postponed until the next party congress. The Twentieth Party Congress, in 1956, resolved again that the next party congress would “prepare a new party program.” A commission was formed once more, and tasks were assigned to various academicians, but no one set to work seriously. Disputes had broken out in the upper echelons. Father and Molotov had very different views, not only about the future but also about the present. In Molotov’s view, only the foundations of socialism had been laid, but Father held that in almost every respect socialism had already been built. In these circumstances the academicians were unable to orient themselves. They only did so after 1957, after Molotov and the rest of the “anti-party group” had left the stage. (“Anti-party group” was the term later used for the pro-Stalin Soviet leaders Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, and others, who gained a majority at a CC Presidium meeting in June 1957 and tried to take the party leadership from Khrushchev. They were not supported by the full body of the party’s Central Committee, which was quickly convened by Khrushchev and his supporters.) In 1958, two academicians, Stanislav Strumilin and Yevgeny Varga, who in those years were considered the indisputable experts not only on our economy but also on the economies of other countries, produced two groundbreaking documents. One was titled The General Course of Capitalist Development; the other was On the Road to Building Communism. They predicted the coming of the future society, communism, within ten to fifteen years. They promised that by 1964 the Soviet economy would have caught up with and surpassed the United States in the total volume of industrial production and by 1971 in per capita production. These authors proposed that their economic predictions be reviewed and, when confirmed, be included as part of the party’s program at the next congress. After reading these works by the two academicians, Father, who was now heading the commission, was still dissatisfied. It troubled him that, on the one

46 At a Crossroads: 1961 hand, very specific years were named, while, on the other hand, there was utter vagueness about what was supposed to be accomplished by then and how. He considered it impossible to submit such “academic fantasies” to the party congress. He suggested that the program be placed on a serious foundation, that precise estimates be made of what each Soviet citizen would receive—and how that would happen—once communism had been built. This should be worked out in detail, showing how our plates would actually be filled. “The economic preconditions for communism must first be created. If we try to establish communism when the productive forces have not been developed sufficiently, what we will get is not communism, but poverty.” Father explained this to an American publisher, Gardner Cowles. “Communism is abundance. If we proclaim communism when, let us say, there is only one pair of trousers for every ten people, and those trousers have to be shared out equally, everyone ends up without trousers. We reject such ‘trouserless’ communism.”1 “You can’t make soup out of an idea.” That was an expression Father repeated on every suitable occasion. The necessary calculations should not be left to irresponsible academicians. You won’t get anything out of them. The task should be assigned to reliable government agencies. On July 19, 1958 (and the corresponding document exists in the archives), he sent a message to Boris Ponomarev, his deputy on the program commission, a member of the Academy of Sciences, and at the same time head of the International Department of the Central Committee. He ordered Ponomarev to clear up the vagueness of the document that had been submitted. Father also gave him the following assignment: “The program should be made clear, precise, and inspiring, but at the same time it should be realistic and true to life and have broad perspectives.” He said further: “It should not be simply a collection of good statements made by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, but the people should feel what each will receive as a result of the fulfillment of this program.”2 On July 25, 1959, the CC Presidium made a change of emphasis. Since the academicians were preoccupied with theory, only some general statistics from them, wreathed in the laurels of their famous names, would take up a few pages. The practical calculations and estimates about how much, when, and where our industry and agriculture would produce such-and-such items—those tasks were assigned to the State Planning Committee and the State Economic Council. Since the spring of 1960 those commissions had been headed, respectively, by two men who could not stand each other: Vladimir Novikov, who headed the State Planning Committee, and Aleksandr Zasyadko, who headed the State Economic Council. Novikov (1907–2000) was born in the Novgorod region. He studied at the Novgorod Industrial-Mechanical Technical School. In 1928 he began work in the city of Izhevsk at factories that were under the jurisdiction of the People’s Commissariat of the Defense Industry. He began as a technician and by 1939 had risen to chief engineer of a factory. In fact he became the director of the

Communism

47

factory in 1939, and in July 1941 became a deputy to Dmitry Ustinov, the people’s commissar of armaments. From then on, the fates of Novikov and Ustinov were inseparable. They were both talented and powerful officials in the economic sphere and proponents of a tightly centralized system of rule, and consequently they were pro-Stalin. Novikov continued to work as a deputy minister until 1957, when he was transferred to become the chairman of the Leningrad regional economic council. By 1958 he was already a deputy premier of the Russian Federation, and in May 1960 he became a deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers (that is, a deputy premier of the Soviet Union), and at the same time he became chairman of the State Planning Committee. He took a cautious attitude toward Khrushchev’s reforms. His ideal was Stalin’s type of strict vertical control over industry, from the top down, but as a disciplined person, he unquestioningly carried out his orders. Zasyadko (1910–1963) was born in Lugansk province. In 1924 he became an apprentice metalworker and in 1927 a fully trained metalworker at the Lugansk Railroad Car and Locomotive Works. After that he worked in the coalmining industry. In 1930 he began his studies at the Mining Institute in Donetsk (called Stalino at that time). By 1935 he was an engineer in the mines, and in 1939 he became deputy head of the Chief Coal Administration. In 1942 he became deputy people’s commissar of the coal industry. In January 1947 the title “commissar” was changed to “minister.” In March 1958, Zasyadko was made a deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers (that is, a deputy premier of the Soviet Union), and at nearly the same time, in April 1960, he became chairman of the State Scientific Economic Council under the Council of Ministers. Zasyadko was an energetic man, and by nature a reformer, constantly seeking new and more efficient ways of managing the economy. He loved to work with innovative scientists and knew how to do such work well. He firmly supported Khrushchev’s line of decentralizing industry and the economy as a whole. On January 14, 1959, the CC Presidium began a discussion of the first rough drafts of the party program for building communism. Father set the tone: This is a concrete task. We must take as a basis the projected economic development of the country for a period of 15–20 years and calculate everything, as it should be, by 5-year plans. In the program we must direct attention toward the electrification of the entire country. This is a behest of Lenin’s that we have not yet fulfilled. We have to go by stages: our first step will be to provide social security for children and elders; then after one or two 5-year plans we will provide food for the entire population practically free of charge. In the capitalist countries there are restaurants where you pay a certain amount and then can eat all you want. Why can’t we organize something similar in communist society? Under communism order will also be necessary; otherwise we’ll end up with a herd of people, and not a society. [Here Father began presenting his conception of the future communist system.] At the same time we have to think about the democratization of our system. Let’s take, for example, the leadership of the country, the CC Presidium. We have no restrictions of time

48 At a Crossroads: 1961 or of power. We have been elected, and does that mean we are the greatest geniuses? And that people other than us are completely unworthy? Bourgeois constitutions are arranged more democratically than ours. In the United States a president is limited to two terms in office. Among us changes in the top leadership result only when someone dies a natural death. Only then is a new candidate elected to replace the departed. We can form ourselves into a “guild,” a kind of closed circle, as happened under Stalin. But that isn’t right. We ought to provide for constant renewal, for example, one-third of the CC Presidium at each congress, and to continue that process further down at all levels, including among deputies elected to congresses. If you can only be elected to one or two terms, a caste-like quality disappears and bureaucratism is reduced. That, comrades, is my contribution.

That is how Father finished his speech. “How well that was said,” Mikoyan responded quickly. He was supported by Aristov. “Up until now an abstract, scholastic, dogmatic opinion about the program has prevailed among us,” Suslov then made a prattling contribution. “Without a 15–20-year plan, without this backbone, the program remained a collection of dry and boring observations, but now . . .” Here Suslov stumbled and began to mumble not very clearly. “Such a backbone—with that everything will flow very well, and the program will not be an abstract document, but one that calls on people to move forward and one that will be embodied in real life . . .” Looking around cautiously, Suslov took his seat, but no one paid any particular attention to his blundering. The rest of the people present in the room, one after the other, supported Father, and only Ponomarev began to raise some questions: “How is agriculture to be developed further—by establishing communes? Or by strengthening the collective farms and going further along that path, avoiding communes, but merging the collective farms together with state property in the form of the state farms? How is the nation to be defined?” His questions went in one ear and out the other. Matters that had been insufficiently thought through were entrusted for further clarification to a commission formed at that Central Committee Presidium meeting, a commission headed by Suslov. It was given twenty days to do everything.3 Beginning in 1960 a new editorial committee for drafting the program, under Father’s watchful eye, cooked up a mixed stew. Among the ingredients they threw in were some of the “theoretical fantasies” of Suslov’s and Ponomarev’s academicians, and also a document drawn up by the State Planning Committee, titled “An Overall, Long-Term Twenty-Year Plan of Economic Development for the USSR.” On the basis of this plan, or more exactly on the basis of a summary report compiled from it, titled “Report on General Economic Problems and the Development of Economic Science over the Long Term” (a rather peculiar title), 1980 stood out as the year by which something they called the “foundations of communism” would be built.

Communism

49

As I have already written, Novikov’s State Planning Committee and Zasyadko’s State Economic Council, independently of one another, had drawn up not so much a plan for, as a prognosis of, the growth of the economy. The State Planning Committee’s version was the more cautious of the two. It proposed that for the period 1961–1970, the annual growth of production be set at 9.6 percent, and for the twenty-year period of 1961–1980, growth would be projected at 9.4 percent. Thus, for the entire period, industrial production would increase by a factor or four, or perhaps four and a half. From 1961 to 1980, the following industrial construction was projected: 180 hydroelectric power plants, 200 thermal electric power plants, 2,800 new factories (of all kinds), 1,180–1,200 tons of coal to be mined, 250 million tons of steel to be produced, along with 125–135 million tons of mineral fertilizers and 233–235 million tons of cement. Agricultural growth was projected at 5.7–6.5 percent annually, and by 1980 the production of grain, meat, milk, and all other agricultural products would have an overall growth of two and a half times, while the productivity of labor would increase two and a half times. In this process, certain priorities were assigned. An abrupt turn was made toward increased production of consumer goods, the so-called Group B. By 1980 it was to increase thirteen times over, while Group A—heavy industry— would be only six times larger. Zasyadko, in contrast, proposed “not to be miserly” and to orient toward higher percentages of annual growth.4 Where did Novikov and Zasyadko get their figures from? Both the State Planning Committee and the State Economic Council extrapolated the past into the future. Both of them projected that, as in preceding years, US industry would grow no more than 2.5–3.0 percent annually, while US agricultural growth would be less, 1.7–2.0 percent. At the same time, according to the State Planning Committee, Soviet industrial production in 1960 was 60 percent of the US figure, while for agriculture the figure was 80 percent.5 From these estimates it followed not only that we would catch up with the Americans, but also that by 1980 we would surpass them. This assertion was not just a matter of fantasy at that time. A prognosis made by the CIA in the late 1950s drew similar conclusions. The Americans did not rule out the possibility that by the end of the twentieth century the Soviet national product would be three times greater than their own. But what did communism have to do with all this? In 1961 communism meant to everyone, including Father, a prosperous life. A life that would be more prosperous than that of anyone else in the world, above all more prosperous than that of the Americans. If we follow this peculiar logic, it meant that the Americans were already living under communism. But here I seem to be getting ahead of myself. The data from the State Planning Committee and the State Economic Council were mixed together by Aleksei Kosygin, Father’s first deputy. He was a cautious

50 At a Crossroads: 1961 man who weighed everything carefully. He sided with the State Planning Committee. Father agreed with his opinion. “Comrade Zasyadko has distributed material and you have all read it,” Father addressed his colleagues at a CC Presidium meeting on June 17, 1961. “He shows that we have better possibilities than have already been written into the program and says that the numbers ought to be corrected. I have read everything carefully and talked with the comrades. We agreed that these corrections ought not to be made. . . . In addition, we should keep in mind that these are statistical predictions, not concrete plans.” As a result, the parameters as conceived by the State Planning Committee and signed by Novikov were entered into the party program.6 Such are the facts recorded in documents. But not just documented information has come down to us; so too have emotional echoes of those long-forgotten bureaucratic battles. Zasyadko died in 1963 and did not manage to write any memoirs. With Novikov it was a different matter. He was the main author of the economic section of the party program, and in 1980 he retired. He knows everything and remembers everything, but in his memoirs, written after the fact, when communism had not been built after all, Novikov lays all the blame on the late Zasyadko and at the same time on Khrushchev: A draft of the economic part of the program was made by the State Economic Council headed by Zasyadko and his deputy N. A. Tikhonov. The contents of this draft were that in twenty years we would virtually have communism! What foolishness didn’t they write in that draft? . . . The Council of Ministers met in full session. Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev] came in. Without sitting down at the table he put his hand on the text of the program and said: “I have carefully studied all this. The proposals are good, and they ought to be adopted. We distributed the text to the members of the Council of Ministers in advance, and apparently all have familiarized themselves with it. I don’t think there’s any point in discussing it. Are there any objections?” Everyone was silent. Khrushchev concluded: “Let us consider it adopted.” As everyone knows, the economic part of this program did not become a reality.7

Here Novikov deliberately misleads the reader. He presents matters as though he had not contributed to the program himself, that he had not discussed it many times both with Kosygin and with Father, and as though 170,801 suggestions had not been submitted to the Central Committee, of which 40,733 were published in the newspapers.8 Of course, not all these suggestions were taken into account. Far from it. But the final document was certainly read, reread, and discussed in detail at CC Presidium meetings.9 It is possible that at the Council of Ministers this document was later approved in a formal way, without discussion. But Novikov deliberately tries to create quite a different impression.

Communism

51

Another memoirist, Fyodor Burlatsky, also tends to becloud the issue, though probably without bad intentions; perhaps he just wanted to make an impression. Here is how, according to him, the figures for the twenty-year plan for economic development found their way into the party program: “This proposal was brought to one of the sessions (of the working editorial group) by a prominent figure in economic management circles, A. F. Zasyadko. . . . The calculations about the pace of development of our economy and that of the United States were actually made up out of nothing, out of thin air.”10 Generally speaking, Burlatsky is not to be relied on. He was an ambitious man, but never more than a clerk in the Central Committee apparatus. And he was not even in Ponomarev’s department, but in a neighboring department headed by Yuri Andropov. He did not take part in the drafting of the economic development plan. He simply heard something somewhere by accident, out of context. As can be seen from the preceding quotation, nothing substantial remained in Burlatsky’s memory. Unfortunately, Burlatsky is quoted by others in serious works, and his words are taken as the truth, as though Zasyadko had actually shown up, blabbered something, and then the members of the working group put it all in the party program. “All this is extraordinarily light-minded!”—if I may echo the words of Khlestakov, the “hero” of Gogol’s 1836 play The Government Inspector. I have my own recollections about the drafting of the party program—although, to tell the truth, there was only one episode in which I was involved personally. On the eve of a Central Committee plenum, the economists who were making prognoses, headed by Kosygin and Ponomarev, gathered at the Gorki-9 dacha one sunny afternoon, a Sunday in June 1961. I would not say they reported to Father, but simply told him about what they were working on. Father often had these kinds of Sunday sit-around sessions. At the dacha, under the pine trees, people could talk and discuss to their hearts’ content without being regimented and without being interrupted by phone calls, without having visitors waiting for them in their anterooms. They all took seats in wicker chairs out on the grass, sitting in a circle. Father was wearing a lightweight embroidered Ukrainian shirt; among the others, some wore neckties and some did not, but everyone had their jackets off. It was hot. They took turns talking without standing up. I found a seat behind the group next to one of Father’s aides, Grigory Shuisky. I had an ambivalent reaction to what I heard: the figures were on a grandiose scale, to be sure, but they were only figures. Where was there any actual communism? And where was the guarantee that we would outdo the Americans, rather than they us? A smoking break was announced. Father could not stand tobacco smoke, and people didn’t smoke near him even when they were out in the open. I saw that Ponomarev was standing by himself apart from the others, and I decided to ask him some questions in more detail. He explained that the US economy was exhausting itself and the crisis of capitalism was irreversible, whereas we

52 At a Crossroads: 1961 would continue our forward motion. His words were not very convincing to me, but just then everyone was called back to the circle for further discussion before he managed to tell me what communism actually was. But I took him at his word that we would catch up with the Americans; after all, he was a Central Committee secretary and member of the Academy of Sciences. I ought to believe such a person and I did. But enough of these accusations and self-justifications about past events. There is actually no one to blame for any of this. As we know, what was under discussion was not an economic plan, but a prognosis. The prognosticators were not able to look into the future. They had to base themselves on past experience and could not foresee the coming technological and other revolutions, nor the various crises and cataclysms. That is exactly why predictions rarely come true. One need only recall the naive novels of Jules Verne, who incidentally was one of the best prognosticators of the nineteenth century. We can also recall predictions by leading scientists about what would exist in twenty or thirty years. They are worth reprinting for the humor of it alone. And then there were the fantastical predictions of Isaac Asimov and other pioneers of the computer age, who predicted gigantic electronic brains, full of light bulbs, taller than the tallest skyscraper, working with perforated cards and perforated tapes. To Father’s credit, I must say that he tried to see beyond the horizon, to the extent that he could. For example, he insisted that the pace of steel production be reduced in favor of increased production of plastics. But that was not a forecast; it was a sober assessment of the present, of the technological revolution that was already beginning in the realm of construction materials. On this point a correction was made to Father’s position. Soon after his ouster in 1964, steel production again became a priority. But there is no reason to blame either the State Planning Committee or the State Economic Council for adventurism, incompetence, or other sins. They drew up the prognoses, and Kosygin and Father took their conclusions for good coin. But none of them should be blamed. We will turn out to be just as “incompetent” when our future arrives, just as our predecessors in relation to their future. We do not know what will actually happen in twenty or thirty years, just as they did not. It is precisely because we do not know that we are motivated to try to accomplish things in the name of the future. But if we knew the truth . . . Let us return to the party program. What did communism look like in the program for all of us, including Father? First of all, a sufficiency of everything. Thus the program for building communism was the latest in a series of attempts to overcome poverty, to ensure a decent life for everyone. This program followed along the same lines as the cultivation of the Virgin Lands, the construction of inexpensive and affordable housing, not only at the present time but also for twenty years ahead. Father hoped that he would succeed in solving all the remaining problems in one stroke. Also there was the concept of universal equality. Here a contradiction arose. The notion of universal equality conflicted with the principle Father proclaimed

Communism

53

that people should have a material interest in their work. This was a principle that rejected vulgar egalitarianism. Here top priority was given to the principle that if you work better, you will live a more prosperous life. I cannot say that Father failed to think about the contradictions in this very approach to communism. He thought about it a great deal. But he was not always able to find answers to his questions. One of these contradictions was the role and place of the state in our future. According to the theorists, and Father agreed with them fully, the closer we come to communism, the more the state as an instrument of coercion is doomed to wither away. The future prospect was that society would take upon itself the care of human beings, from birth to death, all concerns about housing, food, domestic services, education of children, and providing care for retired people. This conception of the future flowed logically from the present. As early as 1960 the state paid pensions and provided medical care to 20 million retired people free of charge. It built care centers for 6 million young children and what were called Young Pioneer camps for 6 million school-age children. At high schools, technical colleges, institutes, and universities, 42 million people were studying, not only free of charge, but in most cases, approximately 36 million, they were also receiving a stipend. All 62 million people in the work force had no less than three weeks of paid vacation. All patients were given medical treatment free of charge by 2 million doctors, orderlies, and nurses. Three million people went on vacation to sanatoria and other vacation places either free of charge or almost free. However, in economics nothing comes from nothing. All of these “free of charge” services required payment of significant sums from government resources. It was estimated that by 1980 the income of individual Soviet citizens would be 75 percent greater than that of Americans in 1960. Once again the comparison was made with Americans. But most of such income had a single source: “the common pot,” that is, government funds. “The social funds for consumption in 1980 will account for approximately half of all the income of the population.”11 According to the economic logic, the role of the state would increase as we came closer to communism. State-owned property dominated the economy, but at the same time theory prescribed that the state would wither away. This contradiction, on the practical level, proved insoluble. Any decision about it was postponed to some other time. Meanwhile, the concept “dictatorship of the proletariat” was banished from the party program. The theoreticians believed that the dictatorship would wither away together with the state itself. Father did not agree with them. He could not very well imagine how the country would live without a government, but he did think it could get along without a dictatorship. In the future there would be a government of all the people, without suppression of anyone by anyone, and it would be democratic. Free people would be able to elect whomever they wanted as their leaders. At the same time, along with the elimination of the “dictatorship” concept, Father had a clause written into the program calling for

54 At a Crossroads: 1961 soviets at all levels to be transformed from merely decorative bodies into true organs of power. Real rights and powers should be assigned to them, and their duties should not be merely to rubberstamp laws adopted by others. Above all, they should check up on how those laws were being implemented. Unfortunately, Father did not live to see these principles that he proclaimed carried out in real life. As the nationwide discussion of the party program continued, there was a growing urge to socialize everything in society. Ordinary “discussants” demanded that private property should be “dealt with” immediately and fundamentally. They demanded not only that private homes, dachas, and cars should be turned over to public ownership, but also deposits in savings banks that exceeded a “permissible” level, which was quite modest. They also demanded that people should be moved from apartments to “comfortable” dormitories, so that they would be freed from “trash” and that the spirit of collectivism would be restored to them.12 Those were not even the most radical ideas of the extremists and idealists. Father did not approve of universal socialization, but he also did not think there was enough land for all to have a dacha of their own, their own house in the country. As a result, he sought a compromise. Instead of individual houses in the countryside, it was proposed that multistory cooperative complexes be built with small apartment units that would be the property of one family, or that would be used by several owners in succession—what is now called “time-sharing.” It was noted that the future lay with municipal public transportation, subways or buses, and if under communism someone wanted to ride in a car, there could be rental services for that purpose. It was necessary to restrain not only and not so much the rank and filers who were “restless” to achieve the universal prosperity of the future, but also respectable academicians. The academicians, for example, in their outlines, proposed that labor would be proclaimed voluntary under communism. Nikolai Barsukov has preserved for us some of Father’s comments: “Just imagine. What if half of society decided voluntarily not to work.” That is how Father expressed his doubts. “The formula of voluntary labor has become outdated. Perhaps the founders of Marxism, in order to attract attention, proclaimed: ‘If you want to work you can; if you don’t want to, you don’t have to, and eat as much as you wish . . . But that is incorrect.’ A different formula has to be used: ‘Necessary labor.’”13 The phrase “voluntary labor” disappeared from the text of the program. Then there was also a minor correction. In the passage that promised “to increase paid vacation time in the next few years from three weeks to one month,” Father crossed out “in the next few years.” No one knew exactly what shape things would take in the future. The academicians “foresaw” that “in the second decade [that is, in the 1970s] housing will be provided free of charge.” Father had his doubts: “Maybe

Communism

55

such a possibility will not be available to us in 1970. This needs to be stated more flexibly.”14 The clause was rewritten more flexibly. I will not wear out the reader with more examples. There are a great many of them. Father corrected almost every paragraph of the text of the program, which had been edited in the Central Committee apparatus. The final draft of the program was given a thorough going-over on June 17, 1961, at a Presidium meeting, as well as at a Central Committee plenum on June 19, 1961; and then in October, after being thoroughly worked over and polished, the delegates at the Twenty-Second Congress voted for it. The congress concluded on a note of high emotion, with words that Father himself had thought up: “Our goals are clear. Our tasks have been defined. To work, comrades!” Those present in the auditorium stood up and applauded for a long time. After the congress, millions of copies of this slogan were distributed on placards. The most easily accessible of these innovations for moving toward communism were implemented as early as 1962. In restaurants and diners, servings of bread appeared free of charge. People could eat as much bread as they wanted. In municipal transport, conductors disappeared from the streetcars, trolleybuses, and regular buses. Socially conscious people would drop their coins in the collection box, and those who were not so conscious would ride for free. As time went on, the number of free services provided to the population was supposed to increase. Despite all the errors and oversights in the statistics, the absolute numbers written into the program for building communism, in terms of volume of production, did not differ that much from the results achieved by the Soviet economy toward the end of the twentieth century. In the two decades 1961–1981, the total output of industrial production increased by a factor of four and not of six, as was written in the program. The productivity of labor increased by a factor of about two and a half, not four to four and a half. It is true that the total output of agriculture increased only 54 percent. It also became necessary to buy grain from abroad. Petrodollars earned by the Soviet economy bought foreign grain to feed our livestock. And all of that happened despite the fact that throughout those years our country was in a state of stagnation, and there was a huge increase in military spending. One can only guess what might have happened if the process of reform had not been stopped in 1964. Mass consciousness is not interested in statistical calculations. The masses are guided by their own feelings. And as our country grew closer to the banner year of 1980, the mood among the people became fouler and fouler. Each year of stagnation turned out to be worse than the previous one. Sausage disappeared, at first from the Volga region. For some reason, shortages in Russia have always started there. Then commuter trains with “sausage-sellers” on board began making their way from Moscow’s nearby and more distant suburbs into the temporarily fortunate capital city. Later, even in Moscow, the most basic products,

56 At a Crossroads: 1961 one after the other, fell into the category “in short supply.” Such goods were sold only to “one’s own people” and then only under the table. At the same time, the United States and Western Europe continued to serve Soviet citizens as a source for items that were hard to find in the Soviet Union. What the devil kind of communism was that?! Most Russians to this day conceive of communism as the Kingdom of God on Earth, or something just as wonderful and just as unattainable. It is not in anyone’s power to build a communist society like that; it can only be promised. If Father had been more cunning and cynical, he would have written into the program that prosperity would steadily increase, without giving any figures. Time limits would have been removed, and reference made only to “the foreseeable future.” Who knows how far ahead you could foresee with anything as vague and indefinite as the building of the communist “paradise.” Then everything would have gone smoothly. On appropriate occasions, officials at public gatherings would have mentioned the program, and among the “parishioners,” some would have believed in it and others would not. Still others would have believed only in the Holy Scriptures. With his commitment to specific figures and time limits, Father, without realizing it, made history with this “third” party program in both literal and figurative senses. Who did not take comfort in his words, “The present generation will live under communism”? And that was his mistake. It was as if the biblical prophets had inscribed on their tablets the specific dates for the end of the world, the Day of Judgment, and the Second Coming. Everything would have been all right until the particular dates arrived. Father turned out to be an imprudent “prophet.” He has to answer posthumously for all the unfulfilled expectations.

10 Again About Stalin The people at Father’s secretariat gave me a guest ticket to the

Twenty-Second Party Congress, for a seat in the highest part of the balcony, right under the roof. I attended the sessions regularly. In those days, being admitted to a party congress was a very great honor, but I was bored to tears. The orators read from written speeches, monotonously, lulling you to sleep. I drowsed off now and then, and I was not the only one. There was animation in the hall only toward the end of a session; the rows would stir as delegates began to make

56 At a Crossroads: 1961 one after the other, fell into the category “in short supply.” Such goods were sold only to “one’s own people” and then only under the table. At the same time, the United States and Western Europe continued to serve Soviet citizens as a source for items that were hard to find in the Soviet Union. What the devil kind of communism was that?! Most Russians to this day conceive of communism as the Kingdom of God on Earth, or something just as wonderful and just as unattainable. It is not in anyone’s power to build a communist society like that; it can only be promised. If Father had been more cunning and cynical, he would have written into the program that prosperity would steadily increase, without giving any figures. Time limits would have been removed, and reference made only to “the foreseeable future.” Who knows how far ahead you could foresee with anything as vague and indefinite as the building of the communist “paradise.” Then everything would have gone smoothly. On appropriate occasions, officials at public gatherings would have mentioned the program, and among the “parishioners,” some would have believed in it and others would not. Still others would have believed only in the Holy Scriptures. With his commitment to specific figures and time limits, Father, without realizing it, made history with this “third” party program in both literal and figurative senses. Who did not take comfort in his words, “The present generation will live under communism”? And that was his mistake. It was as if the biblical prophets had inscribed on their tablets the specific dates for the end of the world, the Day of Judgment, and the Second Coming. Everything would have been all right until the particular dates arrived. Father turned out to be an imprudent “prophet.” He has to answer posthumously for all the unfulfilled expectations.

10 Again About Stalin The people at Father’s secretariat gave me a guest ticket to the

Twenty-Second Party Congress, for a seat in the highest part of the balcony, right under the roof. I attended the sessions regularly. In those days, being admitted to a party congress was a very great honor, but I was bored to tears. The orators read from written speeches, monotonously, lulling you to sleep. I drowsed off now and then, and I was not the only one. There was animation in the hall only toward the end of a session; the rows would stir as delegates began to make

Again About Stalin

57

their way toward the exits, first by ones or twos and later in whole groups, slipping through the doors to get first place in the waiting lines at the coatroom, toilet, or buffet, depending on the circumstances. I was sitting right next to a door, and it surprised me that such solid and respectable people, the leaders of our country, were behaving this way, like little schoolboys. Father was not planning to talk about Stalin at the congress, but he could not hold his tongue. He was terribly afraid of the possibility that a new Stalin would appear. He felt that the country could not endure another tyranny, and he tried to do everything in his power to avoid such a “second coming.” People of his generation, who had shared his destiny, had all been infected by Stalin. They had tried to free themselves from him but could not. In private conversations, at dinners, or in speeches discussing various measures, sooner or later, against their own will, they would return to the subject of Stalin, as though under an evil spell! Not only Father, who loved to talk about the past, acted this way; so did the less garrulous Mikoyan, Molotov, and Kaganovich. But there was a difference. Mikoyan and Father condemned Stalin, while Molotov and Kaganovich praised him. Father was always thinking about the potential “Stalin danger,” and he was inclined to make unplanned improvisations, departing from his written text. He couldn’t restrain himself and began talking at the congress about Stalin’s crimes, the crimes of a tyrant, and about the inadmissibility of anything similar in the future. He began talking and couldn’t stop. This time he was not talking about the problem of Stalin and Stalinism at a closed session in a “secret speech.” He was sharing his feelings about this painful subject with the entire world, and he mentioned his friends Yakir and Korytny and his assistant Finkel, as well as many others who had disappeared without a trace. (In Stalin’s purge of the military in 1937, Iona Yakir, a Red Army commander of the first rank, was arrested and shot. S. Z. Korytny, secretary of a party district committee in Moscow, was also shot in 1937, as was I. D. Finkel, who had served as an assistant to Khrushchev during the latter’s time as a party leader in Moscow in the 1930s.) At this congress, Father said much more than he had at the Twentieth Congress. He spoke about everything straight from the heart, everything that had built up inside him during those terrible years. Most of those present—and Stalinists were actually the majority among the delegates to the congress—felt that Father was improperly washing dirty linen in public. It was all water under the bridge, they felt, and we should let bygones be bygones. But the dam of silence had been broken. Following a Stalin-type procedure, everyone lined up behind the leader, and having put their names down to speak, hastily revised their speeches. The telephone of KGB chairman Aleksandr Shelepin never stopped ringing. Presidium members were asking him to dig around in the archives and supply them with some “meaty material.” Although at heart they were Stalinists, they displayed special zeal. If you read the stenographic record of the congress, you discover that the most “neutral”

58 At a Crossroads: 1961 speeches were by Artyom Mikoyan and Otto Kuusinen, who were openly antiStalinist, while those who most ardently “exposed Stalin” were Aleksandr Shelepin and Dmitry Polyanksy, who later gained reputations as hard-liners. After everything that had been said at the congress, it was reasonable to ask what should now be done with Stalin, since his corpse was lying in the Mausoleum next to Lenin? And what should be done with the countless number of cities, towns, factories, collective farms, and the like, that bore his name? After the Twentieth Congress, nothing had been touched. After all, formally speaking, his crimes had been exposed only in secret. Not having planned a new anti-Stalin campaign, Father found himself at a crossroads. But not for long. “To bow down to Stalin, to worship a tyrant is a destiny fit only for slaves,” he frequently repeated, but at the same time he understood that a slavish consciousness is a dreadfully powerful force. Nevertheless, he decided to take action. Not long before the end of the congress, he proposed to the presiding body to vote on the question of removing Stalin’s remains from the Mausoleum. The presiding body at a congress usually agreed with proposals from the top leader. I should remind readers that we are not talking about the eleven members of the Central Committee Presidium, but about the presiding body at the congress, which numbered several dozen people of the most varied kind. They were all united by one thing—they had a panic fear of Stalin. Previously they had feared him as a living person and now they feared his dead remains. This fear was felt by people who continued to worship him in their heart of hearts as well as by people who cursed him with all their heart and soul. Everyone was afraid and couldn’t help it. After having agreed with Father, it was time for one of them to do the scariest thing of all, to stand up at the podium and in front of the congress and the whole country, in front of the whole world, to denounce this deity and topple him from his lofty perch. It was one thing when the whole collective voted together. “Everyone’s voting in favor, and I’m just one of many.” It was an entirely different matter to openly take such a responsibility upon oneself. Not everyone was up to doing that. We know almost nothing about what actually happened among the members of the presiding committee of the congress, what dramas unfolded there. Witnesses did not leave testimony. That is, hardly any of them did. I found a few quite interesting pages only in the memoirs of General Nikolai Zakharov, a deputy chairman of the KGB, and in those of Nuriddin Mukhitdinov, at one time a secretary of the party’s Central Committee and a member of the CC Presidium. “In the evening, after one more session of the congress, I was told to go see Khrushchev,” Mukhitdinov writes. “I walk in and I see there are people sitting with him: Podgorny, Mikoyan, Suslov, the KGB Chairman Shelepin, and some others.” Mukhitdinov continues: “Let’s remove Stalin from the Mausoleum and bury him at the Novo-Devichy cemetery, where his wife and relatives are buried,” said Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev].

Again About Stalin

59

General silence. “Nikita Sergeyevich, he was placed in the Mausoleum by a decision of the Central Committee, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and the Council of Ministers,” I [Mukhitdinov] was the first who dared to start speaking. “Everyone knows that. Why repeat it?” Kozlov interrupted me. “The people will hardly take it well if we treat the remains of a dead person in that way. Among us in the Orient, among Muslims, it is a great sin to disturb the remains of the dead,” I continued. “Don’t barge in on us at this congress with your Muslim customs,” Mikoyan interrupted me. “It would be a risky thing to move Stalin’s remains to the Novo-Devichy cemetery. The possibility is not ruled out that someone would try to steal them. We could hardly succeed in preventing that. The result would be a disgraceful scandal, and that at a time when the congress is proceeding so well,” Shelepin had started to speak after being silent for a while. “Well, let’s propose to the congress that he be removed from the Mausoleum. There is no place for him next to Lenin. Perhaps he could be buried behind the Mausoleum, where a number of well-known people are buried.” This was what Khrushchev stated after thinking about it a little while. Everyone agreed. “You, Nikolai Viktorovich [Podgorny], should submit a draft resolution. Anastas [Mikoyan] will be in charge of the reburial. Comrade Suslov will draft the resolution, and Comrade Kozlov will think about who should speak on the topic. It would be desirable for leaders of major republics and regions to express support for this decision,” Nikita Sergeyevich continued. With that we all parted and went our separate ways. The next day after the evening session Kozlov called me to his office and asked if I was finished with my affairs for the day. I answered that I was finished. “Let’s go for a ride together in my car. Let’s go out to the entrance,” he suggested. On the way Kozlov complained about how tired he was. “Let’s stop in and have a drink. And the housekeeper can cook something for us.” He was suggesting we stop at his residence in the Vorobyov Hills district. There we had something to eat. “Together with some comrades familiar with the question of Stalin we’ve discussed and agreed to move him on October 30 at the morning session, as though it were spontaneous, during the discussion of the draft party statutes, without including this proposal as a point on the agenda,” Kozlov told me while we were at the dinner table. “Shvernik will preside. At the beginning Spiridonov will speak. He’s the first secretary of the party’s Leningrad province committee. He will tell about the abuses of power, lawless actions, mass arrests, from which many Leningraders suffered and, referring to the Old Bolsheviks, he will make a motion that the body of Stalin be removed from the Lenin Mausoleum and reburied at a different location. We have made the arrangements that on behalf of the party organizations of the peoples of Transcaucasia, Mzhavanadze would speak.”

Vasily Mzhavanadze was at that time first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia.

60 At a Crossroads: 1961 “It is considered appropriate for you,” Kozlov continued, “to speak in support of the motion in your own name, to tell about Stalin’s repression in Central Asia and in particular in your homeland of Uzbekistan. Demichev will speak on behalf of the Moscow party organization, and then Podgorny will present a draft resolution to the congress on behalf of the delegates of Ukraine and other republics.” Pyotr Demichev was at that time first secretary of the party’s Moscow city committee, while Nikolai Podgorny was first secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party. Mukhitdinov tried to wriggle out this. “How appropriate was it for me to speak in the name of all the republics of Central Asia and Kazakhstan? And this would occur after I had already spoken for almost half an hour from the congress rostrum. “Moreover, I have not represented Uzbekistan for a long time now. I’ve been working with your people in Moscow. The first secretaries of all the Communist Parties of all the union republics are present at the congress. They should be gathered together and should come to an agreement about who would speak on behalf of the region—Kunayev, Rashidov, and others.” Dinmukhamed Kunayev was at that time first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, and Sharaf Rashidov was first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan. “Don’t try to violate what has been agreed to. You have been assigned to speak,” Kozlov objected. “But who has authorized me to do that? Especially since no other secretaries of the Central Committee will be speaking on this question.” Mukhitdinov continued his stubborn resistance. “Keep in mind that ‘the boss’ will get very angry,” Kozlov warned him. Kozlov was demonstratively honoring Father with the title “the boss,” in the same way that he had learned to speak of Stalin. Mzhavanadze was even more disinclined to speak than Mukhitdinov. The latter would remain in Moscow, but the former had to return to Georgia, where he would face the nationalist pro-Stalin sentiments held by many Georgians. “On October 30 before the morning session of the congress an extraordinary occurrence took place.” Again I am quoting from Mukhitdinov’s memoirs. “Instead of Vasily Mzhavanadze, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia, another person had to hastily prepare a speech. That was Givi Dzhavakhishvili, chairman of the Council of Ministers of Georgia. After Kozlov’s conversation with him, Mzhavanadze had arrived at the congress in the morning with bandages around his neck and said in a whisper that he had a sore throat; he had lost his voice, and could not speak. The choice then fell on Dzhavakhishvili, who certainly resisted, but the speech was imposed on him.”1 That same morning, on October 30, Father summoned the deputy chairman of the KGB, General Zakharov, mentioned earlier, and the commandant of the Kremlin, General Andrei Vedenin, and assigned them to carry out the process

Again About Stalin

61

of reburying Stalin, of course after the congress had adopted the appropriate resolution. “The place has been designated, and the Kremlin commandant knows where to dig the grave.” According to Zakharov’s memoirs, that is how Father instructed these two generals. “Everything must be carried out without a lot of noise, and the work must be completed tonight. You will receive specific instructions from Comrade Shvernik.” (Nikolai Shvernik was at that time the chairman of the party’s Control Commission under the Central Committee.) The congress session had just opened, but work toward carrying out the forthcoming resolution had already begun. An order was given to Konev, commander of the detached, special-purpose regiment that served the Kremlin commandant’s office. A good coffin was to be made out of well-dried wood at the Kremlin carpentry shop. The wood of the coffin was draped with black and red crepe fabric, so that it ended up looking not bad at all and even rather fancy. Colonel Tarasov, head of the housekeeping department of the KGB’s Ninth Administration, was instructed to put up sheets of plywood to screen off the right and left sides of the area in back of the Mausoleum [i.e., between the Mausoleum and the Kremlin wall], so that the site where the work was being done could not be observed. Three soldiers were detailed from the Kremlin commandant’s office at 6 P.M. to dig the grave, and eight officers to carry the sarcophagus out of the Mausoleum.

Thus General Zakharov remembered down to the last detail what happened on that day. All those who had been assigned were carefully instructed and warned not to say anything about the work entrusted to them. In the workshop at the Kremlin arsenal an artist by the name of Savinov made a large white strip of cloth with the letters L-E-N-I-N on it. It was to cover the inscription on the Mausoleum that said “Lenin-Stalin.”

Nikolai Dygai, head of Moscow’s municipal government, was commissioned to bring ten slabs of concrete to reinforce the sides of the grave. An eleventh slab, of marble, with the inscription “Stalin, Iosif Vissarionovich, 1879–1953” was prepared as a gravestone. Meanwhile, the congress continued its work as scheduled. “No one from Central Asia or Kazakhstan took the floor,” Mukhitdinov asserts.” Thus, in support of Spiridonov’s motion the people who spoke were Demichev, first secretary of the party’s Moscow city committee, then Dzhavakhishvili, and then an Old Bolshevik, Dora Lazurkina, party member since 1902. At the end Podgorny spoke. On behalf of the Leningrad and Moscow delegations and the delegations of the Ukrainian and Georgian Communist Parties he introduced for the consideration of the congress a draft resolution stating:

62 At a Crossroads: 1961 1. The Mausoleum on Red Square near the Kremlin wall, erected in memory of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the immortal founder of the Communist Party of the Soviet state, the leader and teacher of working people throughout the world, will in the future be called: the Mausoleum of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. 2. It is recognized as inappropriate any longer to keep the sarcophagus and coffin of Stalin in the Mausoleum, because of Stalin’s serious violations of Lenin’s legacy, his abuses of power and mass repression against innocent Soviet citizens, and because of other actions by him during the period of the personality cult, which make it impossible for the coffin with his body to remain in the Lenin Mausoleum.2

The details of this session of the congress relating to Stalin did not remain in my memory. I don’t even remember whether I was at that session or not. Unlike the shock of the “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress, this time I knew in advance what was going to happen, and the events of the congress did not seem to me all that dramatic. Returning to General Zakharov, from his memoirs: I was present at the party congress when Spiridonov, first secretary of the Leningrad province committee, introduced the resolution about removing Stalin’s remains from the Mausoleum. Khrushchev was chairing. “This is a serious question. It needs to be voted on. Are there any objections?” Nikita Sergeyevich asked. “No,” voices rang out. “Then I bring it to a vote. Who is in favor of the motion made by Comrade Spiridonov? I ask you to raise your hands. All right,” Khrushchev stated. “Who is opposed?” No one! “Who is abstaining?” Also no one. “The motion is passed.” Silence settled over the auditorium as though the delegates were still waiting for something.

They were waiting for lightning to strike, for the earth to open up, or still worse for the door behind the presiding committee to open and for Stalin himself to appear before this huge crowd in the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses. But nothing happened. “This long drawn-out pause was broken by Khrushchev, who said a few words about the changed burial place, then he pronounced the session closed.” I continue to quote from General Zakharov. “The unanimity of the delegates turned out to be illusory. Shortly after the vote Mzhavanadze, a member of the commission, hastily flew to Georgia so that he did not have to take part in the reburial.” At the same time, the last preparations had been completed next to the Kremlin wall. Zakharov writes with military precision: At 6 P.M., admittance to Red Square was closed off, after which the soldiers began to dig the grave. The cement slabs were brought up, the sides of the grave were lined with them, and then a plywood veneer was put over them on the inside.

Again About Stalin

63

Shvernik had warned me that the commission would arrive at 9 P.M. Shelepin and Demichev arrived in advance. They were interested in how the work was going. When all the commission members arrived at the Mausoleum, the eight officers took hold of the sarcophagus and carried it down below into the cellar under the Mausoleum, where a laboratory is located. I noticed that even the pockmarks were distinguishable on the embalmed face of Stalin. . . . No one ordered that Stalin be undressed. None of his clothing, including his generalissimo’s uniform, was touched. Shvernik instructed that the gold star designating Hero of Socialist Labor should be removed from the uniform and that the gold buttons of the uniform be replaced by brass ones. All of this was done by the commandant of the Mausoleum, Mashkov. After they were removed, the gold star and gold buttons were placed in a special location where the medals and awards of all those buried by the Kremlin wall were kept. When the lid was closed on the coffin containing Stalin’s remains, Shvernik and Dzhavakhishvili began to sob. Then the coffin was lifted and everyone moved toward the exit. A bodyguard supported Shvernik, who was not feeling well, and Dzhavakhishvili walked along behind him. Those two were the only ones who wept. The officers carefully lowered the coffin into the grave, which was lined with plywood veneer. Someone threw a handful of dirt onto the lid of the coffin [a Russian Orthodox tradition]. The grave was filled in. The white marble gravestone was placed on top. It covered the grave for a long time after that until a bust was put up. Having buried Stalin, we returned to the Kremlin, where Shvernik gave all of us members of the commission a document to sign about the change of Stalin’s burial place. At the same time, the plywood screening that had blocked off the area between the Mausoleum and the Kremlin wall was removed, and the area was cleaned up. By morning one had the feeling that nothing had happened during the night, as though Stalin had always been resting there by the Kremlin wall.

He lay there next to his loyal “comrades-in-arms.” But where were the graves of his opponents? And of those “comrades-in-arms” who had seemed insufficiently loyal to Stalin? We will never know. “That evening the congress delegates were treated to an opera.” With these words General Zakharov concludes his recollections.3 Shelepin, the chairman of the KGB, reported that “no noticeable reaction in society followed the reburial of Stalin.” On December 2, 1961, a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was issued. It was titled “On legislative actions of the Soviet Union that are no longer in force with regard to places named after Stalin.” A long list of names followed. After this there occurred the wholesale renaming of such places as Stalingrad, Stalinabad, and Stalinsk. The old historical names were restored in some cases, from before the Stalin era, and in other cases new and more neutral names were invented. For example, Stalino was renamed Donetsk. Originally it had been called Yuzovka (i.e., “Hughes”-ovka) after the English businessman Hughes who established the first metallurgical works in the Donbas (Donets Coal Basin).

64

At a Crossroads: 1961

After the revolution, in the early 1920s, the town had even briefly been called Trotsk. Obviously neither of those two historical names was suitable, and so they invented a neutral name, Donetsk. Then there was the case of Volgograd, which had historically been called Tsaritsyn (before it became Stalingrad). That old name did not have a good sound to it for ideological reasons, even though it was named not after an empress (tsaritsa), but after the nearby Tsaritsa River, and no one remembers why the river had that name. At the same time, numerous monuments to Stalin all over the Soviet Union were taken down, with the exception of those in Georgia. In Stalin’s hometown of Gori, the monument to Stalin was left untouched. The changing of monuments with the change of rulers is nothing new. Such things are well known to history. The ancients, however, approached the matter in a more rational way. For example, the Romans built statues with replaceable heads. If some caesar or other emperor passed away, you unscrewed the old head and screwed on the head of the new ruler. The torso wrapped in a toga, the arms, legs, and so on, remained as before.

11 Term Limits for Everyone The party program adopted at the Twenty-Second Congress announced

what awaited us in the future. It was not the program, however, that determined day-to-day life in the present, but the party rules. Those rules were updated regularly at one congress after another, but only cosmetically. This time Father proposed some changes in the rules that would alter the very foundations of the party’s internal hierarchical structure. Stalin, in his day, likened the party to an order of Teutonic Knights, and he proclaimed that unquestioning obedience by the lower ranks to those above them formed the backbone of the organization. There were no restrictions in either time or space on the power of the highest-ranking leaders. In essence, this form of power was no different from the monarchy, which the people had overthrown in 1917. The monarchical principle had been revived, though wearing a different face. In Father’s view, it was necessary to civilize this form of power. He held this view for a long time, actually from the moment he became part of the top leadership after Stalin’s death. He seriously feared the possibility of a new Stalin

64

At a Crossroads: 1961

After the revolution, in the early 1920s, the town had even briefly been called Trotsk. Obviously neither of those two historical names was suitable, and so they invented a neutral name, Donetsk. Then there was the case of Volgograd, which had historically been called Tsaritsyn (before it became Stalingrad). That old name did not have a good sound to it for ideological reasons, even though it was named not after an empress (tsaritsa), but after the nearby Tsaritsa River, and no one remembers why the river had that name. At the same time, numerous monuments to Stalin all over the Soviet Union were taken down, with the exception of those in Georgia. In Stalin’s hometown of Gori, the monument to Stalin was left untouched. The changing of monuments with the change of rulers is nothing new. Such things are well known to history. The ancients, however, approached the matter in a more rational way. For example, the Romans built statues with replaceable heads. If some caesar or other emperor passed away, you unscrewed the old head and screwed on the head of the new ruler. The torso wrapped in a toga, the arms, legs, and so on, remained as before.

11 Term Limits for Everyone The party program adopted at the Twenty-Second Congress announced

what awaited us in the future. It was not the program, however, that determined day-to-day life in the present, but the party rules. Those rules were updated regularly at one congress after another, but only cosmetically. This time Father proposed some changes in the rules that would alter the very foundations of the party’s internal hierarchical structure. Stalin, in his day, likened the party to an order of Teutonic Knights, and he proclaimed that unquestioning obedience by the lower ranks to those above them formed the backbone of the organization. There were no restrictions in either time or space on the power of the highest-ranking leaders. In essence, this form of power was no different from the monarchy, which the people had overthrown in 1917. The monarchical principle had been revived, though wearing a different face. In Father’s view, it was necessary to civilize this form of power. He held this view for a long time, actually from the moment he became part of the top leadership after Stalin’s death. He seriously feared the possibility of a new Stalin

Term Limits for Everyone

65

and wanted to place as many obstacles as possible in the path of any prospective new tyrant. However, under the system existing in the Soviet Union at that time, once an official had occupied a post, it was practically impossible to kick him out. That is, he might be removed from office by an order from above, but no one except God Almighty had the power to deal with the topmost leaders that way. Another, no less serious problem presented itself. The members of the Central Committee Presidium, the secretaries of the party’s province committees, and the government ministers had sat in their offices for decades and were growing senile. Their strength ebbed as they grew older, and they lost clarity of perception. What kind of official was that? Father promoted young people as much as he could, but with no particular success. The old-timers clung firmly to their seats. It is enough to say that in the Russian Federation over the course of several years Father had managed to shove only 2.9 percent of people under age thirty-five into leadership positions in the party’s province committees. To put it bluntly—that is, dropping the faceless percentages—this meant only three or four people. In other republics, matters were in even sadder shape. Now, by 1961, after the “anti-party” group of Molotov and other hard-line Stalinists had been cleared from the arena, and after the removal from office of another rival, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Father had accumulated enough power, paradoxically, to be able to set some limits on that power. In his speech to the CC Presidium of December 14, 1959 (quoted in Chapter 9, Communism), Father referred to that kind of power as similar to a closely knit “guild.” He had proposed democratization and renunciation of a “guildlike, monarchical” form of rule. It is not accidental that Father made these “seditious” statements at the end of 1959, just after he returned from his visit to the United States. The tipping point for him had been a conversation with the US president at Camp David in September 1959. Eisenhower was completing his second term in office and in 1960 would have to leave the White House. The US Constitution did not permit him a third term. Of course Father knew about these constitutional restrictions, but he decided to ask the president about the situation in greater detail in private conversation. He was thinking not so much about Eisenhower as about his own plans for our country, although those plans were still fairly vague. “Isn’t the president thinking about a third term?” Eisenhower was completely surprised by Father’s question. “The constitution does not allow it,” he replied laconically. “I understand,” Father persisted. “But people in this country love you. I have become convinced of that during my visit. You have done a lot of good, and you must have far-reaching plans that have not yet been realized. It would be a pity if your successor spoiled it all. And what of the constitution? Constitutions can be changed. I think the Congress would be on your side.” “No, one cannot merely change the constitution.” Eisenhower was puzzled that Father did not understand such simple matters. “If you start endlessly ‘modifying’ the country’s fundamental law, soon nothing will be left of the country. That’s why it is the fundamental law, because it is not easily changed.”

66 At a Crossroads: 1961 Then Father really got started. He kept questioning Eisenhower this way and that until he was finally satisfied, and then he gave up. His only thought was: if only we could have an untouchable constitution like that. By the beginning of 1961, Father’s vague reflections about turnover in the leadership began to acquire distinct outlines. He proposed that a limit of three five-year terms be set for all elected party positions, including in the Central Committee Presidium. That is, at each party congress—held every five years— one-third of the members of the party’s leading bodies would be replaced. Frol Kozlov was supposed to give the report on the party rules at the congress, but he proved to be a most stubborn opponent of this innovative proposal. What else could you expect!? With the passage of time, Kozlov calculated, he would become Khrushchev’s successor. But everything would be spoiled if this new party statute were adopted. Either he would have to leave office together with Khrushchev or, in the most favorable case, he would gain power for only five years. Other members of the Presidium supported Kozlov, with the exception of two people—but after all, they were old men: Mikoyan and Kuusinen. (Otto Kuusinen, from 1957 until his death in 1964, was a member of the CC Presidium and a secretary of the Central Committee.) The other CC Presidium members did not argue openly against Father. They only spoke about the need to maintain continuity and make use of the experience people had acquired. But behind his back they muttered: “He’s an old man, nearly seventy. Two terms are all he’ll ever need. He’ll die in office. But what about us? We’re in our fifties.” Father was at the zenith of his power and insisted on having his way. It was written into the party rules that rotation of leadership would be obligatory at all levels, from the CC Presidium to the lowest party cell. It’s true that Kozlov managed to haggle enough to extract one concession: if more than two-thirds of the delegates to a congress voted “yes” for a member of the Central Committee, that person could remain on the Central Committee for an additional term “by way of an exception.” The same would hold true for a member of the Presidium if more than two-thirds of the Central Committee “showed their confidence” in him. In those days everyone was still voting in the Stalin manner, unanimously. That’s what Kozlov was counting on. As for Father, he calculated that a Central Committee that was renewed at every congress would gradually acquire authority, and terms in office “by way of exception” would themselves become the exception. At the same time, the new party rules recommended, although no formal prohibition against this had existed earlier, that at party elections at all levels, no line should be drawn limiting the number of candidates. In the past it was usually recommended from above that the number of candidates be the same as the number of vacancies. In other words, this new provision would allow party members who were present and voting to nominate someone “from below.” Here a fundamental Stalinist principle was being violated: for each position only one person should run, someone previously selected. And the

Term Limits for Everyone

67

proposal was not limited to the party framework. In keeping with the practices of that time, party rules immediately became rules for the government as well. The congress adopted the new rules essentially without discussion. These innovations in party elections affected the base organizations of the party first of all. There the post of secretary traditionally was considered a burden. People had to be persuaded to become members of the local party bureaus, especially worthy people, that is, people who were already busy. And I’m not even talking about becoming secretary of a base-level party bureau, just being a member. It proved to be no easy task to persuade anyone to run for these offices. No one wanted to have more troubles piled on his head. Potential candidates found ways of wriggling out of the “honor” being offered to them. Some cited their obligations at work; others, poor health; and still others, family difficulties. It’s true, on the other hand, that having been elected as a party secretary of an organization at the base, some people “grew into the role,” got used to it, and it became their profession. Now these professional types of secretaries faced the prospect of saying goodbye to their “profession.” Also, new troubles and problems were added to those dealt with by factory managers. That is, they had to hunt for more and more new candidates to serve “under them.” The secretary of a local party bureau or party committee, if you found a sensible one, could become a valuable assistant, a right-hand man for the manager, but if you made a mistake, and an intriguer or complainer took office, that meant a constant headache. Unlike the manager, the rank-and-file participants at party meetings were not particularly concerned about who would be elected secretary. The main thing was that such a position not fall into their lap. Thus the rank-and-file party member gave a rather cool reception to the democratization of party life. It was also far from pleasing for everyone to have multiple candidates nominated in elections at the lowest party level. As long as the number of candidates was equal to the number of vacancies, the voting process did not take very long. People simply voted, and knowing in advance what the results would be, and that they would be announced the following day, they could go home. Although it was a secret ballot, the only people who were ever voted down were those who were particularly disliked or who had been imposed from above too arbitrarily. According to the new rules, there would now be an unpredictable number of candidates, people’s sympathies would vary, and it would be necessary to round up a minimum number of votes in order to be elected. If someone didn’t gather up this minimum number, then everything had to be started over, with more discussion and more voting, which was a waste of time. Thus there was always someone who asked that nominations be closed after the list of candidates recommended from “on high” had been read, and a forest of hands would immediately go up in favor of closing the nominations, so that “outsider candidates” would not be added. It was even harder to implant this innovation in the upper echelons of party power. Here there was a great fear of losing control over elections, and therefore

68 At a Crossroads: 1961 everything was done to reduce “democratic” procedures to empty formalities. The nomination of both the “main candidates” and “alternative ones” was done “in an organized way.” I don’t remember any instance in which someone became a secretary of a party province committee whose candidacy had not been approved by a department of the Central Committee. The party’s province committees kept equally strict watch over elections on the district level. Here, however, some accidents did happen; “outsiders” did appear and were even elected to leading posts. All these difficulties were natural. In a society based on monarchical traditions, no one had any hesitation, either in the upper echelons or in the lower ranks, about people being appointed to the most powerful positions by orders from above. They felt that it was all right, and so was the fact that elections were carried out strictly on a pro forma basis. Thus it was difficult for democracy to take root. Attitudes took shape accordingly. In order for people to believe that they really had a choice in an election, time was needed, but you had to start somewhere. And thus Father made a start. Granted it was difficult, but democracy was starting to make a path for itself. But not for long. An end was soon put to taking such “liberties.” The next party congress, the Twenty-Third Congress (in 1966), took place without Khrushchev. The delegates to that congress approved a motion by the CC Presidium, which eliminated such “voluntaristic” foolishness. That was how Khrushchev’s successors described his initiatives. They removed from the party rules all restrictions on the length of time in office and returned to the old election procedures.

12 Kozlov Makes His Move Although Frol Kozlov did not agree with the innovative proposals for

the party rules, which he himself reported on to the Twenty-Second Congress, as an experienced bureaucrat he took advantage of them for his own purposes at the first opportunity. At Father’s suggestion, the elections for a new Central Committee, held at the end of the Twenty-Second Congress, followed the new rules, that is, rotation of one-third of the members, so that one-third of the new CC Presidium would

68 At a Crossroads: 1961 everything was done to reduce “democratic” procedures to empty formalities. The nomination of both the “main candidates” and “alternative ones” was done “in an organized way.” I don’t remember any instance in which someone became a secretary of a party province committee whose candidacy had not been approved by a department of the Central Committee. The party’s province committees kept equally strict watch over elections on the district level. Here, however, some accidents did happen; “outsiders” did appear and were even elected to leading posts. All these difficulties were natural. In a society based on monarchical traditions, no one had any hesitation, either in the upper echelons or in the lower ranks, about people being appointed to the most powerful positions by orders from above. They felt that it was all right, and so was the fact that elections were carried out strictly on a pro forma basis. Thus it was difficult for democracy to take root. Attitudes took shape accordingly. In order for people to believe that they really had a choice in an election, time was needed, but you had to start somewhere. And thus Father made a start. Granted it was difficult, but democracy was starting to make a path for itself. But not for long. An end was soon put to taking such “liberties.” The next party congress, the Twenty-Third Congress (in 1966), took place without Khrushchev. The delegates to that congress approved a motion by the CC Presidium, which eliminated such “voluntaristic” foolishness. That was how Khrushchev’s successors described his initiatives. They removed from the party rules all restrictions on the length of time in office and returned to the old election procedures.

12 Kozlov Makes His Move Although Frol Kozlov did not agree with the innovative proposals for

the party rules, which he himself reported on to the Twenty-Second Congress, as an experienced bureaucrat he took advantage of them for his own purposes at the first opportunity. At Father’s suggestion, the elections for a new Central Committee, held at the end of the Twenty-Second Congress, followed the new rules, that is, rotation of one-third of the members, so that one-third of the new CC Presidium would

Kozlov Makes His Move

69

be new people. Today it is of no interest who was elected to the Central Committee or who was not, but the fact is that at this point the Ignatov group left the Central Committee. The group consisted of Nikolai Grigoryevich Ignatov, Furtseva, and Aristov. Ignatov had been elected to the CC Presidium and CC Secretariat after the ouster of Molotov and others of the “anti-party” group in June 1957. At first surreptitiously, and later almost openly, Ignatov began a struggle for power. He clashed with the person who was then seen as the Number Two man after Father: Aleksei Kirichenko. Ignatov considered Kirichenko and the place he held in the party hierarchy to be a step on the way to supreme power. Once he knocked Kirichenko out of the way, he would then take on Khrushchev. He talked almost openly about this, taking his desires for reality and boasting that while Khrushchev was traveling around the country, he, Ignatov, was running the country. Ignatov managed to win over Central Committee secretaries and Presidium members Aristov and Furtseva and was also courting General Ivan Serov, chairman of the KGB at that time. Of course, Ignatov’s maneuvers did not go unnoticed. Kirichenko constantly complained to Father about Ignatov, and so did Anastas Mikoyan, who was Father’s first deputy (deputy premier of the government). Their complaints were taken up more than once at meetings of the CC Presidium. Finally Father had had enough of it and decided to cut through this thickening knot with one blow. In May 1960 both Kirichenko and the Ignatov group were removed from their posts. Kirichenko lost both his position as Central Committee secretary and his membership in the CC Presidium, but the members of the Ignatov group, after being transferred to less important posts, remained as members of the CC Presidium. The head of the KGB was also changed. General Serov was transferred to the General Staff, to become head of its intelligence directorate, and his place was taken by a young party leader promoted by Father, Aleksandr Shelepin. More than a year had gone by since then. The Twenty-Second Party Congress had opened and was now closing, with elections for a new Central Committee. Of course Khrushchev submitted some proposals about who should be members of the Central Committee. We do not know whether he discussed the list of candidates on a preliminary basis with anyone else, but the advantage turned out to be in favor of Kozlov. He got rid of his last serious competitors (the Ignatov group). Kozlov did not consider two other favorites of Father’s, Mikoyan and Kosygin, to be serious rivals, and he could not do anything about them for the time being anyway. Suddenly there was another man overboard—the Central Committee secretary, Mukhitdinov. He too had not been getting along with Kozlov in the previous several years and had even asked Father to transfer him from the CC Secretariat to the Council of Ministers, so that he could be farther away from Kozlov. Father had promised to think about it, but Kozlov himself stepped in at this point. In the recent past, Mukhitdinov’s wife had complained about him. She protested that he was drinking heavily and, after getting drunk, would beat

70 At a Crossroads: 1961 her and the children, and that in general he was conducting himself in a manner unsuitable for a Communist and CC Presidium member; instead, he was letting himself go completely and behaving like a Central Asian feudal lord. The KGB also reported on Mukhitdinov’s drunkenness, as well as his moral degeneracy. It was said that he couldn’t keep his hands off the female servants at his official residence in the Vorobyov Hills. Kozlov saved all these complaints and denunciations for future use. Now he laid them on the table for Father to see and convinced him that such an immoral individual had no place in the CC Presidium. Mukhitdinov was shoved off to become deputy chairman of the Central Association of Consumer Cooperatives, which was anything but a prestigious organization. He barely remained an ordinary member of the Central Committee. As for Furtseva, Ignatov, and Aristov—they all guessed that they would be removed from the CC Presidium. They had already been deprived of real power in May 1960, and the new duties they had been assigned to at that time left them with no reason to hope. (Furtseva became head of the Ministry of Culture; Ignatov, chairman of the State Committee for Procurements, for agricultural products; and Aristov, ambassador to Poland.) Nevertheless, they continued to hope—as if for a miracle. But in Mukhitdinov’s case, he had no doubt about the results of the new elections. Father asked Kozlov to take steps in advance to ensure the exclusion of “outsider” names in the list of candidates to be voted on. Khrushchev himself did not want to make unpleasant explanations—and in the case of Furtseva, he wanted to avoid her tears. But the outcome was even worse. Either Kozlov was too busy with minor matters at the party congress or he decided to strike his blow in an underhanded way. At any rate, “the unlucky ones” had no chance to get through to speak with Khrushchev in person. They learned about their fates when the names of candidates were read aloud—that is, the names that would be on the ballot in the voting for the new CC Presidium. To be removed from the CC Presidium, even if the action was expected, was a terrible blow for any functionary. It meant the end of his or her career, the first step down the ladder, when only yesterday they had climbed to the top rung. Not everyone is capable of withstanding such a blow and maintaining their dignity. Ignatov and Aristov managed to hold up, but Furtseva and Mukhitdinov broke down. They didn’t even attend the final session of the congress. Father was concerned and asked his aides to find out what had happened. It turned out that Mukhitdinov had seriously overdone it the night before, getting into a drunken brawl, and still hadn’t sobered up. During the night, Furtseva had also suffered a misfortune. She also sought to drown her sorrows (she liked to drink to ease the pain when times were bad) and had even tried to cut her wrists. But her hand had trembled and the suicide attempt was unsuccessful. It is possible that she did not really intend to take her own life, and was only trying to attract attention and arouse sympathy, but her action had the opposite effect. Father viewed their absence from the final session as a demonstrative show of lack of respect for the congress. Kozlov immediately proposed that Furtseva

A Dangerous Partnership

71

and Mukhitdinov be removed, without hesitation, from the Central Committee, not just from the Presidium. Father agreed, but he felt it would be awkward to vote a second time on the last day of the congress. He postponed carrying out this sentence until the next Central Committee plenum, which was already scheduled for March 1962. By the time of the plenum, Father had cooled down. He did not like this kind of “public flogging,” and in the case of Furtseva, he simply felt sorry for her. At the plenum, matters went no further than a discussion and reprimand for the behavior of the guilty parties, without any organizational consequences.

13 A Dangerous Partnership One event at the Twenty-Second Party Congress seemed at first glance

to have little significance, but it brought serious consequences in its wake: Shelepin, former head of the Young Communist League (Komsomol), was transferred from the KGB and elected a secretary of the Central Committee, in charge of highly important cadres: party cadres, military ones, and all other kinds. Generally speaking, it was Kozlov who as second secretary “sat over the cadres,” that is, was in charge of personnel and assignments; but it was customary to have under the second secretary another Central Committee “secretary for cadres.” Formally this other person was subordinate to the second secretary, but in practice he reported regularly to the first secretary and, as it were, kept an eye on the second secretary. Since Stalin’s time, an appointment to this position of “cadres secretary” testified that the first secretary (or in Stalin’s case, “general secretary”) had special confidence in the appointee. Among the chief “cadre secretaries” of the Central Committee under Stalin had been Nikolai Yezhov, notorious as the man who, following Stalin’s orders, carried out the most brutal phase of the Great Purges, in 1937–1938, and having done his dirty work was shot on Stalin’s orders in 1940. Yezhov was followed in the “cadres secretary” position by Malenkov, and after Malenkov came Aleksei Kuznetsov. From 1944 to 1949, Kuznetsov was a member of the Central Committee’s Organizational Bureau and Secretariat and simultaneously was in charge of “cadres.” Stalin even referred to him as his successor, but in 1949 he lost Stalin’s trust and was arrested, and in 1950 was executed.

A Dangerous Partnership

71

and Mukhitdinov be removed, without hesitation, from the Central Committee, not just from the Presidium. Father agreed, but he felt it would be awkward to vote a second time on the last day of the congress. He postponed carrying out this sentence until the next Central Committee plenum, which was already scheduled for March 1962. By the time of the plenum, Father had cooled down. He did not like this kind of “public flogging,” and in the case of Furtseva, he simply felt sorry for her. At the plenum, matters went no further than a discussion and reprimand for the behavior of the guilty parties, without any organizational consequences.

13 A Dangerous Partnership One event at the Twenty-Second Party Congress seemed at first glance

to have little significance, but it brought serious consequences in its wake: Shelepin, former head of the Young Communist League (Komsomol), was transferred from the KGB and elected a secretary of the Central Committee, in charge of highly important cadres: party cadres, military ones, and all other kinds. Generally speaking, it was Kozlov who as second secretary “sat over the cadres,” that is, was in charge of personnel and assignments; but it was customary to have under the second secretary another Central Committee “secretary for cadres.” Formally this other person was subordinate to the second secretary, but in practice he reported regularly to the first secretary and, as it were, kept an eye on the second secretary. Since Stalin’s time, an appointment to this position of “cadres secretary” testified that the first secretary (or in Stalin’s case, “general secretary”) had special confidence in the appointee. Among the chief “cadre secretaries” of the Central Committee under Stalin had been Nikolai Yezhov, notorious as the man who, following Stalin’s orders, carried out the most brutal phase of the Great Purges, in 1937–1938, and having done his dirty work was shot on Stalin’s orders in 1940. Yezhov was followed in the “cadres secretary” position by Malenkov, and after Malenkov came Aleksei Kuznetsov. From 1944 to 1949, Kuznetsov was a member of the Central Committee’s Organizational Bureau and Secretariat and simultaneously was in charge of “cadres.” Stalin even referred to him as his successor, but in 1949 he lost Stalin’s trust and was arrested, and in 1950 was executed.

72 At a Crossroads: 1961 The person chosen for the position of “cadres secretary” had to be absolutely devoted and loyal. That is what Father considered Shelepin to be. He saw in him a leader of a newly emerging formation—one that would be devoted not to him personally, as Yezhov and Malenkov had been to Stalin, but to “the common cause.” That was his reason for transferring Shelepin from the chairmanship of the KGB to this even more prestigious post of “cadres secretary.” On Father’s initiative, the person replacing Shelepin as chairman of the KGB was also a former head of the Komsomol—Vladimir Semichastny. In 1944, Father had brought the twenty-year-old Semichastny from the Donbas to Kiev and, in 1947, made him a secretary of the Ukrainian Komsomol. Even then Father trusted Semichastny and believed in him—so much so that he defended him when Semichastny was in what he himself describes as “a seemingly hopeless position.” At the very beginning of the war, the army unit to which Semichastny’s older brother Boris belonged was encircled by the Germans, and Boris ended up a prisoner of war. He survived and after the war, together with millions of other “traitors,” was sent to the labor camps in Siberia, serving his twenty-fiveyear sentence at mines in the Khabarovsk region. When Vladimir Semichastny was transferred to Kiev, the KGB informed Father, who was then the leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, that the new Komsomol secretary had “unsuitable relatives.” An investigation began. Frightened to death, Semichastny threw himself on Khrushchev’s mercies. Father listened to him and intervened in the matter. He knew perfectly well what had happened at the beginning of the war, just as he knew Stalin’s attitude toward all those taken prisoner by the Germans. (Stalin had declared that they were “traitors,” and so their relatives were too.) Nevertheless, Father took Semichastny’s side and ended the conversation with him by saying: “Go your way. Don’t worry. You can calmly keep doing your work.” Many years later, Semichastny read a letter from Khrushchev to Stalin that had been placed in his personnel file: “I am writing in behalf of the first secretary of our Komsomol, whose brother was drafted into the army before the war. . . . He bears no responsibility for his brother. . . . I personally vouch for his devotion to our cause.”1 I don’t need to emphasize that Father was taking a risk. From then on, Semichastny was inseparable from his benefactor. Father was transferred to Moscow in December 1949, and as early as January 1950 Semichastny was there too, soon becoming a secretary of the unionwide Central Committee of the Komsomol, and then its first secretary. In March 1959, Father moved him from the Young Communist League to the Central Committee, making him the secretary in charge of the Department of Party Organizations. This was a sign of the highest confidence. Father had great hopes for Semichastny and was preparing him for even more important government posts. For this purpose, according to Father’s

A Dangerous Partnership

73

understanding, one had to know not only how to shuffle papers and dig into the files to check up on party cadres; one also had to become skilled in matters of industry and agriculture. In short, one had to go through the school of practical work, and preferably that should be done as far away from Moscow as possible, somewhere where high-ranking officials would not especially interfere with you or keep any special watch over you. At that moment a vacancy appeared: the post of second secretary in the Azerbaijan Communist Party’s Central Committee. Formally, this position could not compare with the one Semichastny then held in Moscow. Even the first secretaries of union republic parties (like that of Azerbaijan) had to snap to attention in front of a Central Committee secretary. But from Father’s point of view, the position in Azerbaijan was very important for Semichastny’s further development and advancement. But Semichastny got stubborn about it; he dug in his heels and refused to go to Baku, the capital of the Azerbaijan republic. Khrushchev barely managed to persuade him. At that point Father should have looked more closely at why Semichastny was holding on so tightly to Moscow. But Father paid no attention to the priggishness Semichastny displayed in this instance, writing it off as a youthful aberration. In August 1959, Semichastny finally began his work in Azerbaijan. Now, at the Twenty-Second Party Congress, Father decided that the onthe-job training had been completed, that Semichastny was ready to return to the capital in a new capacity. On November 13, 1961, the thirty-five-year-old Semichastny was appointed chairman of the KGB—one of the key posts in the Soviet Union. By doing this, Father put an explosive mixture together with his own hands. Though not very farsighted, Shelepin and Semichastny were extraordinarily ambitious politicians. Through a widely ramified official and unofficial network of informers, the head of the KGB could not only control local leaders but also, to a certain extent, filter the information reaching the top leader, Khrushchev— information on the basis of which he made his decisions. Father knew all this and understood it, but he never expected dirty tricks from Shelepin and Semichastny. He miscalculated. This dangerous twosome proved to be devoted neither to Father nor to “the common cause.” They were devoted only to themselves and their careers, and Father did not have x-ray vision. He couldn’t see through such untrustworthy people.

74 At a Crossroads: 1961

14 Disputes over Agricultural Methods After the party congress, Father traveled around the regions for the

second time that year, finding out the results of the year’s work in agriculture and at the same time stirring up local leaders and urging them on. Next year’s spring sowing was not far away. In short, he was trying to dispel entropy. His first stop, on November 11, 1961, was Tashkent, capital of the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan. The Uzbeks were just completing the cotton harvest, so Father began with them. Again he talked about the need to switch from manual labor to machine harvesting. Sharaf Rashidov, first secretary of the Uzbek party’s Central Committee, did not disagree, but to the very end of the Soviet era and until the death of Rashidov himself, cotton would continue to be harvested as before, by hand. It was more convenient and the work could be done more carefully. Also, field hands were always available. Until New Year’s time, year after year, college and secondary school students were sent out to harvest the cotton. The school year did not begin until January, and a full year’s worth of schoolwork had to be “mastered” in half a year. From Tashkent, Father went to the Golodnaya Steppe region, on the west bank of the Syr Darya River after it leaves the Fergana Valley. Work on irrigating the Golodnaya Steppe was being completed. Golodnaya means “hungry, starving, famine-stricken,” but now the region was “Golodnaya” only in name. It had in fact become one of the most fruitful parts of Uzbekistan. With all his heart, Father congratulated Rashidov on this achievement. By November 23, 1961, Father was already in Tselinograd, in Kazakhstan. He spoke to an audience of Virgin Lands agricultural workers and then went to Shortandy, north of Tselinograd, to the Institute of Grain Growing, where he talked for a long time with the institute’s director, an old acquaintance of his, Alesksandr Ivanovich Barayev. He was trying to understand what agronomic methods were most effective in the Black Earth belt of Siberia and Kazakhstan. In the Virgin Lands a serious struggle had broken out between two schools of agriculture. The first was the traditional one, whose history went back beyond the nineteenth century and according to which it should be left to nature to restore the soil after humans had used it for growing crops. The idea was to let the land lie fallow for a year and then let grass crops grow on it for a couple of years. The opposing point of view was a new-fangled American notion that said the

Disputes over Agricultural Methods

75

farmer himself could maintain the fertility of the soil. For this purpose he had machinery, fertilizer, herbicides, and other miracles of the twentieth century. The roots of this issue went far back into the history of agriculture. In the 1930s, two leading advocates of these different points of view had argued themselves hoarse: academician Dmitry Pryanishnikov and academician Vasily Vilyams. Vilyams contended that to increase soil fertility, it was not necessary to have any outside intervention; the soil would restore itself. It was only necessary to have the proper alternation of crops growing on the fields in question. After a harvest of wheat or rye, a field should be left to rest for a season. It should be plowed but not seeded and allowed to lie fallow, and the next year it should be planted with alfalfa or clover. These plants extract nutritive elements from the environment because of the nitrogen-fixing bacteria on their roots, forming nodules rich in nitrogen, which serves as the best fertilizer. Then the cycle could begin again: rye, fallow land, alfalfa or clover. And so on from year to year. This alternation of crops was called the three-field agricultural system. Vilyams had actually not invented anything new. In the early twentieth century he simply borrowed the system practiced by the peasants of the previous century and earlier. At that time science had not yet begun to think about mineral fertilizers, and among the peasants manure was gathered mostly for vegetable gardens, and even that required a lot of work. Gradually the system of alternating grass fields with crops was made more complex. The three-field system was replaced by the five-field system and then the seven-field system, but the essence was the same. A few words about academician Vilyams. Where did he come from? His father, Robert Williams, was an American railroad construction engineer who went to Russia in the 1840s (before the abolition of serfdom). He was hired to work on the construction of Russia’s first railroad, linking St. Petersburg and Moscow, built between 1842 and 1851. Williams came to visit but stayed for good. He fell in love with a young woman who happened to be a serf. (Serfs were bound to the land and to labor service for landowning aristocrats.) Williams bought her from the landowner, set her free, and married her. That romantic story actually happened. Their descendants constitute the Russian family that goes by the name Vilyams (the Russianized spelling of Williams). Their son Vasily, born in 1863, developed a passionate interest in agriculture and graduated from the Petrovskaya Agricultural and Forestry Academy, named after Tsar Peter the Great. It was renamed after the revolution in honor of the great scientist Kliment Timiryazev. In 1901, seven years after he graduated from the academy, Vilyams began to teach there, and later became head of the department of general agriculture and soil science. In the 1920s, when an exodus of scientists from Russia began, a suggestion was made to Vilyams that he move to the United States, his father’s homeland. He refused. The Russian revolution had become his revolution.

76

At a Crossroads: 1961

Vilyams’s main opponent in the realm of agricultural theory, as already noted, was Pryanishnikov. Both men were members of the Academy of Sciences. Pryanishnikov headed the agrochemistry department at the Timiryazev Academy. He considered the three-field crop rotation system harmful and lacking in long-term value. He advocated increased capital investments in agriculture and the production of mineral fertilizers. Otherwise agronomy would remain stuck at a primitive level. The roots of the disagreements between the professors Vilyams and Pryanishnikov went back to the end of the nineteenth century and had flared up especially strongly at the time of the Stolypin reform of the peasant commune, the period 1906–1911. After 1861, when Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom, the peasant commune became an important factor in the economy of the Russian empire. As a result of a compromise between the tsarist government and the aristocracy (the serf-owning feudal lords of the large landed estates), the peasants were given personal freedom, but very little land—and for the land they were given, the peasant communities had to pay reparations for half a century. The small allotments from which the peasants derived their subsistence belonged to a “commune” (in Russian, obshchina or mir), which consisted of all the inhabitants of one or another village. Such peasant communities had existed in Russia “from time immemorial.” Their roots went back at least to the 1200s and probably earlier. Back then, the primitive means that the Russian peasants had for working the land meant that a single household could not survive by itself against nature or enemy invasions. The only way out was to unite in a community and work the land in common. The community assigned certain strips of land to each family to use for several years to grow crops for its livelihood. In addition, the peasant community was responsible for the payment of taxes and other fees to the government. It also helped peasant families in the event of a disaster—for example, if a family’s house burned down. It was obligatory for all residents of a village to belong to the commune, and they were not allowed to leave it. By this means the government and the big landowners maintained control over the peasants, because the small strips of communally owned land did not provide enough crops to live on and thus the peasants were forced to work for a pittance on the same large landed estates where they had previously labored as serfs. The “egalitarian” principles on which the communes were based provided no incentive for peasants to work harder—not on the strips of land allotted to them temporarily by the commune, which they did not consider their own, and certainly not on the fields of the big landowners. Thus by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the peasant commune had become an anachronism. It acted as a brake on the development of agriculture in the Russian empire. There was a need for a reform that would allow peasants the freedom to leave the commune and acquire land as their own private property without restriction, so that they could work the land as they saw fit and earn as much as

Disputes over Agricultural Methods

77

possible from their labor. The first government official who became aware of the need for such a reform was Count Sergei Witte. From 1903 to 1906, Witte was chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian empire. He submitted a memorandum to Tsar Nicholas II outlining such a reform, but received no support. Labor by the peasants of the rural communities was the unshakable foundation of an age-old economic structure. The big landowners of Russia lived off this labor. Taking advantage of the position the peasants were trapped in, the landlords hired them for pennies, then earned large sums in gold by exporting the grain grown by peasant hands. It was natural that neither the ordinary landowners nor the biggest of them all, the “autocrat of all the Russias,” wanted to be deprived of this peasant labor, the source of their parasitic prosperity. It required the great shake-up of the 1905 revolution before Tsar Nicholas II was willing to back down and make some concessions. During the revolution, the peasants, driven to extremes by their desperate situation, occupied the lands of the feudal lords, wrecking and burning down their manor houses. In 1906, the uncompromising reformer Witte was replaced by Pyotr Stolypin, a man the tsar found more acceptable. But Stolypin also understood that without a change in the condition of the peasants, both inside their communities and in relation to the large landowners, Russia would face new upheavals. Stolypin made use of the proposals Witte had prepared earlier and turned them into decrees of the tsar. In 1906, one such decree gave permission, for those who wanted it, to leave the peasant commune and acquire their own pieces of land as private property, which would enable them eventually to become farmers (in the Western sense). In 1910, another decree strengthened the Peasant Bank, from which newly emergent farmers could obtain loans. Although permission was granted to leave the peasant community, there was not enough arable land in the European part of Russia for agriculture to develop there or even for the maintenance of a decent livelihood for peasant families. In 1911, Stolypin organized an arrangement by which those who wanted it could resettle on virgin land in the Black Earth regions of Kazakhstan and Siberia. This aroused a stormy negative reaction not only among the big landlords, who feared the loss of farmhands they could hire for almost nothing, but also among the peasants, who were afraid to leave their communities and did not want those communities weakened by the departure of some members. Such “traitors to the community” were persecuted: their houses were burned down or they were beaten, sometimes to death. In autumn 1911 a revolutionary terrorist who was also an agent of the tsarist secret police assassinated Stolypin. The reform process ended. Then in 1914, the world war began, and no one bothered about reforms anymore. In those years the peasant communities did not know of any methods other than the primitive three-field system inherited from the Middle Ages. At the same time, new winds were blowing from the West, especially from Germany, where industrially produced chemical compounds that could increase crop yields first made their appearance. The most forward-looking agronomists, especially Pryanishnikov and his followers, along with the most energetic entrepreneurs

78 At a Crossroads: 1961 among free farmers, called for the practical application of the latest technology to Russian agriculture, but the conservative-minded majority refused to accept their arguments and stubbornly adhered to the customary methods of working the land. In the decades that followed, Russia became quite a different country. But the disputes about the future of Russian agriculture were no less sharp at midcentury than they had been in 1906–1911. Should the old, patriarchal grass-field rotation system be left as it was? Or should a new orientation be adopted toward agro-industrial development? Pryanishnikov was ahead of his time. In Russia in the early twentieth century, mineral fertilizers were considered German fantasies, and Pryanishnikov, the proponent of such fertilizers, was dismissed as a dreamer out of touch with reality. As for Vilyams, he was in fact behind the times. His scientific views belonged to previous centuries, but they did not contradict the so-called common sense of his day. Pryanishnikov simply ignored Vilyams. Vilyams, however, waged a stubborn war against him. At every opportunity, Vilyams needled Pryanishnikov and tried to humiliate him. Vilyams sarcastically instructed his students: “On the first floor of the Timiryazev Academy (where Vilyams’s department was located) you are taught how agriculture should be done, but on the second floor (Pryanishnikov’s department) they teach how it might be done. And those are two different things.”1 In the 1920s, amid the economic ruin after the revolution and civil war, there could be no question of mineral fertilizers. The peasants had only themselves to rely on, and the foundation of their agricultural work remained the age-old, uncomplicated three-field system. Stalin found the theory of Vilyams immediately to his liking. It corresponded to his policy of plundering the peasants in the interest of industrialization without requiring the government to make any additional capital investments in agriculture. Let the collective farmers deal with their situation as best they could. In the latter half of the 1930s, Vilyams was becoming senile in his old age. He made his way down the hallways of the Timiryazev Academy in a wheelchair, and his disagreements with Pryanishnikov developed into ideological hostility. Then came 1937, the worst year of Stalin’s Great Terror. Stalin elevated Vilyams’s inoffensive theory to the status of unchallengeable dogma. Stalin liked to do that kind of thing, as he also did with the “theories” of academician Nikolai Marr in linguistics and Trofim Lysenko in genetics. Father became acquainted with the grass-field rotation system even before the war. During drought years in Ukraine, this system did more harm than good. But Vilyams convinced Stalin of the infallibility of his theory. “The party came down with all its authority in favor of inculcating the grass-field crop rotation system,” Father said in his memoirs. “How many speeches I made praising him [Vilyams]! But [his system] didn’t produce the desired results. And we had big losses.”2

Disputes over Agricultural Methods

79

Pryanishnikov was lucky. He was not shot in 1937, and not even arrested or fired from his job. He lived until after the war and died in his own bed, in 1948. But it seemed as though Vilyams had permanently discredited him in the realm of agricultural science. When Khrushchev came to power in 1953, he decided to thoroughly investigate the theory of academician Vilyams. “After all,” as Father said in his memoirs, “he was one of our people, one of our very own Soviet scientists.”3 When Khrushchev did this, he found himself in a crossfire, at the epicenter of a dispute between two scientific schools. Representatives of both schools appealed to him and asked him to pass judgment. Naturally each side expected he would rule in their favor. As Father began to look into the essence of the matter, he asked a question: “Is the universal application of the grass-field system of Vilyams in all parts of our vast country possible? That is doubtful.”4 As time went on, Father’s tone became more and more emphatic: “We . . . reoriented ourselves toward Pryanishnikov. . . . He proposed more solid and realistic methods for increasing agricultural yields. In his theory both manure and grasses, both alfalfa and clover, were included, but at the foundation of his whole system was fertilizer, especially mineral fertilizer. Without that it was simply impossible to move forward.”5 By taking up the struggle against the grass-field rotation system, Father not only restored Pryanishnikov’s good name, and not only brought the midtwentieth-century advances of world science to Soviet agriculture; he was also pursuing strictly pragmatic goals. Under the three-field system, two-thirds of the agricultural land was “stagnating,” and under the seven-field system, even more. If the fields that were “resting” were fertilized and sown with wheat year after year, it should be possible to increase grain output several times over. That’s what American farmers did. They had long since abandoned the archaic crop rotation system. They sowed wheat on top of wheat and corn on top of corn, and nevertheless they brought in good harvests. Father kept in mind the fact that the American experience could not be applied right off the bat. The Soviet Union did not produce much mineral fertilizer, and its quality was so poor that he was ashamed to even call it fertilizer. But the country could not be fed by using the agricultural methods of our grandfathers. Father wavered. Sometimes he went on the offensive against the threefield system, driving fallow lands and grass from the fields, and then for a time he would retreat, and then again go on the offensive. In 1961 the crossfire resumed with new force. Barayev and his Institute of Grain Growing held to the traditional view. He was opposed by G. A. Nalivaiko, director of the Altai Institute, who advocated a technocratic approach to agriculture. Nalivaiko argued that if land lay fallow—that is, if fields were plowed but not sown with any crop for a year and became overgrown with weeds—this did not mean that the land actually rested and restored itself between harvests. No, this was simply primitivism and bad management. Nor was it expedient

80 At a Crossroads: 1961 to plant grass on the fallow land for a number of years. Grasses did not accumulate moisture but tended to dry out the land, which was already suffering from a shortage of moisture. With such agronomic methods we would not have a good harvest the next year. What ought to be introduced was a rotation of crops from wheat to corn to beans, and possibly sugar beets; and weeds should be combated with herbicides. That is precisely what the Americans were doing. Barayev insisted on his position. He argued that if the land were not allowed to lie fallow, the Virgin Lands would soon lose their fertility. Father tried to remain neutral between the two disputing schools, but did not manage to do so for long. Gradually he was drawn into the debate and took the side of Nalivaiko. To be sure, he did this cautiously and with reservations: “The system recommended by the Altai Institute is more efficient, more effective. It yields two and a half times more grain than the system advocated by the Institute of Grain Growing, headed by Comrade Barayev. I have probably listened four times already to speeches by Comrade Nalivaiko and to his line of argument. While we give preference to the system advocated by the Altai Institute, we do not swear by it, not at all. The scientists and specialists need to study everything very thoroughly and continue the debate.”6

15 A Lesson in Diplomacy From Tselinograd, Father went to Novosibirsk. There, on November

23–24, he met with Urho Kekkonen, president of Finland. In those years the two were well disposed toward one another, not only as statesmen but also on a purely human basis. I would even say they became friends, if the term “friendship” can be applied to relations among politicians. The previous autumn Father had traveled to Helsinki to help celebrate Kekkonen’s sixtieth birthday. At that time he had lavishly praised the beauties of Siberia and had told Kekkonen about the “wonder of the world” created by academician Mikhail Lavrentyev and his fellow scientists at Akademgorodok (“Academy Town”), a suburb of Novosibirsk where construction of accommodations for the Siberian division of the Academy of Sciences had begun in 1957. Father had invited Kekkonen to come and feast his eyes on the marvelous sights there.

80 At a Crossroads: 1961 to plant grass on the fallow land for a number of years. Grasses did not accumulate moisture but tended to dry out the land, which was already suffering from a shortage of moisture. With such agronomic methods we would not have a good harvest the next year. What ought to be introduced was a rotation of crops from wheat to corn to beans, and possibly sugar beets; and weeds should be combated with herbicides. That is precisely what the Americans were doing. Barayev insisted on his position. He argued that if the land were not allowed to lie fallow, the Virgin Lands would soon lose their fertility. Father tried to remain neutral between the two disputing schools, but did not manage to do so for long. Gradually he was drawn into the debate and took the side of Nalivaiko. To be sure, he did this cautiously and with reservations: “The system recommended by the Altai Institute is more efficient, more effective. It yields two and a half times more grain than the system advocated by the Institute of Grain Growing, headed by Comrade Barayev. I have probably listened four times already to speeches by Comrade Nalivaiko and to his line of argument. While we give preference to the system advocated by the Altai Institute, we do not swear by it, not at all. The scientists and specialists need to study everything very thoroughly and continue the debate.”6

15 A Lesson in Diplomacy From Tselinograd, Father went to Novosibirsk. There, on November

23–24, he met with Urho Kekkonen, president of Finland. In those years the two were well disposed toward one another, not only as statesmen but also on a purely human basis. I would even say they became friends, if the term “friendship” can be applied to relations among politicians. The previous autumn Father had traveled to Helsinki to help celebrate Kekkonen’s sixtieth birthday. At that time he had lavishly praised the beauties of Siberia and had told Kekkonen about the “wonder of the world” created by academician Mikhail Lavrentyev and his fellow scientists at Akademgorodok (“Academy Town”), a suburb of Novosibirsk where construction of accommodations for the Siberian division of the Academy of Sciences had begun in 1957. Father had invited Kekkonen to come and feast his eyes on the marvelous sights there.

A Lesson in Diplomacy

81

However, in the fall of 1961, Kekkonen was thinking least of all about sightseeing in Siberia. Elections were coming, both presidential and parliamentary, and his victory in those elections was by no means ensured. His party, the Agrarian Union, had come to power at the end of the war when President Juho Paasikivi had signed an agreement with Moscow about Finland leaving the war. In 1946, Paasikivi was elected president for a six-year term, after which he was reelected for a second term. Paasikivi died in 1956, and the presidency, according to the constitution, passed to the prime minister, Urho Kekkonen, Paasikivi’s close associate. By 1961 the Agrarian Union had been in power for a decade and a half, and the voters had pretty much had their fill of it. On top of that, by comparison with Paasikivi, Kekkonen had not acquired enough political weight. The Social Democrats, headed by Väinö Tanner, were the Agrarians’ main opponents and were gaining strength. Prospects for their victory seemed increasingly favorable, especially since Tanner, whose reputation had been tarnished during the war, was intelligent enough not to run himself. The Social Democrats nominated one of their other leaders to run for president: Rafael Paasio. The Soviet Union was definitely not pleased at the idea of Tanner or one of Tanner’s people heading the government of neighboring Finland. Two factors came into play here: bitter memories of the “winter war” of 1939–1940, and simple political expediency. Also, the rearming of West Germany had entered an active phase, and the Germans were casting hungry glances at the Baltic Sea and discussing the formation of a unified military command for the Baltic region, under the aegis of West Germany with the participation of Denmark and, over the long term, if possible, Norway and Finland as well. The Soviet Union naturally used all its strength to oppose a NATO umbrella over the Baltic. Kekkonen took a firm position in favor of friendship with the Soviet Union, but Father had grave doubts about the way Paasio would behave, if elected, with Tanner in the background. He decided to play up to Kekkonen. On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Foreign Ministry sent a sharply worded note to the Foreign Ministry of Finland. It expressed not only apprehensions about the security of the Soviet Union, but also stated that the Soviet government considered it timely to begin “preparations to rebuff a possible attack by the German militarists from the direction of the Baltic Sea through the territory and airspace of Finland.” In conclusion it was suggested to the Finns—or more exactly, they were instructed—“to carry out military consultations as provided for in the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance of 1948.” This meant neither more nor less than the introduction of Soviet troops onto Finnish territory for joint operations against an aggressor. The Soviet note was a bombshell. In 1961 the Finns remembered very well what had happened in 1940 and feared more than anything a repetition of events like that. Kekkonen immediately asked Moscow about the possibility of a

82 At a Crossroads: 1961 personal meeting with Khrushchev. History does not tell us whether Father warned Kekkonen about his intentions, but being an experienced politician, Kekkonen (just like Tanner) understood everything quite well without that. Khrushchev allowed a little time to pass before he invited the president of Finland to come to the Soviet Union—not to Moscow, but to Novosibirsk. That’s where the Soviet premier was going to be at that time. The Finnish foreign minister, Ahti Karjalainen, accompanied Kekkonen on the flight. He was also an old friend of Father’s. From the Soviet Foreign Ministry a deputy minister was present as well. Everything went smoothly, as though following a script. On the afternoon of November 23, Father was waiting for Kekkonen at a residence especially reserved for this event. There they had what the diplomats called consultations, followed by dinner. The two sides “understood one another” perfectly and had resolved the crisis by the time dessert was served. It was reported in the press that the president of Finland recognized “that the arguments about the possibility of war in Europe were well founded, but to have military exercises based on the 1948 treaty could cause undesirable concern and create a war psychosis throughout Scandinavia.” In conclusion Kekkonen suggested “that the USSR not insist on joint military exercises, and thus help to calm public opinion.” Khrushchev, in turn, gave credit to Kekkonen’s political experience and emphasized that he “believed in his good will and his ability to maintain and strengthen the current foreign policy line, the wellknown ‘Paasikivi-Kekkonen line’ [the policy of neutrality in the Cold War, as well as cooperation and friendship with the USSR], which is aimed at preserving the neutrality of Finland.” Therefore Khrushchev considered it “possible to postpone the military consultations.”1 On the next day, November 24, at an official breakfast in honor of the president of Finland, Father definitively crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s. He assured those present that “we are not interfering and do not want to interfere in the internal affairs of Finland.” Then immediately, without beating around the bush, he indicated the Soviet government’s preferences: “The people in power decide foreign policy, and for us it is not a matter of indifference who is in power. The right-wing groups, the supporters of Tanner, are taking actions in the direction of undermining the neutrality of Finland, of undermining the Paasikivi-Kekkonen line. That gives us cause for concern. . . . Mr. President, we are glad that we find in you a statesman who sincerely shares our desire for friendship.”2 Kekkonen replied with remarks appropriate to the occasion, and with that the official part of the visit ended. They spent the rest of November 24 together, making a trip to the Ob River and inspecting the hydroelectric power plant there, visiting Akademgorodok, and going to the theater. After that Father said goodbye to his guests, then turned his attention to agricultural problems in the region. On November 25 he attended the opening of a conference of people involved with the agriculture of Siberia.

A Lesson in Diplomacy

83

On November 28, he was at the Bratsk hydroelectric power plant, holding discussions with those responsible for energy about various plans for the further harnessing of Siberia’s rivers. On November 29, 1961, Father was already in Khabarovsk, where he heard reports on the preparations for the spring sowing and about the long-term prospects for the economy of the Soviet Far East, and he also spoke there. From Khabarovsk he returned to Moscow, also on November 29. The political support given to Kekkonen at Novosibirsk was backed up by some concrete measures. As early as October 25, 1961, an agreement was signed in Moscow on economic cooperation between the two countries during 1962. It provided for “delivery to the USSR from Finland of ships for various purposes, machinery for producing cellulose and paper, as well as deliveries of paper, cellulose, and cardboard, along with furniture, steel cable, and Viola cheese,” a type of Finnish cheese popular among Russians. Both sides expressed their understanding that the agreement would be truly effective only in the event that the “Paasikivi-Kekkonen line” was continued. They tried to make it look as though the pressure being applied to Finland was not obviously connected with the upcoming elections. On December 12, 1961, the Soviet Foreign Ministry expressed its concern about the activity of the West Germans in the Baltic region and their plans for establishing a unified military command there. This was stated in a note to the Danish government. For the sake of fairness, I should note that, in fact, the commotion NATO was making around the Baltic troubled Father greatly. He did everything he could to reduce to the minimum the effects of these Western efforts, especially those of the West Germans. As for the elections in Finland, it would have been wrong not to try to influence them. The Finns understood correctly the message addressed to them. In the elections on February 4–5, 1962, 81.3 percent of the electorate participated, and the majority voted for Kekkonen. In Finland, as in the United States, there is a twostage electoral process. People vote for an electoral college, which in turn elects a president in accordance with the preferences expressed by the voters. On February 15, 1962, the electoral college gave Kekkonen 199 votes out of 300, while the Social Democrat ended up in third place with only 37 votes. There you have it: a lesson in diplomacy.

84

At a Crossroads: 1961

16 A Canal from the Baltic to the Black Sea In December 1961, discussion began both at the State Planning Com-

mittee and in the press (another sign of change) about the advisability of digging a canal from the Baltic to the Black Sea, along the old route the Vikings used a thousand years earlier to reach the capital of the Byzantine Empire, then called Constantinople, now called Istanbul. The route went first along the Western Dvina (Daugava), then across a watershed to the headwaters of the Dnieper and down the Dnieper to the Black Sea. The very name, Baltic–Black Sea Canal, cast a spell. It seemed to be a supercolossal project, but in fact it would not require a lot of earth-moving work. The Dvina would have to be deepened, and a passageway dug through from the Dvina to the Dnieper (a distance the Vikings had crossed by making a portage). The entire length of the Dvina was navigable by ships, because some dams had been built earlier. All that remained was to modernize the locks to accommodate ships with heavy loads. According to the estimates made by the State Planning Committee, such a canal would be quite beneficial. It would substantially lower the costs of shipping from our Baltic ports to those on the Black Sea. At that time, such shipping was a primary means of moving freight in the Soviet Union. Trade with the West was then only in its beginning stages. The blockade of the Soviet Union was growing weaker, but it was far from being broken. In addition, the opening of such a canal would remove the necessity of stopping at ports in Western Europe to refuel, and thus of spending foreign currency that our treasury did not have. As one of the arguments in favor of building the canal, its proponents referred to the possibility of a war, which would “bottle up” our fleets in both seas, Baltic and Black. This had happened in the past more than once. Here too the canal would be advantageous. Generally speaking, it would have a lot of advantages. But the canal also had its opponents. The railroad people objected strongly. In their view, the costs of building the canal would not be recovered. It would be cheaper and more convenient to ship by rail, and the money spent on building the canal would be better spent modernizing the railroads. The debate that flared up was no joke. Father did not intervene for the time being, although both sides persistently appealed to him. It sounded as though each side had well-grounded

What Will Our Lives Be Like?

85

arguments, and he was wavering. Thus no decision was made during 1962, or in 1963—even though supporters of the canal kept putting on pressure more and more stubbornly. In late March 1964, a representative conference was held at Pitsunda to discuss the issue, with arguments going on for a long time, but only one conclusion was reached—to continue making estimates, to go deeper into the economics of the issue, comparing income and expenditure, and to report to the government at the end of the year.1 But at the end of 1964, the new chairman of the Council of Ministers, Aleksei Kosygin, did not ask for a report. As time went by, the idea simply died of its own accord.

17 What Will Our Lives Be Like? The year 1961 was ending as it had begun—fair to middling, in eco-

nomic respects. Industrial production was stable. The State Planning Committee and the regional economic councils were coping with their tasks. According to their data, production had increased by 10.1 percent, as against a planned rise of 8.3 percent. During the previous three years, growth had been 33 percent, as against the 27 percent written into the seven-year plan.1 Figures always vary. Another statistical handbook reports that in 1961 the national product grew by 6.8 percent and the productivity of labor by 4.4 percent, as compared to 7.7 percent and 5.4 percent, respectively, in 1960. But the latter figures are from the Brezhnev era. In Father’s time, statistics were “dragged up by the ears,” but afterward they were generally pushed down.2 The Central Intelligence Agency informed the White House that the average yearly growth in the gross national product of the Soviet Union for the years 1958–1961 had been 5.8 percent.3 However variable the figures, they all testified that the economy of the Soviet Union was growing faster than that of the United States, but more slowly than was projected in the Communist Party program. In 1987, in its second issue, the highly respected Soviet monthly Novy Mir (New World) printed an exposé by two economists, Vasily Selyunin and Grigory Khanin. The article’s title, “Lukavye Tsifry,” even implied “Figures Don’t Lie, but They Can Be Very Cunning.” The article left not one stone standing of the system of Soviet government statistical reporting, totally debunking that system.

What Will Our Lives Be Like?

85

arguments, and he was wavering. Thus no decision was made during 1962, or in 1963—even though supporters of the canal kept putting on pressure more and more stubbornly. In late March 1964, a representative conference was held at Pitsunda to discuss the issue, with arguments going on for a long time, but only one conclusion was reached—to continue making estimates, to go deeper into the economics of the issue, comparing income and expenditure, and to report to the government at the end of the year.1 But at the end of 1964, the new chairman of the Council of Ministers, Aleksei Kosygin, did not ask for a report. As time went by, the idea simply died of its own accord.

17 What Will Our Lives Be Like? The year 1961 was ending as it had begun—fair to middling, in eco-

nomic respects. Industrial production was stable. The State Planning Committee and the regional economic councils were coping with their tasks. According to their data, production had increased by 10.1 percent, as against a planned rise of 8.3 percent. During the previous three years, growth had been 33 percent, as against the 27 percent written into the seven-year plan.1 Figures always vary. Another statistical handbook reports that in 1961 the national product grew by 6.8 percent and the productivity of labor by 4.4 percent, as compared to 7.7 percent and 5.4 percent, respectively, in 1960. But the latter figures are from the Brezhnev era. In Father’s time, statistics were “dragged up by the ears,” but afterward they were generally pushed down.2 The Central Intelligence Agency informed the White House that the average yearly growth in the gross national product of the Soviet Union for the years 1958–1961 had been 5.8 percent.3 However variable the figures, they all testified that the economy of the Soviet Union was growing faster than that of the United States, but more slowly than was projected in the Communist Party program. In 1987, in its second issue, the highly respected Soviet monthly Novy Mir (New World) printed an exposé by two economists, Vasily Selyunin and Grigory Khanin. The article’s title, “Lukavye Tsifry,” even implied “Figures Don’t Lie, but They Can Be Very Cunning.” The article left not one stone standing of the system of Soviet government statistical reporting, totally debunking that system.

86 At a Crossroads: 1961 Nevertheless the authors wrote the following long passage, which I consider worth quoting in full: The national economy actually did enjoy rapid growth in the 1950s. That period, by our estimates, looks like the most successful one for the economy. At that time the pace of growth exceeded all earlier achievements. But it is not just a question of pace. Most important is the fact that for the first time growth was achieved not only by means of increased use of resources but also because of their better utilization. The productivity of labor increased by 62 percent (which is nearly 4 percent annually), outlays from government funds rose by 17 percent, and the use of raw materials was reduced by 5 percent. All sectors of the economy developed fairly harmoniously—not only heavy industry but also consumer goods, agriculture, and housing construction. The successes in the credit-and-money sphere were impressive. A balance was achieved in the circulation of commodities and money, which until then had seemed unattainable. From 1928 to 1950 (22 years) retail and wholesale prices increased approximately 12 times over, but in 1951–1955 retail prices were lowered and wholesale prices stabilized. During the second half of the 1950s, only a small rise in prices occurred.

This shows that during those years, Father did not just get a black eye and lumps on the head. Entropy was forced back. The Soviet economy straightened itself out, if only a little, and became more efficient. The only thing that seriously put Father on his guard about the economy was the growing separatism, the tendency for the regional economic councils to act arbitrarily and go their own way, and he decided to consolidate them into larger units linked together by shared economic targets, thus forcing them to think more about cooperating with their neighbors. At the Twenty-Second Party Congress, Father said that the existing regional economic councils would soon be conglomerated into seventeen larger units mutually bound by coordinated plans, by deliveries made cooperatively, and by much else. I have already written about the proposals of the “centralizers” along the same lines. All that remained was to settle the final details and sign a resolution dealing with this matter. From the standpoint of present-day knowledge, this regrouping of the regional economic councils into larger units was a step backward toward a centralized economy. From the standpoint of “introducing bureaucratic order” it was a logical measure. Father was hesitating about which direction to take, toward a decentralized, self-regulating national economy or toward a continued holding of the reins of economic management by the central bureaucracy. The future of the country depended on the correctness of the choice, and not having yet made a final decision, Father took a step now in one direction and now in the other. In science this is called the trial and error method. The important thing here is not to overdo the trying, but after a permissible number of mistakes to finally choose a direction. But let us return to the economic results for 1961. The situation with regard to housing was not bad. In Moscow, 3.7 million square meters had been built

What Will Our Lives Be Like?

87

in 1961, and in Leningrad, 1.175 million. There was a noticeable lag in the outlying parts of the country. Father wrote about this in his memorandum to the CC Presidium in the summer of 1961, and it began to be corrected. However, agriculture was not well; it “had a temperature.” After rushing around the country for several months, Father had only barely dispelled some of the entropy. He had shaken the province committees out of their lethargy, but had not achieved a fundamental change. In August it had seemed to him that we would have an unprecedented harvest. “We traveled around in Ukraine and inspected the fields until it got dark,” Father wrote on July 20, 1961, in one of a series of memoranda to the CC Presidium. “The grain is already ripe and it was a sight for sore eyes. The hay was being brought in at full speed. The corn, sunflowers, and other crops were in fine shape.”4 Things were also good in Voronezh province, “which last year treated us to the ‘innovation’ of harvesting corn with a railroad track.”5 The Virgin Lands also gave reason to hope. But in Stavropol, it was true that the dry spring winds had buried any hopes for a decent harvest, and yet in such a large country as ours, as Father liked to repeat, there’s always a flood somewhere and a drought somewhere. The hopes were not justified. The grain harvest in 1961 was only slightly larger than in 1960, 130.8 million tons of grain, compared with 125.6 million.6 That was considerably less than the amount specified in the seven-year plan, 150 million tons. In 1960, inefficiency at bringing in the harvest had also been displayed. Heads had rolled, new people had arrived in the province committees, and what was the result? Essentially nothing changed. Father consoled himself and others with the fact that since 1953 the annual harvest had increased by 67 percent.7 But uneasiness was gnawing at his heart. The population was growing by more than 3.5 million annually. In the preceding three years alone, people’s incomes had increased by 16.8 billion rubles, and consumer demand had naturally risen accordingly. In 1961, 54.2 million tons of grain had been consumed, compared to 50 million in 1960 and 42.5 million in 1953. Nevertheless, the output of food products was lagging. Father was afraid that a kind of “scissors” was about to appear—a disparity between the purchasing power of the population and the ability of the government to maintain supply. Underproduction—or if you wish, overconsumption—was compensated for temporarily out of government reserves. In 1961 those were reduced from 7.5 million tons of grain to 6.3 million.8 “We do not need an acrobatic performance in the selecting of numbers to solve the grain problem,” said Father in trying to convince those attending a Central Committee plenum to sum up the economic results for 1961. “We need an actual change of the situation, to thoroughly provide the country with grain for food and fodder. . . . If we do not solve this problem, our country will be left to face great difficulties.” Father went on, as usual, to present detailed calculations year by year.9

88 At a Crossroads: 1961 He was also concerned about the condition of livestock breeding in our country: There’s not enough meat in the stores, or butter. People who write letters to the Central Committee think that breakdowns in the commercial distribution structure are to blame. But that is not so. We simply do not have enough meat, just as we don’t have enough butter and milk. The sale of these products has increased since 1953, meat from 1.757 million tons to 4.033 million tons in 1961, milk from 1.980 million tons to 9.393 million tons, butter from 330,000 tons to 632,000 tons, sugar from 2.410 million tons to 4.550 million tons, eggs from 2.045 billion (by the piece) to 5.860 billion respectively. But the population is not interested in numbers. It wants goods on the shelf. Matters are not promising in this respect. The pace of agricultural development has slowed, especially stock breeding. In 1961 the output of meat was 3 million tons less than the planned amount (8.8 million tons instead of 11.8), and the amount of milk produced was 16 million tons less than the planned amount (62.5 million tons instead of 78.4). At the same time in 1961, 46 percent of the meat was produced on private plots, the same percentage for milk, and 78 percent for eggs. We must collectively discuss measures to be taken that will help correct the situation.

This was Father’s appeal to those attending the plenum of March 1962.10 Father understood that they would indeed have a collective discussion and take measures, but the only measures taken would be those he thought up himself and proposed to them. From his experience during 1961 he had been finally convinced that traveling around the country, holding meetings and talking with officials, would not move things forward. As soon as you stopped driving people and urging them on, entropy and inactivity spread over everything again, just as duckweed will spread over the surface of a pond the minute you stop stirring the water with your hand. The system he had inherited and that he had been trying to make efficient all those years, to make it self-acting and self-developing, was offering resistance with all its might. That is a law of nature. The more strongly you suppress entropy and the more a system sets itself to rights, all the more energetically will entropy seek to break through—to free itself from the fetters placed upon it. Entropy seeped through all the cracks that had not been sealed, and the more Father tried to caulk up those cracks, the more entropy reappeared in the most unexpected new places. There’s nothing surprising in this. From the beginning the system was designed on the basis of unchallengeable subordination to the center, and it could not become anything different. To make the system selfregulating, it would have to be reorganized from the bottom up. Otherwise one could not overcome the constant emergence and encrustation of entropy. Entropy is an objective law, and we can only try to hold it in check. In the old centralized system the means for counteracting entropy were fear and some sort of faith in a brighter future. Now fear had more and more disappeared, and there was less and less idealism with each passing year.

What Will Our Lives Be Like?

89

Thus far one had no sense of an emerging new structure, in which the backbone would be material self-interest, as Father had proclaimed it should be. In other words, work for one’s own personal benefit. The only real motivation remained that of following orders from those above you, obeying their whims and caprices at all costs, whether they were for the good of the cause or were harmful to it. All officials, from the province committee secretaries to the chairmen of the collective farms, wanted to distinguish themselves in the fulfillment and overfulfillment of orders handed down from above, and they couldn’t care less about anything else. What had been accomplished was not enough to make the economy, especially agriculture, function without constantly being urged on, without pumping energy from the top down. In other words, the process of reform had to be continued, but now Father faced the problem of deciding how. The government had two possibilities for maintaining control: either to increase the force of external pressure as much as possible; or to transform the system so that its proper functioning was maintained not from a single center but from many sources, that is, to decentralize it, to shift the fight against entropy to the level of the producers themselves. Just as in 1953, Father was attempting to carry out change simultaneously in two directions. Again he tried to reorganize the government structure of economic management and make the system of control more professional, and at the same time to give previously unheard-of rights to the factory managers, to increase their authority and discretion in managing the enterprises entrusted to them by the government. The only question was how to do that. Father thought about this himself and he carefully read letters that were sent to the Central Committee. Many heads are better than one. Maybe by all working together they would think up something sensible. One letter especially attracted Father’s attention. It was written by an accountant who worked in the administration of state farms in Tselinograd, Ivan Nikiforovich Khudenko. He proposed that managerial relations be reduced to the minimum. A collective or state farm, he argued, would do the “homework” assigned to it. It would deliver to the government granaries the quantity of products required in accordance with the inviolable five-year plan, but the rest of its products it would keep for itself: for further development, for wages, for bonuses and other awards, and who knows what else might be needed in the future. In Khudenko’s view the collective and state farms should be given their freedom. Let them plant crops they thought would be profitable for them, of course within the framework of their field of specialization. Let them plant when they considered it suitable, and let them establish their own management structure. Let them have as many specialists and workers as they needed, and not the number prescribed from above. Father liked Khudenko’s proposals. They coincided with his own understanding of the relations between the producer and the government. He saw Khudenko as his ally, and I would even say as his partner. Father ordered that

90 At a Crossroads: 1961 several state farms in the Virgin Lands region be assigned to Khudenko. Let him do there what he considered necessary, and let the party committee of that territory not interfere in his experiments. In November 1961, speaking in Tselinograd, Father reminded those present that “on the basis of a decision by the Council of Ministers to test Comrade Khudenko’s proposals in practice, some state farms were assigned to him. His reasoning and his proposals were soundly based. Within rational limits it was necessary to simplify accounting, to facilitate the work of state-farm directors, to reduce the excessive accounting apparatus, and to put an end to the unproductive expenditure of resources. . . . Khudenko must be allowed to finish his experiment, and the conclusions must be drawn.”11 In the future Father was to follow the Khudenko experiment closely. Soon a similar approach, also on an experimental basis, was applied to a number of plants and factories and even to a metallurgical complex. The last years of Father’s time in power were devoted to searching for an answer to the question: “What will life be like for us in the future?” That is, how could it be improved? Father spent the rest of 1961 away from Moscow. On December 19, he headed for Kiev, that city so dear to his heart. There Father also held conferences and gave speeches. Then he met with two people he had invited to Ukraine for a few days—the Yugoslav leaders Josip Broz Tito and Alexandr Ranković. Unlike Kekkonen, Father did not consider them to be friends. Tito always kept his thoughts to himself. Their relations were friendly to the extent that politics allowed. After saying goodbye to his guests, Father allowed himself a few days off to go hunting. He returned to Moscow just before the New Year. I don’t remember the exact date, but on December 24 he was still hunting near Kiev, with two hares and a fox as his take for the day. At that same time, in Father’s absence, on December 25 in the Kremlin, a conference of ideological workers opened. A report was given by Leonid Fyodorovich Ilyichev, who had recently been elected as a Central Committee secretary for ideology, the Number Two man in that sphere after Suslov. He was an ideologist of the Stalin school, but he loved risqué jokes. He was a collector of modern paintings, yet he persecuted the modernists. He was a man who easily adapted to any system without pangs of conscience. He gave a competent, politically correct report and spoke with vigor. On the one hand he denounced the “cultists,” the supporters of the Stalin cult. On the other hand he waved a threatening stick: “Freedom is one thing, but I advise you not to forget about the leading role of the party.”

18 A Speech in Minsk This time the New Year’s reception was organized in the huge ban-

quet hall of the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses. More guests than usual were invited. Fortunately the size of the hall allowed for that. But the celebration was unusually sluggish. Father was not feeling well; he was sniffling, coming down with a cold. He made no toasts and left almost immediately after midnight. The rest followed suit, and the crowd soon disappeared. Because of illness, Father postponed his trip to Belorussia, scheduled for the first days of January. It was not until January 10 that he got to Minsk. There he attended an exhibition, timed for his arrival, of the Belorussian republic’s production technology. He held a limited-attendance meeting with the Belorussian party’s Central Committee, then spoke before a large crowd—party members active in agriculture in the Soviet Union’s northwest. Father was satisfied with the exhibition. He especially liked the 27-ton dump trucks and the 12.5-ton semi-trailers used for transporting grain. And all the rest . . . “I will quote some figures,” he began his speech to the large crowd. “According to the plan for 1961, Belorussia assumed the obligation to produce 3.3 million tons of grain, but came up with only 2.2 million. Flax production, instead of the planned 179,000 tons, was 86,700 tons. They promised to harvest 14.7 million tons of potatoes, but actually produced 10.8 million. Nor was there any progress with the raising of livestock. It’s true that in comparison to 1953 there has definitely been growth. But, comrades, we’re not living in 1953. This is 1962. The population of the country has increased, and there is increased demand for agricultural products . . .” And so on.1 Father was talking about Belorussia, but in many other regions the state of affairs was no better, or so it seems. That winter he did not go anywhere other than Belorussia. He declined to make the kind of inspection tour of the country in advance of the spring sowing that had become customary both for him and for the local officialdom. His visit to Minsk had more to do with the “arrears” from 1961 than with the upcoming obligations of 1962. The previous year had taught him a lot. He had spent nearly four months traveling, by car, train, and plane, held conferences, talked about new technologies, admonished, cursed, and intimidated. Now he was dead tired; after all, he wasn’t a kid anymore. And hardly anything had come of it. Of 93

94 Time for Change: 1962 course he had shaken up the secretaries of the province committees and dispelled entropy a little, but no fundamental change had occurred. The year 1961 convinced Father thoroughly that the 1953 reforms had done their work and had exhausted their usefulness, as had the Virgin Lands project. Now without decisive changes we would not catch up with the United States, nor would the people be fed. All in all, the new year began where the old year left off. No plan for change had yet taken shape in Father’s mind. He liked Khudenko’s proposals, but had not yet decided to place full confidence in Khudenko. It was too soon. Let him try things out, experiment, and then we would see. For the time being, Father decided to convene a plenum at which knowledgeable people could be listened to, debates held, and collective thinking done in an effort to probe for a point of support that would enable the economy, including agriculture, to develop in the right direction. But if only we knew which was the right direction. Father intuitively understood that no more than one or two parameters must be singled out, so that by manipulating those, the government could direct the whole economy correctly. The experience of the preceding years confirmed one truth: you could not keep track of everything from a single center, from Moscow. It was necessary, if one may use the expression, to strike with a closed fist, not with all five fingers spread out. But in our case, what would that closed fist be?

19 How to Fill the Government Granaries? In his report to the Central Committee plenum, which opened on

March 5, 1962, in the Kremlin—well attended as usual, with many invited guests—Father summed up the results of 1961, but he talked even more about the future. He saw a reserve source from which more agricultural products could be obtained and which was available at that very moment. That was the land lying fallow, not sown with any crops, but resting after the previous year’s harvest. In theory, it should have been sown with alfalfa, which would revive the fertility of the soil through the action of nitrogen-fixing microbes in its root systems. But in fact the fallow land was overgrown with weeds. Father estimated that, each year, 52 million hectares lying fallow or planted with alfalfa or clover were

94 Time for Change: 1962 course he had shaken up the secretaries of the province committees and dispelled entropy a little, but no fundamental change had occurred. The year 1961 convinced Father thoroughly that the 1953 reforms had done their work and had exhausted their usefulness, as had the Virgin Lands project. Now without decisive changes we would not catch up with the United States, nor would the people be fed. All in all, the new year began where the old year left off. No plan for change had yet taken shape in Father’s mind. He liked Khudenko’s proposals, but had not yet decided to place full confidence in Khudenko. It was too soon. Let him try things out, experiment, and then we would see. For the time being, Father decided to convene a plenum at which knowledgeable people could be listened to, debates held, and collective thinking done in an effort to probe for a point of support that would enable the economy, including agriculture, to develop in the right direction. But if only we knew which was the right direction. Father intuitively understood that no more than one or two parameters must be singled out, so that by manipulating those, the government could direct the whole economy correctly. The experience of the preceding years confirmed one truth: you could not keep track of everything from a single center, from Moscow. It was necessary, if one may use the expression, to strike with a closed fist, not with all five fingers spread out. But in our case, what would that closed fist be?

19 How to Fill the Government Granaries? In his report to the Central Committee plenum, which opened on

March 5, 1962, in the Kremlin—well attended as usual, with many invited guests—Father summed up the results of 1961, but he talked even more about the future. He saw a reserve source from which more agricultural products could be obtained and which was available at that very moment. That was the land lying fallow, not sown with any crops, but resting after the previous year’s harvest. In theory, it should have been sown with alfalfa, which would revive the fertility of the soil through the action of nitrogen-fixing microbes in its root systems. But in fact the fallow land was overgrown with weeds. Father estimated that, each year, 52 million hectares lying fallow or planted with alfalfa or clover were

How to Fill the Government Granaries?

95

actually going to waste. This was 20 million more hectares than had come under the plow in the Virgin Lands. He quoted at length from academicians Dmitry Pryanishnikov and Nikolai Tulaikov. Father also cited agricultural experience in Western countries, where “yields have been raised to as high as 28 centners per hectare without using the grass-field crop rotation system.”1 He proposed that the grass-field system be retained on 5–10 million hectares in drought-prone and other problematic regions, but with the obligatory planting of alfalfa or clover. No land should simply be plowed and left unplanted, as envisaged in the three-field rotation system. The other 40 million hectares should be used to grow crops. This land should be plowed and sown with corn, beans, or sugar beets. And the work should begin immediately—no vacillating. That very year, in 1962, the first 22 million hectares should be sown with crops. He would find the necessary quantity of seed. If a yield of 10 centners per hectare were obtained, that would mean an additional 50 million tons of grain, the same amount that on average was procured annually throughout the country. As a result, we would not only meet the growing needs of the steadily increasing population but would also replenish government reserves, which were growing thin. Last, we would solve the “insoluble” problem of finding sufficient feed for our livestock. However, we would have to pay a price for saying goodbye to the grassfield crop rotation system. With these new measures, decent harvests could be ensured only by the use of mineral fertilizers, but in 1962 the Soviet Union produced no more than 22 million tons, the equivalent of about 300–400 kilograms per hectare of arable land, or several times less than the amount used in the United States, not to speak of Western Europe. Father said that the CC Presidium had already agreed to call a special plenum and adopt a plan for increasing fertilizer production as rapidly as possible.2 Possibly he should have waited a little before abandoning the three-field system, until new chemical plants could be built. Such consistency is formally logical, but no reformer has ever followed formal logic. Or more exactly, those who followed it never became reformers. Father too did not follow the dictates of formal logic. He could not do so. As with all reformers, he had no time to wait. The additional grain for bread and feed for livestock were required immediately, right now. In the spring of 1962 an offensive against the three-field system began all along the line. It was accompanied by unending battles. Scientists with big names spoke out on one side and the other. Nor were excesses avoided. In Russia nothing happens without excesses. In some regions overly zealous local officials plowed up any piece of wasteland if it was covered with grass. In other areas active supporters of the traditional three-field system openly sabotaged the instructions from the center, expecting that in Moscow there would be a big noise for a while and then it would quiet down.

96

Time for Change: 1962

Father reined in the overly zealous ones and spurred on the retrograde, reluctant ones. In general he plunged into the new campaign completely. It seemed to him that a quick success was in the offing.3 The abandonment of the three-field system was only an episode in the process of reforming Russian agriculture. I am not about to judge who was right, Father or his traditionalist opponents. I am not a specialist. The overwhelming majority of Father’s critics are not specialists in agronomy either. They are people who are far removed from the land. Who was it that didn’t express an opinion in favor of the old crop rotation system? Every one of them, from poets to diplomats, had an opinion on the matter. I can only repeat that when Father sided with one of the disputing schools in agricultural science, he was proceeding as before on the basis of the experience accumulated by European and American farmers. He thought that what was good for Germany and the United States would also bring success to the Soviet Union.

20 Production Administrations Replace Regional Party Committees The real sensation of the March 1962 Central Committee plenum was

not the boisterous campaign against the grass-field system, but the beginning of a change in the power structure in the countryside. The plan was to transfer power from the party’s rural district committees, which in Father’s words “directed everything and everyone.” In the Soviet Union, the most common larger administrative unit was the province (in Russian, oblast). Each province was subdivided into districts, as a state in the United States is subdivided into counties. Thus, a district was an administrative subdivision within a province. In some outlying areas the larger administrative unit was called a territory (in Russian, krai). It too was subdivided into districts. Power in the rural districts was to be transferred to professional managers, who would head newly formed “interdistrict production administrations” for collective and state farms. The tasks assigned to these new bodies included not only planning production and checking up on performance (on whether planned targets were met), but also personnel selection, the promotion of examples of

96

Time for Change: 1962

Father reined in the overly zealous ones and spurred on the retrograde, reluctant ones. In general he plunged into the new campaign completely. It seemed to him that a quick success was in the offing.3 The abandonment of the three-field system was only an episode in the process of reforming Russian agriculture. I am not about to judge who was right, Father or his traditionalist opponents. I am not a specialist. The overwhelming majority of Father’s critics are not specialists in agronomy either. They are people who are far removed from the land. Who was it that didn’t express an opinion in favor of the old crop rotation system? Every one of them, from poets to diplomats, had an opinion on the matter. I can only repeat that when Father sided with one of the disputing schools in agricultural science, he was proceeding as before on the basis of the experience accumulated by European and American farmers. He thought that what was good for Germany and the United States would also bring success to the Soviet Union.

20 Production Administrations Replace Regional Party Committees The real sensation of the March 1962 Central Committee plenum was

not the boisterous campaign against the grass-field system, but the beginning of a change in the power structure in the countryside. The plan was to transfer power from the party’s rural district committees, which in Father’s words “directed everything and everyone.” In the Soviet Union, the most common larger administrative unit was the province (in Russian, oblast). Each province was subdivided into districts, as a state in the United States is subdivided into counties. Thus, a district was an administrative subdivision within a province. In some outlying areas the larger administrative unit was called a territory (in Russian, krai). It too was subdivided into districts. Power in the rural districts was to be transferred to professional managers, who would head newly formed “interdistrict production administrations” for collective and state farms. The tasks assigned to these new bodies included not only planning production and checking up on performance (on whether planned targets were met), but also personnel selection, the promotion of examples of

Production Administrations

97

outstanding performance, and generally speaking, all real power. Father proposed that the salaries of the officials in these new “administrations” should be placed on a sliding scale, making them dependent on success in the work, on actual harvests and real increases in the quantities of meat and milk. These new structures would be subordinated directly to the governments of the union republics, bypassing the party’s province committees. One of the deputy prime ministers of each union republic government would be in charge of these “production administrations.” In the future, as Father saw it, we would say goodbye to the party’s district committees. The administrative subdivision of the country would be reshaped with these new “production administrations.”1 He proposed that these new structures be located not in the district capitals. After all, they were to be interdistrict bodies. They should be located in towns that were not already “occupied” by the existing structures of power. He did not conceal his apprehensions: “The secretaries of the party’s district committees are tenacious people. They will try to transform these new structures into a bureaucratic superstructure—or more exactly, an appendage to the party’s district committee.” He warned against “dual power in the management of agriculture.” Within the Interdistrict Production Administration, the secretary of the party’s district committee was assigned a subordinate role. He lost his right to command. His assignment now was to help the manager, who was the head of the new “production administration,” and to busy himself with propaganda work among the masses. The production administrations were to be something like rural extensions of the regional economic councils, which had been established in 1957 to manage industry in particular regions, which usually encompassed several provinces. Khrushchev explained that the “interdistrict production administrations would not be engaged in trying to extract harvested crops from the barns of the peasants; instead they would organize the production of agricultural goods on the basis of laws and contractual agreements. Then both the producer and the government would know in advance what quantity of product and what variety of agricultural goods they would have available for the coming year and for several years in advance.”2 “These administrations,” he continued, “should not try to define what crops and how much of each to plant or whom to recommend as the chairman of a collective farm.”3 Here one is reminded of Khudenko’s memorandum, which essentially stated: “Let the collective farm or state farm dispose of its own land, and let the government only specify what its share of the surplus would be, as established by contract, a share that would be unchanging for several years ahead; in other words, a kind of tax or tribute. And that would be all.” Khrushchev’s thinking was moving in the same direction. As usual, the plenum applauded Father and, also as usual, voted in favor, but as the agricultural journalist Anatoly Strelyany wrote later: “The bureaucrats never forgave Khrushchev for this, and they portrayed these quite innocent experiments as virtually an attack on the very foundations of the system.”4

98 Time for Change: 1962 But it actually was an attack on the basic foundations! The rural district committees of the party were being asked to yield power to the “production administrations.” And five years before that, the regional economic councils had begun squeezing out the party’s province committees, infringing on their role in managing industry. Professional managers were gradually replacing party leaders, who were being transferred from the category of leaders to the category of helpers. The party secretaries of the province committees and district committees could not reconcile themselves to this situation, nor did they want to. With this the March 1962 Central Committee plenum marked the opening of a divide between Khrushchev the reformer and the party bureaucracy, which sought only “stability.” He called for renewal and revival of our country, but they were dreaming of a return to the good old patriarchal system of one-party monopoly rule. It is now obvious that Father’s first attempt came out poorly. Many things that he proclaimed remained only on paper. And many things needed to be thought through further. The party’s province committees and district committees were not about to surrender their positions. And the positions they held were virtually unassailable. Real power was concentrated in their hands, and not only on the local level. The secretaries of province committees also controlled the plenums of the Central Committee. At a decisive moment they could also decide the fate of the Soviet Union—and the fate of Soviet leader Khrushchev. He was aware of all this, but he thought that all these people were statesmen, fully devoted to the cause, as he was, that they were his co-thinkers, and that for them the interests of the country were higher than anything else, including personal power. It turned out that he was not prepared for a confrontation with his own bureaucracy. In March 1962 he poked the “hornet’s nest” with a stick. He got the bureaucracy riled up and, what’s more important, he alerted them to look out for their own interests.

21 Day by Day At the beginning of 1962 the Soviet Union became a member of In-

tervision, an international agreement for the exchange of European television programs, whose framework was fairly limited for the time being. We would

98 Time for Change: 1962 But it actually was an attack on the basic foundations! The rural district committees of the party were being asked to yield power to the “production administrations.” And five years before that, the regional economic councils had begun squeezing out the party’s province committees, infringing on their role in managing industry. Professional managers were gradually replacing party leaders, who were being transferred from the category of leaders to the category of helpers. The party secretaries of the province committees and district committees could not reconcile themselves to this situation, nor did they want to. With this the March 1962 Central Committee plenum marked the opening of a divide between Khrushchev the reformer and the party bureaucracy, which sought only “stability.” He called for renewal and revival of our country, but they were dreaming of a return to the good old patriarchal system of one-party monopoly rule. It is now obvious that Father’s first attempt came out poorly. Many things that he proclaimed remained only on paper. And many things needed to be thought through further. The party’s province committees and district committees were not about to surrender their positions. And the positions they held were virtually unassailable. Real power was concentrated in their hands, and not only on the local level. The secretaries of province committees also controlled the plenums of the Central Committee. At a decisive moment they could also decide the fate of the Soviet Union—and the fate of Soviet leader Khrushchev. He was aware of all this, but he thought that all these people were statesmen, fully devoted to the cause, as he was, that they were his co-thinkers, and that for them the interests of the country were higher than anything else, including personal power. It turned out that he was not prepared for a confrontation with his own bureaucracy. In March 1962 he poked the “hornet’s nest” with a stick. He got the bureaucracy riled up and, what’s more important, he alerted them to look out for their own interests.

21 Day by Day At the beginning of 1962 the Soviet Union became a member of In-

tervision, an international agreement for the exchange of European television programs, whose framework was fairly limited for the time being. We would

Day by Day

99

receive politically neutral broadcasts from Western European countries and would send broadcasts that they considered ideologically acceptable. January 1962 saw the publication of Yuri Bondarev’s novel Silence. It was about the Stalin era, and it was much sharper than Vladimir Dudintsev’s 1956 novel Not by Bread Alone, which everyone remembered. But times had changed so much in only six years, almost beyond recognition. What had been considered seditious in 1956 now met with universal approval. In January 1962 an announcement was made about a price reduction for clocks and watches. The lowering of prices that had previously been raised beyond all reasonable limits—that was one of Stalin’s ingenious inventions. For some reason people did not perceive it as a calamity when prices were set so high, but as they were lowered year by year, even a little bit, that was seen as the beneficence of the ruler. It’s not accidental that most people nowadays remember Stalin’s last years, 1947–1953, as a time when prices were lower. That is what they remember, instead of the “doctors’ plot,” the mounting anti-Semitism, and the preparations for a new wave of universal repression. Father scorned the kind of propagandistic action that is only done for effect. He thought that real actions spoke for themselves. While he was in office the stores filled up with goods, waiting lines disappeared, and people moved into new apartments. But all that was quickly forgotten. What people remember is that in the Khrushchev era prices rose more often than they fell. The real economy works that way. Money loses its value over time, and prices rise while wages lag behind. This is the process called inflation. In people’s memories the “Khrushchev inflation” is imprinted strongly. In contrast, the lowering of prices in Stalin’s time, even if they were coming down off the ceiling to begin with, is distinctly recorded in the historical memory. Actually the prices for clocks and watches were lowered not out of propagandistic considerations but because of economic needs. A great many of them had been produced in our country, too many. Once regarded as items of relative luxury, from a poor person’s point of view, they had become simply instruments that measured time. Though they were no longer regarded as luxury items, their prices remained at the old high level. And so they were lowered. There was no great social significance to this action. Most of the population had very little interest in clocks and watches. On January 14, the Friendship oil pipeline went into operation. This largediameter pipe passed through the Carpathian Mountains and reached Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. From there it branched out, with one line going to Germany and Poland and the other to Hungary. On January 19, 1962, Dmitry Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony was played for the first time. On February 10, 1962, there was an exchange of prisoners—the American U-2 spy pilot, Gary Powers, for a colonel of the Soviet intelligence services by the name of Rudolph Abel.

100 Time for Change: 1962 In February 1962, Father took a vacation at Pitsunda in Abkhazia, if you can call it a vacation when a whole series of conferences were held on key questions that would decide our strategy with regard to missiles and the space program, including a go-ahead on the project of sending a man to the moon. At that time I was working at the design bureau of probably our most successful and productive missile specialist, Vladimir Nikolayevich Chelomei, and in that capacity I also attended the conferences at Pitsunda, which I described in detail in my book Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower.1 On March 5, 1962, a new film by Mikhail Romm appeared on the screens of Soviet movie theaters. It was called Nine Days of One Year. It was about physicists, lyricists, heroic exploits, and all in all, about what a really good person is. Unlike the “politically correct Stalinist” person, who had no warts or shortcomings, this “good person” of the present time was simply a human being to whom nothing human was alien. On March 16, 1962, Father signed a decree of the Central Committee and Council of Ministers authorizing the construction of a Biology Center at Pushchino, a town on the Oka River, about 110 kilometers south of Moscow. This project was first contemplated in the mid-1950s. Aleksandr Nesmeyanov, then president of the Academy of Sciences, wanted to locate the new biological institutes on Lenin Prospect in Moscow, but the city authorities were opposed. Moscow was already overpopulated with scientific institutions. Khrushchev supported the city leaders, and thus Pushchino appeared on the horizon. However, in 1957 the prominent scientist Mikhail Lavrentyev blocked Nesmeyanov’s way. Lavrentyev intercepted the financing intended for Nesmeyanov and diverted those funds to the construction of “his own” Siberian division of the Academy of Sciences. In the meantime, Nesmeyanov was replaced as the president of the Academy of Sciences by Mstislav Keldysh. It took some time for the new president, who was a mathematician, to examine this matter thoroughly, since it was a field remote from his own. He finally did look into it, the wheels began to turn, and now Pushchino was given its birth certificate. On March 21, 1962, the newspapers reported about one more economic experiment. In Sumy province, in Ukraine, a cooperative made up of several collective farms had been formed to build a large-scale factory farm for poultry. At this facility American and German equipment had been installed and a license purchased for the right to use the technology, including exact specifications for the most effective types of feed. It was quite an expensive proposition, and so the people involved had decided to pool the resources of several collective farms. The “Sumy initiative” gladdened Father’s heart. He started keeping tabs on this experiment in Sumy just as he did on Khudenko and other experimenters. On March 30, he went to visit the design bureau of Nikolai Yakovlevich Kozlov, a facility that bore the name Prokatdetal (which meant “vibration-rolled concrete construction component”). A month earlier, Kozlov had called him, boasting that he had perfected his method of producing ribbed panels of reinforced

Day by Day

101

concrete, and now they were “rolling off the assembly line” at his design bureau, where he was using an experimental vibrating machine of extra-large dimensions. In addition, he had succeeded in making the strengthening ribs in the panels much thinner; at the same time, they did not crumble or smear together, with even the corners remaining firm as though made of steel. As a result, much less concrete was used, and the panels weighed less, which meant that more components for housing construction could be produced from a given quantity of material. Also, working with these components would now become quicker and easier. For people in construction this was an enormous accomplishment. Father decided to take a look at Nikolai Kozlov’s “miracle” with his own eyes. On April 13, 1962, the Soviet government, because of financial considerations, decided against holding the 1967 World’s Fair in Moscow. On April 21, Khrushchev visited a Moscow factory to observe the beginning of operations with a new vibrating machine that helped concrete set more smoothly and evenly, eliminating bubbles. This machine, developed by Nikolai Kozlov, was the first in the world to produce an unbroken stream of reinforcedconcrete wall panels. Specialists concluded that Kozlov’s invention was much better than an analogous system used by a French company.2 On April 29, 1962, Soviet premier Khrushchev, together with his deputy premier Kosygin, visited a synthetic-fiber production complex in the Moscow suburb of Klin. “This is literally a living display of textile industry history, beginning from the 1930s, when this complex was built, and coming right down to our times.” That was how the top Soviet leader expressed his indignation on his return to Moscow. “Six old machines are standing there. A single modern machine could replace them. That is what any capitalist would do—periodically install new equipment. That would also result in enormous savings, but our State Planning Committee not only does not promote but even opposes shutting down factories for modernization. The factories are supposed to keep ‘driving ahead’ to complete the plan, as in the old days. People get jobs at the Planning Committee through someone they know, thus obtaining a warm, comfortable spot in the capital city with good pay. They sit there for decades, practically from the time they’re born. What can you expect of such people? Party and government oversight over such things needs to be strengthened.” That was the unexpected conclusion Father drew.3 On May 7, he was in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory for the final concert of the second International Tchaikovsky Competition. Van Cliburn, the gold medalist from the first competition in 1958, also appeared. This time the gold medal was awarded to a Soviet pianist, Vladimir Ashkenazy, jointly with the British pianist John Ogdon. Later, in March 1963 while on tour in London, Ashkenazy fell in love with an English woman and decided not to return to the Soviet Union. That was what Father told us then. In fact, in 1961 Ashkenazy had married a foreign student of Icelandic birth when they were both studying at the Moscow Conservatory. Her name was Thórunn Jóhannsdóttir, and her parents were then living in London. By 1963 the young Ashkenazy couple

102 Time for Change: 1962 had a son, and Thórunn was expecting a second child. The whole family went together to London. His wife persuaded Ashkenazy to remain in England indefinitely. In April 1963, at the Soviet embassy in London, Ashkenazy requested that his family’s visa be extended. The embassy consulted with Moscow. In accordance with the example set by Stalin, the Soviet authorities regarded anyone who didn’t want to return to the Soviet Union as a traitor and also, of course, a spy, with all the negative consequences flowing from that. Such was the fate that awaited Ashkenazy, and there was the danger that an international scandal would break out, but Father nipped it in the bud. He ordered that “the young man” be given a passport for foreign travel of unlimited duration. Let him live abroad. And later on, if he decided to return home, please do. Father’s decision was a big shock to the officials who oversaw the foreign travels of Soviet citizens, but no one dared disobey him. On May 8, at a reception for participants in the Tchaikovsky competition, Father joked, clinked champagne glasses, signed autographs, and invited Van Cliburn to visit him at the Gorki-9 dacha when he had a day off. On Sunday, May 27, Van Cliburn made his visit. It was a warm, sunny day. Father showed Cliburn his garden and the crops he had sown. The pianist smiled bashfully. After these agricultural observances, they went for a ride in a motorboat on the Moscow River. Then Father showed him how to shoot at clay pigeons. This didn’t come off well for Cliburn, and the two of them laughed uproariously. The day ended with a home-made meal on the terrace: okroshka, boiled pike-perch, cranberry juice, and kvas, a traditional Russian drink, with very low alcohol content, usually made by pouring warm water over dry rye bread and allowing it to ferment. Perhaps to Cliburn, unfamiliar with kvas, its brown color was particularly unappealing. The guest took an interest in the okroshka (cold kvas soup with chopped vegetables and meat), tried it, and asked how it was made. Father started to explain and immediately ran into a hitch. Our American visitor could not seem to grasp in any way what kvas was. It was necessary to go into detail. But to no avail. What Cliburn might have imagined remains a mystery, but he politely pushed the exotic dish aside, and throughout the meal with great effort kept his gaze averted from the pitcher of kvas at the center of the table. After dinner our guest’s mood improved. He and Father parted warmly, on quite friendly terms. Father jokingly asked his guest if he didn’t want a glass of kvas “for the road.” Cliburn thrust out his hands, as though to push it away. “No kvas. Never,” he said. And they both laughed. On May 9, Victory Day, the seventeenth anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, the film Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan’s Childhood) by Andrei Tarkovsky came out. It was about the war—as seen through the eyes of a little boy. A penetrating and touching film, it gave Tarkovsky his start.

Day by Day

103

In 1962, May 9 was still a working day. Only later was it officially declared a holiday. On that day Khrushchev, with other members of the CC Presidium, went to the Riga Station in Moscow. There an exhibition of railroad equipment was on display. Steam locomotives had not yet disappeared, but they were definitely on their way out. Hardly anyone remembered the clashes between Khrushchev and Kaganovich in 1955 on the subject of diesel locomotives versus steam engines. Now at this exhibition people were debating over which was more efficient: diesel or electric locomotives. Father did not intervene. Either one represented progress in comparison with the steam engine. Let the specialists sort out the details. But he did reprimand the railroad people for still using wooden ties. For three decades the whole world had been using concrete ties. They were cheaper and longer-lasting. But we were wasting money, building railroads as they did in tsarist times. The minister of railroads, Boris Pavlovich Beshchev, promised to do better. It was easy for him to promise. He had been a government minister since 1948 and took a philosophical attitude toward orders from on high. But Father kept the pressure on him. The railroad people, however reluctantly, did begin the transition to reinforced-concrete ties. On May 26, 1962, Khrushchev went to the Moscow City Council to listen to the architects report on their construction plans for the city: immediate ones, up to 1965; and long-term ones, up to 1980. There were models showing rebuilt districts of Moscow—New Arbat and Volkhonka—and a new district, Nagatino. Also on display were designs for overpasses, schools, kindergartens, stores, and personal service establishments, such as laundries, dry cleaners, and shops for shoe repair and clothing repair. There was renewed discussion about the number of stories in apartment buildings. Many opinions were expressed, but everyone, including Father, agreed that at least for Moscow the time of five-story walkup buildings without elevators was coming to an end. Preparations needed to be made for the construction of higher, multistory buildings, along with calculations about which was the more efficient: a nine-story building or one of twelve stories. Apartments also had to be made more comfortable, with builtin furnishings, and over time it was necessary to stop putting the toilet and bath together in the same room, a source of many complaints. (In Europe, unlike the United States, the toilet and bath are often in separate rooms.) On May 28, together with the Italian ambassador, Carlo Alberto Straneo, Father opened the Italian exhibition at Sokolniki Park. He went around to all the stands and spent a lot of time looking at the lathes and other metalworking equipment as well as textile machinery. Trade with Italy was developing well— up to $25 million worth in 1961. That was a lot of money, especially if you remembered that only five years earlier trade with Italy was stuck at zero. On May 30, Mama went with Father to a concert by Benny Goodman. Jazz was not to their taste, but curiosity won out. All of Moscow was talking about

104 Time for Change: 1962 this American celebrity. After the concert, Father shook Benny Goodman’s hand and thanked him for his wonderful performance. Father’s opinion of jazz had not changed, but politics is politics. On the Fourth of July, Father showed up out of the blue at the US embassy for the Independence Day celebration. He had not warned the Americans or our own protocol people. There he crossed paths with Benny Goodman again. After Father had left the reception as precipitously as he arrived, Goodman told reporters they had not talked about jazz, but about Mozart. That same year, in the wake of Benny Goodman’s visit, an American ballet troupe came to the Soviet Union. This was the ballet company created by the world-famous choreographer George Balanchine, who had once been a dancer at the Mariyinsky Theater in Russia. He was the son of Meliton Balanchivadze, who laid the foundations of Georgian classical music. From 1924 on, Balanchine had worked abroad, first in Paris, then in New York. In 1962 he toured the Soviet Union for the first time.

22 The Dawn of Microelectronics At the beginning of May in 1962, Khrushchev spent several days in

Leningrad. On May 3, he conferred with the party’s Leningrad province committee, introducing the new secretary who would replace Ivan Spiridonov, because the latter was being transferred to work at the Supreme Soviet. The changes involved no great surprises. The “second secretary” of the committee, Vladimir Tolstikov, was simply promoted to “first secretary.” On the morning of May 4, Khrushchev was at the Baltic shipyard, where they were commissioning an enormous ship—enormous by the standards of that time—the tanker Ulan Bator, which had a displacement of 40,000 tons. He was satisfied that the shipyard was producing commercial vessels instead of warships. Soon they would be commissioning another tanker, the Bucharest, and after that a refrigerator ship and a cargo ship for timber. Then he went to a rolling mill, the largest and most modern in the country, which produced steel components for the most varied types of production. During the second half of the day, the Soviet premier went to visit a design bureau called KB-2, which was under the State Committee for Radio-Electronics, headed by Valery Kalmykov. It was a secret organization engaged in developing

104 Time for Change: 1962 this American celebrity. After the concert, Father shook Benny Goodman’s hand and thanked him for his wonderful performance. Father’s opinion of jazz had not changed, but politics is politics. On the Fourth of July, Father showed up out of the blue at the US embassy for the Independence Day celebration. He had not warned the Americans or our own protocol people. There he crossed paths with Benny Goodman again. After Father had left the reception as precipitously as he arrived, Goodman told reporters they had not talked about jazz, but about Mozart. That same year, in the wake of Benny Goodman’s visit, an American ballet troupe came to the Soviet Union. This was the ballet company created by the world-famous choreographer George Balanchine, who had once been a dancer at the Mariyinsky Theater in Russia. He was the son of Meliton Balanchivadze, who laid the foundations of Georgian classical music. From 1924 on, Balanchine had worked abroad, first in Paris, then in New York. In 1962 he toured the Soviet Union for the first time.

22 The Dawn of Microelectronics At the beginning of May in 1962, Khrushchev spent several days in

Leningrad. On May 3, he conferred with the party’s Leningrad province committee, introducing the new secretary who would replace Ivan Spiridonov, because the latter was being transferred to work at the Supreme Soviet. The changes involved no great surprises. The “second secretary” of the committee, Vladimir Tolstikov, was simply promoted to “first secretary.” On the morning of May 4, Khrushchev was at the Baltic shipyard, where they were commissioning an enormous ship—enormous by the standards of that time—the tanker Ulan Bator, which had a displacement of 40,000 tons. He was satisfied that the shipyard was producing commercial vessels instead of warships. Soon they would be commissioning another tanker, the Bucharest, and after that a refrigerator ship and a cargo ship for timber. Then he went to a rolling mill, the largest and most modern in the country, which produced steel components for the most varied types of production. During the second half of the day, the Soviet premier went to visit a design bureau called KB-2, which was under the State Committee for Radio-Electronics, headed by Valery Kalmykov. It was a secret organization engaged in developing

The Dawn of Microelectronics

105

guidance and control systems for cruise missiles and other electronic military applications. Waiting for him at the design bureau, in addition to Kalmykov, was Dmitry Ustinov, chairman of the Military-Industrial Commission; Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, commander of the Soviet navy; and Aleksandr Shokin, chairman of the State Committee for Electronics Technology (which was organized only about a year before this visit, on March 17, 1961). The task of this state committee was to develop, and make available for production, items that are now called microchips. That is the kind of thing we will be talking about in this chapter. I was partly responsible for Father’s visit to KB-2. As I have mentioned, I was working at the design bureau headed by Vladimir Chelomei, in the department of guidance and control systems for cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, Earth satellites, and space stations. In general, this had to do with everything that flies and is controlled by gyroscopes as well as by highly sophisticated electronic devices. For several years we had been making cruise missiles for submarines and surface ships. To the irrepressible Chelomei this did not seem enough, and he decided to encroach on the territory of Artyom Mikoyan, brother of Anastas Mikoyan—cruise missiles launched from airplanes. Of course Mikoyan didn’t like this, but just then Andrei Tupolev, whose bombers were capable of firing cruise missiles, promised Chelomei that he would make room for Chelomei’s cruise missiles on the TU-95 and TU-16 bombers. I don’t know if he was seriously interested in our work or just wanted to annoy Mikoyan, who until then had a monopoly in this field. Tupolev always kept his thoughts to himself. The State Committee for Aviation Technology took a cool attitude toward Chelomei’s venture, but it did not openly object. It sent a letter to Kalmykov asking him to acquaint us with the work he was doing on control and guidance systems for missiles launched from aircraft. Thus in the winter of 1962, I was one of a representative delegation from Chelomei’s design bureau, OKB-52, and we ended up at KB-2. We were greeted cordially. After all, we were potential customers, and they showed us everything without any attempt at concealment. As a farewell gesture they took us into a laboratory where they were engaged in work on memory blocks made up of microminiature transistors for some sort of computer, and what amazed me especially was that these microminiature units were the size of a cigarette package or a matchbox. These microminiature boosters and other modules were used for missile control systems. They assembled them right there at the laboratory. First the laboratory workers removed the casings from button-sized transistors that came from a factory. They explained to us that serial semiconductors were much too large for their purposes. Then these stripped-down “naked” transistors were arranged in cubes that they called “micro assemblies.” There were some Leningraders who also made electronic components for our P-6 antiship cruise missiles (called “Styx” missiles, in the NATO classification). They used microminiature vacuum tubes, items we were familiar with, but ours were nothing

106 Time for Change: 1962 by comparison with what I saw at KB-2. I was stunned. Such advanced work was being done right under our noses, and meanwhile we were living in the previous century. The person in charge of these micro miracles was a man with a strange name, Staros. I had already heard about him a little. In the mid-1950s, Father had mentioned in passing either that he had received a letter or that he had met a remarkable Czech engineer by the name of Staros, who was working on a computer control system for airplanes. “A Czech, with the name Staros?” I asked with surprise. “He’s Greek, but lives in Czechoslovakia.” Father stumbled as he said this. He was obviously not telling the full truth. “He recently fled there from Canada, and now he’s come to the Soviet Union. But don’t say anything about him to anyone. He came to us illegally.” I remembered the name Staros because of its unusual sound to my ear. Only after many, many years did I discover that Filipp Staros was not Staros at all, nor was he Filipp, nor was he from Canada. Staros turned out to be Alfred Starant, an American Communist engineer who had worked on the cyclotron at Cornell University and was an intelligence agent for the Soviet Union, although, to be sure, not a very important one. In June 1950, when the FBI began to arrest people, including Starant’s friend Julius Rosenberg, who was also one of our agents, Starant decided to flee before it was too late. His action was accurately timed. The FBI already knew something about him but was in no hurry to arrest him. They were looking into his connections and were on their way to discovering what those were. On August 4, 1950, Starant loaded his family into a car and headed for Mexico. Counterintelligence lost track of him for a while. In Mexico, Starant proceeded very cautiously and, rather than go to the Soviet embassy, went to talk with the Poles. Once they were convinced that Starant was one of our people, the Poles quickly and efficiently delivered him and his family to Guatemala. From there the Starant family took a steamship to Morocco, landing at Casablanca. From Casablanca they went to Franco’s Spain, and from Spain to Warsaw. From Warsaw, Starant, no longer accompanied by his family, was delivered to Moscow. There he met his old friend Joel Barr, who was also an electronics engineer and a Communist, as well as a Soviet agent. He had worked at a laboratory of the US Army Signal Corps and then at a private company, Sperry Gyroscope, a military contractor for the US Defense Department. Barr, like Starant, had good reason to fear arrest and, as a precaution, went to Europe in 1947 when his security clearance was not renewed and he was fired from Sperry Gyroscope. When the “Red scare” about Soviet spies in the United States broke out, he was living in Paris. While FBI agents were looking into the various Communists who had come to their attention and deciding whom to arrest immediately and whom to take their time with, Barr gathered up his things, took his violin—he was a music lover—and after alerting the station chief of the Soviet intelligence operation in France, took the train from Paris to Zurich. No one was searching

The Dawn of Microelectronics

107

for him yet, and he crossed the border without incident. In Zurich, Barr obtained a Czech visa, bought a train ticket to Vienna, and from Vienna went to Czechoslovakia. On June 22, 1950, in Prague, Barr was given new documents identifying him as Joseph Berg, born in South Africa to a Jewish family that had emigrated from Russia. The latter assertion, that he came from a Jewish family that had emigrated from Russia, corresponded to reality. The father of our hero had fled from Russia to escape the pogroms against Jews and had gone to the United States. His name was Benjamin Barr. His Russian name was actually Zbarsky, but the unsophisticated American immigration officials recorded the names of new arrivals as they heard them or as they saw fit, and nobody objected. Now things had come full circle. Benjamin Barr’s son, Joel, an engineer and Communist, had returned to the Soviet Union. The people in Moscow had a talk with Berg and Staros and sent them to live in Czechoslovakia, to keep them out of sight. They were of no further interest to Soviet intelligence, and the officials at Lubyanka Square did not consider their engineering knowledge relevant. At Moscow’s request, Czech counterintelligence made arrangements for these “American friends” to work in their special field. They worked on computing devices for use in airplanes and on guidance and control systems for antiaircraft missiles, but things did not go very well for them. Czechoslovakia did not have its own aircraft industry, and even less of a missile industry, and that country rarely received orders for such equipment from the Soviet Union. In other words, Staros and Berg’s work kept ending up in the wastebasket. Staros, an energetic and ambitious man, wrote a letter to Khrushchev, described how his technology could increase the accuracy of a missile strike, complained about the pointlessness of vegetating in Czechoslovakia, and asked to be given work in the Soviet Union, where he and Berg could be of more use. The person Khrushchev assigned to look into this business was Pyotr Dementyev, chairman of the State Committee for Aviation Technology. He was supposed to find out if it was really true that these “Czechs” had achieved the impressive results described by Staros in his letter. Dementyev flew to Prague, looked into everything carefully, and confirmed that Staros had not exaggerated. Staros and Berg were brought to the Soviet Union and after a brief stay in Moscow were sent to Leningrad to be farther away from the prying eyes of American spies. There was always the off chance that one of them might encounter a professional from the US embassy on a Moscow street, someone who would remember them from the photographs that had been sent by the FBI to all diplomatic offices. Thus in January 1956, Staros and Berg began work at KB-2. (In fact, the organization at first had a different name, but I don’t want to waste space on insignificant details.) They were not assigned to any especially secret work. After all, they were Americans, even though they were “on our side.” Staros’s laboratory (he immediately became head of a laboratory) was allowed to work

108 Time for Change: 1962 on whatever it considered necessary. Thus he set to work on what later came to be called “microelectronics.” Filipp Staros was the first person to introduce this term into Russian. In 1958 the first transistor “micro assemblies” appeared, and Staros also introduced that term into Russian. Within a year the first onboard computer, the Universal Machine–1, or UM-1 (the Russian word um means “mind” or “intelligence”), was in service on Tupolev’s bombers. Staros regularly reported on the results achieved at his laboratory, at first to the board of the State Committee for the Aviation Industry and later, after government ministries were reorganized, to the State Committee for the Radio-Electronics Industry, to which the KB-2 laboratory was assigned. But he was limited to simply making those reports. “Our people” did not especially want to begin serial production of something developed by “outsiders.” The brakes were skillfully applied to Staros and Berg, and when possible their work was used by others, without attribution. Thus Staros and Berg’s ideas made their way into the world, but under Russian names. After I returned from Leningrad to Moscow, as soon as I was alone with Father—after all, this was a secret matter—I told him about the wonders I had seen at Staros’s laboratory. I didn’t remember Berg. “Staros’s micro assemblies,” I tried to convince Father, “are a revolution in electronics just as important as the shift from vacuum tubes to transistors. Today we are lagging behind the United States by five to seven years, but Staros gives us a chance not only to come even with the Americans but also to go past them.” My efforts to convince Father succeeded. Since he was getting ready to go to Leningrad, he decided to drop in at the KB-2 laboratory and hear what Staros had to say. When he mentioned Staros’s name, the officials in the radio-electronics industry were not happy to hear it. They had their own plans about what to show to the head of the government, what to orient him toward, and what to ask him for. And here, out of the blue, Staros had wedged his way in. But Khrushchev made up his mind in favor of Staros. Out of the two hours he spent visiting the KB-2 design bureau, he spent more than an hour in the microelectronics laboratory, listening to Staros’s detailed report on the prospects for using micro assemblies in missile technology but also for other military purposes. They could be used in the national economy as well. Father closely scrutinized the UM-2, a later model of the airplane computer, as well as a version applicable to the national economy. Staros gave Khrushchev a gift, a microminiature radio receiver. Like a hearing aid, it could be inserted directly in one’s ear, making it possible to listen to a radio broadcast, although to be sure only from one station if it was nearby. This wonder produced by Staros not only had reception capability limited to one radio station, but also it was constantly crackling and buzzing. But it was a start! Khrushchev appreciated the gift at its true worth, put it in his ear, and didn’t take it out until after he had left the laboratory, in this way demonstrating to the government ministers present, Shokin and Kalmykov, and to Tolstikov, the secretary of the Leningrad province committee, his full support for Staros.

The Dawn of Microelectronics

109

Father took the radio receiver to Moscow with him and proudly allowed guests to try it, but on his walks he listened to his Japanese transistor radio, which he was more accustomed to even though it was much larger. Staros’s tiny radio in its gray-blue cardboard box with the “KB-2” emblem on the cover remains in my possession to this day. But it was not just a question of the tiny radio, nor of the computer—although Khrushchev did order that a good factory be found for mass production of the latter. The main point was that a new direction in the development of technology was at hand. He quickly seized on Staros’s ideas. To bring them into reality an appropriate material base was required. Staros spoke of the need to organize a special center for microelectronics, in which all aspects would be combined in one location—research, design, and production. The top Soviet leader supported him and asked Staros, together with Kalmykov, Shokin, the appropriate construction personnel, and whoever else was necessary, to prepare a list of everything that would be needed. Three months later, in the early autumn of 1962, Khrushchev signed a decree of the Central Committee and the Soviet government on the construction of a microelectronics center to the west of Moscow near the village of Kryukovo. It was to be transformed into the satellite town of Zelenograd. Satellite towns that would relieve the capital city of overpopulation were another new idea supported by Father. An appropriate field of specialization was chosen for each of them. Zelenograd was to become the Soviet Silicon Valley. The decree of autumn 1962 provided for the construction of an entire complex, from a purely theoretical Institute of Physics Problems through a series of research institutes on materials, microelectronics, and so forth, to a design bureau, an experimental production facility, and even a factory for serial production. An educational institution was also planned at this center—the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology (MIET). The Zelenograd microelectronics center would have affiliates in the capitals of several union republics, including Kiev, Minsk, and Riga. Staros, naturally, was designated as the director of the center, with Berg becoming chief engineer. This whole complex was placed under Shokin as chairman of the State Committee for Electronics Technology. The people in the state committee would have preferred one of “their own” to head this center, but no one could bring himself to broach this suggestion to Khrushchev, who justly thought the operation should be headed by the author of the entire concept—that is, a scientist and not a bureaucrat, no matter how much more experienced such a bureaucrat might be in the corridors of power. At a meeting of the CC Presidium on November 5, 1962, speaking about the future microelectronics center, Father especially emphasized that “we have to break through all the windfalls and clear the way for new technology. Only then will we occupy the leading place in this field. As of now there exists a ‘middle layer,’ which is putting spokes in the wheel.”1 So that fewer spokes would be put in the wheels, Khrushchev suggested that Staros telephone him directly if the need arose. He did the same with other

110

Time for Change: 1962

people he trusted: for example, the rocket scientists Korolyov, Chelomei, and Yangel, the seed selectionists Pustovoit and Lukyanenko, the chemist Semyonov, the aircraft designer Tupolev, the mathematician Lavrentyev—the list is long. Father would find time to meet with the caller without fail. The right to make such a phone call, bypassing the official hierarchy, kept the bureaucrats in check and allowed “good people” to perform their miracles. It was not the phone call itself, but the mere possibility of such a call, that made the bureaucrats much more circumspect and facilitated the solving of problems that under ordinary circumstances would be “insoluble.” But if in fact a problem became insoluble, then a phone call followed by a one-on-one meeting with Khrushchev and a conference of the Council of Ministers would lead to some sort of decision, though not necessarily a positive one. In the rare cases where the Soviet leader was mistaken in his choice of such a confidant, as happened with Lysenko, this “direct phone call” system turned out to be a disastrous bludgeon that could knock everything out of kilter. Thank heavens Lysenko was an exception in this list of special people. I have not included the names of such designers of nuclear weapons as Yuli Khariton and Yevgeny Zababakhin. Not only did I know nothing about the details of their relations with Father, but I never even heard their names mentioned. They were in a top-secret category. From among the people involved in the nuclear program, Igor Kurchatov sometimes came to visit us. He and Khrushchev were very well disposed toward one another. And there was also Anatoly Petrovich Aleksandrov. They were involved with nuclear weapons, but that was not discussed in my presence. Kurchatov talked about using thermonuclear power as a source of energy, and Aleksandrov talked about nuclear reactors for ships and electric power plants. But let us return to the story of Staros. Disputes between him and Shokin began even during the process of drafting the government decree about organizing the microelectronics center. Shokin had his concept about the future center at Zelenograd, and Staros had his. Staros pushed his idea forward without any special regard for Shokin, because after all he had Khrushchev behind him. Staros’s single-mindedness about scientific innovations, and the fact that he was not easy to get along with, reminded me of Chelomei. He was just as inclined to dig in his heels and if necessary stick out his neck. He promised what seemed to be impossible, but kept his promises, and he demanded that the bureaucrats not interfere in his work but at the same time provide fully for the needs of that work. Such people are not well-liked, they are tolerated only with great effort, and at the first opportunity they are disposed of. The officials took a strong dislike to Staros and Berg because of their disdain for bureaucratic procedures and because they could appeal over the heads of the bureaucrats to the highest authority. The scientists who worked with them regarded Staros and Berg as lucky rivals who had laid hands on “their” resources. On top of that, they were foreigners. All in all, an unpleasant situation took shape.

The Dawn of Microelectronics

111

When the time came to assign the various portfolios, Shokin proposed that the director of the Zelenograd center be not Staros but Fyodor Lukin, who at that time headed the Moscow design bureau KB-1, an organization that was developing antimissile systems, antiaircraft defenses, reconnaissance satellites, and control systems for cruise missiles launched from aircraft. Lukin was the head of this scientific monster, in which many scientists were doing research and development, including academicians Aleksandr Raspletin and Grigory Kisunko, as well as Anatoly Savin, who at that time was not yet a member of the Academy of Sciences. Shokin chose some convincing arguments. Lukin would take charge of organizational tasks, so that Staros and Berg could concentrate on the creative work. Care should be taken to nurture their talent. Father agreed. In February 1963, Lukin was appointed director at Zelenograd. Staros became his deputy for scientific matters. As for Berg, he decided not to leave Leningrad. While continuing to be associated formally with KB-2, he began doing research at a new scientific center, whose role was to serve as a connecting link between the two organizations. Unlike Staros, Berg was not eager to hold official posts. Staros was offended and went to see Shokin to have it out. Shokin greeted him in a friendly manner and calmed him down. After all, he said, Staros would have at his complete disposal 20,000 scientists, engineers, technicians, and experimenters. That was the size of the projected staff for the future center. What more did he need? Was he so eager to be involved with construction matters, beating the bushes for the necessary funds, the digging of the foundations, and obtaining timely delivery of concrete? Staros did not want to be involved in such matters and submitted. Lukin’s relations with Staros were similar to those he had shared previously with Kisunko or Raspletin. He, Lukin, was the director. He created the necessary conditions for the work, provided what was needed within defined limits, and monitored the extent to which plans were fulfilled. But things did not turn out well with Staros. Disregarding his official status, he demanded that Lukin actually be subordinate to him and immediately satisfy all his demands. After all, the future of microelectronics depended on that. It was only natural that problems developed not only with Lukin but also with the leadership of the state committee. Staros appealed to the Central Committee. The person in charge of the Central Committee’s department on the defense industry was Ivan Serbin. He scrupulously followed the same line as Father, who had promised Staros his support in front of everyone. Besides that, Serbin did not like Ustinov, the head of the Military-Industrial Commission—he was jealous of him and enjoyed putting the officials under Ustinov “in their place.” But even Serbin could not always help Staros in all matters, nor did he want to. On top of that, the State Committee for Electronics Technology was often enough not all that wrong in its disagreements with Staros. For example, the committee was charged with the task of producing electronic microcalculators by copying them from Western models. The bureaucrats naturally passed this assignment along to Zelenograd. It was not that they were being malicious. This obligation

112 Time for Change: 1962 had crashed down on the heads of the state committee like an unexpected snowstorm. Staros became enraged. He did not want to copy old stuff. He protested and referred to Khrushchev. But they explained to him that the assignment to copy Western microcalculators had come from Khrushchev. Staros complained to Father. Somehow a big row was avoided, but Staros’s relations with his immediate superiors, Shokin and Lukin, became increasingly tense. And day-today affairs had to be worked out with them. You couldn’t run to Khrushchev every time someone sneezed. Thus with unrelenting nervous strain and ongoing intrigues the Zelenograd center was built, with all its attendant research institutes. The bureaucratic fuss and bother around it differed very little from the intrigues that accompanied the rapid growth of other similar organizations—Korolyov’s design bureau in Podlipki, Yangel’s design bureau in Dnepropetrovsk, or the construction of the Siberian division of the Academy of Sciences on the Ob River near Novosibirsk. The creative person, completely absorbed in his task, inevitably steps on other people’s toes. With every new undertaking, there always appear people who do not wish the venture well, sometimes highly influential people. A year and a half went by in this fashion. In the first days of October 1964, Staros called Khrushchev for the last time. It turned out that Father was not there. A secretary said he was on vacation at Pitsunda. Then Staros and Berg wrote a detailed letter. What about? Today that is absolutely unimportant. The letter was sent to the secretariat of the chairman of the Council of Ministers, but the person who read the letter was no longer Khrushchev. It was Kosygin, who by then had become the new head of the Soviet government. Kosygin did not tolerate people who appealed over the heads of their immediate superiors. He considered such “complainers” to be troublemakers who interfered with his work and the work of the apparatus. After glancing through the letter from Staros, Kosygin marked it for referral to his deputy for military-industrial affairs, Leonid Vasilyevich Smirnov, one of those who did not wish Staros well. Smirnov passed the letter on to Shokin. Shokin summoned Staros and read him the riot act. After a while the people in charge felt they had had their fill of the uncooperative Staros. He was simply fired from Zelenograd. Deeply offended, Staros went to Vladivostok to the Far Eastern division of the Academy of Sciences. There he worked on the problem of artificial intelligence, which at that time seemed almost a fantasy. He had promising results, but here too he did not get along with others and finally ruined his relations with his superiors. He continued trying to prove his importance, attempting to be elected to the Academy of Sciences. Of course he was unsuccessful. The Academy of Sciences did not like rebels any more than other bureaucratic organizations did. After the third time that he tried without success to be elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, and because of his extreme nervous agitation over this issue, Staros died of a heart attack in March 1979. Berg, in contrast, was quite easy to get along with, and continued to live and work in Leningrad. Unlike Staros, he did not aspire to anything in particular

From a Price System to the Novocherkassk Tragedy

113

and didn’t fight with anyone. He worked on perfecting his own special invention, the “microfab,” a type of technology for producing microchips. In his spare time he reconstructed his apartment. He knocked down walls between rooms, installed a fancy swimming pool–sized bathtub, and designed a uniquely comfortable toilet seat made to look like a throne. His death was also peaceful. He died in 1998 at the age of eighty-two.2

23 From a Price System Based on a Single Standard, to the Novocherkassk Tragedy May 1962 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Young Pioneers, an

organization analogous to the Scouts in Western countries. On June 1, Father was invited to attend the opening of a stylish new Young Pioneers building in the Vorobyov Hills district of Moscow, an event timed to coincide with the historic anniversary. The celebration was a big success. Dancers, singers, and athletes performed, all of Young Pioneer age, and the grownups gave speeches. Father also spoke. Quite briefly. At the very same time, in far-off Novocherkassk, the workers at the electric locomotive plant in that city went on strike. Father knew nothing of those events. At that moment, actually, nothing worth reporting to the head of the government had yet occurred. What was it that happened at Novocherkassk on June 1, 1962? I will begin with some prehistory. In the summer of 1960, a Central Committee plenum resolved that “prices based on a single standard” should be developed and put into effect. This meant prices that would be paid directly by the consumer and would cover the full production cost of the product. The real cost of production would no longer be made up for by a complex system of subsidies, supplementary payments, and other cleverly contrived financial devices. Let me go further into the history that preceded that 1960 resolution. Stalin carried out industrialization by robbing the peasants, who were forced to labor on the collective farms in return for checkmarks indicating so many “workdays.” The checkmarks were recorded in an account book, so that a certain number of “workdays” were credited to each collective farmer’s account. The

From a Price System to the Novocherkassk Tragedy

113

and didn’t fight with anyone. He worked on perfecting his own special invention, the “microfab,” a type of technology for producing microchips. In his spare time he reconstructed his apartment. He knocked down walls between rooms, installed a fancy swimming pool–sized bathtub, and designed a uniquely comfortable toilet seat made to look like a throne. His death was also peaceful. He died in 1998 at the age of eighty-two.2

23 From a Price System Based on a Single Standard, to the Novocherkassk Tragedy May 1962 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Young Pioneers, an

organization analogous to the Scouts in Western countries. On June 1, Father was invited to attend the opening of a stylish new Young Pioneers building in the Vorobyov Hills district of Moscow, an event timed to coincide with the historic anniversary. The celebration was a big success. Dancers, singers, and athletes performed, all of Young Pioneer age, and the grownups gave speeches. Father also spoke. Quite briefly. At the very same time, in far-off Novocherkassk, the workers at the electric locomotive plant in that city went on strike. Father knew nothing of those events. At that moment, actually, nothing worth reporting to the head of the government had yet occurred. What was it that happened at Novocherkassk on June 1, 1962? I will begin with some prehistory. In the summer of 1960, a Central Committee plenum resolved that “prices based on a single standard” should be developed and put into effect. This meant prices that would be paid directly by the consumer and would cover the full production cost of the product. The real cost of production would no longer be made up for by a complex system of subsidies, supplementary payments, and other cleverly contrived financial devices. Let me go further into the history that preceded that 1960 resolution. Stalin carried out industrialization by robbing the peasants, who were forced to labor on the collective farms in return for checkmarks indicating so many “workdays.” The checkmarks were recorded in an account book, so that a certain number of “workdays” were credited to each collective farmer’s account. The

114 Time for Change: 1962 peasant farmers were to be paid in the future, according to the number of each one’s “workdays,” after the earnings of the collective farm as a whole had been determined, based on what the farm was paid for delivery of grain to government receiving points or grain-storage elevators. But the price the government paid the collective farms per kilogram of grain was even less than the cost of delivering that grain! In effect, the collective-farm peasants were hardly being paid at all—they received almost nothing for their labor. On the other hand, the government sold manufactured goods—from tractors to underwear—at exorbitant prices. When this price structure was established, it created what was called a “scissors,” which sheared superprofits from the labor of the peasants. In those days the profits were invested wherever Stalin considered necessary. Disobedience, or even a hint of disobedience, was cruelly punished, to teach others a lesson. Thus the peasants performed virtually unpaid labor under the constant threat of punishment. But slave labor is not productive. In the Soviet Union there was a chronic shortage of grain for bread, not to mention other farm products. In Father’s view, unless the producer was paid in full for his labor and was thus given a material incentive for doing his work, the Soviet economic wagon would not begin to move forward. Only a logical and consistent price structure, a “transparent” system of prices, would allow fair, just, and rational relations between buyer and seller to be established. Such relations, based on the material interest of the producer in the results of his labor, an interest in making production more efficient and less wasteful—which meant it would be more profitable—at the same time would give the customer the possibility of choosing goods according to his own taste. And by paying the full price for those goods, the buyer would provide an incentive for the producer. In 1953, Khrushchev abolished the most objectionable taxes and at the same time increased the “procurement prices” paid by the government for agricultural goods. Behind those measures stood a single concept: that only motivated labor is efficient—that is, the labor of a producer who knows that when he delivers more goods, and goods of higher quality, he will receive adequate compensation. Father called such natural relations between producer and consumer “material incentive.” Among the people there was a simpler expression: “the more sweat you put in, the more food in the bin.” The words are different but the essence is the same. Actually, during his last years in office, Khrushchev devoted all his efforts toward restoring a material incentive for labor in agriculture. (In industry the situation was somewhat better.) He lowered taxes, raised procurement prices, and tried to establish a fixed amount that would be set for several years in advance for the quitrent. The feudal term “quitrent,” used here ironically, refers to the quantity of agricultural products that a collective or state farm was obliged to deliver to the government. In Father’s view, labor should be sufficiently well paid, so that a person would want to work and would make some earnings from that work. “What

From a Price System to the Novocherkassk Tragedy

115

kind of fool, excuse me for being rude,” he repeated at meeting after meeting, “would increase the output of meat if the more he produced, the greater the losses would be for the collective or state farm?”1 However, the idea of establishing such natural relations between the peasant producer and the urban consumer, with the consumer paying the producer a price capable of making him seriously interested in his labor—that did not work out at all. It all ran into a dead end because retail prices for food products were fixed at a low level in the government stores. These prices were set because of political considerations, or as it was phrased, they were “socially oriented” prices. The government increased its procurement prices for agricultural goods but left the retail prices unchanged at their low level. From this there arose, for example, the supposedly insoluble problem that people were feeding pigs by purchasing bread very cheaply at government stores. Father understood that if the government bought agricultural products such as grain, meat, and milk at higher procurement prices, they should not be sold super cheaply, but he couldn’t do anything about it. If the price of bread went up, who knew what might happen? Thus it became necessary to “scratch with your left toe behind your right ear.” Prohibitions would have to be introduced that would make people extremely angry. But after all, government pockets were not bottomless. It was out of those pockets that the difference had to be made up between higher procurement prices and the unaltered low retail prices for bread, meat, milk, and so forth. In fact, there was very little change in the government’s price strategy. Under Stalin the peasants were robbed in the interests of those working in metallurgy and machine-building, but now an attempt was being made to repay the debt by robbing someone else at some other location, by, let us say, raising the price for clothing or furniture. The money had to come from somewhere. If there was an increase in one area, there had to be a loss in another. The country was sinking into a surrealistic economic situation that would lead to bankruptcy. To break out of this, to provide peasant labor with incentive and make it profitable—this “capitalist” term “profitable” was one Father used more and more often—could only be done by violating the dogma that “prices do not go up under socialism.” This obvious need to violate the dogma was proclaimed by the economists gathered together by Zasyadko in the State Economic Council. Their conclusions were confirmed by the realities of life. Agricultural production had refused to grow for the previous two years, however hard people tried to make it grow. At a Central Committee plenum in March 1962, Father said that it was not only in the case of bread that we were suffering interruptions in delivery of food products. People could not buy meat and milk everywhere, or not the kind they wanted. As before, things were at an impasse because of the shortage of fodder for beef and dairy cattle. Farmers had not taken very well to the idea of raising corn. It required labor, and without appropriate reimbursement for labor, without

116 Time for Change: 1962 a material incentive for doing the work, no one wanted to engage in the painstaking cultivation of cornfields, the necessary loosening of the soil and weeding. The corn plants grew sickly, and shriveled up no sooner than their shoots emerged above ground. Things were better when it came to cereal grains: wheat, rye, barley, and oats. People had long been familiar with the cultivation of those crops, but there was hardly enough to feed the people, let alone to use such cereal crops for feeding cows and pigs. In order to free ourselves from the ancient Russian fear of famine, it was necessary, in Father’s view, to triple the harvest of grain. And he was right. But how? At the plenum, Khrushchev acknowledged that it was impossible to return to the old way, to the use of coercion, and it would not be effective. Therefore only one course remained: to openly balance procurement prices with retail prices without any subsidies. Otherwise the country would very quickly fall into the “black hole” of paying additional sums out of the budget, which it did not have. Today the decision to raise retail prices to balance them with procurement prices would be called “unpopular.” Back then it was simply suicidal, if only in the political sense. But Father decided to do it anyway. Otherwise he would have to abandon the reform process not only in agriculture but also in the economy as a whole. Immediately after the plenum, in March 1962, he ordered that the appropriate documents be prepared. On May 17, 1962, the Council of Ministers passed a resolution to increase procurement prices for large-horned cattle, hogs, poultry, milk, and butter, and to do so quite substantially. In some categories the price would be nearly doubled. At the same time, retail prices for meat and meat products would be increased by 13 percent, and for butter, 25 percent. On June 1, 1962, the newspapers published two decrees: one on raising procurement prices and one on raising retail prices. No one paid any attention to the first decree. It did not affect the ordinary urban citizen who stood in line at the store. But the second decree triggered a storm of protest. Of course they blamed Khrushchev and cited the “benefactor” Stalin, under whom prices had always gone down and never up. Soviet premier Khrushchev decided to make a speech on television to explain the price increases. Oleg Troyanovsky, his aide for international affairs, a cautious and diplomatic person, tried to dissuade him and advised that he preserve his reputation by entrusting this unpleasant task to one of the deputy premiers, to Mikoyan or Kosygin. “I am the Number One person in the government, and it wouldn’t be right to hide behind someone else’s back. I must answer for everything, and it is only I who am obliged to address the people.” That was Father’s sharp rebuttal. Troyanovsky held his tongue, but his opinion remained the same.

From a Price System to the Novocherkassk Tragedy

117

The arguments Khrushchev presented in his speech met with no understanding among the people. There was muffled grumbling. That evening, on June 1, I tried to let Father know what people were saying in Moscow. He waved me away sadly: “I know all that. But there’s nothing else that can be done.” He did not tell me that in southern Russia, at Novocherkassk, and in some other places—I don’t remember exactly where, because so many years have gone by—matters were not limited to merely groans and mutterings of complaint. In most places things ended peacefully. But in Novocherkassk they took a different turn. There, at the electric locomotive plant, work norms had been increased in February, which meant that wages fell. For some people the wage loss was as much as 30 percent, and then on June 1 a price increase was piled on top of that. The coincidence proved tragic. People became extremely angry. On the morning of June 1, workers at the foundry, at first only about twenty to twenty-five people, went on strike and demanded to see the director. The plant director, Boris Kurochkin, behaved extremely boorishly. In reply to the complaint that the workers now had nothing to buy meat with, he arrogantly tossed off the remark: “No money for meat? Then buy those cheap little liver pies.” Infuriated by his remarks, people converged on the plant’s administration building. Along the way, workers from other shops joined them. The number of strikers grew quickly to 3,000. Placards appeared: “Meat, butter, raise our wages!” The strikers put up a large portrait of Lenin. The crowd filled the square in front of the factory to overflowing, blocked the railroad tracks, and stopped a train. The city and province officials were terrified. Instead of trying to calm the situation themselves, they appealed to the military for help. On June 2, Father returned home from work looking grim. To my question: “What happened?” he answered: “In Novocherkassk the workers started a row. Things got so bad that shots were fired.” In his terminology a “row” meant that the workers had refused to work. He often reminisced about how he himself had “started a row” at the Bossé factory in the Donbas (Donets Coal Basin) before the revolution. If people were handled skillfully, that kind of “row” led to no serious consequences. Father did not blame the workers for the way things developed in Novocherkassk; he blamed the local party leadership, which had lost any connection with the people, as he put it. Now that things had flared up, however, the central leadership had to intervene. Father said that Andrei Kirilenko and Aleksandr Shelepin had flown to the region, but they had not been able to cope with the assignment and had proven to be cowards. They were afraid to even go out to speak to the people and were sitting in the offices of the party’s province committee in the city of Rostov. Then Khrushchev sent an entire “landing force”: Frol Kozlov, Anastas Mikoyan, and one of the party’s top propagandists, Leonid Ilyichev. He especially placed his hopes on Mikoyan, on his ability to negotiate and come to an agreement with the devil himself, as Father joked. But Mikoyan did not succeed

118 Time for Change: 1962 in winning an agreement. The conflict was resolved forcefully and people were killed. Those most active in the demonstrations were arrested “for an attempted armed uprising and hooligan actions causing serious destruction in the city,” as was reported by the first deputy chairman of the KGB, Colonel-General Pyotr Ivashutin. To confirm these allegations, he sent Father a thick album of photographs showing buildings with broken windows, rooms with damaged furniture, and crowds of people in the streets. Father took the photographs home and handed me the album: “If you want to, take a look at what’s being done there.” He didn’t wish to answer questions. He just waved his hand: “Don’t pester me.” I learned more about what happened in Novocherkassk from various remarks by people involved in the tragedy. Gradually, the pieces of the puzzle came together, though of course they did not form a complete picture. Thus, for example, the KGB chairman, Vladimir Semichastny, said in my presence that the ringleaders of the disturbances were tried and the most malicious among them were shot. From his words there breathed the foul, cold stench of the grave, vintage 1930s. Later, Sergo Mikoyan explained to me why his father had not succeeded in his mission. According to Sergo, Frol Kozlov kept Anastas Mikoyan completely away from what was going on. Kozlov was a harsh man, and eager to use force. He rejected out of hand Mikoyan’s proposals for negotiating with the crowd. Kozlov bluntly reminded Mikoyan that the latter had dragged out negotiations too long in Hungary in 1956, which had led to bloodshed, and probably would do the same thing here. The disturbances had to be nipped in the bud before they spread beyond Novocherkassk. This should be done while matters could still be cut short, thus if possible avoiding worse developments. Viewed historically, in retrospect, Kozlov proved to be right. Negotiations could not have gone anywhere. A spontaneous protest does not permit such a possibility. In Novocherkassk the authorities were confronted with an unorganized, highly inflamed crowd. There was no one to talk to or negotiate with; no one was leading the crowd. What kind of negotiations can you have with disorganized chaos!? Thus it turned out that while the people from Moscow were consulting and arguing with one another, and could not agree on what to do, the time went by irreversibly. A red-hot situation developed and it all ended with the shedding of blood. If they had acted decisively from the very beginning, as Kozlov proposed, the bloodletting could have been avoided. Thus, however paradoxical it might seem, the peacemaker Mikoyan bears the main responsibility for the bloodshed. When everything was over, Kozlov not only demanded that those who took part in the demonstrations be severely punished, but also ordered that people who had not even been arrested should be deported to Siberia. Mikoyan objected and threatened that he would complain to Khrushchev. In response, Kozlov forbade Mikoyan from getting in touch with Moscow and at the same time ordered that railroad cars be brought to Novocherkassk, so that the people to

From a Price System to the Novocherkassk Tragedy

119

be deported could be loaded into them. Only when Mikoyan made a big scene was he allowed to call Father on the phone. Father was furious at Kozlov’s arbitrariness, and the planned operations were not carried out. From that time on, Kozlov and Mikoyan hated each other more than ever. Strictly speaking, that is all that I succeeded in finding out about the events right after they happened. For a long time I had no doubts about Kozlov’s alleged intention to deport the entire population of Novocherkassk. More accurately, I simply didn’t think about it. Later I began to reflect on the matter, and the story about the railroad cars began to seem to me dubious. We know about this only from Mikoyan’s account, and he told it after Kozlov had had his stroke, when he was unable to refute those allegations. Kozlov did not have the authority to order such a thing, and he could not have had such powers. No one without Father’s consent and a formal decision by the CC Presidium would have listened to him. To order railroad cars brought up! To deport an entire city! Where to? Where could all these people be accommodated? In 1962 such arbitrariness would probably have cost Kozlov his career, and rumors about it would have spread through wide circles in Moscow. But there’s no smoke without fire, and I will tell what actually happened. A more or less accurate picture of the events of those days in Novocherkassk emerged only at the end of the 1980s, in the Gorbachev era, with the establishment of a Soviet parliament, the first Congress of People’s Deputies of the Soviet Union. That Congress authorized the military prosecutor’s office to make a detailed investigation. Of course the results of that investigation were not completely objective either. The military was trying to whitewash its own role and to shove the blame for the bloodshed off onto the KGB, but the investigation did gather an exhaustive number of facts. The evidence from this investigation testifies to the following. The leaders of the party’s Rostov province committee, headed by the first secretary of that committee, Aleksandr Basov, did not arrive in Novocherkassk until the second half of the day on June 1, when the mass protests had already gained strength. This was the same Basov who had made such a poor impression on Father in the spring of 1961. Father had characterized him then as a “phrase-monger” and intended to replace him but did not do so in time. Basov went out on the balcony of the factory administration building. The crowd quieted down and people waited to see what he would say about the issues that concerned them, the lower pay and other factory problems. However, Basov could not find the right words. He began reading aloud from the announcement by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers, which had been published in the papers, about the increase in prices. A hostile roar went up from the crowd and someone threw a bottle at Basov. The province committee officials retreated into the building and ordered the police to clear the square. But the police, even with the support of Internal Ministry troops, who had been summoned by then, could not carry out the order. In fact the strikers took control of the balcony, tore down a large portrait of Khrushchev, which had been hanging on the front

120 Time for Change: 1962 of the building, and since in their opinion he was to blame for all the misfortunes in the country, they hurled down his portrait to approving cries and shouts. Someone in the crowd below shouted: “Down with the government of Khrushchev! Make meat out of him! Send Malenkov and Shepilov here!” Those two individuals were regarded as “good” because Khrushchev, who was now regarded as “bad,” had kicked them out. That is typical of a spontaneous, disorganized protest. The strikers then tried to give their own speeches, making use of the megaphone that Basov had left on the balcony. But it didn’t work. Someone had either cut the wire or unplugged it. The people on the balcony, angered by this failure, broke the nearest windows and crawled inside. They did a bit of plundering, but did not go far inside the building. Their ardor quickly cooled. Meanwhile the mass rally had moved to a nearby trestle over the railroad tracks, which was now being used as a speaker’s platform instead of the balcony of the factory administration building. Some people climbed up and shouted something, but the crowd, which was making its own racket, did not hear the speakers on the railroad bridge or listen to them. Basov, still inside the factory administration building, appealed to the army for help. Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, the minister of defense, basing himself on an order from Khrushchev, sent a message authorizing the commander of the military district, Issa Pliyev, a four-star general, to place military units on the alert and concentrate them in the vicinity of Novocherkassk. But General Pliyev was not at his headquarters. He had gone to visit the troops and as yet did not know anything about the events. People kept searching for him, but did not find him until he returned to his office in Rostov. Meanwhile Basov was sitting barricaded in the factory administration building. The crowd, not knowing what else to do, spilled over onto the railroad tracks. Only at 4 P.M. did the chief of staff of the military district report to Pliyev about the order that had been received from Malinovsky. Pliyev decided not to be too hasty, but to look into the situation himself. Without giving any orders, he went to Novocherkassk. At the same time in Rostov, the first officials from Moscow arrived: Kirilenko, who was a member of the CC Presidium and one of Father’s deputies on the CC Bureau for the Russian Federation, and Shelepin, who was one of the secretaries of the Central Committee. They were accompanied by two deputy chairmen of the KGB, Ivashutin and Zakharov. Shelepin testified to the investigators from the military prosecutor’s office that when Khrushchev sent him and Kirilenko on their way, he ordered them to use only peaceful means. When General Pliyev arrived on the scene at 5 P.M., he was given an order by Kirilenko, who had taken authority into his own hands, to free Basov, still trapped in the factory administration building. In giving instructions to his subordinates, Pliyev especially emphasized: “During the operation do not use force or weapons.” In addition, the soldiers were not given any cartridges for their automatic weapons. A reconnaissance company of the Eighteenth Division

From a Price System to the Novocherkassk Tragedy

121

removed the province officials from the building by the back door and delivered them to Kirilenko. The point should be made that the military men openly marched into the building without any interference, although the crowd was in a very nervous mood. The people had turned over two trucks, and they tugged at the sleeves of the officers, asking: “Who are you for?” “Which side are you on?” But the strikers did not follow the military men into the building. By that time tanks, which had been called in by Kirilenko, came up to the square outside the factory administration building. The workers taking part in the mass meeting gave them a much more hostile greeting than they had to the reconnaissance squad. They tried to stick metal rods into the caterpillar treads of the first tank, broke its headlights and periscope, and to top it all off, covered the tank with a tarpaulin. Pliyev’s deputy, General Matvei Shaposhnikov, when he noticed the tanks, ordered them immediately removed from the square. He did not know they were there on Kirilenko’s orders. In the 1990s, decades after the Novocherkassk events, press reports told of a general who had refused to bring tanks into the city despite orders from his superiors. In the materials turned up by the investigation, there was nothing about any such actions. What actually happened is that before Kirilenko had come to Novocherkassk and before Malinovsky had issued his order, the secretary of the party’s Rostov province committee, Basov, had telephoned the commander of the Eighteenth Division, Colonel Shargorodsky, and commanded that order be restored at the electric locomotive plant. Shargorodsky refused. The province committee officials were not his superior officers. The headquarters of the military district reacted to Basov’s phone call the same way. Without orders from Pliyev they would take no action. General Pliyev approved his officers’ refusal to act. Troops intervened only after receiving the order from Marshal Malinovsky, the minister of defense. No instances of refusal to follow orders were found. But again, there’s no smoke without fire. In 1962, General Matvei Kuzmich Shaposhnikov, a lieutenant-general of the tank forces, had been Pliyev’s first deputy. In 1966, this same person was sent into retirement because of his constant disagreements with his commanding officer. In 1967, under Brezhnev, he was tried and sentenced “for preparing and keeping an anonymous letter, a proclamation with anti-Soviet content.” He was prompted to write the letter because of “repressive actions and scornful conduct on the part of Pliyev.” That is what Shaposhnikov testified at his own trial in October 1967. Of course there were no reports in the press about his trial or about those who took part in the disturbances at Novocherkassk. Popular rumor merged the two separate events, of 1962 and 1967, into one. At 7 P.M. Malinovsky called the headquarters of the military district from Moscow and personally gave an order: “Inform Pliyev. Place the division on alert. Do not use tanks. Restore order. Report.” By evening, Kozlov and Mikoyan had flown in from Moscow, and they proceeded to take over command from Kirilenko. The new arrivals went to the headquarters of the tank division.

122 Time for Change: 1962 Kozlov was in a determined mood. At the very first conference he declared: “Weapons must be used, and a thousand people should be put in railroad cars and taken out of the city.” It was probably this conversation that Mikoyan remembered. Kozlov spoke of a thousand people, not of the entire population of the city, which in 1962 was approximately 125,000, and he did not specify how far they should be taken from the city. But people are inclined to exaggerate. The investigating commission did not clarify whether Kozlov and Mikoyan had the appropriate authorization from Khrushchev to do this, but commented that no actions resulted from Kozlov’s declaration. When darkness came the strikers went back to their homes. On the morning of June 2, the workers again gathered in the square in front of the factory administration building. They tried to decide what to do next. In the end they formed a column and marched toward the bridge over the Tuzlov River toward the building that housed the party’s city committee. It was an impressive marching column. Red flags waved over the heads of the crowd, and the demonstrators carried portraits of Lenin, Marx, and Engels. At the bridge the demonstrators encountered tanks and a row of military students from the Rostov academy, who had been sent by Kozlov. All were without weapons. The people did not charge head-on. Instead, they crossed the river by fording it. No one tried to restrain them. By 10:30 A.M. the column had reached its destination and filled Lenin Square, where the party’s Novocherkassk city committee was located, as well as the executive committee of the City Soviet. No one came out to address the strikers. The local leaders had fled in panic. A row of soldiers and volunteer civilian assistants of the police blocked the entrance to the building. The infuriated crowd easily overpowered this cordon, broke down the doors, and swarmed through all stories of the building. The first orators from among the demonstrators appeared on the balcony. They had already heard that Mikoyan and Kozlov had flown in from Moscow, and they began to demand, or rather I would say, began to beg, that Mikoyan speak to them, to explain what the authorities were doing and to punish the local officials for acting like petty tyrants. The call for Mikoyan to appear became insistent. Every other person who spoke returned to this theme. The crowd began to chant: “Mikoyan, Mikoyan . . .” But Mikoyan did not appear on the balcony of the Novocherkassk city committee. The mood of the crowd gradually grew hotter. Someone called for a march on the police building to free those who had been detained the previous day. About 300 people gathered in front of the building (which the police shared with the KGB; the two agencies had their offices in adjacent rooms in the same building). Several people tried to climb over the brick wall to get into the inner courtyard. In response, shots rang out, fired by soldiers of the 505th Regiment of Internal Ministry troops. They aimed high, firing over people’s heads, firing at the wall, not at people. The demonstrators stopped trying to break into the inner courtyard. They jumped down from the wall, back onto the street. However, the attackers were not frightened by the gunshots. They broke through the

From a Price System to the Novocherkassk Tragedy

123

doors that opened onto the street and penetrated into the police building, but they didn’t find any arrested persons there. During the night those detainees had been taken out of the city. In a corner of the desk sergeant’s room they found a small group of soldiers. They started to beat them, and took a submachine gun away from a private, Repkin. No other weapon was in the hands of the demonstrators either before or after that. Another private, Azizov, shouted, “They’re beating our people!” and began firing in the air. His comrades joined him, and the crowd fled through the nearby doors. They came into the inner courtyard, where soldiers, frightened by the previous attacks, were milling around. They opened fire. The commander of the regiment, Pyotr Malyutin, hurried to where the shooting had erupted and with difficulty stopped it. The result was five people killed on the spot and two more who died later from wounds. The wounded were not counted. While the crowd was storming the police building, Mikoyan and Kozlov had moved from Rostov to the military base where the tank division had its headquarters. Kirilenko and Shelepin were already there. By this time, those who were holding a mass rally in front of the city committee building, seeing that Mikoyan was not coming out to speak to them, decided to send a delegation. It consisted of nine volunteers, including two or three young women; the rest were men, one of whom was pretty drunk. That was the recollection of a witness found in the late 1980s, as testified to the military investigators. Kozlov took it upon himself to meet with the emissaries from the crowd. Mikoyan was sitting right there but did not utter a single word. No useful conversation resulted. Essentially the “representatives” did not represent anyone and had no authority over the crowd. They demanded, “Stop oppressing the working class.” One of them kept repeating: “We are the working class. We are many,” pounding his fist into his hand and cursing a blue streak after each coherent word. Another man complained that “in our country the only people who live well are Yuri Gagarin and Manka, who works at the snack bar.” In general, each person was speaking for himself or herself only, although they were speaking from the heart. When these emissaries had “talked themselves out,” Kozlov said goodbye to them with the following words: “Go to your people, calm them down, appeal to them to stop the disorder.” Even before these so-called negotiations had been completed, or more exactly, understanding in advance that these emissaries represented no one but themselves, Kozlov had sent Kirilenko and Shelepin to Novocherkassk with an order for the commander of the garrison, General Oleshko: “Clear the participants in this pogrom from the city committee building. In case of necessity fire warning shots into the air.” Tanks and armored cars of the Eighteenth Division, as well as students from the artillery school and other military units, had come up to Lenin Square. They formed a semicircle around those who were demonstrating in the square.

124 Time for Change: 1962 The city committee building was cleared out without any difficulty. Only thirty or forty people were inside it, and they had no thought of resisting. General Oleshko went out on the balcony and, with a loudspeaker, demanded that people disperse; otherwise the troops would open fire. Shouts from the crowd echoed in reply: “They’re trying to scare us! They won’t shoot!” Oleshko ordered: “Soldiers, withdraw from the crowd. Move back to the wall.” And shortly after that he commanded: “One volley into the air, fire!” The rat-tat-tat of submachine guns followed, but the crowd did not move from where it was standing. A version of the events widely repeated in the press was that when the soldiers fired into the air, they killed many young boys who had climbed into trees nearby to watch the events, but the investigation did not confirm this version. It seems to have been made up out of whole cloth. “Don’t be afraid. They’re shooting blanks!” someone’s voice was heard in the crowd. Laughter rippled through the crowd. And then the soldiers fired a second volley. The military investigators assert that this happened without any command. Groaning, the crowd swayed and began to disperse. People raced across the square, knocking each other down and rushing into the side streets. At that point the soldiers stopped firing. Bodies were lying in the square. Not that many were killed, as it turned out, because the soldiers were shooting without aiming. It has not been clarified who actually shot at the crowd. Some witnesses asserted that soldiers who were firing in the air “gradually lowered their guns.” The servicemen swore that they fired only into the air. Other “eyewitnesses” claimed that some “civilians”—meaning KGB plainclothesmen—were firing from the rooftops, including with machine guns. In confirmation of this assertion, they cited the fact that people who were far distant from Lenin Square were wounded. Shots coming from the ground could not have reached those people, but from the roofs it would have been easy. The military investigators did not find any such perpetrators. Who gave the order to open fire directly on the crowd instead of into the air, and whether such an order was given at all, remained unknown. The investigators found no documents from that time that were related to the bloodshed in Lenin Square. They were able to establish, however, that Khrushchev did not give permission to fire. The following was written in the investigating commission’s report: “The materials of the investigation allow us to draw the conclusion that the decision to use weapons made by members of the Central Committee Presidium who were on the scene had not been agreed to in advance with Khrushchev. At first, as has already been noted, the latter [Khrushchev] was opposed to extreme measures. Subsequently, as the situation grew worse, he began to demand that order be restored by any means, up to and including the use of weapons. But he made one reservation about this: only in the event of the seizure of government institutions.” Of course I find it consoling that Father was not directly involved in the bloodshed, but that is a small consolation. Blood was shed, and the man who stood at the head of the country and government was responsible

From a Price System to the Novocherkassk Tragedy

125

for everything, regardless what position he took personally. Father never denied responsibility. What then actually happened on June 2, 1962, in Lenin Square in Novocherkassk? Since there is no documentary evidence, one may suppose whatever one likes. I will take the liberty of expressing my own opinion, which is not based on anything other than logic and psychology, to explain what happened. I do not admit the possibility that officers would give an order to open fire directly on the crowd without a clear and distinct written order from their superiors. Officers are disciplined people who understand that if blood were shed in peacetime, they would have to answer for it. The investigation established that no order was given from Moscow for weapons to be used, nor did Mikoyan and Kozlov give such an order, not to mention General Pliyev. The version about secret agents of the KGB shooting from the roofs of buildings near the square is even less convincing. These agents are also officers, and unlikely to shoot without a specific order. And only Khrushchev or his deputies, Kozlov and Mikoyan, could have given such an order to Semichastny, who was then the head of the KGB. No copy of such an order has been preserved. None of those people, other than Semichastny, lived long enough to be interrogated by the military investigators. If he had had the slightest basis for shifting all the blame onto his dead associates, especially onto Father, Semichastny would have done that. But he kept quiet, understanding that the investigator would demand documentary evidence of such accusations. The alleged firing from rooftops does not accord with any logic other than the logic of military men who wanted to shift the blame from themselves onto someone else, in this case onto the KGB. Thus all the facts and testimony come down to one thing: no one gave an order to fire. And it is probably true that no KGB agents were on the rooftops. They wouldn’t have had anything to do there. Their job was to penetrate the crowd, take photographs, and establish the names of those taking part in the disturbances. Most likely, things happened in the following way: the infuriated crowd, convinced that the soldiers were firing blanks, pressed more and more aggressively on the ranks of the youthful conscripts. Sticks and stones flew at the soldiers. It is possible that “the boldest” protesters grabbed the barrels of the submachine guns and pulled them toward themselves. At that point, some soldier’s nerves cracked, and he fired a volley from his submachine gun without aiming at anyone. His neighbors in the row of soldiers, under extreme pressure and hearing these gunshots, also pressed on their triggers. Now everyone was shooting, but thank heavens not for long. If you judge by the number of victims compared to the number of soldiers, they could not have fired for long. I remember that in 1956, in Tbilisi, capital of Soviet Georgia, when a rally next to Stalin’s monument was dispersed by soldiers, firing occurred without any command being given, as was stated in the report. Soldiers fired in the air, but afterward four people were found suffering from gunshot wounds “of unknown origin.”

126 Time for Change: 1962 Fortunately, this time, the commanders did not lose their heads but quickly restored order; otherwise many more people would have fallen—hundreds, if not thousands. After all, the soldiers were firing point-blank, and every bullet would have hit a target in the thickly packed crowd in the square. In 1962 the whole matter was hushed up. Both the army command and the KGB probably did not insist on a “strict” investigation. Let something like that proceed, and before you knew it, you yourself would be called the guilty party. The top leadership was also satisfied with the explanations they were given. Thus everyone was pressing on the brakes. I repeat that all this is my own reconstruction of the events, not based on any documentary evidence. The active phase of the Novocherkassk disturbances came to an end with the shooting in Lenin Square. Having understood that the authorities were not fooling around, most of the demonstrators went home, but a number of young people continued to crowd around the city committee building and the police building until evening. A rumor circulated that Mikoyan was going to speak after all, and the crowd quieted down. Some of them climbed up on tanks that had been placed here and there in the square. They wanted to be able to see the “leader” better. No one prevented them. The tanks stood there with their hatches closed, and the police watched what was happening without moving from the pavements where they stood under the trees. This time people’s expectations were realized. The voice of Mikoyan rang out over the square. Why did Mikoyan speak and not Kozlov? Because of his senior status in the leadership, it was more appropriate for him to speak to the people. Probably the people knew Mikoyan’s name better than that of Kozlov, and the crowd had been demanding that Mikoyan speak. On top of this, the clash between Mikoyan and Kozlov had reached its highpoint at that moment. Kozlov gave him the opportunity to explain things to the people and thereby take the main share of the responsibility upon himself. One of the participants in the events gave some relevant testimony. His name was I. V. Belin, and he was an engineer in the department of technical control at the electric locomotive plant. He said that “after he had climbed up on a tank he could not see Mikoyan. The speech was being broadcast by radio. The loudspeakers had not been set up properly, and were drowning each other out. In addition, the crowd ‘accompanied’ Mikoyan’s speech by cursing the military and demanding that prices be lowered. Belin, having not understood anything Mikoyan said, began asking the servicemen to call their headquarters and have the broadcast repeated, but it would be even better if Mikoyan came there in person and explained everything to the people intelligibly.” Mikoyan did not come. But because of the initiative Belin had taken in talking to the soldiers, he was questioned by a prosecutor. Thanks to that, his testimony has come down to us. I don’t think Belin was right. The reason he could not understand what Mikoyan was saying was not because of poorly operating loudspeakers or the

Dwindling Reserves of Trust

127

noise of the crowd. It was simply that a person who was not used to hearing Mikoyan speak, with his unintelligible diction and heavy Armenian accent, would always have trouble understanding him, especially in a chaotic situation. In order to converse with Anastas Mikoyan without any problems, you had to be familiar with his manner of speaking. On the next day, June 3, at 3 P.M., Kozlov spoke over the radio. His speech marked “the crucial turning point in the mood of the people,” according to General Ivashutin in his report to Khrushchev. Kozlov called on the people of the city to be calm, assuring them that the authorities were not planning mass repression and stating that the disorders had been started by “hooligans.” Those individuals would be dealt with, and everyone else could sleep peacefully. He did not fail to touch on the main point, the price increases. He firmly declared that the government would not change its decision. Strictly speaking, with this speech Kozlov drew a line that put an end to the disorders in Novocherkassk. According to the investigation, a total of twenty-five people were killed on June 1–2, 1962. More than fifty were wounded by gunshots. More than twenty citizens suffered bruises and other injuries. Of the eighty-six servicemen who were injured during the disturbances, nine were hospitalized.2 After the Novocherkassk tragedy, work on “a single standard for prices”— that is, the development of a better, more just, and more rational price structure—came to a standstill. Father no longer attempted to bring prices into line with the realities of the economy. In the government stores, people continued to pay what they were accustomed to paying for food products, not what the food actually cost.

24 Dwindling Reserves of Trust Could the authorities have avoided bloodshed in Novocherkassk?

Undeniably yes, if on the first day the right moment had not been allowed to pass. After all, in other parts of the country, the authorities succeeded in defusing protests relatively peacefully. If the factory director in Novocherkassk had not been an idiot, and if the secretary of the province committee had not been both an idiot and a coward, if on the first day they had found the right words, the crowd would not have become so enraged and would not have started destroying everything in its path. The workers would have held a rally and then

Dwindling Reserves of Trust

127

noise of the crowd. It was simply that a person who was not used to hearing Mikoyan speak, with his unintelligible diction and heavy Armenian accent, would always have trouble understanding him, especially in a chaotic situation. In order to converse with Anastas Mikoyan without any problems, you had to be familiar with his manner of speaking. On the next day, June 3, at 3 P.M., Kozlov spoke over the radio. His speech marked “the crucial turning point in the mood of the people,” according to General Ivashutin in his report to Khrushchev. Kozlov called on the people of the city to be calm, assuring them that the authorities were not planning mass repression and stating that the disorders had been started by “hooligans.” Those individuals would be dealt with, and everyone else could sleep peacefully. He did not fail to touch on the main point, the price increases. He firmly declared that the government would not change its decision. Strictly speaking, with this speech Kozlov drew a line that put an end to the disorders in Novocherkassk. According to the investigation, a total of twenty-five people were killed on June 1–2, 1962. More than fifty were wounded by gunshots. More than twenty citizens suffered bruises and other injuries. Of the eighty-six servicemen who were injured during the disturbances, nine were hospitalized.2 After the Novocherkassk tragedy, work on “a single standard for prices”— that is, the development of a better, more just, and more rational price structure—came to a standstill. Father no longer attempted to bring prices into line with the realities of the economy. In the government stores, people continued to pay what they were accustomed to paying for food products, not what the food actually cost.

24 Dwindling Reserves of Trust Could the authorities have avoided bloodshed in Novocherkassk?

Undeniably yes, if on the first day the right moment had not been allowed to pass. After all, in other parts of the country, the authorities succeeded in defusing protests relatively peacefully. If the factory director in Novocherkassk had not been an idiot, and if the secretary of the province committee had not been both an idiot and a coward, if on the first day they had found the right words, the crowd would not have become so enraged and would not have started destroying everything in its path. The workers would have held a rally and then

128

Time for Change: 1962

gone on their way. Especially if they had been promised that the increased work norms, which had been introduced so foolishly and in such an untimely fashion, were to be revised in their favor. If only . . . If only . . . Oh, that accursed “if only.” We all have perfect vision in hindsight. On the second day, when the unorganized crowd began to believe in, and was partly convinced of, its impunity—that the authorities would not use guns—only great force could stop it at that point. Only force could cool down the hotheads. There is no sense in trying to negotiate with a crowd that has no leaders or organizers. No “representatives” could have affected the disorganized, chaotic crowd. It was virtually impossible to stand up against that chaos. Cases similar to the one in Novocherkassk are not rare in history. For example, in Los Angeles in 1992, when the brutal beating by police of a black man was shown on television, crowds filled the streets and for some reason directed their anger against Korean store owners, who had nothing to do with the issue. The crowds smashed and burned entire city blocks. Order was restored only when the national guard was brought into the city without delay and used force. Here the key phrase is “without delay.” If they had delayed for a few days or displayed indecisiveness, that would have cost dozens or perhaps hundreds of more lives before order could be restored. That is also what happened in 1989 at Tiananmen Square in China. When the authorities vacillated for several days, trying to decide what to do about the students and youth who had taken over the square and were demanding unlimited freedoms in all respects immediately, they lost control of the situation, and the crowd lost all fear and good sense. Gasoline was poured on the fire by Mikhail Gorbachev, who showed up just then at the wrong time in Beijing, preaching the doctrine of “nonviolent resistance to evil.” Those rallying on the square thought that, with him present, the authorities would not use force. The government of China faced a dramatic choice: either to do nothing and place the future of the country in danger, the unity of the country, the possibility of reforming it, and so on; or else . . . The Chinese leaders preferred to act in the interest of the majority. But time was passing and no appeals to the crowd had any effect. They were convinced that the authorities “would not dare” attack them. Tanks arrived at the square, blood was shed, and hundreds of people were killed. The whole world shuddered and began to protest. Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union at that time, joined in the general chorus. What actually happened? The Chinese leaders, displaying statesmanlike thinking and firmness, held the country together and protected the people from oncoming chaos. They did this using Chinese measures—a relatively small amount of blood. When hundreds died, that cooled down the hotheads, and saved the lives of thousands, if not more. Gorbachev with his doctrine of “nonviolent resistance to evil” betrayed the country that had been entrusted to him. By sparing the lives of dozens and

Dwindling Reserves of Trust

129

hundreds of protesters, he made victims of many thousands or tens of thousands of others, who perished in all the various conflicts that broke out because of his incapacity to act decisively and use force without delay. Of course, everyone has his or her own understanding of what “humanism” means. “We had no other choice.” That is how Father drew the balance sheet on the events in Novocherkassk.1 There really was no choice, but Father was not forgiven for that bloodshed. Every people in every historical period chooses its fate for itself and is responsible for that fate. A healthy nation or a healthy person will prefer the shedding of some blood to total destruction. An unhealthy nation will choose to do nothing, even if that leads to destruction. The Novocherkassk tragedy had an extremely negative effect on Father’s future as a reformer. It demonstrated that the people were losing faith and would not accept more sacrifices even in the name of the brightest future. But it was not only a matter of Novocherkassk. In 1955 Father refused to give the admirals 125 billion rubles to build a prestigious but at the same time absolutely useless surface fleet (useless in the geopolitical and strategic senses). Then he denied the air force leaders more than 100 billion rubles for something equally useless and even more burdensome to the budget—an armada of strategic bombers. At first, Father reduced the armed forces by 600,000 troops, and then by 1.2 million, then another 1.2 million, drastically bringing down military spending. Again, in May 1962, the defense budget was cut by 2.4 billion rubles.2 Father also warned that the cuts were not at an end. As a result, the military men, both marshals and generals, majors and colonels, no longer viewed him with favor, although until shortly before they had been friendly toward him. When he forbade city dwellers to feed their pigs with bread purchased cheaply at government stores, and then raised the prices for meat and butter, Father lost their sympathies. The peasants never forgave Father for the constant threats that hung over them that the plots of land next to their households would be reduced and that their cows would be “voluntarily” socialized—that is, they would become part of a modern dairy farm, with mechanization to increase productivity, leading to a better life for all. But people no longer trusted promises about a “better future.” They preferred not to be deprived of what they already had. Without general support, no one is able to carry out serious changes in a country. And Father felt less and less support from below. The time period in our history that had been favorable for reform was irreversibly coming to an end.

130 Time for Change: 1962

25 The Bill from Ashkhabad On September 26, 1962, Father set off on a trip to Central Asia. He

had decided, as he told me, to get to know the region in more detail. It seemed to him he had spent too little time there. He had only visited, on occasion, such places as Tashkent, Alma-Ata, the Golodnaya Steppe, and some other spots. Actually, in less than ten years he had traveled around Central Asia so much that there was not a single Soviet official, never mind a tsarist one, in the whole history of the country who had managed to do more. But to Father that seemed insufficient. He felt that he had not yet thoroughly investigated the specific features of the region and had not yet come to understand all the details. That was part of his character. He began with Turkmenia. On the evening of September 26 he flew to Ashkhabad, capital of the Turkmen Soviet republic. On the next day he met with the Central Committee of the Turkmen Communist Party and then went out to visit some of the remote areas. On September 28 he was in Marý, and visited state farms on land irrigated by the waters of the Kara-Kum Canal. Construction of the canal was started even before World War II, but then the project came to a standstill for a long time, and only recently had a third section of the canal been completed. “The Amu-Darya Flows into the Caspian Sea,” the newspapers reported rapturously. And for some reason no one thought about the fact that since the river was now flowing into the Caspian, it would stop flowing into the Aral Sea, which would start to dry up. Journalists can be forgiven for such ignorance, but not the scientists or the State Planning Committee. Especially since the situation was so simple: when something is added in one place it is subtracted from another. This is not a complicated truth and it is applicable everywhere, both in economics and in water usage. Unfortunately, even major scientists at that time believed without doubt that nature was “inexhaustible.” Warnings made by the occasional rarity, a dissenting ecologist, were not heard. No one listened to such people or wanted to listen, including Khrushchev. He saw that the water was irrigating land that until then had been unproductive and took pride in the fact that cotton was now growing there and that orchards and vineyards were being laid out. But the question of where the water was coming from, how much of it there was, and whether there would be enough of it for very long—those questions did not enter the minds of such prominent figures as Mikhail Lavrentyev, Pyotr Kapitsa,

The Bill from Ashkhabad

131

or anyone else among Father’s scientific friends and correspondents. None of them suggested such questions to him. Did they themselves think about the problem at all? On September 29, Father was in the industrial city of Nebitdag, inspecting the oil derricks and chemical plants. On October 1, he was back in Ashkhabad, shared his impressions with local party activists, and dictated a memorandum to the CC Presidium while the subject was still fresh in his mind. A tragicomical incident occurred in Ashkhabad. Not long before that, in 1961, a Central Committee resolution had strictly forbidden local leaders to give valuable presents to their superiors or to each other or to organize banquets at government expense. All sorts of punishments were threatened for anyone who violated this new rule, up to and including expulsion from the party. However, the Oriental tradition of hospitality was inconceivable without gift-giving and luxurious dinners. Everyone tried to get around the rules however they could. The Kazakhs and Uzbeks, with whom Father dealt most frequently, tried to restrain themselves and adapt to the new winds that were blowing. But they still gave traditional Oriental robes to Father as gifts. A great many such garments accumulated among his possessions. In addition there were dried fruits, such as raisins and apricots, and unshelled pistachio nuts and almonds, roasted in the embers of a fire. Anything more than that was frowned upon. On one occasion in Tashkent, shepherds gave Father a young ram. They presented it to him while he was serving on the presiding committee of a conference. Father posed for the photographers with the little ram in his arms. Even today this scene, revisited in a documentary film, is very popular. But after the conference he said to the shepherds: “Let him be pastured here among you. He will feel more free here in the wide open spaces, but don’t forget: he’s my ram.” In Ashkhabad the local leaders were encountering Father on their own territory for the first time, and although they had of course read the decree about not giving gifts, they could not override their own customs. They presented him with a stallion of the Akhaltekinsky breed and a rug into which his portrait had been woven. Father thanked them for the gifts and asked them to register them officially in accordance with the law, to send the stallion to a stud farm outside of Moscow, and to give the rug to some museum. (It is now at the Historical Museum in Moscow.) The Turkmen leaders did not understand very well what was meant by “officially registering them according to the law.” What law? No such law existed at that time, nor does it to this day. They decided to take no risks. They sent the racehorse to the stud farm, since that address was well known, and the rug they sent to the Central Committee. Let them find a museum. They drew up the bill for the gifts as an official document and also sent that to Moscow. They were sure the bill would not go to Father. The Central Committee accounting services would do the formality of paying the bill, and for their own reasons they added in some of their other local expenses and put them on the bill.

132 Time for Change: 1962 In early January 1963, Vladimir Malin, the meticulous head of the Central Committee’s General Department, placed the bill that had come from Ashkhabad on Father’s desk. Father did not know how to handle it. In the Central Committee budget, no provision was made for such expenditures. Father got angry. On January 9, 1963, at the next session of the CC Presidium, he talked indignantly about the mail he had received from Turkmenia: In the bill they [the Turkmen officials] wrote that they had given me a doublebreasted jacket and indicated the price right there. I never set eyes on any double-breasted jacket. Then the bill listed a rug with [my] portrait and its price, also a horse with the costs of its transportation. Also the amount spent on food was listed on a separate line, such a large amount you couldn’t eat it all in a year, plus a hundred rubles for medications! While I was there I had no thought of getting sick and never took a single pill. A dinner with a parliamentary delegation from India was also included in my bill, although I never had dinner with any people from India. They were entertained in my absence. All this was signed by Balysh Ovezov [first secretary of the Central Committee of the Turkmen Communist Party] and the bill was officially drawn up in the proper manner. It pleased me that people were so scrupulous, but if they invite you to dinner, bring your own food. That will be cheaper. Otherwise you’ll have to work off your bill, as I did, for what you didn’t eat and didn’t drink. Now when I go somewhere I warn people that I’m going to eat alone at my own expense.

At this point, Father reminisced about how General Vasilevsky, a representative from General Headquarters, had complained to him in 1943, during the Battle of Stalingrad, that the local quartermaster had billed him for several cases of vodka and cognac, but the fact was that Vasilevsky did not drink at all; he was a teetotaler. “And after the war, Mikhail Sergeyevich Grechukha, the ‘president’ of Ukraine, after a trip to the Chernovtsy region, discovered that in his accounting department a bill had arrived for three kegs of beer he supposedly drank,” Father continued. “The only thing was that he suffered from a stomach ulcer; and never mind beer, even when it came to water, he could not drink any and every kind.”1 All joking aside, Father felt genuinely pleased that after the Central Committee resolution came out, even in Central Asia the party leaders were cautious about giving out gifts not paid for by anyone—doing so, that is, at government expense. On October 1, 1962, Father flew from Ashkhabad to Dushanbe, capital of Tajikistan, where he met with officials and experts in the chemical and electric power industries. The latter told him about the prospects for hydroelectric power plants along a series of waterfalls on the Panj River, whose waters pour through the narrow confines of mountain gorges with great force. The river was ideal for these purposes. Not only would the hydroelectric plants provide cheap energy and allow the production of aluminum in the vicinity and the development of the chemical industry in general, but also the dams on the river would accumulate

The Bill from Ashkhabad

133

reserves of water for irrigating all of Central Asia. Father supported them and sent an appropriate memo to the CC Presidium. At noon on October 3, Father was already in Tashkent in Uzbekistan, spending the second half of the day at the Institute of Cotton Cultivation. The next morning he inspected the irrigation systems in the Golodnaya Steppe. The cotton grown on this newly irrigated land was much needed by the textile industry and for producing the explosive substance guncotton, used for making gunpowder. Finally it would be possible to stop importing cotton from Egypt. On October 5, he returned to Tashkent and spoke in the afternoon at a meeting with leading officials from Uzbekistan, Kirgizia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. In the evening he dictated a memorandum to the CC Presidium about the future “harnessing of the natural wealth of the Central Asian republics.” On October 6, he went to the city of Almalyk, a center for the ferrous metallurgy industry that was being born in Central Asia. From there he returned to Tashkent for an exhibition of agricultural technology produced at local factories for local needs. After visiting the exhibition he went to an aircraft plant that had been evacuated to its current location in Novosobirsk from Voronezh at the beginning of World War II. This plant was now producing not only AN-2 agricultural biplanes but also Antonov military transports. As time went by, all this running around, the endless trips, meetings, and discussions, each of which required some decision from him, if not now then in the near future, finally wore Father out. On top of that were the endless phone calls from Moscow, where Father’s deputies and other top officials also didn’t want to take a single step without knowing whether he approved or disapproved. On October 10, 1962, overflowing with impressions from his journey, he returned to Moscow. Central Asia stayed on his mind. He dictated memo after memo: on October 15, October 16, and finally on October 17. Generally speaking, 1962 was a bumper year for memos. He sent nine lengthy messages, many several pages long, to the CC Presidium. In them he discussed major issues of principle and minor matters encountered while traveling around “his possessions,” as was once said of the tsars. I will take the liberty of borrowing that phrase from nineteenth-century Russian folk poetry, even though it is not exactly politically correct. In his memoranda he wrote about the need to develop offshore oil drilling. People were only beginning to talk about offshore drilling platforms at that time. He also talked about the advantages of electric-powered drilling over turbine drilling, and again about poultry factories, a new machine for harvesting beans, which he had recently read about in an American magazine, and about using a newer, more efficient milking machine system instead of an older and less efficient one. In each specific case these were very important “trifles.” Father was also concerned about the newly created agricultural district administrations, lest they slide onto the track of goading people on, as the party’s district officials did:

134 Time for Change: 1962 The zeal of the administrators working in the agricultural production administrations should be moderated, as should that of officials in the party’s province committees and in the executive committees of the local soviets. They have been too zealous about not wanting specialists to be in command. People should take a respectful attitude and support that which has been discovered by science and tested and proved in practice. Patience must be shown in solving practical tasks, not allowing the administrative urge to take over. One must first study and learn and not try to take the place of scientific institutions in instructing others. If we were to preach and exhort, trying to command agrotechnology as though from the moon, then we would have no need for scientists. Administrators would be enough. But such a “method” of leadership, if it can be called that, was ridiculed long before we were born by that celebrated Russian satirical writer Saltykov-Shchedrin.2

Here Father also returned to the “problem” of fallow lands and his recent support for the position of Nalivaiko in the debate with Barayev. Some overly ardent officials had taken this as a guideline for action and had started to eliminate fallow lands completely. Father called these officials to order and recommended that fallow lands should not disappear entirely. Where they were useful they should remain, but he added that “this should not be made into a law,” so that the officials would not go charging in the opposite direction. In other words, the problem should be solved by each economic unit depending on local conditions. In another passage, he proposed that milk should not be trucked into the cities, but should be processed at facilities owned by the collective farms. For those days, that was ideological sedition. The traditionalist economists did not think it correct to strengthen the cooperative form of property, which had “outlived itself.” The future lay with state farms, state-owned property, “the property of all the people.” But Father was primarily interested not in ideology but in effectiveness. He proposed a change in strategy for supplying the big cities with vegetables. They should not be supplied from farms adjacent to the cities, as was now being done, because these crops did not grow well everywhere. Instead, vegetables should be shipped from locations where they grew abundantly and fruitfully. Such possibilities had now arisen for us because the transport system existed and refrigerators on wheels were beginning to be produced. In one of his memoranda he proposed that the production of calculating machines for state farms and collective farms should be arranged. They needed them in order to balance their books and, most important, to calculate their profits. The word “profit,” which a few years earlier had been almost a dirty word, was now being heard fleetingly but more and more frequently. He also shared his recent unfortunate experience with herbicides, which were fashionable but had only just begun to be used and had not yet been mastered very well. At that time they were considered a panacea for all difficulties. That summer Father had taken a keen interest in peas, which in the opinion of scientists were the best silage for cattle after corn. At the Gorki-9 dacha he had sown a small field with peas. But they had been overgrown with weeds. He

On Vacation with Zahir Shah

135

decided to fight the weeds with the newfangled herbicide simazine. He defeated the weeds—along with the peas. Neither the weeds nor the desired crop were left on the fields. Nothing but withered yellow stalks. In dismay Father called his agricultural assistant, Andrei Stepanovich Shevchenko. After arriving at the dacha, Shevchenko expressed his sympathies, but explained that everything was as it should be. Simazine had been invented by the Americans to protect corn and other cereal crops from weeds, but only cereal crops. Other plants, including peas, were destroyed by this herbicide as though they were weeds. Having burned his fingers on simazine, Father warned others: “Be careful. The first thing you have to do is read the directions.”3 On the same page, he asked the question: “What have we gotten from raising procurement prices for agricultural goods? How much has our income increased and how are these resources being used?” And then he made a quite unexpected point: “Party and government officials must use restraint, not make declarations, not give instructions to cure one or another illness with such and such a prescription, as some writers do who have gotten into a debate with medical science and medical scientists.” That was Father’s warning. “It will bring nothing but harm.” He was talking about a discussion that had begun in the newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette) about the treatment of cancer. The writers were speaking in support of witch doctors and quacks who were promising a miracle. The traditional medical authorities were infuriated, and a polemic between the writers and the medical people began. But the main point is that during that year Father was preoccupied with the question of how to continue reforming the economy. Without such reforms the economy could not be revitalized.

26 On Vacation with Zahir Shah At the end of July 1962, Father took me with him and set off in a car

for a vacation in the Crimea. Our first stop was the city of Tula, then Oryol. After that he had his chauffeur turn off the main highway so that he could inspect the crops in the fields on his way through Kursk province. There he was also interested in the city of Zheleznogorsk, where open-pit mining of iron ore was beginning as part of the development of the Kursk magnetic anomaly. Father made one more stop, in his native village of Kalinovka. From there the

On Vacation with Zahir Shah

135

decided to fight the weeds with the newfangled herbicide simazine. He defeated the weeds—along with the peas. Neither the weeds nor the desired crop were left on the fields. Nothing but withered yellow stalks. In dismay Father called his agricultural assistant, Andrei Stepanovich Shevchenko. After arriving at the dacha, Shevchenko expressed his sympathies, but explained that everything was as it should be. Simazine had been invented by the Americans to protect corn and other cereal crops from weeds, but only cereal crops. Other plants, including peas, were destroyed by this herbicide as though they were weeds. Having burned his fingers on simazine, Father warned others: “Be careful. The first thing you have to do is read the directions.”3 On the same page, he asked the question: “What have we gotten from raising procurement prices for agricultural goods? How much has our income increased and how are these resources being used?” And then he made a quite unexpected point: “Party and government officials must use restraint, not make declarations, not give instructions to cure one or another illness with such and such a prescription, as some writers do who have gotten into a debate with medical science and medical scientists.” That was Father’s warning. “It will bring nothing but harm.” He was talking about a discussion that had begun in the newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette) about the treatment of cancer. The writers were speaking in support of witch doctors and quacks who were promising a miracle. The traditional medical authorities were infuriated, and a polemic between the writers and the medical people began. But the main point is that during that year Father was preoccupied with the question of how to continue reforming the economy. Without such reforms the economy could not be revitalized.

26 On Vacation with Zahir Shah At the end of July 1962, Father took me with him and set off in a car

for a vacation in the Crimea. Our first stop was the city of Tula, then Oryol. After that he had his chauffeur turn off the main highway so that he could inspect the crops in the fields on his way through Kursk province. There he was also interested in the city of Zheleznogorsk, where open-pit mining of iron ore was beginning as part of the development of the Kursk magnetic anomaly. Father made one more stop, in his native village of Kalinovka. From there the

136 Time for Change: 1962 journey took us to Kremenchug, a city on the Dnieper River, where Ukrainian officials and energy-industry specialists had already gathered for the opening of the Kremenchug hydroelectric power plant. At Kremenchug, Father boarded a steamboat and, accompanied by Ukrainian leaders, cruised down the Dnieper River to Dnepropetrovsk. There he met with people from the metallurgical industry, and stopped in to visit Mikhail Kuzmich Yangel at his missile works, where he inspected the R-16 intercontinental ballistic missile. At Dnepropetrovsk, Khrushchev’s convertible limousine was waiting for him. The whole next day, July 31, we drove through the fields of Kherson province and then to the construction site of the Northern Crimean Canal. Only on August 1 did we finally arrive at the government residence on the shores of the Black Sea at Livadia. Father was going to spend part of his vacation in the Crimea with the king of Afghanistan, Mohammed Zahir Shah. Father had been “courting him” for a long time. And for good reason. A neutral and friendly Afghanistan meant considerable savings for the Soviet Union. It would not be necessary to pay for strengthening the Central Asian borders and maintaining troops as well as building air bases and missile sites in the area. The resources thus saved could be used to greater advantage there, in Central Asia, for irrigation, cotton, and rice. Whether there was a monarchy in Afghanistan or not, and what kind of monarchy, did not concern Father at all. In 1955, when Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin first visited Kabul, the former invited the king to vacation in the Soviet Union. He praised the Crimean beaches and especially the hunting in the Crimean mountains, because the king had the reputation of being a dedicated hunter. Zahir Shah listened to Father and smiled, but continued to spend his summers at his villa in Italy. He was guarded toward the Soviet Union, was not very eager about receiving economic aid, and even refused to accept the offer of a bread factory to be built free of charge by the Soviet Union in Kabul. After Khrushchev’s second visit to Afghanistan, in the winter of 1960, the king thawed out a bit and accepted the bread factory as a gift. And now he had agreed to come to the Crimea to go hunting. Nor did he come alone. He brought his successor, Prince Mirvaiz Shah, with him. On August 6, Father met the king at the door of the government residence. During the four days devoted to “hunting,” they were hardly ever apart. Father played up to the king as much as he could, trying to please him. They went up into the mountains above Yalta, but didn’t so much shoot at deer as engage in target practice with clay pigeons. That did not make their mood any worse. Father drove the king around to see the sights along the Crimean shore, and they did the same in a motorboat, but for the most part they sat under a tent on the beach and conversed. While the “grownups” were discussing, we youngsters entertained ourselves in our own way. I was mad about water-skiing at that time. Each time the motorboat came to the dacha I would try to use it at least once to go water-skiing.

On Vacation with Zahir Shah

137

During the king’s visit the motorboat was sitting at a nearby pier all day long, doing nothing. I persuaded the prince to try water-skiing. He didn’t know how but agreed to give it a try. The only thing was, he had to get the king’s permission, because after all he was the heir to the throne. The king gave permission, and Mirvaiz and I floundered around in the water for about an hour and a half. Sometimes he couldn’t get up out of the water onto the skis, and sometimes he did but after a minute would fall. It is the usual story familiar to anyone just learning the delightful sport of water-skiing. Meanwhile on the shore, the king was answering Father’s questions less and less to the point. He was tense, was watching closely through his binoculars as we somersaulted in the sea. Finally he couldn’t stand it any longer and explained diplomatically to Father that he would like a close-up look at how his son was doing with the water skis. They set out in a second motorboat that was tied to the pier. During the boat trip by Khrushchev and the king along the shore, a unit of bodyguards accompanied them in this second boat. As the other boat came close to us, I could see an expression of fear frozen on the king’s face. Finally Mirvaiz succeeded in staying up on the skis long enough to make an entire circle, and the king indicated with a sign of his hand that that was enough. The prince tried to protest. He liked water-skiing, but the will of the monarch is the law. Zahir Shah and Father returned to their chaise lounges and resumed their discussions. On August 10, the king left, to finish his vacation in Italy. On August 11, the cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev was launched on a flight to orbit the Earth, as was Pavel Popovich the next day. Father spoke with them by radiotelephone while they were in space, and on August 18 he flew to Moscow to meet them—first embracing them at Vnukovo airport and then welcoming them at a grand rally on Red Square and toasting them at a reception in the Kremlin. On August 22, after returning to Livadia, Father received a delegation of Japanese businessmen. On the morning of August 28, the East German leader Walter Ulbricht came to see Father to negotiate the price of fishing vessels that were being built in East Germany for the Soviet Union. Our country had ordered vessels of the same type from East Germany and West Germany, and had negotiated the same price for all of them. However, it turned out that the cost of production in the East was higher than in the West. So now, suddenly, Ulbricht was trying to persuade Khrushchev, on the grounds of socialist solidarity, to increase the amount the Soviet Union would pay. Father would not agree. He reminded Ulbricht that the latter had insisted on a wall being erected between the two Germanys to stop the flow of skilled workers and engineers to the West, and now . . . it was as though he were confessing his own bankruptcy, admitting that in competition with the West they were losing. Was it worth it then to have gone to all that trouble? Father refused to pay the East Germans more, on the grounds of solidarity. When they parted he and Ulbricht embraced in a friendly manner, but the smile on Ulbricht’s face was as sour as vinegar.

138 Time for Change: 1962

27 Liberman, Khrushchev, Zasyadko On September 10, 1962, Father sent a memorandum to the CC Pres-

idium on “restructuring party leadership in industry and agriculture.” In it he wrote about the necessity for “professionalism” in administering the economy and discussed the pluses and minuses of the rural “interdistrict production administrations” that had come to light since March 1962. For the first time, he mentioned the advisability of introducing specialization on the level of the party’s province committees, and drew a preliminary balance sheet on the discussions under way since the beginning of the year on what our lives and work ought to be like. Two groups of reformers had emerged in the Soviet Union at that time and seemed to be moving toward one another. At the top, Khrushchev was persistently seeking to reorient the government toward the goal of economic efficiency, but he did not yet have a clear picture of how to bring that about in practice. From below, some nontraditional young economists supported him and were discussing such questions as realistic and fair prices, what the profit rate of an enterprise should be, and other sophisticated concepts that were not particularly Marxist. For these new ideas to gain strength, they needed reinforcement in the upper echelons, and Father needed fresh ideas for policy matters that would be suggested to him, as it were, “by whispering in his ear.” The place where the lower levels intersected with the upper echelons was the State Economic Council, which was subordinate to the Council of Ministers. I referred to it briefly in Chapter 9, on communism. Now the time has come to discuss it in more detail. From the time Father first attained the summit of power, in 1953, he had been trying to erect a structure that would ensure the influx of fruitful ideas from below, but he had not been particularly successful. In February 1959, the State Economic Council was established for this purpose, but it began to function in a really productive way only after the spring of 1960, when Father recommended Zasyadko to be its chairman. Zasyadko was probably Father’s only sincere co-thinker in the top leadership. In Zasyadko’s view, as in Father’s, the economy needed serious improvement. Like Father, he had begun his career in the coal industry of the Donbas. He and Father were acquainted before the war, but they became especially close in 1947, when Zasyadko, with the rank of state government minister, worked

Liberman, Khrushchev, Zasyadko

139

day and night in the Donbas restoring the mines that the Germans had blown up and flooded. Even in the Stalin era, Zasyadko distinguished himself in the face of all difficulties. He expressed his own, independent opinions, and that impressed Father. Under Zasyadko the State Economic Council acquired its own distinct physiognomy. It began to aspire to the role of pacesetter in working out a strategy for the scientific and technological development of our country. This immediately caused jealousy among the leaders of the State Planning Committee. It quickly became evident that Novikov, head of the State Planning Committee, and Zasyadko, head of the State Economic Council, could not stand each other. The hidden and open struggle between these two institutions never subsided for a moment. It is by no means surprising that Father involved Zasyadko and his State Economic Council in the search for an answer to the question about how to make the Soviet economy more efficient. In early 1962, Zasyadko held a conference under his own auspices in which “a hundred of the foremost economists” participated. (This was their joking way of referring to themselves, a play on the famous saying by Mao Zedong, “Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend.”) Zasyadko appealed to these “hundred” young economists to help the State Economic Council “in the improvement and refinement of economic planning and price formation.” I am quoting from Viktor Belkin, one of the “hundred,” who was head of the economics section at the Institute for Research on Control Computers (hereafter referred to as the Control Computers Institute).1 Belkin was a good friend of mine. He and I became acquainted in 1968, when I was removed from Chelomei’s design bureau by order of Brezhnev and Andropov. That was my punishment for helping Father with his memoirs. It was also intended as a warning to Khrushchev. I was reassigned to the Control Computers Institute, where a computer information system was being developed for the KGB. They figured I could be kept under proper surveillance there. The founder of that institute was a man of encyclopedic knowledge, Isaak Bruk. He took an interest in everything and “left his mark” on the most varied scientific fields: in electrical energy, computer technology, and also in economics—or more exactly, in the application of mathematics to solving economic problems. It was also Bruk who in the late 1950s invited the economist Belkin, a specialist on prices, to join the Control Computers Institute. For several years, Belkin and I sat side by side in the former “display window” of what had been a fish store at 18 Leninsky Prospekt in Moscow. After the store’s “aquarium” had been removed, that was where Bruk’s institute had its beginnings. It was there that Bruk soldered together his first “electronic computing machine.” (The term kompyuter had not yet come into the Russian language from English.) Bruk’s machine was the second computer in the Soviet Union. On that machine Belkin began to experiment on correlating the material

140 Time for Change: 1962 balances of different sectors of the economy using the American input-output method developed by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Wassily Leontief. On the basis of their computations, Bruk and Belkin submitted a “revolutionary” proposal in a memorandum to the Soviet government: when economic plans were drawn up, they suggested, consumer demand should be the starting point, rather than available resources and productive capacity. Nowadays this might seem a trivial notion, but for those days it was downright “seditious.” The people at the State Economic Council took an interest in the Bruk-Belkin memorandum, and that was how the economic dissident Belkin came to be one of Zasyadko’s reformist “hundred-flower” economists. I was transferred to the Control Computers Institute in July 1968, at a time when it was in decline. Bruk had already been fired as director, and mathematical economics was no longer of serious interest to anyone at the institute or higher up. Belkin was sitting on his suitcases, waiting to go elsewhere, and within a couple of years he moved to the Institute of Economics under the Academy of Sciences. But in early 1962 everyone was fired up with enthusiasm. Things were really breaking loose. Everyone had his own project to propose for the improvement and refinement of socialism. These proposals, sometimes quite controversial, ended up on Zasyadko’s desk, and from time to time he would tell Father about them. Economic thought in those years revolved around the magical concept of a single parameter for evaluating the effectiveness of the work of enterprises and sectors of the economy, a parameter that would act as a magic wand to help manage the economy properly. One parameter—instead of the hundreds or thousands we had at that time—would make it possible to clear away the obstructions and layers of sediment left behind by the State Planning Committee. It was necessary to find this one and only correct parameter: Was it the ability of an enterprise to “pay for itself” without government subsidy (samookupaemost)? Or was it profit (pribyl)? Or prime cost (sebestoimost)? Or quality of product (kachestvo produktsii)? These questions were debated with seething passion. Father followed the debates closely, but for the time being kept his distance. He both believed and did not believe, but very much wanted to believe, in the magic of a single indicator, and he himself was constantly trying to think up something along those lines, such as evaluating the functioning of collective farms or state farms by the quantity of their output per hundred hectares of plowed land. However, for the time being, no single indicator worked for him. After all, plowed land differed from place to place. Father hoped that Zasyadko’s young economists, who unlike himself were learned people, would search out this “mighty” parameter, a lever with which he could, like Archimedes, move the world. The first to cry “Eureka!” was not a Muscovite, but an economist in Kharkov, Yevsei Grigoryevich Liberman (1897–1981). It is true, however, that he was not an “unknown” in Moscow circles.

Liberman, Khrushchev, Zasyadko

141

I am not closely acquainted with Liberman’s biography. Despite his fame, he was never elected to the Academy of Sciences, and consequently he is not included in the academy’s reference works or in other reference works. According to the writer Vasily Katanyan, Liberman was married to Silva Horowitz, sister of the famous American pianist Vladimir Horowitz.2 In 1925, while still a Soviet citizen, but during a tour outside the country, Horowitz had decided to remain abroad. His sister, however—they were on tour together—did not follow her brother’s example and returned to her husband Liberman and their daughter in Kharkov. After Stalin’s death, Horowitz came to Moscow to give some concerts and also met with the Libermans, but that is not relevant to the subject under discussion. In the 1950s, Liberman, who held a degree in economic sciences, published an article in the chief theoretical journal of the Soviet Communist Party, Kommunist. It appeared in the tenth issue for 1956, not long after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress exposing some of Stalin’s crimes. Liberman wrote about the negative impact of planning on the basis of “what had been achieved.” Nowadays hardly anyone remembers what the disputes were about back then, what they were breaking their lances over. “Planning on the basis of what had been achieved” in those days meant that the targets for the next year were set at a few percentage points higher than those of the previous year. As a result, the director of an enterprise not only had no interest in improving production or adding significantly to the amount produced; he also would do everything he could to keep his potential productivity secret. After all, if you overfulfilled the plan one year, say by 30 percent, then for the next year, on the basis of “what had been achieved,” they would write down a target of that same 30 percent plus the customary 2 percent. But the director had already exhausted all his resources. It would be a different matter if he were to keep some of his resources in reserve, if he did not reveal all his productive potential, but year after year added 2 or 3 percent based on “what had been achieved.” A “smart” director would stretch out his 30 percent reserve over the whole five-year plan, or longer, and thereby ensure that his collective would receive yearly awards and bonuses, and he himself, if he were lucky, might be awarded a medal. The only problem was that such planning resulted in nothing but losses for the government and the consumer. Liberman proposed that “long-term norms” be introduced—that is, that the relations between producer and consumer be established in advance by agreement and remain unchangeable over a period of several years. This was by no means an ordinary thought at that time, in 1956. Liberman’s article was published only because of the protection provided by the chief editor of Kommunist, Aleksei Rumyantsev. Rumyantsev was also an economist from Kharkov. In 1949–1950 he headed the department at the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute where Liberman was teaching in 1956. Liberman’s article that year went unnoticed, including by Khrushchev—despite the fact that Father read Kommunist closely.

142 Time for Change: 1962 After Liberman heard about the debates at the State Economic Council in the early 1960s, he wrote a new article, but did not send it to Kommunist. His “patron” Rumyantsev had been transferred from that assignment and sent to Prague, Czechoslovakia, to take charge of the magazine Problems of Peace and Socialism, which was the so-called theoretical magazine of the international Communist movement at that time. In 1962, Liberman sent his article to Khrushchev’s son-in-law Adzhubei, chief editor of Izvestia, which, in Liberman’s understanding, was the equivalent of sending it to Khrushchev. Liberman proposed that the functioning of an enterprise should be evaluated, and correspondingly rewarded, on the basis of “earning power” (rentabelnost) and “profit” (pribyl), divided by the “fixed assets” (osvonvye fondy) of the enterprise in question. In other words, what was produced and what was paid to labor would be the numerator, while the denominator would be the value of the equipment, buildings, and so on. The more efficiently the “fixed assets” were used— that is, the smaller the denominator was with a large numerator—the higher wages could be and all other benefits. Totally absent from Liberman’s formula was the concept of “gross output,” one of the foundation stones on which the State Planning Committee based its calculations. Let me explain what was meant. An enterprise’s production plan, and its reports about the extent to which the plan was fulfilled, were evaluated in terms of gross output. That included what the enterprise itself produced and what came from its suppliers: parts, materials, and so forth. Those suppliers had already reported their output, and the statisticians had recorded those quantities in their books. Thus the concept “gross output” counted the same items twice, three times, four times, or more—items that had long since been produced and paid for. Thus the plans were inflated to the skies, fulfilled and overfulfilled, and one could only guess what had actually been produced. Everyone knew this, everyone had been fighting against the concept of “gross output,” but they did not know how to draw up plans on any other basis. Liberman’s magic formula—profit divided by fixed assets—eliminated not only “gross output” but also planning on the basis of “what had been achieved.” That kind of planning had become unproductive. Under the new terms, awards or bonuses would not be calculated on the basis of plan fulfillment. Instead, they would depend on how much profit was earned, and the more, the better. The enterprise would lose interest in keeping planning targets low, and there would no longer be the necessity of applying pressure from above. The enterprise itself would plan everything on its own for maximum output, but a rational maximum. Liberman’s article was lying on Adzhubei’s desk among other potentially interesting material from local areas. To Adzhubei it seemed very appropriate to the moment, and besides, he loved to publish “hot items” and thus to “stick the point of his quill” into the backs of his more cautious and ideologically restrained fellow newspapermen, above all those at Pravda. He did not serve up these “hot items” blindly, but only after he had consulted at home with his

Liberman, Khrushchev, Zasyadko

143

father-in-law—doing so in an unobtrusive way, as though in passing. And so on this occasion too he put off publication until Sunday at the dacha, so he could read the article aloud to Father as a preliminary measure. Father found Liberman’s proposals interesting in their simplicity. How was it that no one had thought of this previously? At the same time, this simplicity put him on his guard. Might there not be some dangerous “underwater rock” lurking beneath this proposal? Father was in no hurry to become a booster of Liberman’s idea. He decided that a discussion should be organized in the press. Let the economists dispute among themselves, and he for his part would read their articles carefully. But there were prominent academicians in the field of economics who might start picking Liberman apart. To avoid that, his article would be published “as a basis for discussion” in the most important newspaper, Pravda. Unlike Izvestia, Pravda was not enthusiastic about “hot items” and did not print anything strictly off the cuff. From time immemorial, an invitation for a discussion in Pravda meant that the upper echelons had taken an interest in the topic and were getting ready to make a decision based on the results of the discussion. Father thanked Adzhubei for what a good thing he had done, and then asked him to send Liberman’s article to Pavel Satyukov, chief editor of Pravda. Father himself called Satyukov. Adzhubei was extremely upset. As it turned out, he had “stuck the point of his quill pen” into himself. He could not stand to suffer a defeat. And the surrendering of this “killer article” to his main rival was not just a defeat; it was a humiliation. Decades later, Adzhubei still choked over Liberman, like a bone in the throat. In his memoirs, Adzhubei referred only vaguely without any details to Liberman, as though in passing.3 When a revised edition of Adzhubei’s memoirs came out under a new title, the passage about Liberman was left out completely.4 Pravda published Liberman’s article on September 9, 1962—not an accidental date. On September 10, Father sent out a memorandum about a new stage in reforming the management of the economy. The editors of Pravda prefaced Liberman’s article with a comment that was highly significant for those who understood the special language of the bureaucracy. The editors of Pravda said that the article raised “important questions of principle.” This meant that people at the top had read the article and were interested in professional opinion on the subject. Responses from readers came pouring in to Pravda, but the people who wrote were mainly “practical workers” from local areas, officials of the regional economic councils, instructors at universities or institutes, ordinary research fellows and senior research fellows, economists at factories or in the rural “interdistrict production administrations.” They argued about what powers should be given to the directors of enterprises and what criterion of efficiency should be accepted as the main one. Should it be profit? Prime cost? Quality? Or something else? The majority spoke in favor of profit. From among the “big names,” an agricultural economist, academician Vasily Nemchinov, was the only one to support Liberman.

144 Time for Change: 1962 Nemchinov was also chairman of an Academy of Sciences organization, the Learned Council, which was tasked with investigating the “scientific bases for economic planning and the organization of social production.” Father knew him well and respected him. All the other “immortals” among economists who were members of the Academy of Sciences preserved an unfriendly silence. They were not about to try tearing Liberman apart. They knew perfectly well at whose initiative Pravda had opened this unusual discussion. But to support him, to give profit top priority, would have meant to cancel out all the works they themselves had written during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Strictly speaking, Liberman’s role was exhausted at that point. It never went beyond that. He simply happened to be in the right place at the right time. His article had caught Father’s eye just at that moment, setting into motion a discussion that had long since ripened in Father’s thinking. From then on, events developed without Liberman’s participation. But the important thing was that discussion had begun. Liberman is rightly considered the progenitor of the second stage of Khrushchev’s reform of the economy. The discussion in Pravda culminated on October 19. It was summed up by an observer whom no one had heard of until then—an engineer who signed himself V. Chernyakhovsky. Speaking on behalf of the Pravda editors, he expressed himself in favor of Liberman and his supporters. Other newspapers continued to debate—Izvestia, Sovetskaya Rossiya (Soviet Russia), Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta (Economic Gazette), and even Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literature Gazette). Adzhubei could never forgive himself for letting the Liberman opportunity slip by. What devil had possessed him to run for consultation to his father-in-law? If only he had placed Liberman’s letter in the “next issue” of Izvestia on his own authority, then Pravda would not have led the discussion that attracted so much attention. Adzhubei tried to find a substitute for Liberman, an economist who would take up a topic in his newspaper, in Izvestia, and one that would be just as timely. As a result, a young and previously unknown economist by the name of Igor Birman began to be published in Izvestia. Like Belkin, Birman had worked for Bruk at the Control Computers Institute. His first article about the use of mathematics in economics elicited a broad response, but Birman obviously did not come up to the level of Liberman. In the end, Adzhubei did not find his own equivalent of Liberman, but instead, on October 29, 1962, there appeared an article coauthored by Belkin and Birman titled “Price and Profit,” which proposed to refine and improve upon Liberman. The tax on an enterprise would be limited to a deduction from the fixed assets (buildings, equipment, etc.), and all other resources would remain at the disposal of the director of the enterprise. “Prices should reflect not only current input but also capital investments,” the article by Belkin and Birman presented its argument. It will then become immediately obvious when it is advisable to replace metal with plastic, and when it would be advisable to develop the chemical industry

Liberman, Khrushchev, Zasyadko

145

and hold back on the metallurgical industry. At present-day prices, where capital investments are not taken into account, an absurd illusion is created that metal and metallurgy are more advantageous than the chemical industry. In the electric power industry, if prices are based on an estimate of output per calorie, real benefits become immediately evident. In some places that will mean a thermoelectric power plant and in other places a hydroelectric plant. If the proposals worked out by a commission of the State Economic Council were adopted, “unremunerative” sectors of the economy would disappear. Profitability would become real, and not ephemeral, as in the presentday pricing system.5

Both men, Birman and Belkin, actively collaborated with Zasyadko’s State Economic Council. In Izvestia they were popularizing the results of their own thinking and research, as well as that of their colleagues. Father singled out the Birman-Belkin article from among many of the publications he had read. He ordered the State Planning Committee and the State Economic Council to undertake a joint effort to make prices consistent with the real input necessary to produce goods. He reminded everyone that the July 1960 plenum had assigned the task of establishing “prices based on a single standard.” More than two years had gone by and “the wagon was still standing there.” Speaking at the November 1962 Central Committee plenum, Father also stated his attitude toward profit as an indicator of quality in the functioning of an enterprise: “Some economists disregard the fact that profit has two aspects when applied to the socialist economic system. Our industry as a whole produces goods, not for the sake of profit, but because they are needed by our society. The individual enterprise is another matter. For it, profit takes on great importance as an economic indicator of its functioning.”6 You can’t state it more clearly than that. However, the State Planning Committee was in no hurry to achieve the goal designated by the head of the Soviet government. I should remind readers—and I am putting it mildly—that Novikov, the chairman of the State Planning Committee, did not like Zasyadko. Their relations had gone sour once and for all the previous year when the State Economic Council had encroached on Novikov’s bailiwick by suggesting some “adventuristic” corrections to the twenty-year prognosis plan of economic development drafted by Novikov’s people. Now Zasyadko was again trying to steal Novikov’s thunder, dragging the State Planning Committee into one more “adventure” initiated by “irresponsible” economists, these Libermans, Belkins, and Birmans no one had ever heard of. Novikov put the brakes on this whole effort as much as he could, tried to smother Zasyadko’s initiatives, and at every opportunity complained about him to Father. In turn, Zasyadko complained about Novikov. But these opposing forces were not equally matched. Behind Novikov there stood not only Dmitry Ustinov and his military-industrial complex but also Kosygin. They were all advocates of a strictly centralized economy. The only person Zasyadko could count on was Khrushchev, which was no small advantage, but

146 Time for Change: 1962 that was only true as long as Father had complete confidence in him. Zasyadko’s opponents were exerting every effort to compromise him in Father’s eyes. They “tattled on him” to Father both on “questions of principle” and about trifles. For example, they said that Zasyadko had no respect for rank; he constantly spoke “straight from the shoulder” to the Soviet premier and to his deputy premiers. On the other hand, Novikov and others accused him of toadying to Father. The need to constantly make peace between Zasyadko and Novikov was something Father finally got fed up with, and in July 1962 he replaced Novikov with his old friend Veniamin Dymshitz. After the war, Dymshitz had supervised the restoration of the Ukrainian metallurgical industry, and in 1957 took charge of building a steel plant in Bhilai, India, where he outpaced his rivals, the West Germans, who were also building a steel plant for the Indian government. Dymshitz brought the Soviet-built steel plant into production first, before the Germans. Father counted on Dymshitz to defuse the tension between the State Planning Committee and Zasyadko’s State Economic Council. After all, Dymshitz and Zasyadko were old friends and had worked side by side in Ukraine for a number of years. But Father’s hopes were not borne out. Dymshitz was thoroughly familiar with the subtle intricacies of the Moscow bureaucracy, and he was not about to get into a dispute with the Ustinov clan or with Kosygin’s people, especially since Mikoyan had suddenly lined up with Kosygin. Why he did that I don’t understand to this day. Mikoyan had a tolerant attitude toward the regional economic councils. It is most likely that Mikoyan was afraid that Zasyadko, following in the tracks of Frol Kozlov, would be promoted and would become one more first deputy premier under Khrushchev, thereby pushing Mikoyan and Kosygin back into lesser roles. Another factor cannot be discounted: Mikoyan was related to Kosygin, even though they were only distant relatives by marriage. In the end, all of Father’s deputy premiers ganged up against Zasyadko. They accused him of everything under the sun. It’s impossible to remember all the different accusations. Rumors circulated around Moscow that Mikoyan had complained at a CC Presidium meeting that at one working conference Zasyadko had likened the collective farms to labor camps and the collective farmers to prisoners in those camps. Father put the brakes on Mikoyan’s complaint. At the Presidium meeting where the “Zasyadko case” was being discussed, Father declared that Zasyadko was of course at fault but that, in all honesty, we ought to admit that to some extent he was right. The attack on Zasyadko was unsuccessful at that point, but his enemies had no intention of giving up the fight. Father related that in the fall of 1962, Kosygin brought a specific complaint against Zasyadko. An important English visitor, a lord, was a guest in Zasyadko’s office. As the conversation progressed, it came out that this English lord, just like Zasyadko, was no slouch when it came to drinking. Zasyadko proposed that they try a little Armenian cognac. According to rumor, Winston Churchill himself preferred it to all other cognacs. The visiting lord readily

Liberman, Khrushchev, Zasyadko

147

agreed. They began giving it a tryout and did so with such thoroughness that when a waiter came to Zasyadko’s office with another bottle on a tray, he froze in the doorway out of fear. Zasyadko, a deputy premier of the Soviet government, was squeezing the nose of the English lord, head of a visiting English delegation, between his forefinger and his middle finger and leading him around the office by the nose while affectionately saying: “Ah, you good little lord” (lordyshka). The good little lord did not protest but submissively allowed Zasyadko to lead him around the room. He was even drunker than Zasyadko. The secret police reported to Kosygin about this incident. He told Father everything, and in his dry, inexpressive manner asked for instructions on how to proceed. Not only had etiquette been violated, but an international incident could result. “Did this lord complain to you?” Father asked. “No, the lord said nothing. The secret service reported this,” Kosygin answered. “Well, all right, I’ll speak to Zasyadko myself,” Father said, putting an end to the discussion. I don’t know what Father said to Zasyadko, but the drinking did not stop, either during work hours or away from work. Everyone knew about Zasyadko’s partiality for alcohol. He not only liked to get drunk, but would go on a binge for days on end. Because of these binges he was removed from his official positions a number of times both under Stalin and after Stalin’s death. In the early 1950s, Zasyadko was sent for treatment, but it didn’t help much. Before he was appointed chairman of the State Economic Council, he gave Father his word that he would not drink, and it must be said that he kept his word. He kept it, that is, up to this point. But now he had broken his word. The constant squabbles with the State Planning Committee, the hostility of his fellow deputy premiers, and their unending denunciations of him to Khrushchev—all this threw Zasyadko completely off kilter. His opponents achieved what they wanted. It was impossible to let Zasyadko remain in such important official posts when he was in such bad shape. Kosygin managed to persuade Father not only to remove Zasyadko but to carry out a largescale reorganization of government structures—I will tell more about them in what follows—and that meant to eliminate the State Economic Council altogether, or more exactly, to merge it with the State Planning Committee. A new chairman was appointed to this enlarged version of the State Planning Committee on November 24, 1962, an incidental figure by the name of Pyotr Lomako. As a result of the operation to “neutralize” Zasyadko, not only he but also his opponents, Novikov and Dymshitz, remained “without portfolio.” Both Novikov and Dymshitz took these changes in stride. They had long since grown accustomed to changes, especially since no tragedy was involved. Novikov, with the rank of a minister, went off to be chairman of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA; also known as Comecon). Dymshitz

148 Time for Change: 1962 became head of the newly created Council on the National Economy, in charge of all the regional economic councils in the Soviet Union, which was essentially a promotion. But for Zasyadko, disaster struck. He was an impressionable person, and when he received the news that the State Economic Council had been eliminated, he began to drink very heavily and did not dry out until March 1963. Attempts were made to get him into treatment, but all these attempts proved useless. This time Zasyadko had no desire to recover from his drunken state. Medicine is helpless in such circumstances, the consulting doctors reported to Father. Zasyadko was retired on a pension. On September 5, 1963, he died. Thus Father lost his most active collaborator among top government officials and probably the only one who thought along the same lines about decentralizing the economy. With Zasyadko’s departure, the development of economic innovations, although it did not stop completely, definitely slowed down. Lomako proved to be a managerial type like Kosygin and immediately undertook to “restore order” in the realm of economic management bequeathed to him by Zasyadko. Economists with “inconvenient” proposals were no longer invited and, one after another, were reassigned in accordance with their field of specialization—after all, they were trained economists—to the State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research. The chairman of that committee was Konstantin Rudnev. Rudnev had previously been a minister of the defense industry, one of Ustinov’s men. Toward economists he was quite cool. He did not persecute them, but he took no interest in their ideas. From then on they reported not to the chairman of the state committee or even to his deputies. They were reduced to the level of heads of department and of course had no access to Khrushchev. At their different departments, each “stewed in his own juice.” Periodically they gathered together, argued, disputed, and made peace, and from time to time they sent proposals to the very top. Those proposals did not always reach Father, but their articles appeared fairly regularly in Izvestia and Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta and more rarely in Pravda. Father read them closely, and thus his connection with the “Libermans” was not broken even after Zasyadko’s departure. However, any feedback mechanism sank and was lost in the bureaucratic swamp. From what I have said earlier, readers might get the impression that the Zasyadko channel was the only one from which Father was scooping up ideas for reform. That is true and yet it is not quite true. Zasyadko and his economists were an important link, but far from the only one, in the formation of new reform policies, the deepening of the decentralization of the economy. Father did not limit himself to the framework of theoretical discussions about profit, the ability of an enterprise to pay for itself, and sophisticated concepts like those. He also experimented and tested the worth of one or another proposal in practice. I should remind readers about the Tselinograd economist Khudenko. This was already the second year that Father had been closely following his activity. By the end of 1962, the first results became evident. At the experimental state

Liberman, Khrushchev, Zasyadko

149

farms placed at Khudenko’s disposal, he had reduced dealings with the government to a very simple scheme: a certain quantity was deducted from the final product and was delivered to the government grain elevator, a quantity that had been agreed to for several years in advance, a specific and unvarying quantity of grain, and that was all. In other words, they were paying the government a tax in kind, and the profit earned beyond that was used for salaries, further development of the farm, and other needs. Everything was simple and transparent, and very similar to the ideas of Liberman and Belkin. The government had promised not to interfere in the affairs of Khudenko’s state farms, and it did not. The farms resolved their internal problems on their own. Khudenko reduced the size of the state-farm bureaucracy to the minimum. Only a few of the farm’s officialdom remained—the director, an economist, and a couple of people to assist them. All power was given to the work brigades laboring in the fields. They decided how and when to sow the crops and how many machines and what kind were needed for that. But the most important thing was that Khudenko allowed them to decide the personnel they needed by themselves, and how to divide up the wage fund, not only among those who were not making any great effort, but also to those who were giving their all, making sure that they were well paid, as they deserved, while loafers were disposed of. One of the three farms placed at Khudenko’s disposal was the Iliyskoye state farm, presumably named after the Ili River of eastern Kazakhstan. The grain harvest at that farm increased by a factor of 2.3 in the very first year, and the number of workers cultivating the fields was reduced from 863 to 85. And that was despite the unfavorable weather. The productivity of labor, in comparison to neighboring state farms, increased six times over, and the profit per worker increased by a factor of seven, while wages went up three to four times higher. The cost price of the grain, the actual costs of its production, was correspondingly reduced to four times lower. In Kazakhstan the average cost of production for one centner of grain was 6 rubles, 38 kopecks, but Khudenko spent only 1 ruble, 66 kopecks per centner. The profit per centner of grain on average on newly plowed land in 1954 was 206 rubles, which made it possible during the first four years of the Virgin Lands project to earn back all of the expenses put into that project. But that profit, which Father was so proud of, could not be compared at all to Khudenko’s profit. In terms of centners of wheat, Khudenko’s profit leaped higher by a factor of eight, to 1,577 rubles. The wages of workers on the Iliyskoye state farm increased from 88 rubles per month to 360 rubles. That was the same amount earned by the director of an average-sized factory.7 “It’s nothing less than a miracle,” said Father, expressing his delight when his assistant for agriculture, Shevchenko, reported to him about the results of the second year on the state farms that had been “given their freedom.” Khudenko’s achievements reminded Father about the initiative he himself had taken much earlier with the Moscow auto transport system. In the mid-1950s, despite the opposition of Molotov and his supporters, Father had succeeded in

150 Time for Change: 1962 unifying the many small departments in charge of garages or other facilities with motor vehicles. He created a Moscow-wide transport enterprise and gave it rights that had previously been unheard of: after deducting 40 percent of their profit, the enterprise could spend the rest on itself. There too a “miracle” happened. Previously there had been a shortage of motor transport, especially trucks. Various products and goods were never delivered on time to the stores, and the same was true for prefabricated panels intended for construction sites. In order to clear out these bottlenecks, it was necessary once in a while to call on military personnel to “help” or to have deliveries made by motor vehicles that were above and beyond the deliveries scheduled in the five-year plan, but now transportation problems in Moscow seemed to solve themselves. And here, in the wake of the success with the Moscow auto transport enterprise, came the resounding success of Khudenko on the Virgin Lands! The theoretical writings of Liberman and others like him proved that the success of these experimenters was not accidental, or to put it more logically, those successes confirmed the advisability of the proposals being made by the reform economists. But Father was in no hurry to make any decisions. Two successful results were good, of course, but they were insufficient. He decided to continue the experiment. Let not just two or three enterprises but several dozen start working along the new lines in various sectors of the economy, and then we would see. Such circumspection was not easy for Father. After all, if the regional economic councils, which in 1957 had been given the right to dispose of the resources in their areas and had consequently increased the national income from 7.0 percent in 1957 to 12.4 percent in 1958, then what kind of leap forward might not be obtained if all directors of enterprises were given their freedom?8 Giving them their freedom was one thing, but the authority of enterprise directors could not be entirely free of control. Father was worried about that. A clever and intelligent person like Khudenko was one thing, but the director of the electric locomotive plant in Novocherkassk was something else. What a mess had been created by his inefficient handling of work norms! Father thought of the idea of “reinforcing” the directors with workers’ councils as being similar to the situation in Yugoslavia. The administration of the enterprise would be accountable to these workers’ councils, as would the accounting and finance departments. The officials in charge of the different shops at an enterprise would report to these councils, and later the councils would be allowed to elect these officials and even the director. It was approximately along these lines that Father reasoned at the CC Presidium meeting of November 5, 1962.9 But the idea of “all power to the Soviets”—that is, to the proposed workers’ councils at enterprises—did not give Father the answers to all his questions. He continued to ponder and to cast about this way and that. At the Central Committee plenum on November 19, 1962, he warned: Such committees [i.e., workers’ councils] should participate in the discussion of economic plans, in monitoring the fulfillment of the plans, and the establishing

Liberman, Khrushchev, Zasyadko

151

of work norms [an obvious echo of the Novocherkassk events], and in the assignment of personnel. In this process directors would report to the committees about the work of the enterprise and consult with the committees on the most important questions of production. But the director must make decisions independently and must answer to the government. The production committee is a consultative body. The main point here is to attract and draw in wider circles, involving more workers in the administration and management of the enterprise. Such public bodies ought to be elective.10

On the whole, there was something here that required more thought and reflection. The reform of enterprises was a matter for the future. Father proposed to experiment with them for two to three years more. But the further “professionalization” of regional administration, taking the next step up the hierarchical ladder, from the district to the province, from interdistrict production administrations to the province committees of the party, and even higher, dividing them into industrial or agricultural bodies depending on the main “interests” they were involved in—that was a matter for the present day. Father felt that nobody could “encompass the unencompassable.” It was on a beach in the Crimea, at Livadia, in August 1962 that I first heard the idea of dividing the party’s province committees into industrial parts on the one hand and agricultural parts on the other. Father had just said goodbye to the king of Afghanistan and had a couple of days free before his flight to Moscow to meet the cosmonauts. On the beach at his vacation dacha were Brezhnev, Podgorny, and (as I recall) Polyansky. They “saw a light in the window,” as Father used to say, and decided to drop by like good neighbors. They took seats in the wicker chairs right by the water. Their rambling conversation was about prospects for the harvest and other matters. Then they went in for a swim. Father never concealed the fact that as a swimmer he was no good at all. He had devised for himself, based on his own design, a large, ring-shaped object of inflated red rubber like the inner-tube of a bicycle, and would not part with it when he was in the water. The conversation about province committees began when the four of them were still paddling around, and it continued back on the beach, as Father dried himself with a towel: It is impossible for the party officials to direct agriculture without knowing the subject. Sometimes a leader doesn’t really know his field, but he presents himself as a specialist and issues orders, and very specific ones at that. But a very specific order without knowledge of the subject will do no good. That’s why I think the party organization should be divided up on an industrialagricultural basis, and not on a geographical basis, as has been done so far. Then it would be easier to select specialists. . . . People will say that, previously, we never had an administrative division of labor based on the “production principle” [the distinction between industrial and agricultural production]. But previously was previously. Now everything will be decided by boosting the economy [and] raising the standard of living.11

152 Time for Change: 1962 Of course I am not now able to reproduce word-for-word the remarks Father made as he dried himself. Instead I have quoted from his memoirs, which were dictated after his retirement several years later. But the essence of what he said had not changed. The moment Father fell silent, all three of his colleagues supported him enthusiastically, speaking in unison as though giving stormy applause. “An excellent idea. It should be realized immediately,” said Polyansky, his words sticking in my memory. Podgorny and Brezhnev expressed themselves no less enthusiastically. For some reason, Father’s plan did not sit well with me. Everyone had become long accustomed to province committees as single units that embodied the sole, unified, all-embracing power. And now what? Generally speaking, I am a conservative by nature and take a guarded attitude toward innovations. Of course, on the beach at that time, I said nothing. There was a long-established rule that we children not interfere in the conversations of our elders. Nor did I ask Father any questions after his guests had departed. Reform of the party’s province committees had nothing to do with me in my work on rockets and missiles, and I instantly forgot about it. Naturally I did not know then that on July 26, on the eve of departure for his vacation, Father’s proposal had already been discussed at a CC Presidium meeting. That Presidium session developed into a full discussion, I would not say a stormy one, but a lengthy one. Everyone expressed his view, and not just once. Opinions differed. Kozlov, Podgorny, Polyansky, Shelepin, and Kirilenko supported Father unreservedly. Mikoyan and Voronov thought there was no point in being hasty, that the matter should be reflected on further, as was only proper, because, after all, the party’s province committees were the backbone of its power. In the end, everyone voted “aye” harmoniously.12 On August 20, 1962, during the days when Father, interrupting his vacation, flew for a week to Moscow to greet the cosmonauts, the proposed administrative reform was discussed again, but this time only briefly, at the CC Presidium. And a decision was made to convene a Central Committee plenum “at the end of October or by the beginning of December.”13 On September 10, 1962, Father sent the CC Presidium the memorandum that I referred to at the beginning of this chapter: After the Presidium meeting I have thought a lot about improving and refining the structure of the party and government apparatus. I have tried to find a way to sharply raise the level of party leadership of the economy. In industry we established the regional economic councils for industry and construction, bringing the leadership of the economy decisively closer to production, and we thereby achieved the more efficient functioning of our industry. In agriculture we found the same kind of organizational form in the interdistrict production administrations. The party leadership tends to be campaign-minded. In 1953, when the Central Committee focused attention on the problems of agriculture, the entire

Liberman, Khrushchev, Zasyadko

153

party leadership, on the province, territory, and republic level, concentrated on that and lost sight of industry. Then in 1957, we switched our focus back to industry, and everyone’s attention to agriculture slacked off. In the last two years we have readdressed our attention to grain production, and of course the party’s province committees and territory committees began to concern themselves less with industry.14

The solution, as Father saw it, was to divide up the province and other regional leadership bodies according to “profile,” that is, the type of production they would be concerned with. The way out of the situation, for the present time, in Father’s thinking, was to have two separate province committees, one for agriculture and one for industry. In this connection he emphasized: “We are not dividing up the territory of the province into an industrial part and an agricultural part. We are dividing the leadership of the two types of production on a single territory.”15 He went on to describe in detail how he conceived of these two separate professionalized province committees and what benefits would result. He proposed that there be no hurry about making any decisions. His memorandum should be sent out to the regions, an open discussion should be organized, and only then should a Central Committee plenum be convened. As the result of a nearly three-month general discussion, hundreds of comments and proposals were received by the Central Committee. “Comrade Khrushchev’s memorandum arrived. It was on the question of restructuring the party bodies on the production principle.” This was written by Pyotr Shelest in his diary. Shelest was second secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party. His diary entry went on to say: “We will make up a schematic listing of the personnel as a whole in the union republics and in the center. There are a lot of difficulties and unclear aspects. It’s hard to say what will come of all this. There are positive things, but many negative ones.”16 No record has survived of how other local officials reacted in their heart of hearts to Father’s memorandum. Officially everyone supported it unanimously. On November 19, 1962, Father reported to the plenum his radical proposals, which had more than one meaning, concerning the reforming of the party itself in relationship to the country it had been ruling for forty-five years. “It is necessary to establish the production principle as the basis for structuring party bodies from top to bottom.” Father was trying to convince the members of the Central Committee at the plenum. In this way we will ensure a more concretely oriented management of industry, construction, and agriculture. At the present time the production principle for structuring party organizations has been maintained among us only in the local party cells. . . . The production orientation is the main thing. We propose to include the party committee as part of the production administrations instead of, as previously, just having an overall district committee of the party. The number of officials in the party committees must be substantially reduced in

154 Time for Change: 1962 comparison with the presently existing district committees of the party. . . . I emphasize that there will be administrations for industrial production, and not just district party committees, that is, they will be based not on the territorial principle, but on the production principle.17

He went into further detail, asking what should be concretely reorganized in the government and how, and what state committees should be abolished and what new ones established. On the basis of previous years’ experience, he suggested that proposals from the local areas should be met halfway, that the rural interdistrict production administrations should be broken down into smaller units. Instead of the existing 961, there should be approximately 1,500. On the other hand, the regional economic councils should be consolidated. In the Russian Federation, the existing 67 economic councils should be reduced to 22– 24, and the 14 in Ukraine to 7, while in Central Asia the whole region should come under the wing of a single inter-republic economic council. The secretaries of the party’s province committees easily guessed Father’s intention. For the time being, in each province the chairman of the regional economic council stood on a lower level than that of the secretary of the party’s province committee. Now with the province committees divided up on the “production principle,” their role would be reduced to a level even lower than that of the chairman of the economic council. However, they could not bring themselves to express even a shadow of doubt, let alone protest. Father went on to deal with the entire vertical structure for planning and administration. He began with the State Planning Committee, reminding his listeners that an ever-increasing number of the trucks being produced could not be used, because there were no tires. “They say that the resources are lacking! But if that is true, reduce the expenditure of metal, build fewer trucks, but supply them with tires. Transfer resources from metal production to the chemical industry. They say you can’t do that. At the State Planning Committee each person focuses on his own little line. The targets for ‘his’ sector are increased by a few percent year after year, and he’s satisfied with that. Science has made new discoveries, new materials have come into existence that are more beneficial than previous ones, but this person doesn’t care about that.” Here Father became indignant. He felt that the system had to be forced to work, and that if this didn’t happen, it had to be sent to the dustbin and replaced with a new system. The audience met his words with silence.18 Father continued. “If a capitalist continued to use bronze and lead, without replacing them on a timely basis with synthetic materials, he would drown in both the literal and the figurative sense. He would sink, and his competitor would win out. Bronze and lead are particular examples only. It is a much broader question.”19 All through the last years of his life, Father tried to understand why the capitalists were constantly in the lead, being the first to invent new machines,

Liberman, Khrushchev, Zasyadko

155

to introduce new technology, and why year after year we were stealing from them, taking samples that were put on display and copying them. While we were copying them and getting to know how to produce them, the capitalists had thought of something new and again were ahead of us and we had to copy them. Things had continued this way already into the fifth decade. It was a vicious cycle. We could break out only if competition was organized among socialist enterprises. It was the absence of competition that distinguished us from the capitalists. Everything else—machinery, machine tools, technology—was the same or almost the same. But how could we organize competition between enterprises that all belonged to a single owner—the government, which sold its products at uniform prices handed down from above? Father had not yet found the answer to his question, but he continued to search. Competition was motivated by the struggle of capitalists for profit. But in our country “gross output” was what mattered to the director of an enterprise. That was necessary for fulfilling the plan, and nothing else mattered. The same old accursed “gross output.” “Gross output does not reflect the real state of affairs in the economy. It is not to the advantage of enterprises to produce cheaper or more complex items. An abnormal situation has also arisen with regard to setting prices.” Here Father was repeating at the plenum the arguments of Liberman and Belkin. “In this connection there arises the question of profit, as an indicator of the quality of output.”20 Competition and profit and at the same time the building of communism— a society of universal harmony without money, without anyone having a material interest or in general any motivation to work other than the “natural” motivation of humans to work—how could all that be reconciled? “We are moving toward communism and at the same time we continue to develop commodity relations. Doesn’t the one thing contradict the other? No, there is no contradiction.” Father had pronounced these words as early as 1958.21 At that time, after making that seditious statement, Father limited himself to it. Now everything was becoming clearer as a result of the experiments at individual enterprises that he had initiated. And it was becoming more obvious that he intended to carry the matter through to its logical conclusion.

156 Time for Change: 1962

28 Still More Power to the Regions and Reliance on Younger People Fundamental reforms in the economy had to wait. For the time being,

Father busied himself with reorganizing the existing power structure. He proposed the transfer of yearly planning, and responsibility for fulfillment of yearly plans, to the jurisdiction of the regional economic councils and union-republic governments. Coordination of the plans was entrusted to the State Planning Committee, which was once again reorganized after it had swallowed up the State Economic Council. A unionwide economic council, the Council on the National Economy, had the responsibility for the fulfillment of plans on an allunion level. Many functions of power—operational functions, above all— passed from the Council of Ministers to this unionwide economic council. There were also changes in the Central Committee. New bureaus and commissions were formed there too: for agriculture, for industry and transport, for party organizational matters, for relations with the “socialist countries,” for ideology, and—as a distinct entity—for the chemical industry. Placed at the head of these new bureaus and commissions were newly elected secretaries of the Central Committee, almost all of them younger people: Vasily Polyakov, Aleksandr Rudakov, Yuri Andropov, Pyotr Demichev, Leonid Ilyichev, and Vitaly Titov. It seemed that no one had been forgotten. Father counted on people who had had a “polishing up” (obkatki), a trial period, usually in a region far away from Moscow. Those who withstood the test were promoted to higher posts, to replace “oldsters.” At the plenum a new “hybrid” body was established, and invested with extensive powers—the party’s Control Commission under the Central Committee and USSR Council of Ministers. The forty-year-old Aleksandr Shelepin was placed at its head, with the party rank of a Central Committee secretary and the government rank of a deputy premier (one of many deputies to the Soviet premier, Khrushchev). Father had especially great hopes for Shelepin and entrusted him with especially great powers. Shelepin’s assignment was to monitor and control everyone and everything: province committees, regional economic councils, production administrations, directors of enterprises, and so on. He became “the ever watchful, never slumbering eye of the sovereign,” a position similar to that of the general procurator of the Senate under Tsar Peter I—Pavel

Burning the Bridges

157

Yaguzhinsky (1683–1736), who had been of one of the special favorites of Peter the Great. Father placed complete confidence in Shelepin—before whom everyone soon began to tremble. They all bowed down to him, being completely at the mercy of his reports. As for Shelepin, he very quickly began to aspire to higher things. It was not enough for him to be the “watchful eye”; he wanted to be the sovereign himself. However, not only did Father stand in his way, but also Shelepin had a tough rival in Frol Kozlov, who had a tight hold on his powerful position as Father’s Number Two man, the semiofficial successor to Khrushchev. Kozlov never took his eyes off Shelepin. Polyansky was another representative of the “younger people” who had followed a career path similar to Kozlov’s. In 1962, Polyanksy was forty-five, whereas Khrushchev and Mikoyan were nearly seventy. Polyansky was moved from his post as chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation to become one more of Father’s many deputy premiers. Before Polyansky’s eyes there opened the rosy prospect of a quick move to the top, as it had for Shelepin. And Polyansky too began to aspire to higher things.

29 Burning the Bridges At the Central Committee plenum of November 1962, if Father did

not completely burn the bridges connecting him to the past, he certainly did set fire to them. He placed less and less reliance on the secretaries of the party’s province committees. Even before that, the chairmen of the regional economic councils had begun to shout complaints against those party secretaries. But now, with the province committees being divided up “on the production principle,” the secretaries of those committees, who only yesterday had been the masters of their domains—viewed as the backbone of the party’s power—were being turned into mere “transmission belts” to carry out the will of the regional economic councils. Who would ever find such a thing to his taste? The serf-owning proprietors of the large landed estates at the time when serfdom was abolished in Russia, in 1861, developed a fierce hatred for the “tsar-liberator” Alexander II. Similarly, the “lords of the provinces” now began to hate Father. In October 1964, it was precisely this decision, to divide up the party’s province committees and

Burning the Bridges

157

Yaguzhinsky (1683–1736), who had been of one of the special favorites of Peter the Great. Father placed complete confidence in Shelepin—before whom everyone soon began to tremble. They all bowed down to him, being completely at the mercy of his reports. As for Shelepin, he very quickly began to aspire to higher things. It was not enough for him to be the “watchful eye”; he wanted to be the sovereign himself. However, not only did Father stand in his way, but also Shelepin had a tough rival in Frol Kozlov, who had a tight hold on his powerful position as Father’s Number Two man, the semiofficial successor to Khrushchev. Kozlov never took his eyes off Shelepin. Polyansky was another representative of the “younger people” who had followed a career path similar to Kozlov’s. In 1962, Polyanksy was forty-five, whereas Khrushchev and Mikoyan were nearly seventy. Polyansky was moved from his post as chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation to become one more of Father’s many deputy premiers. Before Polyansky’s eyes there opened the rosy prospect of a quick move to the top, as it had for Shelepin. And Polyansky too began to aspire to higher things.

29 Burning the Bridges At the Central Committee plenum of November 1962, if Father did

not completely burn the bridges connecting him to the past, he certainly did set fire to them. He placed less and less reliance on the secretaries of the party’s province committees. Even before that, the chairmen of the regional economic councils had begun to shout complaints against those party secretaries. But now, with the province committees being divided up “on the production principle,” the secretaries of those committees, who only yesterday had been the masters of their domains—viewed as the backbone of the party’s power—were being turned into mere “transmission belts” to carry out the will of the regional economic councils. Who would ever find such a thing to his taste? The serf-owning proprietors of the large landed estates at the time when serfdom was abolished in Russia, in 1861, developed a fierce hatred for the “tsar-liberator” Alexander II. Similarly, the “lords of the provinces” now began to hate Father. In October 1964, it was precisely this decision, to divide up the party’s province committees and

158 Time for Change: 1962 thus dilute the power of the party secretaries, for which Father would be reproached most severely. And the foremost among those who reproached him was his former protégé Polyansky. The reign of Tsar Alexander II, who had brought reform to Russia, ended with terrorist bombs. And Russia renounced reform of any kind. For his successors, Alexander III and Nicholas II, the very term “constitution” became the dirtiest of dirty words. Thirty years of stagnation followed, and as a result the tsarist government became totally discredited. The universal spread of discontent culminated in the revolution of 1905, soon followed by World War I and the two revolutions of 1917. Yet everything could have turned out differently. If only his successors had continued along the path marked out by the “tsar-reformer,” the entire history of Russia might have been altered. If only . . . But “the king’s tune is played by his retinue.” And the “loyal retainers” of Tsar Alexander II were convinced that he had gone too far, that his reforms would not save Russia, but destroy it. At the same time, the liberal “maximalists” considered the tsar a retrograde element clinging to the decrepit fragments of the past. As a result, toward the end of his reign, Alexander II found himself completely isolated. He was virtually alone, not understood and not supported by either the extreme liberals or the conservatives. It was a sad fate, but entirely predictable. Father was dependent on the province committee secretaries no less than, and probably even more than, Alexander II had been on his own entourage. However, the first secretary of the Central Committee, unlike the tsar, was not revered as a person “anointed by God.” In June 1957, the province committee secretaries had supported Father in his conflict with Molotov, Malenkov, and their allies, because they knew that any return to the past would threaten them. They counted on the future. The establishment of regional economic councils, it seemed to them, had placed power in their hands, in contrast to the previous concentration of decisionmaking power in the central ministries. But Father subsequently disappointed those expectations. At the Central Committee plenum of November 1962, the province committee secretaries—who actually dominated the Central Committee—voted for Father’s proposal to divide up their committees, but this proved to be a Pyrrhic victory for him, because it earned him their resentment. At the same time, he began to pay less and less attention to the province secretaries. Not only did he stop calling them by phone to consult with them; he also made scornful references to them. Granted, he did so only at CC Presidium meetings, but whatever he said there became known to them the very next day after he said it. As a result, the party secretaries turned away from Father. After his retirement he reflected bitterly about failing to follow the advice once given him by Lazar Kaganovich, who was wise in the ways of the apparatus. His advice was to devote one’s time unsparingly to meeting with the party’s province committee secretaries, at least two or three of them every week. But Father had not listened; he had spurned this good advice.

The Burden of Being a Superpower

159

In my opinion, consulting with them by phone would not have helped either. Khrushchev’s reform policies were in conflict with the aims of those party secretaries. He could not change his policies, because that would have meant abandoning the whole purpose of his life, but unless he renounced reform, there could be no question of restoring good relations with the province committee secretaries. When Brezhnev and Kosygin came to power in October 1964, their first act was to eliminate the regional economic councils and restore the ministries, to kiss reform goodbye and start living on the best of terms with both the province committee secretaries and the bureaucrats of the ministries. Things ended up for them the same way they did for Alexander III and Nicholas II— with a revolution, or to be more exact terminologically, with a counterrevolution. History has its own inexorable logic, and no one yet has managed to outwit it.

30 The Burden of Being a Superpower Preparations for the November 1962 plenum of the Central Committee

were interrupted by an international crisis—or more exactly, they were blown apart by one of the most traumatic experiences of the Cold War. (In Russia this event is called the Caribbean crisis; in the United States, the Cuban missile crisis.) This was an example of the unexpected turns world history takes. I have written a detailed account of everything I know about it in my book Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower.1 Here I will offer some reflections on the crisis itself and the circumstances surrounding it. What did Russians know about Cuba around the time when the twentyseven-year-old Fidel Castro and a group of his followers stormed the Moncada barracks of the dictator Batista on July 26, 1953? Nothing. Or almost nothing. For example, my knowledge of the region from which this “free territory of the Americas” would emerge was limited to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, with its pirates Billy Bones and Long John Silver, the search in the tropical waters of the Caribbean for the buried treasure of Captain Flint, and the parrot who periodically squawked: “Pieces of eight!” Cuba was of such little interest to the Soviet Union in the 1950s that, although it did maintain “full-scale” diplomatic relations with Cuba as well as an

The Burden of Being a Superpower

159

In my opinion, consulting with them by phone would not have helped either. Khrushchev’s reform policies were in conflict with the aims of those party secretaries. He could not change his policies, because that would have meant abandoning the whole purpose of his life, but unless he renounced reform, there could be no question of restoring good relations with the province committee secretaries. When Brezhnev and Kosygin came to power in October 1964, their first act was to eliminate the regional economic councils and restore the ministries, to kiss reform goodbye and start living on the best of terms with both the province committee secretaries and the bureaucrats of the ministries. Things ended up for them the same way they did for Alexander III and Nicholas II— with a revolution, or to be more exact terminologically, with a counterrevolution. History has its own inexorable logic, and no one yet has managed to outwit it.

30 The Burden of Being a Superpower Preparations for the November 1962 plenum of the Central Committee

were interrupted by an international crisis—or more exactly, they were blown apart by one of the most traumatic experiences of the Cold War. (In Russia this event is called the Caribbean crisis; in the United States, the Cuban missile crisis.) This was an example of the unexpected turns world history takes. I have written a detailed account of everything I know about it in my book Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower.1 Here I will offer some reflections on the crisis itself and the circumstances surrounding it. What did Russians know about Cuba around the time when the twentyseven-year-old Fidel Castro and a group of his followers stormed the Moncada barracks of the dictator Batista on July 26, 1953? Nothing. Or almost nothing. For example, my knowledge of the region from which this “free territory of the Americas” would emerge was limited to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, with its pirates Billy Bones and Long John Silver, the search in the tropical waters of the Caribbean for the buried treasure of Captain Flint, and the parrot who periodically squawked: “Pieces of eight!” Cuba was of such little interest to the Soviet Union in the 1950s that, although it did maintain “full-scale” diplomatic relations with Cuba as well as an

160 Time for Change: 1962 embassy in Havana, that building stood empty for a decade without an ambassador, a staff, or even a janitor. On the doors of the embassy there hung a lock, which was by no means merely symbolic. No doubt the KGB did not lose sight of Cuba, but the top Soviet leadership did not ask for information about what was happening there, even during the half-decade of revolutionary war, which ended with the flight of Batista in January 1959 and the coming to power of Fidel Castro. Cuban Communist Party members no doubt shared their observations with officials of the International Department of the Central Committee, but those officials apparently saw no big difference between Castro and Batista, regarding them both as “front men” for capital, who followed orders from Wall Street. When Castro and his insurgents took Havana in January 1959, the opinion of Soviet officials did not change: “hirelings of US capital and probably CIA agents.” In my view, relations between Cuba and the United States are highly reminiscent of those between Poland and Russia. In both cases we see a small but proud people, quick to take offense, who had been trampled on by a powerful neighbor that towered over them and showed no concern about how its actions might be perceived by the “small fry” swarming around its borders. The embittered neighbor—whether Cuba or Poland—was dominated by a desire to demonstrate the impossible: to show that it was equal to its giant neighbor. Over a long period of time this became a dominant complex in the national consciousness. Much depends on the conduct of the superpower in such a relationship, and on the wisdom of its leadership. When Fidel Castro visited the United States in April 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower refused to give up his golf game and entrusted to Vice President Richard Nixon the task of negotiating with the Cuban visitor. Castro was deeply offended by this scornful treatment. A black cat ran across the path of relations between Havana and Washington. Cuba more and more obviously turned away from the United States and sought support elsewhere. In the geopolitical realities of the Cold War, neither superpower ever refused aid to a third party if it could hurt its adversary that way. Both sides in the Cold War followed this not very complicated rule. Therefore, we in the Soviet Union immediately offered the Cubans our weapons, left over from World War II, including T-44 tanks and some other items. As time went on, things got worse. From being a fellow traveler accidentally encountered at a crossroads in world politics, Cuba gradually became a close acquaintance. Not yet a friend, but no longer a stranger. Castro became the idol of Soviet youth—young, bearded, and challenging all the evil in the world. But serious politicians had their doubts. Cuba’s fate was hanging by a thread. The Americans would not tolerate such willfulness. They would smack Fidel down like a fly. I suffered a great deal over what might happen to Castro and the Cubans and once I asked Father: “Why don’t we invite the Cubans to join the Warsaw Pact? Then the Americans would be more cautious about attacking them.”

The Burden of Being a Superpower

161

“Cuba is far away,” Father began as though he were mulling over the question. “The lines of communication are weak. They’re controlled by the US Navy. If the United States attacks the island, we can’t defend it with our tanks, as we could defend Czechoslovakia or Hungary. It would be necessary to resort to nuclear weapons immediately, and that would bring terrible destruction to our own country. To risk the fate of the Soviet people for the sake of Castro, when we don’t even know how he would behave under such circumstances, would not be intelligent; it would even be criminal.” I was very upset. We were going to leave Castro and his bearded heroes to be torn apart by the Americans. However, in my mind I understood that Father was right. Geopolitical logic was on his side. That situation continued until April 17, 1961, when the Americans landed a brigade of anti-Castro Cubans on the island. Their instructions were to seize a nearby airport, proclaim themselves the government of a “free” Cuba, and call for assistance from US troops. But their attempt misfired. The invaders were quickly bogged down. They had hoped, without any justification, that the Cuban people would rise up in support of them, but the people actively opposed them, and the invasion failed. At that point Castro took a step that radically changed the entire geopolitical situation. He declared not only that he supported the Soviet Union but also that he considered himself a member of the world socialist community, our ally on a level with Poland and Bulgaria. This placed Father in an awkward position. A country that aspires to world leadership, a superpower, is obliged to defend its allies, friends, and clients no matter where they are located and no matter what it costs. That is a simple rule of geopolitics. It was a policy invariably followed by presidents of the United States, and Khrushchev could not ignore it. After April 1961, Cuba became a factor for the Soviet Union that was analogous to West Berlin for the United States. If we separate ourselves for a moment from feelings of sympathy or other emotions, we see that an absolutely valueless piece of land, of no great use economically or strategically, was located far away in a territory entirely controlled by the enemy. It was impossible to maintain it without the risk of nuclear conflict, but it was also impossible to retreat. Other allies, friends, and clients would immediately lose all confidence in you. If you surrendered one of them to the enemy, you might be expected to surrender the rest as well if the occasion arose. And a superpower that would “lose face” in that way is no longer a superpower. That was why the presidents of the United States, one after the other, had reconfirmed the order: in the event of an attack on Berlin by the Soviet army, a nuclear strike was to be dealt without delay to that army’s rear bases in East Germany. How necessary is it for a country to “save face”? Can it exist without that? Yes, of course. There are many countries in the world that do not have to “save face.” But those countries make no pretensions to being superpowers. In Russia’s case, ever since the victory over Napoleon in 1812–1815, it has been unable to think of itself as anything but one of the world’s “great powers.”

162 Time for Change: 1962 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British empire and the French republic, which also had a colonial empire, were considered leaders of the world, but Germany, whose strength was growing quickly, disputed them for that title. It all ended with World War I, but no clear winner had emerged. The dispute continued and led to World War II, once again with Britain and France on one side and Germany on the other, but this time Japan declared its worldwide ambitions and joined Germany’s side. A question may be asked: Where was Russia in all this, and where was the United States? They were the real victors, of course. That was after World War II. Before that war, neither of them claimed superpower status, the United States because of its traditional policy of isolationism, whereas Stalin had his hands full with his internal enemies, from Trotsky to Tukhachevsky. As a result of World War II the distribution of forces in the world changed abruptly. It wasn’t just the defeated countries, Germany and Japan, that were knocked out of the competition for world leadership; so too were the so-called victors, Britain and France, which were greatly weakened by their victory. Two leading countries remained in the world, the United States and the Soviet Union, and now they divided the world between them. The conflict was not so much between so-called communism and capitalism, as we were accustomed to think, as between two geopolitical rivals. Previously such rivalry led to wars that would determine the final victor, but nuclear weapons were so destructive that any victory would prove to be a defeat, and that made war unthinkable. No one would ever start a war if they knew in advance they would lose more than they would gain. Instead of wars there began to occur “crises,” and the war itself came to be called the Cold War, that is, a war without a war—a very appropriate definition, in my view. Two powers were aspiring to world leadership, but at that time the US economy was about three times larger than the Soviet economy. The Americans refused to recognize that we were equal with them on the world arena. In such cases, what is the behavior of children in a schoolyard or moose in a forest clearing in the autumn mating season? The rivals demonstrate their serious aspirations to leadership and their readiness to strike down their opponent, but they limit themselves to demonstrations, preferring to go their separate ways in peace. Of course, things do not always end peacefully. One mistake can cost the life of one of the opponents, or even both. The rivalry in the Cold War differed very little from the battles that take place in school corridors or forest clearings. The difference was that the superpowers were not just risking the loss of some branching antlers, but the destiny of all humankind. The United States pursued its own policy, in its own interests. It refused to recognize the existence of the pro-Soviet German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and it sent in the marines to “restore order” in Lebanon and Iraq, and also sought to impose order according to its conceptions in the Far East, especially Southeast Asia. The Soviet Union, in response to the use of force by the United States, would immediately and demonstrably activate its own military

The Burden of Being a Superpower

163

machine. In both countries the newspapers were filled with articles containing aggressive rhetoric. The Americans would call up their reserves, and the Soviet Union would start to carry out military maneuvers on the borders of the territory of its allies. Sometimes the Americans retreated, as with regard to Lebanon and Iraq in 1958; sometimes the two sides found some other compromise. But the Soviet Union did not succeed in achieving the main thing—recognition by the United States of equality between them. The politics of continuing world crises developed on a rising curve. Time after time the confrontation became more dangerous. Of course one could choose not to take such risks, put one’s tail between one’s legs, and step aside. That is how animals that have been defeated in a fight behave. They retreat into the shadows and lick their wounds. They console themselves with the sweet taste of future revenge or, having lost face, disappear forever into the obscurity of the forest or that of history. There are quite a few people who consider life in obscurity to be quieter and freer. You cannot argue about such preferences; there’s no disputing tastes. Geopolitics remains geopolitics regardless of ideology, whether it was under Tsar Alexander I or under Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Central Committee. Just like the Russian tsars, Father had no doubt that the Soviet Russian superpower could never betray its allies! The only problem was that to defend Cuba from the Americans in the middle of the twentieth century was a more difficult task than liberating the Bulgarians from Turkish rule in the late nineteenth century. The Bulgarians were right next door, just across a river, the Danube, but Cuba was over 10,000 kilometers away. And a huge ocean lay in between. As the last doubts faded about the Americans’ determination to remove Castro by “surgical” means, Father was more and more tormented by thoughts about how we could preserve the Cubans from destruction and not make a misstep ourselves, perishing in a nuclear confrontation between the superpowers. “If the Americans decide to attack Cuba and we protest at the UN Security Council—they will pay no attention to that,” Father explained to me. “We are also not in a position to help the Cubans with our conventional forces. The Americans would cut our lines of communication, and the military units that we might be able to place on the island beforehand would perish along with Fidel. They could not hold out for long without the resupply of ammunition, fuel, and everything else. We have to do something that would put the Americans in a state of shock, to show them that if they stick their noses in Cuba, they will regret it.” Thus in May 1962 a plan took shape—to place nuclear missiles (strategic and tactical) in Cuba as a signal to the Americans that we were prepared to defend Cuba from them no less resolutely than they were to defend West Berlin from us. Actually, Father had no other choice. The CC Presidium supported him. On May 27, 1962, it voted unanimously in favor of his proposal. The Soviet leadership understood that to put their tails

164 Time for Change: 1962 between their legs and yield would mean to lose not only Cuba but also all the positions the Soviet Union had won in the world over the preceding years. Only Mikoyan expressed some doubts. To him the risk seemed excessive, and if we could not defend our positions without such risk, then let the Cubans go and may God be with them. However, Mikoyan did not insist on his view. Traditionally he never liked to be isolated, and he too voted in favor. The operation was called Anadyr. It entailed the installation of mediumrange ballistic missiles, the R-12 and the R-14 (in NATO terminology, the SS4 and SS-5), accompanied by an infantry contingent 43,000 strong, reinforced by tactical nuclear weapons. The operation began in July 1962 and went extremely successfully. For three months, until the middle of October, the CIA, despite all its efforts, was unable to sniff out anything. Even in October, when the missiles were practically combat-ready, an American U-2 spy plane discovered the secret only because of the slovenliness of a Soviet lieutenant who failed to camouflage a missile erector and trailers. On Monday, October 22, 1962, with President Kennedy’s address to the American people, the Cuban missile crisis began, the most dangerous international crisis of the twentieth century. A deadly crisis like this could have taken place anywhere, and on whatever basis, around Berlin, in the Middle East, or in the Far East, but it was bound to occur. The fact that everything took place less than 150 kilometers from Florida was a geographical accident and a twist of fate, but the fact that we all came terribly close to being burned to a crisp in a nuclear exchange was a result of the mortal fear and panic of the Americans. Neither Father nor the other Soviet leaders could imagine such a thing. They reasoned on the basis of their own European historical experience and the logic that had its origin in that experience. The Americans were ahead of us with their nuclear potential. They had about ten times more nuclear warheads and an even greater superiority in delivery systems. They had between 1,500 and 2,500 strategic bombers and 154 (or 163) intercontinental missiles (the sources vary on the exact numbers), plus approximately 200 medium-range missiles, which they had installed in Europe at bases in Britain, Italy, and Turkey. Opposed to them, we had a couple dozen of Yangel’s R-16 intercontinental ballistic missiles and about six of Korolyov’s R-7s. Of course, 30 such missiles could destroy 30 cities, but if you add to them another 40 missiles—24 R-12s and 16 R-14s—the number being planned for installation in Cuba, the nuclear balance of power still would not change, nor could it. For that reason Father thought that nothing terrible would happen. When the Americans found out about the missiles, they would raise a hue and cry. They would feel offended that Cuba was now unassailable; they couldn’t make Castro go stand in the corner. Father thought that a couple of months would go by, and then both sides would return to the really important issues: a nuclear test ban, regularizing the situation in Europe and the Far East, and everything else. That was Father’s reasoning. Any other European politician in Father’s place would have reasoned the same way. Politicians, like all other people, base

The Burden of Being a Superpower

165

themselves on their own historical experience, not that of other countries. For thousands of years Russians had lived with neighbors on their borders. The Pechenegs were followed by the Mongols, and the Mongols by the Lithuanians, Poles, and Swedes. From the south, the Russians were threatened by Tatars and Turks. Then new enemies appeared—the Germans, the British, and the French, whether with Napoleon or without him. Then again the Germans, at first the Kaiser then Hitler. After World War II the Americans took the place of the Germans. They inserted their military bases along Soviet borders, causing great concern to the Soviet leadership and the Soviet general staff. We feared the threat from the Americans and tried to neutralize it as much as possible, but no one panicked. Having enemies on the borders was part of everyday life. That’s what enemies were for. Such are the realities of life. They were unquestionably dangerous, and it was necessary to do everything to prevent them from attacking us. That is the main purpose of foreign policy and a primary concern for political leaders. As for the people, being accustomed to the fact that there was always an “enemy at the gates,” they did not express any particular concern. People lived their lives and dealt with their day-to-day problems. Father projected his view of the surrounding world onto the Americans, a nation with a completely different history and a different historical mentality. The Americans were protected from serious enemies by the barrier of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. During World War II they had been panicked by the mere rumors of German submarines off the US East Coast, and they seriously feared the landing of Japanese paratroops on the West Coast. America was a nation that believed in a dogma having nothing to do with real politics: “If someone has a weapon capable of harming us, he will certainly use it; he will press the button regardless of political, strategic, or other considerations.” There is a certain logic to the absence of all logic. It is a logic inaccessible to others. Following their own unique logic, Americans were mortally afraid when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957. They believed absolutely seriously that the Russians would fire on them with the same kind of rocket they had used to launch Sputnik, although at that time the Soviet Union had only one intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile. Why would we launch such a missile? What for? It wasn’t just that the Americans’ peculiar logic required no answer to these questions; the questions never even occurred to them. Now when they heard from their president that the enemy was at the gates, that Soviet missiles were in Cuba, Americans were plunged into a dreadful state of alarm. Like mice they scurried into bomb shelters dug under their houses with supplies stored there, such as water and other household necessities. The nation was thrown into a paroxysm of fear. The media added fuel to the fire, depicting garish scenes of “the end of the world,” one more ghastly than the other. The Cuban missile crisis was a completely psychological crisis, a crisis of the American consciousness, startled by the discovery that they too were now vulnerable, like all other populations on our planet. Bombs might also fall on their heads, as they fell on Londoners and Leningraders in World War II, and they too might

166 Time for Change: 1962 perish. The psychological crisis was irrational by its very nature. The Americans sought to free themselves from the Soviet missiles in Cuba by any means, even at the price of their own existence, but meanwhile no one made the slightest peep about the intercontinental missiles based on Soviet territory. There was only a difference of about twenty minutes between the flight time for a Soviet missile from Cuba and one from Soviet territory. If one were to reason logically, Soviet missiles were equally dangerous to Americans whether they were based in San Cristobal, Cuba, or Tver in Soviet Russia. But the whole problem is that panic and logical thought are incompatible. Just as you cannot use logical arguments to stop a crowd that is rushing toward you, so too in the Cuban crisis, logical arguments were ineffective. As it turned out, neither the White House nor the Kremlin was prepared for a development like this: difficult negotiations had to be carried out under the pressure of a mob that had lost its head. The world was lucky that both leaders, Kennedy and Khrushchev, proved to be responsible people. And I would say they were wise people who did not allow themselves to be distracted by chaos or swept into the whirlpool of emotion from which there would have been only one exit—to the other world. They displayed staunchness and sober thinking. After bargaining and arriving at a compromise, they reached agreement. The Cuban crisis was resolved to their mutual satisfaction. The United States made the commitment to never invade Cuba, and Khrushchev, since the American leaders had complied with his original purpose, took the missiles back to Russia. Both sides could consider themselves victors, but the real victor was the whole world, all of us. We are still alive. In what way did the Cuban crisis differ from all the preceding ones? Why did it become the main event of the Cold War? For the same reasons I have indicated. I will permit myself a repetition—it was an American crisis in which for the first time Americans felt themselves not to be distant observers but direct participants in the events. The Berlin crisis and all the other crises occurred somewhere “over there” in the imperceptible distance. Even if a nuclear war had broken out in Europe, if the Russians and Germans had killed each other off, with the French and British also being wiped out, those were the lives of strangers across the ocean. It would have been no great loss. As before, the Americans would have looked on from the sidelines, or in the extreme case, would have participated with their expeditionary forces. But now, for the first time in history, they were at the epicenter of the crisis. There was good reason to lose their heads, and they did so. It was precisely the Americans who out of extreme fright brought the Cuban missile crisis to the highest level of intensity, brought it to the verge of nuclear war, and for them it became the “event of the century.” At the same time, the Cuban crisis became the last major confrontation between the two superpowers, and that was because the two sides understood that they had both in fact become so powerful that they were capable of destroying each other and all of humankind. In the process of resolving the Cuban crisis,

The Burden of Being a Superpower

167

despite the fact that the Soviet Union withdrew its missiles from Cuba, our country finally achieved recognition by the Americans of equality in the world, if only with regard to destructive power. But it was not Khrushchev who achieved that. All the American media were working on his behalf. The television and the newspapers frightened Americans so badly that after the Cuban missile crisis they would not accept any arguments about American military superiority. Despite all logic, they imagined Soviet missiles everywhere. Of course there are different kinds of logic. According to arithmetic logic— and that is the logic that was followed by the generals and is usually followed by generals—the United States had a superiority over the Soviet Union in the number of nuclear warheads at the end of the 1960s, and consequently the Soviets would have been the victims in a hypothetical nuclear war. Thank heavens in those years the politicians were guided by other criteria. The Joint Chiefs of Staff calculated that the price of “victory” would have been the loss of life of between 30 and 40 million citizens. President Kennedy, like his predecessor Eisenhower, considered that unacceptable. Father held the same opinion. As a result, there was a balance of power between the two sides. The generals did not agree, but at that time their opinion was not taken into account. Thus the crisis passed by, and as often happens with any significant historical event, with the passage of time it became overgrown with myths. Historical mythology is just as natural as history itself. It reflects the state of a nation’s health. The greatness of the United States, the strength of spirit of the American people, lies in the fact that any important event, for them, automatically acquires world significance. The world leadership of the United States rests on this ability of Americans to transform their values into world values, whether in politics or art. They do not impose these values; they transform them. That is precisely the correct term: “transform.” Naturally, in the most dramatic episode of the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, the American nation could not and did not want to yield the laurels of victory or even share them. In order to achieve the necessary result, it is extremely important to select the facts “correctly” and to place emphasis in the appropriate manner. Americans achieved this. Their interpretation of the Cuban crisis became the generally accepted one. Mythmaking around the Cuban missile crisis intensified especially in 1968, when Robert Kennedy entered the race for the White House. He needed the image of a tough, uncompromising politician. Theodore Sorensen has described how he himself helped shape this myth. He was an aide to President John F. Kennedy and one of the leaders of Robert Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency. He took as his starting point Robert Kennedy’s book of memoirs titled Thirteen Days, about the sleepless nights in October 1962 in the White House. Apparently Robert Kennedy described what happened then too truthfully. An entirely different Kennedy was needed for the election campaign. Sorensen considered Kennedy’s memoirs naively soft and unworthy of a presidential candidate. Americans would not vote for someone like that. In the version of Robert

168

Time for Change: 1962

Kennedy’s memoirs edited by Sorensen, the reality of negotiations, bargaining, and an agreement reached between the two world leaders, Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy, was replaced by an “ultimatum.” And who put forward the ultimatum? Naturally, Robert Kennedy. The compromise that had actually been reached was replaced by “the defeat and cowardly retreat of the Soviet Union under the pressure of American superiority,” and so on. In contemporary American historical literature these absurdities, and not only these, were reflected, but only after the stereotype had become fixed in the consciousness of the nation. After all, not that many people read the scholarly historical works. What then are the basic outlines of the American myth about the Cuban missile crisis? The first point was that Khrushchev, the Soviet leader at that time, at his meeting with John F. Kennedy in Vienna in 1961, had allegedly evaluated Kennedy as a “weakling” who could be manipulated, and consequently Khrushchev decided to alter the nuclear balance of power in his own favor. That was why he installed missiles in Cuba. But he picked on the wrong person. President Kennedy responded with the “iron fist of America.” Khrushchev got scared, surrendered, removed his missiles from the island, and for that he was removed from office and pensioned off. This myth follows the Hollywood screenplay about Superman, a story that never fails to be universally applauded. At first as Clark Kent, Superman gives in many times to villains who seem stronger than he is, but then comes the transformation. And after that, everything is crystalclear. If you don’t think so, step into the next movie theater. I am very far from accusing American historians of distorting facts or chronology. In all the details their accounts are consistent with what happened, although of course here and there a little bit of makeup is applied, certain motives are ascribed to the Soviet side for the placement of missiles. But then of course everyone is free to interpret motives as they see fit. In what respect then do the mythmakers becloud the issue? After the meeting with President Kennedy in Vienna in 1961, Father did comment that by comparison with Eisenhower the new US president was not as experienced, and was not always well oriented on the subtleties of world politics. That was only natural. Kennedy had barely begun his term as president. Father did not imply anything more than that in his remarks. It’s true that the “courtiers” in Moscow, super-skilled in flattery, vied with one another to demonstrate that Kennedy could not hold a candle to Khrushchev, that our leader was smarter and handsomer than the American. But that is a different matter. The Americans seized on this eulogizing by Soviet bureaucrats and retouched it slightly in their own interests to explain how the Cuban missile crisis got started. This may be appropriate for mythmaking, but it is absolutely unacceptable for what is called “realistic” politics. No realistic politician in the world could even suppose that it was possible to force an American president, whether Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, Clinton, or any other, to dance to his tune. Here it was not a question of the individual. The simple fact was that he was the president of a superpower, and that was all there was to it. Father was a realist, and naturally

The Burden of Being a Superpower

169

no notion like the one ascribed to him could ever have occurred to him. The fact that we had just as much right under international law to place our missiles in Cuba as the United States had in Britain, Italy, and Turkey—that is a different matter altogether. But attributing to Khrushchev the belief that he could manipulate Kennedy is absurd. Another example of juggling with the facts has to do with the attribution of motives. Khrushchev, like his colleagues in the Central Committee Presidium, asserted that the reason for sending missiles to Cuba was to prevent a US invasion and defend Castro. The mythmaking historians contend that in fact the Soviet leaders were trying to shift the nuclear balance of power in the world in their own favor. Father of course knew how many strategic bombers and missiles the Americans had and how many we had. Thus there could not have been any question of trying to achieve arithmetic parity. This is the most important component of the mythmaking—shifting the motivation for placing missiles in Cuba from defense of the island to an aggressive concept, the hypothetical changing of the nuclear balance of power. Without this feature the whole construction falls apart. After all, if Khrushchev withdrew the missiles from Cuba in response to the US promise to leave Castro in peace, then he did achieve his purpose, although he might not have been the victor. If we are talking about “missile parity,” then it is a different matter. In that case the Soviets “lost” totally. That is the rather simple mechanics of the mythmaking. I will not try to discuss the details any further. Again I refer the reader to my book Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower. I do not dispute the right of Americans to make myths. That is impossible to avoid, because a myth, as I have already written, is a reflection of a nation’s spiritual condition. A healthy consciousness requires an unconditional victory over enemies, because a healthy nation, in its own conception of itself, brings truth and justice to the world, “sowing what is good, intelligent, and lasting”— to quote from a poem, “To the Sowers,” by Nikolai Nekrasov. This is the leitmotif of all, or many, American films, and it also reflects the healthy spirit of a healthy nation. That is a law of social reality. In the time of Russia’s flowering, like the United States it could not allow itself to have any doubts about its own world significance, its destiny. Let us recall the year 1812 and the Battle of Borodino against the army of Napoleon. “Borodino,” a famous poem by the nineteenth-century Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), takes up the question: How could we, the Russians, have won out against Napoleon at that battle? As a schoolboy I learned Lermontov’s poem by heart and, like the poet, I could not understand how we had managed to be victorious at Borodino. The Russian losses were greater than those of the French, the Russians retreated to Moscow, and then surrendered the city to Napoleon. He established his headquarters in the Kremlin. But in the final analysis we did win the war. Napoleon fled in shame from Russia. In 1814, Russian Cossacks cantered down the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

170 Time for Change: 1962 But what did the Battle of Borodino in 1812 have to do with the final defeat of Napoleon? Only after I had grown up did I understand. In Napoleon’s Russian campaign, the only major battle between the Russian and French armies was at Borodino. Before that we had lost to Napoleon at Austerlitz and in many other battles. This time, on our own territory, we could not lose! The healthy spirit of the nation required a victory. Thus there arose in Russian history the myth of a victory in 1812 at Borodino. In the same way the American myth of a victory in 1962 in the Cuban crisis arose—the most important event in the American version of the history of the Cold War. No Soviet mythology or, to use current terminology, Russian mythology about the Cuban missile crisis arose for two reasons. In 1964 Brezhnev forbade any reference to Khrushchev, either positive or negative. He was excluded from Russian history, together with real history itself. How could you talk about the Cuban crisis without Khrushchev? And so they also “forgot” about the crisis. That was one reason. The second reason began in the 1970s with the weakening of the Russian national spirit. This was first manifested in the behavior of the senescent leaders of the superpower. They no longer demanded, but requested. It all began with Brezhnev. Diplomats of my acquaintance have told me that at a meeting in Vladivostok, Brezhnev asked the visiting US president, Gerald Ford, whether he thought the Soviet Union was equal to the United States. Ford briefly and without any reflection answered “No.” They say that Brezhnev was terribly dismayed. It would never have occurred to Khrushchev to even ask such a question of President Eisenhower or Kennedy, just as Peter the Great would never have asked such a thing of the Swedish king Charles XII, nor would Tsar Alexander I have asked such a question of the French emperor, Napoleon. Strength is recognized as real strength the moment it is perceived, the moment one becomes aware of such strength. It was no doubt after the meeting with Ford that the decline of the Soviet Union began from superpower status to just plain ordinary. Only in the Gorbachev era did people in the Soviet Union begin to remember the Cuban missile crisis, and this happened on American initiative, not our own. Beginning in the mid-1970s in the United States, the basic outlines of an account of the Cuban crisis began to be made in detail, with an explanation of all its ups and downs and ins and outs, literally minute by minute. But how could this have been done without the participation of Russians and Cubans? A conference about the Cuban crisis was held in the United States in October 1987, and some Central Committee officials were sent who had taken no part in the crisis on the Soviet side. They were Georgy Shakhnazarov and Fyodor Burlatsky, Central Committee propagandists and specialists on international affairs, and Sergo Mikoyan, who had become a historian on Latin America and who had flown with his father in November 1962 to Cuba for several days. They quickly and easily adapted to the American mythology and, following their example, that mythology has become the dominant one in Russia today.

A Literary “Treasure Island”

171

Russian military men and some diplomats, especially veteran participants in Operation Anadyr, have tried to explain to Russian society that we were not the losing side. In vain. No one listens to them or wants to listen. At a certain stage in its development a nation takes a kind of masochistic pleasure in its own humiliation, whether real or, as in the case of the Cuban missile crisis, imagined. The truth remains unclaimed. And it will remain unclaimed if Russian national consciousness does not change. As for the American myth, there is no point trying to refute it, and more important, that is not necessary. In a healthy body there is a healthy spirit. Here I am rephrasing the old Roman ideal familiar to many cultures: mens sana in corpore sano (a sound mind in a sound body). God grant that the Russian nation soon recover its health.

31 A Literary “Treasure Island” In 1962, or perhaps earlier—I cannot recall the exact date—I discov-

ered that Moscow’s Foreign Languages Publishing House (renamed Progress Publishers in 1963) printed not only books sold in stores but also books not purchasable anywhere. They were distributed through special channels to an official “readership” on the basis of certain lists of recipients. They always had the same yellow-and-whitish paper covers, and each copy was stamped with its own number, to keep track of it. Such restricted circulation of special books was a practice that had begun much earlier, under Stalin, and it continued under Khrushchev. Father was of course one of the recipients, but he kept the books in his office at the Central Committee, and only around 1962 did he start bringing them home. For some reason he now began leaving these numbered books on the dining room table, for the whole family to read. Burning with curiosity, I always tried to be the first to grab the latest book. The truth is, I did not have any competition. Adzhubei received a copy with its own separate number at Izvestia, and my sisters were indifferent to these books. For the most part they were economic or military treatises or reference works, which seemed pretty boring to me. But some of them stuck in my memory. One book, by the former Yugoslav leader Milovan Djilas, astonished me. Conversations with Stalin presented a portrait of Stalin that I found difficult to accept. It was not even that Stalin was portrayed negatively, but the lack of foresight attributed to him struck me as particularly unpleasant.

A Literary “Treasure Island”

171

Russian military men and some diplomats, especially veteran participants in Operation Anadyr, have tried to explain to Russian society that we were not the losing side. In vain. No one listens to them or wants to listen. At a certain stage in its development a nation takes a kind of masochistic pleasure in its own humiliation, whether real or, as in the case of the Cuban missile crisis, imagined. The truth remains unclaimed. And it will remain unclaimed if Russian national consciousness does not change. As for the American myth, there is no point trying to refute it, and more important, that is not necessary. In a healthy body there is a healthy spirit. Here I am rephrasing the old Roman ideal familiar to many cultures: mens sana in corpore sano (a sound mind in a sound body). God grant that the Russian nation soon recover its health.

31 A Literary “Treasure Island” In 1962, or perhaps earlier—I cannot recall the exact date—I discov-

ered that Moscow’s Foreign Languages Publishing House (renamed Progress Publishers in 1963) printed not only books sold in stores but also books not purchasable anywhere. They were distributed through special channels to an official “readership” on the basis of certain lists of recipients. They always had the same yellow-and-whitish paper covers, and each copy was stamped with its own number, to keep track of it. Such restricted circulation of special books was a practice that had begun much earlier, under Stalin, and it continued under Khrushchev. Father was of course one of the recipients, but he kept the books in his office at the Central Committee, and only around 1962 did he start bringing them home. For some reason he now began leaving these numbered books on the dining room table, for the whole family to read. Burning with curiosity, I always tried to be the first to grab the latest book. The truth is, I did not have any competition. Adzhubei received a copy with its own separate number at Izvestia, and my sisters were indifferent to these books. For the most part they were economic or military treatises or reference works, which seemed pretty boring to me. But some of them stuck in my memory. One book, by the former Yugoslav leader Milovan Djilas, astonished me. Conversations with Stalin presented a portrait of Stalin that I found difficult to accept. It was not even that Stalin was portrayed negatively, but the lack of foresight attributed to him struck me as particularly unpleasant.

172 Time for Change: 1962 A two-volume History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, by Leonard Shapiro, a professor at the London School of Economics, proved to be the most interesting. We were still living by the official Short Course of the Soviet party’s history, fabricated by Stalin. Of course other works on party history existed that were possibly less falsified, but we had studied the Short Course in school, and that was what we remembered. Shapiro told about Plekhanov as well as Lenin, about the Mensheviks as well as the Bolsheviks, about Trotsky as well as Stalin, and about the clash of ideas and ambitions, recording not only victories but also defeats. Our real history turned out to be quite engrossing. I reread the book several times and asked Father for permission to keep it. He said I could. But then the book went astray. One of my friends borrowed and never returned it. Winston Churchill’s six-volume memoir-style account The Second World War, whose publication was completed in 1953, surprised me not so much by its content as by its voluminous size and unreadable language. At least that’s what the Russian translation was like. I couldn’t get through even half of it, so I dropped it. Why in the world was he given a Nobel Prize in literature for that? I also read Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls in a numbered edition. Preparations were being made to publish it officially, but the Spanish Communists, with Dolores Ibarruri at their head, rose up in a solid wall against it. There was something about the author they didn’t like. The publishers made a clever move, putting it out “secretly” in hopes that Father would read it and give his okay. But Father set it aside. As for me, it’s not so much that I didn’t like the book, but it made much less of an impression on me than The Old Man and the Sea and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. I couldn’t understand why people were breaking lances politically over this book. What was the terrible “forbidden” element in it? Probably there wasn’t any, because soon after that, the novel was published openly without Father’s intervention.

32 The Khrushchev Constitution Reform of the structures of power was not limited to the establish-

ment of interdistrict production administrations and the twofold division of the party’s province committees into industrial and agricultural. Father also became thoroughly involved in the drafting of a new Soviet constitution.

172 Time for Change: 1962 A two-volume History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, by Leonard Shapiro, a professor at the London School of Economics, proved to be the most interesting. We were still living by the official Short Course of the Soviet party’s history, fabricated by Stalin. Of course other works on party history existed that were possibly less falsified, but we had studied the Short Course in school, and that was what we remembered. Shapiro told about Plekhanov as well as Lenin, about the Mensheviks as well as the Bolsheviks, about Trotsky as well as Stalin, and about the clash of ideas and ambitions, recording not only victories but also defeats. Our real history turned out to be quite engrossing. I reread the book several times and asked Father for permission to keep it. He said I could. But then the book went astray. One of my friends borrowed and never returned it. Winston Churchill’s six-volume memoir-style account The Second World War, whose publication was completed in 1953, surprised me not so much by its content as by its voluminous size and unreadable language. At least that’s what the Russian translation was like. I couldn’t get through even half of it, so I dropped it. Why in the world was he given a Nobel Prize in literature for that? I also read Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls in a numbered edition. Preparations were being made to publish it officially, but the Spanish Communists, with Dolores Ibarruri at their head, rose up in a solid wall against it. There was something about the author they didn’t like. The publishers made a clever move, putting it out “secretly” in hopes that Father would read it and give his okay. But Father set it aside. As for me, it’s not so much that I didn’t like the book, but it made much less of an impression on me than The Old Man and the Sea and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. I couldn’t understand why people were breaking lances politically over this book. What was the terrible “forbidden” element in it? Probably there wasn’t any, because soon after that, the novel was published openly without Father’s intervention.

32 The Khrushchev Constitution Reform of the structures of power was not limited to the establish-

ment of interdistrict production administrations and the twofold division of the party’s province committees into industrial and agricultural. Father also became thoroughly involved in the drafting of a new Soviet constitution.

The Khrushchev Constitution

173

The proposed constitution carried further the line indicated by the TwentySecond Party Congress and the new party rules. Father wanted to embody in law the innovations introduced into the statutes of the party: term limits for those occupying high government positions, real choice in elections, and restoration of real power, not just ritual functions, to the Soviets. He realized that he would encounter more resistance here than he had during the discussion about the party rules, but he saw no other way for the country, and for himself, to move forward. As early as 1961, he began trying on for size the main propositions to be included in the new constitution. In mid-January 1962 he formed a working group, made up of legal scholars and experts, whose job would be to write the text of the new fundamental law. At the head of this group he placed Leonid Ilyichev, who had just been elected a secretary of the Central Committee and who now would be working directly with Khrushchev without having to go through Suslov. At a session of the Supreme Soviet on April 24, 1962, Father gave a report on the basic principles for constructing a “state of all the people” to replace “dictatorship of the proletariat,” “intensification of the class struggle,” and other attributes of Stalin’s rule, which were now things of the past. On April 25, the session passed a resolution establishing the Constitutional Commission. It was headed by Khrushchev, who gave Ilyichev the most important subcommission, for editing the text and pulling it all together. Suslov was entrusted with the subcommission on questions of science, culture, public education, and public health. That is, he was placed on a lower level than Ilyichev. What kind of new constitution did Khrushchev envision? He discussed this in a speech to members of the Constitutional Commission on June 15, 1962. I will take up only the propositions that, in my view, were the most important. The main point was that the constitution ought to exclude the possibility of a new tyranny arising, a dictatorship of the Stalin type. The chief guarantee against such an occurrence, as Father saw it, was to give greater legal force to the concept of rotation in the country’s top leadership, limiting any one person’s stay in a leadership position to two five-year terms. Like the analogous clause in the party rules, this innovation caused a rumbling of dissatisfaction. But Father did not pay any special attention to this grumbling. The proposal for term limits had been adopted by the party congress, and so it would be accepted here too. An extremely important section of the new constitution dealt with the powers of the state. The party program had proclaimed the transition from the dictatorship of the proletariat and its party to a government “of all the people,” and that meant a democratic state. Consequently, power should pass from the party’s Central Committee and its Presidium to elected councils “of all the people,” and over the long term power should pass to social bodies or “forums.” In order that the new structure of power should become truly people’s power and not a mere semblance of that, as existed now, the government ought to be elected by all the people. The absence of alternatives in elections was a

174 Time for Change: 1962 cornerstone of Stalin’s tyranny. Father made inroads into this area as well. He proposed that more than one name appear on ballots. Instead of just one candidate, who had already been selected by someone somewhere, let the voters themselves decide who they find suitable and who they don’t. Father spoke more than once about having alternatives in elections. He cited the example of Wanda Wasilewska, a well-known Polish-born Soviet writer. After the war, Stalin, who was favorably disposed toward Wasilewska, decided that she should be elected to the Supreme Soviet, and since she lived in Kiev she would of course have to be elected somewhere in Ukraine. No sooner said than done. Wasilewska became a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, thanked her voters for having confidence in her, and then forgot all about it. Deputies to the Supreme Soviet did not have much power in those days—or to be more precise, did not have any—but they traveled to their districts, met with their constituents, listened to their complaints, replied to letters, and to the extent possible and to the degree that they were conscientious, they tried to help people. For example, a deputy might obtain permission for a family to register as residents in a city where they wanted to live, or might help a rural resident obtain permission to buy a cow. And so on. However, Wasilewska never went to visit her election district, did not meet with constituents, and did not reply to letters. Complaints about her poured into Kiev and Moscow. By then her term had expired and new elections were forthcoming. It was not possible to avoid nominating Wasilewska again as a candidate for deputy to the Supreme Soviet. After all, Stalin had made clear his choice. But if she was put up as a candidate in that same electoral district a second time, unpleasant incidents could not be avoided. In those days, since there was only one candidate for each post, it was technically impossible for a candidate not to be elected, but if even 5 percent voted against him or her, that was considered an unacceptable failure, a lack of preparatory work by the local authorities. So at the time of each new election campaign it was necessary to transfer Wasilewska to a new electoral district—from a district where they knew her to one where she was not yet recognized, as far away as possible from the previous district. “What good were such deputies to us?” Father asked indignantly. But it proved to be no simple matter to change electoral procedures. “If there was going to be more than one candidate in an election, who would nominate the alternative one?” This “seditious” question was asked by one of the participants at a Central Committee conference, D. I. Denisov. “In that case the party should renounce its leadership role in elections. The party’s province committee nominates candidates now. How can it, after all, propose two candidates for one position?” It was such a nonsensical question and such a dangerous one that without going into any details a decision was noted down: “The proposal is unacceptable inasmuch as it does not correspond to the interests of a businesslike discussion of candidates for deputy who would correctly and adequately represent the united bloc of Communists and non-Party people.”1

The Khrushchev Constitution

175

Father himself could not answer this question, which touched on the sacred issue of power: “Who would nominate the alternative candidate?” He suggested that other public organizations besides the party should be allowed to propose candidates for elections. This too was a “seditious” idea, but it was not the first one in Father’s life and would not be the last. In this case, however, it was not very successful. No sooner had he voiced this idea than questions showered down on him: “How could public organizations be allowed to do this without authorization by the party? Wouldn’t that mean they were going against the party?” “Not against, but together with”—that was Father’s not very self-assured reply. He did not explain more precisely how the Communist Party and the “nonParty” public organizations would continue to go along together if they were nominating alternative candidates, that is, were competing with one another. He understood that having alternatives would undermine one-party rule, but after all, the Soviet state had become a “state of all the people.” The new constitution continued to follow the line of transferring authority from the center to the local areas, to councils on the republic level and to other councils whose names would be changed from “councils of deputies of working people” to “councils of people’s deputies.” Nowadays we can perceive no difference, but then it was a difference of principle. The dictatorship of the proletariat had been legally abolished. Now all citizens had equal rights. A very important point was that at every new election to the Soviets, one-third of the deputies should be new people, and even the most deserving deputy could not aspire to a fourth term. At the end of his speech to the members of the Constitutional Commission, Father proposed a procedure for adopting this idea. After the draft of the constitution had been edited, it should be submitted to discussion by all the people, and then it would be approved, not by a session of the Supreme Soviet, as the commission members had proposed, but by a vote of all the people, a referendum.2 Although the new constitution by its very essence tended to undermine one-party rule, it nevertheless asserted that the Communist Party was the leading and directing force in Soviet society and in the state. But that was simply a declarative statement. Under the new constitution it was not the party or its Central Committee or its province committees and district committees that would control power. With the introduction of multicandidate elections they would in fact lose that control. Actually, it was already possible to elect whomever one wished to a government body. The party bureaucrats understood this, and without risking a direct confrontation with Father, they dragged out the work on the constitution as long as they could. And they could do a lot when it came to such things.

176

Time for Change: 1962

33 Day by Day On June 6, 1962, a conference of leaders of the Comecon countries

was held in Moscow, chaired by Khrushchev. They discussed a mass of ongoing problems: deliveries of goods from one country to another, payment for them, and prepayment. Father insisted on one main point: we had to make the transition from symbiotic relations among several distinct national economies to a unified economic organism. That would benefit all and eliminate a multitude of problems that arose because of the lack of coordination in planning and because of deficient calculation of the mutual requirements of the different economies. Our Comecon partners did not object to Father’s statements. They all voted “aye.” But at meetings with Khrushchev, one on one, the leaders of these friendly countries showed no concern about the general interests of Comecon but sought to extract from the Soviet Union whatever they could. Walter Ulbricht and Antonin Novotny asked for an increase in deliveries of cheap Soviet oil, and Wladislaw Gomulka pleaded for more grain. Both oil and grain were in short supply. Siberian oil was not yet being extracted, and in 1962, as in previous years, problems with the grain harvest were becoming evident. Only the autumn would show the extent of those problems. Nevertheless, Father promised to ask the State Planning Committee to recalculate our possibilities one more time. We would help with what we could. On June 12, 1962, Father signed a decree of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers concerning “measures to strengthen scientific research in a number of biological fields.” The decree had been proposed by Vyasheslav Yelyutin, minister of higher and secondary education, Mstislav Keldysh, the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and Vladimir Kirillin, head of the science department of the Central Committee. Its aim was stated in an accompanying memorandum: “to strengthen scientific research and the training of cadres in the fields of biochemistry, biophysics, virusology, cytology, and several sectors of genetics, microbiology, and physiology.” Essentially this marked some form of legalization of formal genetics, which academician Trofim Lysenko had successfully fought against for the preceding thirty years. He thought he had succeeded in driving it underground, but now it resurfaced.

Day by Day

177

“The study of nucleic acids is the most rapidly developing field in contemporary chemistry and biophysics,” the memorandum stated. And the decree itself prescribed: “Research on the fundamental molecular structures of all living things, including cells and cell structures, must be greatly expanded. . . . Of particular importance is the study of protein and nucleic acid structures, the biosynthesis of proteins, the biological function of nucleic acids, photosynthesis, the photochemical foundations of inheritance,” and so forth. The science department of the party’s Central Committee, in proposing this decree, attached information providing the names of scientists who could engage in this research. It began with the name of academician Ivan Shmalgauzen. On August 14, 1948, Lysenko had presided over a devastating session of the Academy of Agriculture. Before that session, Shmalgauzen had worked as director of the Institute of Evolutionary Morphology. After that session, he was reduced to the status of “senior fellow” at the Institute of Zoology. In the 1962 report from the Central Committee’s science department, after Shmalgauzen’s name there followed the names of eleven other world-famous geneticists who had also been reduced to insignificance after August 14, 1948. Now they had the opportunity to return to their research work. Lysenko had suffered a defeat, but he believed in himself and the rightness of his views, and immediately began preparing a counterattack. Some time later Father would sign another decree that would be in Lysenko’s favor. In June 1962 a new movie was released, a satirical film directed by Sergei Mikhalkov, titled Fitil (The Fuse). Although it might not seem so now, at that time the film struck me as rather significant. Stalin had proclaimed that our society was free of conflicts and contradictions. In contrast, under Khrushchev it became possible to admit that conflicts existed and to talk about shortcomings. Of course the shortcomings taken up in Fitil were mere trifles, but that was not the point. The very fact that discussion of such things was permitted was a step toward openness. Also in June 1962, the newspapers reported that a natural-gas pipeline from Stavropol in the Northern Caucasus had reached Georgia, whose capital, Tbilisi, was now being provided with gas. Soon in all of Transcaucasia, people’s homes would have gas. It’s hard to imagine how people had managed to get along without it. On June 12, 1962, the party’s Central Committee and the government adopted a resolution about “patronage” aid by city dwellers to villagers—the sending of soldiers, high school and college students, workers, engineers, and scientists to do agricultural work. Father was skeptical about this kind of assistance; he considered it unprofitable for the government and society. As early as 1956 he said at a meeting of the CC Presidium that this was not aid, but the illusion of aid; in fact, it meant the squandering of resources. No one had calculated how much the plants and factories lost in this effort or how much the collective farms gained. If a balance sheet were drawn, we would find that we were suffering a loss, and not a small one. We shouldn’t send city dwellers out into

178

Time for Change: 1962

the fields. Rather than doing anything useful, they just left footprints. But if we gave machinery and technology to the villages, along with material incentives, they wouldn’t need any “patrons.”1 But things didn’t work out, and not because of any bad intentions. Everywhere else in the world, farmers hired seasonal workers, day laborers, to bring in the harvest. In California they were unemployed Mexican workers; in Iowa, simply unemployed workers. In our country there was no unemployment, so we had to hunt around to find people with “free” time on their hands. And so we agreed on a temporary basis, until better times came and agriculture was mechanized, to allow city dwellers to be sent out to help the collective farmers, especially to the Virgin Lands. But the “better times” never came. On July 14, 1962, Khrushchev and Mikoyan were at the circus on Tsvetnoi Boulevard in downtown Moscow for a performance by the Gwandung circus troupe from China. Father went partly for political reasons. Relations with China were getting worse, and by attending the circus he was showing good will to our Eastern neighbors. But regardless of political considerations, he very much liked the Chinese circus performers. On July 16, 1962, the press reported that peasants at the collective farm called Dawn of Communism, located at the fifty-nine-kilometer mark from Moscow on the road to Kashira, had moved from their huts into three-story buildings with all the modern conveniences—central heating, running water, indoor plumbing, and even gas. They were more economical than one-family homes, and the people began to live in them as though they were city dwellers. Not long before that, Father had visited a “typical village of the future” at Usovo near Moscow and then had inspected a new kind of peasant home at a construction exhibition. Now here was an additional variant, this newly rebuilt village at Dawn of Communism. Father was experimenting, casting about to see which of the various designs would be the most appropriate. The Dawn of Communism experiment was acknowledged to be unsuccessful. The collective farmers moved into the threestory buildings reluctantly. They did not want to part with their little barns, cattle sheds, and kitchen gardens. In the end, everyone agreed that it was more expedient to build two-story cottages in the villages, housing two families, duplexes with two-story living quarters on each side, so that people would not envy each other. And the outlying structures for each family were retained adjacent to these duplexes. On August 8, 1962, a new decree was issued “on further development of cooperative construction.” It declared that “only residential housing construction programs carried out jointly by cooperatives and the government would make it possible to solve the housing problem in the foreseeable future,” and then it went on to give a detailed picture of how this would be done. On the next day, August 9, 1962, a plenary session of the Supreme Court noted with alarm the increase of bribe-taking in our country. This was one more sign, strange as it may seem, of how far we had gotten away from Stalin’s

Day by Day

179

tyranny. Bureaucrats no longer feared for their lives, or that if they took a bribe they would be sent off to cut down trees at a labor camp. They began to be more concerned about improving their material conditions. Most people did not take bribes, and those who did take them did so with great caution, but they were beginning to do so. It was left to the Supreme Court to come up with an antidote to this side effect of the democratization of Soviet society. On August 25, 1962, Izvestia reported that in Moscow, at 72 Leninsky Prospekt, the first Soviet “Laundromat” had opened for business. Following the American example, four dozen washing machines had been installed at that location. You went in, unloaded your dirty laundry into a machine, inserted a token, which you could purchase on the spot, and an hour later everything was thoroughly washed. At first a line formed at the self-service laundry, not so much to wash clothes as to rubberneck. After a while the line disappeared, and the place was soon shut down. The American example did not take root in Russian soil. Muscovites preferred to do their laundry at home or to give it to people they were familiar with at a local laundry service, getting it back well-ironed and folded, even though such services were more expensive. Also, the authorities were unable to repair the washing machines at this American-style laundry. Visitors caused merciless damage to the machines, sometimes out of ignorance, but mostly “just for kicks.” For the same reason, car rental services did not take root in our country. Cars were returned in such condition that all you could do was send them to the junkyard. All the cars gradually ended up there, and the car rental offices closed. On September 17, 1971, the Friendship oil pipeline reached Hungary. Then there was a completely different kind of news report. On September 21, a famous American, actually a Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, visited Moscow. He had emigrated from Russia in 1914, even before World War I, and was now making a call to see how things were going under the Bolsheviks. He was greeted warmly, though without any special pomp and circumstance. Most of us had never even heard of Stravinsky. On October 11, Father received Stravinsky at his Kremlin office. The composer was accompanied by his wife, and by his friend, the American conductor Robert Craft, as well as by the secretary of the board of the Soviet Composers Union, Tikhon Khrennikov. On September 25, 1962, some extremely unpleasant news awaited Russian citizens. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet passed a law that placed a moratorium (until further notice) on the fulfillment of another law, of May 7, 1960, abolishing income taxes for Soviet citizens. People with the lowest incomes, who until September 1962 had been freed from taxes, turned out to be winners, because they were still not going to be taxed. The rest felt that the government had simply deceived them, and muffled grumbling resulted. At that time, Father calculated that taxes brought in only about 9 percent of the income needed for the budget and that we could easily get along without these tax payments as long as there was stable growth of the economy at a rate of 7–8 percent, but things didn’t work out that way. New construction, including

180 Time for Change: 1962 residential housing, required more and more funds, and agriculture also devoured more than had been expected. It was necessary to stop robbing the peasants and begin repaying the “debt” to them, but it turned out that repaying them in full was very difficult! A choice had to be made: either to reduce investments, thus holding back economic growth, or temporarily, until better times arrived, to go back on one’s word. Father chose the latter, hoping that people would accept it. After all, economic growth benefited everyone. He made an unforgivable mistake. People do not forgive those who break their promises. People were already figuring the future exemption from taxes into their personal budgets, and now look what had happened! The decision to call a halt to exemption from taxes was a very painful blow to Khrushchev’s popularity. On November 6, 1962, on the eve of the celebration of the anniversary of the October Revolution, a circular beltway inside Moscow was opened to traffic. Of course Father went to the opening. After all, this had been his brainchild. He had first proposed its construction in 1955, or perhaps a little earlier. He spoke at the rally marking the occasion and then with pleasure rode in a car from the Leningrad highway to the Minsk highway. On November 22, 1962, the children’s writer Kornei Chukovsky, who for many years had not been allowed to leave the country, flew to London for the first time since 1903. There at Trinity College he was given an honorary doctoral degree in literature. On December 9, 1962, the Swedish ambassador in Moscow delivered the Nobel Prize in physics to Lev Landau, a theoretical physicist who, according to his colleagues, was a genius in his field. Landau could not go to Stockholm. He had been rendered immobile for a year or more after an auto accident. He had been riding in a Volga automobile, driven by a friend of his. They were hurrying to get to a lecture at Dubna, near Moscow, but hit a patch of bare ice and had a head-on collision with a truck. The doctors could not promise anything favorable, and the Nobel Prize proved to be the summing up of Landau’s life.

34 The Yugoslav Model On December 18, Father went to Kiev. Tito, the Yugoslav president,

was again his guest, from mid-December on, as he had been the year before. The relations that had taken shape between Father and Tito were complicated.

180 Time for Change: 1962 residential housing, required more and more funds, and agriculture also devoured more than had been expected. It was necessary to stop robbing the peasants and begin repaying the “debt” to them, but it turned out that repaying them in full was very difficult! A choice had to be made: either to reduce investments, thus holding back economic growth, or temporarily, until better times arrived, to go back on one’s word. Father chose the latter, hoping that people would accept it. After all, economic growth benefited everyone. He made an unforgivable mistake. People do not forgive those who break their promises. People were already figuring the future exemption from taxes into their personal budgets, and now look what had happened! The decision to call a halt to exemption from taxes was a very painful blow to Khrushchev’s popularity. On November 6, 1962, on the eve of the celebration of the anniversary of the October Revolution, a circular beltway inside Moscow was opened to traffic. Of course Father went to the opening. After all, this had been his brainchild. He had first proposed its construction in 1955, or perhaps a little earlier. He spoke at the rally marking the occasion and then with pleasure rode in a car from the Leningrad highway to the Minsk highway. On November 22, 1962, the children’s writer Kornei Chukovsky, who for many years had not been allowed to leave the country, flew to London for the first time since 1903. There at Trinity College he was given an honorary doctoral degree in literature. On December 9, 1962, the Swedish ambassador in Moscow delivered the Nobel Prize in physics to Lev Landau, a theoretical physicist who, according to his colleagues, was a genius in his field. Landau could not go to Stockholm. He had been rendered immobile for a year or more after an auto accident. He had been riding in a Volga automobile, driven by a friend of his. They were hurrying to get to a lecture at Dubna, near Moscow, but hit a patch of bare ice and had a head-on collision with a truck. The doctors could not promise anything favorable, and the Nobel Prize proved to be the summing up of Landau’s life.

34 The Yugoslav Model On December 18, Father went to Kiev. Tito, the Yugoslav president,

was again his guest, from mid-December on, as he had been the year before. The relations that had taken shape between Father and Tito were complicated.

The Yugoslav Model

181

Their views on world politics did not especially differ, but Tito continued to aspire to more than simply being an ally of Moscow. He wanted to be recognized as an equal, as a leader of the nonaligned countries, pursuing their own policies. In other words, in relation to Moscow he conducted himself approximately the same way Father did toward the United States. As a result, there were always ruffled feathers, and sometimes things went as far as sharp words. Then everything would calm down again. Father respected Tito, considered him an outstanding personality, and enjoyed talking with him and exchanging opinions. He did not do so merely out of necessity. However, in Moscow there was no time for in-depth conversation. Father took Tito with him to go hunting at Zavidovo, a forest preserve about 160 kilometers northwest of Moscow, near Kalinin (now Tver). Tito was no slouch when it came to hunting. But after the hunt, when it was getting dark, and in December it gets dark early, they began to talk about politics and soon passed on to economics. Father questioned his guest about the special relationship between Yugoslav workers and the government. Tito explained that factory managers in their country, in comparison to those in the Soviet Union, were much freer. The directors of enterprises themselves decided what to produce, where it should be sold, and for how much, not only inside the country but beyond its borders. The question of workers’ councils was not left aside. Tito’s account of them echoed not only with pride but also with a note of condescension. It seemed that these workers’ councils were not merely highly efficient economic mechanisms, but were a new contribution to Marxist theory. And they, the Yugoslavs, not to mention himself, Tito, were the ones who had allowed these developments to go forward. Father took an interest in this and suggested to his guest that they head down to Kiev together. There the two of them could go hunting and talk things over to their hearts’ content without interference. Tito readily agreed. He had been to Kiev more than once and liked the city, and he understood that the trip would also give his host much pleasure, because Khrushchev had lived there for large parts of his life. In Kiev they spent two days together, not in the city but in a “forest hut,” a suburban government residence by the name of Zalesye (meaning “beyond the forest”). There by the fireplace they continued their conversation about the rights of directors of enterprises, about workers’ councils, and about the particular features of economic management in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia. Tito praised the “Yugoslav model” to the skies. Father listened to him closely and nodded, but could not fully grasp the “innovativeness” and effectiveness of what the Yugoslavs had invented. They agreed that the following year he would make a trip to Yugoslavia, stay with Tito on the island of Brioni, and travel around the country to see things with his own eyes and feel with his own hands. Tito headed home on December 20, and Father, after seeing him off, got busy with matters he needed to attend to. First he had a meeting with a small circle of Ukrainian leaders, then on December 24 he held a large conference of

182 Time for Change: 1962 the Ukrainian Communist Party’s Central Committee on reorganizing the administrative structure, and dividing the province committees into industrial and agricultural. He described how he thought this should be achieved. On December 25, Father and Podgorny visited the Institute of Superhard Materials. A miracle had been accomplished there. Ukrainian scientists had synthesized diamonds. They actually showed them to Father: tiny grains of sand, barely visible to the eye, but as hard as diamonds. They were not suitable to wear as jewelry, but they were good for creating superhard instruments that would not wear out, such as stonecutting saws, or the “milling heads” on oilwell drills. Father was quite satisfied with what he had seen. On December 29, his Polish friends Wladislaw Gomulka and Józef Cyrankiewicz came to visit him. While Father was playing host in Kiev, Frol Kozlov flew to Central Asia. On December 28, 1962, in Tashkent, he introduced a new leader to the first secretaries of the central committees of the union republics of Central Asia. This was the thirty-four-year-old Vladimir Lomonosov, who just the day before had been second secretary of the party’s Kalinin district committee in Moscow. Lomonosov was to be chairman of a recently created Central Asian Bureau of the Central Committee. Lomonosov’s job was to coordinate the work of the Central Asian republics, and that meant also the work of the central committees of those union republics. A fierce dislike was hidden behind the Oriental sweet talk with which the Central Asian leaders welcomed this new emissary from “the Center.” These first secretaries were accustomed to running affairs in their union-republic domains by themselves, and they did not want someone else lording it over them right there on the spot instead of having a boss in far-off Moscow. And here a mere boy had been sent, the secretary of an urban district committee, and not only that: he was a second secretary, not even a first secretary! They already had dozens of such errand boys themselves. Khrushchev had looked upon Lomonosov with favor for a long time. He was well organized and efficient, and capable of grasping new ideas. Father saw a big future ahead of him and had decided to put him through a training program dealing with concrete tasks in a remote area. In the same way, he had sent an equally youthful Semichastny to get polished up with training on the job in Azerbaijan, as the second secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party’s Central Committee. But Semichastny had been made a second secretary in Azerbaijan, while Lomonosov was assigned by Khrushchev to be higher than all the first secretaries in Central Asia. Lomonosov was not able to establish a working relationship with the officials of that region and could not cope with them. In 1964, shortly after Father’s ouster, the Central Asian Bureau was dissolved. The Central Asian secretaries had their former powers restored to them, and Lomonosov was recalled to Moscow. He was appointed as an inspector at the Central Committee’s department for party functioning.

How People Were Living

183

35 How People Were Living On December 30, 1962, Father asked for the results of statistical re-

search that had been conducted on the budgets of Soviet families. Among other things, he was interested in how the June 1962 price increases on meat and milk had been reflected in people’s lives. In 1961–1962, money earnings for workers in industry increased by between 2 and 6 percent, amounting to 1,600–1,700 rubles annually (133–141 rubles per month). For workers on the collective farms, money income increased by 10 percent, but annual earnings were only 1,300 rubles (110 rubles per month). The largest percentage of increase in monetary income was among collective farmers—13 percent—for an annual income of 700 rubles (51 rubles per month). In other words, the robbing of the peasants during the industrialization era under Stalin had not yet been compensated for, nor would it be anytime soon. The prospect was that more and more investment in agriculture would be necessary. “As a result of the price increases there was a 5 percent reduction in the consumption of livestock products by urban families,” the statisticians reported. “At the same time the delivery of meat to government stores increased, also by 5 percent. Reserve supplies of meat rose by 56 percent, and of butter by 80 percent. Spending by urban dwellers on nonfood items did not change, but for villagers such spending grew along with the growth in their income. Collective farmers benefited most from the higher retail prices and procurement prices for meat, milk, and butter. Their earnings from sales at peasant markets increased by 17 percent.”1 At the same time, 44 percent of the meat purchased in the Soviet Union, as well as 45 percent of the milk, 76 percent of the eggs, and 80 percent of the wool, was produced on the private plots of land adjacent to the homes of collective farmers and state-farm employees.2 Father still had no doubt that these private plots had outlived their time. The future lay with large-scale mechanized agricultural complexes. But that would not happen until production, and earnings, by the collective- and statefarm workers began to meet all their needs. Then they would lose interest in their little private plots. “We must not get ahead of ourselves! We will severely punish those who make a display of excessive zeal in trying to eliminate the private plots.” Father was warning not only his subordinates but also himself not to be too hasty.3

184 Time for Change: 1962

36 Problems, Problems, Problems The year 1962 was ending in an ordinary way. It was not an occasion

for great joy, but neither was it especially upsetting. The economy grew at a rate of 5.7 percent, 1 percent less than the previous year. But on the whole, that wasn’t bad. On the other hand, the productivity of labor had increased by 5.5 percent, compared to 4.4 percent in 1961.1 Since the beginning of the seven-year plan (which spanned 1959 to 1962), the Soviet economy had increased its output by 45 percent, as against a planned increase of 39 percent.2 Approximately 3,700 large-scale industrial enterprises had been built, and in the cities housing construction had accounted for about 9 million new apartments, with a total of 325 million square meters of living space. An additional 2,400,000 rural homes had been built. Housing conditions had improved for about 50 million people, roughly a quarter of the Soviet population.3 There was also good news from the energy industry. On November 13, 1962, a new dam had spanned the Dnieper River at the site of the Dneprodzerzhinsk hydroelectric power plant, and on December 10, the third section of the Nazarov thermal power plant, a coal-fired plant near Khabarovsk, had come online. Also, as mentioned earlier, preparations were being made for the construction of superpowered hydroelectric plants on the Vakhsh River in Central Asia. Substantial results had come about as the result of a 1958 decree on the development of the chemical industry, in which Khrushchev had declared a shift of priorities from steel to plastics. On October 10, 1962, the Novokuibyshev plant began to produce synthetic alcohol from natural gas, thus saving on the use of grain and potatoes. On October 23, a synthetic rubber plant in Omsk turned out its first products. On December 15 an oil refinery in Ryazan began operations, and on October 9 the Salavat petrochemical plant synthesized its first batch of polyethylene. Father placed especially great hopes in this type of production. Transparent plastic film would replace glass in greenhouses. Household items could be produced from polyethylene plastics—for example, buckets, basins, tubs, water pipes, and sewage pipes—instead of making them from iron or steel, as was presently being done. In Kursk, production had begun of lavsan (Soviet trade name for a synthetic polyester textile fiber, similar to what is called Dacron in the United States). Yarn and fabrics could be made from it,

Problems, Problems, Problems

185

and fashionable clothing could be sewn. The first samples of fiberglass items were appearing in our country. Abroad a huge number of structural parts made of fiberglass were fused together, replacing items that had previously been stamped out of sheet metal—for example, automobile fenders and hoods, or structural elements in river-going vessels. However, Father did not think that this was enough. Expansion of the chemical industry in our country lagged behind that in the West and what was required to meet our own needs. As Father said at a CC Presidium meeting on November 5, 1962: We have purchased chemical plants in Germany, Italy, Japan, and France, and now these plants have gone into operation. Not long ago we were producing 3,000 tons of polyethylene annually, but now as many as 60,000 tons have been produced. The only people gladdened by these statistics, however, are orators who don’t understand the slightest thing about economics. We’re like a peasant who has a kopeck and then adds a 5-kopeck piece and is overjoyed. But we need a ruble [100 kopecks]. While we have attained production of 60,000 tons of polyethylene annually, the Americans have increased their output from 500,000 tons to 800,000! How much does it cost to produce a ton of polyethylene and how much is wasted producing one ton of steel?! We are imprisoned by old schematic concepts. Capitalism has passed us by and has gone ahead of us, making big earnings. But we continue in the old-fashioned way of making capital investments in the metallurgical industry instead of directing them into the production of plastics. We overfulfill the plans for steel production and fail to fulfill the plan for textiles. We are not investing enough in the textile industry. Textiles mean the same thing as satisfying the needs of people and simultaneously carrying out capital accumulation. This kind of skewed policy puts a drain on our economy. As we catch up with America we cannot forget about the current needs of the population; otherwise, it’s like worrying about the life hereafter. Where do we have to invest? Where it is most advantageous. That is what the capitalists do. The same laws hold for socialism! Only for them it’s called profit, but in our country it’s called “earning capacity” [rentabelnost].4

The conclusion was that the economy had to be managed differently. Planning should be done in the local areas, while in the center we should have a small, well-qualified, and skilled State Planning Committee, which would “sew all the elements together.” From one meeting to the next of the CC Presidium and at the November plenum of the Central Committee, Father hammered away on the point that there was insufficient unifying and standardizing. A uniform technological policy was also missing. Previously we had had one tractor, the DT-54 tractor, and now we had three—the Volgograd DT-54, the Kharkov DT-54, and the Altai DT-54—and each type had its minor distinguishing features, and thus each required its own unique replacement parts. “Here too the capitalists have gone ahead of us,” Father complained. “They have specialization, assembly-line production, mass production of items by stamping them from molds, and cooperation. The capitalists have created a

186 Time for Change: 1962 Common Market in Europe. In Italy the Olivetti firm produces a standard type of office equipment for all countries. The capitalists are doing this, and we’re working in the old-fashioned way, each in his own sphere. We’re making tractors the same way the peasant used to bend each rim of his wagon wheel into shape separately and individually.”5 In his speeches Father touched on such issues as the totally unjustified delay in introducing a technological process that had been developed in the Soviet Union, the continuous casting of steel; he also talked about the problem of replacing open-hearth furnaces with Bessemer-type converters in the steel industry, and the production at the Kirov works in Leningrad of a 220-horsepower tractor for the Virgin Lands; and he complained about the localism of the regional economic councils. Shelepin, head of the government and party’s new Control Commission, reported at a CC Presidium meeting that “in our country finished garments worth 3 billion rubles are lying in the warehouses. No one is buying them. They are too old fashioned. And the shoe factories calculate their production on the basis of weight, so that shoes are heavier than they ought to be.” Father interrupted him: “You talk about shoes, but I can name you a thousand other items. In the good old days a private owner would announce a springtime sale—and the capitalists still do that nowadays—to get rid of leftover winter goods. He would sell them at a discount, because otherwise his capital would lie like a dead weight, out of circulation. But our bureaucrats are not interested in that. When the season ends they put the shoes in a warehouse. Let the moths feast on them.”6 Again, for the umpteenth time, Father spoke about the relations between the center and the periphery, and between central bureaucrats and local factory managers. But with all the problems, and despite the constant need to push and prod everyone and everything forward, industry was still functioning satisfactorily, and Father hoped that after the new reform it would function even more efficiently. But agriculture was a cause for serious concern. In Siberia and Kazakhstan there was a drought. “In the Altai territory, where the plan called for 3.6 million tons, only 1.2 million tons had been produced. In Omsk province, instead of the planned 1.6 million tons, we received only 640,000 tons. In the Virgin Lands territory the wheat had stood as high as a wall all around. A yield of 15–16 centners per hectare was expected [the average yield being approximately 11 centners], but a heat wave of 40 degrees Centigrade [102 Fahrenheit] had struck, and all the stalks of grain had dried up. Kazakhstan delivered to the government only 8 million tons, half of what was expected. The Siberian regions had also fallen short of their expected deliveries, by 7.2 million tons.” Father grieved about that in a conversation with Turkmen leaders on September 28, 1962, then repeated his words at a CC Presidium meeting on November 5, 1962.7 Drought also struck the southern parts of Ukraine, where traditionally winter wheat and corn for use as a cereal grain, rather than cattle fodder, were cultivated.

Problems, Problems, Problems

187

The Ukrainians delivered only 10.4 million tons of grain as against a planned quantity of 16 million tons. In central Russia, Belorussia, and the Baltic region, on the other hand, rain had soaked the crops and the harvest was ruined. The Northern Caucasus, the Volga region, and Orenburg province saved the day. In those regions, a fabulous harvest had come in, enabling the Russian Federation as a whole to obtain more grain than in 1961.8 To sum up, 1962 proved to be a better year than the previous one, but not as much better as had been desired. In 1962, 140.2 million tons of grain were harvested (in 1961 the figure had been 130.8 million tons). Of this, 56.6 million tons were delivered to government storage elevators (by comparison with 52.1 million tons the previous year), and the yield per hectare, despite the drought, was also slightly higher. It rose to 10.9 centners per hectare, as against 10.7 centners in 1961. However, demand for grain had also shot up. In other words the population was buying more bread. The June price increase on meat was partially responsible. When meat prices at the peasant markets rose, that immediately created an additional incentive to feed cattle and hogs with those same old loaves of bread purchasable at government stores at very low prices. A critical situation developed. If measures were not taken immediately, the hogs would devastate and empty out the government grain reserves, where only a wretchedly small amount remained. Shelepin’s Control Commission dug up an old government decree dated November 26, 1947, which had never been annulled by anyone. It limited to two and a half kilograms the amount of bread one person could buy. The Control Commission sent out a circular to the whole country instructing that these limits “established by law” should be strictly adhered to. In all the local bakeries and stores, warning signs appeared, and officials of the Control Commission kept a strict watch on customers. In order to feed bread or bread products to one’s cow, one had to go to the store more often, and if you didn’t look out, Shelepin’s people would note you down as an offender. That was what Shelepin counted on, but he was making his plans on paper, divorced from the realities of life. The restrictions on the sale of bread and bread products were adhered to basically in Moscow and other large cities, where there were more Control Commission officials, but hardly any cattle or hogs were being kept in those areas. In the country as a whole, it turned out to be not very difficult to get around the law. In villages and towns, where people knew each other, it was easy to make an arrangement with one of the women who sold bread. For a small bribe, and more often even out of sympathy, she would give you as many loaves as you asked for. Shelepin’s initiative had the effect not so much of limiting the sale of bread as of causing irritation and annoyance among the people, and not only among the owners of livestock. Here restrictions were being placed on the sale of bread when the recent party congress had promised that prosperity was soon to come and when Khrushchev had declared that the present generation would live under

188 Time for Change: 1962 communism. All this could not be called anything but a very crude political error. The Central Committee was flooded with angry letters. Shelepin did not retreat even after he realized that his measures were not working. By nature he was a harsh individual, and as though to confirm the accuracy of his nickname, “Iron Shurik” (Shurik being a diminutive of Aleksandr), he proposed that draconian measures be introduced, that a crushing tax be placed on livestock owners, as had been done under Stalin.9 Father rejected Shelepin’s initiative. Khrushchev’s strategy remained the same as ever: the crisis could be resolved only by creating abundance, by increasing production, including that of grain. To free ourselves from the grain problem, Father estimated it was necessary to triple the size of the government’s reserve stockpiles. How? Increase the yield per hectare on land already under cultivation. Considering the example in Europe of 20–30 centners per hectare, we needed to get at least 10 centners per hectare. Father would have been satisfied with 20, but without fertilizer that was nothing but a pipe dream, and the necessary quantity of fertilizer would not simply show up the next day. The necessary resources had to be found and allocated from the government budget, fertilizer factories had to be built, the new technology had to learned and made to function correctly, and all that would take three or four years. Father had said literally the same thing about fertilizer and the construction of fertilizer plants at the beginning of the year at the Central Committee plenum of March 1962, but during the year no additional funds for fertilizer had been found. The State Planning Committee and the Ministry of Finance stood opposed like a solid wall. The budget had already been drawn up, they argued, and could not be allowed to leak at every seam. For the time being, there was only one way out of the situation—to plow the fallow lands and the land sown with alfalfa and clover. In 1962, out of the 52 million hectares of “idle lands,” 15 million hectares had already been plowed. Father proposed that the next year, in 1963, another 20 million hectares should be included. With an average yield of 10 centners per hectare the additional quantity would come to 20 million tons of grain. “Before announcing that figure, I thought about it a lot, calculated carefully, and came to the conclusion that it can be done.” That is what Father wrote to the CC Presidium on November 10, 1962.10 Meanwhile the dispute between Barayev and Nalivaiko, described earlier, had not subsided. In fact it had become even more embittered. Nalivaiko never stopped repeating that the grass-field rotation system was an anachronism. Barayev retorted: “There are special conditions in the Virgin Lands. The grass preserves the soil from erosion, and therefore great caution is necessary here.” The example of American farmers supported Nalivaiko’s position. He specifically suggested that we follow their recipes. Barayev was guided by a peasant’s caution and by the experience he had accumulated during many years of living in the steppes of Kazakhstan.

Problems, Problems, Problems

189

Under the conditions that had taken shape, Nalivaiko’s proposals seemed more attractive. They promised to provide a breathing space, which was so necessary until sufficient quantities of fertilizers arrived, and so Khrushchev sided with Nalivaiko, although with the reservation: “A certain part of the grasslands should be preserved. The collective farmers and state-farm employees need alfalfa and clover.” At the November plenum of the Central Committee he chastised the Kazakhs for disregarding the particular features of agriculture in the Virgin Lands, and for not paying attention to the advances in science and practical work, for letting the land lie idle.11 But local leaders let these words of Father’s go in one ear and out the other. They had only been spoken in passing. And after all, it was not merely a matter of providing alfalfa and clover, but of plowing up many millions of hectares of grassland. In siding with Nalivaiko, Father ran a risk. In the event of a spring drought and strong winds, a huge, black dust storm could arise that would sweep the seeds from the fields along with the topsoil and all hopes for any kind of a harvest. But this combination of circumstances occurs very rarely in nature. Father hoped that this kind of disaster would not strike until after the transition had been made to intensive agriculture based on fertilizers. There was also the possibility of using part of the newly plowed land to create strips that would serve as windbreakers. In the United States the effectiveness of such windbreakers had been demonstrated. That was Father’s hope. And in the meantime the grasslands were brought under the plow. If no big breakthrough had been achieved in the grain-producing sector, Father noted with satisfaction that there was some improvement with regard to livestock. After the May decision to increase procurement prices for meat, milk, and butter, there had been a gradual rise in the number of cattle. During 1962 the number increased from 90.7 million head to 95.4 million. The amount of meat purchased in the country increased from 8.7 million tons to 9.5 million, and the quantity of milk purchased rose from 62.6 million tons to 63.9 million. Father allowed himself to brag a little. In 1953, when he had come to power, only 5.8 million tons of meat was being procured, and only 36.5 million tons of milk.12 Thus, progress was evident, although there was not much basis for rejoicing. Year after year the plans were not being fulfilled. The targets for agricultural production over a three-year period in the seven-year plan had been 25 percent, but only 6.2 percent had been achieved in reality. The reason for this was clear to Father—chronically insufficient financing. In agriculture, fixed assets relative to the number of people working in that sector were 2.8 times less than in industry, and electric power available per worker was 2.4 times less. The mechanization of water-supply systems on farms was only 33 percent. The introduction of milking machines (how hard Father had fought for that!) had been

190 Time for Change: 1962 carried out for only 10 percent of dairy cows. Only 33 percent of corn harvesting had been mechanized. For the most part, combines were not bringing in the corn. It was being cut down by hand with axes. Mechanized potato harvesters operated on only 24 percent of the land. The rest of the potato harvest was brought in by digging with spades in the old-fashioned way. In agriculture, only 3 percent of the total output was the result of spending on electric power.13 The “transformation” of collective farms into state farms also failed to produce the expected results. Agrarian economists had predicted that if the form of property was “raised” from collective ownership to “social ownership,” the farms would start to function more efficiently. But those predictions remained a dead letter, only on paper. In fact, such “transformation” produced loss, not gain. And that is understandable. If the lowest-grade and poorest collective farms were converted into state farms, the newly declared state-farm workers were not about to start doing better work. However, they would now be paid regularly for their “labor” with a government-guaranteed monthly salary—instead of making checkmarks for each “workday” put in on the collective farm and then waiting to receive their share after the final accounting was made, after the harvest was brought in and the farm’s obligations to the government had been fulfilled. As a result of these changes, the village residents, the former collective farmers, gained, but the government and society as a whole lost. Father stated regretfully that the “preliminary bout” in the competition with the United States had ended unsuccessfully. It was necessary to regroup and put our own house in order, so to speak; otherwise, we couldn’t count on success. We were losing time, year after year. “And a year is a lot of time. It’s 365 days, one twentieth of the time allowed by the party program for building communism in our country,” Father declared at a CC Presidium meeting. There was only one solution—increase investments, give the peasants more agricultural machinery, flood the farms with fertilizer, and, most important, make reforms in the relations of production. The only question was how to make those reforms. And here Father was leaning more and more in the direction of Khudenko and Liberman. As 1962 ended, Father placed his main hopes for the short term on the coming harvest of 1963. Nature always alternated drought with rain, and thus good harvests and bad took turns. After so many years of drought, better weather ought to come at last. Father sorely needed a good harvest. Without it the intended reform of the country would end up spinning its wheels. It was necessary not so much to think about the future as to fill in the gaps at the present moment.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Yevgeny Yevtushenko

191

37 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, July–October 1962 In 1962, writers and artists, as in previous years, were continuing to

wage their internecine battles, each fighting for his or her place in the sun, with the young “modernists” and “liberals” steadily gaining strength. The older generation was being pressed hard by such younger writers as Vasily Aksyonov and Anatoly Gladilin, Bella Akhmadulina and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. (See the “Cast of Characters” for brief biographies of the prominent people named in this chapter.) Their books sold out instantly, while works by “eminent” older authors gathered dust on bookstore shelves. The “eminent” oldsters had no intention of giving up without a fight. They did not wish to surrender their positions in the arts, nor in the organizations that had power over the arts, such as the Writers Union, the Artists Union, the Musicians Union, and the like. Each of the opposing groups, as in previous years, tried to win Father to its side. Works by “disapproved” writers, banned in the 1930s and 1940s—from Isaac Babel to Mikhail Zoshchenko—were now being reprinted more and more frequently. Anna Akhmatova also became available to readers again. With difficulty, such books made their way through the censorship, but eventually they did get through. Last, there also began to appear memoirs, which discussed people and things that until quite recently could not be spoken of—you could get a prison term for mentioning them. Here too the indefatigable writer and public figure Ilya Ehrenburg made the first breakthrough. In the second half of 1960 the literary monthly Novy Mir (New World) printed the first part of Ehrenburg’s memoirs, and in 1962, in its issues from April through June, it published a further portion. The memoirist recalled some people whose existence seemed to have been permanently forgotten. The censors deleted the pages about Nikolai Bukharin, who had been shot by Stalin and had not been “rehabilitated.” Ehrenburg and Bukharin had been friends in their youth. Ehrenburg’s references to another victim of Stalin’s repression, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, were likewise deleted, and the censors demanded removal of Ehrenburg’s irreverent description of the behavior of Stalin’s Politburo members at Maxim Gorky’s dacha. Nevertheless, quite a lot remained in Ehrenburg’s memoirs. Some people were happy about that, but others voiced their indignation at the author and those who “were indulgent” toward him.

192

Time for Change: 1962

That same summer, despite widespread opposition—from the censors, from the Central Committee ideologists, and from various “eminent” writers—Father supported a request by Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the “liberal” editor of Novy Mir and an established poet, for permission to publish a short novel by an unknown provincial writer named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the very touchy topic of Stalin’s prison camps. It all began on July 3, 1962. On that day, Tvardovsky submitted the manuscript to one of Father’s aides, Vladimir Lebedev, whose many responsibilities included supervision of literary matters. Lebedev promised that at the right moment he would present Tvardovsky’s request to Khrushchev. He had no doubt that the response would be positive. It was only a matter of timing the request properly. Aides to the top Soviet leaders, to the extent that they could, avoided presenting proposals that were likely to fail. Every failure was a blow to the aide’s reputation. Not until September did a suitable moment arise, when Father went to Pitsunda, a Black Sea resort in Abkhazia, to finish his vacation after it had been interrupted by the space flight of cosmonauts Nikolayev and Popovich. That autumn, while we children remained in Moscow, our father and mother vacationed by themselves. Thus I am relating what happened at Pitsunda secondhand, from the words of others. The most reliable testimony comes from the diaries of Tvardovsky himself. He wrote about what happened while the events were still fresh in his mind, without subsequent accretions of thought or feeling colored by changing political eras and opinions. One evening—in reply to Father’s question, “Well, what else do you have?”—Lebedev said that Tvardovsky had brought him a short novel, by an author who had been in Stalin’s prison camps, and that he was asking for an opinion. Lebedev explained that Tvardovsky had the highest praise for the literary merits of the work in question, but of course the subject matter was highly controversial and a political evaluation was necessary. “Well, why not, let’s read it,” Father responded good-humoredly. Lebedev began reading aloud. Father loved listening to someone else read. It allowed him to relax and rest his eyes, which were overworked from perusing hundreds, thousands of typewritten pages of official reports, decrees, and other such documents. If the work being read to him proved boring, he would even allow himself to doze off. This time Father listened with increasingly close attention. It is possible that this was the first time he felt directly what things had actually been like in those dreadful years. And I emphasize the word “felt.” It is one thing to read a report about Stalin’s victims. In such a report, the numbers and names of those who perished have a more or less abstract sound. The specific fates of individuals do not come through. After all, what are statistics? You put down a number. Then you add a zero after it—making it ten times larger. But ten times what? It’s not like a harvest where the number of bushels of grain is ten times larger. This was about people, whose bodies had been dumped in mass graves. It is

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Yevgeny Yevtushenko

193

one thing to read about such numbers, but it is something else altogether to feel what happened “from the inside,” to share the experiences, and the sufferings, of a protagonist in a work of literature—that is, of course, if it is written with talent. It’s like the difference between reading a scholarly history of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and experiencing that historical event as Tolstoy presents it in War and Peace. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich illuminated the whole gruesome reality, the inhumanity of life in the Gulag. Lebedev told me, at a later time, that there was not the slightest doubt in Father’s mind that Solzhenitsyn’s short novel should be printed. The truth about the camps had to be told. “Moscow, September 16, 1962,” Tvardovsky wrote in his diary. “What happiness that I am starting this new notebook with an event of great significance not only for my everyday life—one that I think will be an important turning point in my life—but also one that promises to have serious implications for the general course of developments in literature and, consequently, not in literature alone. Solzhenitsyn [One Day] has been approved by N.S. [Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev].”1 Father returned to Moscow from his vacation on September 14, and Lebedev flew with him. Tvardovsky recalls: “A phone conversation with Lebedev. Its content was obvious to M.I. [Mariya Ilarionova, Tvardovsky’s wife], who was listening. I actually flung myself into her arms and kissed her and wept for joy, although perhaps I could have restrained myself from the latter, but this capability, being able to burst into tears even when sober, was pleasant for me in this case.” Tvardovsky continued in his diary: In the coming days [Lebedev said] I am supposed to remain on the spot. N.S. will invite me to come see him tomorrow or some other day. In short, Lebedev was asking me not to go away, not even to Smolensk [Tvardovsky’s home region]. I of course understood all that as a way of assuring that I would be “in good form” [meaning sober] in case I am summoned. Well, all right then, for heaven’s sake! “He [N.S.] will tell you everything. The impression is still fresh in his mind . . .” [from the reading of One Day]. Bit by bit, however, Lebedev himself told me everything, warning me that this was strictly between the two of us. N.S. [did not] “read” the novel. Lebedev read it to him. That was quite touching, that the old man likes to have people read to him . . . He has read it [or it’s been read to him], and by all indications he was stirred deeply by it. “We read the first half in the evening after his work [on the official papers that arrived every day from Moscow], but the next morning he cleared everything off his desk and said: ‘Go ahead, read it through to the end.’” Then he invited Mikoyan and Voroshilov [who were on vacation nearby]. He began reading particular passages to them, for example, the one about rugs . . . Apparently, as things went along, he asked Lebedev what exactly the problem was. “It’s a good piece of writing, but what does Tvardovsky want?” Lebedev hemmed and hawed, but then came to the point: “You know that Tvardovsky’s poem ‘Horizon Beyond Horizon,’ in its finished form, would

194 Time for Change: 1962 never have seen the light of day if you, Nikita Sergeyevich, had not intervened” [in 1960]. He said: “Oh, that couldn’t be . . .” “What do you mean, it couldn’t be, Nikita Sergeyevich, when you yourself called Suslov on that occasion?” “Ah yes, I remember . . .” I [Tvardovsky] firmly fixed in my mind the words for the telegram I would send to Solzhenitsyn after meeting with N.S.: “Congratulations on victory. Come to Moscow.” [Solzhenitsyn was living in Ryazan, about 160 kilometers southeast of Moscow.] And I relive the words of that telegram now as though I had addressed them to myself. What happiness.

After the Twenty-Second Party Congress and the removal of Stalin’s remains from the Mausoleum, Father was in a resolute mood. Nevertheless, he did not want to make a final decision on his own. The collective leadership ought to express its attitude toward Solzhenitsyn’s work. I return to Tvardovsky’s diary, to the entry for September 21, 1962: Yesterday a phone call from Polikarpov [head of the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department from 1955 to 1962]. “Make twenty copies (no more and no less) of that Ivan thing of yours, what is it? Parfyonych?” “Denisovich.” “Well, all right, Denisovich. No more and no less.” “But are you abreast of things about . . .” “Yes, I am.” I [Tvardovsky] called Lebedev: I told him I wasn’t calling to doublecheck, but I remembered his words about not setting it in type for now . . .”2

Lebedev confirmed the instructions given by Dmitry Polikarpov. Copies were quickly made, equal to the number of full members and candidate members of the CC Presidium, and they were sent to Polikarpov. At the Central Committee the top page was stamped in red saying that recipients were forbidden to make copies of the material, take their copy anywhere, or pass it on to anyone, and that the material must be returned to the CC General Department when the need for it had elapsed. While copies of the manuscript were being made and distributed to the various recipients at one office or another, Father flew off to Ashkhabad. That summer, Ivan Denisovich was not the only literary work subject to ideological dispute. The thirty-year-old poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, already famous at the time, had written a new poem—“The Heirs of Stalin.” When the ideologists at the Central Committee heard about it, the title alone sent shivers down their spines. Publication of such a poem seemed just as inconceivable as publication of Solzhenitsyn’s novel. Thus Yevtushenko also decided to appeal to Khrushchev for help. Yevtushenko did not have the same influence and weight as Tvardovsky, but he did have Lebedev’s phone number. Lebedev suggested that Yevtushenko give him the text of the poem, and he would report later what Khrushchev’s reaction was. Yevtushenko sealed the poem in an envelope, took it to the Central Committee offices, and handed it in at a window.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Yevgeny Yevtushenko

195

After a little while, Lebedev invited Yevtushenko to come see him, made some passing remarks, and then promised that on a suitable occasion he would show “The Heirs of Stalin” to Khrushchev. Yevtushenko did not wait around for the “suitable occasion.” Instead he flew off to Cuba, where a film was being made based on a script he had written. The title was Cuba—My Beloved. Lebedev kept his word. At Pitsunda, Ivan Denisovich was not the only work he read to Father; he also read “The Heirs of Stalin.” It was not until October 10 that Father returned from Central Asia. While he had been traveling, Chinese troops crossed a line in the Himalayas, which India claimed as its border but which China did not recognize. A war of no small proportions broke out between our “brother” China, a fraternal member of the socialist camp, and our “friend” India, with whom we had very close relations. Father tried with all his might to have this conflict extinguished, while striving not to spoil relations with either side. After Father’s return, the CC Presidium met for two days in a row, October 11 and 12. On October 12, in addition to what was already on the agenda, Father included a point on Ivan Denisovich and “The Heirs of Stalin.” At that time, not everyone had had a chance to read Solzhenitsyn’s novel. Presidium members had not expected Father to ask their opinion of it immediately after his return, as though there were no other, more important matters. Thus the decision on Ivan Denisovich was postponed to a later time. But with regard to “The Heirs of Stalin,” Father proposed that he read it out loud right then and there at the Presidium meeting. When he finished reading, silence hung in the air. It was not to the taste of most of those present to have the subject of Stalin presented in this form. To some it even seemed as though the poem was talking about them. However, no one could bring himself to object, and at the same time no one wanted to be the first to express his approval. “Well, how about it?” That’s how Father broke the heavy silence. No one responded, and he himself resumed. In his opinion, the author “was speaking from positions of principle and talking about the personality cult.” Father proposed to the comrades that the poem be published. The comrades agreed and voted in favor.3 By then “The Heirs of Stalin” had already circulated in manuscript form, hand to hand, almost everywhere. Before he left for Cuba, Yevtushenko distributed typed copies to anyone who wanted them. It is not surprising that one of the copies ended up in the hands of Aleksei Adzhubei. I will not speculate on whether that happened by accident or whether Adzhubei received it directly from Yevtushenko. Naturally Adzhubei, who was a newspaperman to the marrow of his bones, was eager to publish the poem first in Izvestia. But he could do so only with his father-in-law’s blessing, and would certainly not go to Suslov for any such thing. But Khrushchev was away on his trip. It was necessary to wait. We all waited for Father. October 14 was the first Sunday in several weeks that our family was able to gather at Gorki-9, the government-owned dacha, or country residence, assigned

196 Time for Change: 1962 to Khrushchev. There we would go for walks together, talk things over to our hearts’ content, and then have dinner. I would remind readers that Gorki-9 is west of Moscow, near the location where the Istra River flows into the Moscow River, positioned between the Moscow River and the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Highway. It was built in the late 1920s for Aleksei Rykov, who was then the head of the Soviet government in his capacity as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. After Rykov, most of his successors in that post lived at Gorki-9. The morning of October 14 proved to be a cold one. It was Moscow autumn weather, with a foretaste of winter. After breakfast Father sat as usual at the large dining room table, from which the dishes had been cleared. The table could seat twenty people, and was covered with a white tablecloth. He was leafing through the “morning portion” of his daily paperwork. Normally it was only after lunch that he got down to work seriously. Now he was just glancing through the most urgent items, those that could not be postponed. Outside, beyond the tall windows that covered an entire wall, the first languid snowflakes began to fall. It was the start of a very gray day. The gloom was intensified in the dining room by the dark oak paneling that reached to the ceiling. It dated from the Stalin era. Molotov had occupied this dacha before us and had tried to preserve “the Boss’s style,” down to the last detail. When we moved into the dacha, we found, hanging in little niches on the bare wall opposite the windows, four black-and-white official photographs—of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. Father ordered the Stalin photo removed. Since that time, there remained, as a reminder of the past, one empty niche with a metal hook sticking out at its center. Father was not about to change anything else. It was a government dacha, and he was not its first nor would he be its last temporary occupant. In the late 1990s, Russian president Boris Yeltsin was shown on television in his home surroundings. He was at that time the occupant of Gorki-9. The television camera moved from the adjacent dining room into the “official” living room, a room with light-colored furniture in the Empire style. That furniture had been installed back in the 1930s to suit the taste of Polina Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s wife. It seemed to me that Yeltsin was sitting in the same old easy chair in which Molotov himself had sat, and then Father, and later Nikolai Ryzhkov, who was the Soviet premier under Gorbachev. And so it seems that government administrations and political eras come and go, but the furniture in government-owned residences remains the same. Yeltsin continued to live at Gorki-9 for some time after his resignation, and therefore the new president, Vladimir Putin, had to find another country place for himself. As of 2008, Gorki-9 was completely rebuilt and now looks very different, on both the outside and the inside. It became the permanent residence and office of Dmitry Medvedev, who was then the president of Russia. I have diverged from my subject. Let us return to that dining room at Gorki9 on Sunday morning, October 14, 1962.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Yevgeny Yevtushenko

197

I was sitting at the table, across from Father, waiting for him to finish with his paperwork, so that we could all go for our usual walk together. Adzhubei was circling about nearby, not sitting down. One minute he would go to the door leading to the living room; the next he would return to the table. He was holding a piece of paper that had been folded twice, into four segments. He was obviously waiting for his father-in-law to take a break from reading. When Father had finished placing the files of different colors back into the voluminous brown-leather briefcase and had fastened the clasp on its flap, he looked up at Adzhubei with an inquiring expression: “Well, what do you have there?” Adzhubei glanced at me quickly. He obviously wanted to be left alone with Father. I understood quite well, but made no move to leave my seat. Somewhat hesitantly, Adzhubei began to hold forth about what a remarkable poet Yevtushenko was, that he had written a politically timely poem about Stalin and Stalinists, but Father’s approval was needed for it to be published. Did Adzhubei know about the Presidium decision that had just been made? Most likely he did not. The meeting had been held only two days earlier, on October 12, and Father had raised the question of Yevtushenko’s poem spontaneously; it had not been on the previously prepared agenda. But if Adzhubei did know about it, that would only have spurred him on. After all, publication had been approved, but no particular place of publication had been specified. Father interrupted his son-in-law: “Go ahead and read it.” He already understood what kind of document Adzhubei had in his hands, but of course he did not know whether this was “The Heirs of Stalin,” a poem familiar to him, or some other, newer work. Adzhubei could recite poetry with professional skill. He had graduated from an actor’s studio, and had even appeared in two wartime films, although in minor roles. He read the poem with strong feeling. I remember how the words rang out. It flashed through my mind that it was written in the style of Mayakovsky, with the lines of the poem “cascading” from left to right: He wanted to memorize every face of those who carried him out of the Mausoleum It came to me that Stalin would have wanted to remember Father’s face more than anyone else’s. It also occurred to me that, in retaliation for a similar poem, Stalin, in his heyday, had another poet, Osip Mandelstam, dragged off to the prison camps of the Gulag. I had recently read the poem for which Mandelstam was imprisoned. It was still an underground poem in 1962, circulating unofficially. And Stalin would have had the author of this new poem, Yevtushenko, dragged off as well! Adzhubei was continuing his recitation:

198 Time for Change: 1962 To double, to triple, the guard by his grave, So that Stalin won’t rise and with Stalin the past. Father would look up and then look down again. He was listening, but at the same time he was glancing at that day’s issue of Pravda, which was lying open in front of him. After going through his daily paperwork, his usual practice was to look at the newspapers, and he always began with Pravda. Adzhubei had wedged his way in during the interval between the two tasks, and so, without taking a break from his work, Father continued turning the pages of the paper. Suddenly he stopped. He had seen something of interest. I followed his gaze. This kind of coincidence was bound to happen. In the top left corner of the newspaper page, the title of a poem stood out prominently, a poem by Yevtushenko, but a different one, though also one that was very timely—“Cuban Mother.” In those years, Pavel Satyukov, the editor of Pravda, used to print poems every week in the Sunday edition, always in the upper left corner of the fourth page. They were poems he considered good ones, but at the same time they were topical politically. Yevtushenko had written “Cuban Mother” after arriving in Cuba, and took advantage of a suitable occasion to send it to Moscow, where it was immediately set into type and printed. Adzhubei’s reading continued: No, Stalin has not surrendered. He considers death correctible. We have carried him out of the Mausoleum, But how will we carry Stalin out of the hearts of Stalin’s heirs?! Adzhubei momentarily looked up from his text. Father wasn’t looking at Pravda anymore. He was listening closely, as though hearing the poem for the first time. I would never have guessed that Father already knew the poem. But then, there’s nothing surprising about that. A really good poem, no matter how many times it’s read, even when it’s quite familiar, continues to have a powerful effect on the listener.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Yevgeny Yevtushenko

199

Some people curse Stalin from the podium, But in their homes at night they yearn for the old days. Adzhubei went on reading: As long as the heirs of Stalin are still on this earth It will seem to me that Stalin is still in the Mausoleum. When he finished, Adzhubei caught his breath and looked inquiringly at Father, who remained silent, but the expression on his face was approving. Obviously the poem had pleased him. “It’s a very timely poem. We would like to publish it in Izvestia, if of course,” Adzhubei started in. Adzhubei very much wanted to “stick a quill in the back” of Pravda, to take revenge for the Liberman article. “But we’re going to publish it in Pravda,” Father said, and was about to go on without changing his tone. But when he saw the hurt look on Adzhubei’s face he said, “Now don’t go getting upset.” Adzhubei certainly was upset. Once again “the quill” had been stuck in his back. What he said out loud was that he never dreamed of taking offense. After all, Pravda was the organ of the Central Committee, and Yevtushenko’s poem, when printed in its pages, would have that much greater political resonance. “Well, I tell you what,” Father muttered in a conciliatory way, getting up from his chair. He went into the living room. I’ve already mentioned that a whole battery of telephones was located there. Father dialed the number of his office. “Please tell Satyukov to call me at the dacha,” he said to the secretary on duty. A minute later Satyukov called. “Aleksei Ivanovich [Adzhubei] is going to read you a poem by Yevtushenko. It must be printed in Pravda, and the sooner, the better.” Thus, after a brief exchange of pleasantries with Satyukov, Father had issued him an order. He did not mention that this was a decision of the Central Committee Presidium. Satyukov promised to print the poem in the next Sunday issue of Pravda. “Now let’s go for a walk,” Father said after hanging up. The whole family went out, heading down some paths through a park and then along the Moscow River. Only Adzhubei remained at home, dictating the text of the poem to Satyukov.

200 Time for Change: 1962 A week later, on Sunday, October 21, 1962, “The Heirs of Stalin” appeared in Pravda. But Satyukov was a cautious person. Above the poem by Yevtushenko, he had placed another, titled “The Program of Our Party Is Clear.” It was by a Tajik poet, Mirsail Mirshakar, translated by Mikhail Derzhavin. At the same time, further down on the page, as though to “balance” the Mirshakar poem, Satyukov had “brought up reinforcements” for Yevtushenko—a poem by Yaroslav Smelyakov titled “Cogs in the Machine” (Vintiki), whose first line read: “Our gloomy chief, the genius of yesterday . . .”4 These poems, especially because they were published in Pravda, had the political impact Father expected. Some people approved them. Others concealed their opinions—for the time being.

38 Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Novy Mir, and Censorship, November 1962 Toward the end of October 1962, Tvardovsky was feeling completely

worn out. After Father’s return from Central Asia (on October 10) Tvardovsky had hovered next to his telephone, not taking a single step away. But the phone never rang. “The main thing during this period, aside from ‘outbreaks’ [of drinking], which occurred twice, was the waiting, the waiting, the waiting,” Tvardovsky wrote in his notebook. “In the last few days this has been intensified by the additional fact that not only N.S. [Khrushchev] but the Presidium itself has made the decision to publish Ivan Denisovich. This question was discussed together with examples of ‘resistance in the apparatus to the decisions of the TwentySecond Congress’ [‘we can’t act as though nothing has happened’]. This occurred in connection with some letters from Yevtushenko and incidents like ‘getting through the censors with The Blue Notebook by the recently deceased author’ [Emmanuil Kazakevich]; he had died that year, from cancer.” I have not been able to ascertain what letters from Yevtushenko were referred to here. But I should remind readers about The Blue Notebook. In April 1960 the magazine Oktyabr (October) published this short novel by Kazakevich, but it did so only after Kazakevich had appealed to Father. The problem was that Kazakevich had taken up a “touchy” subject—namely, that

200 Time for Change: 1962 A week later, on Sunday, October 21, 1962, “The Heirs of Stalin” appeared in Pravda. But Satyukov was a cautious person. Above the poem by Yevtushenko, he had placed another, titled “The Program of Our Party Is Clear.” It was by a Tajik poet, Mirsail Mirshakar, translated by Mikhail Derzhavin. At the same time, further down on the page, as though to “balance” the Mirshakar poem, Satyukov had “brought up reinforcements” for Yevtushenko—a poem by Yaroslav Smelyakov titled “Cogs in the Machine” (Vintiki), whose first line read: “Our gloomy chief, the genius of yesterday . . .”4 These poems, especially because they were published in Pravda, had the political impact Father expected. Some people approved them. Others concealed their opinions—for the time being.

38 Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Novy Mir, and Censorship, November 1962 Toward the end of October 1962, Tvardovsky was feeling completely

worn out. After Father’s return from Central Asia (on October 10) Tvardovsky had hovered next to his telephone, not taking a single step away. But the phone never rang. “The main thing during this period, aside from ‘outbreaks’ [of drinking], which occurred twice, was the waiting, the waiting, the waiting,” Tvardovsky wrote in his notebook. “In the last few days this has been intensified by the additional fact that not only N.S. [Khrushchev] but the Presidium itself has made the decision to publish Ivan Denisovich. This question was discussed together with examples of ‘resistance in the apparatus to the decisions of the TwentySecond Congress’ [‘we can’t act as though nothing has happened’]. This occurred in connection with some letters from Yevtushenko and incidents like ‘getting through the censors with The Blue Notebook by the recently deceased author’ [Emmanuil Kazakevich]; he had died that year, from cancer.” I have not been able to ascertain what letters from Yevtushenko were referred to here. But I should remind readers about The Blue Notebook. In April 1960 the magazine Oktyabr (October) published this short novel by Kazakevich, but it did so only after Kazakevich had appealed to Father. The problem was that Kazakevich had taken up a “touchy” subject—namely, that

Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Novy Mir, and Censorship

201

in the turmoil of political events in Petrograd in July 1917, the Russian provisional government had ordered the arrest of Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik party, who then went into hiding in the small town of Razliv (about thirty-two kilometers northwest of Petrograd). He was accompanied by Grigory Zinoviev, who in 1917 was also a leader of that party and a close associate of Lenin’s. However, many years later, in 1936, Stalin had Zinoviev executed after a show trial in which the latter was falsely convicted of such fantastic accusations as conspiring to overthrow the Soviet state in alliance with Hitler and the Japanese mikado (emperor). In Kazakevich’s novel, set in mid-1917, Lenin addresses Zinoviev as “comrade.” The censors demanded not only that the word “comrade” be removed but also that Zinoviev be excluded altogether. Kazakevich objected and a scandal ensued. When the matter reached Father, he asked for an explanation from the Central Committee’s Cultural Department. In response, Central Committee officials wrote: “The author does not approach the question of evaluating Zinoviev from class positions, but takes a ‘universal-human’ approach, emphasizing how well-educated he was and that, supposedly, he was honestly dedicated to the Revolution . . .” They continued along the same lines: “The Cultural Department does not consider it expedient to publish this work, which places Zinoviev in the foreground, alongside the great Lenin, portraying him as a person close to Lenin, without revealing the subsequent role of Zinoviev as an ideological enemy of Bolshevism, a renegade from the Revolution, and an advocate of the restoration of capitalism.” This was written four years after the Twentieth Party Congress by people who were very well informed about the work of the Shvernik commission, set up in 1956 after that congress. The Shvernik commission’s findings left no doubt that all the charges in the Moscow show trials of 1936–1938, in which Zinoviev was one of the defendants, were total fabrications, sucked out of someone’s thumb, including charges that the defendants wanted to restore capitalism.1 Suslov sided with the Cultural Department, but Khrushchev did not. He brought the question to a meeting of the CC Presidium. In a speech at that meeting, Father expressed indignation: “How can you order Lenin to call Zinoviev something other than ‘comrade’? Should he call him ‘future enemy of the people’?” Suslov said nothing. He was not about to “mix it up” with Khrushchev over this issue. Kazakevich’s work was sent to the printer. And here’s something quite new: the question of my poem Tyorkin in the Other World. [Here I return to Tvardovsky’s diary, to the entry dated October 19, 1962.] Supposedly the following words were even uttered [by Khrushchev]: “We criticized Tv. [Tvardovsky] back then, I along with others, but it should have been printed.” Since Monday [October 15] I have been at Lebedev’s office [Tvardovsky was recovering from a drinking bout], completely preoccupied with this question. The waiting has been especially stressful since this morning (because today or tomorrow he will receive me). In my whole life

202 Time for Change: 1962 it’s hard to imagine a more stressful concurrence of two things so powerfully affecting my nerves, coming from two different directions—my depressed consciousness because of my “weakness” [alcoholism] and the awareness of such a significant achievement, a victory in the full sense of the word, and yet it required so much energy and tenacity.

Meanwhile, developments in the world were following their own course, as usual. The conflict in the Himalayas had not subsided completely, but it had lost its former intensity. On Saturday, October 20, Father met with Tvardovsky, most likely at the Central Committee offices. The visitor’s log at his Kremlin office does not record any visit by Tvardovsky. In fact there are no entries in the log for that day. Father loved Tvardovsky’s poetry. With its melodious evocation of peasant life, it brought back memories of childhood, taking the Soviet leader way back to the days when he lived as a boy in the Kursk region, in his home village of Kalinovka. Father also took delight in Tvardovsky’s wartime poem Vasily Tyorkin, which was truly a ballad of the people, about a Soviet soldier who endured and suffered so much but achieved victory. On the other hand, as I have already written, relations with Tvardovsky as editor had been uneven. On some occasions, Father had supported him wholeheartedly, but on other occasions, at the instigation of Suslov, Dmitry Shepilov, and people like them, he had come crashing down on Novy Mir and its editors with the thunder and lightning of ideological accusations. This time an amicable note had been struck when they met. “I was welcomed in such a favorable way, the likes of which had never happened before. I understood that in general the ice was breaking up in some way.”2 That is what Tvardovsky told his co-thinkers at Novy Mir after returning from the Central Committee meeting. On the next day, Sunday, October 21, 1962, Tvardovsky wrote a detailed description in his diary of what had happened the previous day: Yesterday, at last, the meeting with N.S. took place—which for the last month and a half has been my chief concern, a source of stress and strain, and in the last few days, sheer agonizing impatience. Only on the eve of the meeting did a simple surmise occur to me, that N.S. could not know that I knew about his intention to meet with me. For that reason he would not be feeling any obligations about a promise made or about setting a date—as [he might have] if I myself had asked to be received by him or if he had made known his desire to see me. He could not have been feeling any of that. And I could not even complain to him—because that’s the way everything took shape. On Thursday, Lebedev told me: “either tomorrow [Friday, October 19] or the day after” [Saturday, October 20]. Friday went by—not a sound. Yesterday morning Lebedev advised me: “Call him.” “Should I go use the special government phone line?” “Why? Use the municipal phone.” “Will they connect me?” “I’ve arranged it with Comrade Seryogin there.” [Seryogin was a KGB officer, one of the people on duty at the reception room of Khrushchev’s office.]

Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Novy Mir, and Censorship

203

I made the call: “Comrade Seryogin?” “Yes, this is Comrade Seryogin,” he answered. “Mightn’t I ask . . .” “No, he can’t speak on this phone. I’ll report to him and call you back.” Within less than an hour [Seryogin called back]: “Come to our office.” He [Khrushchev] stood up to meet me, gave me a welcoming greeting, and said a few words about health and age and about Robert Frost. [Father had met with Frost at Pitsunda on September 7, 1962.] “I don’t know if he’s America’s number one poet—he didn’t seem like that to me. Maybe he was at one time.” “Well, now, about Ivan Denisovich. [On Khrushchev’s lips, in the course of the discussion, this was the name of the hero of the story, but also, as it were, the name of the author.] I began reading it with some feeling of prejudgment, I must admit, and I didn’t read it all through at once. At first for some reason it didn’t especially grab me. The truth is that, generally speaking, I don’t have the capacity to read large amounts at one time. But later it went along well. By the second half—I was already reading it together with Mikoyan. Yes, the material is out of the ordinary, and I must say the style and the language are unusual—couldn’t get used to it right away. But regardless, I consider it a powerful work, very. And despite the kind of material in it, it doesn’t produce a feeling of heaviness, although there’s plenty of reason for bitterness there. I consider it a life-affirming work.” That term [“life-affirming”] had been in the preface I myself [Tvardovsky] had written in the manuscript version, but it was no longer present in the printed copies [of which there were twenty]. Dementyev [Andrei Dementyev, one of Tvardovsky’s assistant editors at Novy Mir] and the others had talked me out of it, although I myself did not feel that use of the term was obligatory. The truth is, it’s a banal word, and in combination with this “subject matter” it did have a rather false ring to it.

But Father repeated the phrase: “Yes, a life-affirming work. And written, as I see it, from party positions. I must say that not everyone accepted it that way, and not all at once. I gave it to the Presidium members to read. Then I asked, ‘Well, how about it?’ when we [the CC Presidium] had gathered again. ‘What was this? If at the Twenty-Second Congress we told people what they might believe [about the crimes of the Stalin era] and they believed it, then how could we not let them say the same thing themselves, even if they say it in their own way, with different words? Think about it.’ At the next Presidium meeting, there was general agreement that the piece ought to be published.” That was how Tvardovsky recorded, word for word, what Khrushchev had said to him. Now let us review the chronology once more. On September 20, Polikarpov ordered twenty copies of Ivan Denisovich from Tvardovsky. According to Malin’s notes, on the very same day a CC Presidium meeting was held, at which, by all indications, Father told about this work, which he had read, and advised his colleagues to familiarize themselves with it. In Malin’s notes, there is no reference to a discussion of Ivan Denisovich at the Presidium meeting on that day, which is not surprising. Most Presidium members had never set eyes on it before. The Presidium did not meet again, evidently, before September 26, when Father departed on his trip to Central Asia. At least there are no notes by

204 Time for Change: 1962 Malin to that effect. The next CC Presidium meeting with Father participating was not until October 12. I have already written about that meeting, where there was discussion about both Yevtushenko and Solzhenitsyn. According to Tvardovsky’s diary entries, at that October 12 meeting the decision about publishing Ivan Denisovich was postponed. The decision seems to have been made on October 14, a Sunday, at an extra session of the Presidium, which took up the SinoIndian border conflict. On the one hand, it would seem that there would not have been time for Ivan Denisovich at that session. However, most likely, it was taken up. Father might have been in the mood for such a thing, under the impact of the Yevtushenko poem Adzhubei read to him that morning. That might have reminded him about Solzhenitsyn’s novel, and he might have asked the Presidium members at that point to give their official approval for its publication. Everyone voted in favor. “It’s true that some said it was all right to print it,” Khrushchev told Tvardovsky, “but they felt it was desirable that the description of the camp administration be toned down, that officials of the NKVD [People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs] should not be portrayed in such dark colors. ‘What are you saying?’ I said [this is Khrushchev talking]. ‘Do you think that sort of thing didn’t exist? [cruelties, atrocities, etc.] It did. And people like that were specially selected. And the whole system [of lawlessness] led to that. It was not a vacation resort.’” In other words, the “comrades” had felt compelled to vote “in favor.” They didn’t want to argue with Father. But in their hearts . . . Tvardovsky had had more than just one or two meetings with Father in the past, and he had become accustomed to the Soviet leader’s way of talking, as he indicates in the following passage from his diary: “Beginning at this point, as he had in other conversations we had, Khrushchev returned to his perennial topic, the evil deeds of Stalin’s time.” We have a special commission functioning now, and we already have three volumes, you see, where everything about that period is documented and described in detail. [I am continuing to quote from Tvardovsky’s firsthand account of what Father said.] We can’t publish it now, but let it all be preserved for those who will come after us and will take our places. In general, we are not judges of our own selves, especially we people in power. Only after us will other people judge us: what kind of legacy we inherited, how we conducted ourselves [under Stalin and after him], and how we overcame the consequences of that period. Many people write to me that our apparatus is Stalinist, that in their inertia all [the apparatus people] are Stalinists, that this apparatus should be combed out thoroughly.

At this point Father seemed to turn to Tvardovsky for advice. Father continued: “Yes, we have Stalinists in our apparatus, and we are all Stalinists. And those who write—perhaps they are Stalinists to the greatest extent. That’s why the problem won’t be solved by driving out everyone and everything. We all come from that time and carry the weight of the past on our shoulders. The thing is

Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Novy Mir, and Censorship

205

to overcome past habits, even habits of thinking, to clarify the essence [of these historical matters] for oneself, not to chase people out or arrest them.” Father had answered the question himself. Tvardovsky waited until Father finished his tirade, or disquisition, in order to change the subject to something that troubled him no less than the problem of permission to publish Ivan Denisovich—the subject of censorship. At last an opportunity had arisen for him to bring that up. “I have appealed to you, Nikita Sergeyevich, about this manuscript because, to put it bluntly, my experience as an editor tells me with unalterable certainty that if I did not appeal to you, this talented work would be slashed by the censors.” Here Tvardovsky was making a statement that he had prepared in advance. “Yes, they would slash it,” Khrushchev readily confirmed. Then Tvardovsky reminded him that the censorship had also forbidden publication of the concluding chapters of his long narrative poem Horizon Beyond Horizon. “‘Who could do that? How could that happen?’ Khrushchev repeated the same words I [Tvardovsky] had heard from Lebedev.” I should remind readers about the historical background to what was being discussed here. The aforementioned poem by Tvardovsky, completed in 1953, was held up by the censors for many years. They suspected the author of sympathy for the kulaks. In the 1930s, Tvardovsky’s parents had been victims of “dekulakization”; they had been banished to internal exile in Siberia.3 Father’s direct intervention had been required in order for Horizon Beyond Horizon to finally be printed in 1960. And it was printed not just anywhere, but in Pravda, and not just at any old time, but in connection with the May Day holidays, on April 29 and May 1, 1960. In 1961, Tvardovsky received the Lenin Prize for this poem, thanks to Father’s direct support. Thus, one may regard as purely rhetorical the expressions of “surprise” by Father. He remembered it all perfectly well. However, Khrushchev’s “forgetfulness” allowed Tvardovsky to take up the question of censorship, as Tvardovsky describes in his diary: Nekrasov’s magazine Sovremennik [The Contemporary, edited by the nineteenth-century Russian poet Nikolai Nekrasov] and the tsarist government, whether under Nicholas I or Alexander II, represented two different camps, hostilely opposed to one another. The censorship in that case was natural and to be expected. But Novy Mir and the Soviet government, for example, are all in the same camp. I, the chief editor [of Novy Mir], was appointed by the Central Committee. Why, then, is another editor, a censor, placed above me? The Central Committee would never knowingly appoint this person [the censor] as editor of a magazine, because he has no expertise in literary matters. But he has the right to remove any article at all, to demand cuts or deletions, etc. Thus a non-editor has been placed over the editor. And the main problem is that, even though the function of these censorship agencies (of Glavlit [the main administration on literature]) is officially limited to protecting government and military secrets, they intervene decisively in the

206 Time for Change: 1962 realm of literature proper (asking things like ‘Why such a melancholy landscape?’), and they often take upon themselves the task of implementing the literary policy of the party, referring, for example, to the Central Committee resolution [of 1946] about the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad and especially about Zoshchenko, although it is now outdated and in effect has been nullified by the Central Committee itself, which long ago decided to reprint Zoshchenko and Akhmatova; and not only that, in spirit and style the whole way of directing literary policy has departed from the dictates contained in that resolution [of 1946]. Khrushchev, as though thinking out loud, said in reply: “That’s something we need to reflect on. You may be right. In fact, a year ago we ended the censorship of foreign correspondents’ reports from Moscow, and what do you think? They began to lie less and slander us less.”

According to Vladimir Lakshin, Tvardovsky’s friend and one of his assistant editors at Novy Mir, Tvardovsky told his comrades-in-arms at Novy Mir: “Khrushchev agreed with me that one or another opinion held by some leading official about a work of art often depended on accidental factors, might even be the result of poor digestion.” Tvardovsky tried to convince Khrushchev that literature could best help the Soviet government if it was given the opportunity to more freely criticize the dark sides of Soviet life. “Soviet power,” said Tvardovsky, “is not a tender and fragile flower, like a mimosa, liable to crumple at the slightest criticism. You know, Nikita Sergeyevich, the best elements in our literature support you in the struggle against the cult of personality.”4 Now I return to Tvardovsky’s diary, which quotes Khrushchev as saying: “‘Why, this fellow here, he sent me a letter and his poem, which was forbidden publication. What’s his name?’ For a moment Khrushchev had forgotten the name, but he immediately recalled that is was Yevtushenko and continued: ‘I didn’t read anything there that was against Soviet power or against the party.’” And now, back to Lakshin’s account: “As the conversation [with Khrushchev] was coming to an end, Tvardovsky said: ‘I have one more request, a personal one.’ Nikita Sergeyevich suddenly subsided and seemed to droop. Apparently he thought that a request for a new apartment or dacha was coming. He lost all his exuberance. ‘Couldn’t my trip to America be postponed? [asked Tvardovsky] I want to finish my long narrative poem, that is, I want to finish working on it on my own little plot of land in the country. “Tvardovsky explained that with this poem he was ‘like a pregnant woman getting close to her time.’”5 He was talking about Tyorkin in the Other World. Its history also went way back, to 1954. The official ideologists had searched around in it and had found many dubious allegories and innuendoes. Moreover, they could not understand at all what “the other world” was doing in the poem. Wasn’t “this world” good enough for Tvardovsky? Khrushchev had also been drawn into the uproar around Tyorkin in the Other World. Since then nearly eight years had passed.

Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Novy Mir, and Censorship

207

Father had not forgotten that contretemps, but he no longer remembered the details very well. Let me return to Tvardovsky’s diary. “Ah, of course, now I remember.” That was how Khrushchev responded to Tvardovsky’s request. “Back then it suffered from a number of defects . . . ,” Tvardovsky then stated diplomatically. “No, even then it was a very talented work . . . only some particular places . . . ,” Father interrupted him. Father couldn’t remember exactly what errors the poet had been accused of. “Oh don’t worry, that part hasn’t been in the poem for a long time,” Tvardovsky reassured him. “But I’ll tell you frankly that my reworking of the poem has not gone along the lines of smoothing over the sharp edges. On the contrary, it will be sharper.” “Of course, of course,” Father responded encouragingly. “No, there’s no need for you to go to America now. Our relations with them [the Americans] right now are like this.” Father gestured with his hands to indicate a dispute or a butting of heads. “But in time that will pass.” As Tvardovsky recollected in his diary: “That was how Nikita Sergeyevich responded to my proposal that the trip to America be postponed until the following spring. To be exact, it even pleased him.” On October 20, Father did not know that the Americans were already photographing our missiles in Cuba and that the crisis would break out two days later, on Monday, October 22. But he had no doubt that after the Americans found out about the missiles, which he thought would be in November, Tvardovsky would then say, of his own accord, that he’d rather not visit the United States, because that would be “ugh, no picnic.” Tvardovsky thanked Khrushchev for agreeing that he would not have to go to the United States right then, and he added: “I have one more request, a final one. After I’ve crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s, when I’m completely finished with the poem, allow me to show Tyorkin in the Other World to you.” “I will be glad to read it,” Khrushchev responded courteously. And in parting, he added: “Just stay healthy, and all the rest—fame and everything else— will be yours and will stay with you forever.”6 According to Lakshin: “On the next day, Aleksandr Trifonovich [Tvardovsky] gathered all of us together at the editorial offices and briefly, avoiding any extra verbiage, informed the staff members [of Novy Mir]. He said that Khrushchev made a very good impression on him with his desire not to crudely interfere in literary matters. ‘It seems that he feels annoyed that he does not have his own Lunacharsky.’”7 The thunder of the Cuban missile crisis erupted and then died away. A month later, on November 19, 1962, a Central Committee plenum convened. I have already written about it in detail. The eleventh issue of Novy Mir,

208 Time for Change: 1962 containing the short novel Ivan Denisovich, arrived in time for the opening day. Tvardovsky had made a special effort to have it ready by that crucial date. He himself was a candidate member of the Central Committee and was in a hurry to reach Sverdlov Hall, in the Kremlin, in time for the beginning of the first session. But on the way he stopped at the editorial offices of Novy Mir, where Solzhenitsyn was waiting for him. They had already met the previous day, but had not had time to talk over everything they wanted to. Tvardovsky wrote in his diary: Morning. I’m on my way to the plenum. Yesterday—Solzhenitsyn. Four hours. He’s difficult in some ways, enough to give you a pain in the liver, but he’s a good fellow. Still, he’s very worked up and worried. In a big hurry. Dying to get going, even though I tell him, “Look, right now, within three minutes, a car will arrive.” First day of the plenum—Nikita Sergeyevich’s [Khrushchev’s] report. As always, rather lengthy, with many technical details not obligatory for a Central Committee plenum, and so forth. As always, the main interest [of the report] lies not in the “text,” but when he breaks away from the text, so to speak, as when he quotes a note by Lenin about “a party in power defending its own scoundrels.” After the evening session I came out of the hall, and my goodness!—in almost everyone’s hands, besides the text of Khrushchev’s report, which, with its red cover, had just been distributed to everyone, there was also the blue cover of Novy Mir No. 11. It seems that 2,000 copies had been delivered. I went downstairs, where a brisk trade was going on at kiosks that sold magazines, etc. There were waiting lines—not just one, either—at kiosks where piles of Novy Mir could be seen, and it was not the kind of buying where the customers take a long time to look things over and pick things out, but where they say “Gimme that, gimme that” or “Do you have any left of . . . ?” Last night I shared impressions with Zaks [another one of Tvardovsky’s assistant editors at Novy Mir], and he said that all day at the editorial offices there had been God knows how many phone calls and the constant arrival of people “on a pilgrimage” [to Novy Mir]. At newsstands in the city, lists of people who wanted to order No. 11 were being kept. No copies had yet reached them yesterday, but today they should be there. Now, after all this, I must be somewhat satisfied with myself, instead of indulging in my customary, exhausting self-flagellation, satisfied that I carried the job through to the end, having overcome everything that, to everyone around me without exception, had seemed simply inconceivable.8

Not all writers shared the thrill Tvardovsky felt. “Today I met [Valentin] Katayev,” Kornei Chukovsky wrote in a diary entry for November 24, 1962. He’s outraged over One Day. To my surprise he said: “The novel is false. It doesn’t show any protest.” “What protest?!” “The protest of a peasant confined in a labor camp. How dare he not protest, if only under his blanket?”

The New Generation in Art and Politics

209

But did Katayev himself do a lot of protesting under the Stalin regime? He was composing slavish hymns of praise, like everyone. Now I see how disadvantageous it is for Black Hundred types—this antiStalin policy pursued by Khrushchev.9

I think Chukovsky somewhat overstates the case. Katayev was not a Black Hundred. He simply envied Solzhenitsyn.

39 The New Generation in Art and Politics, April–November 1962 Not only in literature but also in the visual arts, previously unimag-

inable changes were taking place. In Moscow on April 4, 1962, at the Filmmakers Club (Dom Kino), an exhibit of paintings featured artists of a “nontraditional” kind from the studio of Eligiy Belyutin. This studio and its works had very much come into fashion. Eligiy Belyutin (nicknamed Eliy or Elik by those close to him) was an artist and collector of paintings as well as a professor of drawing at the Moscow Printing Trades Institute (Moskovsky Poligrafichesky Institut) and director of an art studio in Moscow, where he functioned as a mentor to young artists. He was a connoisseur of the classics, but at the same time a man who rejected the classical style and encouraged the youth to experiment in new directions. Belyutin’s father was an Italian, whose name had been Michele Bellucci. He was the son of a prominent opera director, Paulo Stefano Bellucci. Michele Bellucci had left Italy in response to the call of the revolution, for people to come to Russia and help build a new life. After settling in Moscow, he married a Russian woman in 1921, a descendant and heiress of the Kurbatov princes. She had been an artist in the Moscow office of the Imperial Theaters run by Ivan Grigoryevich Grinyov. Both sides of the family, that of the Italian husband and that of the Russian wife, were passionate collectors and connoisseurs of painting. Michele Bellucci changed his name to Mikhail Belyutin, and in the years after the revolution he greatly enlarged the size of the collection that he already possessed, purchasing wherever he could paintings that had been confiscated

210 Time for Change: 1962 from the palaces of the nobility, including works by Titian and Veronese. Fortunately for him, he suffered no shortage of funds. His Italian father, the opera director, supported and encouraged him and, on the birth of a son, presented him with the gift of a canvas titled The Madonna and Child with John the Baptist, a painting by Giovanni Battista. The son, born in 1925, was named Eligiy. This is the Russian form of a saint’s name—a seventh-century Christian, Eligius (ca. 588–660), born to a Gallo-Roman family near what is now Limoges, France. He was a goldsmith in the court of a Merovingian king, Dagobert I, and later was appointed bishop of Noyon-Tournai in what is now Belgium. Eligius, also called Eloy, is the patron saint of goldsmiths and metalworkers generally, and by extension, of artists. In 1927, Mikhail Belyutin was arrested and shot, but for some reason his paintings were not confiscated. The son, Eligiy, fought in the Great Patriotic War (the Nazi-Soviet war of 1941–1945), surviving despite being wounded in one of his lungs and suffering gangrene of the left hand. After the victory over the Germans, he became an artist. Others of the “young school” gathered around him, people who had recently fought on the front lines, people who painted, drew, and sculpted in ways different from those prescribed by the generally accepted canons of that time.1 The newspapers did not write about the April 4 exhibit, but “all of Moscow” visited Belyutin’s show. It should be said that exhibits of nontraditional art had occurred even earlier. In January 1960, the Moscow Artists Union, at its exhibition hall on Kuznetsky Most (a major shopping street in Moscow), organized a display of works by Falk, Neizvestny, Andronov, Ponomaryov, and Mordvinov, as well as by many other young and not-so-young artists who did not fit into the framework of official Soviet art. Somewhat earlier, in 1957, at the Moscow Artists Club (Dom Khudozhnika) and later in Gorky Park, a separate exhibition was held for the works of the legendary Robert Falk, who had belonged to the Jack of Diamonds group (1910–1916) and the World of Arts group (1898–1924). In the 1930s, it was forbidden to mention the names of these groups. Under Stalin, Falk had fallen into disfavor, and he resurfaced only in 1957. He died in 1958 but left behind many followers and, more important, many admirers. It was not so much that people admired his art—it was not to everyone’s liking, not by far—but they admired his gift of innovation, a quality that had long been forgotten and to which the visitors at Moscow art galleries were completely unaccustomed. In December 1959, also at the Moscow Artists Club, a posthumous exhibit was held to display the works of the “extreme formalist” D. P. Shternberg. In response to this art show, the minister of culture, Nikolai Alexandrovich Mikhailov, “requested that the Central Committee of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] give the necessary directions both to the Moscow Artists Union [Russian acronym, MOSKh] and to the organizing committee of the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic] Artists Union [which was then in formation] for a decisive change in the nature of the work of the

The New Generation in Art and Politics

211

MOSKh in arranging exhibits,” as though he himself did not have such authority. He simply did not want to step in and “take measures.” The Central Committee also took no measures.2 In May 1960, Yekaterina Furtseva became minister of culture. Not only did she not make any complaints about the modernists, but she actually patronized them. Of course, she did this within certain limits, seeking not to irritate or antagonize the traditional artists “of the academy.” On July 7, 1962, Father visited the workshop of the sculptor Nikolai Tomsky, a leading light in the Soviet art world and a member of the Academy of Arts. Father rejected Tomsky’s proposed monument to Lenin, which previously had seemed beyond dispute and above criticism. Father canceled the project despite support by both the Artists Union and Suslov for Tomsky’s proposed work. Father gave instructions that a contest be announced and young people brought in. Let them compete for the project. Having thus reviewed some of the prehistory of the events, I will now return to autumn 1962. In November 1962, the people who worked at Belyutin’s studio displayed their art once more at a small hall near Taganka Square, also with the permission of the authorities. This exhibit had even greater resonance than the one in April 1962 at the Filmmakers Club. In Western newspapers, reports by Moscow correspondents told about the success of Soviet avant-garde artists in their departure from the rigid canons of socialist realism. In the “Areopagus” (high court), or upper reaches, of the party’s ideological establishment, some changes had also taken place. Although these were not particularly noticeable to the passing observer, for people on the inside they were quite distinct. One of the Central Committee secretaries, Leonid Fyodorovich Ilyichev, who became chairman of the Central Committee’s Ideological Department, formed in November 1962, was increasing his strength and influence. Thus, for Suslov, a rival made his appearance for the first time since 1957, when Shepilov had departed from the scene after participating in a failed coup attempt by old-line Stalinists against Khrushchev. For the time being, Ilyichev represented more a potential, than an actual rival, but still . . . Ilyichev was a small, round, tenacious man, full of initiative, and faster than quicksilver. Moreover, unlike party officials of the Suslov type, he was an art collector. On the walls of his apartment hung canvases not only by the socialist realists, but also paintings done in a much freer manner, up to and including outright abstract art. Suslov and his people considered such liberties to be renegacy, Westernism, and even bourgeoisification. Ilyichev knew this very well, but paid no particular attention. He often allowed himself to be carried away by the mood of the moment, even though such lapses, which as a rule were harmless, did contradict the proper image for the second most important preserver of the ideological and moral foundations of the Soviet system. I remember the occasion when Ilyichev had tried to help catch butterflies for my collection. That was during Father’s official visit to Indonesia in 1960. Can

212 Time for Change: 1962 you imagine Suslov with a butterfly net, even behind the private walls of his own dacha, let alone out in public in a foreign country? During that same trip, on the way to Indonesia from Burma (renamed Myanmar in 1989), our airplane crossed the equator. At that point, Ilyichev had a bright idea—to hold a traditional celebration in honor of Neptune. He used a mop for a beard, put a paper crown with sequins on his head, made a trident out of a broomstick, and in this form appeared before Khrushchev demanding tribute for the right to cross the equator and at the same time requiring his signature on certificates for all “accompanying personnel” signifying that they had permission to cross the equator. In this “Neptune’s retinue,” Ilyichev included not only Adzhubei and Satyukov, chief editors of Izvestia and Pravda, respectively, and Kharlamov, the press secretary of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, who were happy to play along; he also included Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister. Gromyko put on a bright red life jacket, but he felt uncomfortable and smiled in a strained manner, as though apologizing for such improprieties. But Ilyichev took great pleasure in this playacting, and Father joined in willingly as well. He signed the imaginary certificates, presented a can of tomato juice to Neptune as an offering, and begged for permission to fly on. Neptune granted permission. Father viewed Ilyichev quite favorably, was impressed by his vivacity and even more by his energy. Ilyichev was a courtier to the marrow of his bones, and always kept himself in Father’s close vicinity. Unlike Suslov, who sat locked up in his office, Ilyichev was not disdainful toward any kind of work, including in Khrushchev’s private editorial group, which not only edited Father’s speeches but also kept in permanent contact with him and took part in working out political decisions. During the preceding year, Ilyichev had come much closer to Father, while Suslov remained at a distance. It is not surprising that Suslov was on his guard against Ilyichev and at the time under discussion regarded him with increasing hostility as a truly dangerous rival. Adzhubei has written that as early as 1961, immediately after the TwentySecond Party Congress, Father made an attempt to get rid of Suslov as chief ideologist, to reassign him from his position as a Central Committee secretary to the relatively meaningless post of chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and at the same time to return Brezhnev, who was then chairman of the Supreme Soviet, to active work in the party’s Central Committee. Here is Adzhubei’s account: “Khrushchev consulted on this matter with Mikoyan, Kosygin, and Brezhnev. They had a conversation on a Sunday at the dacha, uninhibited by my presence. They asked Brezhnev to have a talk with Suslov. Brezhnev called him on the telephone directly from the dacha and, returning to the group after the phone conversation, reported that Suslov had fallen into hysterics and pleaded that he not be removed.”3 I personally did not hear about anything like that, but I was not interested in ideological intrigues. Adzhubei, to the contrary, was very interested in them. At that time, Ilyichev was putting together his own team. Satyukov, chief editor of Pravda, leaned in Ilyichev’s direction. A cautious man by nature, he

The New Generation in Art and Politics

213

never openly contradicted Suslov, but in his heart he preferred Ilyichev. In addition, like Ilyichev, Satyukov loved paintings and was an art collector. Adzhubei, chief editor of Izvestia, also leaned toward Ilyichev. Adzhubei was a capable person and because of his family connections could be independent in relation to other top officials. On appropriate occasions he loved to give Suslov and his people a “jab of the pen” on the sly, in an unobtrusive way—for example, to publish something without asking them, but of course after consulting with Father, that could be considered ideologically questionable, such as excerpts from the memoirs of Charlie Chaplin or an essay about Marilyn Monroe. Suslov, for his part, hated Adzhubei with all his heart. Adzhubei had little understanding of painting, or the arts in general—or more exactly, he really did not understand them at all. But following Ilyichev’s example, he also became a “collector.” Other “fighters on the ideological front” crossed over from Suslov’s camp to join Ilyichev’s circle, including Mikhail Kharlamov, head of the press department of the Foreign Ministry, and Boris Burkov, chairman of the governing body of the Novosti Press Agency. These “party youth,” that is, young party officials like Kharlamov and Burkov, had traveled abroad, visited foreign museums, and discovered the existence of “modern art” in the West. They had also learned about Kandinsky and Chagall and began unobtrusively, little by little, to provide patronage and protection for our own modernists. After the November 1962 Central Committee plenum, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov also became a Central Committee secretary. He was not purely an ideologist, but because of his official duties as “liaison” with the socialist countries, he was close to those who oversaw ideological matters. Like Ilyichev, Andropov had a keen appreciation for painting, knew his way around in the arts, in a dilettantish way, was not put off by modernism, and even wrote a little poetry himself. In contrast to the impulsive Ilyichev, Andropov was always careful to calculate his political moves far in advance. Andropov was in no hurry to give his support to those who rejected traditional art. In 1956, he had been the Soviet ambassador to Hungary and had seen with his own eyes how the Petöfi Circle evolved from a harmless literary association into a center not only for ideological resistance but also for an armed uprising against the regime. Naturally Andropov had no desire to see a repetition of “the Hungarian experience” in our country, and so he took a cautious attitude toward the young, self-assured proponents of modernism. There was no point in suppressing them, as he saw it, but he was not at all inclined to give them free rein. His attitude toward Suslov was not one of sympathy. He had seen all he needed to see of Suslov in that same year of 1956 in Hungary (when Suslov and Mikoyan had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with Imre Nagy). But Andropov never got into arguments with Suslov, even when the latter interfered too much in the affairs of the “socialist camp,” which was Andropov’s “territory.” By the autumn of 1962, the creative forces in Moscow—and Moscow was where things were heating up the most—were divided into two fairly distinct

214 Time for Change: 1962 camps: the traditionalists and the so-called modernists in painting, sculpture, literature, music, and the like. The latter grouped themselves around the “youngsters” among the Central Committee officials. Under their protection the modernists expected to take control of the various “creative” associations and put an end to the classical-traditional schools of art, which in their opinion (indisputable of course) had outlived themselves and were dead or dying. They wanted to replace the “untalented” works of the traditionalists with their own “works of genius.” There was nothing new in that. Similar struggles had occurred in many other times and places, whether in ancient Greece or in modern Europe from the Renaissance to the time of the impressionists, and so on. Let us recall, if nothing else, the situation in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, when such figures as the Burlyuk brothers (David and Vladimir), Benedikt Lifshitz, the young Vladimir Mayakovsky, the “genius” Velemir Khlebnikov, and a host of others like them, both talented and not-so-talented, self-confident, even insolent, followed the example of foreign innovators, imitating such models as Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire, and were eager to overthrow all the traditionalists, from Ilya Repin to Aleksandr Pushkin. In the 1930s, with Stalin’s backing, the “new traditionalists” of socialist realism gained the upper hand. Unfortunately, those who disagreed were often removed not only from the arts but also, in Stalin’s bloody manner, from life itself. Now in the 1960s, everything was being repeated. The modernists were gaining in strength and popularity, and to repeat a point I have already made, Ilyichev actually liked some of them and saw no threat to the political system in modern art. Adzhubei was interested in “catching up with and surpassing” the West, but not in the production of meat and residential housing, like Father, rather in art and music. The cautious Satyukov took a position somewhere in between Ilyichev and Adzhubei. The young Central Committee officials, in keeping with the current fashion, supported the modernists, but no one placed their bets on these artists, and in fact there was no one among them to place one’s bets on. If the modernists were to take power in the art world, that did not promise any political dividends for the younger Central Committee bureaucrats, just as there was no loss to them if the traditionalists were victorious. The traditionalists were not about to give up without a struggle. They placed their reliance on the man who, for the time being, was the country’s chief ideologist, Mikhail Andreyevich Suslov, a Central Committee secretary but also a member of the Presidium. Both Suslov and the traditionalists had something to lose. The traditionalists held all the power in the world of the arts. They headed the various “creative” unions—the Writers Union, the Musicians Union, the Artists Union, the Filmmakers Union, and so on. And that meant they could place orders for material goods, decide the size of press runs and author fees, the awarding of various official prizes, and so forth. They had no doubts about their own “correctness,” not for even a moment. All this “modernistic baloney”

The New Generation in Art and Politics

215

was not art at all, as they saw it, just an attempt to “shock the public.” They behaved no differently from their predecessors, the traditionalists of France, Germany, Russia, and the like, at the beginning of the twentieth century. But there was one difference—back then, success (including material success) depended on the public at large. The public might come to an art exhibit or it might not. It might buy a book, a painting, a piece of sculpture, or it might not. In contrast, now, in the conditions of the centralized Soviet state, virtually the only customer disposing of substantial resources was the state, and it was the only publisher. Whether a work of art would be purchased and whether a person would be given the right to publish or be refused that right depended on the state. The people who headed the various “creative” unions served as representatives of the state in its capacity as customer or purchaser. They were the agents of the state in literature, painting, music, and the like. In effect they ran the whole show: made all the decisions, chose the art works to go on exhibit, compiled the catalogues, determined the size of the press runs for books, and in all this of course they never forgot about themselves. The officials of the government followed their recommendations and signed the checks—of course within the confines of the amounts allocated for “cultural affairs.” The oppositionists among the youth were dissatisfied with the government in its capacity as patron of the arts, embodied in the persons of Khrushchev, Suslov, Ilyichev, and the heads of the various “creative” unions. The youth accused them of having no taste, of being hidebound and stuck in the mud, blockheaded and narrow-minded. They insisted that their own works should immediately be purchased, published, exhibited, presented on stage, and shown in movie theaters. Thus the representatives of the “creative intelligentsia,” whether traditionalists or modernists, were not only defending their own respective concepts of art, not just fighting for power and influence in their fields; they were also seeking to lay their hands on financial resources, which represented not an insubstantial amount of money for those days. Both the “oldsters” and the “youth” behaved like spiders trapped in a jar. The simplest solution would have been to open the jar and let all the spiders go find their daily bread as best they could and forget about them. Let them write as they wished and publish as they wished and fight among themselves to their hearts’ content. But the trouble is, “the poet in Russia is more than a poet” (as Yevgeny Yevtushenko once wrote). In Russian history, the poet, or more generally the writer, has long been a significant figure who could not be ignored. That was true of Pushkin and Lermontov in the early nineteenth century, of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and others in the later nineteenth century, of Blok and Mayakovsky— and Yevtushenko himself—in the twentieth. They expressed the aspirations of the people, which could not be voiced openly—neither under the rule of the tsars nor under that of the party secretaries. Both the poets themselves and the government officials had no doubt about that. The government was afraid of the poets, and the poets were afraid of the government, but neither could live

216 Time for Change: 1962 without the other. The government shoved the spiders back in the jar and called on them to live harmoniously, not to bite each other, to the extent possible, and above all not to bite the hand that fed them. People were no longer being sent to prison for thinking differently, but the state in its capacity as the only important customer naturally required that goods be supplied in accordance with government tastes. Those with different tastes resisted in whatever way they could and as much as they could. Both the “youngsters” and the “oldsters” would appeal to Father now and then, the former seeking his support and the latter calling for defense of the “moral foundations” of Soviet society. Father could not ignore this war of artistic passions. He had no right to. After all, “the poet in Russia is more than a poet.” The poets or artists conducting their struggles in a political way, without meaning to or even noticing, became above all political figures and began to operate in a field that was actually alien to them. Willy-nilly, Father was again and again forced to break away from matters that were more important to him, such as agriculture, housing construction, and all sorts of other concerns, and was forced to involve himself in squabbles and intrigues that were strange and unfamiliar to him. He emphasized many times that government policy in the arts ought not to be based on any official’s personal predilections. Nevertheless, we are all only human . . . The conditions of life that shaped Father’s personality left him with personal tastes that leaned in the traditionalist direction. He was not affected by the innovative art of the 1920s and early 1930s. He remembered Mayakovsky and the yellow blouse he wore, as well as the other futurists, among others, who wanted to overthrow all the old ways, but he never in his heart associated their works and activities with real art. Father liked the realist painters from Rembrandt to Repin. He took great pleasure in the traditionalist poetry of Nikolai Nekrasov and Aleksandr Tvardovsky and liked to read the prose works of Leskov and Sholokhov and listen to the music of Mozart and Ukrainian folk songs. He found “newfangled” works disagreeable. He had no understanding or appreciation of jazz or abstract art and sculpture. For him, “innovative explorations” remained alien distortions or outright perversions on a level with all other perversions of human nature. Such a perception of art is natural for most people. We like what we became accustomed to as children, from our earliest years. I myself, no longer a young man, have no sympathy for trends in the arts that, for me, are new. I don’t listen to rap music or hard rock, and I don’t even listen to the Beatles. I ignore those things. For me they don’t exist. I’m quite happy with my Bach and Vivaldi, Mozart and Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. The same is true in art. My eyes prefer Laktionov, not Filonov. In those long-ago days of the 1960s, I was like most “techies.” I felt some discomfort, and tried to convince myself that I needed to understand and develop a liking for new trends and fashions in the arts. But I didn’t like them and didn’t understand them. I respected Picasso as a Communist, but I did not appreciate the forms and figures, both human and otherwise, that were distorted by the

The New Generation in Art and Politics

217

imagination of the artist to the point of no longer being recognizable. To me they seemed bizarre and ugly, and I would not have hung such a painting on my wall even if it was a gift. I read some books as though I had been given a doctor’s prescription. It was not that I had a taste or preference for them. Some of those books said that a matter of psycho-physiology was involved. It was said that for many of the famous artists of nontraditional orientation, such as Gauguin and Picasso, because of some peculiarities of their own consciousness, the external appearance of the objects they depicted were precisely what they themselves perceived. But now I’m going off into thickets of heavy underbrush, which I’ll have a hard time getting out of. A painting by Kazimir Malevich, The Black Square, had recently attracted a lot of attention. To me, it was a deliberate mockery of so-called artistic taste. I was unwittingly reminded of the tale by Hans Christian Andersen, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” I suffered greatly over my “ignorance,” but couldn’t do anything with myself. My tastes and predilections differed little from Father’s, but unlike Father, I did not have political responsibilities. He could not simply change to a different radio station, switching himself off from the realities of the world around him. Some people asked for his support in making their works known to the public at large. Others appealed to him to protect Soviet art against pernicious dissident tendencies. And everybody asked his opinion, for example, about the latest novel, film, or symphony. This was how people had been trained. This was what they were accustomed to. They all wrote for one reader, one listener, one viewer, and his opinion outweighed all other opinions taken together. That’s how it had been under the tsars, and the same practices prevailed under Stalin. Now Khrushchev had succeeded Stalin. Everyone asked for his judgment, and Father passed judgment. He could not refuse to do so. He handed down his rulings, but was guided by one criterion, which he himself chose, that of political usefulness. To the extent that he could, he washed his hands of all other considerations. It was on the basis of purely political considerations, not artistic ones, that Father had supported Kazakevich’s The Blue Notebook, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Yevtushenko’s “The Heirs of Stalin.” For the rest, let them sort it out among themselves. I remember the behavior of the theater director and actor Nikolai Okhlopkov, a court hanger-on on the grand scale. When Father came to see one of his productions at the Mayakovsky Theater, Okhlopkov kept asking him during the intermission what he liked about the play and what he didn’t. Father jokingly avoided any direct answer, making do with polite, roundabout remarks. To a certain extent, this kind of tactic worked, although it occasionally misfired. It worked as long as matters involved intrigues or disputes solely within the “creative” unions and as long as the interests of the party bodies overseeing the cultural organizations were not affected—in particular, the interests of Suslov and those around him.

218 Time for Change: 1962 By 1962, the situation had changed. It was not just the heads of the various “creative” unions and their allies who sensed a danger; so too did Suslov and his supporters. And the danger came from the “youngsters”—those in the arts and those in politics. They had proven to be serious adversaries, and preparations to counteract them were made with great care and skillful teamwork. By all indications, the initiative for this operation, and its conception, came from Suslov and his co-thinkers, the people in his entourage. Of course no one could catch Suslov red-handed; professionals like him are careful to cover their tracks in such cases. But it is not hard to reconstruct what happened, if one follows the logic of the events, even without the talents of a Sherlock Holmes. A number of developments had occurred with the obvious approval of the “youngsters” in the Central Committee and of Ilyichev personally! These included the publication of works by Solzhenitsyn and Yevtushenko; the exhibit of works by blatantly abstract artists, the people around Belyutin, an exhibit that created a stir all over Moscow; Khrushchev’s conversation with Tvardovsky and the resulting relaxation of the censorship, which meant an end to control by the censors over everyone and everything; and also, the radio broadcasts and published articles that not only took a positive attitude toward the modernists but openly praised them. Such articles appeared in the newspapers Izvestia and Sovetskaya Kultura (Soviet Culture) and in the magazine Sovetskiy Soyuz (Soviet Union). Ideological and hence political power was starting to slip out of Suslov’s hands, and out of the hands of the leaders of the various “creative” unions. To hold on to power, it was necessary to act, and to do so right away. Suslov—who understood the situation in the Central Committee better than anyone—knew that a direct appeal to Khrushchev would go nowhere. The Ilyichevs, Satyukovs, and Adzhubeis would twist things around in such a way that Khrushchev’s reaction might prove to be far different from what was expected. It was necessary to act in such a way that neither Khrushchev nor those around him would guess what was happening; it was necessary to get Khrushchev to take measures with his own hands, without his realizing that he was being manipulated. The coils of the intrigue wound around the issue of Stalin-era repression and the victims of that repression—a topic of constant concern to Father. While exposing Stalin’s crimes, freeing political prisoners, and liberating Soviet thought from the Procrustean bed of Stalinism, Father was constantly apprehensive about losing control of the process of change. “What if a flood resulted from the thaw, one that would overwhelm us and that we would find difficult to cope with?”4 Most likely, Suslov himself devised the elaborate intrigue that was carried out. It’s likely not only because of the jesuitical subtlety of his mind but also because hardly anyone of lower status would have dared to play at such a game with Khrushchev. All through 1962 the Central Committee ideologists and those heading the creative unions bombarded Father with memoranda explaining that “modernism” in art and literature was not at all as harmless as it might seem at first

The New Generation in Art and Politics

219

glance or as it was presented by those who were indulgent toward “revisionism,” by inexperienced people who had not gone through the real school of ideological warfare, young officials who until yesterday had been mere boys. In fact this was not a conflict between different trends in the arts; it was a political operation carefully planned from abroad and aimed against our system, against our state. It was no accident that Western journalists and diplomats were constantly hovering around our “modernists.” There was undoubtedly an element of truth in this last assertion. It was not only Ilyichev who supported the “modern artists”; the CIA also had its eyes on them; after all, there was a war going on in the world, even if it was a “cold war.” One of the last of these memoranda explained that the activities of the “modernists” were motivated not by artistic considerations but by hatred of Soviet power. Their parents and others close to them had suffered under Stalin, had been in prison or the camps, and many had perished, and now they were transferring their feelings of insult and injury from the tyrant Stalin to the Soviet system as a whole, against the entire land of the Soviets. An impressive alphabetical list followed. It included such “information” as that the father of the popular young writer Vasily Aksyonov had been shot under Stalin (although, in fact, the father survived) and that his mother (Yevgeniya Ginzburg) had spent half her life in the prison camps (which was true). It was correctly stated that Yevtushenko’s grandfather had been arrested. There was no need to even talk about Solzhenitsyn (notorious as a prison camp survivor). And the list went on, name after name. Its effect was impressive and convincing. Suslov and his co-thinkers understood that this list by itself was insufficient, but at least it was a start. Father read this denunciation and set it aside. How many such nasty scraps of paper—and far more scathing ones—he had read in his lifetime. Countless volumes of them. In every Soviet family, you could find someone who had suffered under Stalin; if not a father, then an uncle or aunt, a cousin or son. And what if all of them were to be set down as “enemies of Soviet power”? But on the other hand, Father could not ignore the warning. Like Andropov, he remembered that in Hungary everything had started with the seemingly innocuous Petöfi Circle. Besides, there was not the slightest reason to distrust the authors of the memoranda. Like himself, they were concerned for the strength and prosperity of our Soviet state. They went about this in their own way, of course, but then you can’t make everyone fit the same pattern. Although Father set this memorandum aside on a corner of his desk, it left an imprint on his memory. And that’s what the authors of the memorandum were counting on. Following up on this memorandum, and pounding away on the same theme, information from a variety of sources poured down on Father—about the “incorrect” behavior of the young poets, prose writers, and artists, as well as those who were not so young. Reports told about the constantly increasing activity of Western journalists, about a veritable bacchanalia by Western diplomats, and not just diplomats, around the exhibit of paintings by Belyutin and his circle on Taganka Square, an exhibit that was not remarkable in any way

220

Time for Change: 1962

except that it was “nontraditional.” (Was this nontraditionalism artistic only, or also political?)

40 Suslov Goes on the Offensive, December 1, 1962 Now I will switch over to discussion of an event that occurred in 1962—

by no means an event of the greatest importance, but one that became quite a sensation. It is often referred to as “the scandal at the Manège.” But it was not only a matter of the Manège incident—or of the dispute over abstract art versus “socialist realist” art, which came up then. Much bigger questions were at issue, as became evident during the nine months after December 1962, with continued fighting between the older and younger generations in literature, art, and politics, between Stalinists and reformers, between conservatives and liberals. The Manège was built in 1817 as a riding academy in downtown Moscow, near the Kremlin wall. In Stalin’s time it served as a Kremlin garage. On Father’s orders, it was renovated to serve as a venue for art exhibits and was officially designated the Central Exhibition Hall. On December 7, 1957, an art exhibit honoring the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution opened at the Manège, and Khrushchev too was invited to attend. Not surprisingly, many of the participants in the December 1962 Manège incident and related events were fairly ambitious people, and naturally each has written his own version of what happened, largely centered on himself. Father’s visit to the art exhibit at the Manège on December 1, 1962, seemed on the surface to be merely a routine matter. It was a regular occurrence for him to go to such exhibits, and other members of the CC Presidium would go with him. He would take his time looking around the various rooms, stopping in front of some paintings, but merely glancing at others, and in parting would write his comments in the guest book, thanking the organizers for a pleasant experience. Father had visited the Manège earlier that year, in March 1962, but by December the exhibition had changed, and from one day to the next people were anxiously awaiting his visit. Suslov and his allies, thinking this an opportune moment, turned up at the Manège exhibit. This was not a semi-underground event but a completely

220

Time for Change: 1962

except that it was “nontraditional.” (Was this nontraditionalism artistic only, or also political?)

40 Suslov Goes on the Offensive, December 1, 1962 Now I will switch over to discussion of an event that occurred in 1962—

by no means an event of the greatest importance, but one that became quite a sensation. It is often referred to as “the scandal at the Manège.” But it was not only a matter of the Manège incident—or of the dispute over abstract art versus “socialist realist” art, which came up then. Much bigger questions were at issue, as became evident during the nine months after December 1962, with continued fighting between the older and younger generations in literature, art, and politics, between Stalinists and reformers, between conservatives and liberals. The Manège was built in 1817 as a riding academy in downtown Moscow, near the Kremlin wall. In Stalin’s time it served as a Kremlin garage. On Father’s orders, it was renovated to serve as a venue for art exhibits and was officially designated the Central Exhibition Hall. On December 7, 1957, an art exhibit honoring the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution opened at the Manège, and Khrushchev too was invited to attend. Not surprisingly, many of the participants in the December 1962 Manège incident and related events were fairly ambitious people, and naturally each has written his own version of what happened, largely centered on himself. Father’s visit to the art exhibit at the Manège on December 1, 1962, seemed on the surface to be merely a routine matter. It was a regular occurrence for him to go to such exhibits, and other members of the CC Presidium would go with him. He would take his time looking around the various rooms, stopping in front of some paintings, but merely glancing at others, and in parting would write his comments in the guest book, thanking the organizers for a pleasant experience. Father had visited the Manège earlier that year, in March 1962, but by December the exhibition had changed, and from one day to the next people were anxiously awaiting his visit. Suslov and his allies, thinking this an opportune moment, turned up at the Manège exhibit. This was not a semi-underground event but a completely

Suslov Goes on the Offensive

221

respectable, official undertaking in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of the Moscow Artists Union (Russian acronym, MOSKh). Some nontraditional artists had “made their way” into the exhibit with the unspoken consent of Ilyichev and Furtseva. On an equal footing with others, there hung paintings by Robert Falk (whom I have already mentioned) and by some other “disturbers of artistic peace” who, seemingly, had been forgotten for many years. Besides that, several positive reviews of the exhibit had appeared in Izvestia, the government newspaper edited by Adzhubei, and in its weekly cultural supplement, Nedelya. These reviews spoke of the modernist canvases with warmth and favor. Father did not read these articles, but Ilyichev liked them, and he did not fail to call Adzhubei and tell him so. The leaders of the “cultural” unions became worried. MOSKh sent Father an official invitation. By asking him to visit the exhibit, they hoped to demonstrate to him how outrageous and ugly all these modernistic works were, thus opening his eyes and winning him as an ally. He did not respond to the invitation. He was very busy—with the Central Committee plenum, the reorganization of the system of economic management, the Cuban crisis, whose consequences had not yet been fully sorted out and squared away. He wasn’t up to dealing with paintings right then. At that point a “group of artists” sent to the Central Committee an indignant letter addressed to Father. In both style and content it was a typical denunciation of 1930s vintage. These “artists” had held preliminary consultations with Dmitry Polikarpov, and he in turn had taken up the matter with Suslov. Polikarpov had the reputation of an expert in such affairs. Stalin had “planted him on top of the creative intelligentsia” as early as 1939. He had remained in that position for a long time—serving under Zhdanov for a while, and later under Shepilov—and he hoped to outlast even Suslov and to keep on doing this job. The letter from the “group of artists” was received at the Central Committee during the plenum of late November 1962, at the very time when Tvardovsky was celebrating the resounding success of “his baby,” One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The letter from the “group of artists” warned against the danger of “the penetration of bourgeois ideology into our society . . . , the revived activity of forces who have been seeking for a number of years to subvert our ideology from within, through the cinema, television, literature, music, art, tourism, etc.” The “etc.” here was totally superfluous. They had already listed every imaginable, and unimaginable, source of “subversion.” “These forces have now come out in the open and gone on the offensive, they completely disregard the question of revolutionary Russian traditions (they regard that very phrase as uncouth), they combine advocacy of formalism with nihilism, the uglification of form, and asceticism, and all this is aimed against beauty and life-affirming truth in art,” they wrote. “The town criers of formalism take advantage of the paragraph [in the Communist Party program] about ‘freedom of styles,’ with the aim of imposing the hegemony of one particular style, contending that form is an end in itself and that at its highest level form becomes content.”

222 Time for Change: 1962 Accusing the organizers of the Manège exhibit of being indulgent toward the penetration of bourgeois ideology and the undermining of Soviet morality by displaying the canvases of Falk, and accusing Nedelya of pandering to the exhibit organizers, the artists appealed to the Central Committee to “defend our moral foundations” and excommunicate the formalists from the world of Soviet art. Finally they referred to statements by Lenin and resolutions of the Soviet Communist Party in support of realistic art, and they asked rhetorically: “What exactly has become obsolete or outdated in these party resolutions? If, however, they have not become outdated, then such statements in the press and on radio and television as have been directed against them must be regarded as revisionist and as contributing to the penetration of an ideology alien to us.” More than forty signatures were appended to the letter.1 As had previously been arranged, the letter was received by Polikarpov, and from him it went to Suslov, who quickly ran over to see Khrushchev for “consultation.” Suslov expressed his very serious apprehensions about the situation, and did not fail to mention the Petöfi Circle. He insisted on a discussion of the letter from the “group of artists” at the upcoming session of the Central Committee Presidium, scheduled for November 29, 1962. The Presidium was supposed to take up a question that had nothing to do with “the penetration of bourgeois ideology.” The main topic for discussion by the Presidium was “carrying out the decisions of the November plenum of the Central Committee” about reorganizing the management structure of the Soviet economy. The complaint from the “group of artists” was added as an additional point to an already overcrowded agenda for a meeting that lasted many hours. By the time this point on the agenda came up, Father was tired. Suslov gave the report. Khrushchev agreed: “The penetration of formalism in painting is impermissible, and major mistakes were made by Izvestia and Nedelya in dealing with these matters.” He addressed some harsh words to Adzhubei, who had been invited to this session, and “praised Comrade Suslov.” I repeat that Father had not looked at the articles published in Izvestia and Nedelya. He usually did not read the cultural section but simply paged through it without paying much attention. Others took the floor, nine of them according to the published record, and echoed Suslov—or to be more precise, they echoed Khrushchev, who had already expressed support for Suslov. A resolution was adopted: “to look into the question of art exhibits” and, if necessary, to take harsh measures. The minutes recording the discussion take up only thirteen lines, and not even full lines at that. But for Suslov they were extremely important.2 After this letter Khrushchev was “ripe for the picking” in the opinion of the “conspirators.” (I had doubts about whether or not to use that term, but in the end I decided to.) In their view, the only thing that remained was to give Father a push in the right direction. If he visited the Manège exhibit, that could be the occasion for such a push. Probably Father would not like the works by the modernists, and after that, everything else would be a mere technicality. They even

Suslov Goes on the Offensive

223

informed him, very cautiously, that the problem here was not one of differing artistic visions. The problem was that the modernists suffered from a purely physiological deviation from the norm—namely, that all of them, virtually every last one, were homosexuals, “pederasts.” That might have been true, or partly true, or it might not have been true at all. Nowadays same-sex relationships are not shocking, but in previous times a person who engaged in such relationships was regarded as an “odd man out.” Homosexual behavior was punished as a crime, and not only in Russia. We need only recall the tragic life of the Russian composer Tchaikovsky or the fate that befell Oscar Wilde. Under Stalin, people were shot for being homosexual. Under Khrushchev, they were given ten-year prison terms. This accusation had the desired impact on Father. It was becoming clear to him what the problem was: formalism in the arts was a symptom of unhealthiness in a person’s physical nature. Now all that remained was to lure Khrushchev into visiting the exhibit, but he kept putting it off. Suslov was not inclined to go to art shows. Normally you’d have to drag him there with a rope. But this time he stealthily but insistently advised Khrushchev not to “insult the Moscow artists,” but to spare an evening’s time for them. Father agreed that, generally speaking, he ought to go to the exhibit, but when? Every day in his schedule was filled, every last minute. On November 30, 1962, Father decided to go to the Bolshoi Theater. The Kiev Opera Company, which was on tour, was doing a production there—the opera Taras Bulba, by Mikola Lysenko. Father was persuaded to go by a friend he had known since his youth, Ivan Semyonovich Senin, who was now deputy premier of the Ukrainian government; and besides, the voices of the Kiev opera singers were famous for their excellence. As usual, Father invited “all who wished to” to join him. In addition to his “Ukrainian” guests—Brezhnev, Podgorny, and Polyansky, who loved Ukrainian melodies as much as Father did— Suslov went to the Bolshoi that night. There he reproached Father once again: “You have found time for the Kiev Opera, but what about the Moscow artists?” Father was embarrassed and replied that he was ready to visit the Manège at “any time, even tomorrow.” On that same evening of November 30, 1962, at the Luzhniki ice hockey stadium, the only roofed-over stadium in Moscow, serving also as the largest local concert hall, a group of young poets was appearing: Yevtushenko, Akhmadulina, and Rozhdestvensky. Usually they read their poetry in the large hall at the Polytechnic Museum, but it was no longer large enough to hold all who wished to attend. Even at Luzhniki stadium, the bleachers and the hockey rink, now filled with rows of chairs, could not accommodate everyone with tickets, not to mention those without tickets. People sat on the stairs and crowded in the hallways. The poets were welcomed and accompanied by waves of applause and much loud shouting. At the Pushkin Museum, where gifts once sent to Stalin had been cleared out, preparations were being completed for an exhibit by the French artist Fernand Leger, who was a Communist but by no means a traditionalist. Leger’s

224 Time for Change: 1962 widow Nadia, invited by Soviet minister of culture Furtseva, had brought his paintings to Moscow. At the Manège, preparations were under way for receiving Father. While space had been given to classic works by revolutionary avant-garde artists, such as Falk—which was not the case, incidentally, twenty years later at the fiftieth anniversary of MOSKh—there wasn’t even a whiff of the contemporary modernists. The “traditionalists” who ran the Moscow Artists Union would not let them anywhere near the prestigious exhibit halls of the Manège. Now, with Father actually due to arrive the next day, it was necessary to hurry up and bring their works to the Manège and hang them on the walls, so that they would make the desired impression, set off the kind of reaction the organizers wanted, and ideally, create a scandal. Lying on Father’s desk the next morning were biographical summaries about the nontraditional artists—or more exactly, one more set of denunciations. Father glanced through them without reading them closely, but the main point stayed in his memory: ideologically, these artists were not on our side; in fact, they were against us. I was not at the Manège on that “auspicious” day. As usual, I was at my job, engaged in my daily work on missiles and rockets. To reconstruct the course of events on that day, and their inner logic, I have made use of published accounts by those who participated firsthand and of a stenographic record that was made of what happened there.3 Countless numbers of people have written about the Manège incident and the controversies that followed, but for the most part these are thirdhand accounts. Out of everything I have read or heard about these events, only four accounts fall into the category of genuine testimony by people who were actually present and who have recounted their impressions more or less coherently. Those four accounts are by the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, the painter Eligiy Belyutin, the poet Andrei Voznesensky, and the film director Mikhail Romm. But even in these cases some caution is advisable. People’s impressions vary. Creative people have vivid imaginations and a tendency to substitute their imaginings for the real facts or actual events, and they soon come to believe in their fantasies. This is inherent in the makeup of such people; otherwise, they would be incapable of producing works of artistic value. Thus, in the effort to reconstruct an actual historical event, the testimony of creative people often beclouds the issue. In view of these considerations, I immediately decided to rule out Ernst Neizvestny as a “witness.” It was Ernst who created the black-and-white monument at Father’s grave, and over several years time when he was working on the monument and we were going through all the trouble surrounding it, I had ample opportunity to hear Ernst tell his tall tales. The paradox about Neizvestny is that he does not narrate events; he invents them. Gradually these inventions are transformed into reality, at first for Neizvestny himself and then for the people around him. Consider, for example, his story about a prominent Moscow sculptor (I forget his name) who made a bust of Marshal Khorlogiyn

Suslov Goes on the Offensive

225

Choibalsan of Mongolia and his story about the preparations for the marshal’s visit to Vladivostok, the main naval base of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. These stories are fascinating, entertaining, and humorous, but to separate the fact from the fiction in them would be absolutely impossible. I am not accusing Ernst of lying—not in the least—but his marvelous stories simply have nothing in common with reality. For example, Neizvestny tries to convince the reader (and undoubtedly is convinced of it himself) that he met with Khrushchev after the latter’s removal from power. Supposedly they met at the Petrovo-Dalneye dacha, where Father lived in retirement, had a good talk and forgave each other, and Father even bequeathed to him the task of putting up a monument at Khrushchev’s grave. It’s a good story, and I like it. The only thing is, nothing of the sort ever happened. Neizvestny never came to Petrovo-Dalneye, nor did he have such a talk with Father, and no such bequest existed. In a very interesting book of reminiscences by the writer and physician Yuli Krelin, I read about Neizvestny’s account, related at a table in the restaurant of the Writers Club (Dom Literatorov) in Moscow, of the first time he met me. Sergo Mikoyan and I had come to see Neizvestny to ask him whether he would take on the project of Father’s gravesite monument. According to Krelin, Neizvestny blurted out: “So much anti-Sovietism [from me and Sergo]—I never heard the like from anyone!”4 Coming from Neizvestny, this would undoubtedly have been a compliment, but there is not one iota of truth in it. First, I did not hold anti-Soviet views then, nor do I now. I am a “pro-Soviet” person, although I do not of course approve of everything that happened in the Soviet Union. As far as I know, Sergo Mikoyan held views no different from mine, at least at that time. Second, we had come to see Neizvestny on a business matter, and this was the first time in our lives we had ever laid eyes on him. Third, although he was an avant-garde artist, we had heard that he was no stranger to the KGB. And so is it likely that with a person like that, we who had come to discuss a business matter would suddenly start bad-mouthing the Soviet system? Nonsense! But to Neizvestny, because of the fluctuations of his own consciousness, that’s exactly how things seemed. And he tells the tale so convincingly that, if he were not describing an incident in which I was directly involved, I would have no reason to doubt his word. Here is another one of his stories. In 1973–1974, when we were trying to obtain permission to put up a monument at Father’s grave, the Brezhnev leadership for a long time kept bullying us and delaying matters. Finally, with all that behind us, on a sunny September afternoon in 1975, Ernst climbed up on a wooden box and placed the bronze head of my father, which was burnished like gold, in its intended position in the monument. I then paid Neizvestny the fee we had agreed on. He suggested we celebrate the occasion at the Hotel Natsional (in downtown Moscow). We piled into my small car and headed for the city center. As Neizvestny tells the tale, he did not feel he had the right to take

226 Time for Change: 1962 money for the monument to Khrushchev. He claims that he opened the little side window of the car and, removing one ten-ruble note after another from the roll of bills, popped them out the window, as though “distributing them to the poor.” Neizvestny’s reminiscences are good fiction, but I cannot place any confidence in them at all. Nor can I place complete confidence in Andrei Voznesensky’s recollections. The problem in Voznesensky’s case, however, is entirely different from Neizvestny’s. By coincidence, Voznesensky found himself at the very epicenter of a political storm, which naturally was bound to have a strong impact on the poet’s impressionable psyche. He talks more about his own feelings in response to what was happening than about the facts. After looking over all the accounts available to me, I chose as my “travel guides” to the Manège incident and the events that followed it, the account by Eligiy Belyutin, director of the studio where modern artists of every stripe gathered to study their profession, and the splendid, though frequently sarcastic, account by film director Mikhail Romm.5 Of course I have not limited myself to these accounts alone. From time to time I will refer to my own recollections. I was present for at least one of the discussions—and possibly two—that occurred at the Conference Center (Dom Priyomov) in the Vorobyov Hills (also called Lenin Hills) district of Moscow. I will also refer to the stenographic record of comments made during Khrushchev’s visit to the Manège on December 1, 1962, to transcriptions of speeches he made in those days, and to his memoirs written in retirement, as well as to the recollections of Boris Zhutovsky, one of the “heroes” of that day at the Manège, and to episodic testimony by other participants in these tragicomic events. To repeat, on November 30, 1962, at the Bolshoi Theater, Father accepted Suslov’s invitation to visit the art exhibit at the Manège, but he did not specify an exact day or time, but stated vaguely, “any time, even tomorrow.” The machinery went into operation. Suslov ordered that preparations be made for “tomorrow,” that is, December 1, 1962. “On the night of November 30, I picked up the phone, which had been ringing, and heard the voice of Polikarpov, a member of the Central Committee and head of the CC Cultural Department.” (That is how Belyutin begins his account.) “He spoke pleadingly, talked about needing a favor, and asked me to do him a kindness. “Eliy Mikhailovich [as Belyutin was called], I will send you some people to help you,” the voice from the telephone said, trying to persuade me. “It isn’t possible to get the paintings together in just a few hours,” I replied. “We would like you, together with everyone, to show your works at the Manège,” the voice from the telephone insisted. “Precisely which ones?” I asked.

Suslov Goes on the Offensive

227

“The ones you had on exhibit at Taganka Square,” the voice from the telephone specified. And added: “Most likely, the leaders of the party and government will look at them.” The phone rang again, and this time it was the voice of the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, “the most leftist among the rightists,” as he was referred to in Moscow, a man who was extremely cautious. (“You have to understand me! I have a child!”) In a frightened way he asked what he should do. “It’s either a provocation or recognition,” I said. “It’s hard to believe it would be the latter, but it’s impossible to refuse, and therefore, in my opinion, it makes sense to take works that are quieter, more restful.” That same morning, opening the pages of Pravda, I had read that the first session of the CC Ideological Department had been held, and I learned from my associates [those who studied at Belyutin’s studio] that the discussion there had been about us. And the discussion had been positive. Late that night, as we were hanging our paintings [at the Manège], Minister of Culture Furtseva arrived and, giving me her hand, said, “What a fine fellow you are, Belyutin.” You see, she didn’t yet know how things would turn out.

I should mention that the Ideological Department was chaired by Central Committee secretary Ilyichev. Its first session after the CC Plenum was a very important one, providing orientation and setting the tone for the future. And it was not just Belyutin who got wind of this tone; Suslov did too. On December 1, Father did not want to go to the art exhibit. He was feeling tired and was under pressure from the piles of official papers that had accumulated on his desk. He felt oppressed by the need to find the right tone for communicating with Fidel Castro, who had started to kick up a fuss; by the Chinese, with their shrill accusations of revisionism and capitulation to the United States; by news from the rural regions indicating that the harvest was far below expectations; and so on. How could he be diverted by art shows? And what kind of art show was it? Even yesterday’s opera had given him little pleasure. But Suslov kept pressuring him. He started in on Father early in the morning, insinuatingly: “You promised you would go. The artists are expecting you. It would be embarrassing if you didn’t go.” Father kept saying no, but late in the day he gave in. He really did feel embarrassed, because he had indeed promised. “All right, since I promised, I have to keep my word,” Father replied to Lebedev, who had reminded him that Suslov was waiting for a decision. “Call around to everyone and invite whoever has the time and is willing to go with me to the exhibit.” All the Presidium members present in Moscow found the time and were willing. Those who went to the exhibit, in addition to Father, were Suslov, Kirilenko, Kosygin, Polyansky, and Ilyichev. Mikoyan was absent; he had not yet returned from Cuba. Leonid Brezhnev and Frol Kozlov were also away; it seems that they were official guests at the congresses of two foreign communist parties, in Italy and Czechoslovakia. The Presidium members were joined by some “youth” among the top officialdom: Leonid Yefremov, who had been elected a candidate member of the Presidium at the most recent Central Committee

228

Time for Change: 1962

plenum, and three men who had recently become Central Committee secretaries, Polyakov, Rudakov, and Shelepin. Before Father’s departure, Suslov stopped in at his office and reported some “news.” The Moscow artists had decided to display some works by “modernists.” “Why is that?” Father glanced inquiringly at Suslov. “You remember, Nikita Sergeyevich, the artists’ letter that we discussed recently, which the CC Cultural Department reported on,” said Suslov, starting to fidget. “Some young people who feel offended by Soviet power, whose parents were subjected to repression; they have fallen under the influence of Western propaganda; they have formed a group around a man named Belyutin, who incidentally is of foreign origin, from Italy. They reject everyone and everything. They have confused and taken in our Soviet youth, passing off their paint-smeared canvases as avant-garde art. An extremely unpleasant situation is taking shape. And besides that,” Suslov began to hem and haw, “they themselves are, you know . . . It was reported to you . . . You need to look at their so-called ‘works of art’ with your own eyes and make an assessment from a party standpoint.” Father frowned. Just as he was getting ready to go to the exhibit, these insinuations were being shoved under his nose . . . But then, everyone had been informed that he was coming. With a disgruntled look on his face, Father opened his office door and went to the elevator. Suslov followed along after him. At the entrance to the Manège, the top leaders were welcomed by Vladimir Serov, first secretary of the board of directors of the Soviet Artists Union, a man with close personal ties to Suslov. Ranged next to him were Polikarpov, Satyukov, and Adzhubei, and then various middle-level officials, some privy to what was going on and some not. A little farther off was a row of policemen keeping back the rather sparse elements of a crowd. Earlier that afternoon, the Manège had been closed to the public. Minister of Culture Furtseva was not there, even though the Manège came under her jurisdiction. Lebedev had not called her, because Father had instructed him to notify only the top officials of the Central Committee—members of the Presidium and the Central Committee secretaries. Suslov and Polikarpov gave her no warning, and that was intentional. As they understood things, she belonged to the enemy camp. Against their wishes she had succeeded in pushing through this dubious exhibit by the Frenchman Leger. At the Manège, this “inexcusable” Furtseva might interfere inappropriately, speak up in support of the modernists, and win Khrushchev over to her side. Of course she did find out about Father’s visit to the Manège, but belatedly, and by the time she got to summoning a car to take her there, everyone had already gone inside. When they had finished with all the handshaking, Khrushchev turned to Serov and said, “Well now, show us your treasures.” Serov led everyone through the various “halls” of the Manège, which had been partitioned off into separate areas, with temporary walls of medium height. In each such “booth,” an artist waited for his highly placed visitors. Father knew

Suslov Goes on the Offensive

229

the artists by sight, was familiar with their faces from previous visits to various exhibits, and he also recognized their paintings, which migrated from show to show. Everything was going along as usual. Ilyichev had not known anything about Suslov’s conspiracy. Only at the Manège was he told that the modernists and their works were gathered in waiting on the second floor. At that point he could no longer undertake an initiative of his own. Even to go over to Father and say a few words was not possible, because a crowd was constantly swirling around him, and the artists, one after another, were exhaustively explaining and giving a buildup to their own works. At one of the last rooms they came to, suddenly there was emptiness, no artists standing by to explain their paintings, and the paintings themselves were not at all the customary kind. They were works by avant-garde artists of the revolutionary and early post-revolutionary period. Serov led Khrushchev up to a painting by Robert Falk, which, according to the wall caption, depicted a naked woman. Father peered intently at the canvas, trying to understand what was being represented there, but he couldn’t. In his opinion, the painting could have been given any name or title one wanted, but that would not have made it any better or more comprehensible. Unable to restrain himself, Father cut loose with a few unflattering remarks directed at the artist. But they made no impression on Robert Falk. He had died three years earlier. At that moment Furtseva appeared, completely out of breath. Later she said she was half an hour late, but most likely it was more than that. The viewing of works by the “traditionalists” had gone on for nearly an hour. It’s a curious thing, but the stenographic record of what was said at the Manège begins only with the viewing of Falk’s paintings. I wonder who arranged for Father’s stenographer to be at the Manège. Ordinarily his stenographers did not accompany him on his visits to exhibits, whether they were art exhibits or not. The participants in those events, journalists and officials responsible for the exhibits, were usually the ones who kept a record of what Father found interesting, or seemed to. Other than Khrushchev himself, only Suslov or Lebedev could have summoned his personal stenographer. Most likely it was Suslov. And it was surely he who indicated the moment when the note taking should begin. Suslov needed a document that would demonstrate Khrushchev’s support for his, Suslov’s, position. A document that would allow him to put all these Ilyichevs and Adzhubeis in their place. But only, of course, if everything went as planned. If the operation failed, the stenographic record would lie on the shelf in the CC Cultural Department, and that would be the end of it. I quote the following statements by the participants in the discussion from that stenographic record, preserved in the archives. “This is perversion. It is not normal. I would like to ask whether or not the painters of these works ever lived with a woman.” Father said this indignantly as he looked at Falk’s painting.

230 Time for Change: 1962 Suslov must have smiled to himself. Khrushchev had remembered the information about the alleged sexual perversions of the modern artists, and more important, this was the explanation he gave himself for their “abnormal” way of painting. “As chairman of the Council of Ministers, I will not pay a single kopeck for this trash, and if someone disobeys that policy, we will punish him,” pronounced Father threateningly. Who other than the government and government museums could purchase the works of artists? Private collectors? But in Moscow they could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Artists were completely dependent on the state, and so this threat carried a lot of weight. “By the way,” Father continued, “a group of artists wrote me a letter, and I had a stormy reaction to it [at the recent meeting of the CC Presidium]. They said that Nedelya had printed some reproductions. I looked at them [after the Presidium meeting] and found nothing awful about them. I have my own opinions. I have enough [explosive] fuel of my own; there’s no point trying to add to what I have.” Suslov realized that these words were aimed at him, and he stopped smiling. Father continued. “Here’s what I would say to those who don’t paint, but just smear their canvases: ‘Gentlemen, apparently we have not matured to the point where we can understand your work.’” It was not by chance that Father emphasized the word “gentlemen,” which he used instead of “comrades” or “friends.” “If so-called artists like this want to go abroad to be with their ideological comrades-in-arms, they’ll be given a passport the very same day, and there they can stand on their heads if they want to. For such art we won’t pay a single kopeck out of our government funds.” Father went on to recall some modern art he had seen in the United States, commented that he didn’t understand Picasso, even though Picasso was a Communist, and in this lack of understanding he agreed with the British Conservative Anthony Eden. “How many pederasts there still are, and after all, that’s a deviation from the norm. These painters here—why, they’re just pederasts in the field of art.” Here Father returned to the idea that had been put in his head, the supposed physiological explanation of the root sources of modernism. But then he added in a conciliatory tone: “Let history judge.” Suslov was upset. These last few words of Khrushchev’s did not fit into Suslov’s scenario. Meanwhile, Father was moving along. He stopped at a painting by P. Nikonov with the caption “Geologists,” and looked at it closely for a long time. “You can’t figure out what they’re drinking or what they’re doing,” Father finally uttered. “Things can’t be done this way, comrades. A painting ought to inspire people, uplift them. But what is this? What kind of a painting is this?

Suslov Goes on the Offensive

231

Who would pay money for it? I will not pay. Let them paint and sell their paintings, but not at government expense.” “What’s bad here?!” somebody’s offended voice rang out. “There is nothing about these works that can even be criticized.” In response to that, according to the stenographic record, there was a lot of whistling and commotion. “The government does not have the right to be amorphous. We can’t play at neutrality,” continued Father, ignoring all the noise. “Comrade Ilyichev, this is poor Central Committee work, poor work by the Ideological Department, poor work by the Ministry of Culture. We can’t play at neutrality. A drop of tar will ruin a barrel of honey.” Father’s mood had changed abruptly. Now his voice rang out harshly and intransigently. That was exactly what Suslov had counted on. Gloom descended on Ilyichev, who began jotting something in a notebook. Furtseva looked distraught. However, Father quickly calmed down, started smiling again, and moved on. Ilyichev and Furtseva brightened. And a worried look crossed Suslov’s face. Finally they had gone the rounds of all the “booths” and Father headed for the exit. “Nikita Sergeyevich, that’s not everything yet. ‘Those people,’ the ones I told you about, are on the second floor,” said Suslov, taking hold of Father’s sleeve. Father reluctantly headed for the stairs. “Accompanied by his retinue, Khrushchev went up to the second floor. There in a buffet room hastily converted into an exhibit room the modernists were clustered together.” (That is how Belyutin describes the scene.) “Are we going to applaud Khrushchev?” Someone asked. “Absolutely, we have to,” I [Belyutin] said. Everything was still. We stood in a small group, thirteen men and one woman, ranging in age from twenty-five to thirty-five. Many had beards and long hair. They were gloomy and said nothing. As Khrushchev came up the last flight of stairs we began to clap. He took a few steps forward. “Well, where are the sinners and the righteous among you? Show me!” Khrushchev spoke almost cheerfully. “Thank you for your welcome—Where is your main person? Where is the gentleman Belyutin?” They all turned their heads in my direction—Kosygin, Polyansky, Kirilenko, Suslov, Shelepin, Ilyichev, Adzhubei.

The very fact that Father addressed Belyutin as “gentleman” immediately put up a wall between “us comrades” and “those gentlemen.” Undoubtedly, Father asked this question because he had been influenced by Suslov’s biographical reports, which sought to convince him, and nearly had succeeded, that here on the second floor the matter at issue was not art, and not even physiological abnormalities, but politics. To restate the point, Suslov had previously given Father a list of “politically unreliable” artists, a list that made special note of

232 Time for Change: 1962 those whose parents had been subjected to repression and who were allegedly “thirsting for revenge.” Belyutin’s account continues: I was standing in a far corner of the large room, which had previously served as a snack bar for visitors to the Manège. At the opposite end were Khrushchev, other members of the government, some leaders of the Artists Union, and journalists. There were people all around whose faces I was used to seeing in the papers. Those faces looked at me, bored and indifferent. Most likely they were offended by my long hair, a style not yet fashionable, and my own indifference to what was going on. “Do you remember your father?” Khrushchev asked me. “No,” I answered. Short and sweet. “How could you not remember your father?” Khrushchev asked. “He died when I was two years old,” I said. I watched the restless pupils of Khrushchev’s eyes, and the pure whiteness of the whites of his eyes. The wrinkles that appeared in his forehead boded no good. He was getting angry. “What was he?” Khrushchev asked. I thought to myself: What difference does that make? But I answered: “Politrabotnik.” These questions offended me. What did our fathers have to do with anything here?

Politrabotnik is a term from the 1920s for a low-level party official. As readers will recall, Belyutin’s father had left his native Italy to go help build “a new world” in Soviet Russia after the revolution. In 1927 he was arrested and shot. “Which way to the exhibit?” Khrushchev asked abruptly. I went ahead of him and extended my arm to show where it was. “Thank you.” Khrushchev resumed talking. “They tell me . . . ,” and here he waved his hand toward the people behind him, “that what you have here is just paint smeared on canvases. I haven’t seen it yet, but I believe them.”

According to the stenographic record, Khrushchev said: “I believe them because I saw paintings like that with my own eyes on the first floor.” “I shrugged and opened the door to our Golgotha,” Belytin continues. Khrushchev’s retinue stopped in the doorway. Suslov’s head rose above all the others, gaunt and sinister. Electric light flooded the walls—and on them hung bright, vivid landscapes and portraits, highly expressive in the use of color and manner of depiction. At first Khrushchev looked our exhibit over fairly calmly. Evidently, in some ways he liked our pictures, and that restrained him. He obviously couldn’t just start in, doing something that had been planned, but he began to get angry. He kept changing right before my eyes. His face darkened, then turned pale. This emotionalism was surprising in a government leader. There were abstract paintings only in the corners and in the next room. He might not even have paid attention to them if Serov had not started prompting

Suslov Goes on the Offensive

233

him obligingly: “Is this really painting? Just look, Nikita Sergeyevich, the way it’s smeared on.” Suslov took up the theme of the “abnormalities” and “smearings” [maznya] these artists deliberately indulged in. And he talked about “what the Soviet people really need and don’t need,” specifying the “vast” sums spent by the Ministry of Culture, the Tretyakov Gallery, and other galleries and museums to purchase this kind of “scandalous, so-called art.”

The stenographer did not record these remarks by Suslov. Apparently she had been ordered in advance to take down only what Father said or direct replies to his questions. Ilyichev and Furtseva were glum and said nothing. Ilyichev was an experienced politician. He understood that the artists were only a pretext and that Suslov’s attack was actually aimed at him, Ilyichev. Feverishly he racked his brains in search of a way out of this sticky situation. Furtseva had also seen through Suslov’s scheme, and now her womanly sympathies went out to others. She suffered not only for her own sake but also for the artists and for Father. He was letting himself be tricked, lured into a trap. She still felt a warm regard for Father, even though she herself had been ousted from the Presidium. Belyutin made a good guess about what was going on: “Evidently the visit to our exhibit was not at all necessary, but some sort of scenario had been laid out.” Belyutin did not remember much about what happened first, only this: “They began by looking at a portrait of a young woman by A. Rossal.” In fact, a considerable part of the “discussion” took place around this portrait. Therefore I will temporarily depart from Belyutin’s account and turn to the dispassionate record made by the stenographer. “This woman is on narcotics. She’s been crushed by life,” Khrushchev said indignantly. “We don’t understand you. We don’t support you and we won’t support you. Amoral works like this do not enlighten people and do not mobilize them. Is this a banner for us? Will we march to communism with this?” Again he warned he would not pay for paintings like this and suggested that the artist, since he would find no customers here, should “go to the ‘Free World.’ He would catch on big there.” A question rang out—one that by now was familiar: “What are you? Pederasts or normal people?” It seemed that Father was searching for an explanation that would make sense to him, in response to what he was seeing. The crowd moved on from Rossal’s ill-fated young woman to a portrait entitled “Tolka” (nickname of the artist’s brother, Anatoly), painted by an artist who was then completely unknown—Boris Zhutovsky. Next to the painting a slender, bushy-headed young man was shifting from one foot to the other. “What in the world is this?” asked Father, still indignant. “Where is the artist? Have him come here and give him the floor.” Zhutovsky didn’t look like an artist, and no one had been paying any attention to him. Finally someone introduced him to Khrushchev.

234 Time for Change: 1962 “Well, look at what a handsome lad you are!” said Father unexpectedly. Apparently he didn’t think the author of such a painting would look like a normal person. Father peered intently at Zhutovsky. “If the portrait looked even a little bit like you, I would consider you a worthwhile artist.” Father began peaceably enough, but immediately changed his tone: “Why do you paint like this? What for? What kind of picture of your brother is that? Aren’t you ashamed? Someone ought to take down your pants.” To digress for a moment, let me say that in the 1970s I saw many portraits by Zhutovsky, including of people who were close to me—for example, a portrait of my sister Yuliya and one of Father himself. Zhutovsky also showed me his self-portrait. He is a good fellow, and they say he is a talented artist, but my opinion of his portraits differs little from Father’s. It’s true that I never said anything about that to Boris, and when he showed me a portrait I would merely make approving noises. During Father’s tirade, Zhutovsky maintained an embarrassed silence. “Are you a normal person physically or are you a pederast?” Here Father touched on a subject that had already become customary for him. Zhutovsky is a witty and inventive person. Later he claimed that Khrushchev had said “pederas,” leaving off the final t. Zhutovsky often used that word “pederas” to good effect, making a “big hit” with it. “In your work as a painter you are a pederast,” Father continued. “That’s a monstrosity—and he says it’s his brother?” He turned to those accompanying him, as though puzzled and seeking support. Shelepin, head of the party’s Control Commission, put his oar in: “There are 2,600 such types in this country, and most of them are not employed anywhere.” I don’t know if Shelepin had actually prepared for this visit to the art exhibition, arming himself with statistics, but I doubt it. Suslov was not on friendly terms with Shelepin, and probably did not let him in on the planned operation. Most likely, Shelepin just wanted to show off, and made up this number “2,600” off the top of his head. “You give us lists of names, and we’ll show them the road to the border,” Father said in support of Shelepin’s comment, but he addressed himself to Zhutovsky, who became completely distraught. “We’ll transport you there free of charge. Go through the school of capitalism and you’ll find out what life’s all about, what a crust of bread is worth, and maybe someday you’ll start to be of some use.” The tail end of Father’s remarks was rather unexpected, especially for Suslov. What was this? Was he getting ready to send them to the West for onthe-job training? “Comrade Ilyichev,” Father continued, “I’m angry about the work of your department, and of the Ministry of Culture too.” That lifted a weight from Suslov’s heart.

Suslov Goes on the Offensive

235

During all this lambasting, Zhutovsky didn’t say a word. But he is no fool, and he made a good guess about what it all meant. As he later wrote: “This whole mess of porridge had been cooked up by one team, one group of artists, who were sitting in the seats of power and who had decided to settle scores with another group, who were coming too close to the seats of power. In order to wipe out the other side once and for all, they had come up with a scheme: exploit the circumstances and have their work done for them by the Number One man in the government.”6 Zhutovsky did not guess correctly about everything. The “group of artists” he mentions played an important but subsidiary role, so that the main player, Suslov, would not seem to appear in the matter at all. But Zhutovsky was not interested in these political games being played on a larger scale. Khrushchev made a headlong rush over to a large composition by Gribkov titled The Year 1917. [I return to Belyutin’s account, now regarding Zhutovsky’s ill-starred portrait of his brother.] “What’s this?” Khrushchev asked. “The Year 1917”—someone’s voice prompted him. “What barbarity this is! What deformities! Where’s the author?” Lyutsian Gribkov stepped forward. “Do you remember your father?” Khrushchev started in.

Once again, here was a question about someone’s father, this time in the context of the 1917 revolution. To the artist it was an illogical question, as it was to most of those present—except Suslov. “Not very well,” Gribkov replied. “Why?” “He was arrested in 1937, when I was very young.” There was a pause. “All right, that’s not important,” Khrushchev said, addressing the young artist. “But how could you depict the revolution like this? What kind of faces are these? What’s the matter? Don’t you know how to draw? Even my grandson could do better than that!” This last “convincing proof” evidently satisfied Khrushchev so much that he quickly moved on, hardly even looking at the paintings. Then he suddenly stopped in front of a large composition by Vladimir Shorts. “And this? What in the world is this?” That was followed by the now standard question about the artist’s father—strange as it may seem, hardly any of the people from our studio had fathers who were still alive—and then he demanded the next answer: “Do you respect your father or not?”

Belyutin should not have been surprised. In all likelihood, the modern artists who were invited to participate in the exhibit at the Manège were specially selected, including on the basis of biographical information from questionnaires

236 Time for Change: 1962 that “confirmed” the main assertion made in the various memoranda that had been sent to Father. Belyutin describes what happened next: Khrushchev, surrounded by a dense crowd and in a great rush, began making the rounds of the whole room, along the walls. Time after time his shouts could be heard: crap, dung, shit smeared around. He cursed at almost every canvas. Obsequious lamentations joined in like a chorus to the voice of Number One: “That’s right!” “A disgrace!” “Send them all to the West!” All this was being said, of course, not by members of the government, but by those who made up the entourage around them—journalists, lowerlevel bureaucrats, and, shouting with special zeal, members of the board of the Artists Union. Khrushchev became incensed and got very hot under the collar: “Who gave them permission to paint like this?” “They should all be sent to a labor camp to cut down trees. Let them pay back the money the government spent on them. It’s a disgrace. What is this? Something a donkey painted with its tail?” By and large, what we heard here was a battery of insulting terms of the kind intellectuals might use, as seen from Khrushchev’s point of view. But there was no really foul language. I [Belyutin], standing aside from the flock of people swarming around him, began to understand that this was a theatrical performance, which “our dearly beloved Nikita Sergeyevich” was putting on for the spectators around him—not a very numerous group at all. Obviously there was something about the paintings that he liked, with the exception of a few, and he could not in any way stamp them all with a general seal of condemnation, which Suslov was prompting him to do. Then Khrushchev made a third round [of the room] and stopped in front of a painting by Leonid Mechnikov, a depiction of Golgotha. “What in the world is this?” Khrushchev again raised his voice. “Are you men? Or a bunch of damn pederasts? How can you paint like this? Do you have a conscience? Who painted this?” Leonid Mechnikov, a retired naval officer, was calmer than some of the rank-and-file infantrymen like Lyutsian Gribkov and Vladimir Shorts. He answered the now standard question about his father by saying that he did remember him and that he was still alive. “And do you respect him?” “Of course,” Mechnikov replied. “Well, what’s your father’s attitude toward what you paint?” “He likes it,” said Mechnikov. Khrushchev stared, in a rather dumbfounded way, at the ruddy face of the naval officer, and at that point another Leonid—Rabichev—addressed Khrushchev: “Nikita Sergeyevich, we are all artists—although we are all quite different as people and see the world in different ways. We do a lot of work for publishing houses, and Eliy Mikhailovich [Belyutin] helps each one of us a great deal in the attempt to express our own, individual perception in a painting, and we are very grateful to him for that.” Khrushchev heard him out calmly and, after looking Rabichev straight in the face for a few seconds, moved on. It became obvious to everyone that some sort of change had taken place, and it would be hard now for Khrushchev to work himself up again to the level of his recent cursing. Suddenly another associate of our studio appeared, Boris Zhutovsky [whom we have already discussed]. Obviously Khrushchev was not annoyed by him, maybe because his outward appearance reminded Khrushchev of someone he knew, but the

Suslov Goes on the Offensive

237

“Number One Communist in the world” listened to him attentively without interrupting. It seemed as though the mystery play performance that Khrushchev was trying to enact was fading out. “Well, all right then,” Khrushchev said, “but now tell me what this is about.” I saw that Suslov, Shelepin, and Adzhubei all pricked up their ears, but each in a different way.

You can’t deny that Belyutin showed perceptiveness here. After all, he had no idea that each one of these three was playing his own game, independently of the others and even against them. Belyutin continues: I began to explain, having decided not to address him [Khrushchev] by name: “The artists whose works you see here travel around our country a lot. They love their country and want to give it something not only based on what they see visually but also from the heart.” “Where the heart is, there the eyes are too,” said Khrushchev. “That’s why their paintings don’t try to make a direct copy of reality, but create an image of it that is transformed by their own feelings, by their relationship to that reality and their attitude toward it.” I continued to speak without reacting to Khrushchev’s remarks. “Take this painting, for example, The Spassky Gates [depicting one of the entrances to the Kremlin]. The gates can easily be recognized. But at the same time the artist’s decision on what colors to use heightens the sense of power and majesty.” Khrushchev listened in silence, leaning his head to one side. It looked like he was starting to calm down. No one was interrupting us, and I felt as though, if five or ten more minutes went by like this, that would be the end of the whole business. But we didn’t get those minutes. In the middle of my fairly lengthy explanation, Suslov bent his long, dry neck down toward Khrushchev and whispered something in his ear. Khrushchev suddenly erupted: “Hey, what are you saying? What kind of Kremlin is that! It’s a mockery! Where are the battlements on the wall? Why don’t we see them?” Immediately he seemed to feel uncomfortable, and he added in a polite manner: “It’s very vague and impossible to understand. Here’s what I, as chairman of the Council of Ministers, want to say to you, Belyutin: the Soviet people have no need for all this. Understand me. That’s what I’m telling you!” Again he seemed to feel uncomfortable. His face changed expression, and his small eyes flickered over the faces surrounding him. “But, Serov, it’s true of you too, you don’t know how to paint well either,” said Khrushchev, turning to the old Stalinist painter, who had been trying the whole time to get him stirred up. “I remember once when we visited the Dresden Gallery. They showed us a painting—the hands there were painted so well that even with a microscope you couldn’t see a single separate brushstroke. And you don’t know how to paint like that!” Khrushchev was against everything Stalinist. Only that summer, in 1962, he had rejected a proposed monument to Lenin by men who had promoted the Stalin cult in the arts, Nikolai Tomsky and Yevgeny Vuchetich. And a year earlier, on a visit to this very same place, the Manège, he had said: “I don’t understand anything about art. It’s the job of the artists themselves, and of specialists, to sort things out in this field. Decide these matters among yourselves.”

238 Time for Change: 1962 The pause that ensued had an effect on everyone, but the fact that I couldn’t stand it anymore and turned my back on Khrushchev after the words, “The Soviet people have no need for all this”—well, that heated up the situation more than ever. Suslov, who obviously had an interest in increasing the tension, decided to try another ploy, making use of me. “Couldn’t you continue your explanation?” his voice was soft and sort of hoarse. “Certainly,” I said, looking him in the eye. His cold, intelligent eyes had a glint in them like those of a born gambler. “As our group sees it, the uplifting emotional quality in the choice of colors for a painting intensifies the power of the image and thus creates the possibility for art to have a stronger effect on the viewer.” “And what about truthfulness of representation?” “Well,” I objected, “what about the historical paintings of [Vasily] Surikov, which are full of inaccuracies, aren’t they truthful representations nonetheless?” A discussion started, in which Suslov’s inadequate knowledge put him in the disadvantageous position of a mere beginner, and he abruptly changed the subject. “What does that represent?” he asked, pointing to a rather dreadful painting of the town of Volsk by Viktor Mironov. “Volsk,” I said. “A town of cement factories, where everything is covered with a thin layer of gray dust, but where people know how to work in spite of that . . .” Khrushchev was standing next to us, looking from one to the other, as though our words were tennis balls and he was watching how hard each of us hit the ball. “How can you talk about cement dust? Have you ever been in Volsk?” For some reason Suslov almost shouted these words. His voice had an unexpectedly passionate ring, and I even began to wonder whether he might once have been the first secretary of the party’s city committee in Volsk. “That’s not fantasy. That painting is taken from nature,” I said. “You can check into it and see for yourself.” “Everyone there works in clean, white overalls! That’s how clean it is there!” Suslov continued to shout. White overalls in a town that produces cement? I remembered that place, completely gray, with stunted little trees. And the dust, visible from many kilometers away. “Well now, and what factory is this?” Suslov was still looking for specificity and accuracy. “This depicts the Krasny Proletary plant” [a machine-tool factory in Moscow]. That was how Mironov intruded into our shouting match. “Then why does it have so many chimneys in this picture? It has only four in real life.” Suslov wouldn’t yield. His indignation, which was obviously put on, was intended to show that these smeared-on paintings discredited Soviet industry. “What do chimneys matter? The artist, in creating an image of the city, had the right to paint some extra chimneys to intensify the effect.” I refused to give in. “That is what you think, but we do not think he had the right to paint like that.” Suslov persisted, and said emphatically. Khrushchev was apparently fed up with Suslov’s unconvincing part in the dialogue. He turned to go into the other room, which contained the sculptures of Neizvestny. I looked around in search of Neizvestny and caught sight

Suslov Goes on the Offensive

239

of him, standing near Shelepin and another man, a tall person unknown to me. The tall man hurriedly said something to Neizvestny, who nodded in agreement, his cheeks turning pale. Everyone began to leave, and I remained alone in the empty room, feeling that perhaps all was not yet lost. If everything continued to go as it had here, we could still win something back in this game. If only Neizvestny would behave sensibly. Earlier, when I had thought about inviting someone from among the sculptors to our Taganka exhibit, I had finally chosen Neizvestny. I knew that he had been allowed to go to the foreign press club, together with the painter Ilya Glazunov. There was a saying in Moscow: “We’d like to see who would go to that club on his own initiative [because, in general, no one was allowed to go there] and where he would go afterward.” Neizvestny had his own workshop in downtown Moscow, in the Sretensky Gates district, where he pursued an extraordinarily active and “fashionable” lifestyle. Once I visited him there, and this is what I saw: members of the party bureau of the Kurchatov Institute sitting around on mattresses that had been spread out on the floor and discussing creative freedom. I didn’t like the conversation those people were having—those people with their faceless faces.7 Neizvestny’s behavior at the Taganka Square exhibit was even more peculiar. He was sickeningly vain, but at the Taganka he tried to keep in the shadows, refused to give any interviews, and didn’t want to participate in any press conferences. But what he did at the Manège surprised me even more. He had been at Khrushchev’s shoulder the whole time, but now he literally evaporated, just when Khrushchev, after making the rounds of our room three times with curses on his lips, expressed curiosity about Neizvestny’s name. Not only was he no longer at Khrushchev’s side; he was not even in the room. About forty minutes before that, calling me aside, Neizvestny had said: “I was just given some friendly advice, coming from Satyukov, and I was asked to tell you that if Nikita gets angry, don’t engage in any sort of debate with him, but answer his questions as briefly as possible. Then everything will blow over.”

I should remind readers that Satyukov, the chief editor of Pravda, a connoisseur of paintings and a collector, tended to lean toward Ilyichev. He sincerely wanted everything to blow over. At the same time, in case it did not, he was demonstrative about showing his “loyalty” to Suslov. Now, standing in the empty room and only listening to the noise of voices, I looked around at the good paintings hanging on the walls and wondered: Would Neizvestny know how to follow his own advice, and would he want to, in view of one or another consideration? For my part, I had strictly adhered to that advice. To me it was obvious that I would not be able to make this kind of experiment a second time. Also, I would never again put any trust in the actions of this man, who previously I had seen only twice in my life. The very fact that he had invited foreign correspondents to the Taganka exhibit was a telling indication of who he really was. And yet a person like that ought to know how to conduct himself properly. And he really did know how. Not ten minutes had elapsed when the visit [by Khrushchev], which was about to come

240 Time for Change: 1962 out at least partially in our favor, proved to be the moment when all our hopes collapsed.

That’s how Belyutin sums up his reflections on the Manège incident. He comes very close to accusing Neizvestny of a deliberate provocation. I think he exaggerates. It’s true that Neizvestny had dealings with the KGB. That’s why he could permit himself to do things that for others were impermissible. However, the men in charge of the KGB—first Shelepin, then Semichastny—were by no means close to Suslov. In 1962, they would never have ventured into making a “deal” with Suslov behind Father’s back. They would have been much more likely to “tell on” Suslov to Father. At that time, Suslov didn’t have any contacts with them. Neizvestny was on good terms with some of the younger Central Committee functionaries. From time to time he carried out certain delicate assignments for Andropov’s people. And there were phone calls, back and forth, between him and men like Lebedev and Ilyichev, who were by no means allies of Suslov. Here too there are no grounds for suspecting Neizvestny. “Up to that moment,” Belyutin continues, “there were two reasons to be confident of our victory, or more exactly, our partial victory. First was the very fact that Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev] had visited our exhibit. Second was the fact that, in spite of all the efforts of Suslov and his helpers, Khrushchev had left our room in a fairly calmed-down mood.” What, then, could have happened in the room containing Neizvestny’s sculptures? As we know, Belyutin did not go into that room. According to Neizvestny’s account, from the moment Father crossed the threshold, he launched into an attack on Neizvestny, swearing at him with vulgar, unprintable language, using such “refined” expressions that even Neizvestny was taken aback. In fact, Neizvestny is a virtuoso in the use of obscenities and foul language. In his view, there cannot be a serious discussion without the use of such language. Therefore, in this instance he is portraying Father in his own image. I have nothing in principle against foul language. But the simple fact is that vulgar “swearing,” in the generally accepted Russian meaning of the term, was something Father simply did not know how to do, surprising as that may seem. An aversion to the use of foul language was instilled in him from childhood, and in his work life in the Donbas (the Donets Coal Basin). Among skilled workers in mining and metalworking, Father’s primary milieu as a young man, it was not considered good form to “talk dirty.” Later in life, when he worked under Kaganovich, who was also a past master at “dirty talk,” and under Stalin, who never hesitated to use strong language, Father still avoided obscenities. Even then the immunity he had acquired as a young man made itself evident. The worst curse word he used was “Turk,” and he employed it with various intonations depending on the situation: from an affectionate and encouraging tone to one that was ominous and threatening. I also remember a

Suslov Goes on the Offensive

241

term he used that, for him, expressed the ultimate in contempt: “loafer.” I do not use foul language either. Father didn’t teach me, and now it’s too late to learn. In Neizvestny’s version of events, he replied to these insults with such dirty talk that “all the people crowding around behind Khrushchev, whether Presidium members or not, recoiled. As for Khrushchev, he acquired a new respect for Neizvestny, sensing a force in him that was equal to his own.” This version of events does not correspond to reality any more closely than Belyutin’s own conjectures about Neizvestny as a provocateur working for Suslov. To judge by the stenographic record, the conversation in the sculpture room differed from both Belyutin’s and Neizvestny’s accounts: “I have so many good things to say to you that I’m afraid you’ll consider me a toady. Allow me to show you my works,” Neizvestny began saying as he led Father over to the pieces of sculpture on display in the room. Father, not yet having cooled down from the heated disputes over The Spassky Gates, Volsk Panorama, and The Krasny Proletary Factory, did not react in a very friendly way to Neizvestny’s words. “Praise from such gentlemen is not praise, but an insult.” He waved away the “good things” Neizvestny was saying. Incidentally, these are the coarsest words recorded by the stenographer during Father’s interaction with Neizvestny that day. The stenographic record is unedited. The stenographer, and also a tape recorder used later on, recorded everything, word for word, down to the last interjection. After a second attempt, Neizvestny was able to bring Khrushchev over to look at his sculptures. They were of bronze, melted down into forms that had no connection with anything real. The captions indicated the artist’s titles for them. One was The Classics Destroyed. Another was called Cancer, and a third, Atomic Explosion. “These works embody space and composition, or construction,” began Neizvestny, trying to explain the unexplainable. Father was not interested in abstract concepts of space and composition, and he asked where the sculptor had obtained the bronze for his castings, because bronze was in very short supply. I should remind readers that in those years, bronze was considered a strategic material. It was given out exclusively by government authorization, and even then very sparingly. Using bronze for the casting of sculptures seemed an extravagance and in this instance, as Father put it, “a waste of government resources.” Neizvestny was embarrassed and muttered something about purchasing the bronze legally at his own expense from a stock officially allocated for use in the arts. The metal, he said, was also obtained from scrap heaps or junkyards, where one could find broken faucets or bushings that had worn thin. “This must be investigated,” Khrushchev ordered. Neizvestny told me later that Shelepin took charge of the investigation personally, but no criminal violations were found. Neizvestny had not broken the law, and the case was closed.

242

Time for Change: 1962

“What does this express?” Father pointed at The Classics Destroyed. “It doesn’t express anything.” Neizvestny could not have come up with a worse answer. “I advise you to go abroad. Maybe you’ll become a capitalist over there.” Father said this indifferently, without any heat. “I don’t want to go abroad,” Neizvestny responded with dismay and immediately went on to the next piece of sculpture, in the shape of a human head that had been split in two. “This is Atomic Explosion. I don’t know how else to show the horror of an atomic blast.” “It’s good that you say that frankly and openly.” Khrushchev’s voice now sounded peaceable. “Some of your concepts are not bad; they’re even good. But everything depends on how they are expressed. The embodiment of the concepts must reach the consciousness of ordinary people. The whole question is how to properly express something. We cannot agree with the way you interpret it [an atomic explosion] in this work.” “When I was invited to put my works on display here,” Neizvestny replied, “I was assured that nobody would be ‘slaughtered,’ that a frank and open discussion would take place.” Neizvestny said this as though in partial justification for his presence there. “I have put everything on display, and I see that you are not cursing it . . .” The stenographer made an annotation at this point: “Humorous animation among the onlookers.” “I would like to say a few words in defense of my new friends, the artists,” Neizvestny continued. “I have only known them for ten days. They are sincere people.” I find it hard to believe that Neizvestny had not, at an earlier time, made the acquaintance of these fellow members of the broad community of artists. And it’s hard to believe that he hadn’t participated with them in art exhibits. In fact, Belyutin reports the opposite. Nevertheless, I have quoted what appears in the stenographic record. In reply to Neizvestny’s comment that the artists were sincere, Father began talking about sincerity and honesty, and different kinds of sincerity. He retold Gorky’s short story Chelkash, in which an honest peasant sincerely wanted to kill a tramp, in order to buy a cow with the money he would get from the dead man. Then he cited the example of academician Yevgeny Paton. Paton had been a sincere opponent of Soviet power, but he came to his senses during the war and asked to join the Communist Party. “If you merely had a disagreement with me,” Khrushchev said, “that would be no tragedy. But you have a disagreement with the people. You say that the people are ignorant. Possibly you are right. I think that a feeling for what is beautiful arises in any person, whether they are educated or uneducated, whenever consciousness arises. Art should not repel and frighten. It is one thing to depict something atrocious to arouse anger and protest against it, but it is something else if the depiction arouses fear. Fear leads to capitulation, including in

Suslov Goes on the Offensive

243

the face of the atom.” He concluded his disquisition with a question: “What aims are you pursuing?” “The Western Communists have a very good attitude toward me,” said Neizvestny, “including prominent artists. They write letters to me, and I answer them. Our comrades know that.” And he added: “It’s a very complicated question . . .” Neizvestny’s reply was not very much to the point. “Communists are united by one overall idea,” interrupted Father, then continued to explain his own view of what is beautiful. “I can’t stand jazz. Melodious sounds are what I like. And I like art that is melodious, art that is pleasant to look at. In Kiev at the Mariyinsky Palace, to this day there is a residence for important visitors, and a painting is hanging there—I don’t remember the name of the artist [apparently it is Nikolai Glushchenko]. It shows spring, a tree in flower, spilling over with milk-white blossoms. The branches hang down, almost touching the ground, and the meadow is dotted with flowers. Under the tree is a young couple. The father is holding a child in his arms, and the child seems to blend with the flowers. The mother sitting next to them is feasting her eyes on the flowers, her husband, and her child . . .” These words, as Father said them, seemed to come from the heart. He could see that painting with his inner eye and was enjoying it to the fullest. “Do you really think you can inspire people with deformities?” Once again his voice took on a metallic ring. “Is anyone inclined to take a second look at a deformity? Why do you view us as damaged, deformed people? We want to live, and to enjoy life. Well, look here, Solzhenitsyn wrote about terrible things, but from positions summoning people to live, pointing toward life . . . You say that in your work the ocean and the air can be seen, but only you see them. That’s not enough. Other people also have to see the ocean, and what I see, rather than the ocean, is the devil. You and I have different conceptions. But we reject this kind of tendency in the arts.” Father continued: “If you were the chairman of the Council of Ministers, you would probably have boiled your opponents in oil long ago,” he said, looking at Neizvestny with a cunning twinkle in his eye. During this short conversation he had managed to detect Neizvestny’s own harshness and intolerance toward those who thought differently. “We are not going to put you in a kettle and cook you, but we are also not going to support you.” “I apologize for taking up your time . . .” Neizvestny began, but Father interrupted him before he could completed his thought. “You are an interesting man. I see in you a divided consciousness.” Father did not know that Neizvestny himself had chosen the image of the centaur (half-beast, half-human) as a leitmotif in his work: the dualism of man and nature, of the living and the dead, the creative impulse and nuclear destruction. To this day I don’t understand how Father so quickly grasped this aspect of Neizvestny’s nature. “In you I see both a devil and an angel, all at the same time, and they are fighting each other. I want to see the victory of the angel, but if the devil wins out, we will help you suppress him.”

244 Time for Change: 1962 But Neizvestny took up Father’s words and rephrased them: “In order to live, one must suppress the devil within, and also the slave.” And then for some reason he added: “I am friends with the cyberneticists. My best friends are scientists—Landau and Kapitsa . . . They regard art as the forerunner of science. The arches of the Kremlin were built intuitively, but optimally, from the standpoint of the strength of the building materials in them. But the builders at that time had no scientific knowledge of this.” Father did not continue the conversation. He had already said everything he wanted to, and he was tired. Besides, the time “allocated” for these artists, as he put it, was running out. “Goodbye, and I hope the angel in you wins out. But that depends on you.” After saying that, he gave Neizvestny a farewell handshake and headed for the exit. At this point I will depart from the dispassionate stenographic record and show how this episode was reflected in the memory of Belyutin: “Ban it! Ban all of it! Put a stop to all this grotesqueness! That’s an order!” Suddenly Khrushchev’s hysterical shouting could be heard from not far away. His voice was surprisingly piercing and shrill. I walked over to the doors of our room. Khrushchev was already going down the stairs, waving his arms, red blotches on his face. Next to him, going downstairs, was Suslov, who did not conceal his triumph, and also Kosygin, obviously perturbed. On everyone’s face, including photographers and reporters, was a look of frozen amazement. And suddenly in the semi-darkness of the anteroom connecting the two larger rooms on the second floor, the exultant voice of Serov rang out: “An incredible thing has happened, do you understand, incredible: We’ve won!” He was almost shouting, all fat and sweaty; and though he was in his fifties, he was ready to leap about and jump with joy. His shouts were addressed to the sculptor Belashova, one of the leaders of the official Artists Union. These words, which crashed down like the ceiling on my head, answered the question of what Neizvestny had managed to do. Everything was finished. Comedy had become tragedy.

The stenographic record gives a different account. A parenthetical note, “(while leaving the exhibit),” is followed by the words Khrushchev spoke to sum up his visit: “The artists and sculptors have to be given the possibility of fighting things out among themselves. We will help those we consider closest to us, those who help in the building of communism. To the extent that we can, we will help in ‘suppressing,’ or keeping down, the others.” He was addressing, above all, Suslov and Ilyichev. “The press must help out in this effort.” This comment came from Serov, who was walking beside Khrushchev. Father assured him loudly, so that Satyukov and Adzhubei could hear, that the press would help. “What message do you have for the Moscow artists?!” shouted someone from the crowd just before Father’s departure.

Suslov Goes on the Offensive

245

“As at any exhibit there are good pieces here and poor ones and medium. That’s the message you should pass on.” That was Father’s response, and after a pause he added: “Not everything can be good at any exhibit. That doesn’t happen. Besides, I am not an art critic. I ought to speak cautiously. I might praise a work, and a critic might condemn it. It’s possible that the professionals see better than I do.” Coming out on Manège Square, everyone stopped for a few minutes next to the cars waiting for the top officials. “We have to go through the art institutes and clean out the dirt,” Father said, and added, addressing the members of the Presidium, who crowded around him: “We are the government and the party. We are responsible for our people and our country. Cement needs to be used to construct housing, and paper needs to be used to print works that are in favor of building communism and not opposed to it. All these smearings on canvas only do harm. I’ve already spoken about an art lottery. Qualifying works of art ought to be submitted to such a lottery, so that the one who wins won’t curse himself all his life, saying that fortune never smiled on him.”8 Now Father slowed down for a moment. “We must display strictness,” he pronounced. “We have to make them work, all of them. In Moscow alone there are 2,600 spongers.” This was Shelepin chiming in. Obviously the thought of these 2,600 people gave him no rest, although it’s not at all clear who they were or where this number came from. “Name the people you have in mind, what their occupations are and what they’re doing.” Father was annoyed by Shelepin’s persistence. “We will offer them work, and if they don’t want to work, let them go to the West and ‘enrich’ the culture there.” After a bow to everyone in general, Father went to his car, stopped by the door, which a guard had opened for him, and muttered: “Sometimes it’s good to put a flea down someone’s shirt. To liven him up. There has to be a struggle. Without struggle life is boring.” Then, as though coming back to his senses, he raised his head and let his gaze rest on the people who by then had come running to the entrance of the exhibition hall. He said goodbye and waved to the crowd that had gathered. “Thank you very much for your visit,” a voice was heard, followed by a shout that didn’t make much sense: “You have cleaned our eyeglasses!” Probably the person who shouted meant, “You have opened our eyes!” Father laughed, took his seat in the limousine, and headed for the Kremlin. Unfinished tasks were still waiting for him there. That is where the stenographic record ends. Decades later, in the minds of many people, two separate events have become blurred together: one, the Manège incident of December 1, 1962; and the other, the official bulldozing of an art exhibit on September 15, 1974. In 1974, twenty-four avant-garde artists, when they were denied permission to use a government exhibition facility, put up their paintings on a vacant lot in

246 Time for Change: 1962 Moscow, in the Belyaevo district. The authorities could think of nothing better than to announce that on that day the lot must be cleared to make way for the previously scheduled laying of a foundation for a new building. They asked the artists to leave. The artists refused, and bulldozers began to “level the ground,” at the same time destroying or damaging some paintings. Other paintings were removed from the bulldozers’ path. Western correspondents photographed this grotesque incident, and the result was a great scandal. The authorities pretended that they had had nothing to do with the bulldozing, that it was an act of “local initiative” by the builders. Then the government stepped back and made a concession, allowing the unofficial artists to hold an exhibit under the trees in Izmailovsky Park. The first such exhibit cum art sale took place in an open area of the park on September 29, 1974, and after that, such events occurred regularly, depending on the weather. On September 15, 1974, I happened to be sitting with Neizvestny in his studio. He had not gone to Belyaevo that day. Late in the evening, someone who had been there showed up, all covered with clay mud and choking with emotion. He said the bulldozers had moved in on them “like a solid wall.” The fact is that only one or two bulldozers were used. Neizvestny listened skeptically and then announced his conclusive verdict: “I told you that you were all a bunch of fools.” But let us return to December 1, 1962. Belyutin and his people were almost the last to leave the exhibition building. Here is how he described the scene: Evening was coming on. The huge square was empty. The snow on the square was crisscrossed and crushed by the tracks of government cars. Policemen stood around indifferently. At the corner of the square we stopped under the large, round clock. No one said anything. “So long,” said Neizvestny. Someone nodded his head in reply, looking aside. I said: “‘Let’s go to my place.” When we entered my apartment, frozen stiff, my parrot was hanging upside down in his cage, as though waiting until everyone had gathered. Then he unexpectedly came out with, “Well, life’s like that, I tell you!” “Chief, I know some people—maybe we could consult with them about what to do?” Zhutovsky put this suggestion in the form of a question. “What do you mean exactly?” I found this interesting. “Maybe issue a statement,” he remarked. “Saying what?” “Well, I don’t know. These Central Committee people—maybe they’d suggest something to us themselves.” “All right,” I said. Zhutovsky left and in a surprisingly short time he was back. Out of his pocket he pulled a sheet of paper on which a text had been typed. It talked about people, about birch trees, about things that we seek to portray with all the passion inherent in Soviet man. And it all ended by saying that we are searching and will continue as energetically as ever to search for new ways of expressing our perception of reality. The text had a rather proud ring to it and was entirely respectful toward our artistic style.

Suslov Goes on the Offensive

247

It was clear that someone “up above” wanted to get our studio out from under the blow, but to do so in such a way that our recognition would not be put off indefinitely, but simply postponed for a short time.

Whom did Zhutovsky consult with? Lebedev? Satyukov? Certainly not with Adzhubei—he is of the timid sort, and at that time cowardice had taken hold of him strongly. Did Zhutovsky perhaps consult with Ilyichev himself? He could have had access to him through art-collecting channels. He might have helped him purchase paintings. But all that proved to be unimportant. The important thing was that Suslov had won, at least to some extent and for a certain length of time. He had linked Father with himself in this matter, and had even subordinated Father. Having gained this victory, Suslov took immediate advantage of it. Information written by his people appeared in the papers, reporting on Khrushchev’s visit to the Manège. Usually such reports are limited to three or four lines: “He came, he saw, he thanked the organizers.” But this time the reports were full of details and judgments provided by Suslov’s people, or rather by Father, because Khrushchev’s name leaped from almost every line on the page, along with his judgments about the works on display. Outwardly the reporting seemed quite balanced. Most of the artists represented at the Manège were identified by name, the “pure” alternating with the “impure,” the good with the bad. Then there would be a reference to arguments about the works of Aleksandr Deineka and Arkady Plastov or the painting style of Aleksandr Laktionov. Further on, the names of formalists were listed, people who “smear paint on their canvases like a donkey waving its tail.” The list included the late Robert Falk, A. Alexandr Drevin, Yuri Vasnetsov, Pavel Nikonov, Adelaida Pologova, Illarion Golitsyn, and Gury Zakharov (let us remember those last two names). It was reported that negative assessments of their work had been made not only by fellow artists but also by Khrushchev himself. Information about the visit to the Manège appeared the next day in Pravda. Adzhubei, at an earlier time, had obtained permission for his newspaper not to publish notices about matters of minor importance involving official visits or diplomatic protocol, such as the reception of ambassadors or other foreign guests from countries that were not major powers. Such items (he held) were boring and only irritated readers. Father agreed, and Suslov did not object. Thus, for example, Izvestia did not report Father’s attendance at the November 30 performance by the Kiev Opera Company. Adzhubei tried to put the Manège visit in the same category. But that wasn’t right! Failing to find the necessary report on the front page of Izvestia, Suslov sharply rebuked Adzhubei. In the end, Izvestia was the last newspaper to report the Manège visit—on December 4, 1962. Belyutin must be given credit. He understood quite well, even then, the real, underlying cause, the behind-the-scenes political background, to what happened at the Manège. As he wrote about Suslov:

248 Time for Change: 1962 However, one had to know the man, so as not to have the laughable illusion that he would quietly wait to be defeated. The Manège was his main chance, an opportunity to take revenge. Therefore he mobilized not only the reactionary group of artists but also his apparatus, a kind of secret police of his own. They even edited, with great diligence, the information that was to reach foreign correspondents about the events at the Manège. In Suslov’s version of those events, everything was transformed into rebellion by a few isolated individuals, rather than a manifestation of a broadly inclusive movement among the artistic intelligentsia, which was supported by [a section] of the party apparatus and by a number of highly placed party leaders, a movement that Khrushchev had now spoken out against, as the result of a provocation. In a few short hours, printed texts about our exhibits were eliminated at editorial offices. Type that had been set was discarded, as were stereotype plates, and passages were deleted from radio and television reports. An issue of the magazine Sovetskiy Soyuz [Soviet Union], destined for America, whose layout had already been completed and which contained illustrations of works from our studio, along with an article I had written a long time before, was removed from the printing presses and thrown out.

Suslov was a good tactician. Without delay, he sought to consolidate his gains. Soon a new memorandum lay on Father’s desk, reporting that the artists were not the only problem recently; things were in no better shape in literature, the cinema, the theater, and the musical world. Angry, embittered people had wormed their way into those fields as well. Father felt that he was out of his element. Inwardly he was ashamed of the scene he had made at the Manège, but at the same time he wanted to justify himself in his own eyes and convince himself he was right. As the leader of the government, responsible for keeping the peace and maintaining order in our country, he told himself, he did not have the right to behave in any other way. Suslov’s memorandum had its effect. Father agreed that, after the Manège, it was not possible to stop there, that all the others had to be brought to their senses as well. Thus there began what was probably one of the most unfortunate periods in Father’s life.

Strike While the Iron Is Hot

249

41 Strike While the Iron Is Hot, December 17, 1962 Suslov suggested that a Central Committee plenum on ideology be

convened, with the main report to be given by Khrushchev himself. Father did not object, but he preferred a heart-to-heart discussion with the “creative intelligentsia.” Suslov advised that such a discussion should be held under Central Committee auspices, and at the very least should be in the Kremlin. There the walls themselves would press down on the people attending. A neutral location struck Father as a better idea, like Semyonovskoye, outside Moscow, a former country residence of Stalin’s. Previously they had met there on two occasions, in 1957 and 1960, to have open-hearted discussions with writers and others of the creative intelligentsia. To Father those seemed to have been productive. But in December, a place like Semyonovskoye would be rather bleak, and Father settled on the Conference Center (Dom Priyomov) in the Lenin Hills district. Built in 1957, this two-story building included a large auditorium that could serve as a movie theater and next to it a hall for official receptions and meetings, especially with important foreign guests. In addition to meeting rooms, there was a swimming pool and other sports facilities. The building was right next door to the government residence where our family lived. Our house, where the Khrushchev family lived, was No. 40 Vorobyov Highway, and the Conference Center was No. 42. From 1955 to 1957, Kaganovich had lived at No. 40, and Khrushchev at No. 36. But after Kaganovich was ousted from the CC Presidium in July 1957, Father moved to No. 40 to be closer to the Conference Center, which he used on Sundays as a movie theater if it was not taken up with official events. Historically the area was called Vorobyov Hills. In 1935 the name was changed to Lenin Hills, but in the post-Soviet era the older name was restored. These hills overlook the Moscow River a few kilometers south of the Kremlin and near the main campus of Moscow University. Government-owned residences for many of the highest officials were built there, beginning in 1955. They were built on both sides of Vorobyov Highway, which was later renamed Kosygin Prospect. Father felt that tensions could be eased by having a luncheon before the discussion, to show that the get-together was for friendly conversation, not for

250 Time for Change: 1962 “working people over.” The combination luncheon and conference was set for December 17. At Suslov’s insistence, Ilyichev was assigned to give the main report, since he headed the Ideological Department. Suslov calculated this move with Machiavellian precision. He knew that Ilyichev could not wriggle out of it. Let this worshipper of “modernism” sully his own reputation. Father did not object. He didn’t notice the web that Suslov was weaving around him. I was not present at the December 17 conference. The press published Ilyichev’s speech, but not those of other participants. The complete stenographic record of the proceedings at the Lenin Hills conference is now available to anyone who wants it, but it is long and boring. I prefer the account, full of sarcastic comments, written by one of the participants, the film director Mikhail Romm, who says in part: “I arrived. Cars, cars everywhere, and a file of people stretching to the coatroom. On the second floor, a suite of rooms, in which hung canvases painted by both the just and the unjust.”1 As Father saw it, “normal” artists and nonartists would share his own dislike of “perverted” representations of nature, of man, of our entire reality. That’s why he requested that in the lobby of the Conference Center, traditional-style paintings should hang on one side—by Yuri Neprintsev, Aleksandr Laktionov, Sergei Gerasimov, and Vladimir Serov—and on the other side, sculptures by Neizvestny and works by other abstractionists. This had the opposite effect. Among those who had been invited, many took the side of the abstractionists and modern artists. Some people, such as Ilya Ehrenburg, actually liked their works, and others, including Mikhail Romm, sympathized with those being persecuted by the authorities. In Russia such people always arouse sympathy, whether they be beggars, prisoners, or nontraditional artists. Romm recalls the event: A large crowd has gathered, about three hundred, or maybe even more. Everyone is here: filmmakers, poets, writers, painters, sculptors, and journalists. Through the doors leading into the main auditorium you can see tables set with white tablecloths, dishes, and good things to eat. I’ll be damned! Apparently, there’s a banquet in store. What does it mean? A softer policy? I see that the abstractionists are here too. Along with Neizvestny I catch sight of other artists I know, for whom inevitable punishment awaits, or so it had seemed. And here all of a sudden, a banquet! In the midst of all this hubbub, mutual greetings of every possible kind and all sorts of questioning looks, the leadership makes its appearance. The crowd rushes toward Khrushchev. Cameras are clicking. Of course wherever a reporter’s camera is heard clicking, there the figure of Mikhalkov immediately appears, and invariably at Khrushchev’s side. Right there as well were Sholokhov, Gribachev, and some person unknown to me, whose face is twitching. I ask who it is, and it turns out to be the sculptor Vuchetich—it seems he has some sort of a tic. Well, all right. Khrushchev is conversing more or less on the run. He heads for the main auditorium. They all flow along behind him.

Strike While the Iron Is Hot

251

And they all take their seats. Khrushchev stands up and says something like: “We have invited you here to have a talk, but so that the talk will be a little more straight from the heart, a little better, and a little franker, this is what we decided—let’s first have something to eat.” Oh yes, Khrushchev also apologized that there was no wine or vodka and explained that people shouldn’t drink, because then the discussion would be fully open and candid, so to speak. Understandable . . . Well, people ate and drank for about an hour. Finally coffee and ice cream were served. Khrushchev got up. Everyone got up. They started making a lot of noise, chairs scraping. People went pouring off into the suite of rooms. Intermission!

After the intermission, the discussion began. In the movie room, the screen was covered with a curtain, and Khrushchev and the other members of the CC Presidium took seats in front of it. Ilyichev then gave a short speech. Ilyichev understood perfectly well that Suslov was trying to put him down, but there was nothing he could do to keep from being put down. Was he to lose his position as a Central Committee secretary because of some artists? Or be forced out of politics? An intelligent and resourceful man, he tried to find a way out of this mess. First, he limited his criticism to works that had already been “condemned” at the Manège: Falk’s Nude, Zhutovsky’s Tolka, Neizvestny’s The Classics Destroyed, and other works like that. He added practically nothing of his own. It’s true that he did refer to a book of poetry that had recently been published in New York—by a Soviet dissident and mathematician as yet unknown to anyone, Aleksandr Yesenin-Volpin, who wrote, among other things: “Their tyrants are their mother and father / They should have killed them long ago.” He also wrote: “Not a thing do I want from the beasts / Inhabiting evil Moscow.” The lines quoted here seem to me more political than poetic, but the author would know best about that.2 Ilyichev also told about a new letter Khrushchev had received from a group of prominent cultural figures. The letter spoke about the freedom to express one’s own opinion, which had become possible after the Twentieth and TwentySecond Party Congresses. At the same time, Ilyichev assured those who feared the “appearance of a new Stalin” that no such thing would happen. “We have complete freedom—to struggle for communism,” Ilyichev said in conclusion. People clapped for him amicably, but not very loudly. Romm barely mentions Ilyichev in his reminiscences, and so I now give the floor to Belyutin, who also attended the banquet-conference: “Leonid Ilyichev, short and fat, and with his eyeglasses flashing, did not remind me much of the ‘dismayed student’ he had seemed to be when Khrushchev reprimanded him at the Manège. He [Ilyichev]—after doing so much to bring about the cultural renewal of our country, a renewal in which the studio [of Belyutin]

252

Time for Change: 1962

had played, by all indications, a role as a symbol—he was now like any panicstricken rank-and-file party member, rather than a high official of the Central Committee, ready to let the heads of everyone close to him be placed on the chopping block, for no other reason than to save himself.” Belyutin’s comment gets to the essence of Suslov’s intentions. This is exactly what Suslov wanted to happen, for this new “liberal” ideologist to be seen as repulsive by his “flock” of supporters. Let them be sick to the stomach and retch at the very sight of Ilyichev, the former shepherd of their flock. And they did retch. How they retched! Fully in accordance with Suslov’s scenario. After the report, as was the usual practice, people began to take turns speaking. As it turns out, the only people who have left written recollections of what happened are the young “left-wing” writers and others active in artistic fields, who were just breaking through, their careers on the rise, as well as their patrons, such as Romm and Belyutin. Therefore the accounts about the December 17 conference and the other conferences that succeeded it seem very one-sided and rectilinear, all with a single theme. These witnesses describe the conferences as follows: the “leftists” were clashing with Khrushchev, or Khrushchev was clashing with the “leftists,” and they leave out everything else. This is natural. People talk about what’s bothering them. In actual fact, quite a small amount of time at those conferences was devoted to discussion by or about the “leftists.” As much as 90 percent of the discussion time was taken up by writers, artists, stage and film directors, and the like, who had already made their careers. The existing power structure and ideology suited them just fine. Their speeches were concerned with minor matters. One person wanted certain publication plans to be expanded, but there was not enough money. Another asked that a new conservatory be built. Actually it was money that they mostly rattled on about at the Lenin Hills conference. Everyone was trying to win favor with the government, including the “leftist” formalists and unofficial groups. In the same way, the eighteenthcentury poet Gavrila Derzhavin sought the good graces of Catherine the Great, Russia’s ruler at the time. Because in Russia, and not only in Russia, to be favored by the authorities meant the bestowal of charity and the assurance of prosperity and fame. That’s why they all sought to win favor so desperately. In reading Romm’s account, one cannot forget the fact that he too belonged to a group, or “flock,” and saw the world through its eyes. On the other hand, that is exactly why his account is interesting to us. He says, for example: “I remember several of the speeches. Above all, of course, Gribachev’s, because it had to do with me. He called me a provocateur, a political nitwit, and a slanderer, and at the same time swore to his Jewish friends he was not anti-Semitic. Well then, on top of that, he lambasted Shchipachev.” He continues: “I remember some vile, repulsive, filthy behavior by Vuchetich. I remember the figure cut by Ilyichev, who constantly nodded at every comment made by Khrushchev, because all the speeches that were given chewed over and regurgitated particular statements made by Khrushchev, his long, rambling

Strike While the Iron Is Hot

253

comments in reply to speeches by others. And Khrushchev’s comments were drastically severe, especially when he responded to the speeches of Ehrenburg, Yevtushenko, and Shchipachev, who all spoke very well.” Romm did not remember what Ehrenburg talked about, but Belyutin did: “Ehrenburg did not speak about his own professional doings; he spoke about art. He said that Falk was a great painter. He said that painting is a majestic art, which operates in complex ways to produce the effect it has on people, and that it cannot be dealt with like a color photograph. He said that Belyutin had created a school of painting that stood in opposition to ‘anti-painting’ and that attempting to ban it made no sense.” That’s why he remembered Ehrenburg’s remarks. Ehrenburg had spoken in defense of Belyutin’s “flock of birds.” At that point, according to Belyutin, Ehrenburg paid reverence to Khrushchev: “For the first time, Nikita Sergeyevich, our entire people has seen that the person in the Kremlin is a vital, living person, and that is something colossal.” “The figure of Khrushchev in real life was something quite new to me. It all began with him behaving like the kind and gentle host of some big enterprise. Like a lumber dealer on a large scale, or the master of ceremonies at a big banquet. ‘Be my guest, let me treat you, eat, drink! We’re going to have a good, heart-to-heart talk.’” This, on the other hand, is how Romm remembered Father. And he said all this so kindly—a round man, close-shaven. And his movements were round. And so it all began, so to speak, good-naturedly. And his first comments were good-natured. He told about letting Ivan Denisovich be published. And during those comments Tvardovsky said: “Actually, you know, Solzhenitsyn is here.” Khrushchev said: “Well now, I’d be curious to make his acquaintance.” A tall, thin man stood up, wearing a cheap, threadbare suit, with a gloomy, quite cheerless expression on his unhealthy-looking face. He gave sort of an awkward bow and sat down. What a strange impression he made.

Solzhenitsyn did not belong to Romm’s “flock.” Or to any flock at all. He went his own way. A typical “rogue bear,” you might say. So then, [Romm continues], at first he was such a beneficent, good-natured host, but later on he gradually got himself more and more worked up . . . And above all, he attacked Neizvestny. It was extraordinarily difficult for him. It surprised me the lengths Khrushchev went to, to talk about what the artist is, the artist aspiring to reach “communism” as opposed to the artist who is not helping society reach “communism.” And what a bad one that Ernst Neizvestny was. Khrushchev kept searching for a long time, as though to find the most insulting way to say what Neizvestny was, or to explain it in the clearest way. And finally he found it— he found it and was very happy about it. He said: “This is what your art is like. If a man got into a toilet, got down inside under the toilet seat, and from there, from under the toilet seat, looked up at what was above him, and saw

254 Time for Change: 1962 someone sitting on the toilet seat above him, that’s the part of the body he would look at from down below, from under the toilet seat. He didn’t have a big enough plank to keep himself from falling into the toilet, through that big round opening, that’s what he was lacking, and that is your position, Comrade Neizvestny, you’re sitting inside the toilet!” He said this to the accompaniment of laughter and approval from the creative intelligentsia, that is, from its older members—artists, writers, and sculptors . . .”3

Father later regretted the form in which he had criticized Neizvestny, but only the form, because, as he wrote in his memoirs: “I remain essentially an opponent of abstract art. I simply don’t understand it.”4 It is a paradox—and something Father did not know—that a recurring theme in Neizvestny’s work is the figure of a giant sitting in a characteristic pose, relieving himself of “human beings,” who fall from his rear end, one after another. Father had not seen such products of Neizvesty’s art. To Mikhail Romm, as well as to me until recently, Neizvestny always seemed like a solid rock against which any objections by the authorities, or by other ill-wishers, shattered to pieces. Belyutin, however, saw Neizvestny quite differently: To present more convincing proof of the extremes our studio had supposedly reached in producing grotesque works, Khrushchev requested that some sculptures and drawings by Neizvestny be brought over and placed on a table. Then Khrushchev said: “Look at this here—it’s called a woman. But it’s just a broken water faucet!” These words, accompanied by hoots and laughter from those present, were aimed at a few small sculptures of Neizvestny’s that were held aloft by compliant hands. I don’t know how Neizvestny was able to put up with such ridicule, let alone respond politely, smile, apologize, and promise to mend his ways, but that’s what he did. Taking Khrushchev by the arm, Neizvestny wouldn’t let him say another word for several minutes and desperately showered praise on his own work. And that in turn ignited hysterical outbursts of laughter.

In this situation, Father seems to have lost his self-control and insulted Neizvestny unnecessarily. The next day, after he had calmed down, Father asked Lebedev to telephone Neizvestny and try to smooth his ruffled feathers. In reply, Neizvestny wrote Khrushchev a short letter:5 Dear Nikita Sergeyevich, I thank you for your fatherly criticism. It has helped me. Yes, it really is time to put an end to purely formal experimentation, and move on to monumental works that will have substantial content—creating them in a way that will be understood and loved by the people. Today Comrade Lebedev conveyed your kind words to me, Nikita Sergeyevich. I am afraid I will seem immodest, but I bow down deeply in the face of the humaneness you have shown, and I very much want to write to you with words of the warmest and tenderest kind. But what are words? Deeds are what counts.

Strike While the Iron Is Hot

255

Nikita Sergeyevich, I vow to you and to the party personified in you, that I will work without letup to make whatever contribution is in my power to the common cause for the good of the people. With deep respect, Ernst Neizvestny December 21, 1962

After reading Neizvestny’s letter, Father distributed copies to the members of the CC Presidium. As far as he was concerned, the incident was closed. But Suslov and Shelepin, each in his own way, continued to whip up the scandal initiated at the Manège. Shelepin began an investigation into where Neizvestny obtained his bronze. But for Suslov, the biggest concern was Ilyichev. At the Lenin Hills conference, Ilyichev had managed to slip out of the trap while suffering hardly any losses. Let us then return to the scene of the December 17 conference. Father was feeling hot under the collar after the “exchange of civilities” with Neizvestny, and he now lit into Ilya Ehrenburg, who along with others had written Father a letter suggesting that “peaceful coexistence” among differing trends in the arts be permitted—between formalists and realists, between Gribachev and Yevtushenko, between Serov and Belyutin—in other words, let peace prevail among all the spiders in the jar. Ilyichev also discussed this letter in his speech at the Lenin Hills conference, but did not name any names. He avoided naming them because the authors had “thought better of it.” They had changed their minds and retracted the letter. But Father didn’t forget the letter, or the names of the main “signatories.” He didn’t like Ehrenburg’s idea. He felt intuitively that as a result of such “coexistence” not one stone would be left standing in our country. Romm remembers Khrushchev then saying: “Peaceful coexistence is possible, but not on questions of ideology.” “But that was only said as a kind of witticism, Nikita Sergeyevich,” called out Ehrenburg from his seat. “How shall I put it? A joking way of expressing something. After all, the letter had peaceful intentions.” “No, Comrade Ehrenburg, it’s not a joking matter,” Father replied. “There will be no peaceful coexistence in ideology. There will not be, comrades, and I am warning everyone about that, everyone who signed that letter.” Thus Father closed the subject. The time to open the jar and shake the spiders out of it had not yet come. And the spiders themselves didn’t want to leave the jar. What kind of peaceful coexistence could there be under such conditions?! Belyutin dreamed of suppressing Serov, and vice versa. Yevtushenko hated Gribachev, as Gribachev did Yevtushenko. Those on each side were furiously intent on suppressing whomever they could, among their opponents, and wherever they could. That’s the way life was with those people. “On the one hand, Ehrenburg, Yevtushenko, and Shchipachev spoke very well,” says Romm in summing up the discussion. “But then there was

256 Time for Change: 1962 Mikhalkov, and right along with him, Sholokhov, Gribachev, and Vuchetich, with their mugs twitching, amazingly repulsive individuals.” At the conference, according to the official stenographic record, there were additional speakers, among them the artists Deineka and Serov and the film director Sergei Gerasimov. Romm didn’t remember them or didn’t consider them worth mentioning in his recollections. But the three men he mentions with such distaste did not speak on that day, according to the stenographic record, although they were present. It’s just that Romm had no sympathy for them and they had none for Romm. That’s the way it is. After the luncheon at the Conference Center, Father considered his mission accomplished, and told Suslov to sort out anything further by himself. It was Suslov’s duty as chief ideologist to deal with these matters. As I have already written, Father left for Kiev the next day, on December 18, 1961, together with the president of Yugoslavia. Suslov did not think the mission had been accomplished. He felt that things were only getting started. He assigned Ilyichev to hold an expanded session of the Ideological Department the following week, and in Khrushchev’s absence to give all the free-thinkers a thorough cursingout. Ilyichev had no choice but to salute and follow orders.

42 Suslov Advances Further, December 24 and 26, 1962 The session of the Ideological Commission was set for December 24

at the Central Committee building on Staraya Ploshchad (Old Square). Romm was not invited, but Belyutin was. Here is his account: The poets spoke first. The light of a cold Moscow day filled the windows, but the poets thumped their chests, and each in his own way tried to demonstrate his loyalty and his true belief in the party no matter what it did. Now and then among these empty and stereotyped remarks by the poets, some prose writers such as Aksyonov also kicked themselves. Sitting in the farthest corner of the room, I watched the silhouettes of these wincing, quavering people falling all over themselves to get to the microphone, flinging up their hands, and I asked myself, “Where is so much fear coming from? How have they managed to frighten these young people into saying the things they’re saying?”

256 Time for Change: 1962 Mikhalkov, and right along with him, Sholokhov, Gribachev, and Vuchetich, with their mugs twitching, amazingly repulsive individuals.” At the conference, according to the official stenographic record, there were additional speakers, among them the artists Deineka and Serov and the film director Sergei Gerasimov. Romm didn’t remember them or didn’t consider them worth mentioning in his recollections. But the three men he mentions with such distaste did not speak on that day, according to the stenographic record, although they were present. It’s just that Romm had no sympathy for them and they had none for Romm. That’s the way it is. After the luncheon at the Conference Center, Father considered his mission accomplished, and told Suslov to sort out anything further by himself. It was Suslov’s duty as chief ideologist to deal with these matters. As I have already written, Father left for Kiev the next day, on December 18, 1961, together with the president of Yugoslavia. Suslov did not think the mission had been accomplished. He felt that things were only getting started. He assigned Ilyichev to hold an expanded session of the Ideological Department the following week, and in Khrushchev’s absence to give all the free-thinkers a thorough cursingout. Ilyichev had no choice but to salute and follow orders.

42 Suslov Advances Further, December 24 and 26, 1962 The session of the Ideological Commission was set for December 24

at the Central Committee building on Staraya Ploshchad (Old Square). Romm was not invited, but Belyutin was. Here is his account: The poets spoke first. The light of a cold Moscow day filled the windows, but the poets thumped their chests, and each in his own way tried to demonstrate his loyalty and his true belief in the party no matter what it did. Now and then among these empty and stereotyped remarks by the poets, some prose writers such as Aksyonov also kicked themselves. Sitting in the farthest corner of the room, I watched the silhouettes of these wincing, quavering people falling all over themselves to get to the microphone, flinging up their hands, and I asked myself, “Where is so much fear coming from? How have they managed to frighten these young people into saying the things they’re saying?”

Suslov Advances Further

257

Belyutin could not help remembering certain comments by Robert Rozhdestvensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko: Rozhdestvensky: “My generation will soon take its place at the helm and at the head of government ministries. My generation is true to the behests of our fathers. To us, the ideas of the party are the dearest and most kindred of all. We are happy that we live and think under its leadership.” Yevtushenko: “If someone at one of my evening poetry readings were to say something anti-Soviet, I myself with my own hands would drag him off to the state security agencies. May the party know that even my closest friend or nearest relative would become an enemy in such a case.” “And this was not the fruit of intimidation,” Belyutin wrote. “There was no threat of prison. Some people clapped; others preserved a tense silence. Vladimir Firsov, a young poet himself, but an enemy of the young rebel poets, spoke out against them, saying they were being published too much, and that included Voznesensky.” The artist Andronov spoke up. He said it was impermissible to interfere in the professional affairs of artists. A quarter of an hour later, Nikonov took the floor, and his entire speech was aimed against me and “the Belyutin people.” He demanded we be punished and isolated completely. I sent a note to the presiding body asking for the floor. It was evident they weren’t going to let me speak. After another half hour everything ended. Out on the street it was cold . . . The next day I wasn’t awake yet when the phone rang and the voice of Polikarpov, the man in charge of the Cultural Department of the Central Committee, could be heard rasping from the instrument. The previous evening he had been sitting in the presiding body of the conference along with Ilyichev. “In a friendly way, as though nothing had happened, he asked if I couldn’t come see him at the Central Committee building on Old Square right away? They had scheduled a continuation of the conference for 4 P.M. that day, and I understood that this had to do with me being given the floor to speak.1

Belyutin was encouraged by the conversation with Polikarpov, and in a sanguine mood made his way to the second session with the Ideological Commission. “Walking past the rows of state security officers, I saw with surprise that Neizvestny was talking animatedly with Vladimir Serov, the secretary of the Artists Union, and trying every which way to ignore me.” Belyutin reminisces about that day: I was just coming through the door of the room where the conference was being held when I heard that I was being given the floor. I didn’t think I was late. The room was far from full, and people were still hurriedly taking their places. It was simply that the organizers, for their own purposes, wanted to

258 Time for Change: 1962 cow the audience more effectively by springing something on them all of a sudden. In my remarks I spoke about my profound regret that our work met with no understanding. I said that I had tried to explain our aims in a dozen books I had written about the organic and historical nature of the movement in Russian art toward new paths. But I said it was still too early to speak of any full discovery [of these new paths] and that it was necessary to proceed further. At that point a voice from the presiding body interrupted me: “And won’t you tell us how foreign correspondents ended up at your Taganka exhibit?” It was Satyukov, probably the most intelligent of the people sitting there, who asked that question. A few days later Neizvestny would come to see me and say that he suffered greatly at that moment. He thought for sure I would give him away. I said: “I think the agencies of state security could easily confirm the fact that neither I nor any of my associates, my studio trainees, invited foreign correspondents.” It was awkward trying to argue with them. Let the ball go back into their court. Soon Ilyichev took the floor. [According to the stenographic record, nine other people spoke after Belyutin, and only then did Ilyichev take the floor.] With a smooth play of words he began to lecture us like a patient teacher dealing with schoolchildren: “Who told you, you young people active in cultural fields, that the party had withdrawn its decisions made under Zhdanov? Where did you get the idea that you could do what you wanted? Why did you decide that the party had ceased to exercise control over you?” And so forth. The lenses of his glasses flashed. Smoothly and without consulting any written notes, he spoke for a very long time. Several days later, when his speech appeared in the newspapers, I was quite surprised. A large part of what he had said wasn’t there. Only at the end were the words asserting that the “three leaders of the rebellion”—Yevtushenko, Belyutin, and Neizvestny— would in the future create works worthy of the people. Yevtushenko was given permission to continue being published and Neizvestny to do his sculpting. As for me and our studio, we had been immured, walls had gone up around us. That feeling stayed with me as I went down the stairs to the coatroom, where Neizvestny, ignoring me as before, was sticking by Serov’s side. As I put on my coat I heard a scrap of their conversation: “And you should reeducate me, reeducate me—I am completely at your disposal.” I walked past the guards and out into the snow.

With those words, Belyutin ends his reminiscences about that event. Now I refer to the official documents. The stenographic record of this conference takes up eighty-five pages. It is quite boring and there is no point in quoting it at length. All of the first twenty-four speakers uniformly and unanimously assured those present that they supported the line of the party. And then each one took up his own pet subject. The artist Ilya Glazunov was concerned about preserving the monuments of the past. The poet Vladimir Firsov was indignant about formalism and the “contempt for human beings” evident in the works of Neizvestny. Another poet, Yevgeny Isayev, quoted from Nikolai Roerikh, and the composer Rodion Shchedrin told about the musical talent of Kotik Orbelyan. The poet Yevtushenko denounced as shameful the dissident

Suslov Advances Further

259

Aleksandr Ginzburg and his uncensored publication Sintaksis (Syntax), and also attacked the dissident Yesenin-Volpin, whom we already know from Ilyichev’s speech at the Lenin Hills conference. Yevtushenko also talked about himself and his poetry readings at the Polytechnic Museum and at the statue of Mayakovsky in Moscow Square. Akhmadulina told about her years of study at the Literary Institute, where “we were absolutely not allowed to live.” The poet Vladimir Kotov attacked the recently published collection of poems by Andrei Voznesensky, which had the “pretentious” title Triangular Pear. The title was apparently the main thing that bothered him. Aksyonov told about Japan. He had just flown back from that country, having no idea what was going on in Moscow. “Vain are the efforts of some ill-intentioned critics, who portray us as nihilists and imitators of Western styles,” he said with passion. “I am thankful to the party and to Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev] that I can talk with them and obtain their advice. We definitely want to say that our hands are clean.” I could go on much longer, quoting from those who spoke, searching out something of interest in every speech, but I must force myself to stop. I will add only that Belyutin was mistaken in one respect. Ilyichev did not refer to Zhdanov in his closing remarks. He quickly went over everything that had been said by those who had spoken, but did not particularly curse or berate anyone. In regard to Belyutin himself, Ilyichev said: “The speech he gave today is worthy of attention.” “Allow me to thank everyone and to urge all of you to draw the necessary correct conclusions from everything that has happened at our conference.” Ilyichev summed up the discussion with those words. In a memorandum to Khrushchev, Ilyichev wrote that at the conference of December 24 and 26, they had invited “young writers, artists, composers, and creative workers from the world of the theater and the cinema, 140 people all together.” “The young people active in creative work as a whole understand correctly and agree with the party’s criticism,” Ilyichev’s memorandum continued. A favorable impression was made by the speeches of the artist Ilya Glazunov, the poets Yevgeny Isayev and Vladimir Kotov, the literary critics D. Starikov and Yu. Surovtsev, the writer Chivilikhin, and the composers Rodion Shchedrin and Aram Khachaturyan. Yevtushenko spoke even more intelligently. The writer Aksyonov and the poets Kazakova and Rozhdestvensky all stated that they approved of the measures taken by the party. The sculptor E. Neizvestny and the artists E. Belyutin and B. Zhutovsky voiced self-criticisms and gave assurances that they would take action to respond to the strict but just party criticism of their mistakes. At the same time, the artists P. Nikonov and especially N. Andronov continued to be stubborn about their errors, and they were condemned for this by Glazunov and Neizvestny. Akhmadulina and the poet Bulat Okudzhava tried to present matters as though there had been no ideological perversions and that what was going on was a conflict between the talented and the untalented. They expressed fears

260 Time for Change: 1962 that . . . “reprisals” might be taken on the local level against those who thought differently. The exchange of views that took place will contribute to the consolidation of the creative youth.2

That, in essence, is everything that needs to be said about the Central Committee conference of December 24 and 26, 1962. Ilyichev tried as much as he could to soften the formulations in his speeches and memoranda and thereby slip out from under Suslov’s control, but it became clearer and clearer to him that Suslov had gained the upper hand, at least temporarily. Meanwhile, out in the world, the times were no longer Stalinist. Western correspondents immediately learned about what had happened at the ideological conferences. They were friendly and outgoing toward the modernists, and the latter responded in kind. American and European newspapers were quick to print Neizvestny’s statement acknowledging his responsibility to society and to the government. Neizvestny told me that in spite of everything, Shelepin continued to investigate whether he had stolen bronze from the government’s material reserves. Neizvestny appealed to Lebedev, who then advised Shelepin to “cool his people off.” The investigation into the “bronze affair” came to a halt, and Shelepin even promised, through one of his assistants, to help Neizvestny. Neizvestny’s conversation with Serov in the coatroom of the Central Committee building also had a sequel. Neizvestny was offered the opportunity to demonstrate his professionalism, and he did so quite well. He told me that within two weeks he produced an absolutely realistic sculpture of a steelworker. He said that multiple copies of this sculpture were widely distributed and put up in public places all over the Soviet Union, and he was paid a fabulous sum for it, more than any other sculptor had ever been paid, he claimed. Soon Father returned from Kiev and shortly thereafter celebrated the New Year (January 1, 1963). Yevtushenko told me in 2005 that Father had invited him through Lebedev to attend the New Year’s reception at the Kremlin. This was the first time Yevtushenko had ever found himself in such illustrious company, and he absorbed all the details. After the first few toasts, when the guests had relaxed a bit, Khrushchev called him over to the table where the members of the CC Presidium were sitting, clinked champagne glasses with him, and introduced him to the other Soviet leaders. He did that despite the fact that on December 17, at the Lenin Hills conference, Yevtushenko had fearlessly engaged in a shouting match with Father. At the height of the argument, Yevtushenko had declared that, unlike Khrushchev, he liked Neizvestny’s work. It’s possible that Father did what he did precisely because of what Yevtushenko had done. Khrushchev was demonstrating his desire to bring closure to what had happened, to put it to rest. After the introductions at the Presidium’s table, Father

The Film Outpost of Ilyich

261

began making the rounds of the other tables, shaking hands with ambassadors, government ministers, academicians, and the like, and introducing all of them to the companion at his side, Yevtushenko, as though he were not just a budding young poet but the president of some friendly power of the first rank. After the official part of the ceremonies, the unofficial part began, including unofficial toasts. Yevtushenko recalled that in one of those toasts Khrushchev suddenly began talking about how many people were “simply bursting” to join the party on account of the privileges entailed by party membership, and Khrushchev said he didn’t know what to do. Then after a pause he said he did know how to solve the problem—he suggested that people should think about whether the entire population of the Soviet Union ought not to be admitted to the party. After that he expressed curiosity about the dean of the diplomatic corps, the Swedish ambassador, Rolf Sulman. He wondered when Sulman would submit his application to join the Soviet Communist Party. After all, he had lived in Moscow for so many years and had virtually become one of us. Sulman promised to think about it. Yevtushenko and Father parted almost as friends. It seemed that everything was gradually calming down. But it only seemed that way. Suslov thought otherwise. He came up with a new controversy, this time about filmmakers. By chance, I happened to be present when this contretemps began. I don’t remember the exact date, but it was during the winter; there was snow on the ground; and so it was probably in February 1963.

43 The Film Outpost of Ilyich, February 1963 On his days off, Father sometimes used the Conference Center in the

Vorobyov Hills district as a kind of private movie theater. It had stereophonic sound and a wide screen, which was rare at that time. As I have said, the government-owned residence where we lived was quite close to the Conference Center, separated from it by a fence. Our house did have a screening room, which could also be used as a billiards room. That was traditional for such Soviet government residences. But Father never picked up a pool cue. Moreover, as Mama grew older, she began to snore louder and louder, so Father converted

The Film Outpost of Ilyich

261

began making the rounds of the other tables, shaking hands with ambassadors, government ministers, academicians, and the like, and introducing all of them to the companion at his side, Yevtushenko, as though he were not just a budding young poet but the president of some friendly power of the first rank. After the official part of the ceremonies, the unofficial part began, including unofficial toasts. Yevtushenko recalled that in one of those toasts Khrushchev suddenly began talking about how many people were “simply bursting” to join the party on account of the privileges entailed by party membership, and Khrushchev said he didn’t know what to do. Then after a pause he said he did know how to solve the problem—he suggested that people should think about whether the entire population of the Soviet Union ought not to be admitted to the party. After that he expressed curiosity about the dean of the diplomatic corps, the Swedish ambassador, Rolf Sulman. He wondered when Sulman would submit his application to join the Soviet Communist Party. After all, he had lived in Moscow for so many years and had virtually become one of us. Sulman promised to think about it. Yevtushenko and Father parted almost as friends. It seemed that everything was gradually calming down. But it only seemed that way. Suslov thought otherwise. He came up with a new controversy, this time about filmmakers. By chance, I happened to be present when this contretemps began. I don’t remember the exact date, but it was during the winter; there was snow on the ground; and so it was probably in February 1963.

43 The Film Outpost of Ilyich, February 1963 On his days off, Father sometimes used the Conference Center in the

Vorobyov Hills district as a kind of private movie theater. It had stereophonic sound and a wide screen, which was rare at that time. As I have said, the government-owned residence where we lived was quite close to the Conference Center, separated from it by a fence. Our house did have a screening room, which could also be used as a billiards room. That was traditional for such Soviet government residences. But Father never picked up a pool cue. Moreover, as Mama grew older, she began to snore louder and louder, so Father converted

262

Time for Change: 1962

the screening and billiards room into his own separate bedroom. Therefore, on our days off, we watched movies at the Conference Center next door—either by ourselves or with neighbors who lived in the nearby residences, that is, other members of the CC Presidium. One Sunday, in keeping with the usual practice, two movies were shown at the Conference Center. Besides our family, the Kosygins, the Suslovs, and some others had come to see these films, but no one was there from the film industry. The occasion was something like a family gathering, an evening at the movies. The first film was in German, from East Germany, with the Russian dubbed in. The second film was one of ours, by the director Marlen Khutsiyev. Its title was Zastava Ilyicha (Outpost of Ilyich). On one level, Zastava Ilyicha is simply the name of a square in Moscow, “Outpost of Ilyich.” But on another level, it means “Lenin’s Sentries” or “Lenin’s Guard.” One of the meanings of the word zastava is a sentry detachment or guard unit. The name of the city square comes from a historical time when it was indeed the site of an outpost, outside the Moscow city walls, where sentries kept guard. But in addition to some historical “Ilyich,” in modern times the name Ilyich resonates as Lenin’s middle name. A person’s middle name, in Russian culture, is derived from his or her father’s first name, and thus Ilyich simply means “son of Ilya.” A famous story by Leo Tolstoy, for example, is “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (i.e., Ivan, son of Ilya). Lenin was often called by his middle name, a usage that connoted a mixture of friendliness, familiarity, and respect. The East Germans’ film was about a planned attack on us by the NATO imperialists. Bombers were headed toward Berlin, but the politically conscious pilots, after some vacillations provided for in the screenplay, turned their planes back, and the provocation failed. Father did not usually comment on the movies we watched. If he didn’t like a movie, he would go into the next room or go home to do some paperwork. If he liked it, he would sit through to the end. This time he stayed to the end, but when the lights came on he remarked: “It’s a politically harmful film. They showed us films like that before the war [the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941], but how did things turn out in real life?” Heads turned in his direction, but he didn’t go any further into the subject. Instead, he asked for the second movie to be shown. I liked Zastava Ilyicha. I didn’t take a great liking to it, but I did like it. The film was made by, about, and for Soviet youth, about the way they would walk down the street in a bunch, go dancing, gather at someone’s apartment in the evening, eat unpeeled baked potatoes by candlelight, and talk about life. The film ended, but the elders were in no hurry to leave. They were obviously waiting for something. Today I understand that it was no accident that we watched Zastava Ilyicha or that the Suslovs and Kosygins had come to see the movie. They did not live in the Vorobyov Hills district.

The Film Outpost of Ilyich

263

The high-pitched, bleating voice of Suslov broke the silence. He said that the film was not correctly oriented ideologically. It did not show these young people correctly, and they were not the right kind of young people. Of course I don’t remember everything he said, but I was especially surprised by his objections to the very name of the film. Everyone knows that “Zastava Ilyicha” (Outpost of Ilyich) is the name of a square in Moscow where the Shosse Entuziastov (Highway of Enthusiasts) begins. The movie’s main characters lived near that square, and it was through the streets of that district that they wandered. Suslov began to hold forth about one of the meanings of the word zastava—that is, a guard unit. He claimed that the filmmakers’ intention was to portray the group of young people as a guard against Ilyich—and everyone knew the Ilyich he was talking about. “What an idiot!” I thought to myself. “How can anyone talk such nonsense?” But Suslov wouldn’t let up; he went on unremittingly. He didn’t like anything about the film: these young people wandering around the streets at night, eating unpeeled potatoes, and doing so by candlelight at that. “What is this? Don’t we have any other kind of food? And don’t we have electricity?” Suslov asked rhetorically. I was dumbfounded by everything I heard, and on and on it went! Suslov especially fastened onto the episode in the film where the image of the main character’s father, who had been killed in the war, appears before the son’s eyes. The young man asks his father for advice on how he should live. “You’re no youngster yourself. You are now older than I was,” replies the father’s ghost. With that he disappears in the semi-darkness. To me this meant the following: “Back then I knew what to do. I went to the battlefront and died for my country. But now you need to find your own path, and you’ll make no mistake.” That’s how I interpreted the words of the ghost figure. It seemed to me that this scene in the film was entirely correct and patriotic. (I have described what stuck in my memory, but later I will cite a more detailed recounting of what was shown on the screen and how it was presented. And by that account, the film was even more correct and patriotic.) As for Suslov, he turned everything on its head. He said he found mysticism in the film, which was not characteristic of Soviet art, and he asked why the father didn’t answer the son’s question directly, but instead disappeared like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. I couldn’t understand any of this, and I looked at Father and the others with perplexity. To my surprise they neither laughed nor got angry. Instead, they listened with close attention to Suslov’s falsetto voice. Suslov had prepared everything with great care. The placing of two generations in opposition to one another, the theme of “fathers versus sons,” was not of course something that Suslov made up. It was an age-old topic, especially in Russian literature. Though Suslov didn’t invent it, he made skillful use of it,

264 Time for Change: 1962 presenting matters as though a battle of ideologies was being waged, a virtual revolt against the Soviet state. The issue of “fathers versus sons” did not originate at the film showing in the Vorobyov Hills. Charges against the “sons” were first made, cautiously, at the Manège. At the Central Committee conferences the “sons” had tried to justify themselves as much as they could in the eyes of the “fathers,” assuring everyone that they did not perceive any “conflict of generations”; they had nothing like that in mind. But Father had not been at the Central Committee conferences, and in his report about those conferences, Ilyichev had not said a word about the “problem of generations.” Suslov turned things in the direction he desired. In his interpretation, the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny was not competing with the sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich for the right to erect a memorial in honor of the Battle of Stalingrad on Mamai Hill, nor was the artist Nikolai Andronov debating with the artist Vladimir Serov about different styles or methods of painting. For Suslov, the entire outlaw band of “free-thinkers” was encroaching on and threatening the conquests of the revolution. How did Marlen Khutsiyev happen to fall under these chariot wheels? I don’t know. Father refused to discuss the subject, which he found unpleasant. He was irritated about it then, and later he felt conscience-stricken over it. Suslov had accumulated quite a lot of experience in such matters, and he had a wide range of opportunities at his disposal. Above all, he operated along conventional lines: he circulated commentaries by experts about this film, as well as “appropriate” short biographies of the filmmakers. He managed to convince Father that the screenplay concealed a political subtext and that in general a situation was developing like the rise of the Petöfi Circle in Hungary. Thus, Suslov had not spoken spontaneously after the film showing, but had carefully prepared his attempt to guide the audience’s reaction. At that time I did not understand any of this and was quite surprised when Father, after listening to Suslov’s comments, proposed that the filmmakers be invited to have a talk with them. “Yes, absolutely necessary,” Suslov agreed. The other “grownups” present rumbled their approval. “What’s going on here?” I asked myself perplexedly. “Well, all right, Suslov is one thing. But how can Father behave like this?” Meanwhile, they were all getting ready to leave. I remember that Father and I accompanied Kosygin and his wife as far as the gate to our residence. Kosygin’s wife, Klavdiya Andreyevna, was a plump woman with dyed-blond hair, a likable enough person, but somewhat primitive in my view. As we walked along, Kosygin kept denouncing the film, and Klavdiya Andreyevna kept yessing him and even became rather indignant. Father listened to them with a benign expression of agreement. As for me, I could barely keep from boiling over. How could intelligent people like this, leaders of our country, fail to understand such obvious things!? After accompanying the Kosygins to our gate, we turned in and headed for the house, where the evening mail was still waiting for Father to attend to. I

The Film Outpost of Ilyich

265

couldn’t restrain myself and began explaining to him that they had not understood correctly, that they were wrong, and that things shouldn’t be done this way! “As for me, I liked the film!” I began. Father did not respond, and speaking hurriedly, because it was only a fiveminute walk from the gate to the door, I told him everything that was on my mind. “You don’t understand anything,” was Father’s only response. He took hold of the doorknob, showing plainly that he didn’t intend to continue the conversation. He went into the dining room, where he usually spread out his files and folders of papers. Feeling insulted—it was he himself who didn’t understand anything—I went to bed. The next evening, after I had just come home from work, Father called out to me to come with him to the Conference Center, where they were going to meet with “the film people.” He was hoping to convince me and at the same time convince himself. I don’t know, but it’s possible that after the previous evening he felt out of his element. When we entered the movie room at the Conference Center, a lot of people were already in their seats, including familiar people, such as Father’s colleagues in the Central Committee and government, but there were even more unfamiliar faces. I slipped into a half-empty back row. Father went down next to the screen. A table had been set up there for the Presidium. Once again, Suslov spoke first and repeated the foolish accusations he had made the previous evening. To my ears these sounded more false than ever. Then Father stood up. “I don’t feel comfortable,” he complained unexpectedly. The entire room pricked up its ears immediately. “Even in my own family they don’t agree with me,” Father continued. “Last night my son Seryozha [nickname for Sergei] kept explaining to me all evening how wrong I was. Isn’t that so?” Father glanced around the room. “He’s sitting here somewhere.” Everyone present turned around. Completely embarrassed, I piped up rather loudly: “All the same, it’s a good movie.” And I sat down. There was a rumbling around the room. I had completely forgotten about that incident, but in 1999 at a presentation of the four-volume set of Father’s memoirs, held at the former Marx-Lenin Institute, Marlen Khutsiyev reminded me that, back then, I was the only one who dared to speak up in his defense. Then I remembered it all distinctly, down to the last detail. “There, you see?” For some reason Father cried out happily and went on to blab the same nonsense—excuse me, but I don’t know how else to put it— that Suslov had jabbered, word for word. I was amazed. Usually Father spoke without troubling himself very much about the structure of his sentences, but he spoke his own mind. Now it was as though he were repeating lessons learned

266 Time for Change: 1962 by rote. Even today I can’t find a rational explanation. The only thing that occurs to me is this: within himself, in his gut, so to speak, he did not really accept the words he was saying and therefore he could not find arguments of his own, but instead repeated what he had read in the various reports. A book by Stanislav Rassadin reports that the unpleasantness for Khutsiyev began even before his film had been released. The writer Viktor Nekrasov, whom the ideologists disliked, had praised the episode in the film where the father’s ghost appears. He had written about the film in passing in his travel notes about his trips abroad and had praised the film directors for “not dragging out onto the screen by his gray whiskers some older worker with his mouth full of moralizing statements.” In the context of that time, Nekrasov’s praise had a “more than exasperating” ring to it. It was considered provocative. The harmless words of the characters in the film acquired a hidden ideological meaning that the directors never intended. These “gray whiskers of an older worker” proved to be a real find for Suslov’s ideologists. The absence from the film of this “bewhiskered older worker” symbolized the bad intentions and political unreliability of the filmmakers, and this argument was repeated from one official report to the next. Even today, for some liberal writers, this argument seems to hold water.1 I decided to check what Rassadin had written, to look at the original source. Without lazing around, I visited our university library. There with no difficulty I found on the shelves the gray-blue issues of Novy Mir bound in one volume for 1962. In the eleventh and twelfth issues, I found Nekrasov’s essays about his trips to Italy and the United States to attend film festivals and literary symposiums. He mainly wrote about Western authors and film directors, comparing them with ours, and only in passing did he mention Khutsiyev’s film Zastava Ilyicha. I take the liberty of quoting the passage from Nekrasov without leaving anything out. This is the passage featuring the ill-starred “gray whiskers”: I am endlessly grateful to Marlen Khutsiyev and Gennady Shpalikov [the author of the film script] for not dragging out onto the screen by his graying whiskers an older worker who understands everything and who has a clear and exact answer for everything. If he had appeared on the screen with his hortatory remarks, that would have killed the movie. Khutsiyev and Shpalikov took a different road, one that is more difficult to travel. The room where the young people are sitting suddenly turns into a wartime dugout, with soldiers sleeping wherever they had thrown themselves down. Flickering on a table is a kerosene lamp made from an empty artillery shell. Father and son drink a toast to one another. The son says to the father: “I would like to have been with you there in that attack where you were killed.” “No,” says the father. “Why? You need to live.” “But how?” the son asks. “How old are you?” the father asks in turn. “Twenty-three.” “But I’m only twenty-one.” At these words, chills ran down my spine. The father gave no other answer. He disappeared. His comrades were waiting for him. And they marched

The Film Outpost of Ilyich

267

forward, three comrades in their waterproof capes, submachine guns held at their chests. They are walking through today’s early-morning Moscow. Cars go by, but they keep marching, marching—the same way three other soldiers were marching at the beginning of the film, soldiers of the revolution, marching through the streets of an earlier Moscow, the Moscow of 1917. And theirs is a measured tread that echoes and is replaced by another measured tread. Red Square. The changing of the guard. The Mausoleum. And the inscription “Lenin.” All the lines in the film, all the angles, the confrontations and complications, are reduced to one thing: “How to proceed?” And there’s only one answer: just as we are doing now. Searching unceasingly for an answer, searching for the right road, searching for the truth. As long as you are searching, as long as you are asking yourself and your friends and your father, and asking these questions on Red Square, you are alive. When your questions end, you will also end. Self-satisfied complacency, an existence that is unquestioning and not rebellious, is not a life.2

Do you see the huge difference between Nekrasov’s words, phrased in a party spirit, harking back to Lenin and the revolution, and those of the Suslov-type memoranda? What if the authors of the denunciations had actually quoted Nekrasov in full? . . . But Suslov and his people, who were intent on undermining Ilyichev, required a scandal. And in keeping with their usual practice, they manipulated quotations. They had done the same earlier with Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. But in this case there was a fundamental difference. Father had not read Pasternak’s book, but he had seen Khutsiyev’s movie. Nevertheless, he didn’t stray from the opinion that had been foisted onto him. I don’t know why. Being in a certain mood, he in fact no longer saw what was directly in front of him. He imagined seeing everywhere the “gray whiskers” by which Khutsiyev and Shpalikov ought to have dragged onto the screen an “older worker,” someone like one of Father’s old miner comrades. I tried to understand why Father believed the reports and memoranda more than he did his own eyes. Everything comes down once again to the ugly practice of denunciation. Oh that terrible Russian tradition of denunciations! According to his contemporaries, Viktor Nekrasov was then living in Kiev, drinking constantly, almost never sober, drinking in restaurants or at the homes of others, or in his own kitchen. And everywhere he went, after the second glass of vodka, he would curse everything indiscriminately, his fellow writers and the Writers Union, the authorities in general, and Khrushchev in particular. Among those who drank with him, professional informers invariably appeared—or simply those who reported voluntarily, about what really happened or what never happened. As a result of these denunciations the state security agencies and the ideologists took a special interest in Nekrasov’s travel notes published in Novy Mir. That is how they came across Khutsiyev’s film, and now the reference to the “graywhiskered older worker” had quite a different ring to it. That is how the logic of these events unfolded.

268 Time for Change: 1962 However, this background research has taken us far afield from the Lenin Hills Conference Center where a discussion of Zastava Ilyicha was proceeding. The rest of those who took the floor—and I have absolutely no recollection of who they were—kept circling around that worker’s gray whiskers and repeated with one variation or another what Suslov had said and what Father had repeated after him. Finally even the most garrulous ran out of steam. A recommendation was made that Khutsiyev rework his film to “bring it up to snuff.” In 1965 it was shown in Soviet movie theaters, and to my nonprofessional viewer’s eye, it was the same as before. Only the title had been changed, to Mne dvadtsat let (I Am in My Twenties). Also, the episode with the father’s ghost had been revised. Now, before the ghost disappeared, he delivered an “inspirational” lecture. In writing all this, I begin to feel embarrassed—about our government leaders, about myself, about everything that happened. Can it be that things were really like that in those days? Unfortunately, that’s exactly how they were. Anna Akhmatova once commented that people are happy in their ignorance of the wretchedness and misery out of which poetry is born. It’s the same in politics. An accidental concatenation of circumstances, a denunciation by someone, a top official’s bad mood or indigestion, can cause a chain of events with farreaching consequences. If in 1812 Napoleon had not come down with a cold at the Battle of Borodino outside Moscow, what country would we be living in? I don’t know, but most likely quite a different one. If it had not been for Stalin’s maniacal distrust of everyone and everything, from Churchill’s letters to the reports from our own intelligence sources, the war of 1941–1945 might have taken a different course or might not have happened at all. If only, if only, if only. If only Father had found the time or had had the desire to look into these matters himself, rather than accepting Suslov as an intermediary, everything might have come out differently. But that’s not what happened. Having largely died down after the Central Committee conferences, the scandal broke out with renewed force. The discussion in the film room at the Conference Center started a new round of controversy and inquisition that culminated in March 1963 at the Kremlin.

The Decisive Battle

269

44 The Decisive Battle, March 1963 I should remind readers that Suslov had proposed that the earlier

“trouncing” of writers and artists be held in the Kremlin so that it would have greater resonance throughout the world. But Father had opposed that idea; he preferred a luncheon and “friendly” discussion in the Lenin Hills district. Suslov drew his own conclusions. This time he included more than 600 people in the list of those to be invited. This number could not physically be accommodated at the Conference Center, and he proposed that the event be moved to a larger place: Sverdlov Hall in the Kremlin. Ilyichev was again assigned to give the main report. It was customary for Father, at various meetings, to engage in detailed discussion of subjects he was familiar with. He would go into the minutest details, tossing comments back and forth with those sitting in the meeting room with him, people he had known for a long time and recognized easily—scientists, chief designers, factory managers, state-farm directors, and secretaries of party regional committees and district committees. Whether they were airplane designers like Andrei Tupolev or rocket scientists like Valentin Glushko, seed selectionists like Vasily Remeslo or Pavel Lukyanenko, first secretaries of union-republic communist parties like Uldzhabayev or Pyotr Shelest—he remembered them all from the previous year or the year before, what they had promised, what they had achieved or had not achieved, and he knew which of them could be trusted and which of them he had to be cautious with. Such meetings turned into dialogues between Father and those who took the floor. These dialogues departed from the scenario that had been strictly worked out in advance, but it was a heart-to-heart talk, and dealt with fundamentals, with precise facts and figures. As on earlier occasions, Father was provided in advance with lists of “questionable” writers, artists, and the like, along with brief descriptions of them. But he did not remember these people or know them by their faces. In his memory certain names stood out for him among the younger writers, for example Yevtushenko, but in the case of others, including Voznesensky and Aksyonov, he could not associate the names with their visual appearance. This time in Sverdlov Hall, Father saw hardly any familiar faces or persons aside from such old-timers as Aleksandr Tvardovsky and Ilya Ehrenburg, Aleksandr Korneichuk and Wanda Wasilewska. Father was not in a good mood before this conference.

270 Time for Change: 1962 He did not feel inwardly prepared for the coming discussion. What kind of dialogue can there be if you don’t know whom you’re talking with and are not familiar with most of the works being discussed, if you know them only from official reports and memoranda. It was physically impossible for Father to read all that material. He did not have the time, as would be true of anyone engaged in matters of great importance, whether a politician, the head of a corporation, or a general. Meanwhile the people who had been invited came pouring into the Kremlin. “The final act took place,” as Belyutin recalls, “in the large round hall of the former Senate in the Kremlin.” Before the revolution, this space was called the Senate Hall. (It had been designed by an eighteenth-century architect, Matvei Kazakov.) It was renamed in honor of Yakov Sverdlov, who headed the first Soviet legislative body. “The doors slammed shut,” Belyutin continues. “I was late for the beginning of the conference because it was only at the last minute that I had received an invitation. Here too they checked my pass and compared it with my passport, but less dramatically and in a more everyday manner. “Notes of some sort were being passed up to the Presidium, and I recognized my associate Boris Zhutovsky, who took our draft letter up to Khrushchev. He was sitting in the front row. Khrushchev’s small eyes were darting from row to row. He kept his eyes on everything and everyone at the same time. He undoubtedly had a talent for chairing meetings and conferences.” “I arrived at Sverdlov Hall in the Kremlin,” Mikhail Romm recalls. And the same people were there, only twice as many. The hall was like a large amphitheater with benches all around, and opposite them, on a specially raised area where the Presidium sat, was the rostrum for those who would be speaking. It was a lovely, carefully arranged, but utterly cold auditorium. We all took our seats. It was obvious that a continuation of the earlier discussions would now take place. We sat there and sat there. Then the CC Presidium came in. Khrushchev, and behind him the others. Frol Kozlov, with his curly hair carefully combed, graying a bit, and with a cold look on his face. And also Ilyichev. They all stood up and, well, applauded one another. Then sat down. Silence. A guarded silence. We were waiting. Khrushchev stands up and starts in: “Here we have decided to meet with you again, and you must forgive us that this time there are no tables covered with food and drink. We wanted to meet again in the Lenin Hills, but there wasn’t enough room there. No more than 300 people could fit there. So this time we decided intentionally to have a talk where more people could listen in, and so it was necessary to gather here. But during the break there will be a buffet, and please help yourselves.” Again he began as a good-humored host: “The weather,” he said, “is bad now, unfortunately. It’s a dank and cold winter, which doesn’t contribute to a cordial atmosphere. But never mind. We’ll have a more serious talk to make up for it. The next meeting we intend to hold in May or June, when there will be sun, the trees will have leafed out, and the grass will have come up. And

The Decisive Battle

271

then we’ll have an even more cordial meeting and the conversation will be more cheerful. But for now we have to do things in the winter way.”

Father had in mind a Central Committee plenum on ideology, scheduled for May, at which he was planning to give the main report. There he would cross the t’s and dot the i’s once and for all. He was silent for a while. [I return now to Romm’s recollections.] Then suddenly, without any transition: “Volunteer informers for foreign agencies, I ask you to leave the hall.” Silence. Everyone looked around, understanding nothing: what informers was he talking about? “I repeat: volunteer informers for foreign agencies, get on out of here.” We remained silent. “I will explain,” Khrushchev said. “Last time after our meeting in the Lenin Hills, the very next day the foreign press printed very exact reports. That means there were informers, bootlickers for the foreign press. We don’t need bootlickers. So for the third time I warn you: volunteer informers for foreign agencies, you must leave. I understand: it’s awkward for you stand up right now and reveal yourselves, so during the break when we all go to the buffet tables, you can make it look as though you have to go to the bathroom. You can slip out and disappear, so you won’t be here any longer, do you understand?”

According to the stenographic record, at this point the room echoed with “stormy applause.”1 The Stalin era was now a thing of the past. Talking with Western journalists was no longer considered a crime—akin to espionage, for which one could be arrested—and Soviet writers and artists, especially young ones, readily gave them interviews. They all wanted to become world-famous. The state security agencies did not interfere with such contacts, but kept scrupulously close track of them. Reports appearing in Western publications were translated and ended up on Father’s desk, accompanied by Suslov’s commentaries. There was no special need for those commentaries. The Western correspondents, of their own accord, portrayed everything from a highly ideological point of view. In their opinion, the works of the “modern artists” were a political protest, not just against socialist realism, but against socialism as a whole, an attempt to undermine the foundations of the Soviet state. And they gave the same journalistic slant to information about the conferences in the Lenin Hills and at the Central Committee, portraying them as confrontations between critics and defenders of the socialist system, not as clashes between adherents of different artistic trends. Suslov could not have dreamed of a better gift from his opponents in the West. In this instance I am on Father’s side. He had been talking with the people in the audience as his co-thinkers, trying to understand them and hoping they would understand him. There was no doubt in his mind that they were all working together as a single team. And here they had gone running off immediately to complain about him. And to whom? To the Americans!

272 Time for Change: 1962 “That’s how it began,” Romm continues. “Ilyichev made some conventional introductory remarks, which differed little from his speeches at the Lenin Hills and at the CC Ideological Commission the previous December. Then discussion ensued. “Well, then it went on and on—the same as at the Lenin Hills, but perhaps worse. No one any longer dared to object. Shchipachev was not given the floor. Maltsev kept trying to mumble something about the party committee of the Writers Union, directing his attack at that committee in particular, but people began to interrupt him and he was simply driven from the rostrum. “Ehrenburg remained silent, as did everyone else. The only ones who spoke were the same old types like Gribachev, Sofronov, and Vasilyev. They went on and on, thanking the party and the government for their assistance. They were especially thankful that order was finally being restored in the arts, and that this whole bandit gang (they no longer used any other term for the abstractionists and young poets) had finally been dealt with.” According to the stenographic record, neither Ilya Ehrenburg nor Stepan Shchipachev, nor Nikolai Gribachev, Anatoly Sofronov, and Sergei Vasilyev, took the floor at the Kremlin conference. In using these names, Romm does not have specific people in mind. The names simply personify the disputing groups. And these groups had their roots far back in the Silver Age of Russian culture at the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Even then, the disputing groups had been locked in mortal combat. In 1930, Stalin put an end to these hostilities, giving recognition to one group and dismissing the rest. Then everyone fell silent. Now the hostilities had broken out again with new force. Father knew virtually nothing about the sources of these hostilities. He had no interest in the various literary and artistic trends of the Silver Age, and in this he was no different from the majority of the population in the Soviet Union. And now suddenly it was up to him, the Number One person in the Soviet government, to try to steer by intuition through this stormy sea of other people’s passions and ambitions, alien to him. His feeling of helplessness in this situation put Father into a darker and darker mood and made him angrier and angrier. Meanwhile, the conference kept rolling along the track laid down by Suslov. “‘Wherever we went in Europe, we found traces of the trips made by these young people, who have done a snow job on the whole world. They’re doing a snow job, and everywhere they go, they blabber who-knows-what, which is doing us harm.’ This was said by one of ‘them.’” By “them,” Romm means the group he was opposed to. Actually the “young people” were not making unauthorized forays with their trips abroad. Unlike the “oldsters,” they were being invited to the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. They easily established rapport with their audiences, gave sharp and lively answers to questions from foreign journalists, and their works were increasingly being published in the West, which naturally aroused envy, both professional and purely human. As I have already mentioned, Aksyonov had just flown back from Tokyo when he appeared at the December 17 conference.

The Decisive Battle

273

Yevtushenko, in early 1963, stopped off in Moscow briefly on his way from Havana to Western Europe. As he himself reports: “I met Valentin Katayev there. Our paths crossed in Paris. I was luxuriating in the indiscreet fame I had won after my Precocious Autobiography was published by L’Express. In Paris, as it turned out, I was more famous and far more wealthy than Katayev.” Yevtushenko had been paid in cash by L’Express, while Katayev was trying to exist in Paris on the modest daily allowance doled out by the Soviet government. Yevtushenko, who loved to put on the dog, arranged an all-out binge in Paris for his older fellow writer, thus demonstrating in practice who was who.2 I return to Romm, giving his further impressions of the March 7–8 conference in the Kremlin: [Vladimir] Yermilov spoke at a gallop, quickly and superficially, followed by some other people. The common theme was that in our country there was no “conflict between generations.” The two generations were working together in harmony, and anyone who said there were two different generations was a scoundrel. It was mostly the older ones who said all that, while slashing the younger ones to bits. That’s how the conference was proceeding. Sholokhov went up to speak, and stood there saying nothing. Such a small man. He had put on weight, though it was well concealed. He stood there with an evil expression on his insignificant face. “I agree. There’s nothing more to say. I give you my greetings.” Such were his brief remarks. He turned and went back to his seat. On the first day a realist painter named Plastov also took the floor. His remarks were very amusing. The man who appeared at the rostrum had his hair parted in the middle, a modest-looking man, neither young nor old, and partly deaf or pretending to be, talking like “one of the common people” and telling the most amazing stories, all the while bowing and scraping, thanking the party and the government and Khrushchev personally.

According to Romm, here is what Plastov told Father: You know, Nikita Sergeyevich, after that conference in the Lenin Hills I was inspired and delighted and tried to remember everything. After all, it was a historic event. And I wrote some notes for myself and went back home where I live. I live far away, out in the sticks. We have a state farm there. It used to be a collective farm. I arrive, and there’s a sleigh there to meet me at the station, driven by Semyon. He’s an old man now, with a broad, thick beard. I once did a painting of him as a young shepherd boy. He’s my friend. “Why aren’t you asking me about the big event?” I say to him. “What event?” “Well, at the Lenin Hills, the conference of the intelligentsia, and the artists, with the government.” “Well, what happened? Did they light into you?” he asked. “No, indeed. The opposite. I got up on my high horse and lit into the others, the abstractionists, they’ve lost touch with the people.” That’s how I answered him. “How did they lose touch with the people? What are they? A bunch of foreigners? Or nobles?”

274 Time for Change: 1962 “No, not at all. They’re our own people, but they’ve lost touch, I tell you. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you read the papers?” “Some I read. Some I use to roll my tobacco in,” he says to me in reply. So I arrive back in my home village, and no one knows anything, Nikita Sergeyevich. No one there understands what your abstractionism is, or your surrealism there, or your realism. The schoolteacher came over to me and asked: “At least give me a print of a painting by Repin to show the boys. I don’t know how to explain all this stuff myself.” Well, the peasants gathered around and I began to tell them, but their response was: “You ought to talk to that other guy, Udinov. He works at the post office. He reads everything, knows everything. We don’t understand about this stuff.” Later they asked me: “Now what about these artists? Do they get paid?” “Yes, they get paid,” I answered. “Do they get good pay?” “Yeah,” I told them. “They get good pay.” “That’s amazing. Here we are for something like a month just making our checkmarks [for workdays put in on the state farm] and we haven’t gotten any pay. But there these people who’ve lost touch are getting paid.” That’s what they said.

“He [Plastov] kept talking along these lines.” Romm explains, “Khrushchev tried to interrupt him and make some comments, but Plastov turned around: ‘How’s that? Eh? Yes, yes, I’m telling you!’” Plastov said that in the early 1950s he had illustrated a book by Gleb Uspensky. He went over to where the peasants were mowing hay and made some sketches of the mowers. So after he had done all these sketches, they gathered around him in the afternoon and said to him: ‘Tell us now, how much do you get paid for that?’” It was awkward for me to tell them. After all, that was in Stalin’s time. Of course it was a difficult time, but I’ll tell you straight: they paid me well. I won’t hide it, Nikita Sergeyevich, it was a hard time. But they paid. Oh how they paid! Just between you and me, they paid a lot. One of them asked: “Hey, did they pay you as much as a fiver?” Another says: “Well, he’d start squawking if they paid him only a fiver. No doubt they paid him ten.” But actually I was paid five hundred rubles apiece. I told them: “Go higher.” “Not a quarter of a hundred, was it?” My conscience began to bother me, so I said: “Yeah, a quarter of a hundred.” “Well,” they said, “get a load of this fine fellow. What a lot of arm-swinging we have to do to earn a quarter of a hundred! Probably something like two months of mowing, swinging our arms.”

Plastov kept talking in this manner, and then ended with this: “Listen, brothers, you have to get out of Moscow, leave it. All artists need to get out into the provinces, out into the sticks. Of course there are no comforts there, no bathtubs, no showers, but there you can live.” Summing up, making a wide, sweeping motion with his hand, Plastov said: “In Moscow, there ain’t no truth.”

The Decisive Battle

275

“That’s how the first day went by,” Romm’s account of the Kremlin conference continues,“all on the same note, no counterpoint. It was not as though Gribachev would speak and then Shchipachev would answer him, or that someone else would speak and Ehrenburg would answer him. Everyone was blowing the same bugle. I remember Kozlov’s face. He sat without moving or blinking. With his clear blue eyes, wavy hair, and closely-shaven face he slowly looked around the entire room, taking it all in with his icy gaze as though chewing up and devouring those present. He had such a cold look in his eye. But Khrushchev was boiling over this whole time, working himself up more and more, and Ilyichev kept yessing him to death while the other leaders sat motionless. It so happened that on that first day I took the floor, and during my speech a surprising aspect of Khrushchev’s behavior became clear. A speech of recantation was expected from me. Therefore, no sooner did I send up a note asking to speak than they gave me the floor. I never expected that; it happened so quickly. I went up to speak and my very first words were: “You probably expect that I’ll talk about myself, but first I would like to say something about Khutsiyev’s film.” I began to speak in support of this movie, and in particular I explained the meaning of the episode when the father and son meet, when the son sees his dead father and at the end of their conversation he asks, “How am I to live?” and the father answers, “How old are you?” and he says, “Twenty-two” and the father answers, “But I’m only twenty,” and disappears.”

I have discussed this episode at some length earlier, but I decided to reproduce what Romm says here. Like me, he remembered the scene involving the soldier-father in abridged form, shorter than it actually was. “I said to Khrushchev,” Romm continues,“‘The point of this scene is that the father is saying, “You are older than I am. You ought to understand what to do with your life. After all, I understood what to do in my day, and I died for Soviet power. And so what are you going to do?”’ “Suddenly Khrushchev interrupted me: ‘No, no, no, you’re not interpreting it right, Comrade Romm, you’re not interpreting it right. The father says to the son: “How old are you?” The son says “Twenty-two,” and the father disappears. Even a cat won’t abandon its kitten. Yet here at this difficult moment he abandons his son. That’s the meaning.’” Romm’s account highlights how completely illogical this argument was. It was different when Father discussed subjects he was familiar with: missiles, dams, corn, and so forth. In this case he simply did not know what he was talking about. He was fastening onto one bit of dialogue from the movie, torn out of context, and he wasn’t speaking his own mind. He was repeating Suslov’s arguments. In this case, my sympathies are with Father. He was like a chicken having its feathers plucked, although of course he himself plucked a lot of other people’s feathers during those days.

276 Time for Change: 1962 “Then I said: ‘No, Comrade Nikita Sergeyevich, this is the meaning of that scene,’” Romm’s account continues. And again he said: “No, not at all!” We started arguing. I would say one word, he would say two. I’d say another and he would say two. “Nikita Sergeyevich, please, don’t interrupt me. It’s difficult enough for me to speak. Let me finish. After all, I need to speak my piece!” That’s what I finally said to him. “What? Am I not a human being? Don’t I have the right to express my opinion?” He took offense. “You are a human being, and besides that, you are first secretary of the Central Committee. You will give the summary after the discussion. You can talk as much as you wish after I have finished, but for now there is something I want to say. It’s already so difficult for me.” That’s how I answered him. “Well, get a load of that. They won’t even let me interrupt.” He began wheezing in an offended way.

Romm goes on to state that he defended the independence of the Filmmakers Union and the State Committee for Cinematography. Furtseva, an energetic and authoritative woman, after taking charge of the Ministry of Culture, attempted to bring all such bodies under her direct authority, to include all the “creative” organizations under her ministry. Suslov supported her. That way it would be easier for him to control all of them. Father did not have a good feel for the subject and was wavering. “The next speaker after me was the filmmaker Chukhrai.” Romm continues. “He skillfully adopted the right tone. He began by stating that in Yugoslavia he had slashed away at the abstractionists, that was how he had behaved. Then he ended with the same argument I had made, that the Filmmakers Union should be preserved.” Romm and Grigory Chukhrai achieved their aims. The various creative unions and the State Committee for Cinematography survived as separate organizations. Suslov and Furtseva had prepared all the documents, and all that remained was for Khrushchev to sign them. After the March conference, he refused to sign them. In addition to the speakers mentioned by Romm, a number of others took the floor that first day: six poets (Sergei Mikhalkov, Aleksandr Prokofyev, Andrei Malyshko, Petrus Brovka, Yekaterina Sheveleva, and Robert Rozhdestvensky), the prose writer Leonid Sobolev, the composer Tikhon Khrennikov, the painter Boris Ioganson, and the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny—fifteen people in all. The first day did not seem particularly frightening. But then came the second day. We entered the same large hall, and the same people took their seats. The Presidium came in—the cheerful and benevolent Khrushchev, full of vital energy, and after him the rest. They stood for a moment, applauded, and then sat down. Kozlov fixed his icy gaze on the

The Decisive Battle

277

crowd, getting ready to chew them up and swallow them with that devouring look of his. Khrushchev began quite cheerfully: “Well, comrades, I must say that yesterday’s warning had an effect. Nothing was leaked. Last night there were receptions at several embassies, but hardly anyone who had been here showed up there, apparently because they were being cautious. Well then, let’s continue.” So they started in again, chewing over the same old cud, the kinship between generations, the thanks due to Nikita Sergeyevich, “art is fed by the vital juices of the people.” And all the rest, in the same vein, on and on.

The stenographic record does not confirm Romm’s impressions. The first day did pass by in a fairly routine manner, but not the second day. But let us look into this in the proper order. The first person to speak was the Polish-born Soviet writer Wanda Wasilewska. Romm did not like her. He called her speech an “elegant denunciation.” “Her Polish party comrades,” Romm tells us, “had reported indignantly that Voznesensky along with a group of young poets had given an interview in Poland, and in that interview they were asked their attitude toward the older generation. Supposedly Voznesensky answered that he did not divide literature horizontally into generations. He divided it vertically. For him, Pushkin, Lermontov, and Mayakovsky were his contemporaries, and they were relevant for the young generation. But he added some other names besides Pushkin, Lermontov, and Mayakovsky. He tacked on Pasternak and Akhmadulina. Well, because of that a huge scandal blazed up.” In fact, the “Polish party comrades” were not interested in Akhmadulina and Pasternak. They had enough problems of their own, and their complaint against Voznesensky, and at the same time against Yevtushenko and Aksyonov, was that, without knowing the situation in Poland, these young writers had interfered—not with bad intentions, of course. They were not talking about politics, but about themselves and their Polish friends, who naturally did not avoid mentioning their own internal, Polish, political disagreements and quarrels. Now let me comment on Romm’s phrase “elegant denunciation.” Wanda Wasilewska’s speech was a denunciation only in the perception of it by Romm and his group. As she saw it, she had taken a position of principle. From similar positions she had written her books in Poland, for which the dictator Józef Pilsudski had imprisoned her in the 1930s. He must have been very upset with her if he decided to act in that manner toward his own goddaughter, the daughter of his close comrade-in-arms Leon Wasilewski. Wanda escaped from prison and made her way illegally to the Soviet Union, where she settled in Kiev and soon married the playwright Aleksandr Korneichuk, one of Stalin’s favorites. In those days he was probably the most popular Soviet playwright. His plays, such as Gibel eskadry (Destruction of the Squadron), V stepiakh Ukrainy (In the Steppes of Ukraine), and Platon Krechet, were performed at all the theaters in the Soviet Union.

278 Time for Change: 1962 In Kiev, Father became close friends with Wasilewska and Korneichuk. During the war, they also met occasionally, either in Stalingrad or Moscow. Korneichuk, on Stalin’s instructions, wrote a play, The Front, about incompetent battle commanders who had grown old and out of touch as opposed to good young generals. Wasilewska also published a heartrending novel titled Rainbow about German atrocities in the occupied territories. Wasilewska was a rock-hard woman, about two meters tall, thin, angular, with a large nose. She smoked cigarettes constantly and spoke in an abrupt, commanding voice—I would almost say a Kaiser-like voice—with a heavy Polish accent. She never made denunciations of people, neither to Pilsudski nor to Stalin, nor to Khrushchev. She said what she thought, regardless of who was listening, whether it was Pilsudski, Stalin, or Khrushchev. Stalin never got around to jailing her. She came to our country in 1939, when the wave of repression had subsided somewhat, and she lived in Kiev under Father’s protection, however illusory such protection may have been. To Father, unlike Romm, Wasilewska’s speech did not sound at all like a denunciation. It was simply an expression of her principled position, one he valued and listened to. She was not one to start “chattering” for no good reason. As for comparing Pushkin to Bella Akhmadulina, who was still just a child—that was purely an attempt to “shock the public,” and Wasilewska was not the only one annoyed by that comparison. Voznesensky himself recalled that others besides Wasilewska commented on him unfavorably: The poet Andrei Malyshko was especially zealous in attacking me. To loud laughter, he made fun of the title of my 1962 book of poetry, Triangular Pears, hinting at an obscene Russian expression. Aleksandr Prokofyev blasted me for my “non-Party status”: “I can’t understand Voznesensky, and therefore I protest. Our literature has never put up with such lack of ideological content, and it cannot be tolerated!” With this shouting they were trying to rouse Khrushchev. He had been acting as though he were dozing.”3

Incidentally, according to the stenographic record, both Malyshko and Prokofyev spoke on the first day of the conference, long before Wanda Wasilewska’s speech. I return to the account by Romm: “It had been announced earlier that after Wasilewska the sculptor Nalbandyan would speak [actually Dmitry Nalbandyan was a painter]. But no sooner had Wasilewska [Romm hostilely calls her ‘Madame Wasilewska’] finished her high-minded speech than Khrushchev arose and said: ‘What shall we do, comrades? Nalbandyan was supposed to speak next, but maybe we will ask him to excuse us if we postpone his remarks a little, and listen now to Comrade Voznesensky. How about that?’” Thus Voznesensky was suddenly summoned to the speaker’s platform to explain himself.

The Decisive Battle

279

Voznesensky’s article about his encounter with Khrushchev describes his own perceptions: “How did Khrushchev differ from Stalin? Not so much politically as aesthetically. Stalin was a ‘show master,’ a backstage manager of the ‘sacral’ type, wrapping himself in cultlike mystery, in the era of print and radio. He rarely made public appearances. But Khrushchev was a showman of the TV age, a visual era. How much just one shoe at the United Nations was worth! Without knowing it himself, he was an imitator of the surrealists and their ‘happenings.’ I admire Khrushchev as a stylist, and when the head of state acted as though he had just awakened, and in a high-pitched voice, such as fat men often have, demanded that I come up and speak, I boldly took the microphone. I repeat that he was still our great hope at that time, and I went up there to tell him, as though going to confession, about the real situation in literature, hoping that he would understand everything.” But Khrushchev did not want to understand Voznesensky. In his opinion, the young poet obviously deserved a verbal thrashing. The evidence for this was in Suslov’s report about Voznesensky’s inappropriate behavior abroad and in the words of Wanda Wasilewska, whom Father considered a highly authoritative figure. However, as Voznesensky himself noted, Khrushchev was not Stalin. The latter would have telephoned the poet the evening before the conference, and in an insinuating tone would have inquired what it was about Soviet power that did not suit the poet, and would have advised him that the “comrades want to suck your blood,” whereas he, Stalin, had his doubts. You can imagine what Voznesensky’s speech would have been after a phone conversation like that. On the other hand, such jesuitical behavior was alien to Father. Unlike Stalin, he never studied the writings of Machiavelli. On the spur of the moment, he had decided to have a fatherly talk with this young whippersnapper. But he got carried away. Wasilewska’s words had had quite a strong impact on him. He said more than he meant to, and instead of giving a fatherly lecture, he created a scandal. “I find it difficult to even try and explain what happened at that point,” says Romm, bewildered. “Voznesensky suddenly sensed that things were not going well, and therefore he began to speak timidly and uncertainly: ‘Like my teacher Vladimir Mayakovsky, I am not a member of the Communist Party . . .’” According to the stenographic record, Voznesensky barely managed to say those words when Father exploded: “Why are you parading the fact that you’re ‘not a member of the party’? You’re challenging us! Anyone who stands against the Communist Party—we’ll give them a good shaking. You want a fight? We’ll give you a fight! Our powder is ready, and we have plenty of it!” He shouted this to the accompaniment of great applause and a big uproar in the hall. “Somehow it’s difficult even to remember what all that shouting was,” Romm tells us, “because I never expected an outburst like that, nor did anyone else. It all happened so suddenly. It even seemed to me that in some way it wasn’t serious, that Khrushchev, by an effort of will, was making himself do this, getting himself worked up.”

280 Time for Change: 1962 The point is that Father was coming down with all his might, not on the poet Voznesensky, but on what he saw as the politician Voznesensky. The angry face, the arm thrust forward, the fist clenched—all these were techniques used by revolutionary orators back in the days before microphones. Both photographs and films captured him in that pose at that moment. That image of Khrushchev was widely circulated. It was far from the best image of him, and it absolutely did not correspond to his true nature. Like Romm, I too fail to understand the reasons for his stormy emotional reaction. To be more precise, we do not know and never will know the exact reasons for it. But obviously that reaction was not prompted by Voznesensky’s words or even, really, by Wasilewska’s speech. Someone had prepared Father, primed him for this, convinced him that poetry was not the issue, nor even the chattering of youthful malcontents. Something far more significant was involved. We can guess what that “more significant something” was, just as we can guess who contrived the whole affair. Although we cannot prove it for certain, there is no great difficulty in guessing who was the conniving influence behind the scenes. Voznesensky was confused. He had never expected anything like this. Meanwhile, Khrushchev continued to blast away at him full force. “Do you represent our people or are you defaming our people?” asked Khrushchev from his seat in the Presidium. “Excuse me, Nikita Sergeyevich,” the poet kept prattling. “We’ll never give our enemies free rein, never!” Father interrupted, then after calming down a bit, added: “Just listen to him: ‘I’m not a member of the Communist Party’! He wants to foist some party of non-Party people onto us. No . . . there’s no room here for liberalism, Mister Voznesensky.” The fact that he was called “Mister” (instead of “Comrade”) terrified Voznesensky completely. All of a sudden, he felt, they really might send him abroad, and he prattled on: “But I want to live here!” I return now from the stenographic record to the accounts by Romm and by Voznesensky himself. “So, if you want to live here, why the hell are you slandering us?! What kind of viewpoint from the toilet is that, against Soviet power!” This was Khrushchev’s response. “But I’m an honest person. I’m in favor of Soviet power. I don’t want to go anywhere else,” offered Voznesensky, continuing his prattling. “That’s all just words, rubbish,” said Khrushchev, giving a wave of the hand. “I’ll read to you, if you’ll let me, my poem titled Lenin.” Here Romm notes that “the poet’s reply was not entirely to the point,” but Romm is obviously confused. According to the stenographic record, Voznesensky began to read aloud from Mayakovsky’s poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Voznesensky did not write his own poem about Lenin until half a year later. Romm recalls with cinematographic detail what happened next:

The Decisive Battle

281

Voznesensky began reading the poem about Lenin. He read it, but he was really not up to reading very well: behind him sat Khrushchev, drumming his fists on the table. Next to him was the icy cold Kozlov, and also Ilyichev, who kept whispering something in Khrushchev’s ear. What Voznesensky was still muttering up there I don’t know, I don’t remember, but Khrushchev ended it this way: “Here’s what I advise you to do. You know how it is in the army when a new recruit arrives, one who doesn’t know what’s what and isn’t up to the mark—they attach an older fellow to him. In the old days it used to be an NCO [noncommissioned officer], but now it’s any veteran. Well now, I advise you to get a mentor like that. Take Gribachev here. Take him as your mentor. He’s a loyal soldier of the party. He’ll teach you how to write good poems and he’ll teach you good sense. Comrade Gribachev, will you take on the mentoring of Voznesensky?” “Yes, I will!” Gribachev shouts from his seat.

I have already explained that the poet Nikolai Gribachev, chief editor of the magazine Sovetskiy Soyuz, was on the extreme right wing of the group opposed to Voznesenksy’s group. Father’s threat was never carried out. Gribachev stayed with his “flock,” and Voznesensky with his. I now turn to Voznesensky’s recollections: During that whole time the hall was echoing with shouts: “Shame on him! Down with him!” Glancing at the Presidium, I ran into Kozlov’s blank, icy stare. Both he and all the other Presidium members seemed to be looking straight through me. And suddenly, in the midst of his cursing and despite the shouts in the hall, and apparently doing this mechanically, without thinking, Khrushchev called me “Comrade Voznesensky.” Perhaps the reason was that while I was reading the poem, he had felt compelled to remain silent and then realized he had overdone it. Our “Leader,” who was now all wet with sweat, irritatedly put his mask back on and said through his teeth: “Go and do your work.”

Voznesensky, who was also sweating, left the rostrum without having justified himself or even defended himself. Of course, Father realized he was overdoing it and was very angry with himself, but he couldn’t stop. And in the heat of the scandal that he himself had created, he brought his anger down on the head of Voznesensky’s “accessory” Aksyonov, who had also figured in the official report from Suslov. Father consulted the diagram lying in front of him that showed the seating arrangement in the hall. He established for himself the approximate location where Aksyonov was supposed to be sitting, but he didn’t know Aksyonov by sight. When he looked in the indicated direction, his gaze came to rest on a young man he had seen somewhere before (who turned out later to be the artist Illarion Golitsyn). This young man was “sitting there in the plain view of the Presidium, wearing a red shirt and whispering discontentedly to his neighbor.” That is how Belyutin describes the unfolding of this incident.

282 Time for Change: 1962 Father had no idea who Golitsyn was, although he had seen him at the Manège and later at the Lenin Hills Conference Center. And he didn’t know where he was from, what group he belonged to. But now Golitsyn’s obviously restless and fidgety reaction to what was going on around the speaker’s stand brought on a new outburst from Father. I quote again from Romm: “And what are you grinning about? You over there in the last row with the red shirt! What are you grinning about? You just wait. We’re going to hear from you too! You’re going to get your turn! Who is that?” “Aksyonov,” people shouted to him. “Ah, Aksyonov? All right, let’s listen to Aksyonov. Please come here.” “Me?” Someone in the back rows stood up. “No, not you. Next to you.” “Me?” Another person stood up. “Yes, you, you, you!” And now that entire crowd of intellectuals was seized by a strange kind of cruel impulse. It’s a phenomenon that Leo Tolstoy described very well in War and Peace, where Rostopchin calls for the merchant’s son to be killed and the crowd at first cannot bring itself to do such a thing, but then, gradually infecting one another with ferocity and cruelty, they do commit the foul deed. The young man came walking up the aisle, and people shouted at him: “Filthy scum! Wearing a red shirt to meet with the Central Committee!” “Comes to the Kremlin dressed like a peacock!”

That is how Romm remembered the shouts, and the same shouts were recorded by the stenographer. “It’s the only shirt I have,” muttered the bespectacled young man [according to Romm]. “Go on, go on up there and answer for what you’ve done!” From all sides the various Smirnovs, Vasilyevs, and other ugly mugs were jumping up. He reached the speaker’s stand. “Are you Aksyonov?” Khrushchev asked. “No, I’m not Aksyonov,” he answered. “What’s that? You’re not Aksyonov? Who are you?” Khrushchev was puzzled. “Me? I’m Golitsyn.” “How’s that? Prince Golitsyn?” “No, not at all. I’m not a prince. I’m the artist Golitsyn. I’m a graphic artist . . . I’m a realist. Nikita Sergeyevich, if you want, I can show you some of my work. I have it here with me . . .” “No need. Well, go ahead and talk.” Khrushchev cut it short. “But what should I say?” The young man didn’t understand. “What do you mean what? You came up to speak, so go ahead and speak!” Now Khrushchev was surprised. “I don’t know what to say. I didn’t prepare any remarks.” Golitsyn tried to get out of it. “Well, now that you’re here, go ahead and speak.” Khrushchev didn’t know how to get out of this awkward situation either. Golitsyn said nothing.

The Decisive Battle

283

“Well, do you understand why you were called up here?” “Yes . . . Well . . . No, I don’t understand,” Golitsyn said. “What do you mean you don’t understand? Think about it.” “Maybe because I applauded the poems by Comrade Rozhdestvensky? Or Voznesensky?” “No.” “Then I don’t know.” “Think about it and you’ll understand.” Again Golitsyn said nothing. “Well, go ahead and speak.” “Perhaps I could read a poem?” Golitsyn asks. “What poem?” Khrushchev is surprised. “One by Mayakovsky,” the fellow says. And at that point hysterical laughter broke out in the hall. The scene had become something surrealistic, something unbelievable. Here is this graphic artist who doesn’t know what to say, and here is Khrushchev who has flubbed up, thinking it was Aksyonov.

It really was a scene in the spirit of Ionesco, from the theater of the absurd. That is, if you forgot for a moment that it was all taking place in the Kremlin and that especially for the people sitting on the platform this was no joking matter. As Romm recalls: When Golitsyn said he would read a poem by Mayakovsky, Khrushchev’s reaction was, “Not necessary. You may go.” Golitsyn started to go back to his seat but suddenly turned around and asked, “May I continue to work?” “Yes, you may,” Khrushchev answered. Golitsyn went back to his seat. “Comrade Nalbandyan, please excuse us, but we are going to postpone your speech. Let Comrade Aksyonov come up here,” said Khrushchev. [Nalbandyan was a famous painter, and he was next on the speaker’s list.] The problem was that Golitsyn had been sitting next to Aksyonov, and that was the source of the misunderstanding. Vasya Aksyonov started to go up to speak. “What is it with you? You don’t like Soviet power?” Khrushchev blasted him while he was still on his way. “No, that’s not it at all. I try to write the truth, write what I think,” he answered. “Your father was subjected to repression?” Khrushchev asked. “My father was posthumously rehabilitated,” Aksyonov answered. “Was he the one who taught you to hate Soviet power and to slander it?” “I never heard anything bad from my father. My father was a member of the party and a loyal Communist.”

At this point I need to correct Romm’s account. Aksyonov’s father actually survived and after being rehabilitated in 1956 returned to normal life. Vasily Aksyonov himself restates the answer he gave at that time in his semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional novel published in 2009: “My parents were sentenced in 1937 to long terms in prison, the camps, and internal exile.”4

284

Time for Change: 1962

Further on Aksyonov makes a guess that in my opinion is quite correct: “My father actually was given a death sentence without the right to appeal, but after three months on death row the sentence was commuted to fifteen years in the camps and three years of internal exile.” At the Central Committee, when they were compiling materials about Aksyonov, they must have used a list they found of persons condemned to death. “After eighteen years my parents were rehabilitated and returned,” Aksyonov’s novel continues. “The fact that they were restored to our family is something we connect with your name, Nikita Sergeyevich,” and in saying these words, Aksyonov turned to face Khrushchev. To judge from the stenographic record, after Aksyonov said this, Father began to speak quite differently, in a conciliatory tone, and finally allowed him to leave the rostrum. Generally speaking, in his book, Aksyonov made up many things. That is why he called it a novel, rather than a memoir. But in the preceding quoted passage, it seems to me, his version is believable. “They kept postponing Nalbandyan’s speech,” Romm tells us. “What did you people want? A Petöfi Club? There won’t be any such thing! You know how it all began in Hungary? Everything began with the Writers Union, where they organized the Petöfi Club. Then an uprising began. So there you have it. You won’t get a Petöfi Club here. We won’t allow it.” That is how Romm remembers Khrushchev’s interjection. In the 1960s, the shadow of the Petöfi Club was hanging constantly over the heads of both the politicians and the writers. Everyone expected that Yevtushenko would now be called up to speak, but Father subsided somewhat, and after Aksyonov the conference gradually began to flow into more routine channels. Terenty Maltsev took the floor. He was the secretary of the party committee of the Moscow section of the Writers Union. He was followed by Vasily Smirnov and the composer Aleksandr Arutunyan. Now they gave Vsevolod Kochetov the floor. At that time his very name aroused fury among the progressive intellectuals, especially the young ones, and he responded to them in kind. He very much wanted to heat up the situation again, so as to destroy his enemies, from Yevtushenko to Ehrenburg, by provoking Father into doing this. “In the West no one knows our true literature,” said Kochetov. “They know the names of Yevtushenko and Voznesensky. They don’t know their poetry; they only know the big fuss being made around them. Their hope is that maybe these people will destroy Soviet power.” According to the stenographic record, Kochetov was speaking with great indignation. Apparently, out of the corner of his eye he was trying to see what Father’s reaction was, but it was hard for him to do. The speaker’s stand was in front of the Presidium, and he couldn’t bring himself to turn his head around completely.

The Decisive Battle

285

Then he began to complain that “over there” people were constantly barraging him with questions about Pasternak. But it seemed as though a change had come over Father. He didn’t respond to Kochetov’s remarks by getting worked up again. In fact, with regard to Pasternak he made an offhand comment: “If we had published Doctor Zhivago, they wouldn’t have given him a Nobel Prize at all.” Kochetov shrugged his shoulders despairingly, but he didn’t give up. “If you take a look at Novy Mir, you’ll see that they’ve published a ‘remarkable piece’ with the title ‘Wedding in Vologda.’ When you read it, it makes you feel creepy. There’s nothing in it but drunkards and fools and idiotism . . . ‘Daring people’ like this are writing, and these ‘daring people’ are being printed.” As everyone knew, Kochetov was the editor of the magazine Oktyabr, and he was complaining about his old enemy, the editor of Novy Mir, Aleksandr Tvardovsky. Khrushchev also let these words go in one ear and out the other. Kochetov finally felt confused and discomfited. He wound up his speech and left the speaker’s stand. After Kochetov, the sculptor Azgur took the floor, but no one remembered what he said. Finally, Nalbandyan was allowed to speak. As Romm tells us: He put down the sketch he was working on and went up to speak. His was a very simple speech. He simply wanted to thank Nikita Sergeyevich for the fact that the shackles had been removed from him. And what the so-called shackles involved was that he had done a sculpture of Stalin and therefore constantly felt guilty. And now those shackles had been removed and he didn’t feel guilty any longer, thankfully. In affirmation of this fact that he no longer felt guilty, and that so to speak the shackles had been removed from him, during the whole time that his speech kept being postponed he had been making sketches of the Presidium and of Khrushchev individually and one speaker after another. Evidently he was getting ready to produce a large new canvas: The Meeting of the Intelligentsia with the Party and Government. But somehow he didn’t manage to complete that painting in time, because Khrushchev was removed [from power] before he could finish.

Obviously Romm has no sympathy for Nalbandyan. But I find him very likable. Nalbandyan is an excellent professional artist. Hanging on the wall in my home is a miniature he painted, titled “Lenin at Razliv.” He presented it as a gift to Father on one occasion, and it passed down from Father to me. And the point is not who is depicted in the painting, but how it is done. Everything is just right: light and shade and the human figure. Nalbandyan also did a portrait of Father, probably the only good portrait of him. Today, to the best of my knowledge, it is in Moscow at the Museum of Modern History. But let us return to Romm’s account:

286 Time for Change: 1962 After an intermission Khrushchev gave his concluding speech. As I recall, he apologized for getting hot under the collar and shouting, but please don’t take it amiss, he said. After all, it’s an important matter and something worth getting hot under the collar about. Then he began to explain to us what good art is, conjuring up some vivid images, such as the following: “You’re walking through the woods at night. The moon is shining. The snow is on the ground, pale blue. The spruce trees and pine trees are standing there, covered with snow. You look and you think, my goodness, what beauty! Someone ought to do a painting of this! But no one does a painting of it. And if someone did, people wouldn’t believe it. They’d say, nothing like that exists. But such beauty actually does exist in life. Why in the world do you have to go into the toilet for inspiration?” Then he wandered off onto the subject of anti-Semitism and Ehrenburg. “Is Comrade Ehrenburg here?” But Ehrenburg had left. Yermilov had ridden forth against him on his high horse, and so had others, and they had given him such a working-over that the old man couldn’t stand it any longer. “Ehrenburg not here? Mmm, yes . . .”

The departure of Ehrenburg threw Father off. He valued Ehrenburg, even though he did argue with him and had verbally attacked him more than once. But he took it as a bad sign that Ehrenburg had gotten up and left. Now I leave Romm’s account and give the floor to Belyutin: Khrushchev’s concluding remarks lasted for more than two hours. He began by repeating what he had said during the intermission, while walking around in the lobby: “Here you’re saying that things are bad now, but if you take the floor and express your disagreement with Ilyichev, a secretary of the Central Committee, nothing will happen to you. But if you tried that under Stalin! . . .” His speech repeated his declaration of war against any new attempts at exploration by artists. He declared that Laktionov, Vuchetich, and other photographic artists like them, were models of socialist realism, a term that had almost ceased to be used for several years before the Manège incident. He also cited Shishkin and Aivazovsky, purely optical artists of the nineteenth century, and held them up as models for the experimenters, the “modernists” and “abstractionists,” by which of course he meant us. Khrushchev apparently felt the dissatisfaction of the audience. He kept trying to show that he himself was a vitally alive person and that, moreover, under Stalin he had barely escaped being arrested and condemned, and yet here he was, the Number One Communist in the world. Then suddenly Khrushchev looked at his watch and remembered that it was International Women’s Day, March 8, and that a ceremony to celebrate the day was scheduled to start at any moment at the Bolshoi Theater, and that he and the Presidium were supposed to attend that event.

Father greeted the women present in the hall, wishing them well on their special day, and everyone left, going their separate ways, some went home to continue talking and arguing, and others to the Bolshoi Theater. To Suslov and his fellow heirs of Stalin, the leaders of the various “creative” unions, it seemed that as of March 8, 1963, they had won a definitive

The Decisive Battle

287

victory. The younger ones would no longer dare to try to encroach on their power and authority. The Ilyichevs would no longer dare to infringe on the party’s power, nor Yevtushenko and Belyutin’s people try to encroach on power in the creative realm. No one would dare any longer to make even a peep about ending the censorship. A plenum of the Central Committee, which had been scheduled for the summer, would consolidate their victory, as they saw it, with an official resolution that would be obligatory for all. As readers will recall, I did not belong to any of the “flocks.” I lived within the framework of my job as an engineer and rocket scientist. But the sympathies of people like me were with Romm, Belyutin, and Yevtushenko. To us they seemed more correct. Not more correct artistically, but simply more correct. To this day we have a one-sided view of those past events. We view them through the eyes of that “flock.” That’s how things turned out. There’s no point exaggerating the significance of the March 7–8 conference. For its participants, from Romm to Kochetov, it was highly significant. For Father it was only one more of many routine matters. On March 12, also in the Kremlin, he listened to reports from the heads of territorial-agricultural administrations and gave a speech himself. Then he went off on an inspection tour of new factories in the chemical industry. And of course, in addition to all that, there were the daily receptions of delegations, meetings with foreign visitors, working sessions with them, and interviews. The embarrassment that had taken place in the Sverdlov Hall of the Kremlin receded into the past. People forgot about it, but at the same time there were constant reminders of it. Father began to realize that he had swallowed someone’s bait. He did not yet fully understand how he had been set up, but when Suslov insistently urged him to take decisive measures to put an end to all the “sedition,” he reacted sluggishly. He categorically refused to “take measures” against the youth. Almost immediately after the Kremlin conference, Yevtushenko began making preparations for another foreign tour, first to Italy and then to Princeton University, to which he had been invited. But then things were “processed” at the highest level. In view of the atmosphere at the time, it was considered simply inconceivable that Yevtushenko might make this trip. On the other hand, the fact that such a tour was planned was a very encouraging development. Ilyichev had arranged it. It is of secondary importance that Ilyichev did not succeed right then in doing what he had intended. Writers Union officials said that this trip by Yevtushenko was “inexpedient” and complained to Suslov. Ilyichev had no option but to submit, and the trip was canceled.5 But at the same time, Aksyonov did fly off to Argentina, as though nothing had happened. A premiere showing was scheduled there of a Soviet movie based on one of his novels. Obviously the furor was subsiding, but it had not yet died down completely.

288 Time for Change: 1962

45 The Thunderstorm Fizzles Out, April 25–June 18, 1963 The last echo of the March discussion in the Kremlin was heard at a

meeting of the CC Presidium on April 25, 1963.1 The details of an agreement on the monitoring of nuclear tests were being discussed, along with related replies to messages from President Kennedy of the United States and Prime Minister Macmillan of the United Kingdom. But suddenly the conversation shifted to cinema and even to a production of Gogol’s play The Inspector General at the Maly Theater in Moscow, which had provoked a great many different interpretations, and to a production of Maria Stuart at the Moscow Art Theater. Leonid Leonov’s novel The Russian Forest was also discussed. To Father it seemed extremely boring. “When I was reading it I kept pinching myself all over, giving myself bruises trying to keep awake, and I only got through the first volume. I picked up the second, but it just didn’t move along.” Then Father called to mind an article by Konstantin Paustovsky that had been published in Izvestia. The writer complained that on the shores of the Oka River near Tarusa, where he lived in a country place, a gravel pit was being dug. The gravel pit didn’t fit in at all with the landscape along the Oka. Paustovsky suggested that gravel be obtained somewhere farther away. He even indicated a place, and commented that extracting the gravel there would cost only two kopecks more per cubic meter. Father did not agree. “What do two kopecks add up to when you’re talking about millions of cubic meters?” It was his turn to become indignant. “How many fewer apartments will the people end up with?” After talking about economizing and the waste of resources, Father refused to let this subject rest. From Paustovsky and the gravel pit he transitioned over to writers and the writing community in general. “Now we’re publishing everything. And we’re not that rich that we can publish everything people make up. Some order has to be introduced here. The Writers Union and the Literary Fund—it’s a giant feeding trough. It’s corruption. It’s money being thrown away. It’s irresponsibility. A person is admitted to the Writers Union and immediately they give him an apartment in Moscow. I am in favor of supporting writers, but let it be moral support. If a peasant writes a book, let him not abandon his agricultural work. If he’s a teacher, like Solzhenitsyn, let him remain a teacher.”

The Thunderstorm Fizzles Out

289

Father recalled the Ukrainian writer Mikhail Kotsyubinsky. Before the revolution he had written many good books, but he continued to work at the Statistical Bureau in Chernigov province. “It’s terrible. We waste money on a writer, even if he writes nothing and is just getting drunk at the expense of the Literary Fund. What good is all that?” Everyone agreed that it was no good at all, but that was as far as the matter went. Then they began talking about a Georgian writer, Konstantin Gamzakhurdia. Father had met him in 1949. Also mentioned were the ballads of Bulat Okudzhava and the poetry of Yevtushenko. A discussion started about whether some sort of social-ideological council should be established under the chairmanship of Suslov, but at that point Ilyichev reminded everyone that the Central Committee’s own Ideological Department had already been in existence for quite a while. The discussion gradually petered out and came to nothing. After that late April meeting of the CC Presidium, to Suslov’s surprise, Father decided not to give a report at the upcoming Central Committee plenum on ideology. He proposed that Suslov speak instead as the Central Committee secretary responsible in that area. Unexpectedly Suslov declined, although by the standards of that time it was a great honor, even for a member of the Presidium, to give a report to a plenum. He palmed it off onto the same old Ilyichev. The opening date of the plenum was also moved, from May 28 to June 18. The reason was that Fidel Castro flew into Moscow at the end of April, and Father did not want to be distracted from his Cuban guest by more discussions with writers and artists, which he already felt were a burden. Life was gradually flowing back into the pre-Manège channels. It must be said that Khrushchev’s stormy dealings with the “renegade” intellectuals, complete with cursing and abuse, not only did them no harm, but added to their fame both inside and outside the Soviet Union. Of course Yevtushenko and Voznesensky, even without that, were not suffering from lack of prominence, but the additional promotional boost did not hurt them. As for Neizvestny, Zhutovsky, and Golitsyn, they not only became famous overnight in the Soviet Union, but also achieved celebrity status worldwide. The most respectable foreign newspapers and magazines printed articles about them, and Western diplomats and journalists purchased their works without haggling over the price. The more pressure they came under here, the more popular they became there. It was like the law of conservation of matter. What disappears in one place reappears in another. The ideological plenum of the Central Committee, which opened on June 18, 1963, proceeded in a mundane manner. Ilyichev gave a report in a dry, formal way. The previous conferences were mentioned, also in a formal way, and a dry statement was made about their contribution to the cause. No call was issued for crushing the “renegades” who had strayed from the herd. Suslov also gave a report at the plenum, but not on ideology. He talked about the worsening dispute with the Chinese. He criticized Mao Zedong for accusing Khrushchev of “bourgeoisification, revisionism, and reconciliation”

290 Time for Change: 1962 with the United States. Somehow of its own accord the orientation of the plenum shifted. At first it had been focused internally, but now it turned outward. Instead of poets, abstract artists, and sculptors, the Chinese “ultrarevolutionaries” became the primary target for criticism. As a result, Suslov’s report became the main one, pushing Ilyichev into the background—not only Ilyichev but also Andropov. According to the distribution of roles in the Central Committee, the report on China ought to have been assigned to Andropov, but Suslov convinced Father that such a serious subject should be dealt with only by a member of the Presidium, not merely a Central Committee secretary. Those who spoke during the discussion also concentrated on China. As for the “modernists,” either they were not mentioned at all or they were just touched on in passing. As usual, Father invited many people to the plenum besides Central Committee members. Among them was Mikhail Romm. Naturally Romm was primarily interested in what they would say about his colleagues and about himself personally, not about Mao and the other Chinese. As a result, in his recollections the emphasis is altered. Nevertheless, as before, I prefer Romm’s lively impressions to the dry account in the stenographic record. “Finally the plenum was held,” Romm recalls. More than 2,000 guests were invited to the plenum. Suslov gave a report on the Chinese question, and Ilyichev on cultural matters. The speeches were quite ordinary, run-of-the-mill. I must confess I’ve forgotten it all and could not bring back to mind now what was said there. Be that as it may, the speeches were given, and I kept waiting to see if they would get around to me. Finally, and this was already the third day, Sergei Pavlov—secretary of the Central Committee of the Young Communist League—took the floor. Pavlov began by talking about the Virgin Lands, and he kept “striding across the Virgin Lands,” but after striding far enough at last, he got around to me: “Some people are making complaints about our youth, but what can we ask of our youth if among their mentors we find people like Professor, if I may call him that, Professor Mikhail Romm, who makes propaganda in favor of some sort of universal human morality and lyrical . . .” He did not succeed in finishing his phrase about something lyrical, because Khrushchev suddenly interrupted him. “We know about the waverings of Comrade Romm,” Khrushchev said. “We ourselves will look into the matter.” He remained silent for a moment and then added, “But we hope that this major figure, this master in his field, will soon be back on his feet.” Well, to tell the truth, I was also hoping to “be back on my feet,” but at any rate I understood that Pavlov was not going to continue his speech along the same lines. In fact he smiled mildly, turned the page of his written speech, and went back to striding across the Virgin Lands. I sat there in confusion. I didn’t understand this at all—was it a threat? Or on the contrary, was I being granted an indulgence? At any rate, it was a good thing that Pavlov’s speech had been interrupted.

I don’t know whether what was described could be called “indulgence,” but by this gesture, which was completely understandable to the functionaries present,

Last Attempt at a Counterattack

291

Father was letting it be known that there had been enough blather and it was time to get down to real work. “After that,” Romm continues, “the case against me more or less died down. My case was transferred from the CC Presidium down to somewhere in the party’s Moscow city committee and from the Moscow city committee to a district committee, and from a district committee to a local party committee. And there it seemed to die away completely.” I did not know what “Romm’s case” involved, and I was too lazy to go digging in the archives, and it’s not of great importance now. If the case against Romm died down, the ideological battles were only starting to die down. On every appropriate occasion, Suslov’s ideologists tried to revive them and to drag Father into them again. The next “appropriate occasion” was during the international film festival held in Moscow from July 7 to July 21, 1963.

46 Last Attempt at a Counterattack, July 7–21, 1963 The tradition of giving the main festival prizes to our own films had

by then become a thing of the past. The jury gave first prize to 8½, the film by the celebrated Italian director Federico Fellini. For film people, it was a natural and entirely justified decision, but among the ideologists it caused a stormy reaction. Their arguments boiled down to an already familiar formula: the film is too remote from our traditions of realism and will infect our healthy socialist society with bourgeois ideology. It was proposed that the film not be given first prize and that permission not be granted for it to be shown widely in the Soviet Union. It’s easy to imagine how big a scandal would have erupted if that proposal had been adopted. The Manège would have been dwarfed by comparison. Suslov went on vacation and Ilyichev was left in charge of ideology. Finding himself between the hammer of the international jury and Suslov’s anvil, Ilyichev rushed over to see Khrushchev. Father gathered people together for a meeting of the Central Committee Presidium, those who were still in Moscow and had not yet gone off on vacations. They included Brezhnev, Kirilenko, Polyakov, Rudakov, Ponomarev, Ilyichev, and Andropov from the Central Committee, plus

Last Attempt at a Counterattack

291

Father was letting it be known that there had been enough blather and it was time to get down to real work. “After that,” Romm continues, “the case against me more or less died down. My case was transferred from the CC Presidium down to somewhere in the party’s Moscow city committee and from the Moscow city committee to a district committee, and from a district committee to a local party committee. And there it seemed to die away completely.” I did not know what “Romm’s case” involved, and I was too lazy to go digging in the archives, and it’s not of great importance now. If the case against Romm died down, the ideological battles were only starting to die down. On every appropriate occasion, Suslov’s ideologists tried to revive them and to drag Father into them again. The next “appropriate occasion” was during the international film festival held in Moscow from July 7 to July 21, 1963.

46 Last Attempt at a Counterattack, July 7–21, 1963 The tradition of giving the main festival prizes to our own films had

by then become a thing of the past. The jury gave first prize to 8½, the film by the celebrated Italian director Federico Fellini. For film people, it was a natural and entirely justified decision, but among the ideologists it caused a stormy reaction. Their arguments boiled down to an already familiar formula: the film is too remote from our traditions of realism and will infect our healthy socialist society with bourgeois ideology. It was proposed that the film not be given first prize and that permission not be granted for it to be shown widely in the Soviet Union. It’s easy to imagine how big a scandal would have erupted if that proposal had been adopted. The Manège would have been dwarfed by comparison. Suslov went on vacation and Ilyichev was left in charge of ideology. Finding himself between the hammer of the international jury and Suslov’s anvil, Ilyichev rushed over to see Khrushchev. Father gathered people together for a meeting of the Central Committee Presidium, those who were still in Moscow and had not yet gone off on vacations. They included Brezhnev, Kirilenko, Polyakov, Rudakov, Ponomarev, Ilyichev, and Andropov from the Central Committee, plus

292 Time for Change: 1962 Aleksei Vladimirovich Romanov, chairman of the State Committee for Cinematography. Neither Brezhnev nor Kirilenko, let alone the agricultural specialist Polyakov and the industrial expert Rudakov, had any interest in Fellini. They hadn’t even heard of his film. Nevertheless, those who gathered cursed Romanov concertedly. Malin’s notes on this meeting do not indicate who, but someone even called Romanov a philistine, and a proposal was made to “disavow the prize,” but then, after thinking it over a little, they decided not to strike from the shoulder, but to pass along the task of looking into Fellini and his film and the prize that had been awarded him, to turn that over to the “Secretariat” of the Central Committee, that is, to Khrushchev, the “first secretary.” That same evening the film was sent to us at the Gorki-9 dacha. Usually the whole family would be informed, and there would be a wide-open invitation for any film showing at the dacha, but this time Father did not invite anyone. I dropped in at the dacha purely by chance. The house was empty. When I asked where Father was, I was told he was watching a film that had been sent from the Central Committee. I glanced into the screening room, took a look at the screen, and was horrified. I had already had a chance to see 8½ when it was shown to the public during the competition for the prize. I must say that, like the Suslov people, I assumed that Father’s reaction would be extremely negative. In a work like that, the “ordinary” viewer would find it difficult enough to orient himself. When the film had been shown in movie theaters, the seats had been mostly empty. I will not hide the fact that to me, as well, the film seemed mannered and boring. I slipped into the screening room and sat down quietly on the sofa next to Father, waiting a few minutes before I began to whisper in his ear about what a genius Fellini was as a director, what a big splash his film had made in the world, what he symbolized, and then I stumbled. To tell the truth, I had no idea what he symbolized. “Get out of here and don’t bother me!” Father hissed. I left in a state of confusion. The viewing of the film soon ended. Father went out for a walk on the grounds and I went with him. “How did the film seem to you? . . . He’s a highly celebrated director,” I began. “I told you not to butt in,” he interrupted me, but no longer in an angry way. “The film was given first prize at the festival. Suslov and Ilyichev are against it, and they asked me to take a look at it.” “And what?” I barely managed to breathe these words. “I didn’t understand much of it, but the international jury awarded the prize. And where do I come in, in all this? The people on the jury understand this business better than I do. That’s what they’re on the jury for. But the problem was palmed off onto me . . . I’ve already called Ilyichev and told him not to interfere.”

Back on Track

293

I sighed with relief. We began talking about other things and did not return to Fellini. Thus there was no scandal. After all, if there had been high-level interference with the jury’s decision, its foreign members would have threatened to leave Moscow in protest. Now everyone sighed with relief, including Ilyichev. He himself had nothing against Fellini, and now, with Father’s “help,” he had tweaked Suslov’s nose, but no more than that. As Suslov had intended, Ilyichev’s reputation as a reactionary was affixed to him firmly for the rest of his life.

47 Back on Track, July–August 1963 Two weeks later, after the film festival had ended in Moscow, on Au-

gust 5, 1963, a gathering of the European Community of Writers opened in Leningrad. Our writers, both the politically correct and the “incorrect,” unanimously assigned great importance to this event. All the “big names” went there, from Tvardovsky to Sholokhov, all except Ehrenburg. Ehrenburg, a sophisticated politician, knew that they couldn’t get along without his presence at this gathering in Leningrad. After all, he was one of the best-known Soviet writers in the West, moreover one who had been roundly criticized by Father at the Kremlin conference, and on top of that he was Jewish. Better than anyone else he felt the shift that was beginning in the Central Committee, flowing back onto the pre-Manège track. After the Lenin Hills conference, on December 17, 1962, when the tightening of the screws had only begun, the first chapters of part five of Ehrenburg’s memoirs—the next part in sequence—nevertheless made it past the censors and appeared in the January 1963 issue of Novy Mir, but then everything came to a halt. The censorship was fighting not to allow further publication of these memoirs. Only in the third issue of Novy Mir, for March 1963, did the memoirs continue, and only as the result of a letter Ehrenburg sent to Khrushchev.1 At the Kremlin conference of March 7–8, 1963, Ehrenburg had been given another working-over and “put in his place.” Again everything came to a standstill. The publishing house Sovetsky Pisatel (Soviet Writer), which had included the Ehrenburg memoirs in its list of forthcoming publications, did not drop

Back on Track

293

I sighed with relief. We began talking about other things and did not return to Fellini. Thus there was no scandal. After all, if there had been high-level interference with the jury’s decision, its foreign members would have threatened to leave Moscow in protest. Now everyone sighed with relief, including Ilyichev. He himself had nothing against Fellini, and now, with Father’s “help,” he had tweaked Suslov’s nose, but no more than that. As Suslov had intended, Ilyichev’s reputation as a reactionary was affixed to him firmly for the rest of his life.

47 Back on Track, July–August 1963 Two weeks later, after the film festival had ended in Moscow, on Au-

gust 5, 1963, a gathering of the European Community of Writers opened in Leningrad. Our writers, both the politically correct and the “incorrect,” unanimously assigned great importance to this event. All the “big names” went there, from Tvardovsky to Sholokhov, all except Ehrenburg. Ehrenburg, a sophisticated politician, knew that they couldn’t get along without his presence at this gathering in Leningrad. After all, he was one of the best-known Soviet writers in the West, moreover one who had been roundly criticized by Father at the Kremlin conference, and on top of that he was Jewish. Better than anyone else he felt the shift that was beginning in the Central Committee, flowing back onto the pre-Manège track. After the Lenin Hills conference, on December 17, 1962, when the tightening of the screws had only begun, the first chapters of part five of Ehrenburg’s memoirs—the next part in sequence—nevertheless made it past the censors and appeared in the January 1963 issue of Novy Mir, but then everything came to a halt. The censorship was fighting not to allow further publication of these memoirs. Only in the third issue of Novy Mir, for March 1963, did the memoirs continue, and only as the result of a letter Ehrenburg sent to Khrushchev.1 At the Kremlin conference of March 7–8, 1963, Ehrenburg had been given another working-over and “put in his place.” Again everything came to a standstill. The publishing house Sovetsky Pisatel (Soviet Writer), which had included the Ehrenburg memoirs in its list of forthcoming publications, did not drop

294 Time for Change: 1962 them, but it also did not print the memoirs. The publishers were waiting for a clarification of the situation, but in the meantime they were overwhelming the author with comments and blatantly nitpicking criticisms. Ehrenburg decided to appeal again to Khrushchev. This time Ehrenburg refrained from making a direct appeal. He was an experienced courtier of the Stalin school and undertook a roundabout maneuver. He sent a letter to one of the secretaries of the union of writers, Aleksei Surkov, with a formal refusal to make the trip to Leningrad. He said he was old, had one foot in the grave, and besides he didn’t know nowadays where he stood in his own country: he wasn’t being printed, the publication of his collected works had been stopped, and so on. He went on in the same vein for several pages. Ehrenburg had no doubt that his move was one that could not lose. He was not wrong. Surkov immediately passed the letter along to Tvardovsky, who ran with it to Lebedev, and Lebedev put it in Father’s mail. Father felt embarrassed about all the harsh words he had spoken to Ehrenburg in the previous several months, and was also looking for an occasion to smooth over ruffled feathers. Not only did he receive Ehrenburg, but he did so immediately, on August 3, 1963. They talked for an hour and a half from 12:05 to 1:30 P.M., as is recorded in the visitors’ book. Father not only apologized for the harsh words he had used, but complained that he had once again been led astray and that people had provided him with quotations arbitrarily taken out of context from Ehrenburg’s memoirs. He himself had now read the entire book from beginning to end and had found nothing in it that was harmful. As for the delays at the Sovetsky Pisatel publishing house, Father promised his support and recalled the occasion the previous autumn when he had said to Tvardovsky: “writers of such magnitude require no censorship.”2 At the beginning of 1964, the volume with Ehrenburg’s memoirs appeared on bookstore shelves. Having completed the discussion about books, Ehrenburg began to complain that because he was old and tired he couldn’t bring himself to make the trip to Leningrad. Father tried to persuade him that his presence with the European writers was absolutely necessary for reasons of state, considerations that Ehrenburg understood better than anyone else and by which he had always been guided. Actually Ehrenburg had planned precisely this turn of events. But Khrushchev went even further and asked if it wouldn’t be worthwhile if he, Khrushchev, were to go with Ehrenburg to Leningrad, to confer with the Europeans and with our own writers, and in this way restore the relations that had been disrupted by recent events, relations not only with Ehrenburg but with the substantial part of the writers’ community that stood behind him. Ehrenburg persuaded Father not to go to Leningrad. They agreed that after the conclusion of the Leningrad conference, Father would invite the writers to come visit him at the Black Sea resort of Pitsunda. Father was getting ready to go on vacation there within a few days.

Back on Track

295

As they were saying goodbye, Ehrenburg began talking about the need for the rehabilitation of Fyodor Raskolnikov, who had been one more of Stalin’s victims. Ehrenburg’s proposition succeeded, according to his own account, and Raskolnikov was soon exonerated and restored to his rights posthumously. Ehrenburg arrived in Leningrad on August 6, 1963, in a splendid mood. He told everyone that Khrushchev had given him a very friendly reception and had kindly said that he, Ehrenburg, had the right to print anything he wanted, that for him the “censorship would not exist.” A detailed recounting of the conversation then followed. In particular, according to Ehrenburg, when he referred to his unfortunate letter to Khrushchev about “peaceful coexistence in the arts,” the latter had waved his hand, as if to say: “Let it pass—it doesn’t mean anything.”3 Ehrenburg also bragged about how he had interceded in behalf of Yevtushenko and Voznesensky. He said that Khrushchev had agreed with him on that point, too, and asked Lebedev to see to it that nobody “picked on them” anymore. On August 13, 1963, a group of European writers together with a number of our own flew to visit Father at Pitsunda—not all of them, of course, but a fairly representative delegation headed by Tvardovsky, who was pursuing his own interest in this connection, hoping that at Pitsunda he would finally succeed in having a question resolved, that is, the publication of his poem Tyorkin in the Other World, which had suffered so much. As readers will recall, in October 1962 Tvardovsky had obtained a promise from Father that he would read the poem and help “get it through” the censorship. But the Manège incident and subsequent events had upset the applecart. Now everything was falling back into place. In June 1963, after the Central Committee plenum, Tvardovsky had given Lebedev the final text of the poem. Neither Tvardovsky nor Lebedev made any secret of this, and a rumor spread quickly through the Central Committee offices—that Khrushchev was going to read this “seditious” poem on his vacation, just as in the previous year he had read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. At the end of July, on the eve of Tvardovsky’s departure for Leningrad, after a long interruption, Ilyichev invited him to come see him. He spoke with Tvardovsky about this and that and finally asked him to let him read Tyorkin in the Other World. Of course, that’s what he had really called Tvardovsky for. Not wanting to take a chance, Tvardovsky declined. He said he had promised Khrushchev that he would be the first to read it. “This whole story was now condensed into several decisive hours,” Tvardovsky wrote in his diary on August 18, 1963. “It was like a chain of accidental circumstances and fortunate coincidences. On the plane [on which he had flown together with Lebedev] I tossed out the idea to Vladimir Semyonovich [Lebedev] that perhaps I could read the poem in the presence of our colleagues, the Russian writers who had accompanied the Europeans.”4

296

Time for Change: 1962

Detailed accounts of the meeting at Pitsunda are given by Tvardovsky himself in his diary and by Vladimir Lakshin, recounting what he heard directly from Tvardovsky. As Tvardovsky recounted the event later to Lakshin: We had just landed and were being assigned to the guest cottages when Snastin [an official of the Central Committee] came running up: “They’re calling for you!” Everyone headed for the parklike grounds, where Khrushchev met them and welcoming speeches were given. Later, in a room where they gathered, Khrushchev addressed the foreign writers in terms that were not very polite. The background to that, the underlying reason for it, was that the vacationer at the neighboring dacha, on the other side of the fence, was the French Communist leader Maurice Thorez. The previous evening the French Communist writer André Stil had arrived from Leningrad for a visit to Thorez after attending the gathering of European writers as an observer. He complained to Thorez that, supposedly, the European Community of Writers had not invited Communist writers to Leningrad but had given a very cordial reception to bourgeois writers. Based on what Stil told him, Thorez expressed his dissatisfaction to Khrushchev, and Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev] felt it was necessary to have it out with the Europeans.

Khrushchev addressed his guests rather bluntly: “Here among us are writers who defend the interests of socialism and writers who defend the interests of the bourgeoisie.” That caused Jean-Paul Sartre to protest: “There are no bourgeois writers here.” They went in and sat down to eat, and during dinner the atmosphere warmed up. Vigorelli, the Italian, who was secretary-general of the European Community of Writers, leaned over to Khrushchev and said that he wanted to quote to him from memory one of the clauses in the organization’s bylaws: “The Community accepts Communists into its ranks, but it does not accept antiCommunists, whom it equates with Fascists.” Khrushchev nodded, and that helped improve the atmosphere. “Tvardovsky was very strict with himself,” Lakshin reports. “He did not drink any alcohol and hardly ate anything because he knew that possibly after dinner he would have an opportunity to read his poem to Khrushchev.” According to a previous agreement with Lebedev, it seems that the foreigners were to go their own way, and Tvardovsky would then read the poem to a small group. Only Konstantin Fedin and Mikhail Sholokhov had been invited. “Unexpectedly a new proposal was announced by Khrushchev: after dinner Tvardovsky would be ‘taken advantage of’ and would read a poem in the presence of all the guests. Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev] said this in a completely relaxed manner, as though no previous agreement existed. He said: ‘I hear that Tvardovsky has something new. Perhaps we will ask him to read it to us.’” Here Lakshin makes the details more precise. “[Giuseppe] Ungaretti and [Giancarlo]Vigorelli declined, but all the others remained,” Tvardovsky wrote in his diary.

Back on Track

297

The reading lasted for forty minutes. The reading went well. Nikita Sergeyevich was smiling almost all the time, and sometimes he even laughed softly in the manner of an indulgent elder. I knew that laugh of his—it’s very pleasant, warm-hearted, and even rather touching. In the middle of the reading I asked permission to take two smoking breaks. By the time I finished reading I was in a sweat from my emotions and from the pace at which I had read the poem. The front of my light blue shirt, which I had worn the whole previous day, had turned completely dark. I finished and there was a burst of applause. Nikita Sergeyevich stood up and put out his hand to me: “I congratulate you, thank you.” Then various comments and praise followed, but Surkov quickly made the point that there should not be a “discussion” and proposed a toast to the unusual fact that the leader of a great country had listened in the presence of prominent writers, including foreigners, to a new work by a great poet of our homeland.

I should point out that Aleksei Surkov in 1954 was the first to raise a stink around Tyorkin in the Other World. That led to the banning of the poem for a long time, eight years. Tvardovsky was “obliged” to him for many other unpleasant experiences. In March 1963 at the Kremlin, Surkov had snubbed Tvardovsky, but now the winds had shifted, and he shifted with them. Tvardovsky’s diary continues: Then, after resolutely refusing to drink any alcohol either the evening before or at the dinner, I asked Nikita Sergeyevich for permission (and this was rather daring) to “wet my whistle.” He slid a bottle of cognac over to me and I poured. “Pour some for me too,” he said, “as long as there’s no doctor nearby.” When I poured for him my hand shook so shamefully that many people noticed it, but of course it could be attributed merely to the state of my emotions.

Everyone knew about Tvardovsky’s alcoholism, including Father. The poet suffered enormously, but he couldn’t help himself. Returning to Lakshin: During dinner Sartre had no translator, and Tvardovsky asked him later if he hadn’t been bored during the reading. Sartre answered: “Not a bit. I was watching the expression on Khrushchev’s face and the people around him. It was a very interesting spectacle.” When the reading ended, Khrushchev asked that the manuscript be left with him. He wanted to read it again with his own eyes. Sholokhov went over to Tvardovsky and embraced him. There were only two people with obviously dissatisfied looks on their faces—Aleksandr Chakovsky and Aleksandr Prokofyev, especially the latter. He had hoped that after Tvardovsky, he too would be asked to read his verse. But they hadn’t asked him. At this point Adzhubei came flying over and said he wanted to have the poem for Izvestia. It was impossible to deny him that request.

That is how Lakshin restates Tvardovsky’s impressions of what happened.

298 Time for Change: 1962 Aleksei Adzhubei describes the scene somewhat differently. According to him, after the reading of the poem Khrushchev himself asked: “Well now, who will be the brave one? Who will print this?” “There was a prolonged pause,” Adzhubei tells us, “and I couldn’t restrain myself: ‘Izvestia will be glad to take it.’”5 After Father’s approval of the poem, of course, no bravery was required to publish it. What Adzhubei was really worried about was that Father might again prefer Pravda as the place to publish it first. But Father didn’t say anything. Tvardovsky handed the poem over to Adzhubei somewhat reluctantly. “Adzhubei approached me with some specific suggestions and with promises to abide by all the necessary terms and conditions.” (That is how Tvardovsky, in his diary, gives his interpretation of the process by which the poem came to be printed.) At that point he also told me he wanted to write a preface. “Is that necessary?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “You look it over after it’s done, and if you don’t want it, we don’t have to use it.” Today I think that, despite everything, it was necessary, although it was written poorly—convoluted and full of pat phrases. He tried to give me a bottle of cognac “for the road,” but I didn’t accept it.6

Lakshin presents us with another curious detail: At the last moment, when we were already back in Moscow, the deputy head of censorship, Stepan Petrovich Avetisyan, called Tvardovsky on the phone and pleaded with him, literally pleaded with him to remove six lines about the foolish people of the bureaucratic hierarchy, the so-called “nomenklatura”: For those you’d never ask to retire, Who for retirement have no desire, The custom is to make them censors With salaries in the upper numbers. Well, from a nice soft job like this Who’d want to rush off somewhere else? “That’s simply not true. The salaries at Glavlit are not big,” Avetisyan appealed to Tvardovsky.7 Then he called a second time: “Think what people will say about us.” “But why do you take it personally?” Tvardovsky asked him, not without some clever slyness. After hanging up the phone and turning to me, Tvardovsky said: “Maybe that’s cruel. Now when he goes home, how’s he going to show that issue of Izvestia to his wife and children? . . . But let it be. They deserve it.” In this connection he recalled a poem by Pushkin, “For the Improvement of Lucullus.” In that poem a prototype of the modern-day corrupt official recognized himself in a line describing the theft of government firewood. All these phone conversations with the censor were a small bit of repayment for the torments of the previous months, and amused us quite a lot.8

After the Storm

299

The issue of Izvestia containing Tyorkin in the Other World appeared in Moscow on the evening of August 17, 1963, and on the morning of August 18 it was flown to all parts of the Soviet Union.

48 After the Storm To sum up the story so far: an extremely unpleasant pustule had first

swelled up as a result of Suslov’s efforts at the Manège on December 1, 1962, erupted at Sverdlov Hall in the Kremlin on March 7–8, 1963, but then was reduced to nearly nothing at the Central Committee plenum in June, and finally dissolved at Pitsunda on August 13, 1963. Let us now review selectively the subsequent fates of the main characters in the disputes described. As early as June 8, 1963—that is, before the Central Committee plenum—the CC Ideological Department wrote a report about the mood in the “creative” unions. Here is a passage from that report: Those working in the creative fields have taken a very serious and responsible attitude toward the party’s criticism. The writer Aksyonov, on his own initiative, wrote a statement to Pravda in which he said that the meetings helped him “to strengthen his vision and his ability to keep in step with the ranks, and to understand his tasks in a new way and much more broadly.” Similar statements were submitted to Pravda by R. Rozhdestvensky, A. Vasnetsov, and E. Neizvestny. A. Voznesensky declared that he would demonstrate with the work he did his correct attitude toward the party’s criticism of his mistakes. Yevtushenko conducted himself somewhat differently. At a plenum of the Writers Union he gave a speech that was insufficiently self-critical, trying to demonstrate that he had proceeded from the best motives. . . . At a conference of the Moscow Artists Union, the painter Nikonov stated that the administrative measures taken against the group of younger artists contradicted the spirit of the party’s criticism.

And so the document continues for four pages in small type.1 On October 13, 1963, on the anniversary of the publication of Yevtushenko’s “The Heirs of Stalin,” the Sunday issue of Pravda printed an excerpt, taking up half a page of the newspaper, from Voznesensky’s narrative poem Lenin in Longjumeau, about Lenin in Paris. Unlike Yevtushenko, Voznesensky did not take on Stalin’s heirs directly, but instead addressed himself to history.

After the Storm

299

The issue of Izvestia containing Tyorkin in the Other World appeared in Moscow on the evening of August 17, 1963, and on the morning of August 18 it was flown to all parts of the Soviet Union.

48 After the Storm To sum up the story so far: an extremely unpleasant pustule had first

swelled up as a result of Suslov’s efforts at the Manège on December 1, 1962, erupted at Sverdlov Hall in the Kremlin on March 7–8, 1963, but then was reduced to nearly nothing at the Central Committee plenum in June, and finally dissolved at Pitsunda on August 13, 1963. Let us now review selectively the subsequent fates of the main characters in the disputes described. As early as June 8, 1963—that is, before the Central Committee plenum—the CC Ideological Department wrote a report about the mood in the “creative” unions. Here is a passage from that report: Those working in the creative fields have taken a very serious and responsible attitude toward the party’s criticism. The writer Aksyonov, on his own initiative, wrote a statement to Pravda in which he said that the meetings helped him “to strengthen his vision and his ability to keep in step with the ranks, and to understand his tasks in a new way and much more broadly.” Similar statements were submitted to Pravda by R. Rozhdestvensky, A. Vasnetsov, and E. Neizvestny. A. Voznesensky declared that he would demonstrate with the work he did his correct attitude toward the party’s criticism of his mistakes. Yevtushenko conducted himself somewhat differently. At a plenum of the Writers Union he gave a speech that was insufficiently self-critical, trying to demonstrate that he had proceeded from the best motives. . . . At a conference of the Moscow Artists Union, the painter Nikonov stated that the administrative measures taken against the group of younger artists contradicted the spirit of the party’s criticism.

And so the document continues for four pages in small type.1 On October 13, 1963, on the anniversary of the publication of Yevtushenko’s “The Heirs of Stalin,” the Sunday issue of Pravda printed an excerpt, taking up half a page of the newspaper, from Voznesensky’s narrative poem Lenin in Longjumeau, about Lenin in Paris. Unlike Yevtushenko, Voznesensky did not take on Stalin’s heirs directly, but instead addressed himself to history.

300 Time for Change: 1962 In 1963, one more important gathering was held—the congress of the Artists Union of the Russian Federation. A “hero” of the Manège, Vladimir Serov, chairman of the union’s presiding committee, had kept putting off the convening of the congress as long as he could until Ilyichev put pressure on him, accusing him of violating democratic procedure and warning him that he would complain to Khrushchev. Serov was forced to submit. Neither Serov nor Ilyichev had any doubt that without pressure from above, Serov would not be reelected chairman. There was no pressure from the top. After the Manège events, Ilyichev couldn’t stand the sight of Serov. As for Suslov, he lost all interest in Serov—the Moor had done his job. In the elections, Serov was “blackballed” and failed in his attempt at reelection to the presiding committee. On December 27, 1963, Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was nominated for the highest Soviet award, the Lenin Prize. On New Year’s night, January 1, 1964, Eliy Belyutin was invited to a restaurant at the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin. “This large room,” Belyutin tells us, “located under the very rooftops and not even visible from Ivanovskaya Square, was overcrowded with tables and people. The last year of Khrushchev’s rule was beginning, and he was sitting at the head of an enormous table, pouring vodka now and then into a tall wine glass, talking, playing the oracle and making predictions.” Concerning vodka, especially vodka being poured into a tall wine glass, Belyutin is letting his imagination run away with him. He was sitting at quite some distance from Father and could not see what kind of bottle Father had in front of him. But what else can you drink on such a special night, right? Actually Father was drinking Borzhomi (mineral water from the Caucasus), as he did regularly and in large quantities in the last years of his life, to wash out stones from his kidneys, which were causing him severe pain. By then he hardly touched vodka, or even brandy. “Finally Khrushchev stood up,” Belyutin tells us, “and headed toward a small door.” I noticed that the person sitting next to me exchanged glances with someone, then quickly got up and said: “Let’s go. They’re waiting for us.” We went to another door. It seemed to open by itself. We went down two corridors and ended up in a small hallway without windows, where a man stood inviting me into a reception room, along with another man who was familiar to me from the Manège. The latter put out his hand and said: “Nikita Sergeyevich will be here any moment now. Wish him Happy New Year.” He hadn’t finished saying these words when a door opened and Khrushchev appeared. He looked around the room quickly, taking in everyone, and stopped when he saw me. He recognized me and put out his hand to the man who had invited me [most likely it was Lebedev] and said: “It seems to me we haven’t yet said hello. I wish you Happy New Year and hope that everything with you and with us will go well.” The man he was talking to smiled, took a step back, and putting his arm partly around me, pushed me forward toward Khrushchev: “Nikita Sergeyevich,

After the Storm

301

this is Belyutin. He wants to wish you Happy New Year.” Khrushchev turned to me. Although before my very own eyes he had drunk a lot, his face was sober, his eyes were bright, and his voice was firm and lively. At his back I saw Brezhnev. “I would like to wish you, on my own behalf and on behalf of many young artists”—I said this looking into his small dark pupils and noticing the amazing whiteness of the whites of his eyes and the flatness of his face—“to wish you and the Presidium good health and Happy New Year.” “Thank you,” said Khrushchev and put out his hand. I felt its warmth. It was dry and limp. “Tell your comrades for me that I wish them Happy New Year and I hope their wounds will soon heal,” he smiled, “and that they will, as the saying goes, create something more understandable.” He laughed and gave me a little poke in the shoulder, then headed for the door. Brezhnev, who was walking behind him, stopped for a second. “Greetings,” he said and also put his hand out to me. In the middle of 1964, I was invited to visit the Cultural Department of the party’s Moscow city committee, and a heavy-set, big-boned woman, who turned out to be the head of the department, asked me whether people were interfering with my work. I merely shrugged my shoulders. “We have been asked by the Central Committee to inquire whether on your part or on the part of your associates there are any complaints. We will take stern measures, straighten it right out,” she continued. I recalled that the MOSKh [the Moscow Artists Union] had expelled my associates, who were members of the Artists Union. They had been expelled from the union for one year (as a warning!).2 Many of them, with the direct knowledge of this woman, had been denied the opportunity to do creative work. What reply could I give her? “Thank you for your concern, but I have come to you with a request. The thing is that to this very day our paintings, which were on display at the Manège, have not been returned to us. By all indications, the campaign against us has ended. It seems that the Manège has been closed for repairs. Why must our paintings continue to be kept under arrest?” I don’t know if my remarks had any effect, but three weeks later my associates were given permission to go pick up their paintings. A month later we put on an exhibit. The doors opened to let people in. There were a great many of them. And not only from Moscow.

Things began to go better for the members of Belyutin’s studio. They shifted the center of their activity to a dacha of Belyutin’s at Abramtsevo, a historic center of the arts in Russia where many artists have lived. This art community is near the historic site of the Monastery of Saint Sergius, about fiftysix kilometers northeast of Moscow. Belyutin had a small house there on an allotment of about one hectare, where he and his associates built a large studio, together with outbuildings, and began spending all their time there. On July 29, 1964, Wanda Wasilewska died of cancer. I don’t know what she was like as a writer, but I knew her personally as a woman of uncompromising principle, one who was troublesome and inconvenient not only for the authorities but also for the various groupings among creative people, including her own grouping.

302 Time for Change: 1962 In October 1964, Khrushchev was removed from power. Now Suslov’s reign was unlimited in the sphere of ideology. Against all logic, many people at that time placed great hopes in Suslov. “On that very day I flew into Moscow and went to Abramtsevo,” Belyutin recalls. As I approached the gate, I heard voices. The place was full of people. Many of them came over to congratulate me on the removal of Khrushchev and his whole administration, which, they said, had “wanted to do you in.” They passed on the rumor that Suslov, in speaking about Khrushchev, had condemned him for the Manège incident. Standing there in the midst of these dozens of excited people, who already imagined our quick recognition and the possibility of free development for a new Soviet art, I thought sadly about their good souls and about the fact that in reality all this meant the end for us, the loss of any and all hopes for recognition. This man [Suslov], who had taken part in the coup, although he was not formally at the head of the party, nevertheless held a primary position and would now begin to settle accounts with everyone who had made himself evident to the slightest extent during the Khrushchev thaw. Suslov, at the age of sixty-plus, could not change himself, and if in Khrushchev’s case Stalinist ways of thinking had persisted, still he had the soul of a true ordinary Russian, but for Suslov there could be nothing but the ideas of Stalin. The return of this gigantic state to the primitive methods of Stalin meant not only the end of culture but also a threat to the economy. For the first winter and the spring of 1965 it seemed that nothing changed, although everyone sensed that an energetic weeding-out of the cadres was under way.

That is how Belyutin ends his account. Suslov very carefully weeded out the ideological flowerbed, and I would say that he did it with pleasure. In November 1964, Ilyichev was ousted from the Central Committee and “exiled” to the Foreign Ministry, where he was appointed a deputy minister for African affairs. When it became evident that, even after Khrushchev, relations with the Chinese could not be repaired, Ilyichev was also put in charge of negotiations with Beijing. He conducted such negotiations until he finally retired in 1989. He also continued as a collector of paintings. In the late 1980s, Russian television showed academician Ilyichev presenting his collection of paintings as a gift to the Soviet Cultural Foundation. By no means did it consist exclusively of “socialist realist” paintings. Retired on a pension, he died in 1990. It was with special pleasure that Suslov took reprisals against Father’s aide Lebedev. He was moved down from the fifth floor of the Central Committee building, the floor that was most prestigious, to the cellar of the State Publishing House for Political Literature. There he was appointed junior editor, and a year of constantly being picked on brought him to his grave. Lebedev died in January 1966.

After the Storm

303

Within minutes of Father’s removal from office, Satyukov was dismissed from Pravda, just as Adzhubei was from Izvestia. Suslov was afraid they might “pull a fast one.” Both were appointed to the most insignificant journalistic posts, without the permission to write or, more exactly, to sign their names to anything. Satyukov died in 1976 and Adzhubei in 1993. Boris Zhutovsky, one of Belyutin’s people, became a regular and welcome visitor to the dacha of the retired pensioner Khrushchev at Petrovo-Dalneye near Moscow. On one of Father’s birthdays, Zhutovsky presented him with one of his own paintings. It was not a piece of abstract art, and also not realistic, but a kind of fairy-tale painting. It showed a teddy bear smiling sweetly amid some sort of red berries. It is now in my collection. Boris did not become famous; his work is exhibited moderately. Father, now out of favor, met with Yevtushenko only once, at the end of August 1971, just a week or so before his death. Yevtushenko visited Father at Petrovo-Dalneye. They talked for several hours, sitting on a bench in the woods. Stirred by impressions from that meeting, Father dictated what turned out to be the last chapter of his memoirs, titled “I Am Not a Judge.”3 In that chapter, Father wrote that “without tolerance by the authorities toward creative work, the artist cannot live.” Father recalled the help he had given to Kazakevich and Solzhenitsyn. He tried to explain to Ehrenburg in absentia about the thaw, which could not be allowed to develop into a flood that would sweep away everything in its path, and he apologized to Neizvestny and Shostakovich. About Neizvestny he wrote: “If I met him today, I would ask for his forgiveness. I held a high government position and had the obligation to restrain myself. To use administrative and police methods to combat trends that arise among the ‘creative intelligentsia’ is something we must not do, neither in painting nor in sculpture nor in music nor in anything else!” He apologized but immediately added a qualification: “While I repent today about the form in which I criticized Neizvestny, I remain essentially an opponent of abstract art.” In his memoirs, Father also said that Shostakovich “produced many beautiful works, including his masterpiece, the symphony about the defense of Leningrad.” He said that the leadership “did not understand Shostakovich’s support for jazz,” but that Shostakovich “was right to support jazz. You can’t fight against any type of music by administrative means, and that goes for jazz, too. Let the people themselves express their attitude toward this music.” I have not written about the incident involving Shostakovich, which happened that same year of 1963. He was the chairman of the Composers Union of the Russian Federation and invited Father to his concert at the Kremlin Theater. The concert was preceded by his unexpected introduction of “Moscow’s five best jazz musicians.” Father was deafened, and he told the composer everything that was on his mind. “I’m already an old man, and I was raised on different kinds of musical art. I like folk music. Of course I also like classical music. But I don’t like jazz.

304 Time for Change: 1962 Here I am expressing my repentance, but not absolutely,” Father concluded near the end of the “I Am Not a Judge” chapter. After Khrushchev’s retirement the life of the poet and editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky “did not go well,” as he put it himself. He didn’t feel like writing, and the authorities would not allow anything of value to be printed in Novy Mir. In 1970, Tvardovsky was officially removed as editor of Novy Mir. Father, in that same chapter about relations with the intelligentsia, wrote that Tvardovsky’s path in life was coming to “an end without honor.” Father died on September 11, 1971. He was buried in a far corner of Moscow’s Novo-Devichy cemetery, right next to a wall. In December 1971 in that cemetery, by that same wall and in the same row, the poet Tvardovsky was buried. He had never failed to remain a true human being. Resting in that same row of the cemetery next to the wall lie the remains of Tvardovsky’s irreconcilable opponent, the writer Kochetov. Today, now that all those battles have receded into the past, these men differ only by the trees that grow over their graves. At Tvardovsky’s grave an oak tree grows, at Kochetov’s a cedar, and at Father’s grave I planted his favorites, birch and mountain ash. In 1975, Ernst Neizvestny erected the black-and-white marble monument at Father’s grave. It is Neizvestny’s best-known work. Yevtushenko now lives in the United States, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a center of the oil industry. He teaches poetry at the local university, continues to write and make public appearances, and in 2005 published an anthology of Russian poetry. He is gradually taking his place among the great poets of Russia, at least the greats of the twentieth century. Voznesensky, up to his death in 2010, continued to write, and many prefer his poetry to the work of other contemporaries. For Eligiy Belyutin, everything is in good shape as well. In the early twenty-first century he was living in Moscow and tried to present his collection of paintings, which he had spent his whole life accumulating, as a gift to the city. But the Moscow authorities were not satisfied with the prospect of having the collection bequeathed to them after his death. They wanted it all right away. I don’t know the outcome of that dispute. I wasn’t particularly interested. And what of Mikhail Romm? After Father warded off the attacks on him by bureaucrat-ideologists in June 1963, Romm plunged headlong into making a new political documentary, Obyknovenny fashizm (Ordinary Fascism). He completed the film shortly after Father’s removal from power and for a long time had to keep pressing, with great difficulty, for it to be shown in the Soviet Union. In 1966 the film finally appeared in Soviet movie houses, but not those of the first rank. He then dreamed up another political film, Mir—segodnya (The World Today), which was even less likely to get past the censors. But he wasn’t allowed to make the film. This wore on his nerves to such an extent that

After the Storm

305

in 1968 he suffered a heart attack. This maker of classic Soviet films died in November 1971, outliving Father by a month and a half. Now for a final comment. There is a widespread opinion in the literary community that as a result of his quarreling with the “progressive” intellectuals, Father lost their support and consequently lost power. This contention has nothing to do with the political realities. Its authors greatly exaggerate their own role and influence. “The poet in Russia is more than a poet,” but not to the extent that the fate of the rulers and their system of rule is affected. The players operating in that sphere are weightier by far. It is a shame that Father fell for the provocation at the Manège and afterward, however subtly and carefully the plot may have been laid. One may try to justify and explain it, but it can never be fully justified and explained. The only thing left is to regret it. In essence, though, Father did not lose anything as a result, because you can’t lose what you don’t have, what did not exist and never will exist. The “progressive” writers, artists, sculptors, composers, and the like, as well as the “reactionary” ones (and the accuracy of these terms depends, of course, on one’s point of view), had no doubts about their own genius or at least exceptional qualities. But they never actually provided “support” for anyone. They may have accepted alliances with politicians who expressed a high regard for their creative work, but they never “lowered themselves” to working as actual allies of the politicians. After all, they were masters in the realm of thought and inspiration, not politicians. Both the “progressives” and the “reactionaries” tried to use Father to serve their own interests, and they did use him. But after using him, having lost any further need of him, they addressed their attentions to the next potential patron of the arts. These are the realities that exist in the relations between these two worlds, the world of the arts and the world of politics. The fact is that under Khrushchev, despite the confrontations, disputes, and scandals, new shoots sprang up and grew strong in the world of prose and poetry. But that is a different matter altogether. Father fought with them but, unlike Stalin, he did not weed anyone out of the “creative” flowerbed. And when he was removed from office, the new rulers found that it was beyond their power to weed out the flowerbed completely. It’s a good thing that in the twenty-first century, the poet in Russia is becoming simply that, a poet. He is no longer a slave writing for an “enlightened despot” (a term used for Stalin by both Fadeyev and Pasternak). He does not long to be read and appreciated by the despot. He is no longer an “engineer of human souls,” as Stalin called “his” writers. He is simply a poet, and he doesn’t suffer from the fact that the politician is illiterate or has no taste, regardless of whether he is the president or the prime minister. Such an official may neither read nor appreciate the poet or even be aware of the poet’s existence. Each one is busy with his own job, the poet with words and images, the politician with

306 Time for Change: 1962 laws and policies. And the engineer continues his research on the strength of materials. “The poet in Russia” is now just a poet. These events, though not of the greatest significance, are the events that have stayed in everyone’s mind, that have become highly memorable. These events are remembered because they affected people who were writers and who described the lives of people in our country—or more exactly, described their own lives, but were read by many others. The truth is that they look on life from their own ivory tower. They describe their own experiences, problems, and interests as though these were everyone’s. There is nothing unusual in this. One’s own sufferings are closest to one’s heart, and each of us takes pleasure in what we uniquely enjoy. But the fact is that the people who describe life present their writings to the reader with such intensity and power that they seem to become more important than life itself, and sometimes literature even becomes a substitute for life. That only testifies to the talent of the writer.

Part 3 Unforeseen Delay: 1963

49 The Year Began As Usual Father began the year 1963 by answering the questions of a corre-

spondent for the British newspaper Daily Express, by speaking at the New Year’s reception in the Kremlin, and, later on, by following the customary routine: consulting with his own people and receiving ambassadors and delegations from foreign countries. January 2 saw the launching, in Leningrad, of the supertanker Sofiya (displacement, 60,000 tons). He had inspected the same ship while it was still under construction in May the previous year. On January 5, Rudakov, the Central Committee secretary in charge of industry, invited Father, along with Kozlov and Kosygin, the two second-ranking figures in the party and government—that was how power was apportioned at the top level at the beginning of the year—to visit an exhibition of new technology sponsored by the State Committee for Automation and Mechanization. Father paused for a while at several of the exhibits and listened closely to a talk by Boris Paton, director of the Welding Technologies Research Institute in Kiev, under the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He was speaking about the prospects for establishing factory-like welding facilities. Then the group moved on to a display of tractors and construction machinery. There a discussion continued about which was preferable: wheels or treads? This was not an idle question. Given our lack of roads, there seemed to be no alternative to treads, but that was only at first glance. After two or three hundred kilometers, treads needed substantial and costly repair. Father was shown new, highly durable tractor tires. Their producers assured him that, for crossing difficult terrain, they were no worse than treads and were ten times longer-lasting. Father spoke in favor of the wheels, but remembering how weighty any remark by him might be, he qualified his words by adding that treads also still performed good service. There was a specialized caterpillar tractor used on marshy land that could not be put on wheels no matter how much one might wish to. The next display stand had calculating machines—large electronic ones for complex scientific computation and relatively modest ones, electro-mechanical replacements for adding machines. After listening to explanations by the developers of these products, Father said it would be good to have something in between, a specialized calculating machine that would facilitate accounting at

309

310

Unforeseen Delay: 1963

collective farms, keeping track of output, wages, and the portions of feed used for animals. The developers promised to give it some thought. Why do I recall this occurrence of seemingly minor importance? Because Father hit the nail on the head. Many years later I was reading a book about the rise of computer technology in the United States. I came across a passage telling about the IBM Corporation. Everyone knows its name today, but back then it was still a small company producing sewing machines, upright clocks, and primitive counting machines and cash registers. During World War II it switched over to making simple tabulator-calculators, part of the equipment for each battalion of the US Army. By using perforated cards the military could calculate wages and correlate outlay of materials with available resources, and this not only made life easier but also freed up quite a few corporals and privates, people who previously had been wearing out the seats of their trousers sitting at office desks, to carry out other military duties. The number of US battalions during World War II was no fewer than the number of collective farms in the Soviet Union. During the war, IBM produced a great many of these small calculators and rose from the bottom of the US business pyramid to the very top. Soviet product developers took no interest in making tabulators or primitive calculators for collective farms and state farms. They simply forgot about what Khrushchev had said on this subject. Then they showed him the first models of products that combined metal and ceramics—now called “composite materials.” A machine part of any shape could be “baked” from a mixture of metal and ceramic powders in appropriate proportions, so that subsequently this part needed no further processing. Father brought home a little white cube that served as a cutter on a turning lathe. This was a component used in metalworking on a massive scale. In one year’s time more than a million of these were worn out by use. This new cutter was several times cheaper and served for a much longer time. This meant a savings of tens of millions of rubles, or even hundreds of millions. Father carried this item around in his pocket for a long time and would proudly show it to his guests. On January 9, together with Podgorny, who was then first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Father headed off to East Berlin for the Sixth Congress of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. On the way, they stopped in Brest to meet with leaders of the Belorussian republic. Then they were delayed in Warsaw for a couple of days. Khrushchev spent eight days in East Germany, January 14 to January 22. He attended no more sessions of the congress than decency required. The rest of the time he traveled around to various chemical plants. At the end of World War II on his visits to Germany he had been impressed by the synthetic products of the chemical industry there. In the Soviet Union, new plants were being constructed, and synthetic goods would soon replace more expensive natural ones, such as steel, wood, cotton, and linen. Bringing new things into our lives with chemistry was slow going, and Father decided to see what the East

Mathematics in Economics

311

Germans had achieved in this sphere during the twenty years that had elapsed. It turned out to be a lot, but the West Germans had accomplished even more. It was necessary to apply to them to obtain licenses for the production of lavsan (a synthetic polyester fiber similar to Dacron) and of other recent miracles of better living through chemistry. On January 25, 1963, the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers issued a decree openly taking the side of Lysenko and proclaiming his views on genetics to be the “only correct ones.” This was the response by Lysenko and his supporters to the June 12, 1962, government decree legalizing research in “formal genetics,” which had seemed to restore the balance in biological science. Father had signed the 1962 decree, but matters did not end there. Many people around Khrushchev—including his assistant for agriculture, Andrei Stepanovich Shevchenko, who was very close to him and who had been tested and proved reliable hundreds of times—convinced him that only Lysenko could increase the yield of wheat, the fat content of milk, and other miracles our country needed so badly. Lysenko backed up his words with “deeds” at an experimental farm at Gorki Leninskiye, a country place west of Moscow where Lenin had stayed during his last illness in 1922–1923. Father visited the farm many times, and Lysenko demonstrated his “record-breaking” dairy cows and miracle-making varieties of wheat, and promised—if not today, then tomorrow—to make his discoveries available to the collective farms and state farms. But only if people stopped interfering with him. Now the Central Committee had stepped in, and it became dangerous to object to the views of Lysenko or to oppose them. People would no longer be imprisoned for such opposition, as they had been under Stalin, but they might lose their jobs. On March 17, 1963, another Central Committee resolution endorsed Lysenko’s method for increasing the fat content of milk.

50 Mathematics in Economics In February 1963, Father received a message from an economist, ac-

ademician Vasily Nemchinov. Strictly speaking, it was a collective letter, also signed by Viktor Glushkov and some others. Glushkov was a “young talent” who had just been appointed director of the Institute of Cybernetics, established in Kiev; however, among the signers, Nemchinov was the only one who was

Mathematics in Economics

311

Germans had achieved in this sphere during the twenty years that had elapsed. It turned out to be a lot, but the West Germans had accomplished even more. It was necessary to apply to them to obtain licenses for the production of lavsan (a synthetic polyester fiber similar to Dacron) and of other recent miracles of better living through chemistry. On January 25, 1963, the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers issued a decree openly taking the side of Lysenko and proclaiming his views on genetics to be the “only correct ones.” This was the response by Lysenko and his supporters to the June 12, 1962, government decree legalizing research in “formal genetics,” which had seemed to restore the balance in biological science. Father had signed the 1962 decree, but matters did not end there. Many people around Khrushchev—including his assistant for agriculture, Andrei Stepanovich Shevchenko, who was very close to him and who had been tested and proved reliable hundreds of times—convinced him that only Lysenko could increase the yield of wheat, the fat content of milk, and other miracles our country needed so badly. Lysenko backed up his words with “deeds” at an experimental farm at Gorki Leninskiye, a country place west of Moscow where Lenin had stayed during his last illness in 1922–1923. Father visited the farm many times, and Lysenko demonstrated his “record-breaking” dairy cows and miracle-making varieties of wheat, and promised—if not today, then tomorrow—to make his discoveries available to the collective farms and state farms. But only if people stopped interfering with him. Now the Central Committee had stepped in, and it became dangerous to object to the views of Lysenko or to oppose them. People would no longer be imprisoned for such opposition, as they had been under Stalin, but they might lose their jobs. On March 17, 1963, another Central Committee resolution endorsed Lysenko’s method for increasing the fat content of milk.

50 Mathematics in Economics In February 1963, Father received a message from an economist, ac-

ademician Vasily Nemchinov. Strictly speaking, it was a collective letter, also signed by Viktor Glushkov and some others. Glushkov was a “young talent” who had just been appointed director of the Institute of Cybernetics, established in Kiev; however, among the signers, Nemchinov was the only one who was

312 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 well known to Father, as Father read his articles and statistical reports on a regular basis, although I don’t think they had met personally. Nemchinov had devoted his life to statistics, mainly agricultural, and through statistics he had come to mathematics. The compilation of statistical tables was a labor-intensive, time-consuming activity, a dreary and tiresome business, and Nemchinov was one of the first to become aware of the advantages for economics promised by an alliance with mathematics backed up by computers, which made it possible to complete work in one day that previously had stretched over weeks and months. But computers also offered the hope for a transition from intuitive and volition-based planning to detailed, concrete planning that would take account of all conceivable nuances, offering a multitude of variations and the option of choosing the best from among them. As often happens in any new field, the enthusiastic Nemchinov overestimated the potential of computers. Even the most powerful of them, even the most complex, could do no more than make results more precise. A computer was not capable of changing the logic programmed into it by human beings. The alliance of mathematics with economics became possible only after the label “pseudoscience” was removed from cybernetics. Not only did the idea of mathematical economics gain popularity; it actually became a fad. In 1958 at the Academy of Sciences, Nemchinov organized the first independent laboratory for research on mathematical economics. It was subordinated only to the academy’s presidium. Economists flooded into mathematics, and mathematicians, for their part, took up an interest in economics. They seriously expected that with the help of computing devices they could purge economics of “scholastic nonsense” and make it a “serious science” like physics or mechanics. In 1956, even before the initiatives taken by Nemchinov, the mathematician Isaak Bruk, a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, had set up an economics subdivision at his Control Computers Institute. He had seated, all at one table, such young economists as Viktor Belkin and Igor Birman, who were not burdened down by “tradition,” along with two no less young and ambitious mathematicians who specialized in algorithms, Aleksandr Brudno and “Sasha” Krondrod. At the Mathematics Institute of the Siberian division of the Academy of Sciences, Mikhail Lavrentyev had also begun to put together teams of mathematical economists and economics-oriented mathematicians. Their work was headed by the forty-five-year-old Leonid Kantorovich. In the future, Kantorovich would be one of the founders of the theory of linear programming, a method for achieving optimal planning, especially for optimizing the use of raw materials and natural resources. Also in the future, he would be a member of the Academy of Sciences and winner of the Nobel Prize and the Lenin Prize, but back then, around 1958, he was only a professor who inspired great hopes. Research laboratories combining economics and mathematics also arose in Leningrad and other scientific centers of the Soviet Union. For the coordination of that work, the president of the Academy of Sciences, Aleksandr Nesmeyanov,

Mathematics in Economics

313

established a body under his own direction called the Scientific Council on the Application of Mathematical Methods in Economics. He also supported the project of establishing a special Institute of Mathematical Methods in Economics. It was proposed that this new institute be set up within the economics division of the Academy of Sciences. In the beginning, the “traditional” economists did not attribute any importance to all the fuss by mathematicians over economics. Now they “came to their senses” and tried, before it was too late, to smother the infant in its cradle. Among the opponents of Nemchinov were quite a few who were experienced in the techniques of burying inconvenient new initiatives. They reigned unchallenged in their own province. Things began to get drawn out. No one openly objected, but nothing was being done, and matters dragged along for an entire year. Nemchinov appealed to Mstislav Keldysh, the new president of the Academy of Sciences, who replaced Nesmeyanov on May 19, 1961. Keldysh promised to look into it, but had no relish for a fight with the “traditional” economists, who were close to Suslov and had access to the Central Committee. Keldysh himself was a mathematician, but he took no special interest in the application of mathematics to economics. Nemchinov did not give up. On June 12, 1961, shortly after his appeal to Keldysh, a conference of scientists was held in the Kremlin. They discussed the planning and coordination of scientific research, the interaction of higher educational institutions with the institutes of the Academy of Sciences, and many other questions. Father attended all the sessions and listened carefully, but did not speak. From the rostrum, academician Nemchinov complained about the delays with the organizing of the Institute of Mathematical Methods in Economics, which was so badly needed by our country, and he spoke about the accomplishments of his own research laboratory. Nemchinov’s speech stuck in Khrushchev’s memory, and he asked his first deputy, Kosygin, to look into the matter, together with Keldysh. Kosygin turned it over to Keldysh and instructed him to prepare the necessary materials, working together with the leadership of the division on philosophy, economics, and law of the Academy of Sciences. (A separate economics division within the academy was not established until 1962.) The division on philosophy, economics, and law was headed by academician Pyotr Fedoseyev, an orthodox Marxist who specialized in historical materialism and the theory of scientific socialism. He regarded the intricacies of mathematics with great suspicion, fearing that an attempt was being made to smuggle into economics something similar to Machism, a version of positivism that Lenin had sharply criticized in 1908–1909 in his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Fedoseyev told Keldysh about this when they met, and promised to consult with the Central Committee. Keldysh did not insist on rapid action. He let the matter slide. Probably the simplest thing for Nemchinov to have done then would have been to pick up the phone, dial Khrushchev’s number, and ask for a meeting. Father would not have refused him, of course, but the academician preferred a roundabout maneuver. In the corridors of power, he did not know his way

314 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 around very well. Nemchinov turned to Zasyadko for help, immediately arousing a negative reaction from Kosygin, who was not well disposed toward him. Zasyadko sympathized with Nemchinov but could do nothing. The matter was not under his jurisdiction, and besides, he was only a deputy premier, while the first deputy premier, Kosygin, had already reported to Khrushchev that at the Academy of Sciences they considered it premature to establish another institute. Nemchinov’s laboratory existed, it was coping satisfactorily with the tasks assigned to it, and there was no sense in giving birth to additional new structures. Father placed his reliance on the opinion of his first deputy. At that point Glushkov suggested that they appeal directly to Khrushchev by writing him the “collective letter” mentioned earlier. The only problem was that if it was passed from one hand to another, going through the usual channels, it might not reach Khrushchev, but end up instead in some department that someone considered relevant or, even worse, find its way to Kosygin. Then they would have written in vain. Glushkov had a much better sense of how to find one’s way through the bureaucratic maze. He suggested using Sergei Pavlov to carry the message. Pavlov was the first secretary of the Young Communist League’s Central Committee. Glushkov was a young professor, who had recently been a member of the Young Communist League and still had close ties with Pavlov. Pavlov willingly agreed to Glushkov’s request. Glushkov knew how to persuade people. He convinced Pavlov that the future of the country virtually depended on the founding of this Institute of Mathematical Methods in Economics. Moreover, as one of his duties, Pavlov was in charge of working with young scientists. The letter turned out to be well-argued, and after Father read it he got angry and reprimanded Kosygin for dragging his feet and functioning bureaucratically. He ordered that there be no more delays about the founding of this institute and to report back on the carrying out of his order. To supplement the letter and to expand on the arguments presented in it, Nemchinov published an article in the Sunday edition of Izvestia on April 3, 1963, titled “The Alliance of Economics and Mathematics.” In that article he described the fact that with the help of computers it would be possible to draw up realistic plans, not inflated ones, and he went into detail about the work he had done with the Moscow Transport Administration (Russian acronym, Glavmos-Avtotrans). During the years after the founding of Nemchinov’s research laboratory in 1958, his team had achieved specific results. One of its first jobs was to “optimize shipping by truck in Moscow,” and with the help of mathematics they had been able to increase the earnings of Glavmos-Avtotrans in 1959 by 15–20 percent. Father read the article with close attention. He had a soft spot in his heart for the Moscow Transport Administration, considering it his “brainchild” and regarding its successes as his own. At the dawn of his work, as a Moscow party official in the early 1950s, Father had managed to

Mathematics in Economics

315

unify all the small outfits engaged in truck transport into a single structure for all of Moscow. This effort began in 1950–1952 and continued after Stalin’s death. In the course of this reform effort, Khrushchev had more than one clash with Molotov, with the ministries, and with the entire bureaucracy of the Council of Ministers. In the end he won. In May 1955, Glavmos-Avtotrans was established by government decree; it was headed by Father’s protégé, Iosif Mikhailovich Goberman, who took charge of truck shipping in Moscow. From that time on, Khrushchev followed Goberman’s activities closely. The very fact that a centralized Moscow-wide transport structure had been organized increased greatly the efficiency of truck shipping, cutting down on the time when trucks stood idle. And now Nemchinov and Goberman were reporting new accomplishments. On Sundays, after reading the papers, Father usually went for a walk, together with the rest of us who lived with him. He chewed over and retold the story of his clashes with Molotov and repeated with pride that now even scientists were confirming his correctness. Thus Nemchinov could have chosen no better illustration of his economic-mathematical methods and no better means of strengthening his position against his opponents. In fact it was not he, but Goberman, who chose this example. Goberman had an “absolutely right” feel for the way to present initiatives that would be beneficial. On the next day, a Monday, at the Kremlin, Father continued to express his delight about the successes of the Moscow Transport Administration and urged his listeners to read the article by Nemchinov. In May 1963 a decree of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers was issued. Its title was “On the development and use of computer technology in the national economy.” Among other things, it provided for the founding of an Institute of Mathematical Methods in Economics, and also for a division within the State Planning Committee that would introduce mathematical methods into economic planning. I don’t think Father had any great hopes that mathematical methods in economics would help with the further reform of the national economy, but Nemchinov’s proposals seemed to him a good tool for facilitating the drafting of realistic plans, whose main advantage was that they could be fulfilled. I should mention one more event that is related to this subject, though only tangentially. As part of the implementation of the decree mentioned earlier, about greater use of computer technology in the national economy, a new boarding school specializing in physics and mathematics and affiliated with Moscow University began operations in the fall semester of 1963. “Future geniuses” in math and physics were gathered together from all parts of the country to attend this school.

316 Unforeseen Delay: 1963

51 The Council on Science Father had long felt the need to have at his side a scientist with en-

cyclopedic knowledge who also had government interests at heart, a person he could turn to for advice about which scientific trends to support and which to discourage. Moreover, this scientific adviser, as Father imagined him, should be above academic squabbles and intrigues, but should know about the hidden processes under way in scientific circles. On the whole, he had an unrealistic image of such a perfect adviser. In making his choice, Father settled on academician Igor Kurchatov, head of the Soviet nuclear weapons and atomic energy program, who was not only a scientist but also a statesman. They came to a general agreement on everything, but did not succeed in starting any project. In February 1960, one week after being appointed to this new post, Kurchatov died suddenly. For a long time, Father searched for a replacement who would be of equal value, but could not find one, and so he decided to create a “collective Kurchatov”—a Council on Science that would report to the chairman of the Council of Ministers, that is, to Khrushchev. He sent a memorandum to this effect to the CC Presidium, and when it met on January 9, 1963, he proposed that, in addition to the State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research, a new “pocket edition” be created, a scientific council under himself as head of government, and that it should consist of scientists who would “discuss urgent problems of industrial and agricultural development” and “make their recommendations directly to the Council of Ministers.” “Nowadays we are continually lagging behind,” Father continued. “We hold conferences and plenums, and only then begin to clarify the real state of affairs. All of us, government ministers and officials of the regional economic councils, are loaded down with our day-to-day tasks. We cannot lift our heads. As a result, we keep doing things the same old way, through inertia, keep walking down the same old path, as has happened with the chemical industry.” “In the future we will ask the Council on Science to have preliminary discussions at research institutes about plans drafted by the State Planning Committee and to verify the extent to which those plans correspond to the world level of scientific development.”1 Father telephoned academician Mikhail Lavrentyev and suggested that he head the Council on Science. It seems to me that in Father’s eyes, at that time, Lavrentyev was equal in authoritativeness and objective judgment to Kurchatov.

The Council on Science

317

A government decree of February 7, 1963, established this new Council on Science under the chairman of the Council of Ministers. By general agreement between Khrushchev and Lavrentyev, it was proposed that the scientists to be appointed to the council would have broadly recognized qualifications and authority but should not be the current occupants of any administrative posts; in other words, the appointees should be independent of the government, to the extent that this was possible.2 Lavrentyev himself chose the members of the council from among the most authoritative academicians—and not just academicians but active people, real fighters. No administrative powers were assigned to the council, with the exception of the right of direct access to Khrushchev. But that was no small thing. It was quite enough to arouse jealousy and even hostility in the bureaucracy. Father assigned two rooms in the Kremlin to “his council,” near his own office, and he was pleased with its work, turning to it now and then for information or sending it documents for examination and appraisal. After being appointed to these new duties, Lavrentyev got ready to move to Moscow from Akademgorodok (“Academy Town”), a suburb of Novosibirsk. That was the location of the new Siberian division of the Academy of Sciences, which Lavrentyev had founded and led. In autumn 1963 and early 1964, people in Akademgorodok openly gossiped about the departure of their “granddad.”3 The successor to Lavrentyev at the Siberian division was to be Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov (1912–1999), who was then rector of Leningrad University and, like Lavrentyev, a mathematician, and also a philosopher of the natural sciences. In 1964 he was made a full member of the Academy of Sciences. He was the author of works on geometry and its practical applications, and on the theory of relativity, and was awarded the State Prize in 1992. After Lavrentyev had promised Aleksandrov that he would be elected to the Academy of Sciences (in fulfillment of the quota for members from Siberia), he moved to Novosibirsk in early 1964, and was elected to the academy. However, he was not fated to become Lavrentyev’s successor. The Council on Science, during its brief existence of slightly more than one year, put into effect only three or four ideas, but they were ideas that had an impact on the future development of our country. Lavrentyev began by trying to introduce elementary order into the planning process. At that time, planning was done on the basis of “what had been achieved,” which meant that the plan for the next year would be set for slightly more than the 3–5 percent of what had been completed in the current year. The system created a large number of absurdities. For example, if it was possible, under favorable circumstances, to increase production of, say, airplanes or slippers by 25 percent, a “clever” director would spread the process out over the entire five-year plan, artificially measuring out the growth at 5 percent a year. Such behavior was dictated by the rules of the game or, more exactly, by the

318

Unforeseen Delay: 1963

realities of economic life at that time. If a person increased production 30 percent in one year, utilizing all available resources, then on the basis of “what had been achieved,” he would be assigned an additional 5 percent for the following year. And having gone all-out that first year, he would not have the capacity to produce that additional 5 percent the next year, leaving his factory and himself without any bonuses; in fact, he would “earn” a reprimand. The same kind of thing happened with the extraction of minerals. A “conscientious manager” would never ship off to the consumer everything dug from the ground in one year. He would set some of it aside as a reserve, in case something went wrong during the next quarter of the productive year. There might be a decline in the amount of material produced, and the semilegal reserve would ensure fulfillment of the plan. Lavrentyev came to see Khrushchev with a fairly weighty file full of selected materials. This was his first visit in his new capacity as scientific adviser. Father listened to Lavrentyev without interrupting him. He knew perfectly well about all these subtleties. The only thing he didn’t know was how to struggle against them. When his turn came, he told the academician about an incident around 1940 involving Lev Mekhlis, who had been one of Stalin’s aides for many years, but had a mentally unbalanced quality about him. At that time, Mekhlis was head of the People’s Commissariat of State Control. He had “unmasked” the director of a factory in Ukraine, and was going to file charges against him for stealing airplane engines. In those years, if a factory director got into a scrape like that, he was not likely to get out of it. The “best-case scenario” would have been prison camp in the Gulag. Fortunately for the director, Mekhlis shared his “discovery” beforehand with Khrushchev, who expressed his doubts: “It’s true that people steal just about anything, but an airplane engine? . . . You can’t eat it. You can’t sell it. What would be the point of stealing it?” It was all explained quite simply: the number of engines produced was recorded daily, not monthly. Let’s say the factory was supposed to make 100 engines a day. But on one day it made 101. The director would not report that extra engine, instead holding it in reserve in case he was short an engine later. Or if only 99 were made, he would still report 100 for that day, expecting that the monthly production quota would balance out. Mekhlis was counting the engines that were reported but not actually produced, and decided they had been stolen.4 Khrushchev promised Lavrentyev he would think further about this difficulty and asked him also to think about it some more. Father soon concluded that the solution was greater decentralization of the economy. “Lavrentyev’s Council”—as it was christened by the people in the offices of the Kremlin—took up a very broad spectrum of problems. For example, Lavrentyev established a commission, with himself as its head, to study the specific conditions facing machinery that operated in the extreme cold of the northern Soviet Union in the winter. Not relying on anyone else, Lavrentyev and

The Council on Science

319

Guriy Marchuk, secretary of the Council on Science, traveled around in the fiercest freezing weather for fifteen hundred kilometers through the Kolyma region, which had been a major prison camp area in Stalin’s times. There they talked with gold miners, truck drivers, hunters, and local officials. They saw with their own eyes how steel structures broke to pieces in extremely cold temperatures, metal parts became as fragile as glass, rubber crumbled like sugar, plastics split apart, and grease would not lubricate anything—it turned to stone. They estimated that winter breakdowns occurred almost ten times more in the northern Soviet Union than in central Russia. They also searched for a solution to the problem. At Lavrentyev’s request, Boris Paton, director of the Welding Technologies Research Institute in Kiev and a member of the Council on Science, an assertive man who was quick on the uptake, worked out a method for welding alloys of steel that were highly resistant to cold. Chemists undertook the production of rubber, plastics, and lubricants that would also resist the cold. The council drafted a special resolution for the government, and things moved ahead. In the 1950s, Lavrentyev had gotten to know the Kamchatka peninsula. When he returned to Moscow, he invited vulcanologists from Kamchatka to come to the capital and report on the possibilities of creating a new branch of the energy industry on that peninsula and on the Kurile Islands, making use of thermal power. Lavrentyev decided to go there himself to look into the possibilities of building a thermal electric power plant based on the heated water surging up from underground, a free source of energy. He returned from his expedition convinced that the energy future of the peninsula—and of other regions as well—was hidden in the “bowels of the earth,” in the geysers, hot springs, and the like. It was not necessary to spend money on the shipping of heating oil or coal to that remote location. All one had to do was drill a certain distance into the ground at the right place in order to obtain sufficient steam for an electric power plant and hot water for heating homes. “After my trip to Kamchatka I called Khrushchev on the phone,” Lavrentyev reports. “We met. He listened carefully to what I told him about the riches of the Far East and its thermal energy reserves. “What is necessary in order to put these waters to work?” Khrushchev asked. “A decision by the State Planning Committee to drill some test wells.” On this occasion my request was quite simple. In my presence Nikita Sergeyevich called up the State Planning Committee. They began to express some doubts. “The scientists are requesting this. That means they have a solid basis for it. It is necessary to help set up the experimental facilities and carry through with this research.” Khrushchev summed up the matter. After a few days the State Planning Committee adopted a resolution to drill the test wells, make the necessary equipment available, and plan the establishment of the first such thermoelectric plant in the Soviet Union, at Pauzhetka. In 1963 I visited Kamchatka again. At Pauzhetka the construction of the power plant, based on underground steam, was nearing completion, and at the

320 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 nearby Paratunka health resort, hothouses were using heated water from underground to provided vegetables for the sanatorium.5

Lavrentyev, however, switched over to environmentalism—in connection with the planned construction of the gigantic Lower Ob hydroelectric plant. The newspapers gave it a big buildup, describing from every angle its fabulous 10-million-kilowatt capacity and the boundless immensity of the future manmade sea, the size of the Caspian. Kosygin was one of the enthusiastic supporters of this project. A resolution of his allocated 2 million rubles for finding the appropriate site for the dam. Officials of the electric power industry placed their pointers at a location near Surgut, a port on the Ob River. For Lavrentyev, the flooding of nearly one-third of western Siberia was grounds for serious apprehensions. He shared those with Father, who asked the Council on Science to look into it. A commission organized by Lavrentyev traveled around the regions designated for flooding. If the dam were built, both forests and arable lands would be covered by water. The commission also visited the area around the village of Beryozovo, where geologists had discovered rich oil deposits. If the dam were built, we would have to say goodbye to the oil. The electric power people had no interest in the oil. The Council on Science concluded that the Lower Ob hydroelectric plant was economically inadvisable and even harmful. Despite objections by power-industry officials and protests from Kosygin, Father backed Lavrentyev. The planning for the Lower Ob plant was stopped by a resolution of the Council of Ministers. In contrast, Lavrentyev and Khrushchev did not see eye to eye in a dispute over the construction of a paper mill complex on Lake Baikal. Father supported the project. Our country needed cheap paper and cellulose. People did not think seriously about the environment in those days. They thought that nature could cope with any amount of industrial waste. Only a few individuals realized that nature is not all-powerful and is even “mortal.” Lavrentyev was one of them. He went to talk with Khrushchev, but was met with no understanding on this issue. On Father’s desk lay the conclusions reached by another highly authoritative commission. In it other scientists who were no less prominent than Lavrentyev wrote that the paper mill complex should be built and that nothing would happen to Lake Baikal. One of the decisive arguments was the example of our neighbors. “In Japan and the United States, they build such complexes and nothing happens. That means we can too.” At approximately the same time that we were beginning to plan this accursed paper mill complex, a new awareness was ripening in the United States, the realization that nature is not all-powerful. Life was dying out in the Great Lakes, and in the northeast of the United States fish were disappearing from rivers and lakes, while acid rain was destroying the forests. People there began to be concerned, but for our part, we continued to live according to the standards of an earlier time, a time like that in the United States thirty years before, when people still thought nature could tolerate anything.

The Council on Science

321

Could Father have agreed with Lavrentyev’s views back then? I would like to answer yes, but that would not be the truth. He believed in the inexhaustibility and omnipotence of nature. How could little grains of sand like us harm it? The conclusions of numerous commissions reinforced his faith. Was it necessary to spend millions and billions on protecting the environment from ourselves? Or should we use those resources to produce something needed by the people? Father always supported the second viewpoint. In that respect he remained a product of his time, while Lavrentyev was ahead of his time. Thus their ways parted and they could never arrive at agreement. Not until the 1980s did people in the Soviet Union become aware of the real situation regarding environmental pollution. Our attitude, like that in the United States thirty years earlier, evidently conformed to a historical pattern. Thirty years is approximately how much the Soviet Union lagged behind the United States in general economic development. And no one learns from the mistakes of others. I have been discussing big issues, but the Council on Science and its presidium also concerned themselves with minor matters, including personal ones. For example, Father once asked Lavrentyev to help him with a small difficulty he was having with academician Pyotr Kapitsa. Father himself was acquainted with that venerable academician, had met with him several times, but then a touchy matter had come up. Kapitsa wanted to go abroad, to England, Denmark, and other places, and he submitted the appropriate documents. But he was refused. He complained to Khrushchev. Father found himself in a difficult position. The KGB was categorically opposed. And the people in the atomic weapons program also objected. A decision was required from Khrushchev. Not a simple matter for those days. To explain what happened, I must go into Kapitsa’s history. As a young man he was already a famous scientist, and he worked in England for a long time, from 1923 to 1934. In England he made his main discoveries in the field of liquefaction of gases—oxygen as well as helium. In 1934, as in previous years, he traveled to the Soviet Union to give lectures to students and discuss his discoveries with colleagues. But he did not return to England, nor was that by his own free will. In the 1930s, Stalin was making a major effort to persuade prominent people—writers, artists, composers, scientists—to return to our country, people who had left after the revolution. Some did return—the novelist Aleksei Tolstoy, the poet Marina Tsvetayeva, and the composer Sergei Prokofiev—but many remained wary. For example, it is said that Stalin sent the writer Kornei Chukovsky to persuade the famous Russian painter Ilya Repin to return to Russia. Repin and Chukovsky had been friends before the revolution. When Chukovsky returned after a couple of weeks, he spread out his hands. He had done all he could, but old Repin had been stubborn. In 1940, as a result of the Soviet-Finnish war, the small town of Terioki in Finland, where Repin had lived and worked, became part of the Soviet Union. But Repin had died. The Finns were not interested in

322 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 his paintings and even less so in his personal papers. Everything was left untouched in Repin’s home, including his diary, on a page of which he had written: “Kornei arrived. We talked about my returning to Russia. He didn’t advise it.” As for Kapitsa, the Soviet authorities took away his passport while he was visiting the Soviet Union in 1934 and suggested he continue his work in Moscow. The Soviet government purchased the laboratory and equipment he had been using in England. Kapitsa’s new life took shape amid complications. He intervened on behalf of persons who had been arrested during the worst years of Stalin’s repression, in the late 1930s. As a result of his efforts, two future academicians—Lev Landau and Igor Tamm—were freed from Stalin’s prisons. After the war, Kapitsa, during his brief participation in the Soviet atomic bomb program, expressed his dissatisfaction with Lavrenty Beria. Kapitsa regularly wrote to Stalin and Stalin replied favorably, but in a letter dated November 25, 1945, Kapitsa went too far in complaining to “the Leader” about Beria. Stalin had put Beria in charge of the atomic bomb project, but Kapitsa likened Beria to a conductor leading an orchestra without knowing the musical score. Stalin did not dismiss Beria. Beria dismissed Kapitsa. At first the academician was removed from all work related to the oxygen industry, but he had been nothing more nor less than the head of the chief administration for the production of liquid oxygen. At the same time, his method of liquefaction of gases was declared to be “untenable.” Later, Kapitsa was expelled from the Institute of Physics Problems, where his entire laboratory and equipment that had been purchased from England were located. Finally, he was dismissed from the university, where for a time he had continued to give lectures. Luckily they never put him in prison. In summer 1953, after Stalin’s death and the arrest of Beria, Kapitsa tried to have his institute restored to him. He wrote a letter to Malenkov, but it was not the right time yet. Beria was gone, but the officials in charge of the atomic program remained the same. They had no desire to give Kapitsa’s institute back to him. In reply to Malenkov’s inquiry, three men spoke categorically in opposition—Mikhail Pervukhin, the CC Presidium member responsible for the atomic program; Vyacheseav Maeyshev, head of the Ministry of Medium Machine-Building (the ministry for the nuclear industry); and Maeyshev’s deputy Boris Vannikov. Understanding that nothing would work out for him with Malenkov, Kapitsa asked to be received by Khrushchev. They met in mid-February 1954. As I have said, Father loved to interact with scientists. And here was Kapitsa— a living legend! But Father was disappointed with him. First of all, there was his sloppy appearance, as Father said, not what you’d expect of an academician. And also the fact that his nose was constantly dripping and he didn’t bother to use his handkerchief. But those are trifles of course. Geniuses are special kinds of people. Father began to ask Kapitsa about his work and was curious whether he would return to the atomic weapons program now that Beria was gone. Kapitsa categorically said no. “Scientists are like artists,” he explained. “They

The Council on Science

323

like it when people talk about their work, write about it, make movies about it, but military projects are top secret. If I got involved in that work . . . I would bury myself behind the walls of an institute . . .”6 Father did not understand Kapitsa and he was not capable of understanding him: the threat of an atomic attack by the United States hung over our country, and here he was talking about movies. Then Kapitsa complained that he had to work at his dacha, a country place west of Moscow. Beria and Stalin had taken his institute away from him. Father promised to look into it. On January 28, 1955, Kapitsa once again occupied the chair of director of the Institute of Physics Problems. Now Kapitsa was writing letters to Father, as he had previously written to Stalin. In them he tried to persuade Khrushchev about the importance of fundamental science, and he complained about censorship, which held up foreign magazines and books being sent to him from abroad. Father distributed Kapitsa’s letters to the members of the CC Presidium and asked his assistants to remind him about those letters. Problems with censorship were easily resolved, but the question of fundamental science required a long and tortuous investigation. But more about that later. They met again in the spring of 1958. Kapitsa told Father that he was working on the concentration of electromagnetic energy into a ray. He was anticipating the idea of the laser, but did not succeed in inventing it. At any rate, Father decided to consult with Kurchatov, who gave “little reason to hope,” explaining that Kapitsa’s work was “not the most urgent” from the point of view of the interests of the Soviet state.7 Later Kapitsa wrote to Khrushchev that he had discovered the secrets of ball lightning, and that he had learned how to create artificial energy clusters inside of which, according to him, thermonuclear reaction was taking place. He again asked Khrushchev to receive him. But they did not meet. Father had lost interest in Kapitsa. And now, in his latest letter, Kapitsa was asking Khrushchev to intervene and allow him to travel abroad. Similar problems arose in those days at every step. Trips to capitalist countries were still considered something quite out of the ordinary. It was necessary that someone “vouch” for the traveler, that he would return and that he wouldn’t say something unnecessary or out of place or spill some information that ought not to be spilled. Especially touchy problems about travel abroad came to Father and he took on the responsibility himself. Thus he “vouched” for the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and the pianist Svyatoslav Rikhter, but in the case of Kapitsa he had his doubts. Not that Kapitsa would fail to return. Of course he would return. But when he was “over there” might he not brag in front of his “grateful” listeners? Might he not unintentionally reveal some classified information? After all, he himself had told Father that in the makeup of his personality he was an artist, and artists—what talkative people they are! Thus Father decided to obtain Lavrentyev’s opinion. Lavrentyev spoke about Kapitsa with the highest praise, and in response to the question about his

324

Unforeseen Delay: 1963

going abroad he said: “What would be wrong with that? You should let him go.” But Father continued to question Lavrentyev about how much Kapitsa knew about our top-secret projects, even those in which he did not participate. Lavrentyev attempted no concealment. He said: “Of course. He knows everything. After all, academicians communicate with one another and discuss scientific problems, and they read specialized literature. Besides, he is a scientist of colossal stature, and there are no secrets that can be kept from him.”8 Kapitsa was not allowed to go abroad at that time. In his memoirs Father states: “With regret we were forced to deny him permission to go abroad.” But then Father immediately adds: “Later [in 1966] . . . he did make a trip abroad after all. He made a trip to England with great fanfare—and not only to England. . . . I’m happy for him and pleased that he finally has the worldwide recognition that he deserves. Today I’m feeling a little jealous perhaps that it was not I who decided the matter in his favor. But now that we have become an acknowledged nuclear power, the things we feared at an earlier time have ceased to be as much of an obstacle as they were.”9 Father then wrote: “People may ask, ‘Wasn’t that a throwback to the Stalin era?’ Possibly it was. After all, I had worked under Stalin’s leadership for so many years. You can’t free yourself all at once from such layers of moral encrustation, even those that you yourself have condemned.”10 In 1963 the members of the Council on Science held a discussion about how to reform education and what should be taught in secondary schools and in higher education. Some arguments flared up, especially around the reform of secondary schools. Both Vsevolod Stoletov, the minister of higher education for the Russian Federation, and Vyacheslav Yelyutin, the minister of higher education for the USSR, advocated a shift from a ten-year school to an elevenyear program. “The school does not have time enough to train a fully rounded individual,” said Stoletov in seeking to persuade his listeners. “A fully rounded individual is an individual who is undeveloped in all aspects.” That was how academician Anatoly Dorodnitsyn, a mathematician, geophysicist, and specialist in mechanics, countered the arguments of Stoletov and Yelyutin. “Every person, if he or she is really a person, has a central focus in life. In this area he or she should know everything thoroughly, and everything else is subsidiary, merely contributing to that main focus. That is the only way harmony can be achieved. All the rest is pointless daydreaming.” People were afraid of Dorodnitsyn, a man of strict principles, like Lavrentyev. On this occasion also, the ministers could find no way to counter his argument. Lavrentyev took advantage of a pause in the discussion. In his view, the school curriculums were overloaded with Russian-language instruction. “We scientists do not know Russian perfectly, but that does not interfere with our communication, our ability to prove our theorems and develop theories.” He cited an argument that was more than debatable. He addressed academician

The Council on Science

325

Nikolai Semyonov, a founder of chemical physics and Nobel Prize laureate: “Do you know Russian well?” “Probably not,” Semyonov replied after brief reflection. “And how do you deal with documents and papers?” Lavrentyev pressed his point. “I am not a fastidious writer, but the secretaries correct all of it the way it needs to be,” muttered Semyonov disgruntledly. The discussion was obviously going in the wrong direction and at that point Keldysh, president of the Academy of Sciences, took the floor. “No need to distort things,” he began in his gentle manner. “We need to talk sensibly about the study of Russian. Every cultured individual, and especially a scientist, ought to be a highly literate person. The Russian language is the basis of our culture and our worldview.”11 Keldysh was supported by academician Vladimir Kirillin, a physicist, and gradually the rest of the members of the Council on Science joined them. Lavrentyev and Semyonov remained in a minority. Everyone expressed their views unanimously in favor of maintaining the ten-year curriculum. The idea of shifting over to an eleven-year school was buried for a long time. Another “interesting” subject came up—that of increasing people’s salaries when they earned a doctorate or candidate degree. Many considered such bonuses undesirable and even harmful, motivating people to defend a dissertation not for the sake of knowledge but to improve their personal material situation. It was proposed that scientists should be stripped of “undeserved” privileges. Well-meaning people regularly supplied Father with the absurd titles of some dissertations. After all, the announcements of dissertations to be defended were published daily in the newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva (Evening Moscow). Father often made use of these curiosities in his speeches, but he was in no hurry to pass a resolution on the matter. He wanted to consult with someone who knew the subject better than did his Central Committee colleagues and the journalists. Besides, he himself had not had the opportunity to study as he had wished, and he felt an inner reverence for science and scientists. Real ones, of course, those who did their jobs, not blabbermouths. He sent the proposal for giving bonuses to the holders of degrees and asked for Lavrentyev’s response. “Most scientists are not inclined toward any fundamental change in the system by which degrees and titles are awarded to scientists. It needs to be improved, but not radically changed in any way.” That was Lavrentyev’s response. He considered privileges for the holders of degrees as too much of a burden on the budget. Most authors of dissertations were honest scholars, and a material incentive ought to be provided for their labor, just as Khrushchev wanted to provide for the work of farmers and industrial workers. There was nothing shameful in that. And as far as the “barren flowers” in science were concerned, they were a minority. A struggle should be waged against them but not against dissertations.

326 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 After reading this memorandum, Father invited Lavrentyev to come see him. I do not know the details of their conversation, but when Father returned home he recalled with a laugh one of Lavrentyev’s arguments: “To deprive the holders of scholarly degrees of their privileges is the same as shearing a pig. There’s a lot of squealing but not much sense to it.” Jokes are one thing, but Father’s meeting with Lavrentyev in the Kremlin changed his mood. He did not sign the draft resolution. In October 1964, Khrushchev was removed from power. On the very next day the Council on Science was abolished. Lavrentyev had not even had time to move to Moscow. Father’s successors regarded the Council on Science as an organization that was exclusively personal, linked to Khrushchev, and this meant that it was subject to elimination. Actually, that’s what it had been. Father felt an inner need for communication with scientists. He needed their knowledge, needed discussions with them, even though at times they were difficult and the interactions with them not very pleasant. Still, he needed their advice and independent opinions. With their help he was trying to grasp what the main trends were in the world around us, to ensure rapid development for our country, so that it would come out on the leading edge in competition with the West, especially with the United States. In the unending struggle against entropy, against the chaos that engulfed everyone and everything, the Council on Science became a very important and effective instrument. Khrushchev’s successors, having announced the principle of stability, stability in the interests of the government and party apparatus, themselves became an organic part of the mounting chaos and entropy. Kosygin emerged as head of the government. He sincerely believed in the effectiveness of a bureaucratic hierarchy. Since the State Planning Committee existed, as well as the State Committee for Science and Technology and the Academy of Sciences, what need did he have for his own personal Council on Science? He saw it as another one of Khrushchev’s caprices, a manifestation of “voluntarism,” and so he eliminated it as something that was not needed. A personal component also played a role. Kosygin had replaced Father as head of the government, and he could not forgive Lavrentyev for the latter’s negative position when the Lower Ob hydroelectric plant had been discussed. Testimony has survived from one witness about the last days of the council’s existence—from Guriy Marchuk, secretary of the Council on Science. Lavrentyev and Marchuk and others like them in those years were torn between “Academy Town,” at the Siberian division of the Academy of Sciences outside Novosibirsk, and the Council on Science in Moscow. They were constantly dashing back and forth between the two cities. The inconvenience of a life like that was compensated for by certain conveniences in Moscow: a personal “Volga” automobile from the garage of the Council of Ministers was always on call if needed, and there was always a good hotel for them.

Fresh Vegetables for the Winter Table

327

Thus in October 1964, Marchuk was at the Siberian division. Here he describes what happened: On the 14th, four hours after seeing off a French delegation, Lavrentyev called me into his office and said: “Something has happened in Moscow. As a member of the Central Committee I must go there immediately to attend a plenum. You should come with me, because our Council on Science may also be affected.” I immediately got my things together and we went to the airport. To the surprise of the French who had been our guests, we flew with them to Moscow in the same airplane. In Moscow, Lavrentyev went immediately to the Kremlin, but I went to my apartment. [Lavrentyev and Marchuk had kept the old apartments they had had in Moscow.] On the next day I called the dispatcher’s office at the garage of the Council of Ministers to ask that a car be sent for me, but I received the reply that as of today I did not have car service. I learned from the newspapers what had happened: on the previous day [October 14] the Central Committee plenum had removed Khrushchev from his position as first secretary of the Central Committee and elected Brezhnev to replace him. I hurried to the Kremlin. I was stunned by what was happening there. A large group of housekeeping employees and workers were going from office to office in the Kremlin, and if a portrait of Khrushchev was hanging there they tore it down with a rake and put it in a rubbish bin. It was a repulsive thing to see. On the next day Kosygin, the new chairman of the Council of Ministers, conducted a session of the council’s presidium. They passed a resolution, one of their first actions, to eliminate the Council on Science. What a bad decision! It was not an expensive operation for the government, but it was useful and necessary. The Council on Science never reappeared.12

52 Fresh Vegetables for the Winter Table On March 8, 1963, Ivan Volovchenko, an agronomist who had been

the director of the Petrovsky state farm in Lipetsk province since 1951, and who was an old acquaintance of Father’s, made a sudden upward leap, skipping over many rungs of the bureaucratic ladder to become head of the Ministry of Agriculture. Father was completely disillusioned with the bureaucrats who had been in charge of agriculture up until then. Even the most capable of them, such as Vladimir Matskevich, had refused to understand him. They were accustomed

Fresh Vegetables for the Winter Table

327

Thus in October 1964, Marchuk was at the Siberian division. Here he describes what happened: On the 14th, four hours after seeing off a French delegation, Lavrentyev called me into his office and said: “Something has happened in Moscow. As a member of the Central Committee I must go there immediately to attend a plenum. You should come with me, because our Council on Science may also be affected.” I immediately got my things together and we went to the airport. To the surprise of the French who had been our guests, we flew with them to Moscow in the same airplane. In Moscow, Lavrentyev went immediately to the Kremlin, but I went to my apartment. [Lavrentyev and Marchuk had kept the old apartments they had had in Moscow.] On the next day I called the dispatcher’s office at the garage of the Council of Ministers to ask that a car be sent for me, but I received the reply that as of today I did not have car service. I learned from the newspapers what had happened: on the previous day [October 14] the Central Committee plenum had removed Khrushchev from his position as first secretary of the Central Committee and elected Brezhnev to replace him. I hurried to the Kremlin. I was stunned by what was happening there. A large group of housekeeping employees and workers were going from office to office in the Kremlin, and if a portrait of Khrushchev was hanging there they tore it down with a rake and put it in a rubbish bin. It was a repulsive thing to see. On the next day Kosygin, the new chairman of the Council of Ministers, conducted a session of the council’s presidium. They passed a resolution, one of their first actions, to eliminate the Council on Science. What a bad decision! It was not an expensive operation for the government, but it was useful and necessary. The Council on Science never reappeared.12

52 Fresh Vegetables for the Winter Table On March 8, 1963, Ivan Volovchenko, an agronomist who had been

the director of the Petrovsky state farm in Lipetsk province since 1951, and who was an old acquaintance of Father’s, made a sudden upward leap, skipping over many rungs of the bureaucratic ladder to become head of the Ministry of Agriculture. Father was completely disillusioned with the bureaucrats who had been in charge of agriculture up until then. Even the most capable of them, such as Vladimir Matskevich, had refused to understand him. They were accustomed

328

Unforeseen Delay: 1963

to commanding everyone and everything, whereas Khrushchev wanted to give freedom to the agricultural producer, the right to decide for himself what to sow, when to sow, and how to do it. Here a contradiction arose, which Father on his own could not in any way solve. Freedom on the one hand, and on the other, the necessity to fill the government granaries every year, to ensure that all needed agricultural products were delivered in the quantities needed. Father was hoping for help from Volovchenko, a specialist and a practical man who had been working on the land for years. Together they would finally succeed in turning the Ministry of Agriculture around; they would “de-bureaucratize” it and, following the American model, transform it from an authoritarian body that merely issued directives into a scientific organization that made recommendations, advising the collective and state farms on how to plow, sow, and harvest better and more effectively. Now instead of a bureaucrat like Matskevich, Father had the specialist Volovchenko. At the same time, responsibility for the sowing and harvesting, and for the fulfillment of the plan, was removed from the Ministry of Agriculture. Unfortunately, this was only theoretical for the time being, only on paper. During the transitional period it was necessary to ensure that government procurement of agricultural goods would continue, and the only way they knew how to do that was by yelling at people. Father himself was guilty of this, especially in critical situations. And such situations occurred at every turn. After all, Russia is not the United States, and the chairman of a Soviet collective farm was not at all like an American farmer. What if he got the crazy idea of growing roses and carnations, selling flowers in the city for one ruble apiece, instead of planting wheat and rye on his fields? That would have been a more than profitable business under existing conditions, because the low prices for bread, and therefore for grains such as wheat and rye, were firmly fixed, and even the head of the government dared not raise them. The events at Novocherkassk had served as a lesson to all government officials, old and young. Of course the chairman of a collective farm could grow flowers, and that would be more profitable for him, but it would mean the opposite for the chairman of the Council of Ministers, with grain harvests never being large enough. He asked for the wheat and rye he needed from the chairmen of the State Planning Committee and the State Committee for Procurements. And they in turn “gave hell to” the secretaries of the party’s rural province committees and of the chairmen of the local production administrations, and did so in such a way that the latter, forgetting about their assignment to act as mentors, grabbed the heaviest club handy and ran with it to the collective and state farms to knock the necessary wheat and rye out of them in short order. This was the chief contradiction that Father was now trying to deal with: how to make the transition from forced labor using the heavy club, as mentioned above, to voluntary labor based on the motivation of people through their own self-interest. And how to do it without causing a catastrophe. He was steering

Fresh Vegetables for the Winter Table

329

between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand, he was encouraging Khudenko and his potential imitators to assume complete autonomy, that is, administrative independence from the authorities, but on the other hand, he was demanding that the authorities look out for the interests of the state in the territories entrusted to them. So far, all this was not a good mixture. The interests of the state, as he understood them as head of government, often did not coincide with regional priorities or with the personal interests of collective-farm peasants or state-farm employees. It was necessary to create conditions in which it would become advantageous for the peasant producer to supply our country with grain, vegetables, meat, and milk—that is, to provide him with a material incentive for doing that. Oh, that accursed concept of “material incentive.” For how many years had Father hammered away about that? But the rural economy continued to be like a truck stuck in the mud, spinning its wheels. After decades of fleecing the countryside, officials of every rank had grown accustomed to demanding things from the peasants, and the peasants had grown out of the habit of working for the collective or state farms; they worked hard only on their private plots. Father understood that such a duality could not continue indefinitely. It followed that everything had to be changed: the laws, the prices, and most important, people’s attitudes. He had made his choice. He had placed his bets on Khudenko. But . . . That nightmarish “But” was an everyday torment for him. On March 12, 1963, Volovchenko made his debut. He reported at an AllRussia conference of the leaders of the interdistrict production administrations. Father also spoke at this conference, indicating priorities for the further reform of the countryside. The conference did not limit itself to organizational matters. The year 1963 marked the definitive transition from extensive to intensive agriculture, from the process of expanding cultivated areas—there was almost no “empty” land left—to that of raising the level of productivity, obtaining higher crop yields and increasing the amount of meat or milk from each animal. On March 16 and 17, Father sent two memoranda, one after the other, to the CC Presidium. In them he talked over and over again about specialization—specialization in industry and specialization in agriculture, especially in raising beef and dairy cattle, as well as poultry and hogs, and in creating factory farms for fattening poultry and livestock based on German and American models. No less urgent a problem was that of providing the urban population with fresh vegetables—salad greens, radishes, cucumbers, onions, and so forth— year-round, not just seasonally. How many decades had they been trying to solve this problem, which had existed through all of modern Russian history? There seemed to be no way of solving it. But now Father proposed that entire regions should specialize in producing vegetables (including potatoes), starting with Belorussia and followed by the entire northwestern part of the Soviet Union. A mighty belt of vegetable farms should be established around the big cities, first of all Moscow, and they should all have greenhouses. Not just the old-fashioned ones, but the most modern kind, in which vegetables were grown not in soil but in special nutritive solutions with strictly supervised doses. In

330

Unforeseen Delay: 1963

other words, hydroponics. He had read about hydroponics in the most recent American agronomic journals and was all fired up about this new concept, which had caught the imagination of the entire Western world at that time. But just as in the case of corn, hydroponics ran up against insurmountable resistance in our country. It required something different from the familiar, traditional greenhouses, which everyone understood, where you filled boxes with compost, planted seedlings in them, and then just waited for the tomatoes, cucumbers, whatever, to ripen. Instead, every day and every hour, you had to keep track to be sure the nutrient content of the liquid solution was correct—and if for the slightest moment you failed to keep close watch, all your efforts might go nowhere. Father found some state farms near Moscow and forced them to begin experimenting with hydroponics. It was precisely true that he forced them. As soon as he was “relieved of his duties,” hydroponics was immediately dropped, and no one took it up again. For Russians, during the two decades of Brezhnev’s era of stagnation, fresh vegetables for the winter table remained a dream that never came true.

53 What We Managed to Accomplish in the Chemical Industry The year 1963 marked the five-year point since the adoption of a pro-

gram in 1958 for the preferential development of the chemical industry. Father decided to visit newly built plants or those under construction to be convinced firsthand that everything was proceeding as planned. After all, the State Planning Committee, if you didn’t keep your eye on it, would keep trying to restore the priority of metallurgy—that is, to turn back to the “old road” that it was familiar and comfortable with.1 On March 14, 1963, Father was in Tula inspecting the New Moscow Chemical Complex, where lavsan was being produced on the basis of a West German license, as well as chemical fertilizers based on our own recipes. In Shchekino they showed him the process for obtaining from natural gas the raw material from which some chemical fertilizers are made—ammonia carbamide, better

330

Unforeseen Delay: 1963

other words, hydroponics. He had read about hydroponics in the most recent American agronomic journals and was all fired up about this new concept, which had caught the imagination of the entire Western world at that time. But just as in the case of corn, hydroponics ran up against insurmountable resistance in our country. It required something different from the familiar, traditional greenhouses, which everyone understood, where you filled boxes with compost, planted seedlings in them, and then just waited for the tomatoes, cucumbers, whatever, to ripen. Instead, every day and every hour, you had to keep track to be sure the nutrient content of the liquid solution was correct—and if for the slightest moment you failed to keep close watch, all your efforts might go nowhere. Father found some state farms near Moscow and forced them to begin experimenting with hydroponics. It was precisely true that he forced them. As soon as he was “relieved of his duties,” hydroponics was immediately dropped, and no one took it up again. For Russians, during the two decades of Brezhnev’s era of stagnation, fresh vegetables for the winter table remained a dream that never came true.

53 What We Managed to Accomplish in the Chemical Industry The year 1963 marked the five-year point since the adoption of a pro-

gram in 1958 for the preferential development of the chemical industry. Father decided to visit newly built plants or those under construction to be convinced firsthand that everything was proceeding as planned. After all, the State Planning Committee, if you didn’t keep your eye on it, would keep trying to restore the priority of metallurgy—that is, to turn back to the “old road” that it was familiar and comfortable with.1 On March 14, 1963, Father was in Tula inspecting the New Moscow Chemical Complex, where lavsan was being produced on the basis of a West German license, as well as chemical fertilizers based on our own recipes. In Shchekino they showed him the process for obtaining from natural gas the raw material from which some chemical fertilizers are made—ammonia carbamide, better

The Chemical Industry

331

known as urea. Fertilizer containing urea very effectively releases nitrogen into the soil, contributing to plant growth. On the next day, March 15, he was in Kursk at a chemical plant that also produced fertilizers, and then at a synthetic fiber complex where he observed the transformation of lavsan into various fabrics—for making clothes and for technical purposes. On March 16, he reached the Donbas. At the Lisichansk chemical complex being built at Severodonetsk he was told about its plans for producing fertilizer and caprolactam, from which capron and other types of plastic were made. On March 17, 1963, he was already in the Northern Caucasus, at Nevinnomyssk, at a chemical complex that produced fertilizer. He was satisfied with what he saw. The production of chemical fertilizers was expanding, and with the application of those fertilizers, within two or three years, bigger harvests would be the result. The grain problem would be solved. On his return to Moscow, Father shared his impressions in detail at a CC Presidium meeting. He instructed the ministries and the State Planning Committee to “tickle” the seven-year plan once again, adjusting it for the remaining two years to concentrate all available resources on the chemical industry, including at the expense of new capacity in ferrous metallurgy. What he had seen with his own eyes and been told by the people at the chemical plants confirmed the correctness of a statement made to him five years earlier by academician Nikolai Semyonov, now a member of the Council on Science, that “the age of metal was coming to an end and the age of chemistry was beginning.” We had succeeded at the last moment in hopping onto the “train” of worldwide technological innovation just as it was picking up speed. The State Planning Committee people were slow about responding, and so at the CC Presidium meeting on May 6, Father returned to the subject of “chemicalization.” He proposed that further inquiry be made into the possibility of buying another plant in the west for producing an additional 50,000 tons of lavsan, as well as a plant to produce polymer polyethylene coatings and films, and also technology and equipment to produce transistors. The State Planning Committee was instructed to stop importing natural rubber, switching over instead to making our own synthetic rubber, and to introduce more widely the use of synthetic lubricants. At the next meeting of the CC Presidium, on May 8, 1963, discussion centered on capital investments for the coming year, 1964. Of the total 18 billion rubles for such investment, 3 billion would go to the chemical industry, more than to any other branch of industry. The remaining 15 billion was to be invested as specified by the State Planning Committee. In particular, resources were to be set aside for importing the necessary equipment from abroad. Defense spending was to be reduced by 600 million rubles, with 300 million rubles being added for agriculture.2 Father gave the State Planning Committee people no rest that year. On June 4, 1963, at a meeting of the Council of Ministers, the committee was assigned

332 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 the task of finding the resources for additional investment in the chemical industry “with the aim of increasing the production of consumer goods and finding substitutes for metal during 1964 and 1965.”

54 End of the Era of Five-Story Apartment Buildings In January 1963, Ignaty Novikov, the deputy premier for construction,

gave assurances in an article in Pravda that the housing targets for the sevenyear plan would be met and that, by 1965, Soviet citizens would receive 15 million new apartments. If the children and grandparents in the families of new occupants were included, the average family would have five people. That meant a figure of 75 million, or almost one-third of our country’s population. And that was only in the cities. If one counted the villages too, almost half the Soviet population would be moving into new quarters. In the opinion of the State Committee for Construction, every five to seven years a new generation in housing construction began—everything would change: the planning and design of residential areas, the number of floors in apartment buildings, the technology of construction, and the outer appearance of buildings. Thus, the time had come to decide what should be built after 1965 and how. On February 9, 1963, Khrushchev, together with other Soviet leaders, at the Construction Pavilion of the Exhibition of Economic Achievements in Moscow, listened to a report given by Mikhail Posokhin, chief architect of Moscow. He told about the work being completed at the New Arbat neighborhood in the center of Moscow, dwelling especially on the subject of the new floor plans for the residential housing, which had been borrowed from Sweden. The New Arbat district consisted of four twenty-six-story “book-shaped” buildings. This was an experiment. Each apartment would have two floors, the kitchen and dining room below and the bedrooms above. Father agreed that we had “conquered” the housing shortage, and now we could think about comfort. He was familiar with the Swedish innovations, having read a report by a delegation of Soviet builders and architects who had visited Scandinavia, Britain, and France at the end of 1962. He had also watched a film they made. In those

332 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 the task of finding the resources for additional investment in the chemical industry “with the aim of increasing the production of consumer goods and finding substitutes for metal during 1964 and 1965.”

54 End of the Era of Five-Story Apartment Buildings In January 1963, Ignaty Novikov, the deputy premier for construction,

gave assurances in an article in Pravda that the housing targets for the sevenyear plan would be met and that, by 1965, Soviet citizens would receive 15 million new apartments. If the children and grandparents in the families of new occupants were included, the average family would have five people. That meant a figure of 75 million, or almost one-third of our country’s population. And that was only in the cities. If one counted the villages too, almost half the Soviet population would be moving into new quarters. In the opinion of the State Committee for Construction, every five to seven years a new generation in housing construction began—everything would change: the planning and design of residential areas, the number of floors in apartment buildings, the technology of construction, and the outer appearance of buildings. Thus, the time had come to decide what should be built after 1965 and how. On February 9, 1963, Khrushchev, together with other Soviet leaders, at the Construction Pavilion of the Exhibition of Economic Achievements in Moscow, listened to a report given by Mikhail Posokhin, chief architect of Moscow. He told about the work being completed at the New Arbat neighborhood in the center of Moscow, dwelling especially on the subject of the new floor plans for the residential housing, which had been borrowed from Sweden. The New Arbat district consisted of four twenty-six-story “book-shaped” buildings. This was an experiment. Each apartment would have two floors, the kitchen and dining room below and the bedrooms above. Father agreed that we had “conquered” the housing shortage, and now we could think about comfort. He was familiar with the Swedish innovations, having read a report by a delegation of Soviet builders and architects who had visited Scandinavia, Britain, and France at the end of 1962. He had also watched a film they made. In those

End of the Era of Five-Story Apartment Buildings

333

countries people also used prefabricated components made of reinforced concrete to build mass housing cheaply, not on the same scale as in our country, but then our needs were different. The only thing was that the quality of the Swedish prefabricated buildings completely outclassed ours. There was no comparison. One month before the visit to the Construction Pavilion, on January 9, 1963, at a CC Presidium meeting, in taking up the agenda point on improving the organization of planning in the development of the Soviet economy, Father complained: “We need to learn from the French and the Swedes about accuracy in cementing, caulking, or otherwise sealing the prefabricated components together.” This was a reference to the cracks and gaps between prefabricated panels, caused by the failure of the plants that produced the reinforced concrete panels to stick to the measurements given in the blueprints. This caused torments for the builders and especially for the new apartment dwellers. And it had been a problem from the very first days of our transition to prefabricated construction using reinforced concrete. “In this respect we are not doing as well as the French and the Swedes,” Father continued. “The quality of production of the prefabricated panels among the French and the Swedes is very high. We too have accomplished something, but in those countries a company is not allowed to make any adjustments at the building site. Everything must be done at the plant.”1 But let us return to the Construction Pavilion at the economic exhibition. After Posokhin, the sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich told about the memorial to be built at Poklonnaya Gora (west of Moscow) in honor of the victory in the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945). Vuchetich proposed a complex similar to the one he had designed at Mamai Hill (a memorial to the Battle of Stalingrad, which was then being called the “Battle on the Volga”). It would have the same kind of statue of “Mother Country” (Rodina-Mat’) and bas-reliefs depicting our warrior heroes. The sculptor’s concept was something Khrushchev liked, but he was in no hurry to state his approval. Of course it was our duty to pay homage to those who had fallen in battle, but the memorial was already costing our country a lot of money, and now they were talking about putting up another such expensive complex. Father asked how much it would cost. Vuchetich claimed that he had not thought about the cost. Posokhin came to the rescue. He named some figure, obviously plucked out of the air, but sounding realistic. He was a man of great experience and knew what things cost. Father nodded and immediately added out loud the number of square meters of new housing that would be sacrificed to pay for the new memorial. In the budget there were no extra funds, nor were any predicted. Khrushchev remained silent for a long time. Behind his back, members of the CC Presidium were talking among themselves. They liked the design of the memorial and were ready to authorize it. Finally the Soviet premier shook hands with Vuchetich, thanked him for providing a pleasurable occasion, and asked him to continue drafting plans for the project. As for the decision about when the work would start, that would be made later. Vuchetich was obviously dismayed. He had expected approval right

334 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 then. He expected not only that the project would be approved, but also that the financing would begin, and that the Moscow authorities would start the digging of trenches for the foundations. Now everything was suspended in uncertainty. After those remarks by Khrushchev, no one would take any action on their own responsibility. Father felt the awkwardness of the situation, but he did not show it. Addressing Posokhin, he asked, “Well, what else do you have?” He knew very well the “what else” they had come for. A discussion had begun about the strategy for designing neighborhoods in cities and towns. What kinds of buildings were to be put up after 1965? And how should they be constructed? In January 1963 at a CC Presidium meeting, they had already begun this discussion with Posokhin. For the umpteenth time they had talked about the absence of a general plan for urban development in Moscow, and about the diminishing returns on housing that had a small number of stories, because of the increased costs of infrastructure. When roads and various other connecting lines, such as electricity and water, were counted, the cost of building on one new hectare of land had risen to 150,000 rubles. The complex problems of designing new neighborhoods were discussed in general. Father referred again to the experience of the Swedes. They did not locate commercial enterprises inside residential apartment buildings, but placed them separately: “That is progressive. It’s not suitable to have a store in an apartment building. It’s not advantageous for the designing or construction of the building or for commerce.”2 At that point Posokhin corrected Father. He said they were already doing that in Moscow. Father gave a grunt of satisfaction and promised to find time to look into it in person. Meanwhile Posokhin had begun reporting about plans for the designing of new neighborhoods in southwest Moscow, which had long since passed beyond the former village of Cheryomushki, which in the early 1950s had still been on the outskirts of the city. For old time’s sake the area kept the same name; it was called New Cheryomushki. The picture Posokhin presented was of a series of “high-rise” prefabricated apartment buildings that would be of nine stories, twelve stories, and even sixteen stories. This differed from the five-story housing of the early 1950s as much as the modern Boeing airplane differs from the first attempts at heavier-than-air flying machines built by the French aviators Louis Blériot and Henri Farman. These tall buildings of course required elevators, better systems for delivering water to upper stories, and much else. But all these things paid for themselves and more with the savings on infrastructure. Father accepted Posokhin’s arguments without any objections. Later, in his memoirs, he wrote: “Such is the dialectics of construction, and it is important to grasp the right moment when one should shift from an outdated strategy . . .” As it now turned out, “the higher a building was, the cheaper it was,” within certain limits of course. Father had asked Posokhin “to provide for new and different standards in these new buildings: in terms of living space, especially the entrance hallway,

End of the Era of Five-Story Apartment Buildings

335

the kitchen, the toilet, and the bathroom. It was obligatory to have toilets separate from the bathrooms, and also to have built-in furniture.” Posokhin reminded him that this would exceed the standards set at that time by the government. Father replied that “this was residential housing—the next stage to which we should ascend . . .”3 They agreed then and there that after the new plans had been approved and the first nine-story building had been put up, Posokhin would go to the government with a proposal to revise the standards. Then he invited Father to a “housewarming party” for the first high-rise building. “This coming May,” Posokhin specified. “All right then, in May,” Father agreed. Father complained about the primitive outer appearance of the buildings. In this respect the new series differed little from the old five-story buildings. He repeated remarks he had made at a recent CC Presidium meeting that the boxlike structure and absence of individuality attested to the lack of talent of the architect, who “ought to be able to play with and make variations in shadings of color, outer finishing touches, and the configurations of buildings.”4 After the shift to mass production of residential housing, neither the classical nor the modern school of “palace style” architecture was any longer applicable. But no modern school of architecture for “serial” production of housing for everyone, not just for the select few, had come into existence as yet. Posokhin cautiously commented that to design an attractive and at the same time economically rational building with large prefabricated components was more difficult than to build them out of bricks. A combination of the architect’s talent and the engineer’s resourcefulness was needed. But for now, not only were the architect and the engineer not combined in one person, but the technical schools trained them in different departments, and in fact when they worked together in one studio, under the same roof, architects and engineers got along no better than cats and dogs. Posokhin promised to think about how to make the new buildings more attractive, borrowing what he could from the Swedes and French. His efforts did not turn out very well, and he did not manage to develop a cross between an architect and an engineer. After all, everything would depend on those doing the detail work, and not on Father or Posokhin, in determining what the new series of buildings would look like. Only the designers at the location could use their talent to alter the arrangement of the constant basic elements and to style buildings the way new cars are styled. Their appearance changes from one year to the next, although the components inside the vehicle remain much the same. And if they were not successful in this, the leadership, specifically Khrushchev, would be blamed for everything. He was responsible for all matters, including the absence of talent. Then discussion turned to the five-story buildings. In twenty to twenty-five years their life span would come to an end. Tearing them down would cost a pretty penny, but it was also impossible to leave them in their “primordial” condition. They were simply not fit to live in. Here was Father’s suggestion: “We

336 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 have to preserve them, carrying out major repairs, reorganizing them internally and improving them. If we give a new appearance to these older houses, put in elevators, and improve living conditions in them generally, a person will not always want to move out of them into a high-rise building.”5 In conclusion, Father reminded everyone that the next meeting would be in May, and then they would no longer be reviewing preliminary models but would be at the construction site to mark the “birthday” of the nine-story apartment building. On April 23–25, 1963, Father sat for three days at a conference of builders of the Russian Federation, and he listened closely to the speakers. The latter, knowing his passion for specific information and exact figures, tried to impress him favorably, and though they all tried hard, not all were successful. Father himself spoke on April 24. On May 13, 1963, he and his colleagues of the CC Presidium went to the “housewarming” event for the new nine-story building in Cheryomushki. I myself took a day off from work and tagged along after them. After Cheryomushki, Father planned to travel through the city and stop to see what progress was being made on construction of the New Arbat throughway, which would connect the old center of Moscow with the outskirts of the city. The construction at New Arbat was the subject of gossip on every corner in those days, and I too wanted to see how it was turning out. Father liked the nine-story building. He especially praised the new wall panels designed and made with the help of a vibrating machine. Their designer, Nikolai Yakovlevich Kozlov, took the occasion to invite Father to visit his plant, the Prokatdetal (Rolled Components) plant, to see his new 120-meter rollingmill type of production operation, capable of turning out as much as 500,000 square meters of prefabricated construction panels made of reinforced concrete in one year. Kozlov’s plant alone had provided for the erection of 80,000 square meters of housing. No one else in the world had achieved such a thing. “Yes, absolutely, I will come,” Father responded vigorously to the invitation and, after thinking for a moment, added: “I’ll come tomorrow. Will that work?” “That’ll work,” Kozlov responded. In spring 1962, Father had inspected the prototype of Kozlov’s installation. At that time they were only just working out the technology for producing thin, ribbed panels for walls and floors. And now the serial production of such panels was already under way. For a long time, Father walked around the new nine-story building, looking into every nook and cranny, and scolding the builders for the poor quality of the finishing, especially of the doors, windows, and built-in furniture. It was customary for the builders to promise to improve, but they in turn complained that the lumber they had received had not been properly dried, so that the doors and windows became warped or cracked as they dried out. Father directed a questioning glance at the chairman of the State Committee for Construction,

End of the Era of Five-Story Apartment Buildings

337

his deputy and old acquaintance, Ignaty Novikov. The latter spread out his hands in a gesture of helplessness. Father decided not to go any further into this subject, which was unpleasant for all of them. He had encountered the problem of green lumber in the 1930s in Moscow and in the 1940s in Ukraine. In those days, no satisfactory techniques for drying lumber had been achieved, neither in Russia nor in the United States. The conversation passed on from the quality of construction to its financing. Father turned to address Nikolai Yegorychev, first secretary of the party’s Moscow Committee, who always tried to stay close to Khrushchev. As head of the party and government, the latter began questioning Yegorychev. How much of the housing in Moscow was built at the expense of the central government’s budget? And what proportion was paid for by housing cooperatives? Yegorychev got nervous. He did not remember what the figures were, and so his answers were both verbose and vague. “The Moscow leadership ought to think about shifting the center of gravity to construction by cooperatives.” That was Father interrupting Yegorychev, who was continuing to hem and haw. “The people who live here are better off than the average person elsewhere in our country. They are capable of paying for a new apartment and will want to do that, especially if they can get one of higher quality, and get it more quickly. We can transfer the resources we save in this way to the periphery, the outlying parts of the country, and at the same time not take anything away from Moscow. That way we will be helping the provinces and increasing the total quantity of newly commissioned housing for our country as a whole. Do you understand?” Yegorychev assured him that he understood. “That’s good,” said Father. “I will check up on this next year.” From Cheryomushki, everyone went in a cavalcade to the nearly finished New Arbat throughway. It was to be opened to traffic half a year later, around the time of the November 7 celebrations, the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Along the way we stopped at the Berezhkovsky Embankment, and a discussion was held about the urgent problem of moving the Dorogomilovsky chemical complex out of Moscow. It had been built before the war, in the era of the first two five-year plans, and now twice a day, or perhaps even more frequently, at the moment of output of their product (what they were making there I don’t remember, but it was something that stank terribly), the surrounding area became clouded with fumes of dirty-yellow sulfurous smoke smelling like rotten eggs. The residents flooded officialdom with complaints: living there had become impossible. Father also received such letters, but even without them he knew very well what that chemical complex smelled like. It was located not far from the Vorobyov Hills residence where we lived, and he too would have had good reason to write letters of complaint, but there was no one for him to write to. Agreement was reached that the complex would be moved out of Moscow— and fast! Reports to that effect were even printed in the press. A few months later, under the impact of one more sulfurous emanation from the complex, I

338 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 asked Father when in the world all this would end. He smiled helplessly. In response to the order to remove the complex from Moscow, the chemical-industry people had threatened that this would disrupt the annual production plan. Many things and many people depended on that. A decision was made to postpone removal of the complex until equivalent productive capacity had been brought into operation elsewhere. They gave it some time. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the mayor of Moscow said on television that they intended in the near future to solve the problem of relocating the Dorogomilovsky chemical complex to somewhere outside the Moscow city limits. Father’s next stop was at Insurrection Square, where a high-rise apartment building stood. At that intersection, when rush hour came, traffic jams involving dozens of vehicles would develop. The proposal to clear away this bottleneck by having traffic flow on two levels, either by digging a tunnel or building an overpass, encountered “insuperable” obstacles. An overpass would mar the city skyline, and a tunnel wouldn’t work; it was too close to the Moscow River. A decision was needed, an assertion of the will. Father made that decision on the spot. As I recall, he chose the overpass. Everyone agreed. It would be cheaper. The appropriate official decree was prepared, but it remained on paper only. Nothing was actually done. A year and a half later, after Khrushchev’s removal from power, the arguments about untangling this traffic snarl resumed with new force and acquired an ideological coloration. Decisions made by Khrushchev were branded as “voluntarism and subjectivism,” and no one was in any hurry to carry them out. No one contracted any actual work at Insurrection Square. As for Brezhnev, the red lights that caused traffic snarls there did not bother him. His limousine did not stop for red lights. But let us go back to May 13, 1963. From Insurrection Square, Khrushchev and the group of people with him went on to Arbat Square. Father was pleased with the progress there. He liked the new throughway (called New Arbat Avenue) and the traffic tunnel at the end, and he liked the apartment buildings with enhanced comforts that were being built on either side of the street. After listening to some reports, he suggested to Posokhin that they “take a stroll” across the avenue. From the Prague Restaurant, located at the beginning of the avenue, they crossed to the other side of the street, veering back and forth among the holes in the ground and the piles of reinforced concrete panels and the pieces of equipment sticking up here and there. The rest of the group was strung out to the rear along a trampled muddy path, but moving slowly, trying to avoid getting mud on themselves. The procession stretched out at length as most of the group lagged more and more behind Khrushchev. Meanwhile, without regard for obstacles, Father had already clambered across what would be Moscow’s widest thoroughfare. (The widest section of the future avenue was twenty-eight meters across.) For a while, he and Posokhin were by themselves, and the latter seized the moment to lead Khrushchev over to a little half-ruined church teetering on the

End of the Era of Five-Story Apartment Buildings

339

edge of the construction pit. Arguments had also flared up around this church. Moscow’s party authorities, in particular Yegorychev, first secretary of the Moscow Committee, insisted that it should be torn down. There was no reason for it to be sticking up there like a sore thumb. It was only ruining the view. But Posokhin did not favor removing the church; he would have regretted its loss. In his opinion, it did not spoil the view at all, but rather enhanced it. Now he decided to bring Khrushchev into the dispute. Indifferently, as though in passing, he pointed the church out to Father and remarked that it was intended for demolition, but that the Museum of Architecture had requested that it be preserved. They had put up a display in the church, telling the story of the reconstruction of the Arbat district. Yegorychev arrived just then, but he was exhausted from clambering over the piles of construction materials and did not have the physical capacity to either agree or disagree. Father liked the museum’s idea. Yegorychev, still panting, caught the very end of the conversation and, not understanding very well what was happening, also expressed his support for Posokhin. Once he figured out what was going on, it was too late to object. As a result, the church was not torn down. Instead, it was restored, a rare occurrence in those years. The next stop was Manège Square, near the Kremlin. Here again they discussed the problem of disentangling traffic snarls. Vasily Promyslov, chairman of the Moscow City Soviet (in effect, mayor of Moscow), gave a report about plans for regulating the flow of traffic through Manège Square, along Manège Street, through Sverdlov Square (Theater Square) and along Pushkin Street (Bolshaya Dmitrovka). Father suggested that everyone walk the route together. As a result of this inspection tour, they decided to introduce one-way traffic on Pushkin Street going up from below, from Mokhovaya Street to Pushkin Square, but not to be in a hurry about regulating the rest. Promyslov and Posokhin were assigned to draw up a “general plan for reorganizing the flow of traffic in the center of Moscow.” The problem centered on the Manège and an “island” of buildings located between the Manège and Kamenny Most (Stone Bridge). There was two-way traffic for cars and trolley buses through some narrow “channels,” one going along the edge of the Aleksandrovsky Gardens and the other going past Pashkov House (Dom Pashkova). It was impossible to widen the thoroughfare. That would require tearing down not only the “island” of buildings but also the Manège itself. Moreover, nothing special would result, because further on, traffic ran into another snag—the narrow passage on both sides of Hotel Moskva. A tunnel would not work, because the space below ground was already taken by subway lines, both existing line and lines planned for the future. The only remaining option was an overpass. Not the most elegant solution, but at least it would be something. They agreed to work on the problem some more and meet again in a month or a month and a half. An overpass would not intrude on the landscape. That is, there was the technical possibility that after clearing the “island,” the overpass “could be

340 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 extended on six-meter-high supports from Kamenny Most, past the Manège, alongside the old buildings of Moscow University, then farther along, between the Bolshoi Theater and the Metropole Hotel, coming out onto Dzerzhinsky Square (Lubyanka Square). When all this was put down on paper, it appeared that downtown Moscow would be submerged under oppressively heavy concrete pillars supporting the overpass.”6 The result might be something that fit in with Los Angeles or Tokyo, but not at all with Moscow. The architects proposed a palliative measure—not to build the overpass, but to introduce one-way traffic from the Bolshoi Theater to Kamenny Most, going past the Manège and the old Moscow University buildings, and also to introduce one-way traffic in the opposite direction, passing by the fences of the Aleksandrovsky Gardens. However, “in order for this route to come out directly onto Dzerzhinsky Square, a wing of the Metropole Hotel would have to come down, and so would the drugstore on the corner of October 25 Street, along with the apartment building next to it.”7 Posokhin had his doubts, and no fundamental solution to this traffic problem resulted, but later an agreement was reached. Posokhin had to spend a long time trying to persuade Promyslov and Yegorychev, but after all, Khrushchev had spoken in favor of an overpass . . . In the end, somewhere around the second half of July 1963, Posokhin managed to win them over, and all that remained at that point was to report the proposal to Khrushchev. Meanwhile, on May 14, Father had gone to visit Nikolai Kozlov’s plant, Prokatdetal. Coming out of this production operation, which sent prefabricated construction components through rollers that shaped and processed them as they moved along a conveyer, were not only ribbed wall panels but also multilayer floor and ceiling panels, with insulation and soundproofing “sandwiched” inside them, and also especially sturdy roof panels. “All the roofs of Moscow from now on will be coming from our factory,” boasted Kozlov, unable to restrain himself. Father walked around for a long time, inspecting Kozlov’s equipment and asking questions, and in parting he congratulated Kozlov on his successes. Father liked this new conveyer system, just as he liked everything Kozlov did. He liked Kozlov’s inventiveness and his ability to carry an idea through to completion. He valued this type of man very highly. Then they inspected the production of new reinforced concrete tubing for shoring up and putting a facing on subway tunnels. Father was no less proud of this tubing than of the prefabricated reinforced concrete panels for housing construction.8 He had lent a hand in this sphere also, supporting the innovators who proposed reinforced concrete tubing instead of cast-iron tubing. People didn’t believe in this, however, fearing that the concrete might not withstand the colossal pressure underground or that water might seep through the concrete. They also feared that with the passage of time it would start to crumble. Besides, they

End of the Era of Five-Story Apartment Buildings

341

were accustomed to cast-iron tubing, and their attitude was: “leave well enough alone.” That is the usual position of those who are opposed to anything new. The innovators demonstrated their correctness. They made all the technical calculations down to the last detail. Experiments were carried out, and they proved that reinforced concrete tubing was no worse than cast-iron, and its use promised to bring substantial savings. But none of that helped. The innovators kept knocking on doors until they got to Khrushchev. Father received them, talked with them for a long time, examined their blueprints and calculations, and decided to make a test case in one of the tunnels of the Moscow Metro. It was successful. With Khrushchev’s blessing, reinforced concrete tubing became an ordinary, everyday element in underground construction. Today in the building of subway tunnels reinforced concrete is as common as asphalt on the streets. Three days later, on May 17, 1963, Father was again at the Construction Pavilion accompanied by all the same people. This time he was shown several projects: another monument to Lenin, one to the first space travelers, and a sculpture in honor of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the forefather of space exploration. Father was equally pleased by a symbolic rocket whirling upward and by its location at the entrance to the permanent Exhibition of Economic Achievements. The statue of Tsiolkovsky left him indifferent, but aroused no objections. However, he asked that more work be done on the Lenin project. Something about the draft version of the monument annoyed him, although he himself could not say exactly what it was. Two competing projects were presented by two rival sculptors, one by Nikolai Tomsky, and the other by Aleksandr Kibalnikov. In addition, the sculptors and architects could not come to any agreement on where to locate the monument. One variant was the Vorobyov Hills. At one time a great church of Christ the Savior was going to be built there. And quite recently a television tower. Visually it was a desirable location, but from the builders’ point of view it was dangerous. Such a heavy structure (and the monument to Lenin was conceived in grandiose dimensions) could not be built too close to the edge of the hillside. It might not stay in place, might begin to break loose, then slide and fall into the Moscow River. But if the monument were moved back to a safe distance, an outcropping at the summit would block the view and “cut” the monument in two. It was for this reason that neither the church of Christ the Savior nor the television tower was ever put up there. Father was impressed by the Vorobyov Hills as a location for the monument, but in the end he agreed with those who opposed that idea. They decided to think about it some more, as was appropriate. On July 30, Father again went to the Construction Pavilion. There he was shown new versions of high-rise apartment buildings, which had been reworked after the February meeting. Then everyone went together to the Moscow City Soviet, in the White Hall of which a discussion was held on the strategy for developing the Moscow Metro system. Father’s view was that when construction was undertaken in an area that had not previously been built up, a surface train

342 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 was preferable. It was cheaper. And such was the decision they made. In new districts the trains would be above ground, but at a distance from people’s homes such that the noise would not disturb the residents. The underground tunnels and their subway trains remain a part of the densely built-up districts of the “old city” in Moscow. Having finished with the Moscow Metro, they switched over to discussing the plan for reorganizing traffic around Manège Square, as had been promised in May. They settled on a “no overpass” option. On the next day, July 31, a Wednesday, Father went to the Klzyazma Reservoir and inspected a complex of vacation lodges that had just been made available by the builders. These buildings had three to five stories each, with a total of 3,000 apartment units. This seemed to Father a model for the vacation areas of the future. It would replace the dachas and “garden cottages” (little houses with adjacent gardens) that had devoured so much of our native land. There was not enough “free” land for everyone. On August 21, 1963, to draw the balance sheet on the discussion of the previous several months, the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers issued a decree “on improving designing in the field of civil construction and the planning and building of cities.” It officially announced the coming of a new stage in housing construction, confirming the transition to multistory buildings with elevators and with separate toilets and bathrooms, and it legalized the allotment of more space to the standard apartment, as well as built-in furniture free of charge. All these things would become ordinary and familiar in the decade to come. A decade without Khrushchev. On October 27, 1963, one more decree of the party and government announced that a new, modern building, as part of the Tretyakovsky Art Gallery, would be erected on the Moscow River embankment near the Krymsky Most (Crimean Bridge). This was probably the only case of permission for construction of a nonresidential facility in those years. The existing Tretyakovsky Gallery was suffocating from lack of space. Some of the most precious paintings were gathering dust in storage rooms. The minister of culture, Yekaterina Furtseva, had persuaded Father to make this exception for her. The opening of this new section of the Tretyakovsky Gallery was scheduled for 1967. On November 4, 1963, on the eve of the November 7 celebrations, the builders “turned over” the New Arbat district, and the first cars drove over the asphalt of the new thoroughfare. Strictly speaking, this “grand opening” was limited to the throughway. The buildings on either side of the avenue had not yet been completed. Where the sidewalks ran, some trenches still gaped. Pipes, cables, and the like, for utilities and services were still being installed. Nevertheless, the main thing was done. A wide thoroughfare, somehow reminiscent of Paris, linking the western outskirts with the center of the city, had been carried through. The old Dogs’ Square (Sobachya Ploshchadka) and other tourist sites of the old Arbat district ceased to fever the imagination. They remained only in the memories of the lovers of olden times. To this day such

End of the Era of Five-Story Apartment Buildings

343

people regret the loss of these grand old places, just as history buffs pine for the old back alleys of the “real Paris”—before it was redesigned by Georges Haussmann at the time of Napoleon III. On December 16, 1963, a session of the Supreme Soviet opened. The head of the government, Premier Khrushchev, because of his status, was supposed to be present during all three days of this session. But he was not sitting in the hall where the proceedings took place. On the second day, on December 17, he slipped over to the offices of the Moscow City Soviet. There a discussion was continuing on the revised and updated plan for the reconstruction of Moscow. This plan provided for an increased number of underground pedestrian crossings and for new subway lines to be added to the Moscow Metro. On the new mockup of the city there stood elongated parallelepipeds, low to the ground, designating five-story apartment buildings. They were replaced by little towers signifying the new nine-story and twelve-story residential housing. On the same amount of land, these buildings could accommodate twice as many residents as before. Just before New Year’s Eve, on December 28, 1963, Father went for the third time that year to visit the Prokatdetal plant of Nikolai Kozlov, who had promised to show him a new prototype of a nine-story building, 80 percent of which consisted of components produced by his machinery. This was a pilot project, a high-rise building that would have 180 apartments. The building had already risen to the sixth floor. Kozlov explained that, on average, it took six days to put together one floor. “Six times nine is fifty-four,” Father responded. “Plus days off. That makes a total of about two months.” “Three,” Kozlov corrected him. “Time is needed to prepare for the assembling of the components, then there’s the finishing work, putting on the wallpaper, cleaning up.” “Three months instead of three years!” That was Khrushchev’s triumphant response. “And all this has been done in less than thirteen years.” So much time had gone by since he had first seen the prefabricated wall panel, serving as a divider between the rooms of an apartment, devised by the engineer Nikolai Yakovlevich Kozlov. Father began reminiscing about how they had first become acquainted and about how difficult it had been for them to break through and bring industrial assembly-line-type methods into housing construction.9 Then he and Kozlov walked through the finished floors of the building, to look them over together. Khrushchev fastidiously studied the areas they walked through, but there was no reason to be picky. The wall panels, delivered directly from the production plant, were so smooth that no plastering was needed. Wallpaper could be pasted onto them as they were, and people could move in. It was a pleasure for Father to run his hands over those wall surfaces. An age-old dream of builders had come true. They could now do without plastering, on which so many hours of labor had been wasted. At that moment he felt truly happy.

344

Unforeseen Delay: 1963

After finishing this inspection, they returned to the Prokatdetal plant. A second vibrating machine had recently been installed there. It hardly differed from the first one, which Father had already seen, but he never stopped expressing his delight as he looked it over. He was in very high spirits indeed on leaving the scene of Kozlov’s operations. The year 1963 brought completion to the era of five-story housing. In the following year, in 1964, nine-story and twelve-story buildings constituted 85 percent of all residential housing erected.

55 Day by Day On February 6, 1963, Ulisse Mazzolini, the general secretary of the

Balzan Foundation, which was headed by the presidents of Switzerland and Italy, addressed a proposal to Khrushchev that he accept the Balzan Prize “for peace and humanism,” which was considered a highly respectable award in those days. Let me say a few words about the wealthy Italian businessman Eugenio Balzan (1874–1953) and the prize given in his name. After World War I, he was the editor and part-owner of the prestigious Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera (Evening Courier), but he and Mussolini did not see eye to eye. In 1933, Balzan emigrated to Switzerland, where he had invested his assets. There he survived World War II, and there he died after the war. He left a substantial inheritance to his daughter, who established the prize in his memory. It was awarded for outstanding achievements in physics, technology, astronomy, astrophysics, architecture, philology, paleontology, literature, and public affairs. The Balzan Foundation had an endowment of 1 million Swiss francs. Some thought that as time went by the Balzan Prize would equal or surpass the Nobel Prize in prestige. That did not happen, but in 1963 the Balzan Prize was rated quite highly. The Balzan Foundation’s awards committee met on February 5, 1963, and decided in favor of awarding the “peace and humanism” prize to the top two world leaders, Khrushchev and Kennedy. In this way the committee was giving credit to these two leaders for their restraint and statesmanlike wisdom displayed in resolving the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. In addition to Khrushchev and Kennedy, the committee considered the candidacies of Pope

344

Unforeseen Delay: 1963

After finishing this inspection, they returned to the Prokatdetal plant. A second vibrating machine had recently been installed there. It hardly differed from the first one, which Father had already seen, but he never stopped expressing his delight as he looked it over. He was in very high spirits indeed on leaving the scene of Kozlov’s operations. The year 1963 brought completion to the era of five-story housing. In the following year, in 1964, nine-story and twelve-story buildings constituted 85 percent of all residential housing erected.

55 Day by Day On February 6, 1963, Ulisse Mazzolini, the general secretary of the

Balzan Foundation, which was headed by the presidents of Switzerland and Italy, addressed a proposal to Khrushchev that he accept the Balzan Prize “for peace and humanism,” which was considered a highly respectable award in those days. Let me say a few words about the wealthy Italian businessman Eugenio Balzan (1874–1953) and the prize given in his name. After World War I, he was the editor and part-owner of the prestigious Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera (Evening Courier), but he and Mussolini did not see eye to eye. In 1933, Balzan emigrated to Switzerland, where he had invested his assets. There he survived World War II, and there he died after the war. He left a substantial inheritance to his daughter, who established the prize in his memory. It was awarded for outstanding achievements in physics, technology, astronomy, astrophysics, architecture, philology, paleontology, literature, and public affairs. The Balzan Foundation had an endowment of 1 million Swiss francs. Some thought that as time went by the Balzan Prize would equal or surpass the Nobel Prize in prestige. That did not happen, but in 1963 the Balzan Prize was rated quite highly. The Balzan Foundation’s awards committee met on February 5, 1963, and decided in favor of awarding the “peace and humanism” prize to the top two world leaders, Khrushchev and Kennedy. In this way the committee was giving credit to these two leaders for their restraint and statesmanlike wisdom displayed in resolving the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. In addition to Khrushchev and Kennedy, the committee considered the candidacies of Pope

Day by Day

345

John XXIII; an Indian nuclear physicist, philosopher, and philanthropist, Homi Jehangir Bhabha; and also the prime minister of Malaysia, Abdul Rahman Tungku. Before the public announcement of its decision—which was set for February 25—Mazzolini was assigned to clarify whether the nominees were agreeable to accepting the prize and whether they could come to the awards ceremony in Milan on May 10. In Moscow almost nothing was known about the Balzan Prize, and therefore Father asked the Soviet Foreign Ministry to invite Mazzolini to come to Moscow, since no decision would be made until after hearing his explanations. Mazzolini arrived the very next day—after all, less than three weeks remained before the names of the recipients would be announced. If Khrushchev and Kennedy declined, the awards committee would have to reconvene and choose a new candidate from among the other three nominees. As a gift, Mazzolini brought with him a memorial medal with Khrushchev’s profile on it. This was one of a series of medals produced by the foundation in 1962, with likenesses of outstanding world leaders. I still have the medal in my possession. It is made of gold, about three to four centimeters in diameter, and has Khrushchev’s profile engraved on the front. It is kept in a blue leather case with an inscription in embossed gold lettering: “International Balzan Foundation, 1962.” Father did not meet with Mazzolini, but assigned the Foreign Ministry to negotiate with him. Mazzolini assured them that the prize was worthy of consideration, and the CC Presidium granted permission for Father to accept it, but only if Kennedy too gave an affirmative response. But Kennedy declined the prize. He was afraid to be ranked together with the “world’s chief Communist.” That seemed to Kennedy not to be to his advantage in the light of upcoming elections in the United States, although they were not coming up right away.1 Thus the issue became moot. On February 25, 1963, the Balzan Foundation announced the award of its prize to Pope John XXIII, who in the ordinary world was the Italian citizen Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli. Pope John was a reformer. After assuming the papal throne he undertook a modernization of the Catholic Church, trying to bring it in tune with the changing world, and for that purpose in 1962 he convened the Second Vatican Council (the first having been in 1869), and he declared his support for Khrushchev’s call for peaceful coexistence between countries with differing social systems. Father, as a fellow aspirant for the Balzan Prize, sent his greetings to the pope. However, he did not do this formally through diplomatic channels, but through two personal representatives, my sister Rada and her husband, Aleksei Adzhubei, editor of the newspaper Izvestia. The pope agreed to meet with Adzhubei and Rada. In this way the two sides were signaling each other that they were willing to establish relations of trust for the first time in history between Moscow and the Vatican. Pope John received his guests in an informal and friendly way in his private library and, in response to the greetings passed on to him from Khrushchev, commented: “I am not afraid to talk about peace with anyone. And if Mr.

346 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 Khrushchev were sitting in front of me, I would not feel any awkwardness. We both come from small farming villages, and we are both of humble origin. We would understand each other. I hope that Mr. Khrushchev will visit Rome [such a visit was intended] and that we both will find the time to have a one-on-one conversation. I am sure that Mr. Khrushchev would not be afraid of such a meeting either.”2 Father would not have been afraid to meet with the pope, nor would he have felt any awkwardness in doing so. He was ready to talk about peace with anyone anywhere, including the pope, and they would have understood each other. There was not enough time for this dialogue, which promised so much, to actually take place. In June 1963 the pope died of cancer. A decade later the influential American journalist and publisher Norman Cousins wrote a book on this subject. It commented on the history of what Cousins saw as the years of hope, 1962–1963. The heroes of this narrative were Kennedy, Pope John XXIII, and Khrushchev, three men who, in the Cousins’s opinion, wanted to and could have turned the world in a better direction, but they did not succeed. Fate decreed otherwise.3 On February 14, 1963, the newspapers reported that Central Asian natural gas from Bukhara had reached the Urals region. They also reported on how daily life was changing in the Virgin Lands. People were putting down roots there and it was ceasing to be virgin territory. On March 25, 1963, the builders of the Krasnoyarsk hydroelectric power plant completed the damming of the Yenisei River over a period of six and a half hours. Father telephoned the chief of the construction project and congratulated him, then followed up with an official telegram. On March 27, 1963, procurement prices for cotton were substantially increased. This was one more step in providing economic incentives for production. On April 25, 1963, the CC Presidium discussed a memorandum submitted by Central Committee secretary Leonid Ilyichev about the advisability of jamming foreign radio broadcasts that were transmitted in the languages of the peoples of the Soviet Union, the so-called enemy voices. Jamming had begun by Stalin’s order in 1949. Since then the number of “enemy voices” had steadily increased, and accordingly the number of jamming stations as well. Those were distributed across the entire territory of the Soviet Union. Ilyichev’s report stated that there was not much sense in the jamming, but enormous resources were spent on it: Almost half the capacity of all the radio stations in the Soviet Union are used to create interference with hostile broadcasts, more than 14,000 kilowatts from 1,400 transmitters, of which 150 are short-wave transmitters and the rest of local significance. Each year 15 million rubles are spent to keep them operating. To suppress the broadcasts of Radio Liberty transmitters with a total capacity up to 6,000 kilowatts are used at 110 radio stations, whereas for

Day by Day

347

broadcasting the USSR’s main central radio programs, only between 2,000 and 4,000 kilowatts are used at only 28 broadcasting locations. As life has shown, jamming is only symbolic in character. For jamming only one broadcast of the Voice of America in Estonian, 37 radio stations are used on a territory from Moscow to Tashkent. Despite that, with the exception of the cities of Tallin, Tartu, and Kokhtla-Yarve, the Voice of America can be heard on all the rest of the territory of the Estonian republic.

Ilyichev was appealing to common sense. He proposed that jamming gradually be ended and the transmitting capacity thus freed be shifted over to Soviet broadcasting. The leaders of the KGB opposed this suggestion, and to reassure them, Ilyichev suggested that short-wave radio production be simultaneously ended. Then it would not be possible to listen to these foreign broadcasts, but also of course our own short-wave broadcasts could not be heard. According to this logic, we should stop broadcasting on short-wave bands. The transmitters and antennae of the short-wave jamming devices to which Ilyichev was calling attention would prove useless. The country would become mute: the long waves and medium waves could broadcast only a relatively small distance. They easily covered the distances in European countries, but were absolutely unsuitable for the vast expanses of the Soviet Union, across eleven time zones. In the northern regions and in the mountains of the Far East and Central Asia, only short waves could be received. On the long-wave and medium-wave bands, all that could be heard was the crackling of static. In the event that such a decision were adopted, vast stretches of our country would suddenly be cut off not only from foreign propaganda but also from our own. Any access to news broadcasts would be lost, and people would not even be able to listen to music. In general this raised more questions than it answered. Ilyichev understood all this and did not insist strongly on the initiative he was proposing. He suggested that production not be entirely stopped, but that we continue to produce short-wave radios for special purposes “for sale to the populations of the northern regions of our country and regions where flocks are sent out to pasture to remote areas such as Kazakhstan and the republics of Central Asia, and also for export.” Essentially Ilyichev was writing all this only for form’s sake. At the CC Presidium meeting, agreement was easily reached to stop jamming BBC broadcasts. We had already stopped jamming those in June 1956 after Khrushchev and Bulganin visited Great Britain, but after the Hungarian uprising the jamming was renewed. The broadcasts that would no longer be subjected to jamming included, in addition to the BBC, Voice of America, Voice of the Vatican, Voice of Azerbaijan from Iran, Deutsche Welle, broadcasts from Paris, Voice of Zion from Israel, and Voice of Tirana from Albania. It was agreed that the jamming of approximately twenty other “voices” would be ended gradually, by stages. As for radio receivers, deputy premier Ustinov was assigned to look into those. Electronics came under his sphere of responsibility. He was a highly

348 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 experienced bureaucrat and immediately caught on to all the nuances that were not spoken openly and he “wrapped up” the business effectively. Short-wave radios continued to be manufactured as before. Jamming was stopped, although only for a short time. After Khrushchev’s ouster, it was renewed at full force.4 On May 10, 1963, in his Kremlin office, Khrushchev received an old friend, the American millionaire farmer Roswell Garst, whom he had known since 1955.5 Garst arrived with his cousin and companion John Crystal. A special relationship, one could say a friendship, had arisen between Father and Garst. But friendship is one thing, and the business discussions they held were something else. Father was interested at that time not so much in US technology for growing corn as industrial methods for obtaining meat. Garst raised hogs and was willing to share with Father some of his business secrets. Not free of charge, of course. They talked about the future, never suspecting that this would be their last meeting.6 On June 4, 1963, Khrushchev led a session of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers. They discussed principles of devising economic plans for the future. Father set the priorities: the production of clothing, footwear, and other consumer goods came first, then came the production of chemical fertilizers, then other chemical products, and after that everything would proceed in the order proposed by the State Planning Committee. On June 27, 1963, the newspapers reported the commissioning of the Polotsk oil refinery in Belorussia. This was one more part of the expansion of the chemical industry projected in 1958. On July 11, 1963, accompanied by other “comrades,” Khrushchev went to the Exhibition of Economic Achievements, walked around among the various pavilions, and stopped at the display of machinery for raising livestock. He asked in detail about the “mechanical chicken coop,” which was the term they used at that time for a chicken-raising factory farm. He also gave high praise to the newest milking machines that were on display. Then everyone watched a sheep-shearing contest. It is a remarkable spectacle for those who know something about this not-so-simple business. The sheep has to be sheared quickly but in such a way that the animal is not traumatized, and the fleece thus obtained must be smooth, clean, and free of debris. The winner of the contest, as was expected, was the world champion of that professional “sport,” the New Zealander Godfrey Bowen.

Horizontal vs. Vertical

349

56 Horizontal vs. Vertical On March 13, 1963, a reorganization of the government was carried

out. A Supreme Council on the National Economy for the entire Soviet Union was reestablished, and at the same time the size of each regional economic council was enlarged, while they were reduced in number. Originally in 1957 there were almost 150, but now only about 30. Dmitry Ustinov became head of the Supreme Economic Council. Both the regional economic councils and the various state committees, including the State Planning Committee, were subordinated to Ustinov, and he reported only to the Council of Ministers and its chairman, Khrushchev. Nominally Ustinov was dependent on Khrushchev, but in many respects Khrushchev in fact became dependent on Ustinov. All the reins of economic management of the country were in Ustinov’s hands, all information flowed to him, and he decided what to promote and what to discourage, what to report to Khrushchev and what not to. This was one more in a series of seemingly routine and seemingly neverending changes in the seating arrangements of Moscow offices. But in fact it was a step back toward the centralized, administrative-command system. The search for a more effective structure for managing the economy had begun in 1957, and ever since then the struggle between two principles—the vertical, top-down, centralized one and the horizontal, decentralized one—had not ceased for a moment. Khrushchev and Zasyadko had advocated that decisionmaking powers be transferred downward—to the union republics, to the regional economic councils, and recently even to the directors of enterprises. What would remain at the center, in Moscow, would be coordinating functions and the drafting of an overall economic development plan for five, ten, fifteen, or even twenty-five years. Such a long-term plan actually became a prognosis. This prognosis plan would outline the general trends of development of our country’s economy, weaving them into a single whole, but specific directives and numerical targets would be the task of the union republics, regional economic councils, and base-level enterprises. The idea was not to micromanage but to provide overall direction, and to do so under new conditions. According to this concept, put forward by the reformers, it would be the task of the State Planning Committee to gradually transform itself from a purely directive body into a structure providing scientifically

350 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 based recommendations, generalizing on the basis of the experiences of the enterprises themselves. At the same time, the State Planning Committee would retain supervisory functions. In other words, it would still have some power to command. How to combine these contradictory principles was something that still needed to be thought through. Under the new conditions, a Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research, together with other state committees that supervised various branches of industry, would inform the State Planning Committee about the latest trends and accomplishments in science and industry, so that the plan would be properly adapted to such advances rather than force new ideas to fit into a rigid plan like a bed of Procrustes. “New ideas do not arise according to some plan. For the bureaucrat the plan is an excuse for throwing things into the garbage dump. Scientists approach him with their proposals, and he replies: ‘It’s not provided for in the plan.’” That was Father’s indignant comment at a CC Presidium meeting on December 23, 1963.1 Arguments like those given above are scattered here and there throughout Khrushchev’s speeches in the second half of 1962 and the first months of 1963. But these were scattered, disconnected ideas, not yet consolidated into a clear and distinct pattern. Father saw the future Soviet economy as a self-regulating, decentralized system in which the relations between the state and the enterprise-as-producer would be reduced to the mutually advantageous minimum, such as the deduction of a previously agreed-on percentage of the profit to go to the national budget and the setting of a general strategy for capital investments. The ideas of Liberman and people like him pleased Khrushchev precisely for the reason that those economists articulated what he himself felt intuitively. With the unfolding of a ceaseless polemical discussion in the press about the basic management principles for a socialist economy, he ordered the beginning of an experiment on a substantial scale. In 1963 he decided to organize the work of forty-eight enterprises in various sectors of the economy “a la Liberman.” Among those that were granted autonomy and allowed to make decisions themselves was the famous “Red October” Moscow confectionery; and an enterprise no one had heard of, the “Engels complex,” which produced synthetic fibers; also, a metallurgical plant, and the Bolshevichka garment factory. In addition, several state farms in the Virgin Lands, which had been placed under Khudenko’s complete control, continued to operate along new lines. The realities of the transitional period became a stumbling block at this point. The republics and regional economic councils, although they were seemingly led by responsible people who had the interests of the Soviet government in mind, tried to break away more and more when given the slightest free rein, tried to tear off a larger piece for themselves, without considering the interests of their neighbors or of the Soviet state as a whole. And what would happen if real powers were granted to the directors? Each would be guided by his own considerations. Father could not at that point imagine how to overcome this “malady.”

Horizontal vs. Vertical

351

Meanwhile the forces opposing him were not idle. They were also concerned about the good of our country, but they understood it differently. It became more difficult with each passing year to fulfill the plan or “over”-fulfill it. With the transition from an economy under wartime mobilization to a normal economy, the diversity of goods to be produced increased like an avalanche. Instead of hundreds or thousands of designated items, there were now tens of thousands, from nuclear reactors and space modules to slippers and razor blades. A blockage would form in the constricted throat of the State Planning Committee. No one could manage to deal with all this variety, and now and then a shortage of goods would result. Everyone would rush to clear out the obstruction and while they were doing that a problem would crop up somewhere else. And so on without end. It would seem that the answer was self-evident: let the producers take care of all the “small stuff” while the State Planning Committee and the government undertook to create the conditions providing “material incentives,” so that the producers would satisfy the demands of the consumers, thus making the producers’ work profitable and attractive. Father kept buzzing in people’s ears about this until they got sick of hearing the phrase “material incentives.” No one argued with him. They just didn’t agree. Bureaucrats of the old school, the Stalin school, blamed everything on the free rein given to the regional economic councils. They simply could not stand the “Liberman types.” They saw only one solution: “tighten the screws,” impose order, restore economic discipline, which in their language meant the bureaucratic vertical structure, top-down management, subordination of those below to those above, “from Moscow out to the most distant regions.” The only freedom, in their eyes, was the freedom to carry out the orders issued from on high. Most of the government ministers held this point of view, and the chief ideologist of this bureaucratic renaissance was Father’s first deputy in the government, Kosygin. By an irony of fate it was none other than Kosygin to whom, in 1963, Father assigned the task of bringing order into the structure of government. In the Central Committee, Kosygin was supported by Frol Kozlov, the proponent of rule with an iron hand, and in the Council of Ministers by Ustinov, Lomako, and both Novikovs—all of them Father’s deputies. While verbally agreeing with Khrushchev’s instructions, they in fact pursued their own line. For example, I will quote from a speech by Kosygin at a CC Presidium meeting on January 9, 1963: Take the State Planning Committee. It clearly and completely reflects the proposals that have been presented, the tasks you have spoken about today, Nikita Sergeyevich. The State Planning Committee ought to be responsible for the correct proportions in every economic unit. . . . What do the republics have? They have their own State Planning Committee and a regional economic council, in which all economic problems are definitively resolved. We, Nikita Sergeyevich, have not discussed with anyone the above-mentioned way of posing the question. A certain amount of time

352 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 could be allowed so that the State Planning Committee could once again, with the other State Committees, carefully examine this question, bearing in mind that it may be possible to find a form that would create precision in the management of the national economy and that would not create superfluous, complicated, and additional government bodies, which is not acceptable.

He went on in the same vein for more than ten pages of the stenographic record.2 Was any of that understandable? But Kosygin was not trying to be easily understood. He himself had quite a clear conception of what he was trying to achieve and of what he was hiding behind his double talk. In the end they persuaded Father. The new state structure, with the Supreme Economic Council at the top of the pyramid of power, not completely but to a substantial degree, restored the centralized pattern of economic management, depriving the republics and the regional economic councils of many of their former rights and privileges. Father agreed with all his deputies, but he felt dissatisfied. At the same time, the economic experiments he had authorized continued.

57 What If? On April 5, 1963, the New York Times reported rumors circulating in

Moscow that Khrushchev would soon retire and Frol Kozlov would succeed him in power. Today no one can recall any longer what the American reporter based his conclusions on. Possibly he heard something or simply made it up. Similar rumors had arisen earlier. If one reasons logically, it is not at all unlikely that it was pure fabrication. Kozlov had begun his rapid rise to the top after the removal of Kirichenko in May 1960. (Kirichenko lost his position as a Central Committee secretary and member of the Presidium, and was sent to be secretary of the party’s Rostov province committee.) By July 1960, Kozlov was officially in charge of the Central Committee Secretariat. Now “Frol Romanovich” (as he was called in polite Russian society) had won the right to chair meetings of the CC Presidium when Khrushchev was away from Moscow. On January 9, 1963, when leaving for East Berlin, Father asked in a pro forma manner: “During my absence Comrade Kozlov should be assigned to

352 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 could be allowed so that the State Planning Committee could once again, with the other State Committees, carefully examine this question, bearing in mind that it may be possible to find a form that would create precision in the management of the national economy and that would not create superfluous, complicated, and additional government bodies, which is not acceptable.

He went on in the same vein for more than ten pages of the stenographic record.2 Was any of that understandable? But Kosygin was not trying to be easily understood. He himself had quite a clear conception of what he was trying to achieve and of what he was hiding behind his double talk. In the end they persuaded Father. The new state structure, with the Supreme Economic Council at the top of the pyramid of power, not completely but to a substantial degree, restored the centralized pattern of economic management, depriving the republics and the regional economic councils of many of their former rights and privileges. Father agreed with all his deputies, but he felt dissatisfied. At the same time, the economic experiments he had authorized continued.

57 What If? On April 5, 1963, the New York Times reported rumors circulating in

Moscow that Khrushchev would soon retire and Frol Kozlov would succeed him in power. Today no one can recall any longer what the American reporter based his conclusions on. Possibly he heard something or simply made it up. Similar rumors had arisen earlier. If one reasons logically, it is not at all unlikely that it was pure fabrication. Kozlov had begun his rapid rise to the top after the removal of Kirichenko in May 1960. (Kirichenko lost his position as a Central Committee secretary and member of the Presidium, and was sent to be secretary of the party’s Rostov province committee.) By July 1960, Kozlov was officially in charge of the Central Committee Secretariat. Now “Frol Romanovich” (as he was called in polite Russian society) had won the right to chair meetings of the CC Presidium when Khrushchev was away from Moscow. On January 9, 1963, when leaving for East Berlin, Father asked in a pro forma manner: “During my absence Comrade Kozlov should be assigned to

What If?

353

take charge of all questions, right?” No one objected, nor was anyone surprised. They had already become accustomed to Kozlov’s special position. “All right. And no one’s going to challenge him for power?” Father joked some more. “No,” Mikoyan responded. Four or five years before that, Father would leave Mikoyan in charge when he was away. The changes that had occurred since then were of course not to Mikoyan’s liking. He was resentful and jealous but he couldn’t do anything. That was exactly why he had been quick to speak first on this occasion. Not only Khrushchev but also the other members of the CC Presidium knew what kind of feelings Mikoyan had for Kozlov. “Why are you always the first one to speak?” Father joked to general laughter from the other Presidium members. He was trying to smooth over the tension. Mikoyan said nothing.1 In May 1960, Mikoyan had placed his bets on Kirichenko and had lost. From the first day that Kozlov joined the CC Presidium, everyone knew that Mikoyan hated him. Even Kozlov knew. Now Mikoyan was going out of his way to curry favor with Kozlov, but so far without any visible result. At the beginning of 1963 the signs of Kozlov’s rise above the “rank-andfile” members of the CC Presidium became obvious even to the uninitiated. Unlike in the Stalin era, official announcements now listed the names of Presidium members alphabetically, rather than arranging them by order of their importance at the time, but it was easy enough to figure out who was who. On February 22, 1963, Pravda, for example, wrote about a plenum held by the party’s committee for the Virgin Lands territory, about preparations for the spring sowing, and the replacement of the former party secretary, who had botched the previous year’s harvesting. At the end there appeared a sentence informing the readers that Comrade Kozlov had been present at the plenum and had given a wide-ranging speech. It would seem that there was nothing unusual about this, except for the size and placement of the report. Instead of the standard five lines in the section titled “Party Life,” Pravda gave the prestigious upper-left corner of the second page to this report, which took up almost a quarter of the page. Those in the know about the “ceremonial practices” in the Kremlin would not fail to notice this. On March 3, Pravda noted that Comrades Khrushchev and Kozlov had gone to the Bolshoi Theater the previous evening for a performance of Verdi’s La Traviata. Again there was nothing special. Father often went to the theater with his family, which the newspapers did not report about, and with the entire CC Presidium, which did receive press coverage. And now it was reported that he and Kozlov were there together. I soon noticed that “Frol Romanovich” had begun to conduct himself toward Father in an ever so slightly more independent manner. In Moscow in those days such nuances meant a great deal.

354 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 More and more frequently, Kozlov took it upon himself to decide specific questions and to verify the implementation of previously issued orders. He was especially self-contained and precise in his manner and had no need to be concerned with trifles. The fact that at times he would object and argue was a reason for respect in Father’s eyes, rather than for annoyance. Without arguments, and without a clash of opinions, the work became not only more boring but also more difficult. Especially for the kind of personality that Father had. Endless nodding of the head in agreement, with the eyes always lowered meekly, or the opposite, gleaming eyes that devoured you ecstatically—both of those made Father sick and put him on his guard. In the prior few years, only Mikoyan had declined to agree with Father on everything. Now Kozlov was added to that number. In the depths of his soul, Father was even pleased by the appearance of an “opposition.” Especially since the “oppositionists” held views that did not coincide with each other. Mikoyan had the reputation of being an experienced and cautious politician. Kozlov was an administrator and practical worker. Granted he was a bit crude, but he knew life well. He knew when to put on the pressure and even shout a little. In his political views, Kozlov reflected the right wing of the party, but for the time being, he did not openly express those views. He preferred the apparatus clichés, such as “the opinion is . . . ” or “there is no need to rush ahead too far,” or “no distortions or deviations from the line.” Did a real opposition take shape in 1962–1963, threatening Father’s power? It’s hard for me to give a definite answer. There always existed a certain degree of dissatisfaction over one or another specific decision. But dissatisfaction and the disgruntled jokes that accompanied it—that was one thing. It was something else altogether when a firm nucleus crystallized out from the amorphous atmosphere, a nucleus of people ready to act. I personally have my doubts about the existence of such a nucleus, but my opinion is not worth much. I was not particularly interested in what went on in that political devil’s kitchen. I knew a little more perhaps than the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, but we were both forced to be satisfied with nuances, although he was on the outside and I was on the inside. There are people, however, who were participants in the inner circles of power who have left memoirs behind and who think otherwise. For example, Nuriddin Mukhitdinov, a former member of the CC Presidium, complains about the arbitrary behavior of Kozlov and his supporters in those years. In his view, Frol Kozlov was gathering more and more power into his hands behind Father’s back.2 “At the Twenty-Second Party Congress, Khrushchev, on the advice of Kozlov, did not include the group consisting of Ignatov, Aristov, and Furtseva in the CC Presidium.” This statement by Mikoyan seems to confirm what Mukhitdinov said. Mikoyan continues: “I supported his proposal. Although I felt sorry for Furtseva, I knew she was with them unqualifiedly. As for Aristov, he was not a suitable person, but he had big pretensions.”3

What If?

355

This is not very convincing. As I have already written, the Ignatov group was ousted from positions of power, but it was not in October 1961 at the Twenty-Second Party Congress. It was in May 1960, before the rise of Kozlov. At the party congress, their ouster was simply made official and embodied in documents. Kozlov had nothing to do with it. The preceding quote from Mikoyan is one more proof of his opposition to Kozlov. Further on, Mikoyan adds that “Kozlov’s aim was to reduce Khrushchev to playing a role that would be merely perfunctory, while he himself would decide all matters behind Khrushchev’s back.”4 But even these words do not testify at all to the existence of a conspiracy. They only tell us about Kozlov’s ambitions as refracted through the eyes of Mikoyan, who did not wish him well and who had been pushed out of the foreground by Kozlov. Mukhitdinov goes a little further. According to his account, at some time after the Twenty-Second Party Congress (it is not clear exactly when), Kozlov sounded him out on the subject of removing Khrushchev. At that time Mukhitdinov held the relatively minor position of deputy head of the All-Union Central Council of Consumer Cooperatives (Russian acronym, Tsentrosoyuz). He had already been ousted from the top circles of power. Mukhitdinov writes that Kozlov invited him one day for a walk on Gorky Street (in Moscow) and “starting out indirectly, talking about this or that, he came around to the main subject: ‘The boss, in recent times, hasn’t been feeling very well. He complains about his health. It’s not excluded that he should be retired.’ He waited for my reaction.” Mukhitdinov said nothing. “Well, and what about placing me there?” Kozlov put the question directly. Mukhitdinov answered that he would think about it, but in his opinion Kozlov ought not to count on universal support. As the Central Committee secretary in charge of nominating cadres to positions in the party, the government, and the military, he had used his power to remove almost half the high-ranking officials such as province committee secretaries. “He had kept himself busy knocking the cadres around.”5 It is true that many of the party’s province committee leaders lost their posts, but it was not Kozlov who removed them. It was Father. I’ve already written about that. Of course it is not ruled out that they blamed Kozlov for that, as the person carrying out Khrushchev’s will. Mukhitdinov’s whole account does not seem convincing to me. What would have been the point for Kozlov to talk on such a touchy subject with the deputy head of the cooperatives, a figure who was even below the third level in the Soviet table of ranks? It is more likely that in writing his memoirs, Mukhitdinov decided to settle accounts with Kozlov, a man he did not like, and to do it in this way, after the fact. But maybe there’s no smoke without fire. It is not ruled out that they did meet somewhere and talk about something. Who knows? It is possible that Kozlov had his eyes on the “crown” and was even quietly “trying the crown on for size,” but was there anything more to it than that?

356 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 Wasn’t he simply waiting until Father transferred power to him, as he openly said he would? Here are my own recollections of what Kozlov was like. On May 11, 1963, a death sentence was handed down in absentia against Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet intelligence agent who had begun to work for the British and the Americans as a spy. Two major military figures were drawn into the scandal, and both of them were linked with Father in one way or another. They were the commander-in-chief of the missile forces and artillery, Sergei Sergeyevich Varentsov, and the head of the Chief Military Intelligence Administration (Russian acronym, GRU), General Ivan Serov, who until a short time before had been the head of the KGB. Varentsov had recommended Penkovsky for service in the GRU. And he periodically shared with Penkovsky some bits of news about the work they were both engaged in. Naturally this was secret information. In some other situation there would have been nothing blameworthy about this, since they were both serving in high military posts. Serov was blamed not only for failing to perceive that Penkovsky was a potential traitor but also for showing special favor toward him. Above all, there was the fact that Serov’s wife and daughter had been in Britain together with Penkovsky not long before his arrest. The women had gone as tourists, and he went there in the line of duty. People felt a certain timidity in those days about visiting a capitalist country, and when Serov remembered that his subordinate was getting ready to go to London, he asked Penkovsky to look after his wife and daughter, and help them out if they needed it. The colonel was happy to carry out this assignment. He showed them the sights and took his charges to some stores to go shopping. After his arrest it was all depicted in a different light. Some people even tried to portray Varentsov and Serov virtually as accomplices of Penkovsky. Father was not inclined toward taking severe measures against Varentsov and Serov. He felt they had been punished enough already by what had happened, and after all, it was not written on Penkovsky’s forehead that he had been recruited by the British and the Americans. Father was leaning in favor of an administrative reprimand and letting it go at that. Kozlov thought differently. He wanted decisive action. The real reasons for his behavior remain enigmatic. Was he unable to reconcile himself to the fact that Serov and Varentsov had failed to see through Penkovsky and discern that he was a hidden traitor? That is doubtful. Kozlov himself sometimes looked the other way at even more flagrant transgressions. What was it then? Was he seeking with one blow to removed two generals who were devoted to Father? But why? Of course one could give free rein to one’s imagination, but I have no facts at my disposal. In late February or early March 1963, not long before the trial of Penkovsky, Kozlov called Father at his dacha on a day off and asked for a meeting.

What If?

357

Father readily agreed. Within a quarter of an hour, Kozlov arrived at our place. His dacha was located nearby. Father welcomed him and suggested he join us on our walk. Before the guest appeared, Father and I had been walking together, and I remained with them. Kozlov looked at me out of the corner of his eye now and then as he began trying to persuade Father that Penkovsky had totally compromised both Varentsov and Serov. He had not only served under them but also made his way into their homes. He had been a guest at Varentsov’s and had performed services for Serov’s family. That was the first time I had heard about the ill-starred shopping visits to London stores mentioned earlier. Kozlov raised this virtually to the level of a crime against the state. Father remained gloomily silent, and then, not very confidently, tried to object, but Kozlov displayed great persistence. I was not present at the end of the conversation. Father asked me to leave them alone. About an hour later Kozlov left. Father had not invited him to dinner. We continued our walk, so suddenly interrupted by this visit. Father was frowning. He didn’t even look from side to side. He walked along staring at his feet. The silence lasted for about ten minutes. Finally Father began talking. He said that according to Kozlov, everyone—he didn’t name any names—insisted on holding Varentsov and Serov strictly accountable. “Maybe they’re right,” Father muttered doubtfully. “I feel sorry for them, especially Varentsov.” “So what then?” I asked. “We’ll demote them and send them into retirement,” Father said with annoyance, concluding the conversation. All the indications were that Father had given in to Kozlov against his own will. On March 12, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, “for loss of vigilance and unworthy behavior,” deprived Varentsov of his title as a Hero of the Soviet Union and demoted him from a five-star general to a one-star general. Things went no better for Serov. He was also demoted from four stars to one star, and the gold medal he had received as a Hero of the Soviet Union was taken away. Then he was sent off to the Turkestan military district to serve out his time until retirement as assistant to the commander of military training schools there. On June 22, 1963, a plenum unanimously deprived both of them of membership in the Central Committee. Can this event be categorized as the formation of an opposition to Father? It’s no longer possible to determine that now. No traces remain. Father continued to behave with complete confidence in Kozlov. He ever more plainly treated him as his successor and made no secret of it—although they did not get by without disagreements, sometimes quite sharp ones. That year in Moscow many disagreements about Yugoslavia were revived. There had been a brief thaw in Soviet-Yugoslav relations in 1955. But that was chilled, as though with a bucket of cold water, after Soviet tanks appeared in the streets of Budapest in October 1956. Time gradually healed the wounds. By

358 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 1963, relations were again becoming more and more friendly. The orthodox conservatives in Moscow did not like that. The May Day holiday was approaching. In 1963, as in previous years, the buildup to May Day went on for a couple of weeks with the publication of proclamations by the Central Committee. The front pages of all the central newspapers were filled with messages in large type addressed to the men and women workers, those in military service, and the intellectuals of various countries, peoples, and continents. Every word in these announcements was carefully screened and verified. The appropriate departments of the Central Committee were responsible for the content of these proclamations. Central Committee people drafted them—or more exactly, rewrote them from the previous year’s newspapers, updating them and adding a slight touch of something new to meet the needs of the day. Father was not attracted to this kind of empty dogmatic playing with words, and he was relieved to entrust to Suslov the task of checking up on publication of the May Day messages. In such day-to-day operational matters, Suslov in turn relied on Kozlov, especially when Father was absent from Moscow. But Father’s absence from Moscow did not mean that he was not following what was printed in the press. He could not bring himself to look at these pages covered with slogans that he was fed up with, but his assistants reported to him about anything deserving his attention. In April, Father was on vacation at Pitsunda. I went with him. An additional two-week vacation in the winter or spring had become his regular practice. The years had taken their toll. And the doctors insisted on it. Their recommendations were reinforced by a special resolution of the CC Presidium. Discussion was also held there about shortening Father’s workday, but he did not make use of that privilege. He did become accustomed to the additional vacation time, however. Far from the fuss and bother of Moscow, it was easier to think. Recently his thoughts had been more and more preoccupied with the constitution. That April, Father was working on materials from the constitutional editorial commission. As for me, I was enjoying my week of rest, sun, and sea. I sat next to him on the beach but did not listen very closely to the conversations. The May Day proclamations were published on April 8. Immediately after the domestic part came the international one. One by one, all our allied countries were scrupulously greeted: “Fraternal greetings to the peoples . . . building socialism!” As for third world countries, an appeal was made for their friendship and for their people to struggle for socialism. Here there was a difference in principle. If the people were going to fight for socialism, and were not yet building socialism, that meant there was someone to fight against, that is, those holding power. Yugoslavia fell somewhere in between. The proclamation in Pravda read as follows: “Fraternal greetings to the working people of the Federated People’s Republic of Yugoslavia! May the friendship and cooperation of the Soviet and Yugoslav peoples develop and strengthen in the interest of the struggle for peace and socialism!”

What If?

359

At that moment I became an unwilling witness to a clash between Father and Kozlov. The newspapers had just arrived. They reached Pitsunda toward the end of the day. Father glanced quickly at the front page and was preparing to plunge deeper into the newspaper, turning the pages. The assistant who had accompanied him to Pitsunda called attention to the ill-starred slogan. Father read the indicated lines and flew into a rage. Molotov’s ideas were being dragged up out of the past. There had been a disagreement over whether Yugoslavia was building socialism or not. Back in 1955, on the basis of conclusions reached by economists, the decision had been made that it was building socialism—and now the issue was being raised again. Less than a week before that, on April 3, 1963, right there at Pitsunda, Khrushchev had spent a whole day talking with the head of the Yugoslav trade unions, Svetozar Vukmanović-Tempo, a man very close to Tito. In saying goodbye, Father had told Tempo that he wanted to see with his own eyes the accomplishments of socialist Yugoslavia, taking his time, without fanfare and protocol of the kind that usually accompanied official visits. For example, if Comrade Tito agreed, he would do it during his summer vacation. He would not come alone, but with his family, and stay somewhere in a hotel. While the children and grandchildren were enjoying the beaches on the Adriatic Sea, he himself would travel around to factories and other enterprises and talk with people. He wanted to look into the role of the workers’ councils at the factories. For him that would also be a vacation, but an active one, useful for the cause. To a certain degree this was a formal reminder. Khrushchev and Tito had talked about this the previous December in Kiev. Vukmanović-Tempo in turn assured him that the peoples of Yugoslavia and their leader Tito would gladly welcome Comrade Khrushchev and all those he decided to bring with him. But it would not be appropriate for him to live in a hotel. He would be welcomed with higher honors. When Tempo returned to Belgrade he immediately reported about the conversation to Tito, and the only thing that remained was to set the date. I have already said that Kozlov could not be counted among the supporters of Liberman. Kozlov wanted to see the regional economic councils under the strict control of the center, as was being accomplished with the establishment of the Supreme Economic Council headed by Ustinov. And now Khrushchev was going to Yugoslavia, where he would look to his heart’s content at all sorts of things, and on his return, God forbid, would start making changes again. Thus it is possible that, hidden behind the wording of the May Day message, there was more than just the dogmatism of the ideologists. Father understood perfectly well what a negative response would be stirred up in Belgrade when they read the ill-starred message. All the nuances of Moscow politics were followed closely by the Yugoslavs, and their refusal to call Yugoslavia a socialist country—that was no longer just a nuance. And this after Khrushchev had met one-on-one with Tito and just recently had talked with Vukmanović-Tempo! The Soviet premier had assured them that he wanted to look into the achievements of the Yugoslav socialist economy, and now the

360

Unforeseen Delay: 1963

Soviet press was implying that no socialism at all existed in Yugoslavia. Father demanded that he be immediately connected with Kozlov. After hardly even saying hello, he began to scold Kozlov for not watching things more closely. But apparently Kozlov rejected this reproach. As he saw it, what had been printed corresponded objectively to the Yugoslav reality. Father began yelling at Kozlov, accusing him of being arbitrary and trying to decide things on his own. After all, there was an official resolution of the Central Committee confirming as a fact the socialist foundations of the Yugoslav economy. No one had the right to revise that position unilaterally. He demanded that a correction be made and the sooner the better, before this incorrect position traveled around the world. To change the wording after an official proclamation by the Central Committee had already been published—that was an unprecedented event for those times. The rumors spread quickly at the Central Committee offices that there had been a clash between Khrushchev and Kozlov. Or more likely, Kozlov himself shared his injured feelings with his co-thinkers. In the corridors they gossiped about how unjustly harsh Father had been toward Kozlov, and they whispered sympathetically among themselves. Kozlov was very seriously upset, but he didn’t dare disobey Father. He gave the ideologists the order to rewrite the May Day proclamation. Three days were spent composing the new slogan, and on April 11 a correction appeared in Pravda explaining that the appeal should read according to the new version: “Fraternal greetings to the working people of the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia, who are building socialism! Long live eternal, unbreakable friendship and cooperation between the Soviet and Yugoslav peoples!” As it turned out, Kozlov paid with his life for this mistake on “Yugoslav socialism.” Matters unfolded in a tragic way. On April 11, or the night before April 11, Kozlov had a severe stroke. On April 10, Kozlov had been an honored guest at the All-Union Congress of Artists, but on April 12 he did not appear at a celebration in honor of the space program, although as a member of the CC Presidium, together with Khrushchev, he was responsible for defense and space. He never again made an appearance out in the world among people. Father suffered greatly from the loss of his “right-hand man.” Besides that, inwardly he felt guilty for what had happened. If he had not yelled so loudly at Kozlov over Yugoslavia, everything might have gone by without this happening. At the end of May or in early June, when Kozlov began to get a little better and was moved from the hospital to his residence outside the city, Father went to visit him. It was the weekend, and our family, as usual, had accompanied Father to the Gorki-9 dacha. He took me with him to visit Kozlov. “Frol Romanovich” had often been at our house, and our families knew one another quite well. After going through the standard green gates leading into the grounds, our car stopped at the front door. We were greeted by Kozlov’s wife and some other people, and went inside. The patient’s bed had been set in the

What If?

361

middle of the room so that the nurses could more conveniently look after him. Next to the wall was a small table with medicines, a sterilizer, and syringes. Kozlov was half-lying, propped up against pillows, and his pale face had a yellow cast. Only a shadow remained of the formerly self-assured, robust man. When we entered the room he recognized Father and began to wave his hands around, trying to move from where he lay and to say something, but his speech was incoherent. He made a doleful impression. Father stood next to his bed for a little while and tried to encourage him. He joked in his own way that Kozlov was taking a leave and just faking it; it was time for him to get well and go back to work. After saying goodbye we went into the next room. The doctors had gathered there. They explained to us that Kozlov’s life was not in immediate danger, but it would be many months before he was well. In the meantime he was really incapable of dealing with the world around him. And God alone knew when and if he would become capable again. It was especially depressing for the doctors that the patient had developed what they called a “sexual syndrome.” He became extremely excited at the sight of a woman, and if he had a chance, he would try to grab one of them. When the nurses were going through their procedures, giving him shots and so on, it had been necessary to resort to force, to hold him down by his arms and legs. It was not rare for this kind of thing to happen with people who had suffered strokes. This indicated that the brain had been deeply damaged. One could no longer talk about normal morality. That part of the brain simply did not exist any longer, the doctors explained. I remembered noticing that when Father and I were standing next to the sickbed, the nurses stayed close to the wall when they went past Kozlov and gave him unpleasant looks. Father did not lose hope, however, and he asked: “Will he be able to work?” The doctors’ verdict was unanimous—absolutely not! He would remain a complete invalid. In fact, anything that might seriously upset him could lead to a new stroke and death. Father could not count on Kozlov. Remembering the doctors’ warning that any nervous stress might prove fatal for the sick man, Father made a proposal at the next CC Presidium meeting, when the subject of Kozlov was brought up, that “Frol Romanovich,” despite his incurable illness, should retain his former post. No one opposed the suggestion. It’s true that they decided that confidential mail should not be sent to Kozlov “until he had fully recovered.” He himself was in no condition to read such mail, and it might fall into the hands of unknown persons.6 Everything remained the same until after Father’s retirement. Then, at the next Central Committee plenum, on November 16, 1964, Kozlov was remorselessly removed from the Presidium. At one time or another he had greatly angered them with his harsh and demanding ways. Kozlov did not survive the shock. As the doctors had predicted, he suffered a new stroke. Kozlov died on January 30, 1965.

362 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 In the 1990s, Rudolf Pikhoya, our country’s chief archivist at the time, circulated a rumor about an alleged speech by Kozlov, supposedly made at the CC Presidium meeting on October 13, 1964, when Father was ousted. According to Pikhoya, Kozlov was the first to propose that Khrushchev be relieved of all his duties.7 This I did not believe. I had seen Kozlov with my own eyes. How could he have attended the Presidium meeting? However, at that time Pikhoya was the only one who had access to the most inaccessible of Kremlin documents, and I yielded. But it turns out that I was right after all. Now Malin’s notes have been published, including his notes from the CC Presidium meetings of October 13 and 14, 1964. It turned out that Pikhoya had not read them carefully and had made an elementary blunder. Kozlov himself was not there, of course, but Gennady Voronov reported a few words spoken by “Frol Romanovich” some time earlier: “Comrade Kozlov said: ‘Don’t get mixed up in such matters. Comrade Khrushchev is in charge of them.’” No other reference to Kozlov appears. Thus, after April 11, 1963, the position of second secretary of the CC Presidium, which meant, in effect, successor to Khrushchev, unexpectedly became vacant. People did not like Kozlov. They feared and envied him. But no one attempted to challenge his authority and no one was ready to take his place. The way Ignatov and Kirichenko had left the stage at earlier times discouraged aspirants from trying too hastily to occupy a vacant post. There was now a vacuum on the bench where the second team sat. According to formal logic, the right to become “second secretary” belonged to Mikoyan, and he made every effort to achieve that. All through the previous years he had been the oldest and most experienced person in the circle around Father. He had intrigued against his rivals, who had risen to power one after the other and then disappeared without a trace. He considered them upstarts and hated them, including Kozlov—more than all the others combined. And now the path to power had been cleared. All that remained was for him to take one step. But Mikoyan could not bring himself to take that step. Formal logic and the logic of power are subject to different laws. Perennially in the presence of power, Mikoyan in fact feared holding power himself. He did not like to be responsible for making serious decisions. And what is power without that? Khrushchev, for his part, valued Mikoyan, but he did not overestimate him. He made use of him as a negotiator when patience and the ability to maneuver skillfully were required, but not for making decisions. Father had become accustomed to sharing with Mikoyan, first of all, ideas that had occurred to him— testing them out on “Anastas Ivanovich,” listening closely to his comments and especially to his objections—but then Khrushchev himself decided whether to take all that into account or to ignore it. In his makeup, Mikoyan was a typical “wise Armenian in service to the governor,” to paraphrase a Russian saying. He was clever, resourceful, intelligent, possibly all those things to a greater degree compared to the “governor” himself. For a real “governor” to have a confidant like that was a veritable treasure. On

What If?

363

the other hand, a person like that did not represent any threat. He was organically incapable of becoming “governor” himself and never would. If he did become governor, that meant he was not the kind of person he was thought to be, and the whole story would be different, no longer relevant to what we are talking about. Without such an “Armenian” even the most intelligent governor would remain the governor, but without the governor the “wise Armenian” would become simply an ordinary citizen. Mikoyan understood all this better than anyone else, because he was indeed a “wise Armenian.” He performed his role uncomplainingly under Stalin, as he would have under Beria. He developed splendidly under Khrushchev, who had great confidence in him. And he could have performed his role under Kozlov as well. Mikoyan’s finest hour was his time under Khrushchev. They worked in tandem, which proved to be extraordinarily effective in foreign policy, in relations with the Soviet Union’s main competitor on the world arena—the United States. The latter country, in pursuit of its own doctrines, sought to consolidate its domination in the world. Khrushchev, in keeping with his doctrine, disputed the right of the United States to do that, and pushed back whenever he could, wherever he could, and however he could. Naturally disputes arose constantly. Khrushchev took a hard line, and sometimes let temperatures reach the boiling point. Then he would send Mikoyan to “cool passions down.” As a result they achieved what they wanted as a team, not everything—that never happens in real politics—but they achieved much more than calm and routine diplomatic negotiations might have. The policy of “managed crises” yielded some fruit in the early 1960s. After the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, the United States was forced, gritting its teeth, to admit that the Soviet Union was a superpower of equal stature, and it was the hard-line “governor” Khrushchev and his “softly lisping” negotiator Mikoyan who forced the United States to do this. Now that Kozlov was out of the game, Father, who had been seriously thinking about retiring, as soon as he had completed a last round of reforms, found it necessary to begin from the beginning, to look around once again for a successor, preferably a young man. He did not even think about Mikoyan. He knew Mikoyan’s true worth. And Mikoyan himself was of retirement age, only one year younger than Father. It was very difficult to find a way out of this situation. In democracies, ambitious politicians promote themselves. They have the opportunity to test their strength through all the stages of the electoral process, in one elected office after another. Competing with their rivals and having made their way through the natural political selection process, the most energetic and resourceful, not necessarily the most worthy, reach the highest levels of power. They become presidents or prime ministers for a certain length of time, usually a term limited by a constitution. Then everything begins all over again. The Russian monarchical tradition rejected democracy as such. After the revolution, the system of power combined a monarchical pyramid with the

364 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 embryonic beginnings of rule by the people. Power was no longer inherited on the basis of blood and kinship. That became unacceptable in Soviet society. Even the appearance in public affairs of the wife of a top government leader, as in the case of Raisa Gorbacheva, was not welcomed by the public. In the case of members of the highest ruling body, the Presidium or Politburo of the Central Committee, they had made their way to the top by their personal talents and resourcefulness. But the decision to award them high posts (such as first secretary of a province committee or a minister of the government)—I’m not even talking about the very highest levels of the hierarchy—such things were not decided by elections but depended entirely on the will of the “sovereign” (in the Soviet case this would be the first secretary or general secretary of the Central Committee). The formality of elections merely represented a stamp of approval after the top leader’s decision. The appointment of ministers or province leaders took place in accordance with the views of the relevant personnel department of the Central Committee, but when it came to candidates for the Presidium or Politburo, the “sovereign” made a personal selection, and he did so from among candidates known to him personally. How many such people could one man keep in his memory? Several dozen or even several hundred. Father had a phenomenal memory, but he hardly knew more than five or six hundred people by name—which is a huge number for an individual, but insignificant in a country of many millions. When it came to having a knowledge of the personalities and abilities of his comrades-in-arms, the number was limited to a few dozen, if not less. That was the entire reserve of potential replacements for the highest positions of power. And this number becomes even smaller when you consider the possibility of error, which is inherent in human beings. As a result, the choice of the “most worthy” successor became more than problematic. The way things developed in Russia, there was always a problem with successors from the time of Peter the Great to the time of Tsar Paul—because there was no legal procedure for inheriting the throne. The attempt to select the ruler of Russia was not always successful; far from it. For example, Peter the Great died suddenly, without making his testament known. And in the case of “Catherine the Great,” her testament burned up in a fire immediately after her death. As for Tsar Paul, he was simply killed. In the new Russia of the Soviets, the problem of “inheriting the throne” remained as before. The tradition continued as Lenin’s testament after his death was quickly forgotten. Stalin, because of the peculiarities of his nature, preferred not to name a successor. Father took this sad experience of many centuries into account. His intention was to transfer the reins of power during his lifetime. Nevertheless, he was completely unable to decide who should be made “second secretary” of the Central Committee. And there was no one to consult with. The doubts that tormented him and his inner need to talk about it apparently were the reason why it came about that I myself penetrated briefly into the holy of holies of the political devil’s kitchen and became a witness to Father’s hesitations.

What If?

365

Never before had Father, in conversation with a family member, touched on an issue involving top leadership personnel. That was an absolutely forbidden subject. Thus, when he suddenly began to talk about the doubts tormenting him, I was extremely surprised. This happened at the Gorki-9 dacha in the late autumn of 1963. We went for a walk one evening. As we moved along under the streetlights on the asphalt path that led from the gates of our home, suddenly Father began to talk about the situation in the CC Presidium. To the extent that I can remember, he was expressing regret that Kozlov could not return to work. Father had not found a replacement, and it was already time for him to think about retiring. “I will hold out until the Twenty-Third Party Congress and then I’ll retire,” he said then. I remained silent. It was hard to make his words fit in my consciousness. Then he began to say that he had grown old, and the other members of the CC Presidium were also grandfathers of retirement age. There were hardly any young people. He himself had become a member of the Politburo at the age of forty-five. A suitable age for dealing with major issues. You have the strength and there is still time ahead. But at the age of sixty, you don’t think about the future. That’s the time for taking your grandchild on your knee. He was racking his brains over the problem of a replacement for Kozlov. In our country it is not enough to be just a politician; you have to know the economy, defense, ideology, and most important you have to know how to deal with people. Earlier Father had placed great hopes in Shelepin. He had seemed the most appropriate candidate. He was young, had gone through the school of the Young Communist League, and had worked in the Central Committee. But he had no experience in economic management. He had spent all his time sitting in bureaucratic posts. Father had expected him to acquire some on-the-job, reallife experience, and for that purpose had proposed that Shelepin become secretary of the Leningrad province committee. It was a large organization, with modern industry and a great revolutionary tradition. After passing through a school like that, a person could occupy any post. But Shelepin had unexpectedly refused. He considered it a reduction in rank because he would lose his bureaucratic chair as a secretary of the Central Committee. “It’s too bad. I evidently overestimated him,” Father complained. “But maybe it’s for the best. There’s no making mistakes in this matter. If he had spent a few years in Leningrad, maybe it would be possible to recommend him to replace Kozlov. But he has remained just a bureaucrat. Doesn’t know real life. No, Shelepin is not suitable, although it’s too bad. He’s the youngest one on the Presidium.” As I recall, Father stopped talking then. He was thinking to himself. Then he continued to discuss possible successors to Kozlov. In particular he talked about Podgorny. He was a man who knew his way around in economic matters, and could work with people. In Ukraine he had showed his worth. He had a wealth of experience, but he lacked broad vision. After his transfer to the Central Committee he could not cope at all with the problems assigned to him, not even

366 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 the food industry, for which he was responsible as a member of the CC Presidium. In short, Father’s opinion was that he was not suitable for the post. Then he began talking about Brezhnev, saying that he did have enormous experience, he knew the economy, and he knew people. But in Father’s opinion, he didn’t hold firmly to a decision, and gave in too easily to the influence of others and to his own moods. A strong-willed person would have no problem subordinating Brezhnev to himself. Before the war, when he was appointed secretary of the party’s province committee in Dnepropetrovsk, the local wits christened him the “ballerina.” Whoever wanted to, could turn him around. But a strong person was needed in this post, someone who could not be diverted from the right road. Kozlov had been like that. No, it seemed that Brezhnev too was not suitable. Father fell silent again. The conversation was not renewed. We strolled for a long time along the path from the house and back, thinking to ourselves. It seemed that Father was turning thoughts over and over in his mind about the possible candidates for “second secretary.” I was stunned by his sudden openness. How difficult and lonely it must be for him, I thought, if he had to unburden himself on this topic with me. Nothing like that had happened before. Father unceasingly thought about the problem of a successor, turning over in his mind the names of various candidates, but he could not choose, could not settle on one person. The former French prime minister, Guy Mollet, once told reporters (in the New York Times on April 11, 1964) that when he met with Khrushchev on October 29, 1963—Guy Mollet was vice president of the Socialist International and had visited Moscow as the head of a delegation of French Socialists—Khrushchev had quickly run through the names of hypothetical successors, meaning Brezhnev and Podgorny but also Polyansky and Polyakov. I will not undertake to judge to what extent Guy Mollet’s words may correspond with reality, especially with regard to Polyakov. Generally speaking, it is doubtful, extremely doubtful, that Father would start talking about such a touchy subject with foreigners, knowing that his words would appear in the press the next day. It came as a great surprise to me when I learned that the plan was for Brezhnev to take the position of second secretary after all. This evidently meant that Father was not able to find a more suitable candidate. However, I was not about to ask him any questions about that. Personally, Brezhnev had always been nice to me. A kindly smile always played on his lips. And he always had an entertaining story to tell. Likewise, he was ready at any time to listen and help out. One thing that surprised me, however, was his passion for dominoes. That was not in keeping with my image of a government leader. However, it seems that Brezhnev was not all that happy about the flattering offer. A new post meant enormous power, but he would go unnoticed. He had already had his fill of being one of the ordinary Central Committee secretaries.

Dust Storm

367

The work there was intense and exhausting, involving the very widely ramified party organism, a great weight of responsibility and the necessity to make countless decisions. He had to interact with the province committee leaders, keep track of work in the army, and take the blame for any failures. In July 1960, Brezhnev had left the Central Committee without any regrets. He was inclined by nature to find the kind of work he was being offered as chairman of the Supreme Soviet more suitable. It was a mainly ceremonial post, but it kept him in the public eye, meeting with foreign dignitaries and ambassadors, making official visits abroad, attending numerous receptions, and so forth. Now all that would be coming to an end. But of course he could not refuse or even express dissatisfaction. He thanked the leadership for the confidence placed in him and promised to justify it. On June 21, 1963, a Central Committee plenum elected Brezhnev to be a Central Committee secretary while preserving his post temporarily as chairman of the Supreme Soviet. Brezhnev had pleaded with Father to let him keep that post and swore that he could pull both loads. Brezhnev worked on him so hard that Father finally gave in, not wanting to offend his future successor. To be sure, he made the reservation that this decision was temporary. Father said that Brezhnev himself would soon understand that his new duties at the Central Committee would require his full attention and that Brezhnev himself would “beg for mercy.” By December 2, 1963, the same “all-knowing” correspondent of the New York Times was already reporting that Brezhnev was Father’s successor.

58 Dust Storm At the end of 1962, Father had great hopes for a good harvest in

1963. During the previous few years something was going wrong somewhere, either with nature or with people. Time after time, it had been necessary—so as not to reduce consumption and not to return to the Stalin era’s long lines at bread stores—to dip into government grain reserves, stored up against the eventuality of all possible disasters. But what should be considered a disaster? Famine is a dreadful disaster, but lines at bread stores are no holiday either. Through all the years from 1953 to 1962, the size of the grain harvests had steadily increased. In 1953, 82.5 millions tons were produced, of which 31.1

Dust Storm

367

The work there was intense and exhausting, involving the very widely ramified party organism, a great weight of responsibility and the necessity to make countless decisions. He had to interact with the province committee leaders, keep track of work in the army, and take the blame for any failures. In July 1960, Brezhnev had left the Central Committee without any regrets. He was inclined by nature to find the kind of work he was being offered as chairman of the Supreme Soviet more suitable. It was a mainly ceremonial post, but it kept him in the public eye, meeting with foreign dignitaries and ambassadors, making official visits abroad, attending numerous receptions, and so forth. Now all that would be coming to an end. But of course he could not refuse or even express dissatisfaction. He thanked the leadership for the confidence placed in him and promised to justify it. On June 21, 1963, a Central Committee plenum elected Brezhnev to be a Central Committee secretary while preserving his post temporarily as chairman of the Supreme Soviet. Brezhnev had pleaded with Father to let him keep that post and swore that he could pull both loads. Brezhnev worked on him so hard that Father finally gave in, not wanting to offend his future successor. To be sure, he made the reservation that this decision was temporary. Father said that Brezhnev himself would soon understand that his new duties at the Central Committee would require his full attention and that Brezhnev himself would “beg for mercy.” By December 2, 1963, the same “all-knowing” correspondent of the New York Times was already reporting that Brezhnev was Father’s successor.

58 Dust Storm At the end of 1962, Father had great hopes for a good harvest in

1963. During the previous few years something was going wrong somewhere, either with nature or with people. Time after time, it had been necessary—so as not to reduce consumption and not to return to the Stalin era’s long lines at bread stores—to dip into government grain reserves, stored up against the eventuality of all possible disasters. But what should be considered a disaster? Famine is a dreadful disaster, but lines at bread stores are no holiday either. Through all the years from 1953 to 1962, the size of the grain harvests had steadily increased. In 1953, 82.5 millions tons were produced, of which 31.1

368 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 million tons were delivered to government procurement agencies, whereas in 1962, the harvest was 140.2 million tons, with government procurements of 56.6 million tons. And yet consumption had risen even faster, from 42.5 million tons in 1954 to 56.6 million in 1962.1 One reason for increased consumption, of course, was population growth. Another was the increased feeding of grain to livestock. But the main reason was the effort to fill the shelves of government stores, so that neither the cheap, rectangular-shaped blocks of dark rye bread nor the more elegant, long loaves of wheat bread would be regarded any longer as “goods in short supply.” Consequently, government grain reserves steadily dwindled, from 13.1 million tons in 1954 to 6.3 million tons in 1962.2 I have cited these figures before, but I repeat them now because without them the following narrative loses its meaning. In 1962 the balance between the amount of grain obtained by the government and the amount it expended was reduced to zero. A good harvest in 1963, or even one above average, might improve this balance by increasing grain procurements, and the entire increase might then be applied to filling up the grain reserves again. The winter of 1963 turned out to be freezing cold, but snowy. On March 12, 1963, speaking at a meeting of leaders of collective- and state-farm administrations of the Russian Federation, Khrushchev even allowed himself to dream a little, and to jokingly give his listeners a bit of a scare: “The present winter is rich with snow, and there will be a lot of moisture. If the crops planted in the fall get through the winter well and the spring turns out to be favorable, you will have such a big harvest that maybe you will request that the plan for grain procurements be increased. But we advise you to use the added amount from a good harvest to increase the livestock herd.”3 Cheap feed for livestock would appear and relieve the burden on the bread stores, because, as I mentioned before, people were buying the cheap rye bread to feed their livestock. A good harvest would also mean that the government could start to replenish the depleted grain reserves. On the whole, for Father the future that was visible on the horizon had quite a rosy hue. And not only in agriculture. With a good harvest giving everyone a full belly, the reforms he had been thinking about the previous autumn would go through easily. For the present, however, he was dividing up the bearskin before the bear had been killed. The hopes for a good harvest in 1963 began to collapse in the early spring. As it turned out, the snow that promised to bring moisture to the winter crops fell too late that year in the Virgin Lands of Kazakhstan. The crops had already frozen and died. Now it was necessary to sow again in the spring. This was an unpleasant but familiar occurrence. It happens every five or six years not only in Russia and in Kazakhstan but also in Ukraine and Canada. But trouble came in more than one form. As soon as the first shoots of the newly sown spring wheat appeared in the Virgin Lands, a drought set in. The root systems of the

Dust Storm

369

plants were not yet strong; they had not had time to develop and “take hold” of the soil. Then in May the wind began to blow. According to some reports, on May 7 a huge dust storm erupted over Kazakhstan. Pavlodar province suffered especially. If one has not seen this phenomenon of nature, it is hard to imagine. First there is blazing sun, drought, and stillness, and suddenly wind begins to blow, at first just a breeze, but here and there over the fields little dust devils start to swirl, carrying up into the air the remnants of the previous year’s stubble. Then the dust devils die before really being born, and the stubble falls back to earth again. It is not yet a blizzardlike storm and not even an overture to that. This kind of thing happens in the steppe regions regularly, and most often nothing comes of it. Only rarely is the overture followed with real action. The dust devils are transformed into a strong wind blowing low over the ground, lifting the soil into the air, soil that had been broken up by plow and harrow and was not yet held together by the roots of plants. The wind blows the dust and manure and straw, and last year’s tumbleweed. The storm gains strength, and soon there is a black cloud forming a solid wall across the whole sky from horizon to horizon, and it brings all its weight to bear on the fields below. This is called a black dust storm, a black blizzard, a blizzard without snow. Instead of snowflakes, the wind is driving dust particles. This strong dry wind in a matter of minutes sucks all the moisture out of the plants and turns them into frail stalks and rootlets, reducing them to rubbish. No one and nothing can hold the dried-out soil in place any longer. Millions of tons rise into the air, soil that only the day before was called “black earth.” It becomes hard to breathe. The dust fills people’s lungs and makes their eyes water. And that lasts for several hours or sometimes days. Finally the wind blows off to somewhere else, taking with it not only the soil that had turned to dust but also the hopes for any kind of harvest. Actually, dust storms are not all that unusual, and they are not necessarily black. Their color depends on the region and the soil. In the Black Earth regions of Ukraine and Kazakhstan they are black. In the American Midwest they are rusty brown. In China they are yellow because of the loess soil. When the wind blows and carries off the fertile top layer of soil from one field, it eventually brings it back to earth, delivering it as an unexpected gift on some distant field, possibly in an area where nothing had grown at all. In Central Asia the so-called Afghan wind carries thousands of tons of fertile soil northward every year, blown from the fields of Afghanistan (located, as is generally known, to the south of the Central Asian republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kirgizstan, and Kazakhstan). Of course, things don’t go well for a farmer thus robbed by the wind. Someone somewhere else may be lucky, but his labor has gone for nothing. Here are a few facts from the history of dust storms. In the United States in May 1934, a dry wind blew the top layer of soil from the fields of Wyoming and Montana and carried it off far to the east and literally rain downed the dust upon Chicago. For several days, life in that city was unbearable. In the state of Oklahoma, on April 15, 1935, a Sunday in the American Bible Belt, a red dust

370 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 storm blew the soil, along with the seeds of wheat and corn, from 3 million hectares of land. Two years later, in 1937, one more in this series of dust storms erupted, this time in California. All together, dust storms occurred in twenty-seven US states in the 1930s. In Australia in 1983 there was a dust storm near Sydney. Back in the United States in November 1991, in California after the harvest had already been brought in, a very strong wind blew a cloud of dust, blocked out the sun, and traffic was stopped on the roads of the Los Angeles area for several days. In 2002 a drought spread across the entire western part of the United States from Montana and the Dakotas in the north to Texas and New Mexico in the south, but there was a windstorm only in California, and it was only of “medium caliber.” In other areas the weather remained “favorable.” The crops perished and there was no harvest, but the soil remained on the fields. On April 22, 2004, again in New Mexico, a “red” dust storm caused a traffic accident on a major highway, involving dozens of automobiles. Dust storms in the southern part of the Soviet Union are also not rare. Father remembered such storms in Ukraine in 1948 and 1949. A black dust storm, which swept over the fields of Kirovograd province in 1960, was even discussed at a CC Presidium meeting.4 Pyotr Shelest writes about a dust storm in April 1969, with a wind speed of up to forty meters per second (144 kilometers per hour), that swept across the fields of Krasnodar territory and Stavropol.5 The fact that there are different kinds and degrees of dust storms is a separate issue. The scope of any such disaster is determined by the amount of sun and wind. In Kazakhstan in May 1963 there was an excess of both. The most reliable remedy against dust storms is grassland that has not been plowed. The interwoven root system of grass undisturbed by the plow holds the soil firmly, and there is nothing to fear from any wind. Dust storms are a product of the economic activity of human beings. Such storms first appeared on the Earth when agriculture originated, and their destructive power multiplied as agriculture developed. It is not accidental that the most ancient records of powerful dust storms are found in the cradles of human civilization—in China and Persia, for example. Human beings are the cause of dust storms, and it is up to human beings to “tame” them. It cannot be said that there is no way to deal with such storms. In the United States, after the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, people began planting rows of trees and bushes as windbreaks between fields of corn and wheat. This kept the wind from blowing directly on the cropland. In Ukraine and southern Russia, windbreaks had been in use since time immemorial. In Kazakhstan, human hands had not yet gotten around to planting windbreaks, and when they did, their efforts did not immediately succeed in making trees grow. It must be said that in the Virgin Lands and in other places, people did not just sit there with arms folded. “On October 9, 1959, by order of Khrushchev,” writes the historian and agricultural expert Ilya Yevgenyevich Zelenin, “the

Dust Storm

371

Academy of Sciences presidium discussed the topic of ‘measures to combat water and wind erosion of the soil.’ In 1960 the first All-Union Congress of Soil Scientists was held, and other measures were taken. In his speeches of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Khrushchev, while remaining an ardent supporter of the use of the plow in agriculture, constantly noted that for Kazakhstan and other virgin-land regions, it was necessary to preserve up to 15–20 percent of the total cultivated area as fallow lands or unplowed grassland.”6 The destructive effect of dust storms can be reduced by plowing without a moldboard. In his memoirs, Khrushchev tells about learning from the Canadians about agricultural work in an arid zone. He pointed out that the Canadians used “subsurface tillers,” shallow-tilling devices, which did not turn over the soil like a plow, but cut it up just below the surface, and then they further loosened the soil with disk harrows. In the summer of 1963, Father sent a special agricultural delegation to Canada to learn from the experience accumulated by the farmers there.7 In the Virgin Lands territory, academician Barayev advocated shallow plowing without a moldboard and with strips of grassland as barriers interspersed among the plowed fields. I have already written and will write further about the clashes of opinion between Barayev and Nalivaiko, who was located in the Altai region. At that time, Father sided with Nalivaiko. At his experimental station, Barayev obtained his usual, reliable yield even in the unfavorable conditions of 1963. Father came to a sudden realization and immediately began to take decisive measures. “Khrushchev, unlike the majority of his colleagues, was capable of recognizing (to be sure not always publicly) and correcting errors made in agrarian policy, including his own, and in this connection he acted with his inherent energy and assertiveness,” the historian Zelenin writes further. “In 1963–1964 the leader of the party revised his extremely negative attitude toward the recommendations of Barayev—an outstanding scientist and practical worker. The proper system of cultivation in an arid zone, toward whose development academician Barayev made an enormous contribution, along with the institute he headed—that system was fully rehabilitated and began to spread across the Virgin Lands territory on a wide scale.”8 I do not fully agree with Zelenin with regard to the supposed “extremely negative attitude toward the recommendations of Barayev.” It is true that Father took Nalivaiko’s side, but this does not mean that he dismissed Barayev’s. Barayev continued to work and carry on his experiments, and his writings were published in special publications and in the central newspapers. Some people followed his advice and some did not. The fact that after the disaster of 1963 his recommendations began to be introduced everywhere—that is another matter. The black dust storm occurred in May, and as early as June 1, 1963, Barayev published a major article in Izvestia. I would describe it as an instructional article about his method of agriculture. However, the turn toward Barayev did not mean going back to the old grassfield rotation system, nor did it mean turning completely away from Nalivaiko.

372 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 Besides, the Virgin Lands of Kazakhstan are one thing, but the climatic conditions in the Altai region are something else again. The scientific dispute between Barayev and Nalivaiko did not begin in 1963, nor did it end then, nor could it end, because scientific debates do not end if they are truly scientific. Each side finds new arguments and confirmation of its views and at the same time corrects and modifies its position, and then goes on to refute or reconsider the views of its opponents. Both men had their supporters, sometimes very ardent ones. And that’s how things will continue without end, because a rational kernel can be extracted only from that kind of contrapuntal dialogue, if it is a genuinely scientific disagreement. Often a third party—interested mainly in getting results, rather than “winning the argument”—can extract such a rational kernel without becoming involved in the dispute. The scientific disputants themselves and their ardent supporters are usually not inclined toward compromise. Let us return to the realities of spring 1963. The dust storm by itself could not have caused the disaster. A new trouble reared its head. At the beginning of the summer the fate of the harvest is decided by whether or not the rains come on time, and as bad luck would have it, a searing heat wave began that dried up everything, and not just in one place but practically across the entire country: in Kazakhstan, Siberia, and Ukraine. This drought foreshadowed genuine disaster. Such an unfavorable combination of weather conditions did not happen at any other time during Khrushchev’s decade, nor in the entire twentieth century. As a result of many years of observations in Russia, it has been determined that out of every ten years, usually three years have a bad harvest because of the weather, whether due to excessive cold, drought, or rain that does not come at the right time. But catastrophic anomalies like the one in 1963 occur only once or twice in a century, the last time being in 1890. In the past, such events had been followed by universal famine, plague, and the depopulation of entire provinces. I remembered that in earlier years, in reply to complaints by the minister of agriculture and the secretaries of the party’s province committees about drought, freezing weather, hail, and so forth, Father would reply: “Ours is an enormous country. In one place there will be drought or flooding, but in another place things will work out well. The thing is not to complain about the weather but to work.” In “normal” years his arguments sounded correct, but not in 1963, when hardly any healthy areas remained on the fields of our country, from Ukraine to Lake Baikal. That year the central government in Moscow literally had to beat with its fists to get 11.2 million tons of grain from Ukraine. Shelest, the Ukrainian leader, resisted. He argued that the livestock would be left with nothing to eat. Podgorny, the Central Committee secretary responsible for food supplies for the country as a whole, replied with his own arguments: “In Siberia there has been a real catastrophe; in Kazakhstan, where the plan envisaged 15.3 million tons no more than 3 million tons will be delivered; and in the Altai region, instead of the planned 3 million tons, we will not even get 160–210 thousand tons.”9

Dust Storm

373

These figures aroused doubts in my mind. Podgorny was using them as a means of putting pressure on the Ukrainians. In fact, Kazakhstan delivered somewhat less than half of the planned 15.3 million tons. After lengthy wrangling, Moscow and Kiev came to an agreement: “to make a detailed accounting of the true state of affairs concerning grain in the [Ukrainian] republic.” The accounting turned out to be not at all consoling by comparison with 1962, which was not a very successful year either. In 1963 the average yield in Ukraine fell to 3.5 centners per hectare. As a result, instead of the expected 14.4 million tons of grain, the Ukrainians did not even reach 9.6 million tons.10 Nor was the situation saved by the good harvests in the Volga region and in the Northern Caucasus. Saratov province delivered 2.6 million tons; the Krasnodar territory, 3.2 million tons, more than the planned amount; and the Stavropol region, 2.8 million tons, likewise above the planned amount. The Moldavians also did their work well, in Father’s opinion, with their contribution amounting to 740,000 tons of grain.11 But all of that was a drop in the bucket. By no means did these successes compensate for the losses. The total grain harvest in 1963 should be compared to that in 1962, when 140.2 million tons were harvested. In 1963 the figure was only 107.5 million tons, a decline of almost 30 percent. The yield per hectare also declined, from 10.9 centners in 1962 to 8.3 centners in 1963. As a result, government procurements of grain in 1963 amounted to only 44.8 million tons, which was 10.7 million tons more than in 1953, but 11.8 million tons less than in 1962.12 These are the figures from the end of 1963, but in the middle of the summer the situation seemed even more terrible, as indicated by the argument between Podgorny and Shelest cited earlier. Our country was on the edge of the abyss. It was not a question of a famine like the one in 1890, but for Father there was no talking about reforms now. In 1963 all efforts had to be focused on how to make it through to the next harvest, how to preserve what had been accomplished with so much hard work during the previous years of relative prosperity, and not to slide back into a situation like 1953 with long waiting lines at bread stores or, what was worse, the ration card system of 1947. Rationing was considered as one of the possible scenarios for solving the food crisis. Another was to buy grain from abroad. Father ordered that the government reserves of 6.3 million tons of grain not be touched. They could not make up for the shortage, and our country could not be left without anything at all, in case some other misfortune occurred. Opinions differed. The Finance Ministry, the Supreme Economic Council, and the State Planning Committee, along with their “chief curator” Kosygin, spoke in favor of ration cards. They considered it unreasonable to buy grain from foreigners. They would have to pay with gold, and the government reserves of

374 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 gold were no less inviolable, in their view, than the grain reserves. Father did not agree with them. Ration cards for bread would throw us back to the early postwar years, and besides, we did not need to buy a superabundant amount of grain. The situation was not so tragic. After all, despite all the misfortunes, we had harvested 15.3 million tons more than had been harvested in 1952, the best harvest of the Stalin era (92.2 million tons in 1952 and 107.5 million tons in 1963). During the decade after Stalin, since 1953, people had forgotten about the interruptions in food supply back then, the lines that had formed at the bread stores from the wee hours of the morning in the Stalin era. The people had become accustomed to the idea that there would certainly be plenty of bread on the shelves. Finally, Father countered the arguments of Kosygin and others by asserting that the population had the right to demand that the government look after them: “We cannot operate according to the methods of Stalin, who exported grain abroad when there was famine in Ukraine in 1947 and people were swelling up from malnourishment and things went as far as cannibalism.”13 Nor could we follow in the footsteps of the government of Tsar Nicholas II, who in the years 1890 and afterward, years of terrible hunger in the Russian empire, exported “famine bread” so as not to fail to make the payments on German and French loans.14 “It’s a pity about the gold, of course,” Father agreed with his opponents. “But that’s what reserves are for, to be used in the event of a disaster. Stalin was preparing for a new war, and he accumulated reserves like a miser. Today there is no threat of war. Our missiles reliably protect us against an American attack.” Father won the argument. They decided, by way of an exception, to buy some grain from the capitalists and pay with gold. Canada sold us 6.8 million tons, and Australia 1.8 million. The Romanians provided us with 400,000 tons in a mutually beneficial trade arrangement. The United States hesitated for a long time, but on October 8, 1963, President Kennedy, a month and a half before he was killed, signed a permit for the export of grain to the Soviet Union. All of it together amounted to about 12 million tons.15 Our deliverance from hunger cost us 372 tons of gold, out of an existing reserve of 1,082 tons.16 To this day, Khrushchev is blamed for squandering the gold reserve, and I too condemned the action at that time, but now it has become clear that Father acted quite correctly and courageously. With the purchase of approximately 12 million tons of grain, the situation stabilized. Our country was no longer threatened by ration cards or, what was worse of course, famine. Together with grain procurements amounting to 44.8 million tons in autumn 1963, the total came to 56.8 million tons, slightly more than the 56.6 million tons in 1962. It’s true that only 51.2 million tons were used for domestic needs, unlike the 56.6 million tons in 1962. We added 700,000 tons to the government grain reserves, increasing those from 6.3 million tons to 7 million tons.17

Dust Storm

375

When you add 51.2 and 0.7 million tons you get 51.9, which is 4.9 million tons less than the total amount of 56.8 million tons. Evidently the difference was used to feed our East European allies: the East Germans, the Czechs, and the Hungarians. In domestic consumption of grain, a hole appeared of approximately the same size, 4.4 million tons. It was balanced off by a temporary departure from the standards for baking bread. Permission was given that year to add corn flour and pea flour to the flour for baking bread and, if pressed, potato flour and bran flour as well. “How could you do that?” I began to lament, but Father saw no big disaster in adding these ingredients to the flour. “The Moldavians eat bread made from corn and they eat polenta, also made from corn. They love the stuff.” Father tried to calm me down. “I myself ate cornbread when I was a young man. It’s very good bread. Only it gets crusty quickly.” I said nothing. Father’s words had not convinced me, but what was the point of objecting if I had no good arguments to back up my position? “The long loaves of white bread with a characteristic greenish color, from the flour of ground peas they had mixed in, appeared in the Leningrad bread stores in mid-September 1963. This became the culminating point in the universal dissatisfaction with Khrushchev’s food policies.” That is what the historians Lebina and Chistikov write.18 The editor and literary critic Vladimir Lakshin made an entry in his diary on October 16, 1963: “Panic at the bread stores in Moscow. White bread has disappeared. No vermicelli or semolina. Waiting lines. The people are angry, and they’re not shy about saying what they think.”19 Things really did get worse with regard to bread. People began saving up bread for a rainy day. The upset caused by rumors about a bad harvest and imminent famine swept the store shelves clean. “Consumption” rose sharply in the fall of 1963. The supply could not make good the “deficits” that showed up here and there. And on top of that there was the “green bread”! No enemy of the Soviet system could think of anything worse. And the problem was not its quality but that it was so unfamiliar. Incidentally, in the United States, breads made with added flour from peas and corn are quite common in some parts of the country, and even considered delicacies in other parts, costing more than breads made from wheat. The poor harvest of 1963 struck a painful blow at Father’s authority. What was worse, two years earlier he had promised to build communism, and now you couldn’t find decent bread in the stores. Also, in the cafeterias, free bread disappeared. It was explained that this was only temporary, only for a year, but no one was interested in the explanations. The main thing was that bread had disappeared. There’s no denying it: 1963 was the least successful year of the Khrushchev era, and it seemed to cross out all the accomplishments of the previous years. Against all the facts, it suddenly began to seem to Soviet citizens that they had lived better under Stalin.

376

Unforeseen Delay: 1963

59 From Chemistry to Agrochemistry It’s an ill wind that blows no good. The bad harvest of 1963 pushed

Father toward new—and I would say fundamental—changes in agricultural policy. The year 1963 is the line that marks a definitive transition from extensive to intensive agriculture. The dust storm was a onetime occurrence. It came and went. But it highlighted our primary failing, which was not a matter of drought or freezing weather, but of low agricultural yield. We may have been harvesting 10–11 centners per hectare instead of the 8 centners per hectare in 1953, but that by itself did not solve the grain problem. The existing expanses of cultivated land were physically insufficient to provide the grain needed to feed the people, store up reserves, and raise livestock. There was no uncultivated fertile land left. What was worse, some areas had been brought under cultivation, but were not at all promising: wind erosion had damaged some and salinization of the soil had occurred in others. It was necessary to return those lands to their original primitive state of pasture. They were not suitable for anything else. Without a sharp increase in the production of chemical fertilizers, we could not have any dreams of increasing the yield per hectare. And the problem was not that Father had underestimated the importance of fertilizers earlier; the problem was that there simply was not enough money for everything, and it seemed that for the time being we could get by. After all, we had lived without fertilizers for so many years. And we would get by a little bit longer. The drought of 1963 indicated more clearly than anything that there could be no more waiting. Resources had to be reallocated. In a memorandum sent to the CC Presidium on July 12, 1963, the third such memorandum already that year, with the content of each quickly becoming part of the general public discussion, Father noted that the increased production of grain during the past few years was mainly the result of an expansion of cultivated areas and an altering of the structure of those areas through reductions in the amount allotted for grassland and fallow lands. During those years, the area that had been sown to grain expanded from 107 million hectares to 136 million hectares. But this alone would not be enough to increase the production of grain to the level needed. “According to the estimates of the State Planning Committee, in the coming years we need to harvest no less than 220 million tons of grain, and by 1980

From Chemistry to Agrochemistry

377

our country’s need for grain will amount to 290–300 million tons. That is the only way we can cover our needs, and build up our reserves, and provide for our neighbors. The production of meat, milk, and butter will grow accordingly. Our country will finally provide each person with what science tells us is an adequate and healthy diet. Without fertilizers, without pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides, we cannot dream of achieving that.” After drawing this interim conclusion, Father continued: “If today the United States is ahead of us in agricultural output, that is not because of any special American know-how. We have simply not been able to allocate the necessary capital investments to the production of mineral fertilizers and agricultural technology. Now we have that possibility and should make use of it.”1 But where would the billions of rubles come from that would be necessary to organize such production on an agrochemical basis? “We will now reduce spending on defense, and direct those resources toward the production of mineral fertilizers.” That was how Khrushchev described his plans to the visiting US secretary of agriculture, Orville Freeman, on July 30, 1963.2 In the memorandum of July 12, Father scrupulously estimated how much fertilizer would be needed, measuring the steps he planned to take against those already taken in the United States. There 35 million tons of mineral fertilizers were used on 118 million hectares of land under all different kinds of agricultural crops. In our country, the area under crops was nearly twice as much, 218 million hectares, but only 14 million tons of fertilizer was applied to that land. That figure was fairly impressive by comparison with the 6 million tons of fertilizers produced in the Soviet Union in 1953, but it was a miserly sum compared to the real needs of agriculture. For the sake of fairness it should be recalled that it was not until the 1930s that the Americans began to make a transition from manure to mineral fertilizers, as we were now doing, and they began only after the terrible dust storms in the Midwest. That was most likely just a coincidence. Father estimated that to increase the yield of grain by 5 centners per hectare, agriculture needed 86 million tons of fertilizer, and if the needs of sugar beet cultivation, cotton growing, and other agricultural activities necessary for our country were added, the quantity of fertilizer would have to be increased to about 100 million tons per year. In the ensuing four or five years, we would have to allocate approximately 1 billion rubles each year to the construction of factories for mineral fertilizer production, or about 5 percent of the total sum of 20 billion rubles assigned for new construction in general. But fertilizers by themselves are not all that we needed. It was also necessary to arrange for the production of herbicides, and to increase that from 92,000 tons to 1 million tons per year. Otherwise, on the fertilized fields, we would be growing not wheat or cotton, but wall-to-wall weeds. We absolutely could do this, and we had to. Father went on to compare spending on the production of fertilizer with projected earnings from the increased yield. It turned out that everything would pay for itself in two or three years.3

378 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 In the last part of the memorandum, Father dwelt at greater length on specific details of agronomy and agricultural technology that are probably of interest only to professionals, and I will not go into them.

60 Orville Freeman and the American Chicken As indicated earlier, Father met with Orville Freeman on July 30, 1963.

In the conversation, he noted with pleasure that our contacts with American farmers had now been successfully established and were going well, then he immediately began talking about mineral fertilizers. He said that such fertilizers occupied all his attention now. Freeman agreed. In the United States they had come to the same conclusion thirty years earlier. Then Khrushchev’s guest diplomatically shifted the subject to the main purpose of his visit: he wanted to sell some chicken meat. The Americans now had practically an unlimited supply of it—as much as anyone could want. A few years earlier, they had gone from raising chickens on their own farms to a system of large-scale mechanized factory farms. They had taken the road of specialization, and now had a surplus of chicken meat. “When I was a boy,” Freeman recounted, “we only ate chicken on Sunday or holidays, but in America today it’s the cheapest kind of meat. Nowadays with two pounds of chicken feed it’s possible to obtain one pound of meat. In eight weeks we can grow a chicken weighing three to four pounds.” “I really envy you and wish you further success,” Father answered politely, “but we are not going to start buying chickens from you. We are raising them ourselves, but we would eagerly buy chemical plants from you for producing mineral fertilizers.” That was one of Father’s long-standing principles—to buy equipment and technology that would allow us to set up production ourselves, and he tried to steer the conversation in that direction. “Would you only want to buy the plant and equipment for producing fertilizer, or would you also buy some fertilizer?” Freeman inquired. His aim was to sell the finished product, as a support for his own American manufacturers, whether they were farmers in the Midwest or chemical companies.

378 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 In the last part of the memorandum, Father dwelt at greater length on specific details of agronomy and agricultural technology that are probably of interest only to professionals, and I will not go into them.

60 Orville Freeman and the American Chicken As indicated earlier, Father met with Orville Freeman on July 30, 1963.

In the conversation, he noted with pleasure that our contacts with American farmers had now been successfully established and were going well, then he immediately began talking about mineral fertilizers. He said that such fertilizers occupied all his attention now. Freeman agreed. In the United States they had come to the same conclusion thirty years earlier. Then Khrushchev’s guest diplomatically shifted the subject to the main purpose of his visit: he wanted to sell some chicken meat. The Americans now had practically an unlimited supply of it—as much as anyone could want. A few years earlier, they had gone from raising chickens on their own farms to a system of large-scale mechanized factory farms. They had taken the road of specialization, and now had a surplus of chicken meat. “When I was a boy,” Freeman recounted, “we only ate chicken on Sunday or holidays, but in America today it’s the cheapest kind of meat. Nowadays with two pounds of chicken feed it’s possible to obtain one pound of meat. In eight weeks we can grow a chicken weighing three to four pounds.” “I really envy you and wish you further success,” Father answered politely, “but we are not going to start buying chickens from you. We are raising them ourselves, but we would eagerly buy chemical plants from you for producing mineral fertilizers.” That was one of Father’s long-standing principles—to buy equipment and technology that would allow us to set up production ourselves, and he tried to steer the conversation in that direction. “Would you only want to buy the plant and equipment for producing fertilizer, or would you also buy some fertilizer?” Freeman inquired. His aim was to sell the finished product, as a support for his own American manufacturers, whether they were farmers in the Midwest or chemical companies.

“Our Farms Don’t Supply Meat and Milk”

379

“Only the plant and equipment,” said Father, remaining firm. He knew what he wanted. No deals were made, but they continued to talk for a long time about the latest advances in agricultural science and about the merits and shortcomings of various types of agricultural machinery. Both had an excellent knowledge of the details, but sometimes Father stymied Freeman by showing that he knew more about American tractors and combines than the US secretary of agriculture himself. As the conversation was drawing to a close, Freeman made one last attempt, suggesting that the United States would sell the latest models of agricultural machinery, but that as part of the bargain the Soviet Union would need to buy some chicken meat. “No,” Father laughed. “Eat your chicken yourselves, and enjoy it. But we will buy the technology for producing mineral fertilizers from you, and also some mixed feed, if the price is right. When we spend money, we have to have our head on our shoulders.”1

61 “Our Farms Don’t Supply Meat and Milk to Their Own Workers” On the day after the conversation with Freeman, on July 31, 1963,

Father sent to the CC Presidium one more memorandum, this time about the rural economy as a whole. In the preceding ten years a great deal had been accomplished, but even more had been left undone. “There are many backward collective and state farms. And they have remained just as backward as they were before.”1 Collective farms that had been changed over into state farms multiplied their losses, and continued to hang like dead weight on the government’s neck, and the “interdistrict production administrations” were looking the other way. In Father’s view, the solution was to improve the selection of personnel, strengthen discipline, and wage a struggle against the private plots: Many workers and even directors of state farms are distracted by the raising of their own private livestock. For example, at the Dobrovsky state farm in

“Our Farms Don’t Supply Meat and Milk”

379

“Only the plant and equipment,” said Father, remaining firm. He knew what he wanted. No deals were made, but they continued to talk for a long time about the latest advances in agricultural science and about the merits and shortcomings of various types of agricultural machinery. Both had an excellent knowledge of the details, but sometimes Father stymied Freeman by showing that he knew more about American tractors and combines than the US secretary of agriculture himself. As the conversation was drawing to a close, Freeman made one last attempt, suggesting that the United States would sell the latest models of agricultural machinery, but that as part of the bargain the Soviet Union would need to buy some chicken meat. “No,” Father laughed. “Eat your chicken yourselves, and enjoy it. But we will buy the technology for producing mineral fertilizers from you, and also some mixed feed, if the price is right. When we spend money, we have to have our head on our shoulders.”1

61 “Our Farms Don’t Supply Meat and Milk to Their Own Workers” On the day after the conversation with Freeman, on July 31, 1963,

Father sent to the CC Presidium one more memorandum, this time about the rural economy as a whole. In the preceding ten years a great deal had been accomplished, but even more had been left undone. “There are many backward collective and state farms. And they have remained just as backward as they were before.”1 Collective farms that had been changed over into state farms multiplied their losses, and continued to hang like dead weight on the government’s neck, and the “interdistrict production administrations” were looking the other way. In Father’s view, the solution was to improve the selection of personnel, strengthen discipline, and wage a struggle against the private plots: Many workers and even directors of state farms are distracted by the raising of their own private livestock. For example, at the Dobrovsky state farm in

380 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 Lipetsk province there are a total of 1,384 cows, but the workers at the state farm have 2,280 cows on their private plots. The Kirov state farm near Tashkent has 1,570 large horned cattle, but the workers at the farm have 1,952 of their own, and so it is everywhere. These livestock are maintained at the expense of the state farm’s feed and fodder, they graze on the state farm’s croplands, and they destroy the state farm’s grain crops. As a result, the state farm’s livestock are starving.

Father draws his conclusion. “They are given only half or sometimes only a quarter of the standard amount of feed.” And what did he propose? It is necessary to have realistic plans for raising livestock, taking into account the potential of each republic, each province, each production administration, and each collective and state farm individually.” That was perfectly sensible, but then he added: “Consider the amount of feed and fodder that is pilfered by dishonest people for the maintenance of their private livestock. If that feed and fodder were returned to the state farm, we could double the standard amount to be fed to the livestock and sharply increase the output of milk. We have already passed a resolution on this question. Where the government’s retail system does not provide people with sufficient quantities of meat and dairy products, the state farms ought to sell meat and milk to their workers. As far as the nonworking elements at the state farms who are making use of private livestock for their own profit, harsh measures must be taken without delay, and such people must be prohibited from keeping livestock. We have to reexamine the standard size that has been set for private plots around the homes of collective farmers—we either have to reduce them or eliminate them entirely and replace them with collectivized vegetable gardens.2

These gardens were to be located outside the village and would be equal in size to the total sum of all the private plots adjoining people’s houses. With the land thus aggregated and relocated, it would be possible to farm it in a modern way, to plow it with tractors, not work it with spades, and to mechanize other basic agricultural tasks. The decision of what to plant on this land, how to harvest it, and what to do with the harvest would belong, as before, to the individuals who had owned the private plots around their homes. In Khrushchev’s view, livestock would also be treated more efficiently in collective-farm barns rather than on the private plots. I wrote about that in earlier in the book, and will not repeat those arguments here. The idea was to make labor more effective, to produce larger amounts at less expense for both the collective farms and the collective farmers. Further on in his memorandum, Khrushchev wrote a lot and in detail about what had to be done to increase productivity in the raising of livestock. He referred to the experience of Germany and proposed certain measures, but the Central Committee members who read his memorandum paid no particular attention to his words; he had said all that before. But they did not hesitate about taking the “harsh measures” he mentioned. When the collective-farm peasants heard that Khrushchev was talking about “harsh measures” against their private plots, it scared them terribly.

“Our Farms Don’t Supply Meat and Milk”

381

Historically, they did not trust the government, neither before the revolution nor after it. In particular, they remembered Stalin’s collectivization and confiscation campaigns. The small plot of land next to their house clearly belonged to them, but when that land was moved to some faraway location, it began to look elusive. It could easily be taken away from them. The same was true of their cows when those were transferred to collective-farm barns. Thus their reaction was predictably negative. Rumors spread like wildfire around the country—heartbreaking stories, allegedly by eyewitnesses, about police being called in to take livestock away from collective and state farms, and about people being denied the right to work on their private plots, which then became overgrown with weeds. In fact, things never went that far. No collectivized gardens were established, nor did state farms supply their workers with meat and milk. But people believed these stories in 1963, and still believe them now. They believe because they want to believe, and because they expect nothing better from the authorities. Father’s good intentions were viewed as harmful by the very people he wanted to benefit. To this day, the villagers have not forgiven him for the “initiative” envisioned in that memorandum. They have not forgiven him despite the fact that the threat implied there remained only a threat. At least that is what the statistics show. “Eyewitnesses” tell us one thing, but the statistics confirm that the number of livestock on the private plots of collective and state farmers in the years 1963–1964, compared to 1962, practically did not change and in some cases the number of livestock on private plots increased. Thus, according to impartial statistics, in 1963 there were 14,890,000 large-horned cattle and other livestock, such as sheep, goats, and pigs, on the private plots, compared to the 14,667,000 recorded in 1962. The same picture is observable on the state farms, where in 1963 the number of livestock was 9,634,000, compared to 9,209,000 in 1962. The proportions did not change in 1964 either. The number of livestock owned individually by collective farmers dropped slightly, to 14,666,000—that is, it dropped back to the level of 1962—but in the case of the state farms, it increased slightly in comparison to 1962, to 9,416,000.3 Statistics are one thing, but hardly anyone is interested in them, and the image of Father that remained in the minds of the people after that ill-starred initiative was that of a persecutor of the peasantry.

382 Unforeseen Delay: 1963

62 Irrigation and Rice Cultivation On August 14, 1963, Father wrote one more memorandum, this time

about irrigation. In order to stabilize the supply of food products to the population, independently of changes in the weather, in addition to fertilizer we also needed water. “The irrigation canals that are already being built are insufficient,” said Father. “We need to increase the amount of irrigated land three times over, from 9 million to approximately 28 million hectares in Kherson and Odessa provinces, along the lower reaches of the Danube, in the Crimea and the Donbas [Donets Coal Basin], in the Volga-Akhtubinsk floodplain and in the floodplains of the Don and Kuban, not to mention Central Asia.” Not only cotton ought to be irrigated but also “ordinary” crops such as wheat and sugar beets. “In many places we can bring in two harvests per year, planting peas first, for example, and after that corn. In more southerly regions the corn would provide grain, and in the more northerly ones, fodder. Such experiments have been successfully carried out at the Ukrainian Scientific Research Institute on Irrigation in Agriculture, located in the city of Kherson. Irrigation makes it possible to bring the yield per hectare for wheat up to 50 centners, five times more than we obtain today. What we spend to irrigate land on average comes to between a thousand rubles and one and a half thousand rubles per hectare, which is entirely reasonable and pays for itself in a year or a year and a half.” Those were the estimates Father gave. But that was not all. An abundance of water would allow us to begin growing rice where up until then no one had ever heard of it, in the Northern Caucasus and Ukraine. “Rice is not simply one more agricultural crop that we can add to the wheat and rye we are accustomed to. It is the most productive plant on the earth.” In the memorandum, Father referred to specialists on rice who were highly authoritative in their field, Aleksandr Nikolayevich Askochinsky and K. Shubladze. These academicians had assured Father that if the rice were tended to properly, it could yield 50 centners per hectare, and that that was far from the limit. “In the Russian Federation and in Ukraine by 1970 the irrigated area could be increased to 2,960,000 hectares, and 435,000 hectares could be planted with rice, which would make it possible to obtain an additional 10.1 million tons of grain, including 1.6 million tons of rice. The people in Krasnodar and Rostov say that their rivers have good floodplains and bottomlands, which are now planted with flax. Let us consider

Irrigation and Rice Cultivation

383

whether it is economical to begin cultivating rice in the floodplains of the Don and Kuban.”1 In the Northern Caucasus, rice is not an entirely new crop. There have been attempts to grow rice there since the 1920s, but only where there was a surplus of water. Now, with the development of irrigation, this crop, which had seemed exotic to Russians, promised to become a profitable branch of agricultural production, and the amount spent on irrigation would be quickly recovered. Father was convinced that there were great long-term prospects for rice, and with his characteristic energy he began to promote its cultivation. In the fall of 1963, when he traveled around the regions of southern Russia, he now and then started a conversation about cultivating rice and listened to the opinions of scientists specializing in rice cultivation and seed selection as well as those doing practical work in this field, of whom there were as yet not many. He soon knew a great deal about rice, about the different varieties and the particular features of how those varieties grew, as well as their diseases and pests. Here are a few quotations. “As far as the production of rice goes, it is cheapest apparently in the Kuban region and in the floodplains of the Don in Rostov province. These regions have been brought under rice cultivation, and there we have research institutes, experimental stations, and qualified personnel.” Father was sharing his views on this occasion in the city of Volgograd on September 16, 1963, at a meeting with specialists in the field of irrigation in agriculture.2 On the morning of September 26, at the “Red Army” state farm in Krasnodar territory, he listened to a report by the director, Maistrenko, and commented: “You have a good farm, but your rice yields are low. From your 40 centners per hectare, if we throw out 30 percent corresponding to the husks, the net quantity of grain is 28 centners per hectare. In competition with wheat, your rice does not justify itself economically, but if you get a harvest of 70 centners per hectare, which would be the equivalent of 49 centners of actual grain, a different picture emerges. Can rice give that large a yield? It can! What is needed in order to do that? Herbicides to combat weeds. Another way to fight them is to raise the level of water and drown the weeds. But that also has a harmful effect on the yield. You not only kill the weeds but you damage the rice, and the size of the harvest drops off.” Then he continued to question Maistrenko: “What variety of rice gives the best yield on your farm?” “The best varieties are ‘Donskoi’ and ‘Kuban-3.’ They can be sown early and they sprout quickly. The ‘424’ variety requires more warmth. This year we sent an agronomist to Uzbekistan to look at their varieties of rice, ‘269’ and ‘275,’” Maistrenko began to answer, but Father interrupted him. “What variety gives the best yield?” “A good variety is the ‘275,’ but its vegetative period is long,” said the state-farm director.

384 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 “Which scientists are studying rice selection in the Kuban region?” asked Father, continuing to interrogate Maistrenko. “In this region, on the territory of this state farm, our Kuban rice experimental station is in operation.” intervened Smetanin, the director of that experimental station. “What varieties do you raise?” asked Father, now turning to Smetanin. “Mainly our own varieties—‘424,’ ‘213,’ and others. Last year we sold 10 tons of rice seed of the variety ‘424’ to the Ukrainians and they were satisfied,” said Smetanin, defending the reputation of his rice.3 On that same day, September 26, at a meeting with agricultural workers of the Northern Caucasus in Krasnodar, Khrushchev subjected one expert to detailed interrogation—academician B. A. Shumakov of the Novocherkassk Engineering and Amelioration Institute. He questioned him about the long-term prospects for introducing rice into the region. “In some areas rice was planted after the winter wheat, and not a bad harvest was brought in,” replied Shumakov hesitatingly, and not very confidently. “Where is that?” Khrushchev asked. “At Kislyar on the lower reaches of the Terek River.” Shumakov was starting to overcome the shyness that had frozen him, becoming more expansive. “In the 1920s they planted rice crops for the first time from Volgograd to Rostov and became convinced it was possible to cultivate rice throughout that territory. As long as there was water. In the coming years it will be possible to increase the area under rice in Krasnodar territory up to 140,000 to 150,000 hectares, and in Rostov province up to 50,000, while on the lower reaches of the Terek and the Sulak another 150,000 hectares can be brought under cultivation. No reservoirs will have to be built there, and the expenses for irrigation will turn out to be less than in other places. On the whole in the Northern Caucasus the area planted with rice may reach 300,000 hectares.” “Is there enough rice for making pilaf?” Father joked. “Yes, there’s enough,” said Shumakov, now fully in his stride. “And we have rams for adding mutton to the pilaf.” Father was satisfied. The prospects seemed good, but for now he observed: “The rice yield is low: on average in the Russian Federation it is 28.6 centners per hectare, in Uzbekistan, 19.2 centners, and in Kazakhstan even less, 15.7. Those are the facts, comrades, and unfortunately they are melancholy facts. We have to bring order into irrigation in agriculture, give a certificate of approval to every piece of land that can be irrigated, know the quality of our fields, and determine when to use fertilizer and what kind.”4 In the year that remained for him, Father exerted great efforts to convert the cultivation of rice from a Chinese and Vietnamese phenomenon to a southern Russian one. He would not see the results, but the foundations were laid during his time in office. With the passing of the years, rice cultivation became a profitable branch of agricultural production, not only recouping the expenses for irrigation but

Tomatoes and Superphosphate

385

also making it possible to limit the importing of rice from countries to the south. No one remembers anymore how it all started. Rice became so well acclimated and such a familiar sight on the checkerboard pattern of land allotments in Russia that it came to be regarded as one of our own crops, as though it had always been there.

63 Tomatoes and Superphosphate Instead of Grenade Launchers and Phosgene Father seemed never to rest. On September 5 he wrote two more

memoranda to the CC Presidium. One was about supplying the large cities, above all Moscow and Leningrad, with potatoes, onions, and other vegetables, and about organizing greenhouses for this purpose. Not long before that, Father had met with a world-famous professor on potato cultivation, Aleksandr Georgiyevich Lorkh, and it is most likely that this conversation inspired him to write this memorandum. “Having spent nearly a billion rubles on financing specialized suburban state farms, we now cannot find the insignificant resources for creating hothouse and greenhouse agriculture,” Father complained, but he was complaining about his own poor management.1 The memorandum was a long one, written in professional language with a great many specific details, so I will not reproduce it here. The other memorandum was again about mineral fertilizers. He proposed that since we had not yet developed production of them sufficiently, their export should be restricted: “It does not make sense to sell mineral fertilizers abroad and then, for our own part, to buy grain and livestock products from abroad. Intelligent managers would not begrudge money spent for mineral fertilizers. The additional yield would more than compensate for that spending.”2 According to his estimates, Soviet production of mineral fertilizers would reach 20 million tons in 1963, and in 1964 that would increase to 24 million tons, and so forth, until we reached the standard US level for the use of fertilizer per hectare and the same yield that Americans were obtaining from each hectare.

Tomatoes and Superphosphate

385

also making it possible to limit the importing of rice from countries to the south. No one remembers anymore how it all started. Rice became so well acclimated and such a familiar sight on the checkerboard pattern of land allotments in Russia that it came to be regarded as one of our own crops, as though it had always been there.

63 Tomatoes and Superphosphate Instead of Grenade Launchers and Phosgene Father seemed never to rest. On September 5 he wrote two more

memoranda to the CC Presidium. One was about supplying the large cities, above all Moscow and Leningrad, with potatoes, onions, and other vegetables, and about organizing greenhouses for this purpose. Not long before that, Father had met with a world-famous professor on potato cultivation, Aleksandr Georgiyevich Lorkh, and it is most likely that this conversation inspired him to write this memorandum. “Having spent nearly a billion rubles on financing specialized suburban state farms, we now cannot find the insignificant resources for creating hothouse and greenhouse agriculture,” Father complained, but he was complaining about his own poor management.1 The memorandum was a long one, written in professional language with a great many specific details, so I will not reproduce it here. The other memorandum was again about mineral fertilizers. He proposed that since we had not yet developed production of them sufficiently, their export should be restricted: “It does not make sense to sell mineral fertilizers abroad and then, for our own part, to buy grain and livestock products from abroad. Intelligent managers would not begrudge money spent for mineral fertilizers. The additional yield would more than compensate for that spending.”2 According to his estimates, Soviet production of mineral fertilizers would reach 20 million tons in 1963, and in 1964 that would increase to 24 million tons, and so forth, until we reached the standard US level for the use of fertilizer per hectare and the same yield that Americans were obtaining from each hectare.

386 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 Father did not limit himself to memoranda. The matter was so important that in a discussion at the Central Committee plenum in the Kremlin on December 9, 1963, he made the point that “the development of the chemical industry is the most important condition for raising agricultural production and the standard of living for our people.” The leitmotif of the report he gave at that plenum was that fertilizers, irrigation, and specialization were the guarantees for our future prosperity. In August 1963 he announced the end of the era of five-story apartment buildings, and in December 1963 the Virgin Lands era came to an end. The time had come for intensification of agriculture. Father was laying the groundwork for the future. A future in which the yield for grain would increase more than five times over, from 11 centners per hectare to 60. A future that was fated to happen after his time and without him. But when he gave that report on December 9, 1963, he of course did not know his own future. He spoke about the latest problems and tasks, which had partly come to a head of their own accord and partly had come into sharp outline because of the most disastrous harvest of the century. “The chemical industry,” Father began, seeking to persuade his listeners, “will not only advance agriculture and develop it in a new direction, but will also be a source of profit, ensuring future capital investments in future projects. According to American data [once again he cited the Americans], the profits of chemical companies in the United States are substantial, often 80 percent, exceeding average profits in the processing industries. In the years 1957–1962 the United States invested $2.2 billion in the chemical industry, approximately 13 percent of all capital investments in industry. England and Germany also invested about 10–12 percent each.” We had come to our senses only in 1958, but since then we had accomplished something. “In the five years since 1958 we invested 5.3 billion rubles in the chemical industry. The annual increase in such investments amounts to 27 percent, with an average for the national economy as a whole of 9.6 percent. We have put into operation 35 new chemical plants and 250 large-scale chemical production facilities, and the output of chemical products has increased by 89 percent.” But that was not enough. “The task now is to force the development of the chemical industry by every means and on this basis to accelerate the introduction of chemical production and processes into our national economy.”3 At the plenum, Father proposed that we concentrate our efforts at a point where we could make a breakthrough, as was done at the Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Kursk. For this purpose “we should put a freeze on metallurgy for three years, and transfer those resources to chemistry and thereby accelerate our capital turnover. The chemical plant in Kursk [he had been there in the spring] will pay for itself within a year.” Without chemistry, light industry was doomed to vegetate. Nylon and other synthetic fabrics meant fashionable dresses, stockings, shoes, and the like. “And we, despite the decisions of the Twenty-First Party Congress, continue to overfulfill the plan in heavy industry

Tomatoes and Superphosphate

387

and underfulfill it in light industry,” Father said indignantly. “We are not investing resources in the branches of industry that will enrich us!”4 However, for light industry to make a profit, it was necessary to build and equip plants for producing synthetic fibers and similar production facilities, and to bring into operation new sewing mills and shoe factories. They would pay for themselves within four or five years, and the resources for building them were needed now, immediately. In July, Father had told Orville Freeman that the financing of a program of agrochemical development and light industry was what he preferred, and he wanted to “place that on the shoulders of the military.” In the months since then, he had become more certain than ever of the correctness of his choice and now he officially called for returning to the task of reducing the armed forces, which had been envisaged in a resolution of the Supreme Soviet in January 1960. The carrying out of that decision had been delayed first by the Berlin crisis in 1961 and then the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Since then, dozens of intercontinental ballistic missiles had become operational, and no one would dare attack us now. And since this was so, it would be a shame not to take advantage of the circumstance to reallocate our resources in favor of the chemical industry and the production of consumer goods. Here I summarize Khrushchev’s statements at a CC Presidium meeting on November 10, 1963, where the subject under discussion was the reporting to Pyotr Lomako, head of the State Planning Committee, about a draft plan for the development of the Soviet economy in 1964–1965. “We also ought to return to the question of our troops in neighboring countries,” said Father. “Why do we have troops in Poland? They have their own large army. And it costs us 18 million rubles to maintain them in Poland; that’s twice as expensive as it would be in our own country. With those resources we could build three new chemical plants.” As an additional source of accumulation, Father looked to the expansion by every possible means of cooperative construction of housing of all types, including vacation facilities. Such housing would be paid for out of people’s savings, replacing government investment.5 As a result, a solid sum could be envisioned, according to the estimates of the State Planning Committee, a sum above more than 42 billion rubles. Of that sum, 10.2 billion was designated for the introduction of chemical products and production into agriculture. “During the next seven years with that 42 billion rubles we will build 200 new enterprises and reconstruct more than 500 currently operating enterprises, and we will increase the volume of chemical production by 3 to 3.3 times,” stated Khrushchev in his report to the plenum on December 9, 1963. “By reducing the cost price of production, and by the introduction of synthetic materials, in the period from 1964 to 1970 alone, given capital investments of 42 billion rubles, our country will obtain a net profit of 57 billion rubles, that is, the profit will amount to 15 billion rubles.”6 Father was being as scrupulous as a bookkeeper in calculating how much money should be invested where, and what we would receive in return. It seemed to him that the Russian people would pay close attention to the numbers

388 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 he was citing as income and expenditure, because after all he was their “allunion director,” and they would approve the promising investment of this total amount of capital, which offered the pleasant foretaste of future dividends. In short, he was running ahead of himself, picturing the people as being with him, when in fact the readers of newspapers responded to all these numbers with nothing but annoyance.

64 “Times Have Changed” Father sent his last memorandum, the eighth one for 1963, to the CC

Presidium on November 2. Its subject was the work of the interdistrict production administrations. He still did not have a clear picture of their position in the structure of agricultural production. Most of all he was annoyed by the incompetence of people working on those bodies. The production administrations had not become, as he had hoped, centers for the introduction of new advances in agricultural science and practice, and they were incapable of anything other than continuing to give orders to everyone and about everything. This kind of leadership was not only unhelpful; it was harmful, because “if farm leaders are sufficiently well educated, they don’t need instructions that are issued in a peremptory manner; and as for collective-farm chairmen and state-farm directors who are not well trained, they are helped even less by general orders handed down from above.” “Times have changed,” Father wrote in his memorandum. At one time [in the 1930s] we sent industrial workers to the collective farms, people who had no special education. But now thousands of people have college or high school education, and yet we continue to promote unqualified, “unlicensed” people. However, every branch of agriculture requires profound knowledge. The production administrations, their inspectors and organizers, should engage in the analysis of the efficiency of the work on the farms, function as dispensers of knowledge, of new information. They should be provided with regional research institutes and agrochemical laboratories, equipped as necessary. While we are investing billions of rubles in the mineral fertilizer industry, we do not even have devices for calculating the effectiveness of the fertilizer applied to a particular field at a state or collective farm. Here the German experience may help us. The Germans have been working with agrochemistry for many decades now.

388 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 he was citing as income and expenditure, because after all he was their “allunion director,” and they would approve the promising investment of this total amount of capital, which offered the pleasant foretaste of future dividends. In short, he was running ahead of himself, picturing the people as being with him, when in fact the readers of newspapers responded to all these numbers with nothing but annoyance.

64 “Times Have Changed” Father sent his last memorandum, the eighth one for 1963, to the CC

Presidium on November 2. Its subject was the work of the interdistrict production administrations. He still did not have a clear picture of their position in the structure of agricultural production. Most of all he was annoyed by the incompetence of people working on those bodies. The production administrations had not become, as he had hoped, centers for the introduction of new advances in agricultural science and practice, and they were incapable of anything other than continuing to give orders to everyone and about everything. This kind of leadership was not only unhelpful; it was harmful, because “if farm leaders are sufficiently well educated, they don’t need instructions that are issued in a peremptory manner; and as for collective-farm chairmen and state-farm directors who are not well trained, they are helped even less by general orders handed down from above.” “Times have changed,” Father wrote in his memorandum. At one time [in the 1930s] we sent industrial workers to the collective farms, people who had no special education. But now thousands of people have college or high school education, and yet we continue to promote unqualified, “unlicensed” people. However, every branch of agriculture requires profound knowledge. The production administrations, their inspectors and organizers, should engage in the analysis of the efficiency of the work on the farms, function as dispensers of knowledge, of new information. They should be provided with regional research institutes and agrochemical laboratories, equipped as necessary. While we are investing billions of rubles in the mineral fertilizer industry, we do not even have devices for calculating the effectiveness of the fertilizer applied to a particular field at a state or collective farm. Here the German experience may help us. The Germans have been working with agrochemistry for many decades now.

“The East Wind”

389

“Introducing the advances of science into production is an obligation,” Father concluded, and then summed up his argument as follows: “The production administrations, as well as the Ministry of Agriculture, should be responsible for managing agriculture on a modern level.”1 The essence of the memorandum boiled down to the need to provide more freedom to the directors of enterprises. The fetters should be removed from them, for they themselves knew their own business perfectly well, and would begin to work no worse than Khudenko. Everything indicated that, inwardly, Father’s thinking had ripened almost completely, but he was restrained by the bad harvest that had crashed down upon our country. Crisis conditions were not a time for making fundamental reforms and he decided to wait.

65 “The East Wind” In November 1957, in a speech to Chinese students in Moscow, Mao

Zedong, who was there attending a conference of sixty-four “communist and workers’ parties” and who was verbally still very pro-Moscow, made the pronouncement: “The East wind is prevailing over the West wind.” By 1963, the Maoist “East wind” had shifted and developed into a Sino-Soviet dispute. In 1963 this dispute, which had previously been kept quiet, splashed out onto the pages of Soviet newspapers, and relations with China went sour. The Soviet friendship with Mao was disrupted because of Stalin. The public disclosure of that tyrant’s crimes, his being pulled down from the pedestal, and finally, in 1961, the removal of his body from the Lenin mausoleum—those were things that Mao rightly considered dangerous to his own authority. He decided to strengthen his hold on power by drawing a line between himself and the Soviet Union. In Beijing, Khrushchev was accused of revisionism, of kowtowing to the United States, and in contrast Mao was proclaimed to be the only revolutionary leader in the world. Naturally, Moscow did not like that, but Father did not want to get into an open confrontation with Mao. He thought that reason would gain the upper hand and that they would be able to settle their differences peaceably, but the differences were not smoothed over and the debates became harsher and harsher. Nevertheless, for a time, both countries refrained from public polemics. I am not going to write about the ups and downs of Sino-Soviet relations. It would take us far afield, and that is not the subject of this book. But I cannot

“The East Wind”

389

“Introducing the advances of science into production is an obligation,” Father concluded, and then summed up his argument as follows: “The production administrations, as well as the Ministry of Agriculture, should be responsible for managing agriculture on a modern level.”1 The essence of the memorandum boiled down to the need to provide more freedom to the directors of enterprises. The fetters should be removed from them, for they themselves knew their own business perfectly well, and would begin to work no worse than Khudenko. Everything indicated that, inwardly, Father’s thinking had ripened almost completely, but he was restrained by the bad harvest that had crashed down upon our country. Crisis conditions were not a time for making fundamental reforms and he decided to wait.

65 “The East Wind” In November 1957, in a speech to Chinese students in Moscow, Mao

Zedong, who was there attending a conference of sixty-four “communist and workers’ parties” and who was verbally still very pro-Moscow, made the pronouncement: “The East wind is prevailing over the West wind.” By 1963, the Maoist “East wind” had shifted and developed into a Sino-Soviet dispute. In 1963 this dispute, which had previously been kept quiet, splashed out onto the pages of Soviet newspapers, and relations with China went sour. The Soviet friendship with Mao was disrupted because of Stalin. The public disclosure of that tyrant’s crimes, his being pulled down from the pedestal, and finally, in 1961, the removal of his body from the Lenin mausoleum—those were things that Mao rightly considered dangerous to his own authority. He decided to strengthen his hold on power by drawing a line between himself and the Soviet Union. In Beijing, Khrushchev was accused of revisionism, of kowtowing to the United States, and in contrast Mao was proclaimed to be the only revolutionary leader in the world. Naturally, Moscow did not like that, but Father did not want to get into an open confrontation with Mao. He thought that reason would gain the upper hand and that they would be able to settle their differences peaceably, but the differences were not smoothed over and the debates became harsher and harsher. Nevertheless, for a time, both countries refrained from public polemics. I am not going to write about the ups and downs of Sino-Soviet relations. It would take us far afield, and that is not the subject of this book. But I cannot

390 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 completely ignore those relations. In 1958, Father tried to talk things over openly with Mao and flew especially for that purpose to Beijing at the height of the oppressive Chinese summer. No frank and open talks resulted. Mao behaved in a lordly and condescending manner and lectured Khrushchev about not being afraid of the American “paper tiger,” about getting into confrontations boldly, even a nuclear confrontation. After all, ours would be the victory all the same. Who “we” were Mao did not specify. At the same time he could not refrain from some pranks worthy of a schoolboy. He arranged for their talks to be held at a swimming pool, where he demonstratively displayed his swimming skills, showing off in front of Father, who could hardly swim at all. In another instance Mao ordered that the screen be removed from the window of Father’s bedroom. Let the mosquitoes bite him. Father did not allow himself to be provoked, and ignored the mosquito bites. But he declared that talk of war with the United States was impermissible light-mindedness on the part of a government leader. They did not part on the best of terms. In that same year, 1958, Mao announced the Great Leap Forward, in which the People’s Republic of China, in the course of one five-year plan, would surpass the Soviet Union, catch up with England, and in this way “wipe Khrushchev’s nose for him.” All over China a campaign began that in the end would exhaust the country—“backyard furnaces” for making iron or steel at people’s homes. Various household objects made of metal, such as frying pans, irons, and knives and forks, were melted down in those furnaces to produce lumps of metal that were of no use to anyone. At the same time, in the countryside, the organization of “people’s communes” began. Father took a skeptical attitude toward Mao’s initiatives, but unexpectedly, inside the Soviet Union, Mao found not only critics, such as Father and others like him, but also leaders who sympathized with “reforms” in the Chinese style—including “revolutionaries” in the Soviet Central Committee itself. Even when Mao’s initiatives ended in a resounding fiasco, when the Great Leap Forward and the “people’s communes” led to a famine that took the lives of more than 20 million Chinese, some Soviet leaders continued to think that if only we had not distanced ourselves from Mao and had treated him in a fraternal manner, things would have come out differently. They placed the responsibility on Khrushchev for the difficulties in relations with China—not openly, but among themselves. In the highest echelons of power, those who held such views included not only Shelepin but also— strange as it seemed to me—Kosygin. In the early summer of 1963, both sides agreed to meet and try to clarify their relations. Mao himself did not wish to go to Moscow, but he promised to send a representative delegation. He made that promise and then immediately published in Beijing a letter to the Soviet leaders, accusing them of capitulating to imperialism, being excessively carried away with the “struggle for peace” to the detriment of the revolution, and many other mortal sins. The polemic, hidden under a fig leaf before then, became public. And meeting for negotiations no longer made sense, but Father showed restraint, held his

“The East Wind”

391

tongue, and limited himself to informing the participants in the Central Committee plenum that opened on June 18, 1963. Not wishing to strain relations with Beijing further, he himself did not give the speech about China at the plenum, turning that task over to Suslov. But Mao, who was thirsting for a scandal, did not feel comfortable with restraint. Chinese diplomats were given the order to distribute leaflets with the text of the open letter on the streets of Moscow. Chinese conductors on the train from Beijing to Moscow unfailingly passed out these leaflets to the passengers, but also sent the leaflets flying out the windows of the train as it sped along the vast stretches from station to station in Siberia. In response the Soviet leadership expelled an entire group of the most active Chinese propagandist-diplomats from Moscow. The Chinese, in their turn, published a protest on July 1, but not against the expulsion of the diplomats; they demanded the publication of their letter in Moscow. Needless to say, the conditions held little promise of favorable negotiations, but the preparations for holding them continued, and a date was set. A delegation was to arrive from Beijing in Moscow on July 5, 1963, headed by the general secretary of the Communist Party of China, Deng Xiaoping. By his formal rank, his position was equivalent to that of Khrushchev. But Father no longer expected anything good to come of the meeting, and so he again turned over the assignment to Suslov and decided to ignore the Chinese altogether. In order not to meet Deng Xiaoping at the railroad station, as protocol would have required, Father went to Kiev on July 4, 1963. There he received the foreign minister of Belgium, Paul-Henri Spaak, and then on July 10 he shook the hands of members of a Hungarian delegation headed by Janos Kadar back at a railroad station in Moscow. At the talks with Suslov, Deng Xiaoping behaved in a cold, challenging, and inaccessible manner. I do not know what Deng thought about Mao in those days. Later on, Deng became the great reformer of China, but in 1963 he carried out Mao’s line, strictly. The hopes for arriving at a mutual understanding were completely extinguished, and Khrushchev decided not to postpone an answer any longer. On July 14, 1963, the Moscow newspapers published an open letter from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and an appeal to the working people of the Soviet Union. This contained “open” criticism of the policies of the People’s Republic of China, which until the day before had been a fraternal country, as well as criticism of the Great Leap Forward, the “people’s communes,” and other innovations by Mao. The full text of the Chinese letter of June 14 was appended. After this exchange of “courtesies” in the press, the “confidential negotiations” lost all meaning, but both sides decided to continue to observe the proprieties, which culminated in an official reception in honor of the Chinese

392 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 delegation on July 20, which Father did attend. That same day, Suslov accompanied Deng Xiaoping and his comrades to the Kazan Railway Station in Moscow, from which they departed for Beijing. On July 24, Khrushchev gave a speech to members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), who had gathered at the Kremlin. He informed them about what had happened. An optimist by nature, Father thought that, sooner or later, relations with the Chinese would be adjusted, that our two countries were “destined” to be good neighbors, but that this would happen after Mao and possibly even after he himself, Khrushchev, had passed from power. Not everybody agreed with him, and as I have indicated, Kosygin and Shelepin had no doubt at all that if it hadn’t been for Khrushchev, everything would have been fine in relations with China. In October 1964, Khrushchev was removed. Kosygin became the head of the Soviet government, but relations with Mao did not improve. In February 1965, Kosygin visited North Vietnam in his new official capacity. He tried to come to an agreement about making a brief stop in Beijing to refuel his airplane, and, as if by chance, to meet with Mao. Such practices are observed in diplomacy. Beijing did not respond to his request. Finally the Chinese let it be known that they were agreeable to the refueling stop, but Mao would not meet with Kosygin. Zhou Enlai would come to the Beijing airport in his place. Kosygin swallowed this humiliation, but it turned out not to be the last. During their conversation, which to Kosygin seemed somewhat promising, Zhou Enlai indicated that a meeting with Mao might be possible during Kosygin’s stop on his way back from Hanoi. Kosygin was overjoyed, but as it turned out, his joy was premature. The Chinese suddenly fell silent, and when Kosygin flew from Hanoi, he had to make a refueling stop not in Beijing but in Tashkent. Only there, back on Soviet territory, did word “suddenly” come that he could fly home by way of China. In spite of this second humiliation, Kosygin flew from Tashkent for a “refueling stop” in Beijing. There at last the desired meeting with Mao took place. But what a meeting! Mao reprimanded his guest as though he were a naughty schoolboy and sent him home empty-handed. Relations between the two countries returned to normal only after Mao passed from power.1

John Kenneth Galbraith

393

66 John Kenneth Galbraith Despite the Cuban missile crisis, relations between Khrushchev and

Kennedy did not grow worse, but rather a feeling of trust developed—to the extent that any rival can be trusted. Both leaders were clearly aware of their mutual and inseparable responsibility for the future of the world. At that time, Father frequently repeated that each of them, Kennedy and himself, while defending the national interests of his country, was aware of their joint responsibility for life on this Earth and were fully determined not to allow a mutually destructive war to occur. Step by step the White House and the Kremlin groped for ways to resolve their problems, to promote peaceful coexistence and understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union, though naturally only as long as the benefits did not outweigh the detriments. In 1963 the Kremlin and the White House agreed to establish a “hot line” that would not be dependent on Western Union’s transoceanic telegraph cable— or more exactly, they rented two wires on that cable. On August 5, 1963, the foreign policy leaders of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain—Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hume—signed a treaty banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in space, and under water. After the treaty was signed, Father invited all participants in the negotiations to go with him to Pitsunda, where they could hold further discussions, unhindered, about problems requiring joint resolution. At approximately that same time, in mid-1963, Kennedy decided to propose, indirectly and diplomatically, not forgetting about his own interests, a couple of advisers for Father on the question of reforming the Soviet economy. Earlier, in 1962, the White House had correctly guessed that Khrushchev was preparing for a new stage in his economic reforms, an even more profound decentralization of the Soviet economy involving simplifying relations between producers and the government. Intelligence analysts in both countries read the newspapers of the other countries carefully, Soviet analysts in Washington and American analysts in Moscow. Sensible people in Washington understood that neither Liberman and Lisichkin nor Belkin and Birman could begin a discussion in Pravda without the support and approval of Khrushchev himself. But then the missile crisis had erupted, and President Kennedy had other things to think about besides Khrushchev’s economic innovations. Now, when everything had

394 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 more or less settled down, it occurred to Kennedy to send an intelligent person to Moscow, someone who was restrained and who would know what kind of advice might be given to Khrushchev that would be useful from the White House’s point of view. Not only Kennedy but also the leaders of other countries knew that Father took a favorable attitude toward smart, or even simply clever, ambassadors. He readily established rapport with them, held conversations with them at length on all possible topics, invited them to the dacha at Gorki-9, and not to Novo-Ogaryovo, which was intended for official receptions of foreigners. In particular, Father had especially warm relations with the Yugoslav ambassador, Veljko Mićunović, and the American ambassador, Llewellyn Thompson. The person Kennedy finally chose was John Kenneth Galbraith, an economics professor at Harvard. His theory was that convergence was under way between the two rival social systems, that the political and ideological contradictions between them were being smoothed over against a general background of economic progress and the socialization process under way in both societies. As a result, capitalism and socialism would find a common language, and a new society of universal prosperity would emerge as a synthesis of the two rival systems, which would continue to converge. Kennedy was a friend of Galbraith’s and knew about this scholar’s theories firsthand, and it was probably for that reason that he invited Galbraith to the White House in the summer of 1963 and proposed that he go to Moscow to represent the United States. And not just represent it, but try to convey to Khrushchev the latest ideas of world economic thought that were blowing in the wind. Was that the American president’s intention? Naturally he did not suggest that Galbraith try to encourage Khrushchev to lean toward capitalism. But the dominant economic theory in the West in those years assigned an essential role to government—not to manage the economy directly, but to regulate it and influence it in the direction of further development. And now Galbraith’s theory of convergence had come along! It provided grounds for mutual understanding, which is a rare thing in world affairs, and for that reason especially valuable. Kennedy’s proposal frightened Galbraith. His life had been going smoothly, but now he was being asked to throw over his successful academic career, exchange it for work with the State Department, and go to Moscow of all places to teach Khrushchev “market economics.” But Khrushchev considered this phrase tantamount to blasphemy. On the other hand, he couldn’t refuse a request from a president, and not just any president, but his old and good friend Jack Kennedy. Nevertheless Galbraith did say no. Kennedy reasoned with him for a long time, explaining that the Soviet Union was at a crossroads. Which direction would the Russian giant take, toward greater decentralization and freedom of managerial decisionmaking or back to the strict vertical command system? Not only the fate of the Soviet Union but also the future of its rivals and its allies would depend on that choice. Naturally the president was interested above all

John Kenneth Galbraith

395

in the well-being of his own country, but in today’s world everything is interconnected. “Hearing you tell firsthand about how the modern world economy is organized, about its achievements and potential, will surely make Khrushchev reflect further on such issues,” Kennedy continued, trying to persuade Galbraith. “It is no accident that in his speeches Khrushchev refers to the experience of capitalist America more often than to the works of Lenin. No one could handle this mission as well as you can, Galbraith.” Kennedy hit the nail on the head. Father not only referred to the experience of capitalists but also, where he considered it useful, borrowed from their accomplishments. In other words, intuitively and empirically, he was putting into practice in his socialist conditions the idea of convergence, carrying out the Harvard professor’s ideas without realizing it. Khrushchev and Galbraith had every possibility of finding points of mutual understanding. But only if they chanced to meet. “The president’s words made an impression on me,” Galbraith admitted to me many years later. “I wavered.” Galbraith was shaken but did not give in. He and Kennedy agreed to meet once again, but they never did. On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated, and a year later Khrushchev was ousted. Lyndon Johnson, the new president, knew nothing about the Harvard professor, and was not about to offer advice to the Soviet leaders on how they could best arrange their affairs. In turn, Father’s successors, Brezhnev and even Kosygin, had no need for advice from Western economics professors, especially not American ones. They did not invite foreign ambassadors to their dachas, nor did they have heart-to-heart conversations with them. It was in the mid-1990s that Galbraith told me about that long-ago conversation with Kennedy. Despite his ninety years of age, he continued to teach at Harvard. Of course Khrushchev would not have allowed Galbraith to restructure the Soviet Union along American lines. He defended the interests of his own country to the last. Sometimes perhaps he behaved in too arrogant a manner, but he would never retreat, not one iota, before the West or the East. And yet Galbraith might have been able to put some fresh ideas into Khrushchev’s head, ideas that, as interpreted and expounded by Father, could have served the welfare of the Soviet economy and the welfare of us all. But it did not happen. It was not fated to be. There remain only the reminiscences of Galbraith, full of regrets that he never did become the US ambassador to the Soviet Union.

396 Unforeseen Delay: 1963

67 “The Same Thing, Painted a Different Color” On August 20, 1963, Father departed on a two-week vacation to Yu-

goslavia. As usual, he went on vacation with his entire family. Tito suggested that Father stay on the island of Brioni, next to his own residence there. Thus they could relax comfortably and talk about many things. But Father only called it a vacation. His main goal was to get a firsthand feeling for Yugoslav socialism, to gain an understanding of how Yugoslavia’s economy differed from ours. And if it differed in a better way, then everything good about it could be borrowed. Possibly people in Yugoslavia knew the answers to questions he himself had raised in previous years. After thanking his hosts for the invitation to Brioni, Father asked Tito to arrange a trip for him around the country, so that he could stop and visit at industrial enterprises and agricultural cooperatives. Tito readily agreed. He was proud of his country, and did not want to miss an opportunity to brag about how well off Yugoslavs were. It was flattering to him that Khrushchev finally had come to learn from them after so many years of disputes and accusations against one another. The schedule for the trip was quickly agreed upon. It was a crowded vacation—visits to coal mines, factories, rural cooperatives. Of his own accord, Tito added visits to the capitals of all the constituent republics of Yugoslavia, so that none of them would feel injured or insulted. As a result, there was hardly any time left for the beaches of Brioni, the island where Tito lived. Father had decided not to take this look at the Yugoslav experience by himself. He invited the party secretaries of the two most authoritative Soviet provinces to come with him, those of Moscow and Leningrad—Nikolai Yegorychev and Vasily Tolstikov respectively—as well as the Central Committee secretary who was “responsible” for socialist countries, Yuri Andropov. He had long-range considerations in mind. Many people in Moscow continued to treat the Yugoslavs with suspicion. Father calculated that, on his return home, should he decide to speak about applying the Yugoslav experience, he would prefer not to be alone in fighting against any opponents. At any rate, in a “slippery” business like this, it was a good idea to have witnesses.

“The Same Thing, Painted a Different Color”

397

In Belgrade, Father the “vacationer” was received by an honor guard, and in response he said a few words of welcome, followed by a ceremony of laying wreaths on the tomb of the unknown soldier. Foreign agencies noted especially that in his speeches Khrushchev stated that “the Soviet Union is ready to make a step toward the further democratization of its society.” Father had in mind the draft of a new constitution. The work on that had entered its final stages. I will briefly describe how Father “vacationed” that year. On August 21, the day after his arrival by plane, Father—and the rest of us along with him—went to a plant that produced tractors in the suburbs of Belgrade. There he spent a long time talking with the director, the chairman of the workers’ council, and a large number of other people at the factory. On August 22, he was in Skopje, Macedonia. It had recently been destroyed by a powerful earthquake, and the city lay in ruins. Soviet military engineers were looking into ways of helping the victims. They had arrived in Skopje from Hungary. On August 23, Father flew to the capital of Montenegro, a tribute he had to pay for the sake of politeness. On August 24, he spent a whole day at a shipyard in Split (Dalmatia), and in the evening crossed over by cutter from nearby Dubrovnik to the island of Brioni again. Here we spent four days, Father talking with Tito, and the rest of us enjoying the beaches, splashing in the Mediterranean waters, saltier than we were accustomed to. Our swimming was interrupted by an excursion in the presidential yacht along the coast of Istria, with a visit to an ancient Roman amphitheater and a resort called Golden Cliffs. On August 29, we left Brioni for Slovenia, where Tito had a mountain residence. The walks and talks there were accompanied by fishing in a lake seething with trout that had not been fed for the past four days. We ecstatically pulled in fish after fish, which took the bait as quickly as we could cast our lines. Even Father, giving in to the universal enthusiasm, put his hand to a rod and reel, probably for the first and last time in his life. He didn’t like fishing. By nature he was an active person, and felt awkward having to wait in a situation not under his control to see whether the fish would bite or not. Hunting and mushroom-gathering were a different story, and the same was true of just plain walking. You and not the fish decide what to do and where to go. On August 30, Father was in the Slovenian town of Velenje, where he visited such places as the Ljubljana agricultural complex and a pig farm, among other sites. On August 31, Father traveled to some coal mines, where he was given a miner’s hat and lantern as a welcoming gift. Then he inspected a lignite mine and had lengthy discussions about the workers’ councils and the Yugoslav method of managing the economy. On September 1, we were already in Zagreb in Croatia, first at the Workers University and then at a factory complex for organic chemicals.

398 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 On September 2, Father returned to Belgrade, where he visited an industrial exhibition on the shores of the Sava River. In the evening a farewell reception was held, and on the next day we were already home in Moscow. The entirety of this already-crowded itinerary was supplemented by almost unending conversations. They were not negotiations, but precisely conversations—with Tito and his deputies Alexander Ranković and Edvard Kardelj, and also with the head of the trade unions, Svetozar Vukmanović-Tempo (whom I have mentioned before); the Yugoslav foreign minister, Koča Popović; and many other Yugoslav leaders. Father questioned all of them separately about the principles and the particular features of their system of economic management, and with one voice they praised the Yugoslav model. Wishing to help Father at any suitable occasion, mainly during walks, when I was strolling along next to an assistant to the Yugoslav president, General Cernobrn—some distance behind Father and Tito, who had become an inseparable pair—discussing without a translator or witnesses, I tried to extract from Cernobrn the secrets of Yugoslavia, which he eagerly shared with me, and then in the evening I would tell Father my “discoveries.” Father was satisfied with the “vacation.” One less riddle remained before him. Of course, he had not found answers to the question of what we should do in our own country, but he had discovered something: “The workers’ councils at the factories are advisory bodies.” That is how he shared his impressions about his trip at a CC Presidium meeting. “Yugoslav economic practices are similar to ours, but there is a lot of window dressing. The people’s attitude toward us was good.”1 “It’s the same thing as in our country, only painted a different color.” That was how he answered my question during an evening walk. Yes, the workers’ councils, about which the young Soviet economist Gennady Lisichkin had propagandized in his newspaper and magazine articles, and for whose sake Father had gone to Yugoslavia, had disappointed him. He did not return to that subject, just as he did not listen to Lisichkin’s proposals. It would be up to him to solve his problems himself.

Tourists and Unlocking the Border

399

68 Tourists and Unlocking the Border The workers’ councils at Yugoslav factories did not meet Father’s ex-

pectations, but the abundance of Western tourists, especially Germans, on the beaches of Istria astounded him. It was simple, Tito explained: the Yugoslav leadership had merely “unlocked” the borders, reducing entry and exit procedures to basic formalities. That was the whole trick. “But aren’t you afraid of spies?” Father was curious. Stalin’s obsession with spies was firmly lodged in the Soviet consciousness. “Yes, of course, but there aren’t many spies. And we do catch them. On the other hand, the tourists bring in a lot of foreign currency.” Tito smiled. “Our country comes out the winner.” Father began questioning Tito about the details. But what Tito told him could not in any way have “entered the gates,” or been easily accepted, in our country. Moreover, the Yugoslav leaders did not keep their own citizens under lock and key. Whoever wanted to could go earn money in West Germany, work there for several years, buy a car, save up for a house, and then come back. Again this was to Yugoslavia’s advantage. People used German marks to build homes for themselves in Yugoslavia, putting money into the Yugoslav economy. “And they don’t run off?” Father was surprised. “Some remain abroad, but only a few,” Tito answered. “No one is waiting to welcome them with open arms over there. Most of them return, and we have no regrets about those who don’t. Besides, they send money back to their relatives here, and so they continue to work for our benefit.” This unheard-of freedom to travel made an enormous impression on Father. He had come in search of one thing and, as often happens, found something else. He seriously intended to apply the Yugoslav experience to our country, to open our borders and let anyone, whoever wanted to, enter or leave. If a system like that could bring in so much wealth for Yugoslavia, it could be a hundred times more profitable for us. In the Soviet Union there were many more beautiful sightseeing spots for tourists than in Yugoslavia. And Soviet citizens deserved to be trusted no less than Yugoslavs. Why should we keep them locked up? Actually, such questions had arisen in Father’s mind even earlier. But everyone had grown accustomed to the kind of closed society we had in the Soviet Union. It seemed that it was necessary. The trip to Yugoslavia revealed in a flash that it was not necessary at all. Father decided to act.

400 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 “They have many foreign tourists—700,000 a year. The Yugoslav experience with tourism ought to be studied. [The word “tourism” is underlined in Malin’s notes.] Send our border-guard personnel there to study their bordercontrol system. After a few years, possibly, we too could open our borders for free entry to and exit from our country.” That was the program Father outlined for the near future, and the Presidium members supported him.1 But not enough time remained. He did not succeed in opening our borders during his time in office, although he did begin to do so. In 1964, 1.33 million foreigners visited and traveled around the Soviet Union, some in organized groups, some individually. That was not so much compared to tourism in Italy, France, Germany, or even Yugoslavia, but the progress was quite notable if one kept in mind that in 1955 only 92,500 persons visited the Soviet Union, mainly from the socialist countries.2 It’s true that if you count only Western visitors, the numbers come out differently. In 1953 the Soviet Union admitted only 43 foreigners who had hard currency to spend in our country. In 1956 the number rose to approximately 2,000. In 1964 it was substantially larger—20,000. The trend was obvious.3 At the Presidium meeting in September 1963, those who would become the heirs of Khrushchev voted in unison in favor of his proposals for unlocking the borders. But in October 1964, they decided just as unanimously that those proposals had represented “voluntarism.” It was not until the 1990s that our borders were finally opened.

69 Send Them to Prison or Give Them an Award? On August 21, 1963, a TU-124 passenger jet plane flying from Tallin

to Moscow made an emergency landing on the Neva River in Leningrad. On takeoff, just before leaving the ground, the front-wheel support of the plane’s landing gear had apparently struck a rock, whose presence there no one could account for. The plane had managed to take off, but it could no longer make a normal landing, because of the damaged landing gear. In such a situation the usual procedure is to fly in a holding pattern to use up extra fuel, because excess fuel is dangerous in a crash landing. And wouldn’t you know it? It so happened

400 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 “They have many foreign tourists—700,000 a year. The Yugoslav experience with tourism ought to be studied. [The word “tourism” is underlined in Malin’s notes.] Send our border-guard personnel there to study their bordercontrol system. After a few years, possibly, we too could open our borders for free entry to and exit from our country.” That was the program Father outlined for the near future, and the Presidium members supported him.1 But not enough time remained. He did not succeed in opening our borders during his time in office, although he did begin to do so. In 1964, 1.33 million foreigners visited and traveled around the Soviet Union, some in organized groups, some individually. That was not so much compared to tourism in Italy, France, Germany, or even Yugoslavia, but the progress was quite notable if one kept in mind that in 1955 only 92,500 persons visited the Soviet Union, mainly from the socialist countries.2 It’s true that if you count only Western visitors, the numbers come out differently. In 1953 the Soviet Union admitted only 43 foreigners who had hard currency to spend in our country. In 1956 the number rose to approximately 2,000. In 1964 it was substantially larger—20,000. The trend was obvious.3 At the Presidium meeting in September 1963, those who would become the heirs of Khrushchev voted in unison in favor of his proposals for unlocking the borders. But in October 1964, they decided just as unanimously that those proposals had represented “voluntarism.” It was not until the 1990s that our borders were finally opened.

69 Send Them to Prison or Give Them an Award? On August 21, 1963, a TU-124 passenger jet plane flying from Tallin

to Moscow made an emergency landing on the Neva River in Leningrad. On takeoff, just before leaving the ground, the front-wheel support of the plane’s landing gear had apparently struck a rock, whose presence there no one could account for. The plane had managed to take off, but it could no longer make a normal landing, because of the damaged landing gear. In such a situation the usual procedure is to fly in a holding pattern to use up extra fuel, because excess fuel is dangerous in a crash landing. And wouldn’t you know it? It so happened

Send Them to Prison or Give Them an Award?

401

that, on top of the damage caused by the rock, the plane also had a faulty fuel gauge. It showed two and a half tons of fuel, when actually the tanks were empty. The engines sputtered out, and the plane began to fall, with Leningrad directly beneath it. Such things happen with fuel gauges. A decade later, in the mid-1970s, the American pilot Gary Powers found he had run out of fuel in a helicopter he was flying over Los Angeles. On May 1, 1960, he had emerged without a scratch when his U-2 spy plane was shot down by a Soviet missile as he flew over Chelyabinsk. But he perished because of a fuel-gauge malfunction on a routine “chopper” flight over Los Angeles. The pilots of the TU-124 had better luck, or rather, they were able to maneuver their aircraft and choose an open space for a landing. In Leningrad, that meant the Neva River, toward which they made a gliding descent. The airplane splashed down on the Neva just after the Liteiny Bridge, but it nearly ran into a tugboat that was towing a large, flat barge. The pilot of the TU-124, whose name was Viktor Mostovoi, pulled the control stick sharply toward himself, causing the airplane to lift and clear the barge, then land on the river again and slide for several dozen yards, coming to a stop against the concrete abutment of the next bridge downriver. The captain of the tugboat threw a rope up to the pilot’s window, which had been broken in the process, and the airplane was tied to the side of the barge. The passengers crawled out onto the barge. The people were saved, but the airplane sank by the edge of the embankment. This spectacular landing on the Neva was filmed by Nikolai Vinogradarsky, a cameraman who was working on a film about the construction of a railroad bridge nearby. When the TU-124 came sliding and leaping down the Neva, his camera captured the event. The fantastic sequence was thus recorded for posterity. The incident ended happily for everyone except Mostovoi. The Aeroflot authorities carried out an investigation and blamed the pilot. But the matter did not end there. The passengers whose lives had been saved found out about this flagrant injustice, and in late summer 1964—the case dragged on for a long time—they wrote a letter to Khrushchev. Father called Marshal Yevgeny Loginov, head of the Civil Air Fleet, “onto the carpet” and gave him a good talkingto. As a result, they decided not to punish the crew of the airplane, but to give them an award. Mostovoi was recommended for the Order of the Red Banner. Still, luck was not with Mostovoi. In October 1964, after Khrushchev was pensioned off, the Ministry of Civil Aviation decided to shelve the “voluntaristic” decision about giving an award to the crew of the TU-124 for its “display of heroism and resourcefulness.” Thank goodness the investigation of the case was not revived. The members of the crew were able to continue their flying careers. The case of the TU-124 was not an isolated incident. Not only in aviation but also in the army and navy, people were severely punished when any oversight occurred, not just an accident but when anything went wrong. The commander

402 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 was the first to be blamed, whether or not he could have had an effect on the course of events. There was a stern logic to this: a person was put in command to see that inappropriate situations did not arise. On July 4, 1961, an accident happened to the first Soviet nuclear submarine, the K-19. After it had been in service for nineteen months, because of the constant vibration, the welding cracked on the pipes around the cooling system of the nuclear reactor and a leak of radioactive water occurred. There was a danger that the reactor would become overheated, and in the worst-case scenario it might break apart. The commander sent welders into the zone of deadly radiation. The problem was corrected and a nuclear disaster was prevented, but fourteen crew members died. The decision was made to put the commander on trial because of the accident and the deaths. I was told by some seamen that in this case too an appeal was made to Khrushchev. (In 2002, an American film, K-19: The Widowmaker, was based on this incident, with Harrison Ford as captain of the submarine.) They say that when Father heard about the judicial proceedings, he was furious and severely reprimanded Admiral Gorshkov. As a result, the incident involving the K-19 submarine was reclassified from being a crime to being a feat of heroism, and the commander was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Lesser awards were given to the other officers, and the seamen received medals. But all those are exceptions to the rule—the result of interference by civilians in military affairs, in this case the civilian being Khrushchev.

70 Day by Day On July 24, 1963, Khrushchev led a conference in Moscow attended

by the first secretaries of the ruling parties of the Comecon countries (the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) and the Warsaw Pact. China was not the main topic of discussion; instead, it was economic cooperation and specialization. According to the view Father had expressed many times, the economies of these countries ought to be integrated. A single supranational economy ought to arise from the many separate individual economies, with each country finding a place for itself, an area of specialization, so that it could supply all the other countries with its products. For the umpteenth time they agreed to think about

402 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 was the first to be blamed, whether or not he could have had an effect on the course of events. There was a stern logic to this: a person was put in command to see that inappropriate situations did not arise. On July 4, 1961, an accident happened to the first Soviet nuclear submarine, the K-19. After it had been in service for nineteen months, because of the constant vibration, the welding cracked on the pipes around the cooling system of the nuclear reactor and a leak of radioactive water occurred. There was a danger that the reactor would become overheated, and in the worst-case scenario it might break apart. The commander sent welders into the zone of deadly radiation. The problem was corrected and a nuclear disaster was prevented, but fourteen crew members died. The decision was made to put the commander on trial because of the accident and the deaths. I was told by some seamen that in this case too an appeal was made to Khrushchev. (In 2002, an American film, K-19: The Widowmaker, was based on this incident, with Harrison Ford as captain of the submarine.) They say that when Father heard about the judicial proceedings, he was furious and severely reprimanded Admiral Gorshkov. As a result, the incident involving the K-19 submarine was reclassified from being a crime to being a feat of heroism, and the commander was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Lesser awards were given to the other officers, and the seamen received medals. But all those are exceptions to the rule—the result of interference by civilians in military affairs, in this case the civilian being Khrushchev.

70 Day by Day On July 24, 1963, Khrushchev led a conference in Moscow attended

by the first secretaries of the ruling parties of the Comecon countries (the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) and the Warsaw Pact. China was not the main topic of discussion; instead, it was economic cooperation and specialization. According to the view Father had expressed many times, the economies of these countries ought to be integrated. A single supranational economy ought to arise from the many separate individual economies, with each country finding a place for itself, an area of specialization, so that it could supply all the other countries with its products. For the umpteenth time they agreed to think about

Day by Day

403

it, to draw up the necessary documents, and then make a decision. That decision was made, but after the Khrushchev era. On August 20, 1963, the New York Times noted that in Moscow life had become better that summer despite the bad harvest. There were more goods in the stores, and people were breathing more freely, “especially the intelligentsia,” the Times reporter emphasized. On August 22, restoration had been completed on the Kremlin chimes, and they rang out again from the Spassky Tower. On September 16, Khrushchev flew to Volgograd. During the previous year he had reduced to a minimum his trips to the different regions of our country, but he could not just sit there in Moscow. Not enough information came in. It was better to see once with your own eyes than to read through mountains of documents, sometimes highly dubious ones. He drove around among the fields, and at meetings both impromptu and prescheduled he talked about fertilizer, irrigation, and (future) cheap rice from the Don and Kuban regions, as well as about sprinkler systems for the fields. The next day he inspected the Volgograd hydroelectric power plant, and from there went to a construction site for a synthetic rubber plant. On September 18, he moved on to Astrakhan. A discussion had been going on there about building a paper production complex that would use the bulrushes that abounded locally as a raw material, instead of wood or cloth. The project had been under discussion since 1961, some specialists being in favor and others categorically opposed. Nevertheless, construction had begun. Father suggested that while they were arguing about the cellulose composition of bulrushes, they should start producing paper with the wood of fast-growing poplar trees, as was done in Italy, where trees were few. “Poplars require a lot of water and heat, but there’s plenty of that here in the Volga delta, and later on, you can come to agreement about the bulrushes.” That’s how he summed up the discussion.1 Then he switched over to a discussion of the prospects for a Lower Volga hydroelectric plant, whose construction had already been planned, with a capacity of 2.5 million kilowatts. Officials of the electric power industry were insisting on this project, but there were many who objected. In order to protect the Volga-Akhtubinsk plain from being flooded, it would be necessary to build earthen dams along the shore for 400 kilometers, work that would cost nearly a billion rubles. “Wouldn’t it be better to invest that billion for irrigating 600,000 hectares of land along the Lower Volga, and to bring irrigation to 2 million hectares somewhere else where such huge earth-moving work would not be required?” That was how Father expressed his doubts. “We need to make a rational decision, and not only on this question. We are preparing to develop an aluminum industry, which would absorb a great deal of electric power, and to base that on the Volga power plants. But wouldn’t it be more to our advantage economically to shift this work to eastern regions, to the Angara and Yenisei rivers?”

404 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 They agreed not to do anything in the heat of the moment but to return to this whole range of problems another time.2 As a result the Lower Volga hydroelectric plant was not built after all, and the aluminum plants were indeed erected, although this was after Father’s time, at Bratsk (on the Angara) and near Krasnoyarsk (on the Yenisei). After the meeting about power plants Father disappeared from view. September is the height of the hunting season for water birds, and Father was a passionate hunter. He could not deny himself this pleasure. On September 25, he showed up in Krasnodar, accompanied by the head of the Russian Federation, Gennady Voronov. The same topics were aired: fertilizer and irrigation. “For grain alone we need 40 million tons of fertilizer, and it will cost 1.7 billion to produce that fertilizer,” Father said in one of his speeches. “The hands of the planners tremble at the thought of having to allocate such enormous sums to agricultural chemistry.” Father promised to bring the “planners” around.3 From Krasnodar he traveled on, to the Kuban region and then to southern Ukraine, to Novaya Kakhovka, on the Lower Dnieper, where a hydroelectric plant had been built in the 1950s. That area, like almost every other, had suffered from drought that year. Not a drop of rain had fallen since the spring. The topics of discussion were the same: fertilizer, irrigation, and economic management. Before making a costly decision, Father gathered people together who knew about both irrigation and crop cultivation. He did not give a speech himself, but listened to them and asked many questions. Father carried out a reconnaissance trip around the territory, where irrigation canals were soon going to be dug. That was on September 30, 1963, at Kherson. On that day the first rain of the entire summer and autumn fell in southern Ukraine. The people there commented that it was a good sign. Father was satisfied. From Kherson he went to the Crimea, to the government dacha at Livadia for a short vacation, and on October 14 he invited the Ukrainian leaders to come there, along with land-improvement scientists. They discussed in detail the plans for irrigating the Crimea and the Black Sea coastal region. On October 17, 1963, Father attended the opening of the first stretch of the Northern Crimean Canal from Khakovka to Perekop, on the northern boundary of the Crimean peninsula. The trip to Perekop was not so much a work assignment as a holiday. There had been such a shortage of positive emotions during 1963. And he fully enjoyed feeling them on this occasion. And the weather at last gave good grounds for happiness. Drenching rains fell on all of the Crimean peninsula and southern Ukraine, and the winter crops were able to drink their fill. But there was still a long way to go before the harvest of 1964. A plenum of the Central Committee was scheduled for December 1963. (I have written all that I wanted to about that plenum earlier, in Chapter 63.) A program for the production of fertilizers was to be adopted at that plenum, but the newspaper writers couldn’t wait. During the autumn they vied with each

Day by Day

405

other to report on the construction of the largest phosphate plant in Europe, at Kingisepp in Estonia. They also reported on a nitrogen fertilizer plant in Kemerovo (in western Siberia), on large-scale chemical works in Georgia, and about the gigantic Berezniki chemical complex (near Perm). On November 3, 1963, at the government’s Lenin Hills Reception Center, a wedding was held for the cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova and Andriyan Nikolayev. On this nuptial occasion the “chief marriage arranger,” the noted missile and rocket designer Sergei Korolyov, telephoned Father to invite him to the ceremony. As a result the decision was made that this would be a government event and the expenses would be paid out of the public treasury. I too wangled an invitation. Surrounded by so many guests who were present solely for the sake of protocol, the young couple felt constrained. But the guests went all-out to celebrate. The retired Kliment Voroshilov competed with Khrushchev in offering toasts to the bride and groom. Valentina and Andriyan smiled bashfully in response. Finally the dignitaries subsided and let the principals go off to finish their spree—or more exactly, to really celebrate their wedding at Zvyozdny Gorodok (Star Town), where Soviet cosmonauts resided. The next day the front page of Pravda featured a photo of the newlyweds. A year went by, and the “cosmic couple” became the proud parents of a “cosmic child.” Later they got divorced. In the Kremlin on November 6, 1963, Father received the heads of about twenty US corporations. Today people would say that this meeting was evidence of the Soviet Union’s increased attractiveness for investors. On November 12, Father was in the Kiev area, not in the city itself, but at a government dacha overlooking the Dnieper. He was preparing his report to the Central Committee plenum scheduled for December. He did not know that with this report, in the next to last year of his time in power, he was not only outlining plans for the future but also summing up his political career. And it’s a good thing he didn’t know that. Of course, while working on his report, he could not isolate himself completely from Moscow and the outside world. The mail arrived regularly, but he received almost no visitors. The only exceptions were General Abdullah Nasution, Indonesia’s defense minister, the second most important man in that country, and the foreign minister of Denmark, Per Haekkerup. Khrushchev was preparing for an official visit to Denmark shortly thereafter. On November 20, he took the night train to Moscow. The evening of November 22, Foreign Minister Gromyko called to inform him about the tragedy in the United States: President Kennedy had been killed. The next day Father went to the US embassy in Moscow to offer condolences. On December 18, Father went to the permanent Exhibition of Economic Achievements, in Moscow, to view a display of nonwoven fabrics, both our own and those made abroad. He had read about this promising new technology and now had a chance to see it with his own eyes. He looked it over and approved.

406 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 Also on December 18, fighting broke out in Red Square between African students attending Moscow universities and their Russian “friends.” One Ghanaian was killed. But there was also pleasant news. The Friendship oil pipeline had reached Schwedt in East Germany that same day, and in the Tajik republic the laying of a 120-kilometer pipeline for natural gas from the deposits at Kzyl-Kushmuk to Dushanbe, the republic’s capital, had been completed. On December 28, 1963, Father went again to the Exhibition of Economic Achievements. This time he inspected exhibits on the use of plastics in shipbuilding, as well as samples of tires containing cord made of synthetic fibers; water and sewer pipes made of plastic, replacing iron, steel, and copper; and a new type of bulky synthetic yarn. All this was the embodiment of new technology that had found its way with difficulty through the bureaucratic maze of the State Planning Committee. In the evening that same day, at the Kremlin Palace, Father attended a performance of Prokofiev’s The Love for the Three Oranges put on by the Lithuanian Theater of Opera and Ballet. It had never been staged in Moscow before, and he could not let this rare spectacle go by without seeing it.

71 Time to Decide Father had mixed feelings about the results of 1963. I am not talking

about agriculture, where bad luck is always possible. Industry, too, was a cause for concern, with its chronic nonfulfillment of plans that had seemed to be realistic. On the other hand, the growth since 1953 was impressive: the smelting of iron had increased from 39.6 to 58.7 million tons, and of steel from 54.9 to 80.2 million tons; the extraction of oil had increased from 113 to 206 million tons, and of natural gas from 29.9 to 91.5 billion cubic meters; and the production of electricity had increased from 235 to 412 billion kilowatt hours. It’s true that, just as before, production of consumer goods was limping along. The output of textiles had increased only by 14 percent, and of footwear, 30 percent. A shamefully small amount! During the preceding decade, government procurement prices for agricultural products had risen: from 97 kopecks for a centner of grain in 1952 to 7 rubles,

406 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 Also on December 18, fighting broke out in Red Square between African students attending Moscow universities and their Russian “friends.” One Ghanaian was killed. But there was also pleasant news. The Friendship oil pipeline had reached Schwedt in East Germany that same day, and in the Tajik republic the laying of a 120-kilometer pipeline for natural gas from the deposits at Kzyl-Kushmuk to Dushanbe, the republic’s capital, had been completed. On December 28, 1963, Father went again to the Exhibition of Economic Achievements. This time he inspected exhibits on the use of plastics in shipbuilding, as well as samples of tires containing cord made of synthetic fibers; water and sewer pipes made of plastic, replacing iron, steel, and copper; and a new type of bulky synthetic yarn. All this was the embodiment of new technology that had found its way with difficulty through the bureaucratic maze of the State Planning Committee. In the evening that same day, at the Kremlin Palace, Father attended a performance of Prokofiev’s The Love for the Three Oranges put on by the Lithuanian Theater of Opera and Ballet. It had never been staged in Moscow before, and he could not let this rare spectacle go by without seeing it.

71 Time to Decide Father had mixed feelings about the results of 1963. I am not talking

about agriculture, where bad luck is always possible. Industry, too, was a cause for concern, with its chronic nonfulfillment of plans that had seemed to be realistic. On the other hand, the growth since 1953 was impressive: the smelting of iron had increased from 39.6 to 58.7 million tons, and of steel from 54.9 to 80.2 million tons; the extraction of oil had increased from 113 to 206 million tons, and of natural gas from 29.9 to 91.5 billion cubic meters; and the production of electricity had increased from 235 to 412 billion kilowatt hours. It’s true that, just as before, production of consumer goods was limping along. The output of textiles had increased only by 14 percent, and of footwear, 30 percent. A shamefully small amount! During the preceding decade, government procurement prices for agricultural products had risen: from 97 kopecks for a centner of grain in 1952 to 7 rubles,

Time to Decide

407

56 kopecks in 1963; prices paid for potatoes went from 47 kopecks to 7 rubles, 10 kopecks; for vegetables from 1 ruble, 92 kopecks to 7 rubles, 52 kopecks; for ham, from 2 rubles, 3 kopecks to 79 rubles, 90 kopecks; for milk, from 2 rubles, 32 kopecks to 12 rubles, 18 kopecks; for eggs (by the thousand) from 19 rubles, 90 kopecks to 70 rubles. The listing could be continued indefinitely through the whole “bill of fare.” The collective and state farms were performing better than ten years previously; in 1963 they delivered 4,986 thousand tons of meat, compared to 1,757 thousand tons in 1953. The corresponding figures for milk were 10,113 thousand tons in 1963 compared to 1,980 thousand tons in 1953; butter, 622 thousand tons as against 330 thousand tons; sugar, 5,329 thousand tons as against 2,410 thousand tons; and eggs, 7,343 million (by the piece) as against 2,045 million.1 But no fundamental change had occurred. Even the raising of procurement and retail prices on June 1, 1962, which provoked such a dramatic reaction, did not bring a breakthrough in the general situation. “We increased procurement prices for meat, but no additional meat showed up in the stores,” Father complained at a CC Presidium meeting on September 10, 1963.2 The preliminary results for the seven-year plan of 1959–1965 also put Father on his guard. The planning period had not yet ended, but it was obvious that it would not be fulfilled completely. The gap between the rate of growth in production of consumer goods as compared with the rate in production of producer goods had not declined to 23 percent, as provided for in the plan, but instead had increased to 43 percent. The State Planning Committee, little by little, had simply sabotaged Khrushchev’s initiatives. The bureaucratic policy of giving preference to heavy industry over production of consumer goods continued. They didn’t argue with Father, who had been demanding the opposite, but they didn’t listen to him anymore. On November 10, 1963, the CC Presidium drew the preliminary balance sheet on the fulfillment of the annual plan and the projected development of the economy for the two remaining years of the seven-year plan. During the year, the gross domestic product had increased, on average, by 3.5 percent. That was 1.4 percent less than expected. And real income per worker had risen only 2 percent, as against the planned target of 4.9 percent. During 1963 the growth of industrial production amounted to 6 percent (for producer goods the figure was 7.7 percent, and for consumer goods, 4 percent), which was also less than planned. But agriculture as a whole had declined by 3 percent. In 1963 the amount of uncompleted construction rose by 53 percent, with 40 percent of planned capacity not being put into commission on time, and as a result the amount of capital investment on which there was no return increased by 42 percent. For the production of synthetic fibers, the plan had been fulfilled only by 57 percent; for synthetic rubber, by 68 percent; and for the construction of electric power plants, by 79 percent. The residential housing that was actually built during the seven-year plan amounted to 401 million square meters. That was a lot, but it was only 86 percent of what had been planned. At the same time, the

408 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 cost of one square meter had been reduced from 145 rubles to 138 rubles, although the planning target had been 120 rubles.3 At the very end of the year, matters either straightened themselves out somewhat, or the numbers were altered, but officially it was announced that the growth of industrial production had been 8.5 percent. In 1964, when Father was relieved of his duties, Suslov threw the following accusation in his face: “From 1950 to 1956 the annual growth of the economy varied between 10.6 and 11.1 percent, but in the ‘Khrushchev’ seven-year plan of 1959–1964 the annual growth fell to between 6.9 and 5 percent.” As though Khrushchev had not known that, and as though Suslov himself had not taken part in perennial discussions of the problems of the economy, including on November 10, 1963. In the 1990s, people began citing even more depressing numbers, claiming that supposedly in 1963 the gross national product had not increased at all and that by comparison with 1962 it had actually decreased by 1.7 percent, including a decline in industrial production of 1.6 percent, while in agricultural production, the figure was an entire 7.5 percent decline. Where they got those figures from the authors did not say. It is hard to know whom to believe. Most likely everyone is lying, adjusting their figures to the “political demands” of the moment, but one thing is certain: in the mid-1960s the economy was in trouble. Looking back at Soviet history, we see that nonfulfillment of the plans began with the very first five-year plan. In Stalin’s view, the deliberate setting of a target that could not be fulfilled acted as a stimulus and forced people to work harder. Father tried to make the plan a real plan, but with no special success. And the reason for this did not have to do with Father and not even with the bureaucracy of the State Planning Committee. That committee, even with computers available, could no longer cope with the task of coordinating the constantly growing range and variety of goods (from socks to computers) that were supposed to be produced according to the plan. It was drowning from a surplus of information. Delays and interruptions occurred more and more frequently, disturbing the fulfillment of a plan that they themselves had so carefully worked out, or so it would seem, and the results were reflected painfully in the lives of the people. Today, looking back from the future, we can obviously see that this was an objective process. The centralized top-down management of the economy had reached the limits of its possibilities, and this structure was no longer capable, even theoretically, of coping with the increase from day to day in the variety and range of goods to be produced, their quality, and other parameters of production. The human factor, the bureaucratism and personal predilections of the planners, of course, had an effect, but that was not “the root of the evil.” Father was the first to intuitively sense that limiting oneself to “rearranging the furniture” could no longer succeed. The basic principles in the relations between the producers and the government, and between producers and consumers,

Time to Decide

409

had to be changed. By the end of 1963 he had become convinced once and for all that the freedom of decisionmaking that had been given to the regional economic councils was not enough. Khrushchev entered 1964 with the firm intention of giving freedom to the directors of enterprises and of reducing their relations with the “upper echelons” to an absolutely transparent minimum. What remained to be decided was what that minimum should be. Those who debated economic questions in 1962 had proposed that a certain “tribute” be imposed on the enterprises, an amount agreed to in advance, for a five-year period. In modern terminology we would call it a tax. Then there would be no further interference in the concrete decisions made by the directors of enterprises. Back then, that was regarded as an anti-bureaucratic measure. Today, it is obvious that the logic of the reforms being proposed inevitably would require that, immediately after freedom of decisionmaking was given to the enterprise directors, their actual responsibility for the consequences of their decisions would have to increase. They themselves would have to pay for any mistakes they made, not the government. In other words, the road Khrushchev was stepping onto led inevitably to the privatization of enterprises, to a transition from managing the economy on the basis of a plan to a market system. But Father did not see that far ahead, nor did the most farsighted reform economists of that time. They were concerned with the problems of the moment, and the solution seemed to be to give freedom to the directors of enterprises while overall government supervision would continue. How much freedom to give to the directors of enterprises and how to do it would be answered by the ongoing experiments that were gaining strength. The first results of those experiments were expected in 1964. In Khrushchev’s view, that was when a decision could be made. Unfortunately, the circumstances that had taken shape in our country were not favorable to Father’s intentions. In 1953 his reforms had been supported by the majority, but now a muffled grumbling was coming from that majority. People expected more from the decade that had gone by: more prosperity and more freedom. Everyone felt that something was lacking, and they were all discontented. That’s how people react. They quickly grow accustomed to changes, once they’ve been made. They stop noticing them and forget about them. The insufficient variety of products in the stores annoyed and irritated people, not to mention the frequent interruptions in delivery, the poor quality of housing, the endless waiting lines for everything. No one wanted to remember the fact that quite recently the only people who could aspire to have apartments of their own were generals and prize-winning authors, that not so long ago the variety of products in the stores consisted of nothing more than a couple of brand names, and that those products could be obtained only by those who began standing in line in the wee hours of the morning. All complaints were addressed personally to Khrushchev. He was always in public view, and so he was the person responsible for everything. Even the current year’s bad harvest was blamed on him, although famine had not followed in its wake, as had happened in earlier times, only painful inconveniences.

410 Unforeseen Delay: 1963 The first people who “fell out of love” with Father were the Moscow bureaucrats, immediately after the “blue envelopes” of the Stalin era (containing bonus money) had been taken away from them, and other privileges had been curtailed. On top of that there had come the perturbations with the establishment of the regional economic councils and the elimination of the central ministries and along with that the elimination of their comfortable offices in the capital city, offices in which they had made themselves at home for so long. The party officials were annoyed by the interdistrict production administrations, which had begun to overshadow the party’s rural district committees; the division of the party’s province committees into industrial and agricultural branches; and the ever more insistent demand that they personally should “professionalize” themselves. The generals and officers in the military were rankled by the reduction of the armed forces and the need for conversion to civilian life. The writers and artists, after many long years of silence, had been given a relaxation of government controls, but not—as they would have liked—complete freedom. Who was to blame for all that? Khrushchev, of course. He answered for everything. That’s the kind of bouquet that came his way. To carry out reforms in the absence of allies would have been genuine insanity, but despite everything, Father did not lose his optimism. It seemed to him that the coming year would be a turning point, especially if there were good luck with the harvest.

Part 4 Downfall: 1964

72 The Last New Year At the New Year’s celebration in the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses,

the New York Times correspondent counted 100 tables and 2,000 attendees. He commented that Khrushchev looked more cheerful than he had the previous year, made countless toasts, and later on even tried to dance. I do not recall any such thing, just as I do not remember ever seeing Father dance. On the other hand, the New York Times reporter and I both noticed that Bulganin was present. In fact, Father went over and clinked glasses with him. In our country as well as abroad, people began to talk about this encounter of the two former friends, searching for the hidden political meaning. The invitation to Bulganin to attend the New Year’s reception did not have any underlying political significance. Father had simply begun to forget his former injured feelings. Bulganin’s participation in the “anti-party group,” which in 1957 tried to remove Khrushchev from power, is a well-known part of history. By nature Father did not tend to hold a grudge, and he had begun to feel some compassion for his former enemies, not the main ones, such as Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich, but those who, in his opinion, had simply blundered. A year earlier, at a CC Presidium meeting in January 1963, in response to a letter of repentance from Dmitry Shepilov, who in 1957 had joined the “antiparty group” and had then been expelled from the party, Khrushchev gave the following order: “Restore him to party membership, but don’t put anything in the minutes now.” Nothing was recorded in the minutes and at the relevant Central Committee department no action was taken. The officials there had no love for Shepilov, who was not restored to party membership until 1978 after a great many letters and appeals. In the summer of 1964, Father made a phone call to a disgraced former military and political leader, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, suggesting that they meet in the autumn, after his vacation. This revived interest in former comrades-in-arms—what did it mean? What was Khrushchev thinking? Was he having forebodings about his own fate? Who knows?

413

414 Downfall: 1964

73 Not Yet a Conspiracy On January 1, 1964, in the evening, having celebrated the New Year,

Father went off for a few days to Poland to rest and go hunting with his “friend Weslaw” (Wladislaw Gomulka, head of the Polish United Workers Party) and his “friend Józef” (Cyrankiewicz, head of the Polish government). At the same time, he wanted to sound them out again on how they would regard the withdrawal of our troops from Poland. This was an idea Khrushchev frequently returned to. The expense for the upkeep of one division abroad was greater than that for an entire army on our own territory. Gomulka was secure in his seat of power in Warsaw, and in the previous few years Father had the opportunity to be convinced of Gomulka’s loyalty many times. Moreover, Father sincerely believed that our allies ought to maintain their hold on power not with Soviet bayonets but by winning the support of their own people. After 1957, Khrushchev brought up the subject of withdrawing Soviet troops more than once, but only the Romanians agreed and were even glad of the proposal. On the other hand, Gomulka and Janos Kadar, the Hungarian leader, persuaded Father not to be in a hurry. Soviet troops were not causing them any problems. Father smiled to himself at that. The thrifty Poles, and the Hungarians, who were no less careful about counting their money, did not want to lose the income from the presence of Soviet troops on their territory. The Soviet generals also did not want to hear about any troop withdrawal. They argued that such a step would seriously undermine the defense capabilities of the Warsaw Pact. Father did not insist. The fact was that, beginning in 1957, the Soviet military formations in Germany, Hungary, and Poland had been steadily reduced in number. By 1964 there were fewer than half as many as in 1957. During this visit the hunting went well, but discussions with “friend Weslaw” did not. Gomulka smiled endearingly, joked, but would not agree to the withdrawal of Soviet troops. He was more worried about his own budget than that of his neighbor. Father decided not to insist. We would save 18 million rubles by withdrawing the remaining divisions, but that 18 million meant more to the Poles than to us. It was worth spending money to maintain good relations with our neighbors. On the night of January 5 they all went together from Poland to the Belovezh forest preserve in western Belorussia, where they did some more

Not Yet a Conspiracy

415

hunting, and on the morning of January 7, Father returned to Moscow by train. Another Soviet official had traveled to Poland with him, Kirill Mazurov, first secretary of the Belorussian Communist Party. (Belorussia was one of the westernmost republics of the Soviet Union, on the border of Poland.) Father liked to “go on a hunt” now and then with one or another promising younger official from the outlying regions of the Soviet Union. They could talk in an informal atmosphere, at meals and while walking. This way the Soviet leader could get to know his counterpart, find out “what made him tick” and what might be expected of him. In this particular case, Khrushchev also liked the fact that, unlike Brezhnev, Podgorny, or Polyansky, Mazurov always had his own opinion, expressed it freely, conducted himself independently, and argued with the Soviet leader as an equal. In the “collective leadership,” which was what they called the CC Presidium, you could argue with the first secretary, even criticize him, but you could not challenge his dominance. The leadership remained “collective” as long as no other member of the team encroached on the authority of the leader. As in any hierarchical social structure, whether it be a pride of lions or the CC Presidium, as soon as a dangerous rival made himself apparent he was driven out mercilessly—or he himself would drive out a leader who was no longer able to defend himself, who had grown old and weak. In a society where one’s term in office is strictly regulated by law, competition in this form does not occur. An aspiring rival knows that new elections will take place after a certain length of time and, if he is lucky, his turn will come automatically. It was precisely that kind of orderly succession of governmental power, without conspiracies or coups d’état, that Father wanted written into the new constitution. For the time being, however, danger lurked in any disagreement with the top leader, whatever the subject of the dispute might be. He is sure that he is right, and so are you, but he is Number One and you are not. If the dispute is carried too far, one man or the other will have to go. Here the rules are the same, whether in a democracy or a centralized form of government. The senior official dismisses the junior one. And if things have gone that far, they can no longer be stopped halfway. At an earlier time I myself witnessed an argument between Khrushchev and Mazurov, also at the Belovezh preserve. The Soviet leader was vacationing there with Podgorny when some guests came to visit—either the Hungarian leader, Janos Kadar, or the Poles, Gomulka and Cyrankiewicz. Mazurov also showed up. They hunted, went for walks, and conversed. I recall that on the last day, after Father had seen off all the other guests, he and Mazurov went for a walk, just the two of them, but I was present as a third party. I have forgotten exactly what they were talking about. My only recollection is that Father didn’t like something Mazurov said and began to correct him. In turn, Mazurov objected

416

Downfall: 1964

to Father’s remarks, and they began to argue, raising their voices. They were quite displeased with one another when they parted. To my great surprise, on our return to Moscow, right at the railroad station, where Father was met by CC Presidium members, he began telling them that Mazurov was not the right man for the job, that they had had a long talk the day before and Mazurov’s proposals did not hold water. It was necessary to think about replacing him. No objections were expressed. A week went by. Father cooled down. He thought it over some more and no action was taken. Later I found out that the main disagreement between Father and Mazurov was over investment strategy in the agriculture of Belorussia. Mazurov insisted on large-scale reclamation of marshland, draining the marshes and turning them into arable land. He had even sent a memorandum to that effect to the CC Presidium in the spring of 1963. Khrushchev did not consider it a priority to have canals dug to drain the water from the swampy areas. That would require major spending. In his opinion, it would be more rational to fertilize existing cropland. That would produce a greater yield and would be cheaper. As a result, the CC Presidium criticized Mazurov. Father declared that Mazurov’s proposal was “not rational,” that it was “self-seeking,” and ordered that Mazurov’s memorandum be returned to him “to be revised.”1 Nevertheless, Mazurov continued to press the issue and asked to meet with Khrushchev. In the end, Mazurov’s ill-fated memo was not returned to him, and the decision was made to reclaim some marshland, but on a very limited scale. Despite all these ups and downs, Khrushchev did not lose confidence in Mazurov. More and more frequently there came to Father’s mind the thought of his own retirement, not right away, but in the foreseeable future. And he was more and more concerned about bringing younger people into the CC Presidium, and Mazurov was one of the youngest of the potential candidates. But in 1964, the Belovezh discussion with Mazurov had not gone smoothly. Khrushchev felt that again, as with Mazurov’s 1963 memo, the Belorussian leader was trying to “grab” more resources for his republic and give less to “the Center,” to Moscow. It was natural for the leader of one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union to have an attitude like that, but in this case, Khrushchev felt, Mazurov had overstepped the bounds. Consequently there was no more talk about bringing Mazurov into “the Center.” Instead, Father started talking again about replacing Mazurov at a CC Presidium meeting on January 10, 1964. This threat never went beyond words. He was not actually going to remove Mazurov from his post, but of course Mazurov heard about the threat and it left a bad taste in his mouth. After that, Mazurov could not be counted on as one of the supporters of First Secretary Khrushchev. Here is another, similar instance. On June 21, 1963, a Central Committee plenum had elected Nikolai Podgorny to be a secretary. Thus he was to move from Kiev to Moscow, and his place in the Ukrainian leadership would need to be filled. According to the Soviet “table of ranks” of those days, whoever replaced Podgorny as top leader of Ukraine would become a potential candidate for

Not Yet a Conspiracy

417

membership in the CC Presidium. Everyone expected that the position would be filled by Vladimir Shcherbitsky, head of the Ukrainian government, who had already been elected a candidate member of the CC Presidium. Another pretender to the Ukrainian “throne” evacuated by Podgorny was Ivan Kazanets, who had been “second secretary” of the Ukrainian Central Committee for a long time. Suddenly something incredible happened. In June 1963, Shcherbitsky was sent off to be secretary of the party’s province committee in Dnepropetrovsk, and Kazanets was made head of the Ukrainian government, while Pyotr Shelest became first secretary of the Ukrainian party’s Central Committee. Before that, Shelest had been “simply” the secretary responsible for industry. According to all the customary parameters of that time, Shelest was not likely to advance. On December 13, 1963, a plenum of the Soviet party’s Central Committee dropped Shcherbitsky as a candidate for membership in the CC Presidium and elected Shelest in his place. It was Podgorny who brilliantly played out this whole intrigue. Father was not closely acquainted with Shelest, who had worked closely with Podgorny in Kiev since the early 1950s. Podgorny was second secretary and then first secretary of the Ukrainian party’s Central Committee, and he promoted Shelest, step by step, up the hierarchical ladder—first as secretary of the party’s Kiev city committee, then secretary of the Kiev province committee, and after that, as already indicated, secretary of the Ukrainian party’s Central Committee responsible for industry. Podgorny, after his transfer to Moscow, quickly began to assume more power. It was he who gave the traditional speech on the anniversary of the October Revolution, on November 8, 1963. That was quite indicative. And now he was putting together his team. We did not know the real reason for the removal of Shcherbitsky. The gossip was that Khrushchev was dissatisfied with Shcherbitsky’s report on economic conditions in Ukraine. Moscow officialdom was not pleased with Khrushchev’s decision. Shcherbitsky had a reputation as a good administrator, a skillful leader, and an intelligent man. Father was blamed for the removal of Shcherbitsky, who had slipped up just once and all of a sudden was treated so unkindly. Only after the ouster of Khrushchev did the real game played out behind the scenes become clear. Brezhnev had been the person behind Shcherbitsky. They were both from Dnepropetrovsk and had worked together since 1946. It was Brezhnev who pushed for Shcherbitsky to become head of the Ukrainian government, and it was Brezhnev who persuaded Father, by way of exception, in view of Ukraine’s importance within the Soviet Union as a whole, to have Shcherbitsky elected as a candidate member of the CC Presidium. In this way Brezhnev not only brought Shcherbitsky out from under Podgorny’s thumb in the Ukrainian party’s Central Committee, but also placed Shcherbitsky in a position of nearly equal importance to Podgorny. Podgorny and Shelest were as one in their hatred for Shcherbitsky. He had behaved in a refractory manner, making decisions that went around the Ukrainian

418 Downfall: 1964 party’s Central Committee, disregarding Podgorny. In doing this, Shcherbitsky had relied directly on support from Brezhnev in Moscow. As for Shelest, Shcherbitsky had no regard for him at all. Now Podgorny had managed to outmaneuver Brezhnev. He had Shcherbitsky “demoted” because of his unfortunate economic report and craftily convinced Khrushchev to send the errant official back to Dnepropetrovsk. But that proved to be a Pyrrhic victory. In October 1965, Brezhnev put Shcherbitsky back in his former post as head of the Ukrainian government and as candidate member of the Soviet party’s CC Presidium. In September 1971, Brezhnev made Shcherbitsky a full member of the CC Presidium, that is, an equal of Shelest; and in May 1972, he removed Shelest as party leader in Ukraine. Shcherbitsky then became first secretary of the Ukrainian party’s Central Committee, and that’s where he remained—almost until the end of the Soviet Union’s existence. As for Shelest, both he and Podgorny were pensioned off. That’s how the whole intrigue ended up. Mazurov, Shcherbitsky, and various secretaries of the Soviet party’s province committees—Father rebuked them directly to their faces for not showing the necessary ability as leaders of their regions. One, two, three, ten, twenty—all of them felt insulted by Khrushchev. At the same time, they remained members of the Central Committee, and Khrushchev’s fate depended on how they voted in that capacity. For the time being, they did not represent an organized opposition. They merely gossiped in the corners and cautiously, quietly cursed Khrushchev among themselves, but no more than that. For the time being . . . In January 1964, the New York Times printed one more news story stating that Khrushchev would soon be removed. Father read the TASS translation of the Times story the next day, but paid no attention to it. The Americans had been predicting his ouster ever since 1953.

74 Day by Day On January 13, 1964, Fidel Castro flew to Moscow. In contrast to his

previous visit, in May 1963, he came more for a vacation than for business. Father had told Castro intriguing stories about the charms and delights of the Russian winter. On January 17, after some official negotiations, Khrushchev took Castro

418 Downfall: 1964 party’s Central Committee, disregarding Podgorny. In doing this, Shcherbitsky had relied directly on support from Brezhnev in Moscow. As for Shelest, Shcherbitsky had no regard for him at all. Now Podgorny had managed to outmaneuver Brezhnev. He had Shcherbitsky “demoted” because of his unfortunate economic report and craftily convinced Khrushchev to send the errant official back to Dnepropetrovsk. But that proved to be a Pyrrhic victory. In October 1965, Brezhnev put Shcherbitsky back in his former post as head of the Ukrainian government and as candidate member of the Soviet party’s CC Presidium. In September 1971, Brezhnev made Shcherbitsky a full member of the CC Presidium, that is, an equal of Shelest; and in May 1972, he removed Shelest as party leader in Ukraine. Shcherbitsky then became first secretary of the Ukrainian party’s Central Committee, and that’s where he remained—almost until the end of the Soviet Union’s existence. As for Shelest, both he and Podgorny were pensioned off. That’s how the whole intrigue ended up. Mazurov, Shcherbitsky, and various secretaries of the Soviet party’s province committees—Father rebuked them directly to their faces for not showing the necessary ability as leaders of their regions. One, two, three, ten, twenty—all of them felt insulted by Khrushchev. At the same time, they remained members of the Central Committee, and Khrushchev’s fate depended on how they voted in that capacity. For the time being, they did not represent an organized opposition. They merely gossiped in the corners and cautiously, quietly cursed Khrushchev among themselves, but no more than that. For the time being . . . In January 1964, the New York Times printed one more news story stating that Khrushchev would soon be removed. Father read the TASS translation of the Times story the next day, but paid no attention to it. The Americans had been predicting his ouster ever since 1953.

74 Day by Day On January 13, 1964, Fidel Castro flew to Moscow. In contrast to his

previous visit, in May 1963, he came more for a vacation than for business. Father had told Castro intriguing stories about the charms and delights of the Russian winter. On January 17, after some official negotiations, Khrushchev took Castro

Day by Day

419

on a winter hunt at the Zavidovo preserve. At the request of our guest, movie cameramen filmed him as a memento. The scenes from this “royal hunt” are often shown in our country. On January 22 they went to Kiev together. The next day Castro flew back to Cuba, while the Soviet leader sat down to work on material for a Central Committee plenum scheduled for February 10, 1964, which was to take up the question of intensive agriculture. According to Father’s conception, the plenum would mark the beginning of a new course in agricultural policy. On January 30, 1964, Father went to the construction site of the Kiev hydroelectric power plant. A debate was continuing between advocates of thermal power and those of hydroelectric power over which type of power plant was more economical. Whose power was cheaper? The “hydroelectric people” decided, in order to reduce the costs of construction, to switch over to the use of prefabricated units. Dams had not yet been built in this way. The Kiev dam was chosen as an experimental site because it would not be the largest and the water pressure there was low. “The dam was divided into sections, with four powerproducing units in each section. The work was done in assembly-line fashion, with mobile construction cranes bringing prefabricated structures of reinforced concrete to one section after another.”1 Along with the traditional hydroelectric plant, they were building a pumpedstorage hydroelectric plant. At night, when the demand for power was low, pumps sent water to an upper reservoir, and during the day that same water flowed down through the turbines, producing electricity. And so it went, day after day, night after night. Needless to say, Father did not miss the chance to inspect these two new types of power plant. From there he went to a set of greenhouses, the oldest ones in the city, whose foundations had been laid when he was in charge of Ukraine in the late 1940s. He inspected the greenhouses and urged the Kievans to shift over to hydroponics. It was cleaner work, and better yields could be obtained. That same evening he went by train to Moscow. Meanwhile, on January 27, 1964, Ilyichev presided at a conference at the Central Committee to discuss a new anthem for the Soviet Union. Three Moscow poets, Tvardovsky, Gribachev, and Sergei Smirnov, and the Belorussian poet Petrus Brovka, had written drafts. None of these variants seemed suitable to the conference participants. They decided to continue the work. On January 29, Semichastny, the head of the KGB, sent Father a memorandum “on the situation among the creative intelligentsia.”2 What was it here that attracted the attention of state security? “Gennady Shpalikov acknowledged as justified the critical comments about his screenplay for the film Zastava Ilyicha [Outpost of Ilyich]. He now states: ‘I consider my new screenplay for the film Ya shagayu po Moskve [I Stroll Around Moscow] to be a first response to the criticism.’” The prose writer Anatoly Gladilin had said: “Contemporary Soviet prose has become degraded, and therefore the model that youth should choose for imitation is not ours, but that of foreign classical literature.”

420

Downfall: 1964

As Semichastny wrote: “The behavior of the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko is particularly alarming. . . . His main concern, as becomes evident from available material, is to try with all his might to restore his former popularity. For that purpose he gives public readings of unpublished poems that are politically ambiguous, such as ‘Russian Toy,’ ‘Ballad of a Punitive Battalion,’ and ‘Game Wounded by Hunters’ (copies of which are attached). At a reception at the US embassy in Moscow, on the occasion of a visit to the Soviet Union by the American writer John Steinbeck, Yevtushenko behaved with excessive familiarity.” The film director Andrei Tarkovsky was quoted: “Art is difficult to do now, as never before. It is no longer possible to do it in the old way, as under the personality cult, but they don’t let you do it in a new way. They are afraid.” On the other hand, the poet Andrei Voznesensky had said: “After the conference with the leaders of the party, I was completely at a loss for a long time. I wanted to do better, but the way it came out was the opposite. I had to rethink a lot. . . . For me the year was difficult, but fruitful. By that I mean not only what was published but also what I am writing. . . . I have now begun to think about writing a screenplay on Lenin.” Many of the names mentioned in these quotations were “heroes” of the previous year’s battles at meetings of writers, artists, and others of the intelligentsia at the Central Committee offices, at the Kremlin, and at the Lenin Hills Conference Center. There are many other quotations, but I have chosen the ones that seem to me the most curious. The communication from Semichastny was of no interest to Father. After nearly a month went by, his assistant Shuisky wrote a note on Semichastny’s memorandum: “This was reported to Comrade Khrushchev. Central Committee secretaries to be informed. February 20, 1964.” After the Central Committee secretaries had been informed, the memorandum was sent to the archives.

75 “Specialists Build Our Rockets, but Who Grows Our Potatoes?” On February 10, 1964, in the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses, a plenum

of the Central Committee opened. Khrushchev, as he had done previously, invited thousands of guests: scientists, collective-farm chairmen, exemplary workers

420

Downfall: 1964

As Semichastny wrote: “The behavior of the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko is particularly alarming. . . . His main concern, as becomes evident from available material, is to try with all his might to restore his former popularity. For that purpose he gives public readings of unpublished poems that are politically ambiguous, such as ‘Russian Toy,’ ‘Ballad of a Punitive Battalion,’ and ‘Game Wounded by Hunters’ (copies of which are attached). At a reception at the US embassy in Moscow, on the occasion of a visit to the Soviet Union by the American writer John Steinbeck, Yevtushenko behaved with excessive familiarity.” The film director Andrei Tarkovsky was quoted: “Art is difficult to do now, as never before. It is no longer possible to do it in the old way, as under the personality cult, but they don’t let you do it in a new way. They are afraid.” On the other hand, the poet Andrei Voznesensky had said: “After the conference with the leaders of the party, I was completely at a loss for a long time. I wanted to do better, but the way it came out was the opposite. I had to rethink a lot. . . . For me the year was difficult, but fruitful. By that I mean not only what was published but also what I am writing. . . . I have now begun to think about writing a screenplay on Lenin.” Many of the names mentioned in these quotations were “heroes” of the previous year’s battles at meetings of writers, artists, and others of the intelligentsia at the Central Committee offices, at the Kremlin, and at the Lenin Hills Conference Center. There are many other quotations, but I have chosen the ones that seem to me the most curious. The communication from Semichastny was of no interest to Father. After nearly a month went by, his assistant Shuisky wrote a note on Semichastny’s memorandum: “This was reported to Comrade Khrushchev. Central Committee secretaries to be informed. February 20, 1964.” After the Central Committee secretaries had been informed, the memorandum was sent to the archives.

75 “Specialists Build Our Rockets, but Who Grows Our Potatoes?” On February 10, 1964, in the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses, a plenum

of the Central Committee opened. Khrushchev, as he had done previously, invited thousands of guests: scientists, collective-farm chairmen, exemplary workers

“Specialists Build Our Rockets, but Who Grows Our Potatoes?”

421

in agriculture, and all those who, in his opinion, cared about the future of Soviet agriculture. He declined to give the report to the plenum. Let others give reports: the new minister of agriculture, Volovchenko; the chairman of the State Committee for Irrigation and Water Resources, Yevgeny Alekseyevsky; the chairman of the All-Union Association for Agricultural Technology (founded in 1962), Aleksandr Yezhevsky; and as co-reporters, the heads of union republics. As for Khrushchev, he would listen, evaluate, and sum up after the discussion (giving a speech on February 14). The leitmotif in all the speeches was the “three whales,” or three basic principles, of intensive rather than extensive agriculture: specialization, “chemicalization,” and irrigation. (The phrase “three whales” comes from an old belief that the Earth rested on the backs of three gigantic whales.) On the last day of the plenum, Father also spoke about the “three whales.” But he began by talking about the interdistrict production administrations. For the umpteenth time he talked about holding back on overly zealous administrative methods. “Let the state and collective farms decide for themselves what and when to sow and reap. And you, if you can, should give them advice and information about the latest scientific advances.” Further on, he compared the productivity of labor on our farms with that in the United States and West Germany: “We bought equipment and technology from a US firm, the La Torra Company,” he reminded his listeners. “We shipped all this to the Krasny state farm in the Crimea, and how did things turn out? For 1 kilogram of meat the Americans spend 2.02 kilograms of feed, but we spend 3.5 kilograms. They require one worker for every 100,000 chicks, but we require one for every 20,000. For them the fattening time is 67 days; for us, 80 days! Things are no better at the Yagotin duck farm near Kiev. We bought a factory farm for ducks with all its technology from a German company, Boelz. But Boelz spends 3.5 kilograms of feed for 1 kilogram of meat, and we spend 5.7 kilograms!” This was not a new topic. He had talked about it in 1958, 1959, 1960, 1962, and 1963. But it was as though he were talking to a wall. “How are you ever going to build communism?” he appealed to his listeners. But there was no reply. In his speech he expressed agreement with Barayev that “we cannot do without some fallow fields in the Virgin Lands.” (I have described the dispute between Barayev and Nalivaiko in previous chapters.) The key question was what the correct proportions should be between fallow fields and land sown to crops. Should it be 20 percent or 12 percent? Father thought this question should be reexamined over and over again. It is noteworthy that Barayev, who was supposedly disliked by Khrushchev, was invited to the plenum, while his opponent Nalivaiko was not. (However, by the end of summer 1964, Nalivaiko managed to restore his standing.) At the end of Father’s speech, he officially informed those present about the new, additional reduction in military spending. The audience applauded in unison—all except the generals.

422

Downfall: 1964

In the opinion of the Russian agrarian scholar Ilya Yevgenyevich Zelenin, this last plenum under Khrushchev’s leadership had great importance in principle, because of the issues discussed and the resolution adopted. It was the testament of Khrushchev the reformer, parting words for his successors. But they did not follow his parting words, as we shall see later in Chapter 106, “After Khrushchev.”1 After the plenum, on February 28, 1964, Khrushchev convened a conference of leading party and government officials concerned with agriculture and leaders of agricultural organizations. Here he did give the main report, exhorting and instructing his commanders on the main directions the upcoming “offensive” would take, the strategy and tactics of the coming reform.2 Father continued to press for specialization and intensification of agricultural production, but in his speech the main emphasis was on separating the functions of the party’s province committees from those of the rural interdistrict production administrations. He began in a minor key, noting that “things had not gotten anywhere” with the production administrations: Instead of presenting scientific arguments, they resorted to issuing commands, relying on administrative fiat, which is intolerable. When we carried out a restructuring of agricultural management, we were borrowing from the practice in the United States, the way services are provided to farms there, where the scientific component predominates. The work of an American “inspector” is paid partly by the government and partly from the local budget, that is, the taxes paid by farmers. This latter portion of the payment depends on how effectively the farms are operating, how successfully the advances of science have been applied. But in our country the salaries of specialists at a production administration, as before, are not connected in any way with the end-results of production. That is our mistake. We ought to make them materially dependent on the state and collective farms, on the results of their work.3

Since things were not working out by doing them the old way, Father proposed turning the pyramid of power upside down. Put the farmer above the production administration. Make the administrator dependent on the farmer. Again he cited the US example: “There, if the results promised by the ‘administrators’ [e.g., the US agricultural extension service] do not materialize, the ‘supplier’ [in the Soviet case that would be the government in the form of the production administration] reimburses the farmer for losses suffered through the fault of the supplier. It is time for us to switch over from slackness and inertia to such a transparent pattern of relationships.” The audience was listening tensely, and there was almost no applause.4 Furthermore, he urged his listeners to remember that a 1958 resolution had not been carried out. It had provided for the establishment for years ahead of a plan for the delivery of grain and other products to the government. As for what would be sown and how it would be done, that would be left up to the state and collective farmers themselves. “You cannot issue orders from Moscow, Kiev,

“Specialists Build Our Rockets, but Who Grows Our Potatoes?”

423

Tashkent, or Baku about what is to be sown and how it is to be done!” he admonished his listeners. “As before, the plans for deliveries to the government are not being presented in advance to the state and collective farms, but after the fact. Whoever has done better work and brought in a bigger harvest, that person has a bigger plan imposed on him. What is the result of all this? The leaders of a backward farm, having fulfilled a smaller plan of delivery of agricultural products, become heroes and are given bonuses, but the advanced farms suffer because a bigger plan is imposed on them, after the fact; in effect, they are penalized for doing better. Instead of all that, a system of material incentives must start to operate this year.”5 He went on to cite some examples of foolish, mutually contradictory orders issued by an official of one of the production administrations, a certain Inspector Kukurin. People in the audience laughed in unison. They were laughing at themselves. “Specialists are used to build our rockets. There are no objections to that.” Father had reached the culmination of his speech. “The same will soon be true for our potato growers. The people sitting in the production administration offices ought to be specialist-advisers, not bureaucrats barking orders. The Ministry of Agriculture, despite all the groaning of the apparatchiks, must be transformed, as in the United States, into a scientific center with learned experts deducing generalized lessons from experience. What they must write is not orders and commands but textbooks and recommendations.”6 Father did not try to evade his own responsibility. During the preceding years he too had been issuing commands to his heart’s content. Now it was time to stop that. Unless we corrected the errors that had piled up, including his own, we could not move forward. He was absolutely determined to correct them, applying the full force of state power for that purpose. He was to find out what his listeners thought about all this in October of that same year. Father did not limit himself to words alone. On March 20, 1964, a decree of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers was published with an awesome and intimidating title: “On instances of crude violation and distortion in the practical work of planning production at state and collective farms.” Now Father’s ideas were repeated, but in the form of a decree—the same ideas he had presented at the conference on February 28, 1964—that the peasant farmer be given the opportunity to grow what was to his advantage and to stop imposing plans from above. However, without a concrete mechanism for implementation, this amounted merely to good intentions. It was no accident that precisely at the beginning of 1964 the discussion was renewed on how to transform the Soviet economy to make it efficient and self-regulating—not just agriculture, but the whole economy. On April 13, 1964, Father wrote a memorandum to the CC Presidium titled “Some problems of the intensification of agriculture.” Unlike earlier memoranda, this one was published in the newspapers, a sign that Father gave it great importance. The memorandum was almost entirely devoted to specialization. Father proposed to increase the number of factory farms for poultry. Until we

424 Downfall: 1964 learned to organize these ourselves, we should buy the technology and equipment abroad. It would all repay itself a hundred times over. The eggs from factory farms that already existed were twice as cheap as those at state farms. George Finley, president of the Finley-Moody Trading Corporation in the United States, had told Father that his company now produced pork at largescale factory farms. “The fattening of hogs under contemporary conditions is a matter for engineers,” said Father, quoting Finley. He continued to quote: “Pork production is being placed on an assembly-line basis. Mr. Garst produces corn as feed or fodder for livestock, while we hog-raising ‘engineers’ are solving the problem of mechanizing all the processes of pork production, from raising the piglets to delivering the finished product to the consumer.”7 The memorandum that was published in Pravda on April 13, 1964, continued as follows: “As a result, the productivity of labor has been sharply increased. At a livestock-fattening complex in America today only eight persons can raise 250,000 hogs annually. And without losing any time, we too need to create our ‘meat factories.’” Father was trying to convince his readers. “It’s time to stop feeding hogs in the old way with slops, using scraps or leftovers to feed animals. We need to become accustomed to the fact that mixed feeds for them are the same as bread or oatmeal for people. Otherwise we will not achieve success. And here is another comparison with the United States. They can obtain 15 centners of meat from one sow, but we only get 4 centners. One of their hens produces 200 eggs per year, but ours, only 90.” In other words, we still had a long way to go to catch up with the Americans.

76 Day by Day In the Kremlin on February 17, 1964, Father met with a man he had

known since the 1950s, the billionaire US-Canadian industrialist Cyrus Eaton (1883–1979), one of the leaders of the Cleveland financial group. Eaton had helped initiate the Pugwash conferences, where scientists from both East and West could meet and discuss issues relating to world peace, especially the role of scientists in educating the public about the dangers of nuclear war for all human beings. The Pugwash conferences were named after Cyrus Eaton’s estate in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, where the first conference was held in 1957; they were held once or twice a year after 1957, the thirteenth being in Czechoslovakia,

424 Downfall: 1964 learned to organize these ourselves, we should buy the technology and equipment abroad. It would all repay itself a hundred times over. The eggs from factory farms that already existed were twice as cheap as those at state farms. George Finley, president of the Finley-Moody Trading Corporation in the United States, had told Father that his company now produced pork at largescale factory farms. “The fattening of hogs under contemporary conditions is a matter for engineers,” said Father, quoting Finley. He continued to quote: “Pork production is being placed on an assembly-line basis. Mr. Garst produces corn as feed or fodder for livestock, while we hog-raising ‘engineers’ are solving the problem of mechanizing all the processes of pork production, from raising the piglets to delivering the finished product to the consumer.”7 The memorandum that was published in Pravda on April 13, 1964, continued as follows: “As a result, the productivity of labor has been sharply increased. At a livestock-fattening complex in America today only eight persons can raise 250,000 hogs annually. And without losing any time, we too need to create our ‘meat factories.’” Father was trying to convince his readers. “It’s time to stop feeding hogs in the old way with slops, using scraps or leftovers to feed animals. We need to become accustomed to the fact that mixed feeds for them are the same as bread or oatmeal for people. Otherwise we will not achieve success. And here is another comparison with the United States. They can obtain 15 centners of meat from one sow, but we only get 4 centners. One of their hens produces 200 eggs per year, but ours, only 90.” In other words, we still had a long way to go to catch up with the Americans.

76 Day by Day In the Kremlin on February 17, 1964, Father met with a man he had

known since the 1950s, the billionaire US-Canadian industrialist Cyrus Eaton (1883–1979), one of the leaders of the Cleveland financial group. Eaton had helped initiate the Pugwash conferences, where scientists from both East and West could meet and discuss issues relating to world peace, especially the role of scientists in educating the public about the dangers of nuclear war for all human beings. The Pugwash conferences were named after Cyrus Eaton’s estate in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, where the first conference was held in 1957; they were held once or twice a year after 1957, the thirteenth being in Czechoslovakia,

Day by Day

425

only one month before Khrushchev’s ouster; Eaton was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1960 “for strengthening peace among nations.” Eaton and his wife had a lively conversation with Khrushchev from noon to 1:10 P.M. They never suspected, as fate decreed, that this would be their last meeting. In 1971 the Eatons sent their condolences to Mama on the occasion of Father’s death, and to the Soviet government as well. On February 18, 1964, a district court in Leningrad ruled that the poet Joseph Brodsky should be expelled from the city for “parasitism.” He had dropped out of school at the age of fifteen, and in the years since then was on record as working for a total of only nine months. He was banished for a fiveyear period to the village of Norinskoye in Arkhangelsk province, but in fact he returned to Leningrad after a year and a half. At that time I had not heard of Brodsky, and I think Father was also unaware of the existence of this future Nobel Prize–winning poet. On February 19, 1964, Father went with Mikoyan and Podgorny to a sculpture exhibit to look over two works by Ukrainian sculptors: the mock-up of a statue to the great nineteenth-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko; and the preliminary model of a monument to be erected in Odessa commemorating the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin during the Russian revolution of 1905. Then they went to the building of the Moscow City Soviet on Tverskaya Street, where they listened to reports on the development of urban transport in Moscow. A decision had been made to try out some monorail trains on an equal footing with the inexpensive surface trains of Moscow. Monorail trains were a recent technological innovation imported from France. After Father’s retirement, work on monorails dried up. The new leaders anathematized anything that Father had supported. That’s the way things go in Russia. On February 20, 1964, production began at a nitrogen fertilizer plant in Stavropol territory, in the Northern Caucasus. There was a labor shortage in our country. On February 26, 1964, a joint resolution of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers was adopted. It was titled “On increasing material incentives for pensioners at work in production.” On March 16, 1964, the newspapers reported that production had begun at three cities in Ukraine: at a nitrogen fertilizer plant, in Cherkassy, and at two synthetic fiber plants, in Chernigov and Kiev. On March 20, during a “vacation” at Pitsunda, Father arranged a conference with people from the electric power industry. To this conference he invited Pyotr Neporozhny, the government minister for the electric power industry, and other specialists. Many questions had piled up for Father, mainly concerning the long-term prospects for the electric power industry. The conference discussions, with breaks for swimming in the pool and going for walks, lasted four days. They talked about supermodern, block-construction thermal power plants with units

426 Downfall: 1964 producing half a million kilowatts each, and even 800,000 kilowatts. They were preparing to extend an electric power grid from plants to be built in the rich coal basin of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan through western Siberia and the Urals to European Russia. They turned to the question of diverting the flow of some rivers from north to south so that they would flow into the Caspian and Aral seas. Father proposed that for the time being we limit ourselves to research on the subject, but once the development of the chemistry industry had been completed, and the government had become richer—then we would see. In general, the decision was made to wait a little. Almost an entire day was devoted to alternative sources of electric power. Academician Lavrentyev had been “trying these out.” In his new post as head of the Council on Science under the chairman of the Council of Ministers (Khrushchev), he had flown to Kamchatka and after his return had persuaded Khrushchev of the long-term potential of underground thermal power there. “Geothermal power plants,” in Lavrentyev’s opinion, “were the road to prosperity for that region. Without oil or coal, subterranean volcanic activity could supply steam for the turbines of power plants. All we have to do is drill some wells at the proper locations.”1 Lavrentyev proposed that tidal electric power plants be built in the Far East, in the straits between the islands of the Kurile group and in the northern part of European Russia, along the shores of the Kola peninsula. The moon’s power of attraction brought ocean waters through these narrow passages first in one direction and then back again. The cycle repeats itself regularly twice a day, back and forth, back and forth, endlessly, as long as the moon orbits the planet. If a turbine of suitable design were installed, a virtually perennial and virtually costfree source of energy would be the result. Father assigned electric power specialists to calculate to what extent these proposals would be economically practicable. It was agreed that some experiments would be made, that a small geothermal power plant would be built on the Kamchatka peninsula and a tidal plant off the Kola peninsula. The use of solar power and wind power to produce electricity was also discussed. But it was not yet time to make any decisions. The scientists recognized that there was still a long way to go before those forms of power could be put to practical use. During late March and April, Father was constantly among people. At the beginning of April he made a ten-day visit to Hungary. There he received a warm welcome. Father and the Hungarian leader Janos Kadar were bound by a sincere friendship. Kadar was the only leader of a socialist country who remained true to that friendship even after Khrushchev’s retirement. As he always had, he would send a basket of bright red Jonathan apples to Father on his birthday, a kind of apple Father loved, and Kadar alone, showing no fear of Brezhnev’s anger, sent his condolences to Mama after Father’s death.

Day by Day

427

On his return from Hungary, on April 13, Father met with a delegation from Poland, and on April 14 with military men from the kingdom of Cambodia. At that point he disappeared from view for “two whole days.” Rumors circulated that he had died suddenly. The rumors were so persistent and “plausible” that even the New York Times wrote about them. In the West a slight panic ensued. Who started this rumor and why remained unknown, but the response to it testified to a growing nervousness in society. On April 17, 1964, there was a reception in the Kremlin and the guns of Moscow fired a salute. This was in commemoration of Khrushchev’s seventieth birthday. He was awarded a gold medal, the Order of Lenin, and the title Hero of the Soviet Union. Brezhnev, Podgorny, and Shelepin were especially zealous in praising Father. He was embarrassed by the flood of praise pouring down on him, but at the same time he was flattered by the recognition of his services. That same team of Shelepin and Brezhnev had begun at that time to put together their conspiracy against Father, discussing how they would remove him from power in the near future. Father never guessed at any of this, but more and more often within his inner circle he complained about his age and declared his intention to retire after the next party congress, the Twenty-Third. Brezhnev and Podgorny would protest loudly: “Nikita Sergeyevich, you have plenty of strength and energy. You still have a lot of work to do.” Father did not argue, but he had not changed his mind. He confirmed his intentions publicly soon after in a speech, but the newspaper account did not include that passage. The history of how Father was removed from power is the subject of my book Khrushchev on Khrushchev, and I will try not to go into it very much here—to the extent that this is possible. On April 22, 1964, the newspapers published the lists of the recipients of the Lenin Prize for that year. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s name was not there. He had been nominated for this prize on the basis of his short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Father supported Solzhenitsyn, but turned out to be in the minority. The leaders of the Writers Union, together with the ideologists from the Central Committee, took a firm stand against awarding him the prize. In the committee that decided on the Lenin Prize awards, there were practically no supporters of Solzhenitsyn, and even the few who did sympathize with him remained silent. Father also did not interfere. His attitude was to let the “democratic” majority decide. The majority voted in favor of the novel Tronka by the Ukrainian writer Oles Gonchar. The only reason anyone ever remembered that novel by Gonchar was that it had blocked the road for Ivan Denisovich. On that same day, in the Kremlin, Father received George Finley, the previously mentioned president of the Finley-Moody Trading Corporation, one of the “kings” of the meatpacking industry in the United States. Father had met with him earlier and had mentioned him by name in a memorandum about reorganizing agriculture. Now they were discussing a contract under which Finley

428 Downfall: 1964 would give us specific assistance. Finley was ready to deliver equipment for a factory farm to produce pork, along with the recipes for the necessary livestock feed and everything else. On April 23, 1964, in the evening, Father was at the Bolshoi Theater as a member of the presiding body at a ceremony in honor of the 400th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. That same evening of April 23, at another theater, director Yuri Lyubimov presented a performance of Bertolt Brecht’s play The Good Man of Shetsuan. In this way Lyubimov announced to the world that the Taganka Theater had been born, a theater that became probably the most famous and controversial one in Moscow in the second half of the twentieth century. On April 26, 1964, the Beloyarsky nuclear power plant in the Urals near Sverdlovsk began to produce electricity for the first time.

77 Moscow Street Lights On April 30, 1964, on his way to work, Father stopped at Arbat Square

in central Moscow. There on the eve of the May 1 holiday, the day of international labor solidarity, the last work was being completed on a transport tunnel framed by an entire network of underground pedestrian crossings. The work was done well, and Father did not fail to recall that he had been the first to talk with Moscow city leaders about underground transport tunnels for relieving traffic congestion, and that those leaders had initially been opposed. The Moscow officials who were now in his presence unanimously agreed with Khrushchev. The tunnel was opened to traffic that very same evening. From Arbat Square, Father and the people accompanying him went to Theater Square, where work was also being finished on another set of underground pedestrian crossings. In this case the crossings not only came out onto street level but also led to underground stations of the Moscow Metro. This was the first time such an arrangement had been constructed in Moscow. Then they walked down Tverskaya Street to the new Hotel Minsk. Father was satisfied with the inspection tour. As was the custom in those days, the Moscow party secretary followed along inseparably. I am referring to Nikolai Yegorychev, who always carried

428 Downfall: 1964 would give us specific assistance. Finley was ready to deliver equipment for a factory farm to produce pork, along with the recipes for the necessary livestock feed and everything else. On April 23, 1964, in the evening, Father was at the Bolshoi Theater as a member of the presiding body at a ceremony in honor of the 400th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. That same evening of April 23, at another theater, director Yuri Lyubimov presented a performance of Bertolt Brecht’s play The Good Man of Shetsuan. In this way Lyubimov announced to the world that the Taganka Theater had been born, a theater that became probably the most famous and controversial one in Moscow in the second half of the twentieth century. On April 26, 1964, the Beloyarsky nuclear power plant in the Urals near Sverdlovsk began to produce electricity for the first time.

77 Moscow Street Lights On April 30, 1964, on his way to work, Father stopped at Arbat Square

in central Moscow. There on the eve of the May 1 holiday, the day of international labor solidarity, the last work was being completed on a transport tunnel framed by an entire network of underground pedestrian crossings. The work was done well, and Father did not fail to recall that he had been the first to talk with Moscow city leaders about underground transport tunnels for relieving traffic congestion, and that those leaders had initially been opposed. The Moscow officials who were now in his presence unanimously agreed with Khrushchev. The tunnel was opened to traffic that very same evening. From Arbat Square, Father and the people accompanying him went to Theater Square, where work was also being finished on another set of underground pedestrian crossings. In this case the crossings not only came out onto street level but also led to underground stations of the Moscow Metro. This was the first time such an arrangement had been constructed in Moscow. Then they walked down Tverskaya Street to the new Hotel Minsk. Father was satisfied with the inspection tour. As was the custom in those days, the Moscow party secretary followed along inseparably. I am referring to Nikolai Yegorychev, who always carried

Moscow Street Lights

429

with him a notebook in which he diligently recorded everything Khrushchev said. This was supposedly to make sure that orders were carried out. They then went to the Central Committee offices. The building that housed the party’s Moscow Committee was located right next door to the Central Committee building, and Father offered Yegorychev a ride. At 10:30 A.M. they entered Father’s office and sat down at a long conference table, Khrushchev at the head of the table and Yegorychev right next to him, at his elbow. Father was curious about how much housing the Moscow leaders were going to bring into operation during 1964. What Yegorychev answered on that day I do not know, but many years later he told the historian Leonid Mlechin that he gave the figure of “a million” square meters. The quotations that follow come from Mlechin’s interview with Yegorychev.1 “How much? A hundred thousand?” Khrushchev asked again, mistrustfully. “A million, Nikita Sergeyevich,” Yegorychev replied in the polite Russian manner, using Khrushchev’s first name and patronymic. “At one time it was our dream just to achieve a hundred thousand. But now Moscow is living too well!” Immediately, on the spur of the moment, according to Yegorychev, Khrushchev got in touch by phone with the chairman of the State Planning Committee and ordered that central financing for Moscow be cut off. That money was to be redistributed to other regions. Khrushchev suggested to Yegorychev that Muscovites, who always lived in wealthier circumstances than other Russians, could be compensated for this shortfall in central financing by having housing construction done by cooperatives. The result would be an increase in the total number of square meters of new housing for the country as a whole. I should remind readers that a year earlier, Khrushchev had persistently “recommended” to Yegorychev that he concentrate on cooperative housing construction and promised to check up on this matter in a year’s time. Back then, Yegorychev had given assurances that a “restructuring” would be carried out, but in fact he had done nothing. In 1964, he need not have felt offended at Khrushchev’s reaction. He had only himself to blame. Yegorychev went on to relate how he had skillfully extricated himself from this situation. Through cooperatives he was able to obtain funds for only half a million square meters, and so for the remaining half million he imposed a “tribute” on “wealthy” Moscow enterprises. Actually Yegorychev misspoke here. He referred to “wealthy Moscow ministries” rather than “enterprises.” But the ministries had been abolished in 1957 and were not restored until 1965. “When Khrushchev was taking his last vacation at Pitsunda [in October 1964], he telephoned me from there,” Yegorychev relates. “He asked me how housing construction was getting on in Moscow. Someone had reported to him that despite his ban [on any more central financing for Moscow housing], such construction was continuing. If we had not ousted him, he would have removed me.”

430 Downfall: 1964 That is quite likely, but not for the reason Yegorychev thinks—not for the construction of housing, but for the unauthorized use of funds from the central government budget, for taking money illegally from the development funds of Moscow enterprises and “pumping them over” into the Moscow city budget, for failure to carry out orders, and for lack of administrative ability in obtaining the necessary resources from the population of Moscow. Thus, here too, Yegorychev needlessly felt offended by Khrushchev. Again, he had only himself to blame. Yegorychev was deliberately trying to justify himself for taking part in the conspiracy against Khrushchev. He accused Khrushchev of “voluntarism”— arbitrarily and willfully disregarding the realities of life. That was the line of argument Shelepin and Semichastny chose, and Yegorychev was part of their group. However, Yegorychev got the numbers somewhat confused. The amount of new housing planned for Moscow in 1964 was 3.8 million square meters, and for the country as a whole, it was 45 million square meters. (That meant about 130,000 new apartments.) Those are the figures Khrushchev gave in the memoirs he dictated after his ouster: “This [3.8 million] was a figure that made you dizzy compared to earlier times. Pre-revolutionary Moscow built 11 million square meters of living space during the 800 years of its history.” He also said: “At first, before the war, in Moscow we built no more than 100,000 square meters of housing annually. . . . At the time of my return to Moscow from Ukraine, in 1949, as many as 400,000 square meters of housing had been built in the capital city during that year.” It was not until 1956 that Moscow reached 1 million square meters of new housing in one year—long before Yegorychev’s time. Thus, if Khrushchev had dreamed of achieving 100,000 square meters, that would have been in 1936, but in 1964 he not only would have been envious of Yegorychev but also would have taken pride in the achievements of our society as a whole. Of course it’s possible that Yegorychev forgot the amount of housing actually built in Moscow in 1964—which was nearly 4 million square meters, rather than what he said, “a million.” Unlike Khrushchev, he didn’t “get all excited” about numbers. Unfortunately, present-day historians have verified the accuracy of the stories Yegorychev tells.2 In another passage of Mlechin’s book, Yegorychev complained to the historian Mlechin that after the session of the USSR Supreme Soviet on July 15, 1964, he and Khrushchev took a seat on a bench in a Kremlin garden. “Why is Moscow wasting so much electricity on street lighting?” That was the first question. “The party’s first secretary [Khrushchev] lived in a government residence on the Lenin Hills, from which he could see the entire city. In his view Moscow was completely bathed in electricity.” That was Yegorychev’s commentary. “Nikita Sergeyevich, it only seems to be that way.” (Yegorychev was justifying himself.) “In reality some districts of the city are very poorly lighted . . . Only one-tenth of one percent of the total energy used by the city goes to street

Moscow Street Lights

431

lighting. The main part is devoured by industry. We have managed to increase the coefficient of . . . “Khrushchev did not listen to the rest of my remarks. He went off with a dissatisfied look on his face . . . Obviously he had taken offense at the fact that I, Yegorychev, a young party leader, knew my way around on something that he was ignorant of.”3 That was the clash that supposedly occurred between the two men. Naturally I was not present at this conversation in the Kremlin garden, but I remember very well the business about streetlights. The July 1964 conversation that Yegorychev refers to took place right after Father had returned from his visit to the Scandinavian countries, which were famous for their rational utilization of resources, including the use of electric power for street lighting. Father had been impressed by the streetlights in Stockholm. The Swedes had installed reflectors on their streetlights, so that all the light fell on the sidewalks and paved roadways. Back home he cited this example of Swedish inventiveness not only to Yegorychev but also to anyone who would listen. From his residence on Lenin Hills he could indeed see how the Moscow street lights with their bare bulbs were lighting up the sky, not just the streets. “Of course they are capitalists and they have learned how to count their money,” Father observed with crushing irony. For Yegorychev, street lighting was a trifle not worthy of his attention. It was “only one tenth of one percent of the total electricity used by the city.” No further comment is necessary. Finally, let me cite one more of Yegorychev’s recollections, one that is particularly characteristic of him and that again justifies his participation in the plot to remove Khrushchev. As Yegorychev writes: Please, leave it in my style. “Relying on his authority, Khrushchev gave lectures to everyone, right and left,” Yegorychev writes. “One day, having dinner with a friend, I met academician Valentin Alekseyevich Kargin. That day he and his colleagues had been with Khrushchev, who had summoned them for a discussion of the problems in developing the chemical industry. They had all prepared for the meeting and had discussed issues in order to present them to Khrushchev. “Kargin related with indignation,” Yegorychev continues, “that Khrushchev had barely invited them to sit down when he immediately started in: ‘Here’s the thing, dear comrade scientists. I am dissatisfied with the way the chemical industry is developing in our country, and you bear direct responsibility for that.’ Then he began lecturing them. They sat there and could not understand anything. Why had he invited them?”4 According to Yegorychev, at this meeting things did not work out well at all. But he does not tell what else was said. For him, it seems, that is not necessary. What if we look at the beginning of this meeting in a different way? Academician Kargin was a physical chemist, an expert on polymers. He had been awarded the Lenin Prize once and the State Prize four times, and he

432 Downfall: 1964 was a member of Khrushchev’s Council on Science. On that council he was responsible for the development of the polymer industry, specifically the production of lavsan and other materials that were only then coming into use. As a member of the Council on Science he had access to Khrushchev at any time. At that time, the state of affairs with regard to polymers in the Soviet Union was disappointing. Huge sums had been spent on research, with little result. Unfortunately, the only results obtained had come from purchasing licenses from Western companies. I have written about this earlier. The scientists, including Kargin, were opposed to buying licenses. They promised from one day to the next to introduce materials they themselves had developed, but they were taking forever to do this work. Naturally Khrushchev felt he had the right to present his complaints to the chemists, above all to his adviser Kargin. And he did so. Hardly anyone likes that kind of thing. Kargin of course understood what was happening, but he naturally felt upset by the confrontation and, especially after a glass of vodka at dinner, in good company, he might not have been able to restrain himself from expressing his emotions. What are the conclusions to be drawn from this? Whatever they are, they are entirely on Yegorychev’s conscience.

78 Day by Day On May 5, 1964, Father departed from Yalta on the passenger ship

Armenia to make a state visit to Egypt. This trip had been planned for a very long time. Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, had persistently invited Khrushchev, but the latter would not concede. Nasser’s internal policies created an obstacle. The Communists of Egypt were sitting in prison, as they had under Nasser’s predecessor, King Farouk. Nasser did not respond to Khrushchev’s attempts to persuade him to release the Egyptian Communists, and consequently the visit was postponed time after time. Finally, Nasser conceded on some things, and Khrushchev agreed to overlook some other things, but mainly it was geopolitical considerations that prevailed. May 1964 was a special occasion in Egyptian history. The Soviet Union was completing the construction of the Aswan High Dam. For half a century, Egyptians had dreamed of having this dam. Not only would it free the country from the Nile’s destructive floods; it would also make possible the irrigation of

432 Downfall: 1964 was a member of Khrushchev’s Council on Science. On that council he was responsible for the development of the polymer industry, specifically the production of lavsan and other materials that were only then coming into use. As a member of the Council on Science he had access to Khrushchev at any time. At that time, the state of affairs with regard to polymers in the Soviet Union was disappointing. Huge sums had been spent on research, with little result. Unfortunately, the only results obtained had come from purchasing licenses from Western companies. I have written about this earlier. The scientists, including Kargin, were opposed to buying licenses. They promised from one day to the next to introduce materials they themselves had developed, but they were taking forever to do this work. Naturally Khrushchev felt he had the right to present his complaints to the chemists, above all to his adviser Kargin. And he did so. Hardly anyone likes that kind of thing. Kargin of course understood what was happening, but he naturally felt upset by the confrontation and, especially after a glass of vodka at dinner, in good company, he might not have been able to restrain himself from expressing his emotions. What are the conclusions to be drawn from this? Whatever they are, they are entirely on Yegorychev’s conscience.

78 Day by Day On May 5, 1964, Father departed from Yalta on the passenger ship

Armenia to make a state visit to Egypt. This trip had been planned for a very long time. Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, had persistently invited Khrushchev, but the latter would not concede. Nasser’s internal policies created an obstacle. The Communists of Egypt were sitting in prison, as they had under Nasser’s predecessor, King Farouk. Nasser did not respond to Khrushchev’s attempts to persuade him to release the Egyptian Communists, and consequently the visit was postponed time after time. Finally, Nasser conceded on some things, and Khrushchev agreed to overlook some other things, but mainly it was geopolitical considerations that prevailed. May 1964 was a special occasion in Egyptian history. The Soviet Union was completing the construction of the Aswan High Dam. For half a century, Egyptians had dreamed of having this dam. Not only would it free the country from the Nile’s destructive floods; it would also make possible the irrigation of

Day by Day

433

thousands upon thousands of hectares of land previously unavailable for agriculture, turning the impoverished peasants of Egypt, the “fellahin,” into prosperous cotton growers. At first it was the British who had planned to build the Aswan High Dam. They were the dominant power in postwar Egypt, ruling through the government of King Farouk. But in 1952 a group of young officers headed by Nasser overthrew Farouk, and British occupation forces were obliged to evacuate Egypt. The building of the dam by the British was now out of the question. Nasser began negotiations with the Americans and with the World Bank, controlled by the Americans, to obtain credit for building the dam. But nothing came of this. Washington did not find Nasser’s policies to its taste. At that point the Soviet Union offered its services. By then we were no worse at building dams than the Americans. An agreement was signed and the work began. The Egyptians paid with goods, including their special long-staple cotton, which was worth its weight in gold on the world market, but does not grow well in Central Asia. May 1964 was the time set for the most important part of the construction project, the diversion of the Nile so that the dam could then be built across the temporarily dry riverbed. At the accompanying ceremonies, Father was assigned the role of most highly honored guest. In addition, representatives of other Arab governments were expected to attend the ceremonies. Father decided to combine politics with pleasure, to use the occasion to establish contacts with some new Arab leaders and to converse with those he knew already. The trip was highly successful. Nasser and Khrushchev together, each with one finger, pushed the button that detonated an earthen barrier, allowing the waters of the Nile to flow into a new channel around the site where the dam would be built. On this special occasion the Egyptian leaders awarded decorations to their high-ranking guests. The one called “Necklace of the Nile” was awarded to Father. Only one other person in the Soviet Union had been favored with such a decoration—Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut. Even Brezhnev never won a Necklace of the Nile. In accordance with international custom, it was our turn to present an award to the president of Egypt, something that would be equivalent to the Necklace of the Nile. Andrei Grechko, the commander in chief of the Warsaw Pact forces, who accompanied Father on the trip to Egypt, suggested decorating Nasser with the gold star designating him a Hero of the Soviet Union. In terms of diplomatic protocol, this was an unimpeachable solution to the problem, but what about the political implications? In Moscow this award stirred up a lot of negative talk. Somehow it compromised Father. Soviet public opinion did not consider the president of Egypt worthy of this award—even though Egypt was a country friendly to us. Why? After all, it was not the first such award. On May 1, 1964, Ahmed Ben Bella, the president of Algeria, who was on an official visit to the Soviet Union at the time, was presented with the gold star honoring him as a

434 Downfall: 1964 Hero of the Soviet Union. A month later the same honor was awarded to Janos Kadar, the Hungarian leader. No one paid much attention to those awards, but in the case of Nasser a great furor erupted. Was it stirred up by the KGB? After all, the conspiracy against Father had already taken shape by then, and Semichastny, the KGB chairman, was an active participant. Or was this merely a miscalculation on Father’s part? To this day I am not sure. After the ceremonies at the Aswan High Dam, the heads of Arab states retired to Nasser’s presidential yacht on the Red Sea for a meeting far removed from unwelcome eyes and ears. For two days they conferred on the yacht, with Khrushchev participating. On May 25, 1964, Father returned to Moscow by plane. Meanwhile on May 8 the newspapers had reported the launching at the Baltic Shipyard in Leningrad of one more supertanker, the Bratislava, which had a displacement of 62,000 tons. On May 28, 1964, Father went to the opening of a British agricultural exposition on the grounds of the permanent Exhibition of Economic Achievements in Moscow. (It has since been renamed the All-Russia Exhibition Center.) Father was interested in the mechanized and automated factory farms for producing meat from chickens and pigs. It was precisely for that purpose that he had thought up the idea of this exposition in order to familiarize our specialists with the modern technology of other countries. The idea originated in 1962, when he met with Lord Rudy Sternberg, a British industrialist who, ironically enough, belonged to the Labour Party and was chief executive of the Sterling Group. Its volume of sales made the Sterling Group the fourth-largest chemical company in Europe. Khrushchev and Sternberg had not been talking about meat but about the technology of synthetic fiber production and about the possibility of the Soviet Union purchasing licenses and organizing production of those materials in our country. Sternberg was a member of the British cabinet, and was impressed by Khrushchev’s businesslike approach. It occurred to Sternberg that it was not just his company, the Sterling Group, that could derive some benefits from trading with Russia. Sternberg had a friend, Lord David Gibson-Watt, who unlike himself was a supporter of the Tories, the British conservative party, and who headed the Royal Society of Agrarians of Wales. Sternberg told Father that British farmers had achieved great success in breeding varieties of poultry, and that if the Soviet premier considered it possible, he would speak with his friend about organizing an exposition in Moscow. Lord Gibson-Watt was also president of a British association involved in exporting meat products. Father promised to think about the idea, and in November 1962 he informed Sternberg that the Soviet authorities had agreed to the proposal. The appropriate organizing committees were set up in London and Moscow, and the wheels began to turn. The turning of the wheels went on for two years, and finally complete agreement was reached.

Day by Day

435

The opening of the British exposition in Moscow was scheduled for May 18, 1964. Father, who had not yet returned from Egypt at that time, sent Kosygin as his representative. Kosygin gave an appropriate speech, hurriedly walked through the various displays, and went back to his offices in the Kremlin. More important matters than broiler chickens were waiting for him there. In contrast, Father was extremely interested in the production of broiler chickens. Agricultural experts in our country at that time were trying, or so it seems, to extract a double advantage from chickens—let them lay eggs at first and later use them for meat. But this resulted in few eggs, and stringy chicken meat, just skin and bones. The British had developed two separate breeds: laying chickens for eggs, and broiler chickens for meat. When Father went to the British agricultural exposition on May 28, the Cobb Company had some broiler chickens it wanted him to see. The company’s founder was John Knowles. He took a well-fattened chicken from a cage and handed it to his guest. “That’s a nice hen, probably close to two kilograms,” Father said approvingly. “That’s a rooster, Mr. Prime Minister,” said Knowles, correcting Khrushchev. “Not true,” Father objected. “What kind of rooster is it without a coxcomb?” It was true that the bird was lacking that distinguishing decoration usually found on a rooster’s head. Knowles explained that during the breeding process of this variety of fast-growing broiler chicken, the coxcomb had withered away. Father listened closely to this explanation and then turned the bird upside down and checked under its feathers to see if the Englishman was telling the truth. Meanwhile, Knowles was explaining to him that his company’s broilers gained 1.5 kilograms of weight from only 2 kilograms of feed, and after seventy days they attained a weight of 2 kilograms, 150 grams (4.7 pounds). Fattening them beyond that produced no benefits, so at that point the birds were ready for the packing plant. Father was familiar with such information, but the figures nevertheless impressed him. He very much wanted to have a couple of these British broilers for breeding purposes, and he suggested a trade. Knowles would give Father a rooster and a hen, which he himself would keep at his dacha, and he would give Knowles a photograph of the two of them together, with the official Khrushchev autograph. The journalists who were crowding around clicked their cameras. Knowles hesitated a second but then agreed and they shook hands. The adjoining part of the Cobb Company’s display had turkeys. A professor from Edinburgh University, George Clayton, a geneticist by profession, was also a consultant to many companies, including the Cobb Company and a company called British Turkey Meat Products. I still have a photograph from this exhibition with Father’s signature. In his arms he is holding the broiler rooster. Another photo, this time without an autograph, shows Father standing under a plaster cast of a giant turkey, bigger

436 Downfall: 1964 than a human being, and listening to an explanation by Keith Geddes, director of the British Turkey Association. Clayton is standing off to the left. In 2008, this photo was sent to me from a division of the Cobb Company based in Germany (Cobb Germany Avimex GmbH). The Cobb Company was prospering at the time of Khrushchev’s visit to its display in May 1964 at the British exposition in Moscow. The story of Khrushchev’s visit to the exposition I recount here is based on the Cobb Company’s archival records. Father was not really interested in turkeys. After listening to Geddes, he fixed his attention on Clayton, questioning him in detail about how he, as a university professor, interacted with private firms. Who placed requests for his services? Who paid for them? And how were the results utilized? Also, what was the general relationship between a private company and the university? After returning to the Kremlin from this agricultural exposition, Father met for an hour with an editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, W. Benton. On the next day, May 29, 1964, as reported in the historical records of the Cobb Company, a Russian man “of short stature” showed up at the company’s display. (I think it was Lieutenant-Colonel Korotkov, of Khrushchev’s bodyguard.) He delivered to Knowles the autographed photo that had been promised and, pointing to a couple of cardboard boxes he had brought with him, asked which of the broiler chickens he was to take in exchange. Knowles was deeply moved, and instead of a pair of broilers, he handed over three, a rooster and two hens. The emissary from Khrushchev was not in a hurry. He began to inquire meticulously about the type of feed the birds should be given and how often. And he asked for some samples of the feed containing the proper ingredients. After receiving what he asked for, he gave assurances that he would take the broilers directly to Khrushchev’s dacha. But they did not end up at Gorki9. Instead they went to a chicken-breeding farm near Zagorsk, about sixty-four kilometers northeast of Moscow, where the famous old monastery of Saint Sergius is located. The opinion at the Cobb Company is that in the Soviet Union, the commercial development of “pedigreed broiler breeding stock” began with the three chickens given to Khrushchev, described in the company catalogue as being of the Cobb-100 variety. I do not know whether this is true or not. During those years, Father communicated not only with Knowles but also with people involved in the meatpacking industry in the United States, West Germany, and even Australia, and he tried to borrow the best from all of them. But there is not the slightest reason to doubt the truth of the Cobb Company’s archival records. Soviet broiler chickens had to have ancestors of some sort. So why not the three representatives of the Cobb-100 variety? Father’s conversations with the British poultry breeders stuck in his memory. He referred to them in a memorandum to the CC Presidium about the development of Soviet agriculture and returned to them during the discussion about the development of science in our country.

Day by Day

437

“On June 15, 1964, by order of the Soviet minister of culture, Comrade Ye. A. Furtseva, an exhibit of the works of the artist Ilya Glazunov opened in the central exhibition hall of the Manège. The opening of this exhibit had not been coordinated with the Moscow Committee of the Communist Party and took place in opposition to the views of the artists’ professional organizations.” This is what Polikarpov, head of the Central Committee’s Cultural Department, reported to Ilyichev, Central Committee secretary for ideology. The thirty-four-year-old Glazunov had been involved in “the scandal at the Manège,” a dispute over abstract art versus “socialist realist” art, as well as between conservatives and liberals. After that he gained rapid fame. Soon he was painting the portraits of prominent people, from the Soviet writer Fyodor Panfyorov to the French physicist and academician Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Glazunov’s paintings were selling fast. Now along came this exhibit! It drove them wild—the officials of the Moscow section of the Artists Union and of its AllRussia section, all the venerable and worthy members of those organizations. They ran to the CC Cultural Department to complain about Glazunov and his “patrons.” “The organization of an individual exhibit of the works of I. Glazunov at the Manège is an unprecedented event,” Polikarpov wrote indignantly in his memorandum. “Up until now, individual exhibits have not been presented in this viewing space [the main exhibition hall at the Manège]—not even those of the biggest names in Soviet art.” “In organizing this exhibit, certain individual literary figures, Sergei Mikhalkov, Sergei Smirnov, Vasily Zakharchenko, and Antonina Koptyaeva, who act like modern Maecenases, along with some organs of the press, have failed to take into account the unhealthy sensational interest that has been stirred up around Glazunov.” Polikarpov’s memorandum went on in this fashion. The indignation of the “biggest names in Soviet art” knew no bounds. They wanted blood. Under pressure from them, Polikarpov asked his superiors to demand an explanation from Furtseva, to call her on the carpet, and to indicate to the newspapers, including Pravda and Izvestia, “the necessity for a stricter attitude in evaluating or giving support to one or another phenomenon in the arts.” All in all, he was calling for stern measures. At the same time as Polikarpov’s memorandum to the Central Committee, a denunciation came from the KGB: “Using impermissible methods of selfpromotion, Glazunov has contributed to the creation of an atmosphere of nervousness and agitation at the exhibit,” wrote Semichastny. “A rumor has circulated among some of the visitors that Glazunov is a ‘martyr’ and a ‘fighter for freedom’ who does not enjoy the recognition of the Moscow section of the Artists Union.” “This exhibit strikes a blow at our jesuit artists,” wrote Semichastny, quoting a comment that had been written in the visitor’s book. “A discussion of Glazunov’s work was scheduled for June 19. It was canceled. But visitors, mainly young people, ardent admirers of Glazunov’s work,

438 Downfall: 1964 refused to leave the room. They sat on the floor for several hours and shouted for an open discussion to be held. A number of foreign correspondents sent tendentious reports about the exhibit.” That was all. No conclusions. No proposals. Only the signature: “Chairman of the Committee of State Security [KGB], V. Semichastny.”1 In addition to Ilyichev, Suslov and other Central Committee secretaries read these documents, but they did not want to take any action. They advised Ilyichev to wait for Khrushchev’s return from the trip to Scandinavia. The conspiracy against Father had already taken on distinct features—although Suslov was not one of the conspirators at that time. The conspirators would probably have been happy to see another uproar, another scandalous incident involving the artist Glazunov. But no uproar occurred. Khrushchev listened to a report from Ilyichev without interrupting him, but did not follow up on the complaint from the official artists’ group. Ilyichev readily supported this inaction, because he himself belonged to the category of people whom the “artists” denounced as “Maecenases.” In June 1964 the memoirs of Colonel-General Aleksandr Gorbatov were published. Stalin’s secret police had jailed him in 1938 without telling him why and later released him in 1941—again with no explanations. They made him commander of a corps and sent him straight from a prison camp to the battlefront to fight the Germans. In his memoirs he wrote not only about the war but also about his arrest before the war and about the “delights” of Stalin’s prison camps. After One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn, Gorbatov’s book had the most powerful effect at that time on readers of this new “prison camp” genre in Soviet prose writing. On July 8, 1964, Father gave the traditional speech at a reception in the Kremlin for graduates from the Military Academy. Again he talked about the need to reduce the size of the armed forces and to cut military spending. The resources freed up in this way would be reallocated to the production of consumer goods and chemical fertilizers. Those in attendance politely applauded his speech.

The Scandinavian “Miracle”

439

79 The Scandinavian “Miracle” On June 14, 1964, Father departed once again, this time on a trip to

three Scandinavian countries, on the passenger ship Bashkiria. That was more convenient. Shipboard he could have any conversations he wanted with no fear of bugging devices, and he could house the people accompanying him in the ship’s cabins without having to depend on his hosts for accommodations. He visited Denmark first, then Sweden, and ended his journey in Norway. The trip was made in accordance with diplomatic protocol. The Scandinavians had been inviting Father since 1956, but year after year the visit kept being postponed, either because world events took an unfavorable turn or because of some other obstacle. It was impossible to drag things out any longer without really insulting the Scandinavians, and Father did not want to do that. What he saw in the fields of Denmark, and then in Sweden, went straight to his heart. The local farmers, under the weak northern sun and on land that was rather rocky and not at all fertile, had achieved results he could only dream of. “I have simply no words to describe the pleasure I felt observing the state of agriculture in Denmark.” Father made that comment in dictating his memoirs, in 1970. Before my trip I had read a little about Danish agriculture, but I was still surprised by what I saw. We looked at the property of a farmer who was not wealthy in their understanding of things, but to us he would have been a kulak [a wealthy peasant]. Everything was organized so that he would not be wiped out in competition with his neighbors and so that he could earn the maximum. The dairy cattle surprised me more than anything. Denmark is one huge dairy farm with model orderliness, cleanliness, good organization, and little charts showing the productivity of each animal and the percentage of fat in its milk. A cow’s productivity was shown not in terms of liters, as in our country, but in terms of fat content. As we walked past these little charts the figures danced before my eyes: 4.5, 4.7, 5.0, 5.2, 5.5, and even 7.0 percent of fat! It was something to dream about. It’s a small country, but it literally performs miracles. That is, to us these are miracles, but to other countries these are levels that were attained long ago, and for them there’s no miracle involved. I felt the positive feelings of a person who loves to see excellent work done. I must admit, however, that disappointment accompanied my joy. The joy came from the fact that ordinary people could till their fields and obtain such outstanding

440 Downfall: 1964 yields, and from the way they cultivated the land so successfully. My bitter feelings came from the fact that their farming was at a much higher level than our socialist agriculture. Swedish Prime Minister Erlander drove the car himself to visit a nearby farm. The farmer, at the wheel of his tractor, was harvesting alfalfa, but in quite a unique way. I hadn’t seen this method of harvesting before. As the plants were mowed they passed through rollers that crushed the stems, which resulted in the alfalfa drying out more evenly after it was mowed. The harvesting machine also put out rows of twine held up by little rods. The hay rested on the twine, which was made of paper, and dried out more quickly. [The paper twine, unlike wire, was safe for the cows to eat.] Usually the alfalfa leaves, which contain the most valuable nutrients, get dried out too much while the stems are drying. The leaves fall off and are left on the ground. In this new harvesting method the mass of alfalfa dries out evenly, and the hay is gathered up without such losses of nutrients. Unfortunately, we didn’t produce such machines in our country. The farmer also demonstrated an amphibious tractor for us, which mowed down and cleared away reeds and other water plants in ponds. We purchased a model. He also had highly productive cows. Here again, all this made me feel envious. In our country we have so many scientists you could dam up a pond with them, but the science of raising livestock is going nowhere. It doesn’t even have a sensible orientation.1

The Scandinavian trip left Father in a state of shock. We had a lot to learn from those countries, and Father was always eager to learn. We can only guess how the Scandinavian experience might have been reflected in his upcoming reforms, because he had no time left for learning from the Scandinavians or anyone else. He did have time enough to refer to Scandinavian stock breeding in a short speech at the July 1964 plenum of the Central Committee. And in his last memorandum to the CC Presidium, on intensification and specialization in agriculture, he included a few paragraphs on the same subject. But his successors declared that his proposals were merely “tiresome blather.” As for the memorandum itself, it was hidden away and classified as secret. Father was also struck by the simplicity, humaneness, and accessibility of Scandinavian government figures. He thought at first that the king of Denmark was a gardener. Only when this unpresuming figure wearing a khaki field jacket took his seat at the head of the table did Father realize he was the king. When Swedish prime minister Tage Erlander drove them to the nearby farm, he was at the wheel of a minicar. And Norwegian prime minister Einar Gerhardsen arrived at a reception on a bicycle. “This form of transportation is more economical and useful because a prime minister’s traveling is greatly restricted by the limit on the amount of gasoline he can use,” the prime minister explained to Khrushchev when the latter went outside with him after the reception to see him off. Under the impact of his Scandinavian journey, Father again raised the question of excessive use of personal limousines by Soviet party and government

“We’ll Break Up the Academy of Sciences”

441

officials. He brought this up many times during his eleven years in power, but with no results. The bureaucrats would drown his proposals in a swamp of endless discussion in numerous commissions. Still he tried, again and again. This would be the last time he raised the issue. Father’s absence from Moscow—for nearly a month in Scandinavia after almost a month in Egypt—played into the hands of the conspirators. It gave them great scope for their activities. By the summer of 1964 they had control of the main centers of power: the Central Committee (now headed by Brezhnev and Podgorny in Khrushchev’s absence), the Council of Ministers (with Polyansky and Shelepin at the helm), and the KGB under Semichastny. They freely summoned secretaries of the party’s province committees to come to Moscow for consultation, sent their messengers to all parts of the country, and at the same time controlled the dosages of information supplied to Khrushchev. As for Father, he remained ignorant of these activities.

80 “We’ll Break Up the Academy of Sciences and Chase It Off to the Devil’s Grandmother,” or “Whoever Has Science Has the Future” These are two quotations attributed to Khrushchev—the first from a speech he gave at a Central Committee plenum on July 11, 1964, the second

from a memorandum on the intensification of agriculture that he sent to the CC Presidium on July 8, 1964. When he returned to Moscow on July 6 from his trip to Scandinavia, Father plunged into the thick of things. The Central Committee plenum was only five days away, and a session of the Supreme Soviet was scheduled immediately after it. The Central Committee plenum began and ended on Saturday, July 11. This one-day event was convened largely as a formality, to approve without actually hearing it the report Father was to give as head of government to the Supreme Soviet session. Usually such a report dealt with the economic plan for the next year, but in this case it also contained proposals for pension reform.

“We’ll Break Up the Academy of Sciences”

441

officials. He brought this up many times during his eleven years in power, but with no results. The bureaucrats would drown his proposals in a swamp of endless discussion in numerous commissions. Still he tried, again and again. This would be the last time he raised the issue. Father’s absence from Moscow—for nearly a month in Scandinavia after almost a month in Egypt—played into the hands of the conspirators. It gave them great scope for their activities. By the summer of 1964 they had control of the main centers of power: the Central Committee (now headed by Brezhnev and Podgorny in Khrushchev’s absence), the Council of Ministers (with Polyansky and Shelepin at the helm), and the KGB under Semichastny. They freely summoned secretaries of the party’s province committees to come to Moscow for consultation, sent their messengers to all parts of the country, and at the same time controlled the dosages of information supplied to Khrushchev. As for Father, he remained ignorant of these activities.

80 “We’ll Break Up the Academy of Sciences and Chase It Off to the Devil’s Grandmother,” or “Whoever Has Science Has the Future” These are two quotations attributed to Khrushchev—the first from a speech he gave at a Central Committee plenum on July 11, 1964, the second

from a memorandum on the intensification of agriculture that he sent to the CC Presidium on July 8, 1964. When he returned to Moscow on July 6 from his trip to Scandinavia, Father plunged into the thick of things. The Central Committee plenum was only five days away, and a session of the Supreme Soviet was scheduled immediately after it. The Central Committee plenum began and ended on Saturday, July 11. This one-day event was convened largely as a formality, to approve without actually hearing it the report Father was to give as head of government to the Supreme Soviet session. Usually such a report dealt with the economic plan for the next year, but in this case it also contained proposals for pension reform.

442 Downfall: 1964 The July plenum is worthy of mention only because it was Father’s last plenum. If members of the post-Khrushchev government are to be believed, he spoke without a prepared text and rambled on at length and very “chaotically.” According to their allegations, Khrushchev was offended that the members of the Academy of Sciences did not support Lysenko, and that was why he threatened “to chase the academy off to the devil’s grandmother.” This was a remark that came in very handy for the conspirators. I went to considerable effort to obtain from the archives the unedited stenographic record of Father’s speech. The speech is not all that long (only twentytwo pages), and he ended it with an apology: “It seems I have detained and bored you for about an hour, isn’t that right?” After these words he closed the session. Several years after I received that archival document, when my work on the present book was coming to an end, the people in charge of the archives decided to publish it and many other such documents, although to be sure in somewhat edited form. Thus any reader of Russian especially, those who have nothing to do and unlimited free time, can now compare the text quoted here against the version published in 2007.1 Well then, did Father utter those profane words about disbanding the academy, or not? Yes, he did, but in a specific context. The main subject of his speech was agriculture, and the coming reform of agriculture, as was usual for him during those months of 1964. He mentioned the Academy of Sciences only in passing, in connection with the recent election of new members to the academy, and he talked a bit about the academy’s role as a kind of “government ministry” responsible for the organization of scientific research in our country. First, let me comment on the academy elections, which had taken place a few weeks earlier, on June 24, 1964. Most of the “interpreters” of Father’s speech reduce everything to the fact that in the academy elections, Lysenko had backed a “theoretician of his doctrine,” Nikolai Nuzhdin, who was a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. Lysenko wanted to have Nuzhdin elected as a full member of the academy. But some physicists, including academician Andrei Sakharov, concerted their efforts in advance to make sure that Nuzhdin’s candidacy was voted down. In this connection, Sakharov spoke out sharply and in a personally insulting way to express everything he thought about Lysenko and his “biological science.” According to the present-day “interpreters,” Lysenko had complained to Khrushchev, who, to please Lysenko, had threatened to shut down the academy. This version of events stretches the facts. Here and there, the “interpreters” have to alter what Father actually said in their attempt to make their version work. What actually happened at the general assembly of the Academy of Sciences and at the Central Committee plenum? Father did speak quite sharply and critically about Sakharov, but never mentioned Nuzhdin’s name. He talked about Vasily Remeslo, not Nuzhdin. Remeslo was a plant breeder at the Mironovskaya Experimental Station (founded in 1911 at Mironovka, a village

“We’ll Break Up the Academy of Sciences”

443

about a hundred kilometers south of Kiev). He had developed important strains of wheat, including the world-famous Mironovskaya-804 variety. In those days the entire wheat-growing sector of the Soviet economy was built upon this famous variety developed by Remeslo and another variety, the Bezostaya-1, developed by Pavel Lukyanenko. These strains of wheat ensured a yield of 15– 20 centners per hectare more, in addition to the average yield of at least 11 centners per hectare. In the Stavropol region generally, all conceivable records had been broken, with yields as high as 70 centners per hectare, although it is true that such yields were obtained only on land that was fertilized and irrigated especially well.2 To judge from the text of his speech to the Central Committee plenum, Father was seething with indignation. Here Remeslo’s work was making a revolution in agriculture, yet the members of the academy did not consider him their equal. They refused even to make him a corresponding member. They had voted him down resoundingly—and not at the general assembly of the Academy of Sciences, but at the biology division. Anyone who reads the stenographic record of the speech at the Central Committee plenum can have no doubt that it was the vote against Remeslo that upset Father. Again, he never mentioned Nuzhdin or the vote rejecting Nuzhdin’s candidacy for full membership in the academy. Khrushchev stated all this quite clearly: “The issue is the election of V. N. Remeslo as a corresponding member [not even a full member] of the Academy of Sciences. He is an exceptional plant breeder.” Father felt outraged by this injustice, and he let his audience know how he felt. The roots of this problem go back to the age-old conflict between pure and applied science, between theoreticians and practical workers, inventors. The question was whether to vote for the “pure” or the “impure.” What were the proper criteria for choosing a scientist worthy of becoming a member of this august body, the Academy of Sciences? Until the mid–twentieth century the “theoreticians” had dominated the Academy of Sciences, and they looked down on plant breeders, designers of airplanes and rockets, and all such agronomists and engineers. The government, for its part, did not want to offend the people in the applied sciences. After all, in real life the designers and breeders were no less important than the “pure” scientists. Consequently there was always pressure on the academy from the government, so that these “lesser mortals” would be accepted. The theoreticians were concerned that as a result the Areopagus of the “immortals” would be eroded. More and more “mortals” were showing up in their midst. And once these applied-science people had “broken through” into the academy, they would drag a whole garland of new “mortals” along behind them, and soon there would be hardly anything left of the “pure” academy. Their fears were not unfounded. Life is like that. The face of the academy was indeed changing, gradually, but I would not say it was to the detriment of science. For those not initiated in the inner workings of the Academy of Sciences, I should explain: new full members and corresponding members were elected

444 Downfall: 1964 only when a vacancy appeared—because of the death of one of the “immortals,” or if the government created a vacancy, for example in the mathematics, chemistry, or biology division. Full members were elected at the general assembly of the academy, where everyone cast ballots together, biologists voting for mathematicians, physicists for biologists, and so forth. As for the choice of new corresponding members, that was decided by voting at the separate divisions, and the general assembly of the academy as a whole merely confirmed those choices. When the government created a new vacancy, it usually indicated that it was interested in the election of a particular candidate, and sometimes even threatened to cancel the proposed opening should this candidate not be chosen. But the final decision was always left to the academicians, and theirs was a secret ballot. Often the academicians would try to place their “own” candidate in the newly announced vacant spot. The Central Committee department that oversaw the Academy of Sciences would apply pressure and do some haggling, but would try to avoid creating a scandal. If the government-supported candidate was not elected, but the government really wanted this person in the academy, then after the voting a new “special purpose” vacancy might be announced. If the government’s candidate proved to be a loser here too, it would usually resign itself to waiting for the next election. But that would be an exception to the rule. Most often, matters were resolved in a mutually satisfactory way: the academicians would place one of their own candidates in the first government-created vacancy, but then they would elect the government’s candidate to a second, newly opened vacancy, and thus get two permanent positions. There would be two new members of the academy, even though this meant “dilution” of the academy’s purity. A great many examples illustrate this. The first that comes to mind is that of the nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov. In 1943, when he was first a candidate for membership in the Academy of Sciences, he was voted down; the academicians chose another nuclear physicist, Abram Alikhanov, to fill the “personal” spot the government had created for Kurchatov. The government immediately established another vacancy. A new round of elections was held, and Kurchatov became a full member of the academy. In 1953, the election of Andrei Tupolev to the academy was just as dramatic. He was a world-famous aircraft designer. And yet before the voting, as Tupolev told Father, some academicians openly declared: “We don’t need tinsmiths.” He was elected anyway. At the same general assembly in 1953, a group of “atom bomb” specialists “advanced” into the pure spaces of the academy, among them Andrei Sakharov. These were the men who made it possible for us to test our first hydrogen bomb. They too were elected to vacancies especially created for them, and in the case of Sakharov a particular stipulation was made: if he were not elected the first time, the vacancy would be eliminated. He was elected. After Sputnik was launched in October 1957, Sergei Korolyov was proposed for full membership in the academy, and his cohorts, the other chief

“We’ll Break Up the Academy of Sciences”

445

rocket scientists, were nominated to become corresponding members—of course with vacancies established for them. They too were elected, but only under enormous pressure from the government. However, my boss, Vladimir Chelomei, was voted down twice, despite pressure from above and support by a theoretical physicist of great genius, Nikolai Bogolyubov, and by two top-level mathematicians, Mstislav Keldysh and Leonid Sedov. Chelomei “broke through” to academy status only several years later, and not without difficulties. But if he had been a pure physicist, a theoretician of mechanics, without the prefix “designer” attached to his name, I think there would have been no problem getting him elected. Father did not usually interfere in the internal squabbles and intrigues around elections to the Academy of Sciences, but his assistants did report the main results to him after each such election. Things might have gone that way this time too. However, in 1964 the government had opened three additional vacancies for full members in the academy’s biology division and expressed the desire that the three most worthy plant breeders be elected to fill those places. First on the list was Lukyanenko, whom I have already mentioned. He had a doctoral degree in agricultural sciences and was a full member of the Academy of Agriculture. The government’s nominee for the second vacancy was Vasily Pustovoit, head of a department at the All-Union Research Institute on Vegetable Oil and Essential-Oil Plants; he also had a doctoral degree in agricultural sciences and was a full member of the Academy of Agriculture. Pustovoit was just as famous a plant breeder as Lukyanenko, but his special field was the cultivation of sunflowers. The varieties he had bred had gained resounding fame throughout our country, and the shelves of Soviet stores were stocked with containers of oil pressed from the seeds of his sunflowers. Completing the list of three plant breeders proposed for academy membership was Remeslo, the source of all the controversy. He was the director of an experimental station, and had produced spectacularly successful strains of wheat, as described earlier, but had only a candidate’s degree in biological sciences. In the cases of Lukyanenko and Pustovoit, no special difficulties arose. The biology division recommended them for full membership in the academy, and the general assembly voted in favor. But in the case of Remeslo, things went wrong. The academicians were upset by a flagrant violation of normal procedures—that is, a holder of a mere candidate’s degree, not even a doctoral degree, would be going directly to full membership in the academy. At this point I need to give a brief explanation about the difference between a candidate’s degree and a doctoral degree in Russia. In most systems of higher education in Western Europe and North America, upon completion of a course of study (usually for four years) a person graduating from a college or university receives a bachelor’s degree. Those who undertake postgraduate work usually must first obtain a master’s degree (master of arts, master of science, etc.) before

446 Downfall: 1964 going on to earn a doctor’s degree (PhD, etc.). The master’s degree ranks above that of bachelor (bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, etc.) and below that of doctor. In Russia, the system is different. There a student must complete a five- or six-year course of study at a college or university in order to receive a diploma, which in effect is the equivalent of a master’s degree in the West. After receiving such a diploma, the student must pass examinations in order to qualify for postgraduate work. If accepted, the student must also pass examinations in their field of specialization and publish two or three scholarly works, as well as write and defend a dissertation in order to acquire what is called a candidate’s degree, thus becoming a “candidate” in one or another science or art (mathematics, physics, linguistics, literature, etc.). This candidate’s degree is the equivalent of a PhD in most Western countries. In Russia, in order to earn a doctor’s degree, a scholar must first have received their candidate’s degree and must again write and defend a dissertation, but this requires pursuing a further course of study and acquiring much more knowledge. In addition, the scholar must have directed the studies of no less than three other persons in successfully earning their candidate’s degrees. And the scholar must have written a monograph in their field of specialization, presenting important new discoveries made. If all these requirements have been met, the scholar earns a degree as a doctor in one or another science or field of scholarship. Thus, the Russian doctoral degree is two or three levels higher than the Western PhD. In Russia, before either a candidate’s degree or a doctor’s degree is finally approved, the dissertation must be read by experts of the Supreme Certification Commission, which consists of leading scholars and scientists. After the dissertation is approved by this commission, the scholar receives a document confirming a title of “candidate of science” in the respective field or a title of “doctor” of the respective science. In Russia, only about one-tenth of those holding a candidate’s degree go on to successfully earn a doctor’s degree, and this usually takes fifteen to twenty years after receiving the candidate’s degree—that is, after having already demonstrated substantial learning in the respective field. Returning to the case of “candidate of science” Remeslo, I should point out that he, understanding the weakness of his position, had contributed to his own defeat. He applied for election to full membership but also to corresponding membership—as though to say, if I don’t win the first, maybe I’ll get the second. It didn’t work. The disgruntled academicians decided to follow normal procedures—namely, nominees for election as corresponding members of the Academy of Sciences had to be voted on by the appropriate division, in this case the biology division. As a result, Remeslo was voted down. Two other scientists were chosen as corresponding members of the academy in the biology division, out of a total of twenty nominees.

“We’ll Break Up the Academy of Sciences”

447

After Remeslo had failed to win election as a corresponding member of the academy, it was impossible to present him as a candidate for full membership. He was removed from consideration in the voting at the general assembly of the academy as a whole, and a fight broke out over “his” vacancy. Lysenko, with his characteristic pushiness, advanced the candidacy of Nikolai Nuzhdin, head of a laboratory at the academy’s Institute of Genetics, a doctor of biological sciences, and a corresponding member of the academy. He met all the formal criteria to qualify for election as a full member. Competing against Nuzhdin’s candidacy at the general assembly of the Academy of Sciences were two representatives of classical genetics who had miraculously survived Stalin’s purges. One was Nikolai Petrovich Dubinin, also a doctor of biological sciences, a corresponding member of the academy, and head of a laboratory at the academy’s Institute of Genetics. The other was academician Anton Romanovich Zhebrak, head of a department at the First Moscow Medical Institute, a doctor of biological sciences, and a member of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences. Like Nuzhdin, they met all the requirements and were thoroughly qualified to become full members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It was not only Sakharov who spoke in support of these two but other physicists as well. Meanwhile, the biologists sought to remain in the shadows. I should note that the “higher-ups” of the party and government were not pushing for Nuzhdin; otherwise they would have created a special vacancy for him, and most likely there would have been no fight over his election. Both sides in this dispute felt free of any obligations to the government, and neither side was shy about expressing its opinions. At the general assembly the cautious academicians listened to the arguments, especially those of Sakharov and Lysenko, but they preferred the golden mean. To the vacancy that had been meant for Remeslo, they elected the only candidate who had not been involved in the conflict—Boris Yevseyevich Bykhovsky, a worthy scientist in all respects, a parasitologist who had a doctor’s degree in biological sciences, and the director of the academy’s Institute of Zoology; naturally he was already a corresponding member of the academy. Remeslo eventually did become a full member of the Academy of Sciences, in 1974, after defending his doctoral dissertation and being elected as a full member of the Academy of Agriculture. As for Nuzhdin, he was still only a corresponding member when he died, in 1972. After those elections, Father’s assistant for agricultural matters, Andrei Shevchenko, informed him that Lukyanenko and Pustovoit had been voted in but that Remeslo’s candidacy had failed. He gave no details, but later on, most likely at the request of Shevchenko’s friend, Trofim Lysenko, he told Father, with appropriate commentary, about Sakharov’s attack on Lysenko. Whether Shevchenko mentioned Nuzhdin or not at that time, I do not know. Nuzhdin had no authority in the eyes of Khrushchev, who considered him a blowhard and a man of no significance.

448

Downfall: 1964

The “nonelection” of Remeslo had aroused Father’s anger and stirred him to the depths. He didn’t remember where Sakharov had spoken or against whom, but simply spewed out his fury and uttered that threat. But he cooled down immediately, concluding the part of his speech about the Academy of Sciences by saying he did not want “to stir up this smelly business.” In present-day historiography, the “smelly” history about the election or nonelection of Nuzhdin is presented in profoundly negative, anti-Khrushchev terms. In fact, the very possibility that would Nuzhdin be voted down and that a fight would break out over his candidacy—the possibility of that happening without negative consequences for those involved in the fight—testified to the changes that had taken place in Soviet society under Khrushchev. It was not so much that Khrushchev’s “protégé” Lysenko and the “dissident” Sakharov had crossed swords. It was more that two academicians of equal official standing, Lysenko and Sakharov, were lashing out at each other. In 1939, when Stalin “requested” that Lysenko be voted in as a full member of the Academy of Sciences, the “pure” physicists of the same kind as Sakharov and his allies of 1964, along with mathematicians and other “pure” scientists, uncomplainingly and unanimously did as they were asked. They did not dare to contradict Stalin, but in 1964 such scientists openly argued with Khrushchev. Father winced at the unaccustomed nature of it all and had an occasional outburst, but he did not really interfere in these “smelly” matters. He took no measures, and that was thoroughly intentional. He knew that being elected or not is one aspect of democracy. He had taken a firm stand in favor of democratizing Soviet society, and he was not about to retreat from that, not even in relatively minor matters involving the Academy of Sciences. It was necessary to be patient. Nor are Khrushchev’s critics interested in Remeslo or in the real history of the academy elections. Their logic is that since Sakharov had protested against Nuzhdin and since Khrushchev had come down hard on Sakharov, that must have meant that Khrushchev was defending Nuzhdin, and the fact that he talked about Remeslo and never mentioned Nuzhdin—that could be disregarded. After all, Khrushchev’s speech was “chaotic.” Of course his words about breaking up the Academy of Sciences cannot be taken seriously, and yet Father had almost reached the point where he was ready to carry out a fundamental reform of that institution. The question all along was how to make the academy more effective. The Soviet Academy of Sciences is a unique phenomenon in the world. It is not an association of like-minded scientists, but a bureaucratic structure devouring more and more government resources, and the government felt it had the right to ask for a return on its investment. The returns obtained from the institutes of the academy were far less than from analogous research organizations in industry. That problem had been brought up by several academicians back in 1959—Igor Tamm and others, including Semyonov and Kapitsa. Some of

“We’ll Break Up the Academy of Sciences”

449

the “applied science” institutes of the academy were transferred to industry at that time, and Keldysh was brought in to replace Nesmeyanov as president of the academy. The reformists had gone no further than that in 1959–1960, but a whole pile of unresolved problems with the Academy of Sciences remained. One day in my presence, Father and Lavrentyev began talking about the institutes of the Academy of Sciences. As Lavrentyev explained: As a rule, they are established under one particular major scientist to implement his ideas. In everyday conversations they are even called, for example, Semyonov’s Institute, or Kapitsa’s Institute, or Keldysh’s, Nesmeyanov’s, and so on. However, scientists grow old, lose their productivity, and eventually die. Their institutes remain. In our bureaucratic structure it’s difficult, if not impossible, to break them up, but there’s no guarantee that in place of a Kapitsa or a Semyonov a scientist of equal caliber will come along, and there’s no point hoping for that. The deputy director of the top scientist becomes the new director of the institute—a person who by his nature is not a great scientist but an assistant, a right-hand man. All his merits come from knowing how to guard his boss from tiresome routine matters and how to “dislodge” resources from the government. As long as he is an assistant, he is in the right job. The symbiosis is highly productive. The director of the institute, the top scientist, does the creative work, and all the rest falls on the shoulders of his trusted deputy director. On the other hand, the top scientist does not need another scientist under him who would be doing creative work independently. He has enough research ideas of his own to work on. Two creative personalities within four walls do not work well together; each has separate interests he wants to pursue. Therefore the trusted deputy director never encroaches on his boss’s creative prerogatives, but to make up for that he takes control of everything else. He is not capable of becoming a top-level scientist himself. But after the death of the creative genius, the deputy director usually becomes the new director. Consequently, this position with its accompanying academy privileges—which were intended to allow free flight for creative thought, to serve as a support to creative genius—is transformed into a sinecure. It’s one thing to have the Institute of Physics Problems with Kapitsa as director and Lev Landau as a researcher, where people could refer to Yevgeny Lifshitz by the nickname “Zhenka” on the grounds that he never made any great new discoveries but merely wrote—and as Landau’s co-author at that—a ten-volume textbook on theoretical physics that is almost a work of genius. To repeat, it’s one thing to have an institute like that. But it’s something else entirely to have the Institute of Physics Problems without Kapitsa, without Landau, and even without Lifshitz. What you end up with is a nice, average, mediocre institute with an average, mediocre research staff, people who do not even reach as high as the level of “Zhenka.” But if a new Kapitsa appeared, he could not get into this institute. His place has already been taken. The institute exists, and its new director, an academy member, is sitting in the director’s office. He can easily demonstrate, say, at a session of the academy’s presiding body, that duplication of effort is not desirable or sensible. He himself is now firmly ensconced as the new director in place of Kapitsa. He is Kapitsa’s successor, and people will have confidence in him as such, not in some self-promoting outsider.

450 Downfall: 1964 Father was listening very closely to everything that Lavrentyev was saying to him. “But that’s not all,” Lavrentyev went on. “The director of an academy institute, because of his position, is bound to become a full member of the academy. Originally the institute had been established so that a member of the academy, a scientist of genius, could conduct his research. But now the director, simply because of the post he holds, is elected to full membership in the academy. In this way it is transformed bit by bit from a ‘club of immortals’ into an ordinary bureaucratic office, a stagnant swamp. Science is replaced by pseudoscience, and real scientists are replaced by bureaucrats wearing only the trappings of scientists.” In Lavrentyev’s opinion, the future of the Academy of Sciences was threatened not by the influx of people from “applied science,” the plant breeders and rocket or aircraft designers, but by its own natural degeneration. In the same way, the pharaohs of Egypt had degenerated because they were restricted exclusively to marrying their own sisters. If one compares the scientific achievements of academy members in the mid-twentieth century with those at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it becomes obvious that Lavrentyev, and Khrushchev along with him, had good reason to be concerned. Again, in Lavrentyev’s opinion, research in the applied sciences was to be placed under the patronage of industry. The people in charge of industry would themselves decide what was useful and what was not. In the eighteenth century, in the days of Peter the Great or Catherine the Great, the Academy of Sciences was the only center of scientific thought, and so it was natural then that scientific institutions were concentrated solely around the academy. Khrushchev agreed with Lavrentyev, and said in one of his speeches: “Today the situation is entirely different from the time of Peter the Great. Science cannot advance unless it is based directly on production. Production will remain immobile without the support of science.”3 But all of this was only part of the problem. There was also the question of fundamental scientific research. It did not fit well with government departments. Under their auspices it would simply wither away. How could fundamental research be made more effective, but at the same time how could we keep government money from being thrown to the winds? “Without science there is no forward motion. Whoever has science has the future,” Father continued in one of his speeches. “But the good attitude people have toward science must not be abused! Comrades, let’s be more restrained and sensible about establishing more and more new institutes of the Academy of Sciences. Of course we need to develop theoretical research, but we should not be afraid to eliminate institutes that have become divorced from real life. Academy institutes spend money from the government budget without any limitations. If the academy receives so-and-so much money this year, invariably it will ask for more next year, regardless of whether there has been scientific

“We’ll Break Up the Academy of Sciences”

451

growth and regardless of the presence or absence of results. And it turns out that increased spending of resources is the only ‘growth’ at some Academy institutes.” Father implored his audience to “look into matters more closely, stop the unjustified increase in the number of academy institutes, and fix up the coordination of their work.” This work was to be evaluated “not on the basis of the number of staff members, but on the basis of the scientific problems that have been taken up and solved.”4 What then was the solution? What should be done with regard to fundamental scientific research? Father thought its place was in the universities. Lavrentyev, in his conversation with Khrushchev, confirmed that in the West that’s where such research was done. If the appropriate academy institutes were turned over to universities, our country would be the winner, and for outstanding scientists like Semyonov and Nesmeyanov, not much would change. Even now they not only did research but also taught, some at Moscow University, some at the Institute of Physics and Technology, and some at the Agricultural University. And when their place was taken by a successor at a university, even if the successor was not a person of genius, but just a scientist of good quality, that too was no great disaster. The scientist might not be making any great new discoveries, but was teaching the students and perhaps doing some research on the side, at the request of industrial or agricultural enterprises. At that point Father recalled his conversation at the British exposition in Moscow in May 1964 with geneticist George Clayton of Edinburgh University. Clayton was teaching and at the same time doing research under contract with the Cobb Company and at its expense. He did not have to ask for money from the government budget. The company paid him for the results of his work. The Americans operated that way too. Their scientists worked at universities, independent scientific centers, and some of them at companies, and were achieving great success. Most of the new discoveries and inventions of the twentieth century had come into the world from the United States. “If a new genius appears,” Father continued, “he forms his own team of researchers at ‘his’ university and under ‘his own’ direction, a team consisting at first of students and later of the best graduates. A self-reproducing scientific process comes into existence, and [eventually] he is elected to an academy, not because of the office he holds, but because of his intelligence. The bureaucratic structure of the Academy of Sciences that now exists will dissipate of its own accord. It will return to the status of a privileged club of scientists into which people are accepted exclusively because of their talent and scientific merits. In other words, the Academy of Sciences will become what it was intended to be under Peter the Great.” That, strictly speaking, was the essence of the conversation between Lavrentyev and Father. And Lavrentyev was not the only one who agreed with Father. Academician Boris Paton, president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, did so too, although with some reservations. So did Mstislav Keldysh, president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and Nikolai Fyodorenko, director

452 Downfall: 1964 of the latter academy’s Institute of Mathematical Methods in Economics. And they were not the only ones. On April 11, 1963, a resolution of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers was adopted with the title “On measures to improve the activity of the Academy of Sciences and the union-republic science academies.” It stated that the Academy of Sciences had “not yet fully become a center for the coordination and guidance of research in the natural and social sciences in our country.” The resolution reduced the number of personnel in some of the academy institutes that were “incredibly swollen.” But it did not propose any fundamental solution. It only raised the question. The answer was to be sought through joint effort. In April 1963 the Central Committee staff under Pyotr Demichev, the secretary who oversaw scientific matters, gathered together various statements Khrushchev had made about this problem and drafted a memorandum to the CC Presidium. This was the second such attempt. Father had junked the first version, dated January 9, 1963, but he decided to send this reworked version to the presiding body of the Academy of Sciences, to “his” Council on Science, and to the State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research. The memo stated: “During the past ten years in our country, many new research organizations have been organized. The number of research scientists has grown by a factor of almost two and a half, and spending on scientific research has increased approximately fivefold, to 4.7 billion rubles per year. Impressive results have been achieved, but as academician Boris Paton has correctly written in Izvestia, many results lacked long-term value or were of no value at all.” Further, the authors of the memorandum complained about the inadequate coordination of scientific research, both by the respective state committee and by the Academy of Sciences presidium. They proposed greater specialization, and also that doctoral and candidate degrees be awarded not for dissertations on abstract topics, but on the basis of individual contributions to “the collective working out of important problems of applied science and the writing of substantial scientific works.” The authors thought it was advisable “to change the system of payment for the labor of scientific researchers. It is foolish to pay someone for having a degree. Payment ought to be in proportion to results. In his day, Stalin proposed that scientists be paid on the basis of their titles and degrees. What was the result? A flood of people poured into the sciences, but many of them had no real capabilities or aptitude for science. It is not hard to defend a dissertation under good scholarly guidance. And then the author of the dissertation is provided with a decent salary for the rest of his life. An aphorism has been coined, ‘Scientist is something you may not be, / But a PhD is obligatory.’” Something similar could be said in the Western academic world: “Good professor is something you may not be, / But tenure is obligatory.”5 The memorandum continued: “The proposals of academician Ivan Vekua are worthy of attention. He suggests connecting university students to scientific work during their years of instruction. This would help us actively select capable

“We’ll Break Up the Academy of Sciences”

453

young people. . . . We ought to think about more effective utilization of university scientists, about organizing laboratories for fundamental research and laboratories for applied science.” And so forth. The memorandum went on for fourteen pages. In conclusion the memo proposed the introduction of an age limit for holding an administrative post in science. But it did not specify the age, noting just that “scientists who reach this limit should switch over to being consultants.” The memo also expressed doubts about the merger of two Central Committee departments, one on science and one on ideology. In this merged department, “ideology now predominates, and the subdivision for science finds itself in the position of a ‘poor relation.’ It would be expedient to restore a separate department on science and educational institutions,” advised the authors. “We must do everything to clear the road for the fruitful development of Soviet science.” While issuing this call, the authors of the memorandum repeated Khrushchev’s words: “We cannot forget. Whoever has science has the future!”6 As early as May 6, 1963, the first response to this memorandum came from Mstislav Keldysh, the president of the Academy of Sciences. He expressed approval of the proposed innovations and commented on the necessity for Soviet scientists to be more effectively informed about new scientific achievements in the world. This would require putting out a number of journals, above all reference journals. As for having academicians shift over to becoming retiree consultants, in his opinion the older generation of scientists would have a “very painful” reaction to that. And that was understandable. Personnel questions are the most difficult, and they fell entirely on the shoulders of Keldysh. But Father did not insist. On the one hand, he did speak out for bringing younger people into science, but on the other, he held up the favorable example of “academicians of advanced age, such as Konstantin Skryabin, who at the age of eighty was doing better work than many of his juniors.” Academician Boris Paton also liked the memorandum. As president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, he received the memo on an equal footing with Keldysh. In particular, Paton had a proposal regarding the handing out of scientific degrees: “Candidate’s and doctoral dissertations should be assigned, and degrees be awarded, not for the defense of a dissertation, but instead for the writing of an original monograph, providing a description of discoveries and inventions, or describing a cycle of research work.” Academician Lavrentyev, in his response to the memorandum, wrote: “It really is possible to activate scientific work at the institutions of higher education. But this can be done only on the condition that all scientists working at the academy institutes and those associated with branches of industry are drawn into teaching. This measure would advance the level of science at higher educational institutions, create a broader front of scientific research, and bring young specialists to a higher level and also bring them closer to the current state of science and technology in the world. It is necessary to involve university students in scientific research more actively.”7

454

Downfall: 1964

Lavrentyev did not say the words “transfer academy institutes to the universities,” and for the time being Father did not use that wording either. Before making such a decision, all the details had to be thought through. One of the most serious problems was that of organization. One could not get by, in the future as well as the present, without the coordination of scientific research, without extracting resources from the government, and other purely routine bureaucratic matters. Bringing all the scientific research in the country together, and not only that of the Academy of Sciences, ought to be assigned to an interdepartmental committee, which would be given the appropriate powers. Strictly speaking, such a structure already existed—the State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research. The only problem was that the existing committee was not capable of dealing properly with its obligations. It was not doing its job. In many respects the Academy of Sciences presidium was substituting for the state committee. The head of the state committee was Khrushchev’s deputy Konstantin Rudnev, and in recent times Father had more and more often expressed his dissatisfaction with Rudnev. In this case too, unlike the academicians, Rudnev responded to the draft memorandum with a bureaucratic type of reply written for form only. He gave a detailed list of resolutions adopted by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers and gave a kind of report about the work of the State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research, but essentially without making any proposals himself. “There are incredible disputes taking place among scientists,” Father addressed Rudnev at a meeting of the CC Presidium in November 1963. New things are being born, and like a baby the new is crying out, trying to break through into the world. You should hear that cry and assist the scientists with money and equipment. If you can’t get it, come see me. You have not once turned to me and said: “Comrade Khrushchev, help me cope with these ‘barbarians’—Kosygin and Mikoyan, who won’t provide funds for helping new ideas break through and come into the world.” You are not helping the new sprouts to grow. You are helping to stifle them. New ideas are not born according to some plan. The scientists complain about you: “We go to see him and he answers, ‘It’s not provided for in the plan.’” It may be that you are not in the right job. You were a good government minister. Things like that happen sometimes, but it’s impossible to continue in this way.8

Rudnev was the former head of a ministry of the defense industry, one of the best government ministers in Father’s cabinet. But he was failing in his new job. It was one thing to develop and produce rockets or cannons, but it was something else altogether to bring all of science together under his wing. Rudnev did not have a broad-enough perspective or authority among scientists. Nor did he have a feel for the situation. He was not capable of singling out, from among hosts of proposals crashing down on his head every day, the one and only proposal that had a future. However regrettable it might be, it was necessary to find a replacement for Rudnev.

“We’ll Break Up the Academy of Sciences”

455

Who did Father have in mind for the position of chief coordinator of science in our country? Was it Keldysh, the president of the Academy of Sciences? Or academician Boris Paton? They were both scientists and extraordinarily capable administrators. Many years of interaction with them had convinced Father of that. Or did he intend to appoint someone else, someone I simply don’t know of? Today that question cannot be answered. The future “coordinator of all the sciences” was to report to Father through the mediation of the Council on Science and its chairman, academician Lavrentyev, along with the dozen other members of that council—the most productive of Soviet scientists. I have already written about the Council on Science in Chapter 51. If they could not cope with the task, no one could. The wheels gradually began to turn. The Council on Science had been established on February 7, 1963, and at its initiative, as early as March 14, 1963, the Central Committee and the government issued a decree titled “On the further development of scientific research work at the institutions of higher education.” This was the first step toward shifting the center of gravity of theoretical research to the universities and technical institutes. Central Committee secretaries Demichev and Ilyichev put together various commentaries that had been sent to them, and on June 10, 1963, they presented to Khrushchev a newly revised text. Actually this is the only text that is now accessible to researchers, and this is the one I have quoted from here. “Reported to Comrade Khrushchev on August 29, 1963. Set aside.” That is what Father’s assistant Shuisky wrote on the document. A year later, on August 15, 1964, Shuisky made a new annotation: “All these materials on science are to be placed in the archives. A new draft will be presented.” Evidently Father was still dissatisfied with something. It is possible that he still wanted to talk some more with the academicians, consult with Lavrentyev, and then dictate a new memorandum himself. How would he rework the memorandum? We can only guess. Matters went no further. Khrushchev was ousted, and in the process he was accused of “attempting to ruin Soviet science.” That is the end of the story. At the start of this chapter I excerpted two different statements by Khrushchev. Let readers choose the one they like best, according to their tastes.

456 Downfall: 1964

81 The Eight-Year School At the end of 1963 the question of quality of instruction in the schools

had come up again. The 1958 reform of secondary education had changed the ten-year school into an eleven-year school, introducing vocational training and making direct work experience in production obligatory for all. Some people liked the new system. Others grumbled that students had to waste precious time “learning” how to saw boards. Still others considered the eleven-year school a luxury suitable only for the “elite,” the highly talented among young men and women. This third body of opinion included academician Lavrentyev. He kept pushing with all the “weight” he had for a shift to the eight-year school. He thought eight years of schooling would give the average person enough knowledge for later life, for job or career. In his opinion, the overwhelming majority of young people gained no benefits for their future during the last two or three years in high school—whether a ten-year or an eleven-year school—as “everyone’s hair was cut to the same length.” By the end of eighth grade, their aptitudes, if any, had already been defined. And the additional three years of school only filled their heads with information that would immediately be forgotten or would prove useless for some and insufficient for others after they had received a high school diploma. They needed that piece of paper only as a pass for five more years of education to get a college degree. And in most cases it did not matter to them where they went to college—except that the more prestigious the institution, the better. On the other hand, genuine talents from the villages and small towns did not make it into the best universities, which were already full to the brim with the children of people who had “pull”—the children of the big-city intelligentsia, scientists, administrators, and the like. A memorandum from Lavrentyev to Khrushchev dated June 10, 1963, suggested that specialization be widely introduced “in the upper grades of high school, with specialized boarding schools for mathematics and physics. Such schools would wipe out the discrepancy between city, village, and small-town youth, which had nothing to do with talent or lack of talent, but was caused by different levels of teaching at different schools.”1 This memorandum led to a discussion about schools at a CC Presidium meeting on December 23, 1963. Lavrentyev was present at that meeting and spoke there in his capacity as chairman of the Council on Science.

The Eight-Year School

457

“Today the situation with regard to the training of young specialists is not good,” he said. “This is the general opinion of educators. Under the existing system of eight- to eleven-year education, most students are being given higher marks than they deserve [just to keep them in school]. Thus, robust young fellows are not only doing nothing in school themselves but are also a bad influence on others. If they don’t want to study, let them go to work. After the eighth grade there should be a competitive arrangement for acceptance into an elevenyear school. People put no value on anything they get for free. Make them work for it.” Lavrentyev then went into detail about what should be taught in the schools and what should be regarded as “chaff” and dropped from the curriculum. Father agreed with Lavrentyev. Eight years of education should be made obligatory for all, but only talented people should be accepted on a competitive basis into the eleven-year schools. Let the rest go to work in production. And among them, whoever wants to can go to an evening school up through the eleventh grade in order to pursue their studies further. If someone doesn’t want to, that’s no great disaster. “Access to higher education should not be closed to anyone,” Father continued. “The ways of obtaining an education should be made more varied.” Here he gave me as an example. I had entered an engineering institute immediately after high school and had become an engineer at the age of twenty-three. He was satisfied with me, but did not exaggerate my abilities. In his view, my merits as an engineer fell into the category of “statistically average.” “And yet if he [that is, I] had completed the eighth grade, had hung around as a worker in production for four years, and only after that had gone for a higher education, it would have made a better engineer out of him.” That was how Father concluded his remarks. Voroshilov and Polyansky supported what Father had said, but Mikoyan, as usual, had some doubts. On the one hand, he agreed, but on the other hand, it was not so much that he objected as that, in his view, people with connections would still find loopholes, ways of squeezing their offspring into the universities. “There should be two types of schools: eight-year and eleven-year.” Mikoyan was indulging in oratory. “Instruction should be linked with labor, but if children are to be torn away from their education at that age, it’s not right.” Mikoyan spoke for a long time and by the end of his speech everyone was tired. Father proposed that “we end the discussion today, think about it, finish working on the question in the Council on Science, weight it all up, and then return to the discussion again.”2 The Council on Science was assigned to “finish working” on the question together with the Ministry of Secondary and Special Education and the Academy of Pedagogy. Three months was spent on that. Everyone thought eight years of schooling was enough for the statistically average student. On April 9, 1964, the Council of Ministers adopted a resolution titled “On the further improvement of higher and secondary special education through

458 Downfall: 1964 evening schools and correspondence courses.” On August 10, 1964, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet passed a law making changes in the 1958 law, which had been titled “On strengthening ties between the schools and real life, and developing further the system of education in the Soviet Union.” The eight-year school did not last long. After October 1964, to everyone’s satisfaction, Brezhnev turned everything back to the old way. Who was right, Lavrentyev and Father or their opponents? I am one of those people who cannot imagine themselves without a college degree. And that seems to be the universal trend in the world. On the other hand, one can’t help agreeing with Lavrentyev that most people make no use of the knowledge received in the last years of high school. Mathematical and chemical formulas go flying out of the heads of some people, while others quickly forget the irrelevant “chaff” from the humanities. In this sense, making a selection at an earlier stage—and that’s precisely what Lavrentyev was proposing—seems rational, making it possible to economize both resources and time. But what about the overall development of the individual? A higher intellectual level? On that question I will not try to judge.

82 Spelling Reform On July 28, 1964, the newspapers reported that linguists at the Acad-

emy of Sciences were proposing a simplification of the orthography of the Russian language. Stormy debates went on for a year. On September 24 and 25, 1964, for example, Izvestia printed a full-page spread with the future “correct spelling” of difficult words. Both linguistic experts and nonexperts argued themselves hoarse. The country was divided into two warring camps. After the ouster of Khrushchev, someone in the heat of the moment accused him of malevolently trying to foul up the spelling of the Russian language. It was alleged that since Khrushchev himself did not know how to spell well, he had ordered the spelling to be changed so that it would agree with his version. This was pure fabrication.

458 Downfall: 1964 evening schools and correspondence courses.” On August 10, 1964, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet passed a law making changes in the 1958 law, which had been titled “On strengthening ties between the schools and real life, and developing further the system of education in the Soviet Union.” The eight-year school did not last long. After October 1964, to everyone’s satisfaction, Brezhnev turned everything back to the old way. Who was right, Lavrentyev and Father or their opponents? I am one of those people who cannot imagine themselves without a college degree. And that seems to be the universal trend in the world. On the other hand, one can’t help agreeing with Lavrentyev that most people make no use of the knowledge received in the last years of high school. Mathematical and chemical formulas go flying out of the heads of some people, while others quickly forget the irrelevant “chaff” from the humanities. In this sense, making a selection at an earlier stage—and that’s precisely what Lavrentyev was proposing—seems rational, making it possible to economize both resources and time. But what about the overall development of the individual? A higher intellectual level? On that question I will not try to judge.

82 Spelling Reform On July 28, 1964, the newspapers reported that linguists at the Acad-

emy of Sciences were proposing a simplification of the orthography of the Russian language. Stormy debates went on for a year. On September 24 and 25, 1964, for example, Izvestia printed a full-page spread with the future “correct spelling” of difficult words. Both linguistic experts and nonexperts argued themselves hoarse. The country was divided into two warring camps. After the ouster of Khrushchev, someone in the heat of the moment accused him of malevolently trying to foul up the spelling of the Russian language. It was alleged that since Khrushchev himself did not know how to spell well, he had ordered the spelling to be changed so that it would agree with his version. This was pure fabrication.

“In General Everyone Is Busy, but in Particular No One Is”

459

It is true that Father did not spell especially well. Everyone knew that, including himself, and they had long since grown accustomed to it. He dictated the drafts of his speeches, memoranda, resolutions, and the like. Stenographers typed up the dictation, and then the members of his editorial group made sure all the spelling and punctuation were correct. He felt no need or desire whatsoever to change the spelling of Russian. The linguists were entirely responsible for the proposed reform—as had been true with the modernization of Russian spelling after the 1917 revolution. The only difference was that after 1917, the spelling reform was actually carried out. In 1964 and after, it went nowhere. At least for quite a while.

83 “In General Everyone Is Busy, but in Particular No One Is” At the Central Committee plenum on July 11, 1964, Father spoke about

the Academy of Sciences for three minutes, but devoted the other fifty-seven minutes of his speech to the subject of reorganizing agricultural production. He was coming closer and closer to trying out a major economic reform, and now he repeated what he had said at the February plenum, but this time more concretely and categorically. For serious reforms to be carried out, stability was required. The mind needed to be free, not preoccupied with the problems of the present moment, patching up holes of one kind or another. Stability would be ensured, above all, by a good harvest, but that depended on “the will of God,” that is, on the weather. At the time of his speech at the February plenum, he could only guess about the coming harvest. But now, in July, when harvesting had already begun in many parts of the country, the prospects were becoming increasingly clear. From Ukraine to Kazakhstan, the grain had ripened abundantly. Nevertheless, Father spoke cautiously at the plenum, recalling “the late coming of a rather uneven springtime, which had made the sowing more difficult, as well as the drought in Belorussia and the Moscow region, which had been worse than the previous year’s drought, in 1963.” But Belorussia and the Moscow region do not make the weather for the whole country, and “in most regions the picture is

“In General Everyone Is Busy, but in Particular No One Is”

459

It is true that Father did not spell especially well. Everyone knew that, including himself, and they had long since grown accustomed to it. He dictated the drafts of his speeches, memoranda, resolutions, and the like. Stenographers typed up the dictation, and then the members of his editorial group made sure all the spelling and punctuation were correct. He felt no need or desire whatsoever to change the spelling of Russian. The linguists were entirely responsible for the proposed reform—as had been true with the modernization of Russian spelling after the 1917 revolution. The only difference was that after 1917, the spelling reform was actually carried out. In 1964 and after, it went nowhere. At least for quite a while.

83 “In General Everyone Is Busy, but in Particular No One Is” At the Central Committee plenum on July 11, 1964, Father spoke about

the Academy of Sciences for three minutes, but devoted the other fifty-seven minutes of his speech to the subject of reorganizing agricultural production. He was coming closer and closer to trying out a major economic reform, and now he repeated what he had said at the February plenum, but this time more concretely and categorically. For serious reforms to be carried out, stability was required. The mind needed to be free, not preoccupied with the problems of the present moment, patching up holes of one kind or another. Stability would be ensured, above all, by a good harvest, but that depended on “the will of God,” that is, on the weather. At the time of his speech at the February plenum, he could only guess about the coming harvest. But now, in July, when harvesting had already begun in many parts of the country, the prospects were becoming increasingly clear. From Ukraine to Kazakhstan, the grain had ripened abundantly. Nevertheless, Father spoke cautiously at the plenum, recalling “the late coming of a rather uneven springtime, which had made the sowing more difficult, as well as the drought in Belorussia and the Moscow region, which had been worse than the previous year’s drought, in 1963.” But Belorussia and the Moscow region do not make the weather for the whole country, and “in most regions the picture is

460 Downfall: 1964 fairly gratifying.” Father was afraid he might put a jinx on things—Heaven forbid lest rain rot the roots of the ripened grain or early frosts damage it—but as things were shaping up, it looked like there might be “not just a gratifying, but a record harvest.” Even before leaving for Scandinavia, on June 13, 1964, he had begun drafting a memorandum to the CC Presidium, which would turn out to be his last. Its preliminary title was “On the management of agriculture in connection with our switching over to the path of intensification.” In an accompanying letter he considered it necessary to comment: “In the memorandum, I have made some additions on issues that I have been thinking about in the recent period.” He had indeed rethought a great deal during the five months since the February plenum, and now he was ready for decisive action. Or almost ready. At the top of the list, as before, stood specialization and professionalization, above all at the level of the rural interdistrict production administrations and the party’s province committees. I will take the liberty of citing some passages: We are now establishing factory farms to produce eggs, meat, poultry, pork, beef, milk, entirely new types of socialist agricultural enterprises. We are organizing the production of potatoes and other vegetables, as well as cotton, sugar beets, and other highly important crops, on the basis of new technology, at specialized farms, with minimal expenditures of labor and resources per unit of output. . . . The development of agriculture along the road of intensification also requires, of course, leadership that will be new in principle, with higher qualifications. It is one thing to manage a farm that produces only small quantities and something else altogether to manage large-scale specialized production with a high level of mechanization. That requires a great deal of knowledge in engineering, agronomy, zootechnology, and veterinary medicine on the part of specialists and organizers. It is inconceivable that such production could be managed without science taking an active part.

“Specialized agricultural production, from the standpoint of its organization,” Father continued, “is more and more becoming a variety of industrial production. Some people might be thinking: ‘What is this? Are we going to reorganize our agricultural institutions again?’ No, we are not talking about a reorganization, but about creating a system of management of highly specialized production.” That was the task that Father set. “We cannot be talking now about the management of agriculture in general. Who is responsible among us for the production of grain? In general everyone is busy with this, but in particular no one is. Meanwhile, in this branch of production there are questions that highly qualified people need to be involved with systematically, on a daily basis. In the West, industrial methods for producing agricultural goods are making their appearance in literally every sphere.” He held up potato farming in the US state of Maine as an example for people in Belorussia and the Moscow region to follow. The farmers in Maine did not use homegrown seed potatoes, but purchased them from specialized companies. That’s why there was no comparison between the yields they obtained

“In General Everyone Is Busy, but in Particular No One Is”

461

and ours. As for the sheep breeders of Kazakhstan, they had something to learn from the English. On this small, industrialized island of Britain, on tiny plots of land, 29 million sheep were pastured, more than in all the vast steppe lands of Kazakhstan. At the end of his memorandum, Father returned for the umpteenth time to the production administrations, whose inspectors he thought ought not to issue directives, but should bring knowledge to the peasants. And again he held up an example from England, where it was “difficult to find the boundary where science ends and practical work begins. The farmer is provided with a kind of logarithmic equation, and by using it he can easily determine, depending on the weight of the chicken, the surrounding temperature, and the calorie content of the chicken feed, exactly how much he should pour into the feed tray today.” Putting such farming methods into practice, making the peasant’s life easier—that is what the production administrations should be involved with. “Why do we turn to the experience of the capitalists?” Father asked in his memorandum, and answered: “Large-scale production of marketable agricultural goods has been established there for a long time. It is done on an industrial basis, drawing scientists and specialists into the work. Our state and collective farms are bigger than the American farms, but ours have developed without any specialization, having inherited the psychology of the individual peasant owner at the beginning of the century. Without specialization and technology, without making use of the experience accumulated in the capitalist countries, we will not be able to solve the problem of placing agriculture on an industrial basis. “We need to buy licenses from abroad and send our people abroad, so that when they return, they can achieve results in our country’s fields that will be no worse than those of the capitalists.” To organize the work on specialization, Father proposed that special government structures be established in the areas of poultry farming, the raising of hogs, and the raising of vegetables, but these would not have the power to issue orders. The duties assigned to them would be to see to it that our farms were abiding by certain standards of science and technology, to educate cadres, and to write textbooks and manuals. Father especially emphasized that education provided the assurance of success because only trained professionals were capable of effective farming. He singled out the main foreseeable trends in the development of world agriculture during the next half-century. Just as had happened with industry at the start of the twentieth century, an era of large-scale production was beginning. The giants capable of minimizing their losses would win out. According to available information, in the United States by 2002 only fifty large companies would be putting chicken meat on the market, and two or three of those companies would be giants. The same would be true of pork production, and so on. Father correctly grasped the direction of world development in agriculture, but those who read his memorandum refused to understand it. It seemed to them

462

Downfall: 1964

that Khrushchev was suggesting one more bureaucratic reshuffling, and reducing specialization to the founding of new state committees: a “State Committee for Geese” and a “State Committee for Hogs.” Not until 1989 would a kind of partial enlightenment set in. In that year the agrarian journalist Anatoly Strelyany would write: “Specialists knowledgeable about the world economy say: Khrushchev deserves honor and praise for the fact that way back then he was already placing the question of modern methods of raising livestock on the agenda.”1 Well, what can one say? “A prophet has no honor in his own country”? In his memorandum, Father did not fail to mention Lysenko. He believed that Lysenko’s methods would help our country achieve prosperity. He believed in him. We know he was mistaken, but that is what he believed. The memo dwelled especially on the role of the party committees in the production administrations. Father wrote that after the elimination of the party’s rural district committees, when new party committees were attached to the production administrations, those committees did not retreat from the style of work that had prevailed in the district committees. They tried to subordinate the leaders of the production administrations to themselves, demanded that those officials attend meetings of the party committees, and continued to issue commands to the state farms and collective farms, interfering in the productive work without having any qualifications for that and refusing to take specialists into account. All the while, they themselves “were not sufficiently competent, had no specialized education, and sometimes had a very poor understanding of the production process itself. Material and even criminal penalties must be established for the issuing of directives that undermine production and harm the interests of the state and collective farms. The secretary of a party committee should not take over the functions of the production administration. His job is to do political work among the masses.”2 “Leningrad province raises no sheep,” Father stated indignantly at the CC Plenum. “They explain that theirs is a very humid region. Plenty of moistureloving chickweed grows there, but sheep can’t eat it. [It’s harmful to sheep.] And yet neighboring Finland, which is even more northerly, with plenty of precipitation, does raise sheep and exports mutton. Unless we rely on good specialists, as they do in Finland, nothing will work out for us.” “In our country,” Father’s speech continued, “any ignoramus passing by on the road can stop and ‘enlighten’ the chairman of the collective farm on how the work should be done. In our agricultural work who is the main person? The head of the production administration? Or the party secretary? Of course the party secretary. But he is not responsible for production. We can’t do things this way, comrades! “The production administration cannot function properly as long as the party secretary is the most important person! That, comrades, is a disaster for agriculture! I have already drafted a memorandum, and we will soon circulate it.” And then he warned those present: “At the end of November, after the holidays

“In General Everyone Is Busy, but in Particular No One Is”

463

[celebrating the Bolshevik Revolution of November 7, 1917], we will convene a plenum.”3 Father finished writing the earlier-mentioned memorandum after the Supreme Soviet session. On July 18, he sent it to his colleagues on the CC Presidium, and as early as July 20, on the basis of a resolution by the CC Presidium, it was sent to the party’s province committees and to the production administrations, as well as to the newspapers, to scientists, and to other interested persons, so that they would have sufficient time before the next plenum, scheduled for November 1964, to prepare comments and suggestions. In his view this was too serious a matter to be decided just off the cuff. During the next three months, before he was removed from office, there were several more occasions when he addressed this subject, which was of such great concern to him. Among the documents that have survived are transcripts of several conversations he had with CC Presidium colleagues and regional leaders. They all dealt with the same topic. I have chosen one transcript at random, of a meeting on September 18, 1964, “with several members of the CC Presidium and officials of the CC apparatus, about preparations for the plenum and about the structure of the administrative organs in agriculture.” This was twenty-six days before his ouster.4 A report was being given by Leonid Yefremov, Khrushchev’s deputy on the CC Bureau for the Russian Federation. The transcript of the September 18 conversation is quite long, and overloaded with details of no interest to us now. I present here only the most important passages. Father was continuing his discussion of administrative structure. He asked a question of himself and of the others: “What is the production administration today, and what will its role be in the future, after the reform?” Here are some excerpts from his comments on this subject: “In essence it is an administrative entity. Are we, then, going to run after every collectivefarm chairman and state-farm director and tell him when to sow the crops? Give the man his freedom, and you will see what he is capable of. . . . Sometimes we exaggerate our own role in all matters. These people, the state-farm and collective-farm leaders, will decide everything. They will act in their own way and that will be their saving grace. But if we put idiots in charge, then no intelligent officials from the republic-level governments will be of any help. That is one of the key problems.” It seemed to Father that in the previous two years the rural interdistrict production administrations had become too petty. On balance, each of them was responsible for four to six farms, ten at the most, and that created an almost irresistible temptation to issue commands, “to go sit on the collective-farm chairman’s neck and keep nagging at him.” What was the solution? Father said that he did not know, but suggested that people should think about merging several small-scale production administrations into one larger organization. Then that

464

Downfall: 1964

one would really attend to business, developing suggestions of an agro-technical nature and distributing such helpful information to its “customers.” The state of affairs in science was also unsatisfactory. “Why do we have to turn to the West Germans for feed recipes for raising hogs?” Father asked this as a rhetorical question. “In Hungary they showed me a factory farm for poultry. Who did they buy it from? From the Soviet Union? No, they bought it in West Germany, and only because we didn’t have any such thing to sell them! That really burns me up. And about our scientists, how can they, in good conscience, call themselves ‘doctors of science’ when they’re not giving anything to our country? Let science be organized in a local area, at a state-owned factory farm for raising chickens or pigs, not in Moscow or Kiev.” Father was soon to be reminded of these words. In October, at the Central Committee meeting that voted to oust him, Voronov made this accusation directly to his face, claiming that Khrushchev had “proposed that the rural production administrations be eliminated.5 One widely circulated accusation against Father was that “he went so far as to say that he wanted to deprive the rural party committees of the right of control over economic activity, reducing the role of the party committee to cultural enlightenment.”6 And we hardly need mention that Khrushchev’s idea of moving agricultural academic institutions out into the country was proclaimed to be petty tyranny and is held against him to this day. Essentially this was all that was discussed on September 18. Those who took part spoke further about specialization, about staff personnel, about dairy cattle and beef cattle, and they argued a bit, then agreed to meet again in the near future. Some specific and obvious steps were taken without waiting for the scheduled plenum. On September 3, 1964, a decree of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers was adopted, with the title “On organizing the production of meat and eggs on an industrial basis.” With that a program of specialization and industrialization of agriculture began. The resolution projected that, during the years 1965–1970, 508 modern factory farms for producing eggs would be established, and 258 for producing chicken meat. It would be necessary to purchase the licenses and technology abroad. In previous years, more than one resolution on this matter had already been adopted, providing for industrialized production of chicken meat. Five years earlier, in September 1959, it seemed that everything had been scheduled in detail, but things barely moved along, and in some places they were “marching in place,” remaining at a standstill. Now, Father hoped, everything would be different, that one-person management would come into its own at the factory farms, and they would all be united under a single roof, an organization to be called Ptitseprom (Poultry Industry of the Sovet Union). Ptitseprom would be the equivalent of the Perdue and Tyson companies in the United States, in whose orbit a substantial part of US poultry farming was concentrated. In subsequent

“In General Everyone Is Busy, but in Particular No One Is”

465

years, Soviet poultry farming did indeed develop on the basis of this government resolution. On the threshold of a major reform of the economy, an all-embracing resolution was drafted, “On the management of agriculture in connection with the intensification and specialization of production.” The entire structure of agriculture was to be transformed and placed on an industrial basis. Father was never able to sign this decree, and after his ouster the draft document was sent to the archives as “unnecessary.”7 By September 1964, Father had managed to carry out one more action that, in his opinion, was very important. The government wrote off all collectivefarm debt that had accumulated during the previous years. There was no use starting a new reform unless we cast off the burden of past problems and errors. What was the point of giving collective farms the freedom to dispose of their income and expenditures themselves if they were in debt to the government? Whatever they earned had to go to pay off this debt. In the spring of 1964, there were not just one or two such bankrupt collective farms, but 38,772 of them, or 22 percent of the total number of collective farms, covering 40 million hectares of agricultural land, including 20 million hectares of cropland, which amounted to 17.6 percent of all agricultural land in the Soviet Union. For the sake of comparison, the usable land on the farms that were hopelessly in debt was equal to two-thirds of the Virgin Lands, which had been brought under cultivation in the preceding ten years. The number of people working on these “farms that were lagging behind” was 3.4 million. Payment for a workday on such farms never went higher than 1 ruble, 30 kopecks, only half of the amount paid on neighboring farms that were free of debt. It was not only the collective farmers who bore the responsibility for this debt, but also the government, and Father himself. And the problem was not only the unjustifiably low procurement prices paid by the government for agricultural products. The problem was also that they had not looked far enough ahead in 1958, when the collective farms were obliged to take ownership of the equipment previously belonging to the government’s machine-and-tractor stations. At first the government allowed the collective farms five years to pay for this machinery, but then the Ministry of Finance, seeking to fill holes in the budget, began trying to extract payments immediately and in full from the new owners for the machinery they had acquired. To pay off the government, the collective farms took out new loans from the same government, resulting in a vicious cycle. They were unable to repay the debt, at least not in the envisioned time frames, and like all people who become hopelessly indebted, in order to survive for today, they had to take on more and more new debt, to be paid back “tomorrow.” As of 1963, the debtor farms were paying out 110.9 million rubles more than they were bringing in annually.8 That was how they were living—deep in debt and half-starving. What kind of reforms could be undertaken with partners like that? First, it was necessary to clear away all obstacles and make a level playing field for everyone.

466

Downfall: 1964

On March 12, 1964, the government had adopted a resolution titled “On measures to raise the economic level of collective farms that are lagging behind.” This gave permission for debts to be written off if they had been incurred with the acquisition of equipment from the former machine-and-tractor stations. At the same time, the income taxes on these farms were reduced by 75 percent.9 On September 1, 1964, the State Bank and the Finance Ministry reported to the government that they had carried out the task assigned them in March— to reduce or reschedule debt. The collective farms had also been offered favorable credit terms for capital construction and for the purchase of fertilizer for the 1965 harvest. The first results had immediately become evident. At collective farms that were regarded yesterday as hopeless, things had started to move. The value of their livestock had increased by 21 percent, from 218 million rubles in the first half of 1963 to 264 million rubles as of July 1, 1964. And payments to collective farmers had increased.10 Such progress is understandable. When you’re not weighed down by the burden of debt, you can start to loosen the purse strings. Father thanked the financial officials for these reports. Just a little bit more like this, and it really would be possible to launch the reform. However, as things turned out, the new leaders did not discuss reform at the November 1964 plenum of the Central Committee. They had freed themselves from Khrushchev’s “subjectivism and voluntarism,” which was their way of describing his proposals for transforming the Soviet economy.

84 Pensions, Salaries, Two Days Off On Monday morning, July 13, 1964, two days after the Central Com-

mittee plenum of July 11, the Supreme Soviet session opened. Khrushchev gave a report, titled “On measures to fulfill the Communist Party program for increasing the people’s well being.” He proposed government pensions for collective farmers to be established by law. This was one more step in the process of giving peasants rights equal to those of all other inhabitants of the Soviet Union. It followed on the heels of granting them passports. Soviet citizens were not allowed to travel inside the country without internal passports. Previously a collective farmer had no passport

466

Downfall: 1964

On March 12, 1964, the government had adopted a resolution titled “On measures to raise the economic level of collective farms that are lagging behind.” This gave permission for debts to be written off if they had been incurred with the acquisition of equipment from the former machine-and-tractor stations. At the same time, the income taxes on these farms were reduced by 75 percent.9 On September 1, 1964, the State Bank and the Finance Ministry reported to the government that they had carried out the task assigned them in March— to reduce or reschedule debt. The collective farms had also been offered favorable credit terms for capital construction and for the purchase of fertilizer for the 1965 harvest. The first results had immediately become evident. At collective farms that were regarded yesterday as hopeless, things had started to move. The value of their livestock had increased by 21 percent, from 218 million rubles in the first half of 1963 to 264 million rubles as of July 1, 1964. And payments to collective farmers had increased.10 Such progress is understandable. When you’re not weighed down by the burden of debt, you can start to loosen the purse strings. Father thanked the financial officials for these reports. Just a little bit more like this, and it really would be possible to launch the reform. However, as things turned out, the new leaders did not discuss reform at the November 1964 plenum of the Central Committee. They had freed themselves from Khrushchev’s “subjectivism and voluntarism,” which was their way of describing his proposals for transforming the Soviet economy.

84 Pensions, Salaries, Two Days Off On Monday morning, July 13, 1964, two days after the Central Com-

mittee plenum of July 11, the Supreme Soviet session opened. Khrushchev gave a report, titled “On measures to fulfill the Communist Party program for increasing the people’s well being.” He proposed government pensions for collective farmers to be established by law. This was one more step in the process of giving peasants rights equal to those of all other inhabitants of the Soviet Union. It followed on the heels of granting them passports. Soviet citizens were not allowed to travel inside the country without internal passports. Previously a collective farmer had no passport

Pensions, Salaries, Two Days Off

467

or other identification paper and was not allowed to leave the farm without special police permission. Changes began in February 1958, when some categories of peasants received passports. But in any process, the beginning is very important, although the process of giving passports to all peasants was not completed until 1974. Behind the scenes, the decision to give equal rights to peasants raised serious ideological questions. Father thought it was time to stop dividing the people into classes that were not considered equal, even though they might no longer be considered “hostile.” In his view, our country was now all one, and our people were one. The ideologists did not object, but they also did not approve. In their hearts they felt that Khrushchev was being an apostate from the true doctrine, even a “revisionist.” The payment of pensions to collective farmers added a weighty material aspect to their arguments. Beginning on January 1, 1965, pensions were to be paid to rural residents, males over the age of sixty-five, and females over sixty. The pension would amount to 50 percent of their former pay, up to 50 rubles per month; or 25 percent of their pay, if they had been earning more than 50 rubles monthly. This was somewhat less than the pensions paid to blue-collar and white-collar workers. But the argument was that the peasants had a permanent income supplement in the form of their household plots. They raised their own vegetables, poultry, pigs, and other livestock. They didn’t have to go to a store for those products. Besides, even the meager sums represented by these pensions would add a heavy burden to the budget. In addition to pensions for the peasants, Khrushchev proposed that beginning on January 1, 1965, pay for teachers would be increased to between 80 and 135 rubles per month. Before that their pay ranged from 52 to 131 rubles monthly. And for physicians the pay range would be increased to 90 to 125 rubles per month, compared to the previous range of 72.5 to 108 rubles monthly. Other service workers would be given raises of similar proportions. This increase in payments for labor had been promised back in 1961 at the Twenty-Second Party Congress, and not just for specific categories of workers, but for all workers. However, the bad harvest of 1963 had upset all plans, and it was necessary to postpone a universal raise until better times. Additional money could be scraped up only for those who were the most deprived. Salaries were raised for those whose low pay was no longer bearable. In a newspaper the next day I read Father’s speech to the Supreme Soviet, and was unpleasantly surprised by what looked to me like penny-pinching. Salaries were to be increased by not even 10 rubles a month, but only 3–6 rubles. Such a meager raise would not make people happy; it would only irritate and annoy them. I could hardly wait for Father to come home, so that I could tell him my doubts. In the summer he spent the nights at the Gorki-9 dacha. He liked the extensive grounds there, with a walking path along the boundary fences. The path had no noticeable rises or dips in it, of the kind that had become more and more

468 Downfall: 1964 difficult for him. Taking that path, he circled the grounds every evening. The farthest point in this walk was a meadow that bordered on the Moscow River. Father’s previous country place, before the Gorki-9 dacha, had been at Usovo, where the space between the dacha’s grounds and the Moscow River had not been fenced off, and on sunny days the beach there had been filled with crowds of Muscovites, bathing or sunning themselves. At the Gorki-9 residence, formerly occupied by Molotov, the path leading to the meadow had barbed-wire fences on both sides, although there were occasionally yawning holes in them. That evening, as usual, we headed for the meadow to take a look at the garden Father had laid out there. That year, beside the usual corn and tomatoes, he was growing peas. Then we took a walk on the paths bordering the meadow, first passing the edge of the woods and then going along the Moscow River. At the far end of the meadow we stopped to listen to the cry of the corncrake, which lived in a marshy area below us. The bird was making its call before the setting of the sun. Father loved the rasping sound of that call. It reminded him of his childhood in Kalinovka, of village life in the Kursk region, of the sounds at night . . . When we had heard our fill of the corncrake’s cry and started toward home, I took the occasion to spell out my doubts to him about the salaries. He did not get angry or object, but thought for a moment and then began to explain how hard it was to get hold of even those few rubles and kopecks. The state had been scraping them together since last winter. “The problem is not the salaries themselves,” he explained. “Printing rubles requires no great skill. But they have to be backed up by goods—there have to be things you can buy with those rubles. In other words, there has to be increased production of clothing, footwear, furniture, and so on, not to mention food. And for that, new factories have to be built, or facilities expanded at existing factories. If the balance is thrown off, the additional rubles paid to teachers and doctors will sweep our stores clean of everything, and people will be left with paper money in their pockets that they can’t use, and the stores will be left with empty shelves.” Father stopped talking. We were walking slowly on a hillock above the Moscow River. The bodyguard kept himself a discreet distance away. “Things are arranged differently with the capitalists,” he started up again, without any prompting from me. “In their case, if people happen to have money to spend, someone immediately starts producing goods to meet the rising demand, and it all balances out of its own accord. With us, however, everything is tied to the plan, and the State Planning Committee. You can’t take one step away from what’s been written down in the plan. Nothing is supposed to be added or subtracted. You can’t get any additional machine tools, or even complete a set. Nothing. That’s all right if there are intelligent people in the State Planning Committee, but if a fool shows up in some department, there’ll be no end of trouble for the whole country.”

Pensions, Salaries, Two Days Off

469

It was not so much that Father was saying these words to me as that he was talking to himself. “Unfortunately, no matter how much you try to shake something out of the plan and the budget, no matter how much you argue, you can’t scrape up anything more.” Now he turned and addressed me directly: “Once we get richer, we’ll be able to raise salaries by tens of rubles, not just a ruble or two.” I nodded in agreement. It really was true. What use was money if you couldn’t buy anything with it? At one time, right after the Russian Civil War, a loaf of bread cost a billion rubles. I had read about that in books. Father’s answer had satisfied me. But at the same time I felt, not from what he had actually said, but from his intonation, how hard it must be for him there in the Council of Ministers, trying to balance kopecks against the number of carrots tossed onto the shelves of government produce stores, and to make no mistakes in the process. “If the directors of enterprises were given more freedom . . . ,” he began to muse out loud. “If each one was assigned, on an approximate basis, a certain range of goods to produce . . . After all, he himself knows what kind of thing to produce. A baker is not going to try to make boots; or a tailor, teapots. Then let the director make the decisions about producing the goods, and let him sell them himself, within the limits of a ‘corridor’ of prices agreed to beforehand, so he wouldn’t try to fleece people the way the capitalists do.” I opened my mouth in amazement. I had never heard such seditious talk from Father or anyone else. “Of course, the government needs to get its share.” Father paid no attention to my emotional reaction. Again he was completely absorbed with his own thoughts. “But agreement should be established about that in advance, even making it binding by law, for five years or even for eight years. The director, in order to make his plans for the future, needs to know how much the government is going to take and how much he will dispose of himself. “Well then, let him dispose of his own funds, to build new shops at a factory, or put up vacation lodges for the workers, or even raise wages. Then excess money wouldn’t be materializing out of thin air, or from a machine that prints paper money. It would be coming from the fact that people had made something and thus had earned the money; they had produced more goods, for whose purchase the money could be spent. Getting wind of this rising demand, a neighboring director would calculate that if he increased the output of his goods, he too would be able to earn more. Not to shove money in his own pocket, like a capitalist, but to improve the lives of his workers. In our country it would be almost like it is with the capitalists. They are no fools. They keep an eye out for what they can gain. But in our case, things would be better. All the gain, the profit, would go to benefit people.” I cannot reproduce Father’s exact words, of course, but I can vouch for the meaning of what he said. For me at that time his arguments seemed stunningly

470 Downfall: 1964 new. For readers today that will not be so. As time passes, any innovation becomes an ordinary, everyday thing. Even such an amazing invention as the wheel, which at one time turned people’s lives upside down, has long since ceased to impress anyone. At the beginning of 1964 the newspapers revived the discussion of how to make our economy more efficient and effective. Such discussion had been drowned out by the disaster of the 1963 harvest. With the greatest care and attentiveness, Father studied the articles that now appeared, one after the other. Unlike him, I did not follow the subject closely. I looked through the papers rather obliquely, without giving much thought to the matter. I was concerned with much more important problems, or so it seemed to me: rockets, space, a flight to the moon, and then to Mars. And yet what good came of all that? With the passing of the years, I’ve grown wiser. But with the conversation we had that evening, the topic as such was exhausted. We did not take it up again. Having passed through the gate in the fence, we headed for the house. It was time for each of us to get busy with his own affairs. The evening batch of documents was waiting for Father, and as for me—I have no recollection now of what I was busy with then. Salary increases, pensions for collective farmers, and the coming reform of the economy were of interest to me, but they really did not affect my life— unlike another issue that was going to be raised at the Supreme Soviet session on July 13, the transition to a five-day workweek, with Saturdays and Sundays off. I found that of great interest. In those years, we worked seven hours a day, Monday through Friday, and then five hours on Saturday, for a total of forty hours. The plan was to return to an eight-hour day, five days a week, thus adding another full day to the weekend. At first the idea of two days off in a row aroused no objections, but suddenly, in early July, “insoluble” difficulties came up. People vied with one another to report to Khrushchev that the switch to a five-day week would disorganize the work of many branches of the economy. Special difficulties would arise in sectors requiring continuous operation, as in the metallurgical, chemical, and petrochemical industries. Fears were expressed that although the number of hours worked each week would remain the same, total output would fall if a five-day week were introduced. However, the session of the Supreme Soviet was only one week away. Father set to work on the final draft of his report. That summer he was completely preoccupied with the coming reform of the economy, and meanwhile his “closest comrades-in-arms” were completely preoccupied with the question of how to remove him without creating difficulties. For that purpose it was necessary to discredit Khrushchev in the public eye as much as possible, but to do it in such a way that he himself would suspect nothing. The conspiracy entered its decisive phase in the summer of 1964. In July, the cautious Brezhnev even stopped making entries in his notebook. In regions that had leaders with whom Brezhnev had reached “mutual understanding,”

Pensions, Salaries, Two Days Off

471

goods suddenly disappeared from the stores, especially basic necessities. People had to stand waiting in lines for many hours to obtain almost any commodity, including especially bread. The store shelves were to fill up again only after “the source of all our ills” had been removed. Literally the day after. Of course they did not stay filled up for long. The granting of pensions to collective farmers and the raising of salaries for some people, though not all—those measures were not helpful for the conspirators’ aims. But there was nothing they could do to prevent them. On the matter of the five-day week, however, they decided to take a chance. They did not want to leave an ace like that in Khrushchev’s hands. Pressure was exerted systematically from all sides. Dmitry Ustinov, chairman of the All-Union Council on the National Economy, along with Aleksandr Rudakov, the Central Committee secretary in charge of industry, proved to be especially zealous opponents of the switch to a five-day week. I would say that Ustinov was the ringleader, but being an active participant in the conspiracy to remove Khrushchev, he himself did not want to get into an argument with the Soviet premier. Remaining in the shadows, Ustinov had the unsuspecting Rudakov do the work for him. As a result, Rudakov started conversations with Khrushchev about this matter at the Central Committee and submitted relevant reports. Father presented counterarguments and could not be shaken from his views, for a while. The decisive conversation, in my opinion, took place at the Gorki-9 dacha, out on the meadow and in my presence. Rudakov himself was not part of the close circle around Father. He rarely appeared at the dacha, and when he did, it was only on business. He won Adzhubei over to his side, explaining to him that “in the interests of the state” it would be better to put off the five-day week. Adzhubei undertook the task of convincing his father-in-law. One evening during the week before the session of the Supreme Soviet, Father, Adzhubei, and I were walking in the meadow. For the whole length of the walk, Adzhubei, with his characteristic eloquence, kept arguing that the switch to the five-day week was not well timed; it had not been properly prepared, and could result in serious negative consequences. At first Father listened in silence. Then he gradually began to give way. Adzhubei was finding effective arguments. At this point I decided to intervene. I very much wanted those two days off and didn’t want to lose them, so I made some modest objections. They came out awkwardly, and Father waved me away: “Don’t interfere!” In the end he gave up and let himself be persuaded. Adzhubei beamed. At the July 11 plenum of the Central Committee, Father explained this decision, repeating the arguments of Rudakov-Ustinov: “We also wanted to bring up the question of switching to a five-day workweek, but after thinking it over in the CC Presidium, we changed the decision. For now, our country is not yet ready, although a five-day week is very tempting.” It was as though he were trying to justify himself in the eyes of the Central Committee members. “Problems arise in mining, where two days’ absence from the ‘drifts,’ the smaller tunnels connecting the mineshafts, could result in a weakening of the roofs.”

472 Downfall: 1964 Also it was not clear “what would happen with schoolchildren. We can’t leave them with a six-day school week if their fathers and mothers have two days off. If the schools are switched to a shorter week, then the school year as a whole would have to be lengthened. And that’s impossible.” “Let’s not be too hasty about the five-day week, comrades. Let’s think it over, study it, and consult about it. No one is asking us to hurry.”1 After Khrushchev’s ouster, the “insoluble” problems of the five-day week disappeared of their own accord. No longer did anyone’s hair turn gray over the “drifts connecting the mineshafts.” And the schools got by without lengthening the school year. In the fall of 1967, Brezhnev presented the gift of two days off, as though it were his personal gift to the Soviet people on the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution.

85 Not Tightening the Screws “What we should do now is not tighten the screws, as the Chinese

are doing, but show the strength of our socialist democracy. New conditions are being created now in our society. Under democracy, it may also happen that the leadership is subjected to criticism. And it is necessary to accept that. Without criticism there is no democracy. Today not all of us hold one and the same opinion, and this process is developing along a rising curve.” Father spoke these words at the one-day Central Committee plenum of July 11, 1964.1 These words were related to the draft of a new constitution that Father had been working on for more than two years. He was working on it as the chairman of the Constitutional Commission, and the commission members were working on it, but only with difficulty was the project moving forward. Khrushchev’s proposals had a very unfamiliar ring. I have already written about some of them: term limits for officeholders, multicandidate elections, and giving real governmental power, not just decorative functions, to the Soviets. The Soviets under the new constitution were to convene not just once a year but much more often. And they would not merely rubber-stamp laws, but would themselves draft legislation. It was suggested that commissions formed by the Soviets would be “permanently operative,” and their members would be given the power to monitor and inquire into everything and everyone. Father thought it indispensable that people be given the possibility of themselves deciding questions that their

472 Downfall: 1964 Also it was not clear “what would happen with schoolchildren. We can’t leave them with a six-day school week if their fathers and mothers have two days off. If the schools are switched to a shorter week, then the school year as a whole would have to be lengthened. And that’s impossible.” “Let’s not be too hasty about the five-day week, comrades. Let’s think it over, study it, and consult about it. No one is asking us to hurry.”1 After Khrushchev’s ouster, the “insoluble” problems of the five-day week disappeared of their own accord. No longer did anyone’s hair turn gray over the “drifts connecting the mineshafts.” And the schools got by without lengthening the school year. In the fall of 1967, Brezhnev presented the gift of two days off, as though it were his personal gift to the Soviet people on the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution.

85 Not Tightening the Screws “What we should do now is not tighten the screws, as the Chinese

are doing, but show the strength of our socialist democracy. New conditions are being created now in our society. Under democracy, it may also happen that the leadership is subjected to criticism. And it is necessary to accept that. Without criticism there is no democracy. Today not all of us hold one and the same opinion, and this process is developing along a rising curve.” Father spoke these words at the one-day Central Committee plenum of July 11, 1964.1 These words were related to the draft of a new constitution that Father had been working on for more than two years. He was working on it as the chairman of the Constitutional Commission, and the commission members were working on it, but only with difficulty was the project moving forward. Khrushchev’s proposals had a very unfamiliar ring. I have already written about some of them: term limits for officeholders, multicandidate elections, and giving real governmental power, not just decorative functions, to the Soviets. The Soviets under the new constitution were to convene not just once a year but much more often. And they would not merely rubber-stamp laws, but would themselves draft legislation. It was suggested that commissions formed by the Soviets would be “permanently operative,” and their members would be given the power to monitor and inquire into everything and everyone. Father thought it indispensable that people be given the possibility of themselves deciding questions that their

Not Tightening the Screws

473

lives depended on, in nationwide or republic-level referendums. Trial by jury was to be instituted, and the security police were denied the right to independently arrest anyone, whomever it might be. That would now become the prerogative of the courts. Only with the sanction of a court could citizens be deprived of their freedom, and citizens themselves would have the opportunity to file a court complaint against actions by the government or its representatives that, from the plaintiff’s point of view, were illegal. The draft of the constitution provided enterprises and their directors with previously unheard-of independence. They would have the power to decide what would be produced and in what quantities, and how to dispose of the enterprise’s earnings after a previously agreed-on share had been deducted for the government budget. The commission discussed other proposals, even more radical, up to and including elimination of the internal passport system. But they could not think of anything as a replacement for those passports, and decided not to write that clause into the constitution. On July 16, 1964, Father convened one more meeting of the commission, in the Kremlin. As things turned out, that was its last session. In his speech he summed up the work they had done together. He also crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s. As Father said in his speech: “It is necessary to specially emphasize the greater role of the Supreme Soviet and the other Soviets [local councils] in the management of the Soviet economy. . . . In the new constitution the Supreme Soviet is to be defined as a body that carries out not only legislative functions but also the administration of the country at the highest level.”2 Further, Khrushchev explained in detail what he saw as the new functions of the new Soviet parliament. Its power would become real. It would have the power of constitutional control. A permanent committee for constitutional oversight would be created—not an appointed one, but elected directly by the Supreme Soviet. The delegates elected to the Supreme Soviet would be given the real possibility of taking a direct part in administering the country between sessions of the Soviet, and for this purpose they were relieved of work obligations (whether in part or in full had not been decided). They could form their own commissions on all aspects of the life of our country. All government bodies without exception were obliged to reply to the inquiries of these commissions. And so forth. The Council of Ministers under this arrangement would be subordinate, not just on paper, but in fact, to the Supreme Soviet. The proposal was even made that it should be referred to as the “executive and administrative body” of the country instead of the “highest body of public administration,” and that it should be renamed. Instead of “government of the Soviet Union,” it would be called “the governmental council of the Soviet Union.”3 Father intended to have the new constitution adopted the following year, in 1965, after submitting his draft for nationwide discussion as a preliminary

474 Downfall: 1964 move. Such practices had become customary during the preceding years. Then, with the new text of our country’s fundamental law revised on the basis of results from the discussion, it would be presented to a session of the Supreme Soviet and confirmed once and for all in a nationwide constitutional referendum.4 In the last days of September 1964, as he was getting ready to leave for a vacation (which would be his last), Father asked for all the materials of the Constitutional Commission, so that he could take them with him and, in his free time, think everything through properly, polish it up, and then present a final or near-final text of the constitution to the Central Committee plenum scheduled for November. He kept at work on the constitution, dictating and re-dictating clauses to his stenographers, right up until October 12, but he did not have time to finish the work. On October 12 he was called to Moscow, and on October 14 both he and his constitution were “filed away in the archives.”

86 “Why Just One Party?” As I have written earlier, the question of having several candidates,

instead of just one, in the election of deputies to the Supreme Soviet, for example, came up at the very beginning of the discussion about the new constitution, when its basic principles were being considered and before even a rough draft had been sketched out. At that time everything ran up against an insoluble problem: If there was to be more than one, who would propose the second candidate? The party of course would nominate the first, but what about the others? Father thought that the right to do that could be given to one or another “social organization,” such as the Academy of Sciences, the Central Council of Trade Unions, the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives, the Committee of Soviet Women, and so forth. But then new questions came up immediately: Which “social organization”? What was the status of such organizations in general? In what way would they differ from the party if they were given the right to nominate candidates to the highest legislative body in the land? The search for an answer to this problem was left until a later time. In 1964 that time had come. The final text of the constitution would have to describe clearly the procedure to be followed in future elections. People were expecting a decision from Father.

474 Downfall: 1964 move. Such practices had become customary during the preceding years. Then, with the new text of our country’s fundamental law revised on the basis of results from the discussion, it would be presented to a session of the Supreme Soviet and confirmed once and for all in a nationwide constitutional referendum.4 In the last days of September 1964, as he was getting ready to leave for a vacation (which would be his last), Father asked for all the materials of the Constitutional Commission, so that he could take them with him and, in his free time, think everything through properly, polish it up, and then present a final or near-final text of the constitution to the Central Committee plenum scheduled for November. He kept at work on the constitution, dictating and re-dictating clauses to his stenographers, right up until October 12, but he did not have time to finish the work. On October 12 he was called to Moscow, and on October 14 both he and his constitution were “filed away in the archives.”

86 “Why Just One Party?” As I have written earlier, the question of having several candidates,

instead of just one, in the election of deputies to the Supreme Soviet, for example, came up at the very beginning of the discussion about the new constitution, when its basic principles were being considered and before even a rough draft had been sketched out. At that time everything ran up against an insoluble problem: If there was to be more than one, who would propose the second candidate? The party of course would nominate the first, but what about the others? Father thought that the right to do that could be given to one or another “social organization,” such as the Academy of Sciences, the Central Council of Trade Unions, the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives, the Committee of Soviet Women, and so forth. But then new questions came up immediately: Which “social organization”? What was the status of such organizations in general? In what way would they differ from the party if they were given the right to nominate candidates to the highest legislative body in the land? The search for an answer to this problem was left until a later time. In 1964 that time had come. The final text of the constitution would have to describe clearly the procedure to be followed in future elections. People were expecting a decision from Father.

“Why Just One Party?”

475

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Mikhail Gorbachev—and several others following after him—began to say that when Khrushchev divided the party’s province committees into industrial and agricultural, he seemed to be taking an initial step toward the emergence of two parties, an industrial one and an agrarian one. This would have been the embryonic form of a multiparty system. To put it bluntly, I dismissed Gorbachev’s remarks as mere speculation, of the kind that had become so fashionable at that time. In 1962, when Father divided the province committees in two, he spoke about developing more professional management, not about altering the system of one-party rule. In all his subsequent memoranda and speeches, he insistently demanded that party officials become experts in their special field, either in industry or in agriculture. At the same time he also sought to remove party officials from too much direct involvement in managing the economy. He also said repeatedly that the party’s main job was to educate the masses, to carry on propaganda and agitation. On the other hand, if we look at it objectively, Gorbachev was right. The twofold division of the party’s province committees into urban and rural did create the preconditions for the rise of competing centers of power. After all, it is often true that the interests of agrarians and industrialists do not coincide. In many countries it is common for a dividing line to exist between agrarian parties and urban ones. Nevertheless, I do not think that in 1962 Father had gone that far in the plans he was making. By 1964, however, he was thinking not only about the multicandidate clause in the new constitution but also about the dangers of oneparty rule. “A problem inevitably arises—the question of who and what a Communist Party should serve, a centralized, disciplined party welded together by a single aspiration.” Father dictated these thoughts after his retirement. “The organizational system of such a party also allows a single individual to use it for the sake of his own personal power. It seems to me that if Lenin had lived longer, he would have proposed some means of eliminating such a possibility. But that is just a guess.”1 When he referred to Lenin, this meant that he himself was trying to solve the problem left unsolved by Lenin. And as we can see, the problem was not so much one of elections as of the very nature of the power structure, the danger of one-party “democracy” taking a downward slide into outright tyranny by one man, the top leader. Father’s goal was to take action to rule out the possibility of that happening again in the future. The only logical and most natural solution was a multiparty system. And it was entirely possible that the province committees, divided in two, could have become centers for the crystallization of such a system. Thus Gorbachev’s perspicacity about this cannot be denied.

476 Downfall: 1964 I never had conversations with Father on this subject, but the Soviet ambassador to Norway, Nikolai Lunkov, claims to have overheard such a conversation between Khrushchev and two of his assistants during the Soviet premier’s trip to Norway in the summer of 1964. Those assistants were Adzhubei and Satyukov, the chief editors, respectively, of Izvestia and Pravda, who were also members of Father’s editorial group.2 He was strolling with Adzhubei and Satyukov around the grounds of the [Norwegian] king’s residence . . . , the place where Khrushchev and his family were staying [during the visit to Oslo]. I [Lunkov] and the foreign minister [Andrei Gromyko] kept some distance away from the others. Gromyko nudged me forward, saying that the ambassador should be up there next to the head of our government in case some question might suddenly arise about the country being visited. As I came closer, Khrushchev was continuing a conversation, and addressing his interlocutors, he said: “Listen, what do you think of the idea of two parties being created in our country, a workers’ party and a peasants’ party?”

Leonid Mlechin gives his description of this incident based on an account by Lunkov. 3 At that point he [Khrushchev] glanced around at Lunkov. The latter interpreted the glance correctly and withdrew. Shocked by what he had heard, Lunkov immediately whispered into Gromyko’s ear, repeating what he had heard. “Yes, that’s interesting. But don’t say anything about it to anyone,” Gromyko recommended cautiously.

That is not the kind of thing that Lunkov could have simply invented. We should also remember that Father, shortly after his return from Scandinavia, at the Central Committee plenum of July 11, under the direct impression of Scandinavian achievements and the Scandinavian experience, made the remarks that I quoted earlier: “New conditions of democracy are now being created. Today not all of us hold one and the same opinion, and this process is developing along a rising curve.” When that is recalled, the words overheard by Lunkov do not seem so fantastic. It is possible that Father was starting to try on the next step for size. We do not know how his trusted listeners, Adzhubei and Satyukov, reacted. It is not excluded that they vigorously objected and that he retreated temporarily. But if Father had thought up the idea of dividing the party in two, I can safely assume, knowing what he was like, that sooner or later he would have thought it all through to the end. It is also not excluded that he was testing out his ideas not only on Adzhubei and Satyukov; he might also have shared these considerations with his “comrades-in-arms” on the CC Presidium. Such talk could only have intensified the desire of those “comrades-in-arms” to be rid of their first secretary more quickly than ever. Unfortunately, we cannot now find out how far Father was getting ready to go in reforming the political structure of the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev’s Last Act of Sedition

477

87 Khrushchev’s Last Act of Sedition We know nearly nothing about Khrushchev’s perspectives on a multi-

party system in the Soviet Union, but the fact that he intended to investigate the circumstances of collectivization is known with certainty. The truth about the deportation of millions of people that accompanied collectivization, the executions, the monstrous famine of 1932–1933, and as a consequence of all that, the devastation of the rural areas—that is a truth no less terrible and no less explosive than the truth about the other crimes of Stalin’s tyrannical rule, which Father had exposed at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, as well as at the Twenty-Second Congress in October 1961, and which shocked not only the Soviet Union but the entire world. He understood this, but nevertheless he discussed the matter with his colleagues on the CC Presidium, and also, in September 1964, gave an assignment to Pyotr Fedoseyev, a member of the Central Committee and vice president of the Academy of Sciences, to dig up material from the archives and draft a detailed memorandum on the subject by October.1 Father was getting ready to speak about collectivization and its consequences at the November plenum of the Central Committee. He gave warning that Fedoseyev would also have to speak there and take up the topic at greater length. To prepare this material, Fedoseyev assigned Ilya Yevgenyevich Zelenin, who was then a young staff member at the academy’s Institute of History, in a department on the history of the socialist transformation of agriculture, where he and others had been working on a two-volume history of collectivization. “The assignment they gave me was to present material of a critical nature about all-out collectivization,” Zelenin reports.2 “The instructions I received were as follows: only to quote excerpts from documents, peasants’ letters, reports on the situation in the villages, and statements by representatives of the then-opposition, without any commentaries or evaluations. . . . “I drafted a long memorandum, consisting of such excerpts, a typescript of more than twenty pages, depicting the situation in rough outline, the mass famine in the villages in 1932–1933, the arbitrary actions of the procurers of agricultural products [meaning the requisitioners of grain], and the extremely

478 Downfall: 1964 savage acts of repression inflicted on the peasants. And with my signature on it, I sent it ‘upstairs.’” It is most likely that Father did not receive this memorandum. In October 1964 his time was coming to an end. At the CC Presidium meetings that ended with the ouster of Khrushchev from his leadership posts, Shelepin specifically denounced Father for “gathering up material about the period of collectivization.”3 Officials at the Central Committee department overseeing science, who had read Zelenin’s memo, accused him of blackening Soviet reality, but luckily “everything blew over.” The memorandum was classified as secret and buried in the archives. The first volume of the book Zelenin had been working on, which was to a title to the effect of “Essays on the History of Collectivization,” had already been set in type, while the second volume had been edited and was also ready for publication. But the book was dropped from all further publishing plans.4

88 A Fateful Leadership Change On July 15, 1964, after completing its main work, the session of the

Supreme Soviet turned to organizational matters. Unable to find anyone else in the party’s Central Committee to take Brezhnev’s place, Father had proposed that Brezhnev concentrate fully on his tasks at the Central Committee, where all the organizational work rested on his shoulders, including day-to-day communications with secretaries of the party’s province committees and appointments to the highest posts in the army and all other important posts in the country. In essence, real power had now moved into Brezhnev’s hands. With this reassignment of Brezhnev, an important post was left empty— that of chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Father decided to fill that seat with Mikoyan. “Comrade deputies,” Father began his speech on this subject at the July 15 Supreme Soviet session, you know that Comrade Brezhnev, Leonid Ilyich, was elected at the Central Committee plenum in June 1963 to be a secretary of the party’s Central Committee. The Central Committee considers it expedient for Comrade

478 Downfall: 1964 savage acts of repression inflicted on the peasants. And with my signature on it, I sent it ‘upstairs.’” It is most likely that Father did not receive this memorandum. In October 1964 his time was coming to an end. At the CC Presidium meetings that ended with the ouster of Khrushchev from his leadership posts, Shelepin specifically denounced Father for “gathering up material about the period of collectivization.”3 Officials at the Central Committee department overseeing science, who had read Zelenin’s memo, accused him of blackening Soviet reality, but luckily “everything blew over.” The memorandum was classified as secret and buried in the archives. The first volume of the book Zelenin had been working on, which was to a title to the effect of “Essays on the History of Collectivization,” had already been set in type, while the second volume had been edited and was also ready for publication. But the book was dropped from all further publishing plans.4

88 A Fateful Leadership Change On July 15, 1964, after completing its main work, the session of the

Supreme Soviet turned to organizational matters. Unable to find anyone else in the party’s Central Committee to take Brezhnev’s place, Father had proposed that Brezhnev concentrate fully on his tasks at the Central Committee, where all the organizational work rested on his shoulders, including day-to-day communications with secretaries of the party’s province committees and appointments to the highest posts in the army and all other important posts in the country. In essence, real power had now moved into Brezhnev’s hands. With this reassignment of Brezhnev, an important post was left empty— that of chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Father decided to fill that seat with Mikoyan. “Comrade deputies,” Father began his speech on this subject at the July 15 Supreme Soviet session, you know that Comrade Brezhnev, Leonid Ilyich, was elected at the Central Committee plenum in June 1963 to be a secretary of the party’s Central Committee. The Central Committee considers it expedient for Comrade

A Fateful Leadership Change

479

Brezhnev to concentrate all his attention on his work as Central Committee secretary. In this connection, the Central Committee submits the proposal that Comrade Brezhnev be relieved of his duties as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. To fill the post of chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the Central Committee recommends Comrade Mikoyan, Anastas Ivanovich. The intention is to relieve Comrade Mikoyan of his duties as first deputy to the chairman of the Council of Ministers. I do not think there is any need to give a character reference for Comrade Mikoyan. You all know what great political and governmental work Anastas Ivanovich has performed and continues to perform in our party and in the Soviet government. He recommends himself as a true Leninist and an active fighter for the cause of communism. His activity over the course of decades is well known not only in our country but also beyond its borders. The party’s Central Committee considers Comrade Mikoyan worthy to be entrusted with the highly responsible position of chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Comrades! We hope that the deputies will support and adopt the proposal from the party’s Central Committee. I take the liberty, before the voting, although this may seem somewhat premature, to express my cordial gratitude to Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev for his fruitful work in the post of chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and with all my heart to wish Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan great success in his work as the new chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.1

Prolonged, thunderous applause ensued, and in unison the deputies voted “aye.” In the person of Mikoyan, Father counted on having an ally for the process of “liberalization” of the system as envisaged in the new constitution. Mikoyan was not the kind of man who would “leap into the fray,” and Father did not expect matters to develop into a serious fight. However, Mikoyan could prove to be a useful ally in overcoming the possible—and in fact likely— bureaucratic sabotage as the new fundamental law went into effect. Later, after Khrushchev was relieved of his duties and Mikoyan himself was retired, Anastas Ivanovich told one of his sons, General Stepan Mikoyan, that before his appointment as chairman of the Supreme Soviet, he and Khrushchev had had a long conversation about the future, about the new role of the Soviets and, above all, of the Supreme Soviet. “This can be accomplished,” Khrushchev had said,” only by you or by me. I can’t break away from the leadership of the government, and so it’s up to you to be head of the Supreme Soviet and busy yourself with this task.” That is how Khrushchev’s words were reported by the two Mikoyans, father and son.2 Neither Father nor Mikoyan had any inkling that their constitutional plans were not destined to become reality. The months remaining until October 1964 were used to maximum advantage by Brezhnev and his fellow conspirators.

480

Downfall: 1964

89 Day by Day On July 17, 1964, a new book of verse by Andrei Voznesensky came

out—Antiworlds, one of the most memorable of all his works. From July 20 to August 1, Aleksei Adzhubei and his wife, my sister Rada, visited West Germany at the invitation of a group of West German journalists. The whole world was lost in speculation about the meaning of their trip. Was it possible that, behind America’s back, the Soviet premier and the German chancellor were exploring the path of rapprochement between their two countries? Western analysts came to the conclusion that the Adzhubeis’ visit was paving the way for a trip to West Germany by Khrushchev himself, an event that could change the entire lay of the land in European politics if it led to the signing of a peace treaty, with East and West Germany granting each other recognition. Speculation did not rule out even the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. But Father was not destined to visit the Federal Republic of Germany. And it was his successors who signed a treaty confirming the postwar borders. On July 29, Khrushchev conversed for about two hours at his Kremlin office with UN Secretary-General U Thant, and on July 30 and 31 he met twice with the US billionaire David Rockefeller. The New York Times noted proudly that, in total, Khrushchev met with Rockefeller for nearly twice as long as with U Thant. Father was pleased that the Americans were following so closely the amount of time he spent with this or that person—like eager fans keeping track of football scores. This was evidence that our country had won a leading position in the world, a position equal to that of the United States for now—and later on, we would see . . . On July 31, Khrushchev and other members of the CC Presidium attended an exhibition in the Kremlin of the new unit-by-unit and section-by-section methods for the construction of industrial buildings. Now an entire, continuous production cycle could be placed under one roof, freeing the people there from the necessity of moving elements in the production process from one workshop to another. Two Moscow enterprises were involved in the experiment of introducing these methods, an electronics plant and a factory producing tricot. The experiment completely justified itself, and the time had come to extend it to the whole country. Father was satisfied. The new principles of industrial construction promised big savings not only in construction time for industrial buildings but also in the reduced time spent moving things around inside a workplace.

All Power to the Director!

481

90 All Power to the Director! In the second half of 1964, Father’s work schedule, which had always

been overloaded, became more overloaded than ever. It sometimes seems as though he had a presentiment of how joyless his retirement would be, and was trying to enjoy to the fullest all the pleasures of a life of public activity. But that is a false impression. He had no suspicion of the conspiracy against him. The simple fact was that there was so much to be done, so much was scheduled for that year, and the next, and the next: another stage in the decentralization of the economy, specialization, further development of the chemical industry, a new constitution. There wasn’t even time to turn around. On top of that, entire “packs” of foreign visitors had signed up on the waiting list to be received by him, a list filled up for months ahead. If one succeeded in being received by Khrushchev, that was considered a prestigious event, as though it attested to the “world importance” of this or that political figure. Father was healthy. He kept himself in good shape, never let himself go physically. The pace he set himself—not every young person could have kept up with it. But he stuck it out while he could. Discussion about economic reform, which had died down in 1963, began to pick up momentum in the early part of the new year. On January 25, 1964, Izvestia published an article by Gennady Lisichkin titled “How Is Economic Growth to Be Stimulated?” In this article (whose author’s name I hope readers remember from Chapter 67), basic principles of managing the economy were not touched on, but instead the suggestion was made that resources not be dispersed but be invested with precision and in a purposeful manner. On the whole these were good intentions. After Lisichkin a more specific article appeared by Ivan Malyshev of the Central Statistical Administration. It was titled “What Should Be the Main Indicator for the Plan?” Malyshev tried to answer the question of where highest priority should be placed. Should it be “profitability”? Or productivity of labor? Or just plain profit? In his opinion, only profit would make it possible to set up comprehensible and effective relations between the producer and the government. After that it was as though a dam had broken. Article after article appeared regularly on the second page of Pravda, Izvestia, Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta (Economic Gazette), and other periodicals. The editors knew who their highly placed reader was, and they competed in seeking out the most unusual and

482 Downfall: 1964 thought-provoking articles. Father read it all closely—or more exactly, studied it closely. When the contents of an article especially interested him, he would write, directly in the margins of the newspaper, comments addressed to Kosygin or Ustinov and asking for their opinions. Most often their opinions did not coincide with each other’s or with Father’s. Kosygin at that time was the first and most trusted of Khrushchev’s deputy premiers in the government. Kosygin represented someone Khrushchev relied on for support, but at the same time he was Khrushchev’s hidden opponent, who resisted decentralization of the economy with all his might. Ustinov was even more orthodox. He had grown up in the command economy, knew how to command, and considered the top-down, vertical structure of the ministries to be the pinnacle of economic thinking. For him even Kosygin was an incorrigible liberal. There was one thing they agreed on: opposition to Khrushchev’s reform initiatives. Father was in the mood for change, while they did everything they could to preserve the status quo. To be more precise, they would have preferred to return to the familiar hierarchy of ministries, but for the time being they did not make a single peep about that. During the preceding year, Kosygin’s influence on Father had increased noticeably, and it was Kosygin who had succeeded in restraining Khrushchev from immediately “transferring power” to the directors. Father did not get into an open conflict with his first deputy at that time. February 21, 1964, was Kosygin’s sixtieth birthday. All the newspapers printed his unsmiling portrait on their front pages, along with the text of a decree by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet awarding him the title Hero of Socialist Labor and giving him the gold medal of the Hammer and Sickle as well as an Order of Lenin. On March 8, 1964, with an article in Izvestia, the head of one of the departments of the State Planning Committee, I. Libedinsky, joined the discussion. Not without support from Kosygin, he rejected the arguments of the “profit advocates” and proposed as the main criterion for evaluating the work of an enterprise what was called the “standard processing value” (normativnaya stoimosti obrabotki).1 On March 14, 1964, Izvestia published a reply titled “Payment Based on Labor” by I. Zaitsev, chairman of the Trudovik (Toiler) collective farm in Kazakhstan. Zaitsev was in favor of Khudenko, whose experiment he considered more than successful. That experiment involved giving the directors of three state farms the freedom to decide what to sow, when to sow it, how to go about the sowing, and how much to pay people for that work, and the freedom to settle accounts with the government only on the basis of a previously agreed “tax on agricultural products” (prodnalog).2 “The time has come to extend this ‘experiment’ to the collective farms,” Zaitsev demanded. Let me remind the reader that three state farms in the Virgin Lands territory had been placed at Khudenko’s disposal. Father agreed with Zaitsev. In fact he had advocated similar ideas at the Central Committee plenum in February 1964. Suslov, however, disagreed with

All Power to the Director!

483

Zaitsev, and consequently with Khrushchev as well. Granted that “Khudenko’s” state farms worked much better than neighboring farms, but the way they paid their workers was not right. As soon as the earnings of these farms had increased, a differentiation was observable: “Khudenko’s” manager-directors were generally being paid many times more than the state-farm workers. “Pay rates that have a corrupting effect are being received. The collective farmer receives little, but the chairman will receive 22–40 times more.”3 Suslov squeaked his dissatisfaction about these pay rates during a discussion of the question at a CC Presidium meeting on January 9, 1964. In Father’s absence, Brezhnev was chairing the meeting. They were reviewing a resolution drafted by Polyansky, “On measures to strengthen collective farms that are lagging behind by assigning skilled personnel.” The resolution abolished those high pay rates that contributed to corruption. On May 18–19, 1964, an All-Russia conference was held, “On problems of economics in industry and construction.” Father had thought up the idea of holding such a conference at the beginning of 1964, but because of his crowded schedule of meetings on international affairs, one thing piled on top of another and the conference was postponed week after week, month after month. Father realized that he could not “encompass the unencompassable” and assigned Kirilenko to direct the work of the conference. Kirilenko was Khrushchev’s deputy on the CC Bureau for the Russian Federation (by far the largest of the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics). However, in the absence of Khrushchev, no substantive discussion took place. The main report was given by the head of the Russian Federation’s State Planning Committee, Konstantin Gerasimov. He spoke smoothly, about many things, but really about nothing at all, about advances in technology, about improving forms of management, about reducing expenditures, and he called for relying on the support of Soviet society. The Russian Federation’s minister of construction, N. N. Kachalov, spoke immediately after Gerasimov. At first he spoke about what had been accomplished. In the years 1959–1963, the Russian Federation had built 2,400 largescale enterprises and had commissioned 134 million square meters of living space. Then he began talking about reducing the costs of production and other matters familiar to everyone. More than two dozen people spoke at the conference, and they all reported on work accomplished and undertook obligations for the future. The only one who made some substantive remarks was the chairman of the Moscow municipal economic council, Vasily Nikolayevich Doyenin. He complained timidly that planning on the basis of “gross output” was not compatible with the introduction of new technology, which always turned out to be “money-losing.” He gave the example of lavsan (a kind of synthetic fiber, mentioned earlier in Chapter 53, on the chemical industry). Soviet gold was used to purchase the equipment from

484 Downfall: 1964 Western companies, but it turned out that no one wanted it, because it lowered the “gross output” and as a result output per worker declined, and bonuses flew out the window. At the end of the conference, Kirilenko gave what Pravda reported to be a major speech, but for my part I would add that it was totally lacking in content. In general they were “twiddling their thumbs.” The May conference did no good, but it also did no harm. The discussion of the basic principles for carrying out an economic reform continued. On May 30, 1964, Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta published a long interview with a professor, Yevsei Liberman. (See discussion of him in Chapter 27, about Zasyadko and economic reform in 1962.) It was not only Soviet journalists who asked questions of Liberman in this interview but also Western journalists. That was highly unusual for those times. The discussion centered on the question of profit, its role in capitalist economics and its role in socialist economics. Liberman explained that in our country, unlike in capitalist countries, profit was not an end in itself, but an instrument for measuring efficiency of production. The American reporters smiled and later wrote in their newspapers that the answers given by this Soviet reform economist seemed to them naive. And with good reason. They did not understand Liberman. From the point of view of its effect on production, profit is indeed an effective instrument. But then there are all sorts of other questions. Everything depends on how the person who receives the profit wishes to dispose of it. In midsummer, Father himself joined the economic discussion. In his report to the Supreme Soviet session on July 13, 1964, he suggested that people should think about whether the basic principle of Soviet planning ought to be changed. In his opinion, planning on the basis of “what had been accomplished”—a system in which the State Planning Committee assigned production targets to various factories on the basis of the previous year’s results—this wasn’t doing any good. It did not reflect consumer demand, and it imposed products on them that they did not want. The result was excess production. Warehouses were bursting with things that no one would buy, and yet at the same time more and more of those products were being delivered. Father suggested that a production plan for a factory should be in accordance with orders from customers. Then that plan should be sent to the regional economic councils and from them to the State Planning Committee for generalization. That is, things should go from the bottom up, not from the top down. He was suggesting that the whole system of centralized planning be turned upside down and that the State Planning Committee be transformed from a body issuing directives into one that registered economic information. The plan would no longer be considered a guide to action but only a reflection of the balance of interests between the demands of consumers and the capabilities of producers. It is interesting that this is precisely how the functions of the State Planning Committee had been envisaged when it was first created under the Council of People’s Commissars on July 13, 1923, in the third year of the New Economic

All Power to the Director!

485

Policy. Only seven years later, on January 23, 1930, was there a resolution to give the State Planning Committee a decisive voice in the Council of People’s Commissars. Ever since that time, its power had become all-embracing.4 And now Khrushchev was waving away the State Planning Committee! Did Father look up any archival documents? I don’t think so. He was guided by logic—the logic of setting the economy free from bureaucratic dictation. He understood that you could not just wave a magic wand and have things change overnight. In order for his plan to work, the conditions had to be put into place. Both the work force and the director at a factory had to be given a stake in producing for the consumer. The bonuses and other benefits as organized at that time depended on fulfillment of the plan. All they had to do was to report that certain products had been delivered to this or that warehouse, who knows for whom or for what purpose. Now profit had resurfaced as the most obvious criterion showing the success or lack of success of a given economic operation. I ask readers to forgive me for the roughness of my exposition, but I cannot explain it in any other way. The store-as-seller earns profit by selling certain goods, and it shares that profit with the factory-as-producer, having included the factory’s share in the prices that had been agreed on in advance. In turn, the factory would pay a previously determined percentage to the Ministry of Finance. The store-as seller and the factory-as-producer would spend the rest of their earnings as they saw fit. That is the rough outline of how the future economic policy would look. After that speech by Father the modest rivulet of “reform articles” overflowed its banks and became a virtual flood across the pages of newspapers and magazines. Father read practically every article with close attention, extracting its essence. He no longer doubted that the time had come to give all power to the factory director. But there were questions. How to arrange in practice the new relations between the director of a factory or state-farm or collective-farm chairman, on the one hand, and the government, on the other—that is, with the regional economic councils, the State Planning Committee, and the Ministry of Finance? How to simultaneously untie the hands of the directors but maintain control? Only after those questions were answered could the reform actually begin. To re-create the atmosphere of that time, I will list the headings of a few of the articles that Father read during the summer months of 1964. On July 29, in an Izvestia article titled “There Is Such a Science—Economics,” Gennady Lisichkin wrote about particular criteria, and about “gain”—that is, profit. He was referring to criteria that would help achieve results. On August 1, Pravda responded to Izvestia with an article by Ivan Malyshev titled “The Forward March of the Seven-Year Plan: An Economic Review.” Among many other things, the author argued that profit was the main indicator of economic efficiency in production, and the growth of profit reflected most accurately the conditions of production and the productivity of labor. On August 17, Pravda also opened its pages to Vadim Aleksandrovich Trapeznikov, who was not only an academician and the director of the Institute

486 Downfall: 1964 for Problems of Management, but also a deputy of Rudnev’s on the State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research and a member of Khrushchev’s Council on Science. In other words, Trapeznikov was a highly influential person. He had just returned from a trip to Japan, and he let his emotions splash out in an article that took up the bottom half of two newspaper pages. Its title was “For Flexible Management of the Industrial Enterprise.” Trapeznikov’s conclusions harmonized with the words Father had spoken at the Supreme Soviet session: the regulation of the economy should rest on simple but comprehensive ways of evaluating the functioning of an enterprise. There should not be many of them. “At the present time the enterprise does not have an interest in introducing new technology, nor does it have a stake in the quality of its output. Its only incentive is to fulfill the plan at all costs.” That is what Trapeznikov wrote. He went on to say that the enterprise needed to be given a different incentive. Its economic interest should coincide with the economic interest of the government and of the entire national economy. All the existing “norms” handed down from above—such as the quantity of products to be produced, the amount available for paying wages, and such things—had to be sharply decreased in number. Relations with the government should be reduced to paying a single tax, plus additional fines for using outdated equipment and for failure to deliver on time. Results could be achieved by relying on one universal indicator of efficient production—and that is profit. In conclusion, Trapeznikov called for all power to be turned over to the directors. On August 17, 1964, Father was a guest in the mountain town of Przhevalsk in Kirgizia. The mail from Moscow was not delivered there until the end of the day. And so only in the evening did Father glance through Trapeznikov’s article. He liked the ideas expressed by the author. It was almost as though academician Trapeznikov had been eavesdropping on Khrushchev himself. He gave clearcut answers—there was no comparison with anyone else. If he did not answer all the questions troubling Father, he certainly did answer many of them. He folded up the newspaper to one-fourth of its size, with Trapeznikov’s article facing up, and put it in his briefcase for closer study later on. From Przhevalsk he went on to the capital of Kirgizia, then called Frunze, now Bishkek. The next morning he spoke there before the local sheepherders, and then, without eating lunch, took the plane to Moscow. On the plane he returned to Trapeznikov’s article, read it through once more, and wrote a message in the margins of the newspaper: “To Comrade Rudnev, I ask that you look into this and make proposals.” From that moment Trapeznikov’s article in Pravda was transformed from a mere contribution into a mandatory order from above. Father was not content with this. On his return to Moscow he called Rudnev to come see him and explained to him that what he expected was not just some ordinary proposals but a plan of concrete action, followed by a draft of a resolution. Rudnev remembered very well the recent reprimand he had received from Khrushchev, and so—not being privy to the plans of the anti-Khrushchev conspirators—he set about this task with his characteristic energy.

All Power to the Director!

487

Without delay Rudnev called a conference of the “progressive economists” who were at hand, both “profit advocates” and specialists on prices. A central problem that I have already written about is the fact that without a logical and transparent system of prices, one could not dream about accurately measuring the amount of profit. Viktor Belkin’s concept of a price system based on a single standard has been described earlier (Chapter 23). Belkin also participated in the conference called by Rudnev. As Belkin recollects, Rudnev gave them the assignment, to be completed in one month, of drafting the necessary basic explanations for an economic reform as well as drafting a resolution for the CC Presidium and the Council of Ministers. The commission that would carry out this task was headed by Leonid Aleksandrovich Vaag. Vaag was a reform-minded economist, a former member of Zasyadko’s State Economic Council. That council had been dissolved at Kosygin’s insistence, and Vaag was now “chief specialist” in Rudnev’s State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research. Vaag put together a team of former Zasyadko people. Of course, academician Trapeznikov was part of this commission. Plus there were economists of the same general type: Yevsei Liberman, Igor Birman, and S. N. Zakharov, as well as the price specialists Belkin and Lev Leontyev and the finance specialists S. L. Mekhanik and Z. B. Atlas. Also, Ivan Malyshev, deputy head of the Central Statistical Administration, and Nikolai Petrakov, a future member of the Academy of Sciences who even then was preoccupied with the problems of optimization of the Soviet economy. (Later on, Petrakov became well known as an economic adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev.) Two subcommissions were formed. The first, headed by Vaag and Zakharov, got busy with drafting the part of the resolution that would substantiate the necessity for an economic reform. At the same time, Belkin, Birman, and others would schedule, point by point, the stages by which the reform would be implemented. Academician Trapeznikov’s article in the August 17 issue of Pravda did not put an end to the discussion. Rather it stirred people up more than ever, both the reform economists and their opponents. On August 19, Izvestia published an article titled “Money Loves Accounting: Some Thoughts About Economics.” On August 20, Ye. Rubinchik, from the Volga-Vyatsk regional economic council, discussed “Plan, Rhythm, and Supply” in Pravda. In an August 22 article in Izvestia titled “What Then Is the Main Thing?” the economists Ya. Kronrod and I. Mozhaiskova called for incentives to be provided for real results, not just for formal reports about the plan being fulfilled on the basis of “gross output” (discussed earlier). And they knocked to pieces a system that was popular at that time among administrators, the system of “standard processing value” (also discussed earlier). They argued that this system was not effective. “It creates a vested interest in more labor-intensive technologies. Because it increases the share of an enterprise’s own labor in the final product. That is to the advantage of the specific producer, but not for the economy as a whole.” Under such a

488 Downfall: 1964 system it is more profitable to produce nuts and bolts in “cottage industry fashion,” even if they cost one ruble apiece, rather than to buy them from an outside supplier at the price of one kopeck per dozen. The work force and the director are rewarded on the basis of how much labor the enterprise put in to produce an object and not for how profitable the operation is. On August 23, Izvestia discussed how profit works under the conditions of a planned economy and in the absence of competition among socialist enterprises, which was regarded as “unnecessary.” On the same day, August 23, there appeared an article by O. Volkov, head of the technical-economic accounting bureau at the Likhachev Auto Plant in Moscow. It had a headline in large letters: “Urgent Questions: I Support the Proposals of Academician Trapeznikov.” On September 6, three academicians, mathematicians, and economists, Dorodnitsyn, Glushkov, and Fyodorenko, published an article in Izvestia titled “Economic Cybernetics.” They proposed that scientific-productive associations be established in industry and that computers be used to do the accounting on their balances and plans. On September 10, the chairman of the Leningrad regional economic council, Aleksei Konstantinovich Antonov, who was to become minister of the electro-technical industry under Brezhnev, in an article in Izvestia, called for a transition to “Management of the Economy on a Scientific Basis.” On September 13 in Pravda, academician Nemchinov supported his fellow scientist with an article titled “Economics, Mathematics, Cybernetics.” On September 17 in Izvestia, Anatoly Vasilyevich Nikolayev, a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences and director of the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at the Siberian division, expressed himself on the topic “The State, the Economy, and Science,” and he joined in the call for giving directors more rights. On September 19 in Pravda, there was an article by I. Manvelov, director of a rubber factory that was one of the forty-eight enterprises participating in the economic experiment authorized by Khrushchev. He declared: “It is not by giving administrative orders but by objective economic accounting” that forward movement of the economy can be ensured. On September 20, 1964, Yevsei Liberman published an article in Pravda titled “Once Again on the Plan and Profit.” It commemorated the second anniversary of his September 9, 1962, article, from which all this discussion had begun. In his new article he seemed to be summarizing all the ideas of the reformers: existing prices were divorced from their natural base, they did not reflect the real costs of production, they needed to be revised, and the rights of the enterprises needed to be expanded. Within the framework of the “single wage fund” (which set the amount of money the director of an enterprise would have to pay in wages to the workers; no increase of wages could exceed the limit of this “fund”), and within the framework of stable, standardized norms established by law, the director should be given the opportunity to shape the production plan of the enterprise on the basis of orders from customers. Father had been talking about that for a long time. Only profit, in Liberman’s opinion, could serve as an overall and final measure of the effectiveness and efficiency

All Power to the Director!

489

of the work of an enterprise. This measure should not be handed down from above, as was being done now. If directors were given their freedom, they would maximize profit of their own accord. A legal basis for this should be established. It would combine benefits for the government with benefits for the individual enterprise and would connect them inseparably. That which was beneficial to one should become beneficial for the other. Let the enterprise itself provide benefits and bonuses for good work performed and do so only out of its own profits. Liberman had no doubt that on the basis of these new forms of relationship between the individual enterprise and the economy as a whole, the rate of growth of the Soviet economy would increase sharply. In confirmation of his words, he cited the results achieved by the experiments at two clothing factories, the Bolshevichka clothing factory in Moscow and the Mayak (Lighthouse) clothing factory under the Volga-Vyatsk regional economic council. In conclusion, Liberman made a bow in the direction of the ideologists. He explained: “In our country profit is not transformed into capital. Rather, it frees the enterprise from petty supervision, strengthens the initiative of the workers, engineers, and leaders, and as a result, it ensures higher achievements in social production and higher payments for the labor of individual workers.” Twenty years later, Deng Xiaoping would repeat this concept quoting a Chinese proverb: “Black or white cat matters not as long as it catches mice.” On September 27, Viktor Vasilyevich Krotov, chairman of Central Asia’s regional economic council—who in the post-Khrushchev era would become minister of electric-powered machinery manufacture—joined the reformers’ chorus, writing in Izvestia about the beneficial nature of “economics-based management of enterprises.” On October 4, M. Kuznetsova, director of the Bolshevichka clothing factory in Moscow, had an article in Pravda titled “Demand, Quality, Plan.” (As mentioned before, the Bolshevichka factory was one of the forty-eight enterprises where the economic experiment authorized under Khrushchev was proceeding, with free decisionmaking powers granted to the directors of enterprises.) She related that under the conditions of freedom provided by the experiment, they themselves did their economic planning; they themselves determined the volume of production and how to go about selling their products, established their own wages fund, and bought cloth to suit their own taste. They reported to the government only the fact that their products had been sold and the percentage of “profitability” thus achieved—that is, how much profit they had earned. As a result, they had begun to make many cheap suits, whereas earlier they had chosen to make only a few suits, but expensive ones, to make sure the plan was fulfilled in terms of that same old, awful “gross output.” Cheaper goods led to increased sales. Their suits no longer lay around in warehouses. Buyers from the commercial network snapped up their goods “out from under the sewing machine,” with barely enough time for putting in the last stitch. Kuznetsova went on to discuss the fact that although the factory had fulfilled the plan for “profitability,” there were problems—very unpleasant and

490

Downfall: 1964

painful ones, as it turned out. They had introduced new technology and equipment for cutting out patterns, which slightly increased their expenditures for the purchase of cloth. Thus the prime cost for one suit had increased by 1 ruble, 40 kopecks, and immediately it was declared from somewhere “up above” that the “profitability” indicator had fallen (which was unacceptable). A conflict with the Ministry of Finance resulted. The director was punished. “Actually,” Kuznetsova explained, “among us this assessment of ‘profitability’ by the ministry is considered incorrect. It was only on paper that it ‘fell,’ when in reality it had exceeded the planned amount. But for the Ministry of Finance the paper version of our ‘profitability’ was more important than the real thing. The increased earnings of the factory turned around and brought a reprimand down on the factory’s director.” The factory was snowed under with orders from customers—I am continuing with a paraphrase of Kuznetsova’s article. They wanted to fill the orders, but they couldn’t. Not enough of the necessary kinds of cloth were available. Their suppliers were all working in the old way. They were producing not what the seamstresses ordered, but what had been ordered in advance by the State Planning Committee. “It is necessary to act quickly so as to put everyone under the same conditions, to extend the experiment to the whole branch of industry.” That was how the director of the Bolshevichka factory ended her article. On October 17, V. Yshakov, a deputy director of the State Bank published an article in Izvestia titled “Credit, the Economy, and Profit.” I could go on citing such articles, but I’m afraid it would put readers to sleep. They’re probably worn out by what I’ve listed already. It is only from Pravda and Izvestia that I have cited examples of such articles. Other central publications, from Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta to Komsomolskaya Pravda (Young Communist League Truth), also abounded with articles on economic subjects. Editors competed with one another in trying to find the most interesting authors. The tone of the articles also changed. In 1962, only a few daring individuals, such as Liberman and Belkin, had written about economic reform, but in 1964, others added their voices to the chorus, not only directors of enterprises participating in the experiment but also bureaucrats of every color, rank, and description. The latter were doing this more out of habit. They were always quick to pledge allegiance to whatever new winds were blowing. Like weathervanes, they turned with the wind. It didn’t matter what the winds were. Today it was decentralization and profit. Tomorrow it would be the revival of the ministries and the restored authority of the vertical, top-down hierarchy. While arguments about economic reform continued in the newspapers, the commission formed by Rudnev was actually working up its proposals. Toward the middle of October it succeeded in discussing and confirming the documents drawn up by Vaag’s and Zakharov’s people, put them all together, and sent the results of their labors to the higher-ups. It’s true that, as things turned out, Father never saw them.

All Power to the Director!

491

From the recollections of Viktor Belkin and Igor Birman it is possible to get an idea of what “seditious material” they helped to write in an explanatory memorandum, which was also never received by Khrushchev, and in the draft resolution itself. Briefly, in Belkin’s words, what they proposed was this: To assess and evaluate the activity of enterprises and reward their workers not for the extent to which they had fulfilled the plan, based on “gross output,” but depending on the profit made in the course of fulfilling the plan for production of a particular range of goods. This transition to a new system of assessment of the work of enterprises and payment for labor provided for a revision of the wholesale prices then in effect, replacing them with prices corresponding to the actual costs of production, while the enterprises were given the right to reduce prices. The draft reform proposed the introduction of payment by the enterprise for use of the “fixed capital” [buildings, equipment, etc.]. This payment would become the main component of the deductions from the earnings of the enterprise that went to the national budget, instead of the turnover tax and other taxes.5

“The limits set by the plan on the number of personnel at an enterprise and on the average wage were eliminated,” Birman states, in an account that supplements Belkin’s. “Limits remained only on the overall wage fund so as not to disrupt the balance between purchasing power and goods available in stores. After the deduction of a percentage for utilization of fixed capital, a substantial part of the profit remained at the disposal of the enterprises. “Also a clause about bank credit was included.”6 How would Father have reacted to this document, whose preparation he himself had ordered? Here we step onto the shaky ground of alternative scenarios and alternative futures. However, the logic of preceding events allows us to make some assumptions. There is no doubt that Father would have accepted, in one or another form—I think it would have been a more radical form—the idea of “granting freedom” to the directors of enterprises and simplifying their relations with the government and the budget. He had made statements to that effect more than once, and there was also the economic experiment (at forty-eight enterprises), which he had initiated, and which had been going on not just for the first year. It spoke for itself. The “experimental” enterprises operated significantly more effectively than their neighbors. And Khudenko’s state farms, which had gone over to a system of paying the government only a general “tax in kind,” were performing miracles, as I have described. Of course, there was no “miracle” involved at all in the success of these economic experiments. Everything was proceeding naturally, in full accordance with what is known by science about entropy. I am referring to the second law of thermodynamics, about which I have commented more than once in this book. How would this law of nature have been refracted under the conditions of the proposed economic reform? Under the old system, a closed system that depended on the initiative of “those at the top,” the central administrative bodies, and depended especially on the top person at the head of the whole system,

492 Downfall: 1964 it was up to Father to dispel entropy. And if that did not depend only on him as a single individual, it depended on the small group of his supporters, his fellow “enthusiasts” and Don Quixotes. Things did work out for them in some respects, though not in others. And yet the minute they were distracted, their efforts were reduced to nothing, with entropy spreading like the duckweed that closes over the surface of a marsh. The primordial chaos of bureaucracy reasserted itself. The tendency of systems to devolve from more orderly to less orderly, for entropy to increase, is a law of nature, and it can be countered only by continual intervention in a more orderly direction, by the input of energy from outside the system, wherever possible and at all possible levels. A real possibility for accomplishing more could arise if the struggle against entropy were shifted from the upper governmental level, a level where only single individuals operated, to the level of the directors of enterprises. It’s really quite simple. There were a great many directors, and as they introduced order in their enterprises, like so many ants in an anthill, they became equal to the task even if that meant controlling, or getting the better of, “all the chaos of the universe.” Today this sounds obvious and is confirmed by the results of scientific research, but in 1964 Father was only moving in the right direction, feeling his way empirically and intuitively. During the decade that had gone by, he had acquired quite a few bruises in the struggle against entropy, and he had become convinced that coping with it was beyond the strength of a single individual. But working together with the directors of enterprises was something that also had to be learned. It was necessary to find a way of combining the local interests of enterprise directors with those of the government and society as a whole. After all, the directors were given the right to dispose of government resources. As shown by the 1989 law “on the socialist enterprise” under Gorbachev, new problems immediately arise with the granting of decisionmaking freedom to enterprise directors. For example, a director may consider it necessary to provide an incentive by awarding bonuses for good work or raising wages generally, but the government is concerned about maintaining a balance between the amount of money in people’s pockets and the quantity of goods in the stores. To put it crudely, the director may say, “The hell with the balance,” but if specialists quit because of low wages, he will be left high and dry. At the July 1964 session of the Supreme Soviet, as I have indicated, there was an extremely stingy increase in salaries, and accounts were only barely balanced, but that was because industry was not producing the necessary quantity of goods to be purchased by the increased amount of money in circulation with these new salaries. Under Gorbachev’s 1989 law, this delicate economic mechanism was to depend on the decisions made by enterprise directors, who were clear-headed and energetic people, but preoccupied with their own concerns, and not connected with one another in any regular way. Gorbachev’s law, which had not been fully thought through, resulted in an avalanche of increased spending. People felt they had become rich overnight, and all the goods on store shelves were swept away, including those that had

All Power to the Director!

493

long lain around unsold. In a few months, people were left with a lot of paper money in their pockets and yawning emptiness in the stores. That’s what happens when the balance between purchasing power and available goods is disrupted. The balance can be restored only by a sharp increase in prices or by greater output of goods. In the first case, the problems of the illness are only turned inward. But what about the second alternative? Strictly speaking, the whole reform was undertaken for its sake—to increase production in “Department B” or, to use normal language, to produce more consumer goods. That had to happen to avoid the first alternative, higher prices. This was not the only underwater rock that economic reform could run into when greater decisionmaking power was turned over to enterprise directors. But I will not list them all. The main difficulty, I repeat, was to maintain the balance between the goods on the store shelves and the money in people’s pockets. This could be ensured in the old way, through the omnipotence of the top-down, vertical administrative structure, no matter how it went into effect, whether through the ministries (most of which had been abolished by Khrushchev in 1957) or through the All-Union Council on the National Economy (created by Khrushchev in 1963). The details are not important. What is important is that this would be a step backward, a return to an old method of running our country’s economy, which, in the opinion of Father and the pro-reform economists, was ineffective. But it was possible to take a different course—to give directors the “right” to risk their own money, not the government’s, in other words to give the enterprises to them as their private property. That’s how the economies of most countries are organized, both the prosperous countries and the not so prosperous. In their case the relations between the enterprises and the government are reduced to the deduction of part of the profits as payment to the government, as rent for land and for fixed capital or through some other procedure. Taken all together, that is what is called paying taxes. In other words, the logic of a thoroughgoing decentralization of the economy down to the level of enterprise directors would inevitably lead to the introduction of market relations, whether through privatization, the payment of rent, or other methods. These are the conclusions I have come to, thinking it over in the twentyfirst century. But could Father, a fighter in the revolution and civil war, have taken such a step? The spur-of-the-moment answer is simple: No! Never! And yet he was a pragmatist to the marrow of his bones. He repeatedly stated, on appropriate and inappropriate occasions, that you can’t make soup out of ideas and ideology. He constantly cited the experience of the United States, England, and Germany, of course with qualifications. They worked better than us, were more efficient. He envied them and hoped that by borrowing their know-how we could catch up with them. Now, after all the trial and error, after the introduction of the regional economic councils, the best economic minds in our country had convinced him that only “management through profit” was capable of speeding

494

Downfall: 1964

up our economic development. Profit was the quintessence of the Khrushchevian version of a New Economic Policy. But the policy had been Lenin’s idea. In 1921, against the opposition of revolutionary maximalists, Lenin proclaimed the policy “seriously and for a long time.” Later Stalin broke it all up. I dare to suppose that, having become convinced of the real, practical advantages of profit as an economic concept, Father might have—I repeat might have—moved toward an understanding that it was necessary to “restore Leninist norms trampled underfoot by Stalin.” It is not excluded that he might have outstripped Deng Xiaoping and beat him to accomplishing something like the “Chinese miracle” twenty years earlier. Or more exactly, his successors might have, because Father turned seventy in 1964. With such a reform, they might have led our country into a state of prosperity, and by 1970 they might have built a form of communism—market communism—that is, something like Scandinavian socialism. But that’s all in the realm of fantasy. Father’s successors looked in an entirely different direction. Thus, for Russians there never was a glimmer of market communism—that is, it did not glimmer for them later on, after Khrushchev. And yet in his day it might have. I assume that after hearing a report from Rudnev, Father would have reviewed the materials of the Vaag commission and made his own comments on those materials, or in the best of cases would have surrounded himself with them as advisers. But things did not turn out that way. Father did not see the “draft resolution,” and Rudnev did not ask to be received by Khrushchev. The only thing left for us is to fantasize, to guess at what Khrushchev might have done if he had received and read the documents submitted by those economists. Let us suppose that he agreed with them and decided to take action. When might he have come forward with reform? Obviously he would not have done so at the November 1964 plenum. Not enough time would have been left for preparation. Besides, Father intended to speak at the plenum on the topic of specialization. He had already announced that. Knowing Father, I assume he would have pursued the following sequence of actions. Most likely he would have taken the proposals of the VaagTrapeznikov commission and given them a “rolling over,” a preliminary processing, at the Council of Science. Then he would have talked about them with the Central Committee Presidium and at a Central Committee plenum, and then, let’s say by the spring of 1965, he would have presented a draft law for nationwide discussion, so that a final decision could be made in 1966 by the TwentyThird Party Congress—just as under Lenin in the spring of 1921 the Tenth Party Congress adopted the decision to switch over to the New Economic Policy. I don’t think I’m wrong about that. However, the years 1965 and 1966 were not available to Khrushchev. On October 15, 1964, he was removed from his Kremlin office and ended up at the Petrovo-Dalneye dacha, forbidden to leave it without advance notice to the authorities. And everything went back to the old way. The chief editors of Pravda and Izvestia were removed. The tone of articles appearing in those papers changed

Looking to the Future

495

abruptly. And discussion about problems of the Soviet economy died out on its own.

91 July 24, 1964: Looking to the Future On July 24, 1964, the Presidium of the Council of Ministers gathered

in the Kremlin to discuss what kind of economic plan we should have for the next time period.1 Father proposed a departure from the usual pattern, in which the budgetary pie was divided among the various economic sectors according to priorities that had been set in the 1930s—with heavy industry getting everything it needed and other sectors sharing the leftovers. In his opinion, it was time to place the “provision of goods to the people” at the top of the list, and after that, “to ensure the proper financing of agriculture, and not to allow anyone to encroach on those investments, and only after that should anything go to ‘reproduction of the means of production’”—that is, producing more machinery. But even in the latter case, the purpose of new machinery and equipment would be, above all, to increase the production of consumer goods. Father went on to discuss how best to ensure “greater well-being for the people”—whether to emphasize the “collective component or the individual one” that goes into the standard “consumer’s basket.” He considered the provision of food free of charge, as for workers at their jobs or for children at schools or in day care centers, to be the most efficient and democratic. Moreover, if restaurant and dining hall services acquired universal scope, that would free women from tiresome kitchen work. But how to ensure quality and variety? That was not discussed at the meeting. Father recalled the accusations the Chinese made against him, of degeneration, revisionism, and other mortal sins, and boldly proposed going forward “to meet head-on the danger of bourgeois degeneration.” After a moment’s reflection he added: “I would like to speed up this aspect of things, and would be happy if this new aspect were to become a reality during my lifetime.” The “new aspect” was abundance, universal prosperity, what in those days was called “communism.” “Some bourgeois countries already have this, but we are only starting to move in this direction.” Here Father mentioned his recent trip to Scandinavia

Looking to the Future

495

abruptly. And discussion about problems of the Soviet economy died out on its own.

91 July 24, 1964: Looking to the Future On July 24, 1964, the Presidium of the Council of Ministers gathered

in the Kremlin to discuss what kind of economic plan we should have for the next time period.1 Father proposed a departure from the usual pattern, in which the budgetary pie was divided among the various economic sectors according to priorities that had been set in the 1930s—with heavy industry getting everything it needed and other sectors sharing the leftovers. In his opinion, it was time to place the “provision of goods to the people” at the top of the list, and after that, “to ensure the proper financing of agriculture, and not to allow anyone to encroach on those investments, and only after that should anything go to ‘reproduction of the means of production’”—that is, producing more machinery. But even in the latter case, the purpose of new machinery and equipment would be, above all, to increase the production of consumer goods. Father went on to discuss how best to ensure “greater well-being for the people”—whether to emphasize the “collective component or the individual one” that goes into the standard “consumer’s basket.” He considered the provision of food free of charge, as for workers at their jobs or for children at schools or in day care centers, to be the most efficient and democratic. Moreover, if restaurant and dining hall services acquired universal scope, that would free women from tiresome kitchen work. But how to ensure quality and variety? That was not discussed at the meeting. Father recalled the accusations the Chinese made against him, of degeneration, revisionism, and other mortal sins, and boldly proposed going forward “to meet head-on the danger of bourgeois degeneration.” After a moment’s reflection he added: “I would like to speed up this aspect of things, and would be happy if this new aspect were to become a reality during my lifetime.” The “new aspect” was abundance, universal prosperity, what in those days was called “communism.” “Some bourgeois countries already have this, but we are only starting to move in this direction.” Here Father mentioned his recent trip to Scandinavia

496 Downfall: 1964 and added: “The people who have the highest standard of living in Europe are the Swedes, and in their opinion, they have the highest in the world.” Father paused again, but it was obvious what he was thinking. Another possible way of improving the standard of living was to lower retail prices. Despite all the efforts up until then, we still had not succeeded in figuring out how to cope with prices, to make them “transparent,” so that it would be clear to both consumer and producer what they were paying money for, and why. “When foreigners come to visit us, or when our people go abroad, the first thing they do is go into the stores. Price comparisons [in the stores] do not come out in our favor. I would move toward reducing prices for shoes and clothing, including underwear. We must consider giving a really good reduction, even 50 percent. The introduction of synthetic fabrics gives us this possibility, but . . .” Here again Father paused. “Reducing prices is rather simple, effective, and attractive, but it is an undemocratic way of raising the standard of living. People in well-paid categories benefit more, and people who are paid less gain less as a result of lower prices.” In essence Father was correct—but psychologically, absolutely not. Lower prices, even a few kopecks lower, registered very strongly in the memories of the poorest people, because for them a matter of just five kopecks could have tremendous importance. Stalin understood that very well. The discussion turned to the subject of the quality of machinery, as well as specialization and delays in construction. For the umpteenth time, Father recalled that the jet engines in our airplanes had a service life of 500 hours, but British engines lasted for 5,000 hours. In other words, we had to make ten times more jet engines for our Tupolev, Ilyushin, and Antonov airplanes than the British had to for their Comets and Bristols. He also recalled that foreign conveyer belts had a service life three times longer than ours. Our motor vehicles, both trucks and cars, were heavier and consumed more fuel than American models. In confirmation of these words, he cited a memorandum sent to him on July 13, 1964, by a professor, Dmitry Velikanov, recommending a radical restructuring of our machine industry. That memorandum had been reviewed at a CC Presidium meeting on July 20, and a special resolution about it had been adopted. “During this five-year plan we must lay the foundations for everything progressive. If we can’t make the machines ourselves, let’s buy the licenses from foreign companies. Comrades, let’s not be such stubborn idiots,” he exclaimed. “Buy a license to produce synthetic cord for conveyer belts. You may pay twice as much, but from that we will earn three times as much.” Either we sell and buy metal—sell it as ingots and buy it as finished products, and pay three or four times more—or we introduce specialization. How much we have talked about organizing the production of standardized parts at our foundries! We need specialized factories and plants, like Krupp has in Germany. Even during the war, Krupp produced crankshafts and delivered them to customers neatly wrapped in oil paper.

The Farewell

497

When I traveled abroad I saw that chemical plants there were built and commissioned in two years, but for us it takes five years. The capitalists, in order to make a profit, fill their orders on time; but we, on the basis of a planned economy, don’t do that.

The participants at the meeting listened closely, as though for the first time, and diligently took notes on what Father was saying. Father did not set any final priorities, but he stated his desires: With regard to the need for apartments, we have accomplished something. In Moscow now, when people receive a notification that housing is available, they ask, “What street is it on?” And if the street doesn’t suit them, they say they’ll wait for something else. It’s very good that they ask like that. It means that people now have the opportunity to choose. And so, in the near future it will be possible to reassign priorities. I would give preference to the chemical industry for the sake of agriculture, and also to the production of clothing and footwear. In a crowded apartment, if you’re well fed, it’s easier to live than if you have plenty of space but are half-starving. And we don’t have enough resources for everything.

The subject shifted then to the chemical industry, to new products such as synthetic fleece, then back again to housing and agriculture. I have decided not to wear out the reader with countless technical and other details, of interest only to specialists, but that is what they gathered to discuss at the Kremlin that day. The meeting lasted for several hours. In the end, the decision was made to assign Kosygin and Ustinov to compile a rough draft for the economic plan to cover the next five or seven years, and to gather again to review that draft in two months or so, most likely in September.

92 The Farewell Beginning on August 4, 1964, Father was on the move, going from

one region to another. It seems to us now, when we know what the future would bring him, as if his only wish at that time was to keep traveling for the rest of his life.

The Farewell

497

When I traveled abroad I saw that chemical plants there were built and commissioned in two years, but for us it takes five years. The capitalists, in order to make a profit, fill their orders on time; but we, on the basis of a planned economy, don’t do that.

The participants at the meeting listened closely, as though for the first time, and diligently took notes on what Father was saying. Father did not set any final priorities, but he stated his desires: With regard to the need for apartments, we have accomplished something. In Moscow now, when people receive a notification that housing is available, they ask, “What street is it on?” And if the street doesn’t suit them, they say they’ll wait for something else. It’s very good that they ask like that. It means that people now have the opportunity to choose. And so, in the near future it will be possible to reassign priorities. I would give preference to the chemical industry for the sake of agriculture, and also to the production of clothing and footwear. In a crowded apartment, if you’re well fed, it’s easier to live than if you have plenty of space but are half-starving. And we don’t have enough resources for everything.

The subject shifted then to the chemical industry, to new products such as synthetic fleece, then back again to housing and agriculture. I have decided not to wear out the reader with countless technical and other details, of interest only to specialists, but that is what they gathered to discuss at the Kremlin that day. The meeting lasted for several hours. In the end, the decision was made to assign Kosygin and Ustinov to compile a rough draft for the economic plan to cover the next five or seven years, and to gather again to review that draft in two months or so, most likely in September.

92 The Farewell Beginning on August 4, 1964, Father was on the move, going from

one region to another. It seems to us now, when we know what the future would bring him, as if his only wish at that time was to keep traveling for the rest of his life.

498

Downfall: 1964

He started with Saratov province. There the secretary of the party’s province committee, Aleksei Ivanovich Shibayev, together with other officials, met him at the local airport. The first thing they did was take him out to see the crops. The harvest that year was superb. Then he gave a speech to local agriculturists. After that he went to the offices of the party’s province committee for discussion with a narrower, more select group about specialization and the coming reform of the economy. Shibayev warmly supported all these initiatives. The trouble was that two weeks earlier, while Khrushchev was visiting Poland on July 21–23, 1964, Shibayev had been received by Podgorny in Moscow. The two of them had found a common language right away, and Shibayev had agreed that it was time to remove “the Old Man.” On the eve of Father’s departure for Saratov, an article by Max Frankel appeared on the front page of the August 3 issue of the New York Times. Frankel wrote that Khrushchev was under pressure from all sides. The Romanians were disobeying him, and the dispute with China was continuing. “All this uncertainty has hit Moscow at a time of great domestic strain as well,” Frankel wrote. “Debates about investment priorities have not subsided. Khrushchev gives first place to the production of consumer goods. During his visit to Hungary in April this year he repeated: ‘People and their problems are the main thing. Good goulash, housing, schools—it is worth fighting and working for these things.’” Frankel went on to state that not everyone agreed with Khrushchev. Planning officials were lobbying for heavy industry, and the military was dissatisfied with reduced arms production. Khrushchev was in a difficult position, said Frankel. Fewer and fewer people were listening to him. He was still the ruler, but power was gradually slipping from his hands. Father read the translation of Frankel’s article, but did not react in any way. How many times in the preceding years they had predicted his downfall!1 On August 5, Father was in Volgograd. Again he rode around in the fields, where the harvest was all you could ever want. He also made a visit to the Stalingrad hydroelectric power plant and then gave a speech at a citywide public rally, talking at length and in detail about the intensification of agriculture, irrigation, giving more independence to the collective farms and state farms, transforming the interregional production administrations from governing bodies into consultative ones, whose function would be to bring the latest scientific advances to the farms, and he cited the example of Denmark in confirmation of his plans. On August 6, he was in Rostov on the Don. Again he went out into the fields, and here too the harvest was top-notch, couldn’t be better. Meeting with the party’s province committee, he said that leaders in today’s world require knowledge, not loud, bossy voices. They should have a profound knowledge of economics and become professional managers. On August 8, he was in the capital of Northern Ossetia, Ordzhonikidze. (That city is now called Vladikavkaz, the name it had before 1931.) The Ossetians were celebrating the fortieth anniversary of their autonomous republic,

The Farewell

499

and the top party secretary there had pleaded with Father to come visit and award the republic the Order of Lenin. Father had agreed—there was no reason to offend the Ossetians by refusing. Here too, after his arrival, he went around to look at the crops, and the well-ripened stalks of grain were a pleasure to behold. Returning to the city, he took part in the celebrations. Late in the evening at the residence where he was staying, the chief officials of Northern Ossetia gathered, together with leaders from neighboring provinces and territories, and again they talked about the forthcoming Central Committee plenum, and about the production administrations in particular, as well as the structure for managing the economy in general. A stenographic record was made of that conversation, and readers who might wish to can consult it.2 I won’t quote from that discussion. Father repeated before a new audience the same things that he had said earlier and that I have already written about. An assistant accompanied Khrushchev as usual. This time it was not the senior member of his group of advisers, Grigory Shuisky, the “keeper of the portfolio.” Father had sent Shuisky off on vacation, so he could rest up before preparations for the Central Committee plenum began. The person who traveled with Khrushchev this time was Andrei Stepanovich Shevchenko, his adviser on agricultural matters. Many years later, in 1988, Shevchenko shared his reminiscences with the journalist Anatoly Strelyany. In Shevchenko’s memory, that trip with Khrushchev in the summer of 1964 blended into and was merged with the endless round of travels by air and by land, dusty roads, fields of ripened grain, large meeting halls filled with hundreds of people, the many province committee offices with spartan furnishings and no superfluous luxuries, the comfortable residences for visiting guests and the modest village homes, sometimes without any electricity and with an outhouse in the yard. Shevchenko remembered that both he and Khrushchev were worn down with a feeling of incredible exhaustion that would not go away. Here I recount Shevchenko’s description of the night of August 8–9. This is only one of many such descriptions. Earlier on August 8, Turkish troops had landed on the island of Cyprus. The president of the Greek Cypriotes, Archbishop Makarios, appealed to world public opinion for help. In Moscow, Brezhnev was in charge. Late in the evening, after reading a draft statement by the Soviet representative to the UN Security Council, Brezhnev did not want to take the responsibility on himself to approve the document. He advised Foreign Minister Gromyko to call Khrushchev, who was in the city of Ordzhonikidze. The following passage is Shevchenko’s account of what happened: A call came from Moscow. They wanted to talk with him [with Khrushchev]. “He’s already gone to bed,” I explained. “Wake him up,” they insisted. “I can’t do that. It’s very late. There’s a three-hour time difference between us and Moscow.” I tried to talk them out of it. [In fact the time difference between Moscow and Ordzhonikidze is only one hour.]

500 Downfall: 1964 “No, wake him up,” they insisted. I go into the room where he’s sleeping. “Nikita Sergeyevich [Khrushchev],” I call out to him. He doesn’t wake up. I shake him by the shoulder. “What is it?” He starts to wake up. “A war?” “Yes, a war,” I answer. “Who attacked who?” Khrushchev was now completely awake. “There’s been a flare-up in Cyprus. The Foreign Ministry wants to get your agreement to a statement about that.” They worked out an agreement on the wording of the document. He went back to bed.3

On the evening of August 9, Shevchenko and Father flew from Ordzhonikidze to Kazan, capital of the Tatar Autonomous Republic, in the middle Volga region. In the Tatar Republic, after the ritual visit to look at the crops, Father spent most of his time at petrochemical plants that were under construction or already built and turning out petrochemical products. On the morning of August 10, he made an all-day trip to the oilfields near the city of Bugulma. “The whole next day we traveled.” This is Shevchenko’s recollection, as recounted by Strelyany. “Finally, in the evening, we were left alone.” “I’m tired,” Father warned Shevchenko. “Tired as hell. I’m going to bed. Even if there’s a war, don’t wake me.”4 The whole previous decade of Father’s life had gone by this way, under constant stress, and now he was entering his eighth decade. From the Tatar Republic, Khrushchev traveled by car to Bashkiria, to its capital city, Ufa. There, on the morning of August 11, he visited chemical and petrochemical plants and was satisfied with what he saw. The resolution calling for high-priority development of the chemical industry was being carried out. That resolution envisaged a sharp increase in production of synthetic fibers, synthetic coatings, sheets of plastic, and other kinds of plastic products, as well as chemical fertilizers. If things continued as they were going, there would soon be an abundance of quality clothing and footwear. Also, bigger and better harvests would follow, and we would be able to forget about the grain problem. In very high spirits, a mood of elation, Father flew from Bashkiria to the city of Kustanai in the Virgin Lands region. On August 12, he began his inspection tour of those vast expanses, moving from place to place by train and by automobile. In the evenings he always returned to his railroad car, where he spent the night. On August 13, Khrushchev and Shevchenko were in Tselinograd (capital of the Virgin Lands territory, now renamed Astana). There they were joined by the British media mogul Lord Roy Herbert Thomson. For a long time, Thomson had been asking for an interview with Khrushchev, who decided that while he was out on the road he would demonstrate to the British press lord what achievements we had made in the Virgin Lands.

The Farewell

Now I give the floor to Father himself:5 I flew out to Kazakhstan. As soon as we landed I immediately went out to the fields in my vehicle. I know no greater satisfaction than driving through farmlands. I loved to travel to the Virgin Lands when the harvest was being brought in. You ride in a car and as far as the eye can see there are endless fields of grain. After the spikes of wheat have formed, the vast expanses sown to wheat are like waves on the ocean, especially when the wind blows, rippling the sea of grain. Here and there working machines stick up like islands. The most favorable year, with the best harvest, of all the years of the Virgin Lands project, was 1964. After the previous “year of famine” I was simply bursting to get out to see the Virgin Lands. I use the expression “year of famine” in quotation marks because there was no actual famine, we were bringing in enough grain to feed ourselves, and anything we lacked we were able to purchase abroad. We even had some grain left over for the following year. I never felt such great emotion as during that last year of mine. That was my last year after many years of functioning as a party and government official. The grain was like a solid wall, thick as a hairbrush. It was a remarkable harvest! I was riding in an open vehicle, looking down at the wheat fields from above. As the wind blew there was a play of waves as the stalks swayed back and forth. It really was a surging sea of wheat. I’ve been told that if you open up a tarpaulin and spread it out on top of the wheat when the wind is blowing like that, it will actually float along over the stalks of grain as though it were floating on the waves. Even today when I recall the past, it makes me happy and I feel strong emotion at the pleasant memories of that time. Then I got on a train in order to travel a short distance by rail. I wanted to have a look at different regions, see things for myself, and to talk with people, especially those who worked on the state farms. By then the collective farms were rare occurrences, and those we had established at the beginning of the Virgin Lands project had been turned into state farms. Everywhere you looked was grain, grain, grain. Everywhere you traveled, combines were at work. People were sweating but smiling, a pleasant kind of tiredness. By 1964 we had acquired some experience at growing different types of crops in the Virgin Lands. The Kazakhs had managed to sow millet there since ancient times and obtained a high yield from that crop. During my time in the leadership, millet was also grown in the Virgin Lands, but not over a very wide area. The people there learned how to sow buckwheat, peas, and sugar beets as well, and the harvests they brought in were not bad. I’m not even talking about barley and oats. In general in the Virgin Lands we preferred to sow wheat and peas as the most valuable crops for those conditions. Besides, peas have a short growing season, and like all legumes they enrich the soil. Their root systems have nodules that accumulate nitrogen-rich substances. Then we learned how to plant orchards and rows of wind-breaking trees in the Virgin Lands, and we accumulated some experience with growing a type of flax that is not used for linen but from which we obtain linseed oil. Experiments were also made in growing corn for silage, which opened up the possibility of raising livestock for meat and dairy purposes. The time had come to expand agriculture in the Virgin Lands across a wide front, not limiting ourselves to monoculture and also increasing the earnings

501

502 Downfall: 1964 from agriculture. The prospects seemed good to me, confirming the hopes that had inspired us when we undertook the Virgin Lands project. The Virgin Land districts promised, as time went by, to become well-settled and economically profitable regions. At first the most primitive kinds of houses had been built, made of adobe and clay. Later, small prefabricated houses went up. In 1964, I visited settlements whose appearance was much more elegant and appealing. The planning of these settlements was not bad at all. Small trees were growing in the front gardens; all in all, they made a good impression and gave a sense of warmth and comfort. I even saw orchards there. A lot of Ukrainians had moved out there, and wherever fate takes them, Ukrainians invariably plant apple trees and pear trees, and hollyhocks in front of their windows. They can’t get along without such things. And little children had already made their appearance. In short, people were making homes for themselves out there on the land. The steppes had been plowed, families had been formed, and they were having children. People had put down roots, as it were. All this was very pleasing to me. Now [in the late 1960s and up to 1971, when Khrushchev was dictating his memoirs] the Virgin Lands territory has become different. The level of technology is better and more advanced. The cadres are different, and the living conditions are different, and I am glad of this. People’s cultural level and the level of municipal services have risen. Hospitals and facilities for children have been built, as well as cultural centers at the collective farms and state farms. And yet at that time we were economizing greatly; we were more than just economizing; we were simply clamping down on all spending of our resources. Some people may say that Khrushchev underestimated the importance of everyday life and its needs. Not true. I did think about those things, but first of all, the people had to be fed, and then we had to seek out the resources necessary for a more cultured life. Out there on the steppes I experienced a highpoint of personal happiness. I traveled great distances by car, and also by train, and then I got into a car again and kept traveling and traveling across the plains. I saw a beautiful harvest. How glad I was of our success. What joy I took in the labor of our people, the efforts they put in. Involuntarily I recall a remarkable poem by [nineteenthcentury poet] Nikolai Nekrasov: A miracle, Sasha, I’ve witnessed: A handful of Russians were banished To some far off place, God forsaken— Given land and then left on their own. A year, hardly noticed, sped by. Came officials to check on these exiles. Look what stood there—already a village! With storehouses, barns, and sheds! A hammer rings out in the smithy. And a mill will go up very soon. Bit by bit, half a century later A vast open town has arisen. [Note that detail, “half a century”; not just ten years (1954–1964), as in our case.—N. S. Khrushchev]

The Farewell

503

Just by this—human freedom and labor— Truly miracles can be achieved.

“For many hours we cruised around on the roads of the Virgin Lands region. The spectacle was impressive.” These remarks by Viktor Sukhodrev supplement and reinforce those just quoted from Khrushchev’s memoirs. Sukhodrev was Father’s English-language interpreter and had accompanied the British media mogul Lord Thomson, mentioned earlier, to Tselinograd. Around us it was like an ocean, no villages or forests were to be seen, only continuous, unbroken fields of wheat, to the very horizon. In any direction, no matter which way you looked. On the territory of each state farm that we were driving through the director of that farm would climb into our car. The first director was replaced by a second one, and then another. And so it continued—from one state farm to another, one director after another. Khrushchev frequently asked the driver to stop. He would get out, take a couple of stalks of grain, and roll them between the palms of his hands. He would question the director as well as heads of work brigades who we chanced across as we were driving through, and he also issued orders of one kind or another. Lord Thomson was then around seventy. A typical British man of the educated classes, in the classic English type of three-piece business suit, with pinstripes, wearing horn-rimmed glasses with incredibly thick lenses. He was like a creature from another planet in that situation absolutely alien to him. Especially when Khrushchev invited him to get out of the car and roll some stalks of grain between the palms of his hands. At the boundary line of a new collective farm someone approached Khrushchev’s car. It was a tall woman of about fifty by the name of Gurevich. As it turned out, she had graduated from the Leningrad Agricultural Institute. She had been working in the Virgin Lands for ten years already and headed one of the largest state farms. Nearly 10,000 state-farm workers labored under her direction. Khrushchev was overjoyed when he heard all this. Then he turned to me: “Did you translate for the British lord what kind of women we have?” It was as if to say: Look here, what a woman! With 10,000 men under her! And on top of that, one of the best state-farm directors, according to all the indicators. Gurevich took her seat in the car and we went on our way. She told about the accomplishments of the state farm, pouring out all sorts of figures without stopping. Khrushchev was smiling. He looked at his guest with pride. The harvest was very good, and everything was in order with livestock breeding as well, and people were living better and better. We came to a work camp out in the fields. There a huge tent had been erected, and inside it tables had been set up, covered with food and drink. Khrushchev did not stay at the dinner table long; he was in a hurry to get to the train. There in the railroad car Thomson had his interview. That was Khrushchev’s last interview with a Western journalist. Khrushchev looked strong, cheerful, and very energetic. And who could have thought that in something like two months his loyal comrades-in-arms would write in an official communiqué from the Central Committee plenum that this man had been relieved of all his duties because of his advanced age and the worsening of his health.6

504 Downfall: 1964 Thus we have made a kind of lyrical digression. It enables us to understand how Khrushchev was feeling in the months preceding his ouster.

93 Barayev Continues to Argue Against Nalivaiko The trip through the Virgin Lands region ended with a visit to the

Institute of Grain Growing and a conference attended by many people in Tselinograd (Astana). At the Institute of Grain Growing, the old dispute between Barayev and Nalivaiko was renewed. The question was whether there was any need to let land lie fallow in the Virgin Lands territory, and if so, how much? At the beginning of the year the scales were tipping in favor of Barayev, who had been given the floor at the February plenum of the Central Committee, whereas his opponent, Nalivaiko, the agronomist at the Altai Institute, had not been invited at all. For a while he fell silent, but then he got his bearings again and began bombarding Khrushchev with letters overflowing with facts and figures supporting his position. In turn, Barayev lost no time about making a response. From the letters he sent, which were also very lengthy and detailed, it followed that the truth was on his side. The battle was between two scientists representing two different schools of scientific thought. In support of each man’s position was a research institute. Barayev and Nalivaiko referred to dozens of experiments that had been carried out. But of course the conclusions the two men reached were mutually exclusive. “At that time, the majority of scientists and specialists not only had their doubts about the advantages of working the land continuously, without allowing intervals for it to lie fallow and replenish itself; they were actually certain that the method of continuous cultivation was not sustainable. They waged a determined struggle against this new idea.” Those words were written by Fyodor Timofeyevich Morgun, an agricultural specialist who in 1964 was working in Kokchetav province and later worked in the Virgin Lands region. “Barayev insisted on the need to make a massive transition to shallow tilling of the soil without moldboard plows and to introduce the practice of letting 25–30 percent of the cropland lie fallow, under perennial grass crops such as clover and alfalfa

504 Downfall: 1964 Thus we have made a kind of lyrical digression. It enables us to understand how Khrushchev was feeling in the months preceding his ouster.

93 Barayev Continues to Argue Against Nalivaiko The trip through the Virgin Lands region ended with a visit to the

Institute of Grain Growing and a conference attended by many people in Tselinograd (Astana). At the Institute of Grain Growing, the old dispute between Barayev and Nalivaiko was renewed. The question was whether there was any need to let land lie fallow in the Virgin Lands territory, and if so, how much? At the beginning of the year the scales were tipping in favor of Barayev, who had been given the floor at the February plenum of the Central Committee, whereas his opponent, Nalivaiko, the agronomist at the Altai Institute, had not been invited at all. For a while he fell silent, but then he got his bearings again and began bombarding Khrushchev with letters overflowing with facts and figures supporting his position. In turn, Barayev lost no time about making a response. From the letters he sent, which were also very lengthy and detailed, it followed that the truth was on his side. The battle was between two scientists representing two different schools of scientific thought. In support of each man’s position was a research institute. Barayev and Nalivaiko referred to dozens of experiments that had been carried out. But of course the conclusions the two men reached were mutually exclusive. “At that time, the majority of scientists and specialists not only had their doubts about the advantages of working the land continuously, without allowing intervals for it to lie fallow and replenish itself; they were actually certain that the method of continuous cultivation was not sustainable. They waged a determined struggle against this new idea.” Those words were written by Fyodor Timofeyevich Morgun, an agricultural specialist who in 1964 was working in Kokchetav province and later worked in the Virgin Lands region. “Barayev insisted on the need to make a massive transition to shallow tilling of the soil without moldboard plows and to introduce the practice of letting 25–30 percent of the cropland lie fallow, under perennial grass crops such as clover and alfalfa

Barayev Continues to Argue Against Nalivaiko

505

for many years. Many well-known scientists and academicians in our country sharply criticized Barayev.”1 Morgun remembers incorrectly—or more exactly, his memory has confused two separate and different time periods. The argument was about shallow tilling versus deep plowing, the latter of which turns over the entire upper layer of the soil. That was how the land was worked in Russia since time immemorial. The alternative to deep plowing was to use subsurface plows, which barely “scratched the surface,” going down less than a foot and leaving the previous year’s root system mostly undisturbed in the layer of dirt beneath the topsoil, thus keeping the soil structure intact. It was not so much Barayev as Maltsev who fought for this method of shallow tilling, and he did so not against Nalivaiko but against Lysenko. And that was not in 1964 but in 1954. It is a different matter altogether that Barayev did belong to the group of Maltsev’s supporters and sometimes defended Maltsev’s views more energetically than did Maltsev himself. At the time that we are talking about, the proponents of shallow tilling had won the argument. The drought of 1963 had put an end to the discussion. In places where subsurface tillage had been used, the dust storms were less destructive. It had been more difficult for the hot, dry winds to lift the soil and blow it away. (That is, the root system had helped to hold the soil in place and maintain its structure.) Incidentally, the Americans also stopped the practice of deep plowing in arid or semiarid plains regions. They now use subsurface-tillage methods. They came to this conclusion after the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, when dust storms blew away much of the topsoil in prairie regions of the United States. Thus by 1964 the argument about deep plowing versus shallow tilling had already receded into history. In the summer of 1964 a different dispute flared up with renewed force between these two schools of thought. It was over fallow lands. Barayev insisted on his position: “The grass-field crop rotation system is necessary, and in the absence of herbicides to combat weeds, there is only one effective method: to let the lands lie fallow.”2 Nalivaiko argued the opposite position, and no less effectively, citing many years of experiments that had been carried out not only at his research station but on many farms in the Virgin Lands region. This argument among scientists overflowed the banks of pure science. In addition to people involved in agriculture, some who were quite far removed from it joined in the discussion. I will quote again from the memoirs of Viktor Sukhodrev. This is a continuation of his account of the trip with Lord Thomson through the fields of various state farms in the Virgin Lands region: “We drove on . . . Suddenly Khrushchev’s expression darkened. One field had ended and another began, but on it there was not a single ripened stalk of grain. At that sight my heart sank. I am by no means a specialist, but I felt it. The land here was lying fallow . . . Khrushchev gave the order to stop the car.

506 Downfall: 1964 “What exactly is this?” he asked Gurevich. “Fallow lands, Nikita Sergeyevich.” “What are they for?” Khrushchev’s expression grew darker than ever. “Nikita Sergeyevich, year after year I have held first place in this whole district,” Gurevich replied, as calm as ever. But could you really expect to stump Khrushchev with an argument like that? “That may be so, but if these lands were not lying fallow, a harvest would have grown up here also.” Khrushchev was insistent. “But we consider our fallow lands necessary.” She did not give an inch— even in the face of the Number One person in the Soviet state. Finally we drove past this ill-starred fallow field. Again an ocean of wheat surrounded us, golden fields extending endlessly. And Khrushchev became cheerful again. After returning to his railroad car, Khrushchev took the local officials to task for having these fallow lands.

It is evident from this passage that Sukhodrev was on Gurevich’s side. Of course, Sukhodrev worked in the diplomatic service; he was an adviser and diplomatic emissary, a brilliant translator from and to English, but not a specialist on agriculture. He is obviously puzzled about why he himself understood everything, but Khrushchev failed to grasp such obvious truths. The problem is that what he says is true and at the same time not true. Father and he were simultaneously looking at the same fields, but what they saw was different. Gurevich actually did bring in an excellent harvest every third year from this field, which “rested” during the other two years. And for that she received well-deserved awards. But if the harvest is divided by the entire area, including both the area sown to crops and that lying fallow, it becomes evident that the good harvest represents only one-third of the potential total. The state farm directed by Gurevich did not work “in the Khudenko manner.” The plan was handed down to the state farm from above, telling where to sow crops, how many hectares of land to leave unsown, and so forth. In accordance with these instructions from higher bodies, Gurevich did her work and gave her accounting in terms of those instructions. Father was not interested in reports like that. He was interested in actual results: how much grain was poured into the government’s grain elevators. Which is better, a record harvest from one hectare or an average harvest from three? For him the answer was not obvious, but apparently for the diplomat Sukhodrev it was. Of course, if the director had been given free rein, she would have made a decision on her own, and the same for a director on any state farm. If her own self-interest had replaced reporting to higher authorities, this same Gurevich would have thought about whether it was worthwhile to leave two-thirds of “her” land lying unsown or whether some profit could be obtained from those lands. And if letting land lie fallow was an effective method, after all, who would renounce it? Now it was 1964, and Father was searching for an answer to this “accursed question,” and not just for one state farm, but on the scale of

Barayev Continues to Argue Against Nalivaiko

507

the entire country. Both Nalivaiko and Barayev appealed to Father. They asked him for a decision—to allow millions of hectares of virgin grassland to lie fallow for two or three years, or to follow the example of the Americans and sow those lands and reap a harvest from them every year. The wrong answer could be costly. If one agreed with Barayev, millions of tons of grain that the country needed so badly might be lost. But it was also dangerous to place one’s bets on Nalivaiko. As long as the supply of fertilizers in our country was still insufficient, it might happen that the land would be exhausted and lose its fertility. In 1964 the problem of fertilizers was already being solved, and a year or two later there would be an adequate supply. In the long-term perspective, Nalivaiko’s position was more promising. Nevertheless, Khrushchev hesitated. “Whether to let land lie fallow or sow it with crops is a question of economic expediency. Take a pencil and calculate the profit.” Here again Khrushchev uses the word “profit.” “One must be guided by economic considerations.” I am quoting from a report about Khrushchev’s trip through the fields of Kustanai province, published in Pravda on August 14. That was how the conversation with Gurevich, described so emotionally by Sukhodrev, was transformed in a newspaper account. The words attributed to Father in Pravda sound like this: “To let land lie fallow or not? Economics will give the answer. I will bet on the winning horse.” It was in this same tone that Father shared his impressions about the trip through the Virgin Lands with his colleagues, and he also expressed his doubts at a meeting of the CC Presidium on August 19, 1964. Here, as much as possible, I have abridged the stenographic record. In Father’s words: An interesting debate is continuing over fallow lands. I have tried to remain in the shadows and to take a neutral position. But my neutrality suffered a fiasco. We political people cannot avoid taking action. So I propose this formula: the method of cultivating the land that produces the best results—let that be the winner. If fallow lands, with fields “resting” for an entire season, produce a double harvest compared to land that does not lie fallow, then that method is justified. The harvest from lands that have lain fallow is almost always greater than cropland that is used every year. Lukyanenko, who is an honored seed selectionist in Stavropol, told me that his variety will provide a yield of 70 centners from each hectare of fallow land, a very large figure, whereas from cropland that has been used every year the yield is only 40 centners per hectare, slightly more than half. But it is more than half. Over two years 80 centners will be retrieved from the land cultivated two years in a row, but from the land that lies fallow for a year, only 70 centners. That’s the arithmetic. I compared the yield at the experimental station run by another agronomist, V. G. Savostin. In his case, fallow land constitutes 9 percent of the total cultivated land. In the drought conditions of last year, 1963, they obtained an average of 8.7 centners per hectare. I have confidence in Savostin. Barayev proposes that we leave as much as 35 percent of the land to lie fallow, which is more than 10 million hectares. Next to Barayev’s experimental station is a collective farm where the chairman is not a scientist but simply a farmer. He has no fallow land, but the yield on his farm is higher than at Barayev’s experimental station.

508 Downfall: 1964 For now, science is still weak. In earlier times, 40 percent of the land was left to “rest” as grassland. Now they want to call it fallow land. [Father was continuing to think out loud.] I saw fallow land on all the state farms. Savostin had 9 percent. Barayev this year had 18 percent, and last year it was 35 percent. The Kazakhs [i.e., the party and government leadership in Kazakhstan] want to replace Barayev. They consider him an unintelligent man. We will not interfere. Let the collective farms and state farms decide for themselves what is most advantageous.3

Father was having his doubts, but “the Kazakhs” were not. In the fall of that year they took some serious steps against Barayev, but they did not succeed in carrying out the “measures” they wanted to. Instead of Barayev being relieved of his post in Tselinograd, Khrushchev was relieved of his in Moscow, and then there followed a complete reversal. Now everyone condemned Khrushchev’s “voluntarism” and demanded a return to the fallow lands method. How was the question of fallow lands finally resolved? I must admit I don’t know. I was not interested. If you look out the window of your car when you’re driving through the fields of Russia nowadays, you do not see any land “lying at rest.” Everything is sown to some sort of crop. An abundance of fertilizer is now available, and the problems that were so sharply disputed in 1964 have dropped away, disappeared of their own accord. Having gazed to his heart’s content at the wonderful harvests in the Virgin Lands territory and after having listened to the arguments between the fallow lands advocates and their opponents, on August 15, 1964, Father flew to the capital of Kirgizia, the city of Frunze (now Bishkek). There everything was ready for a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Kirgizstan’s entry into the Russian empire. On August 16, Father spoke at a rally to commemorate this special day, and he pinned an Order of Lenin to the flag of the Kirgiz Republic. The next morning he drove out to visit sheepherders in the lowlands around Lake Issyk-Kul. There in the winter of 1963–1964 an enormous number of sheep had been lost, not because of a poor harvest or ice covering the pastureland, but primarily because of lack of organization, irresponsibility—that is, a sharp increase in entropy. This disaster shocked not only Kirgizia, but our country as a whole, which lost more than 3.5 million sheep from its total livestock herd.4 Father had decided to go there to see with his own eyes what had happened. On August 18, 1964, he returned to Frunze, where at a meeting of the republic’s managerial personnel he gave a speech that was by no means purely ceremonial. That same evening he returned to Moscow. There is a three-hour time difference between Frunze and Moscow, so that Father landed at Vnukovo airport near Moscow only twenty minutes later than his departure from the Manas airport in Kirgizia. “I saved three hours of labor time,” he joked in reply to welcoming remarks from those who met him at the airport.

The CC Presidium Meeting of August 19, 1964

509

94 The CC Presidium Meeting of August 19, 1964 On August 19, Father convened a meeting of the CC Presidium, where

he reported on his trip. The harvest made people happy. It is true that the final figures for the harvest were not yet known. After everything had been counted, the size of this record harvest was announced on October 25, eleven days after Father had been removed from power. The yield of grain in 1964 was 152.1 million tons, more than any previous year of the twentieth century. The harvest two years earlier, in 1962, had come the closest, with 140.2 million tons. The yield per hectare also proved to be the highest, 11.4 centners. The government procured 68.3 million tons of grain. In the catastrophic previous year, 1963, government procurements had amounted to only 44.8 million tons, whereas in the relatively favorable year of 1962, procurements had been 56.6 million tons. There was enough grain for baking bread, feeding livestock, and making an appreciable increase in the government’s reserve supplies of grain. Since plenty of livestock feed was now available, the size of our country’s livestock herd was gradually replenished and by the end of 1965 we made up for the losses suffered in 1963, the year of poor harvest and consequent shortage of feed for livestock. Father was aware that the record harvest of 1964 was not so much “our” achievement as a gift from nature, just as the previous year’s disaster had natural causes. “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.” Everything would change once our capacity to produce fertilizers had developed and once irrigation canals crisscrossed all our fields. Only then would we be released from our fatal dependence on nature. That would take approximately another decade, and in the meantime, as Father warned his colleagues: “Don’t get swellheaded over this. Don’t forget about the disaster of 1963. You have to be prepared for the worst. If you are prepared, you won’t be startled when the worst happens. We cannot shame ourself through purchasing grain abroad, as in 1963.”1 In the passage I have just quoted, Father’s use of the word “you,” rather than “we,” surprised me. Was it a slip of the tongue? Perhaps not. The next party congress was scheduled for a year or a year and a half from then. He intended to retire after that party congress, and in that case “you” rather than “we” would become a reality. As for his warnings about “the worst,” it was as though

510 Downfall: 1964 Father was looking into a crystal ball. In the following year, 1965, a very poor harvest came in, only 121.1 million tons of grain, of which government procurements amounted to only 36.3 million tons, 8.5 million tons less than even in the disastrous year of 1963. Why that happened I do not know. Either it was bad weather or, more likely, once Brezhnev had gotten rid of Father, he relaxed and entropy was not slow about making itself evident. The shortage of grain was made up for by imports. The new leaders of our country began to enjoy feeding our people by simply doing nothing, at the expense of American or Australian farmers. Soon the oil of Siberia was harnessed, and petrodollars became available. Buying grain from abroad became an addiction. But let us return to the CC Presidium meeting of August 19. It went on for three hours. The stenographic record barely fits into twenty-nine book pages. Father spoke about everything, and in detail. Among other things, he mentioned his visit to Volgograd. There he was introduced to a man who tended flocks of sheep and earned as much as 200 rubles per month, very high pay for those days. I am not about to pass judgment on the profession of herding sheep, but at our prestigious rocket and missile design bureau an ordinary engineer earned 110 rubles per month, and a highly qualified engineer earned 180 rubles. At ordinary factories an engineer usually made only about 80 rubles. “I consider it incorrect to pay a herder of sheep 200 rubles per month,” said Father, “when salaries for teachers and doctors are only 40 rubles per month. It is not even every engineer who earns 200 rubles per month. I am opposed to larger earnings for workers in agriculture than for those in industry.” “The setting of wage rates for labor in our collective farms is disgusting,” said someone at the meeting, expressed support for Khrushchev’s views (Malin could not make out who said that and in his notes merely designated the speaker as “voice from the floor”). “In times past, unskilled people became sheep herders. I myself began my working career as a herdsman,” Father continued. “It is difficult work, but such pay for sheep herding is not justified economically. I know what it means to revise wage rates. It is a very difficult matter, but we must correct mistakes that have been made.”2 Father was not proposing that any immediate decisions be made, but was simply sharing his impressions. Those in attendance did not usually get into arguments with Father. Sometimes they made comments, but usually they merely took what he said into consideration or let it go in one ear and out the other. On this occasion, Polyansky, who was the Central Committee official in charge of agriculture and one of Khrushchev’s deputies in the government, objected sharply, which was unusual: “You can’t determine policy just from one state farm or collective farm.” “I travel to a great many collective and state farms,” Father retorted. One remark followed another, and a shouting match erupted. In the heat of the argument Father even stated: “You sit in my place, and I’ll sit in yours. Let the Presidium decide.”

The CC Presidium Meeting of August 19, 1964

511

The argument had shifted from the question of the wage rates for tending sheep to the question of productivity of labor in general. Father pointed out that “in our country the output per worker in industry is three times less than in the United States, and in agriculture it is six times less.” Then he recalled some disagreements that had arisen at the time when they decided to establish pensions for collective farmers (it is unclear from the text what those disagreements were), but according to Father, “a sharp discussion had occurred” at that time between Polyansky and himself. “Were you right or was I?” Father asked. “According to you, we don’t have the right to make a mistake,” Polyansky justified himself. “Five members of the Presidium signed that proposal, in addition to secretaries of the Central Committee. You can’t judge by one separate fact.” “But you were the one that drafted the proposal.” Father would not give in. “I am a human being!” Polyansky shouted. He could not restrain himself any longer. “I am also a human being!” Father replied in the same manner. “How can anyone hold a conversation with you?” Polyansky persisted. “This issue is a major one, of interest, and it needs to be studied,” intervened Brezhnev, trying to relieve the strained atmosphere. At that time, when preparations for removing Khrushchev had nearly been completed, the argument between Polyansky and Khrushchev was not at all timely for the conspirators. “Maybe it’s my age. I get upset and disturbed and I react,” said Father, trying to calm himself and change the tone of the discussion. He had not intended to argue with Polyansky, and his outburst was the result of his accumulated exhaustion from the past several months. “Evidently, until the day I die, I’ll be a person who reacts. I can’t do anything about it. What business is this of mine? You go ahead and work! I’m already seventy years old. The heck with it. Do what you want!” Here Father was addressing Polyansky in a conciliatory way, as though to apologize, and a little while later, when other questions were already being discussed, he added bitterly: “I’ve been thrown off balance, my routine has been upset, and I can’t systematize things properly . . .” “No need to get upset,” offered Polyansky. By now he too had gotten hold of himself.3 The issues of specialization in the economy, the new constitution, and in general the reform of the economy—all this had required all of Father’s energy, and in addition there were the endless, exhausting trips, the airplane flights going from one time zone to another, conversations out in the fields and at party and government offices, and speeches to large crowds. It would be hard for even a young person to hold up under all that, and Father was already seventy. In October 1964, Polyansky, who was in his forties, would reproach Father, who then had been removed from power, for making these endless trips, and in particular reproached him for his recent journey to the Virgin Lands: “When things were bad last year, in 1963, you didn’t go there.” On the one hand, he

512 Downfall: 1964 traveled too much, and on the other, not enough. Polyansky himself did not like to travel, preferring to direct matters from his Kremlin office. The conversation then shifted to the preparations for the forthcoming Central Committee plenum, scheduled for November 1964. Father proposed that collective farms and state farms, and not just individual peasants, as was then permitted, should sell their products at farmers’ markets in the cities, and to do so at market prices, although to be sure, some sort of ceiling on those prices would be set. For those days, that would have been an enormous relaxation of government controls. Father considered it reasonable to make such a decision.4 Then the discussion at the CC Presidium meeting switched to the interdistrict production administrations and their future. Father repeated his proposals, which are already known to us from his memoranda, to enlarge those administrations so that, instead of eight state farms or collective farms, there would be no fewer than twenty under the jurisdiction of each such administration. I emphasize that his proposal was to enlarge them and not abolish them. In October, Father would be accused of intending to eliminate the interdistrict production administrations altogether. That had not been his intention, of course. Nevertheless, after his retirement, his successors did immediately eliminate those administrations. One further observation. In this stenographic record, which of course had not been edited and corrected, there was not a single instance of “the use of strong words.” Father was constantly accused of using excessively strong language. I have already stated repeatedly that Father did not curse at home, nor was it his habit to curse among his colleagues at work. The rudest or possibly most offensive expression Father used at that meeting on August 19 was a request to Shelepin to obtain an official document from the Central Statistical Administration and “shove it under the nose of this member of the CC Presidium.” He was referring to Polyansky. That was not very polite, but it was not at all what is usually meant by the expression “using strong language.”5

95 Big Oil of Siberia On August 27, 1964, Pravda published a two-page spread—an article

by the secretary of the party’s industrial committee for Tyumen province, Aleksandr Konstantinovich Protozanov, with the title “Big Oil of Siberia.” He wrote

512 Downfall: 1964 traveled too much, and on the other, not enough. Polyansky himself did not like to travel, preferring to direct matters from his Kremlin office. The conversation then shifted to the preparations for the forthcoming Central Committee plenum, scheduled for November 1964. Father proposed that collective farms and state farms, and not just individual peasants, as was then permitted, should sell their products at farmers’ markets in the cities, and to do so at market prices, although to be sure, some sort of ceiling on those prices would be set. For those days, that would have been an enormous relaxation of government controls. Father considered it reasonable to make such a decision.4 Then the discussion at the CC Presidium meeting switched to the interdistrict production administrations and their future. Father repeated his proposals, which are already known to us from his memoranda, to enlarge those administrations so that, instead of eight state farms or collective farms, there would be no fewer than twenty under the jurisdiction of each such administration. I emphasize that his proposal was to enlarge them and not abolish them. In October, Father would be accused of intending to eliminate the interdistrict production administrations altogether. That had not been his intention, of course. Nevertheless, after his retirement, his successors did immediately eliminate those administrations. One further observation. In this stenographic record, which of course had not been edited and corrected, there was not a single instance of “the use of strong words.” Father was constantly accused of using excessively strong language. I have already stated repeatedly that Father did not curse at home, nor was it his habit to curse among his colleagues at work. The rudest or possibly most offensive expression Father used at that meeting on August 19 was a request to Shelepin to obtain an official document from the Central Statistical Administration and “shove it under the nose of this member of the CC Presidium.” He was referring to Polyansky. That was not very polite, but it was not at all what is usually meant by the expression “using strong language.”5

95 Big Oil of Siberia On August 27, 1964, Pravda published a two-page spread—an article

by the secretary of the party’s industrial committee for Tyumen province, Aleksandr Konstantinovich Protozanov, with the title “Big Oil of Siberia.” He wrote

Big Oil of Siberia

513

about the Beryozovo natural-gas fields and the Surgut, Nizhnevartovsk, Demyansky, Aleksandrovsky, and Salym oil districts. The extraction of oil and gas in those regions had begun. A map of the Soviet Union was included on one page of the newspaper, crisscrossed with solid and dotted lines showing pipelines for gas and oil that were already being laid and those that were only projected. The first two of them, the Shaim-Tyumen oil pipeline, 436 kilometers long, and the Igrim-Serov gas pipeline, were projected for completion by the end of the seven-year plan—that is, no later than the next year, 1965. By comparison with 1950, there had been a fivefold increase in the total length of the pipeline network. In 1950, approximately 5,400 kilometers of such pipelines existed; in 1957, 11,500 kilometers; and in 1964, 28,000 kilometers. And that was only the beginning. The gas pipelines planned for the next decade spread out from Tyumen like a spiderweb: from the Tazovsky deposits to Norilsk; from Okhta-Urtyevsk to the Kuzbas (Kuznets Coal Basin); from Igrim to Perm, Kirov (Vyatka), Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod), Moscow, Cherepovets, and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). In addition, an oil pipeline was being laid from Ust-Balyk to Omsk and Kurgan. Protozanov wrote further about the building of roads and new towns, and about much, much more. Father opened up this issue of the newspaper on an airplane. At 9 A.M. that morning he had flown off on his official visit to Prague. Protozanov’s article made him happy even though he already knew about everything that was written there. But it was so pleasant to read about what had been accomplished and was going to be accomplished in the near future. The presence of oil and gas in Siberia was first predicted in a 1932 newspaper interview (in Pravda) with academician Ivan Gubkin. Hardly anyone believed Gubkin in 1932. But as early as July 1934, geologists did discover oil in western Siberia, in the Yugansk district near Surgut. It had spontaneously seeped out onto the surface and even formed pools in lowlying areas. Nevertheless, the skeptics prevailed, and the region was regarded as having no prospects. Only after World War II, at the end of 1947, did geologists return to Siberia. On September 21, 1953, in the area around the settlement of Beryozovo, scene of the last exile of Peter the Great’s favorite, Aleksandr Menshikov, a gas-bearing stratum was discovered, and soon after that they hit the first “gas gusher.” Seven years later, in the spring of 1960, there occurred not merely the discovery of oil in Siberia but in fact, near a little stream running through the taiga, Konda Creek near the village of Ushya, they struck a gusher of light oil, the most valuable kind. By March 1961 geologists had mapped the boundaries and drilled into an entire lake of oil. That was the Megion oil deposit, one of the largest in the Soviet Union at that time. In mid-1961 a special subdivision was established, the Yugansk-Neftegaz (Yugansk Oil and Gas), for the exploitation of another oil region, that of Ust-Balyk. And they have been pumping Ust-Balyk oil now for half a century.

514 Downfall: 1964 By the end of 1961 five major oil deposits and twelve gas deposits in Tyumen province were marked on the geologists’ maps. All doubts had disappeared. There really was “big oil” in Siberia! In May 1962 a decree was issued by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers, “On measures for intensifying the work of geological exploration for oil and gas in areas of western Siberia.” Up until then they had been mapping the boundaries of only the most promising deposits, but now the offensive developed all along the line. The history of Siberian oil truly dates from the time of that decree. Siberian oil not only freed our country once and for all from the problem of fuel shortages, and the endless rationing and restrictions on the use of gasoline; it also allowed the Soviet Union to come out onto the world market as a petroleum-exporting country. During the previous decade, since 1953, the economic blockade of our country had decayed. The commercial “Iron Curtain” imposed by the West had rusted away and was full of gaping holes. Besides, oil was not a product that customers shied away from. And with the coming of Siberia’s “big oil,” our country acquired a taste for petrodollars.

96 Antonin Novotny and Alexander Dubcˇek On August 27, Father landed in Prague, and from there, together with

Czechoslovakia’s President Antonin Novotny, he made his way to the capital of Slovakia, Bratislava. There on August 29, Khrushchev spoke at a citywide rally immediately after a speech by the first secretary of the Communist Party of Slovakia, Alexander Dubček. That was their first and last meeting. Dubček was fluent in Russian, and after the rally they talked for a long time. Father asked him about the state of affairs in the Slovak Republic. Khrushchev was concerned about rumors regarding an increasing number of disputes between Czechs and Slovaks in the leadership. Dubček assured him that they were living in perfect harmony with the Czechs and changed the subject. He started talking about the economy. Father held his tongue diplomatically, although doubts remained. In his report to the CC Presidium about that trip, he noted that “this problem does exist among them.”1 We do not know whether Father talked about the forthcoming reforms, the plans for further decentralization of the Soviet economy. He did not refer to

514 Downfall: 1964 By the end of 1961 five major oil deposits and twelve gas deposits in Tyumen province were marked on the geologists’ maps. All doubts had disappeared. There really was “big oil” in Siberia! In May 1962 a decree was issued by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers, “On measures for intensifying the work of geological exploration for oil and gas in areas of western Siberia.” Up until then they had been mapping the boundaries of only the most promising deposits, but now the offensive developed all along the line. The history of Siberian oil truly dates from the time of that decree. Siberian oil not only freed our country once and for all from the problem of fuel shortages, and the endless rationing and restrictions on the use of gasoline; it also allowed the Soviet Union to come out onto the world market as a petroleum-exporting country. During the previous decade, since 1953, the economic blockade of our country had decayed. The commercial “Iron Curtain” imposed by the West had rusted away and was full of gaping holes. Besides, oil was not a product that customers shied away from. And with the coming of Siberia’s “big oil,” our country acquired a taste for petrodollars.

96 Antonin Novotny and Alexander Dubcˇek On August 27, Father landed in Prague, and from there, together with

Czechoslovakia’s President Antonin Novotny, he made his way to the capital of Slovakia, Bratislava. There on August 29, Khrushchev spoke at a citywide rally immediately after a speech by the first secretary of the Communist Party of Slovakia, Alexander Dubček. That was their first and last meeting. Dubček was fluent in Russian, and after the rally they talked for a long time. Father asked him about the state of affairs in the Slovak Republic. Khrushchev was concerned about rumors regarding an increasing number of disputes between Czechs and Slovaks in the leadership. Dubček assured him that they were living in perfect harmony with the Czechs and changed the subject. He started talking about the economy. Father held his tongue diplomatically, although doubts remained. In his report to the CC Presidium about that trip, he noted that “this problem does exist among them.”1 We do not know whether Father talked about the forthcoming reforms, the plans for further decentralization of the Soviet economy. He did not refer to

Antonin Novotny and Alexander Dubcˇek

515

Dubček in his report to the CC Presidium. But that does not mean anything. At that time Dubček did not arouse any special interest, unlike, for example, Gustav Husak, a recently rehabilitated dissident, who according to Father “received fairly substantial applause” during the awarding of medals to honor the heroes of the Slovak uprising of 1944. I would not be surprised, however, if Father did talk about those issues. He was constantly thinking about that subject, and if he found a grateful and sympathetic listener, he would begin to share with that person his own vision of the future of socialist society. Be that as it may, at the basis of the economic reforms of the Prague Spring of 1968 lay the idea of a profound decentralization of economic management, giving freedom to the directors of enterprises, reducing their relations with the government to the paying of taxes, that is, precisely what Father was getting ready to do, but did not succeed in doing, in the Soviet Union. It is not surprising that post-Khrushchev Moscow reacted with open hostility to the Prague Spring. History refers to Ota Sik as the “father of economic liberalization” in Czechoslovakia. He was the director of the Prague Institute of Economics and he took the risk of trying to combine market mechanisms and socialism. That only proves of course that such ideas were “in the air.” In 1968, Sik tried to carry out in his country what Khrushchev intended to do in 1965, but I admit I am making assumptions about all this. It is probable that Father took a liking to Dubček, especially compared to Novotny. In a conversation with the latter, Father more than once raised the subject of cleansing the country of the heritage of Stalinism. It was not so much that Novotny took a pro-Stalin position as that he did not want to reexamine the sentences imposed in the Stalin era against “enemies of the Czechoslovak people.” In 1956, immediately after the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Novotny had tried to prove to Khrushchev that in Czechoslovakia, unlike in the Soviet Union, everything had been done according to law. Father did not agree, and he advised Novotny before it was too late: “Look at all the documents, and if there were unjustified arrests and sentences, you have to tell the party and the people that honestly. . . . You will also have to live through the reaction of your people. . . . If you don’t do that, the time will come when you will be made to answer for it, and then you’ll find yourself in a different situation.” Novotny, just like Molotov, Kaganovich, and others in the Soviet Union before him, did not want to find himself “in a different situation” and he took measures. In 1962 he even had Rudolf Barak, the head of state security in Czechoslovakia, arrested. Barak had taken that post immediately after the death of Stalin and had nothing to do with the repression of the Stalin era. Father considered Barak an honest person, devoted to the cause. If Barak’s arrest had involved political issues, Khrushchev would have intervened on his behalf, but he was accused of stealing, of appropriating substantial amounts of foreign currency. Father did not consider it possible to intervene. Barak sat in prison, but rumors spread through Prague that it was not because of foreign currency that

516 Downfall: 1964 he had been arrested, but because he had dug up evidence of Novotny’s own part in the Stalin-era repression. He was being made to pay for that. Barak was released from prison immediately after Dubček came to power. Be that as it may, in 1964, as Father stated in his memoirs: “Novotny didn’t understand his responsibility; he didn’t understand the significance and the necessity of restoring human justice and political purity. [He] didn’t make the decisions that were necessary.”2 Members of the Soviet delegation to Czechoslovakia in August 1964 reported that Novotny got really angry after observing Khrushchev’s favorable attitude toward Dubček. On the day after the public rally the Soviet delegation was driven from Bratislava to Banska-Bystrica, where on August 29, 1944, the Slovak uprising against the Nazi occupation of Slovakia had begun. The main portion of the twentieth-anniversary celebrations were held there. In the lead car of the procession driving to Banska-Bystrica, no room was found for Dubček, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Slovak Communist Party. They had barely started when Father expressed his concern and asked Novotny why the hero of the day was not there. The cortège, the ceremonial procession of automobiles, had to be stopped. Dubček was transferred to the car in which Father and Novotny were riding, and Soviet ambassador Leonid Zamyatin took Dubček’s former seat in another car. The ceremonies in Banska-Bystrica proceeded successfully. Speeches were given, and then meat was roasted over campfires up in the hills. Slovak folk songs were sung along with songs of the guerrilla fighters, and just plain songs in general. Father returned to Moscow on September 6.

97 Richard Sorge, Vasily Porik, and Fritz Schmerkel On September 4 and 5, 1964, most of the central newspapers in the

Soviet Union published articles about the exploits of a German by the name of Richard Sorge, who had warned Stalin about the coming German invasion and even gave a date for the beginning of the attack, June 22, 1941.

516 Downfall: 1964 he had been arrested, but because he had dug up evidence of Novotny’s own part in the Stalin-era repression. He was being made to pay for that. Barak was released from prison immediately after Dubček came to power. Be that as it may, in 1964, as Father stated in his memoirs: “Novotny didn’t understand his responsibility; he didn’t understand the significance and the necessity of restoring human justice and political purity. [He] didn’t make the decisions that were necessary.”2 Members of the Soviet delegation to Czechoslovakia in August 1964 reported that Novotny got really angry after observing Khrushchev’s favorable attitude toward Dubček. On the day after the public rally the Soviet delegation was driven from Bratislava to Banska-Bystrica, where on August 29, 1944, the Slovak uprising against the Nazi occupation of Slovakia had begun. The main portion of the twentieth-anniversary celebrations were held there. In the lead car of the procession driving to Banska-Bystrica, no room was found for Dubček, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Slovak Communist Party. They had barely started when Father expressed his concern and asked Novotny why the hero of the day was not there. The cortège, the ceremonial procession of automobiles, had to be stopped. Dubček was transferred to the car in which Father and Novotny were riding, and Soviet ambassador Leonid Zamyatin took Dubček’s former seat in another car. The ceremonies in Banska-Bystrica proceeded successfully. Speeches were given, and then meat was roasted over campfires up in the hills. Slovak folk songs were sung along with songs of the guerrilla fighters, and just plain songs in general. Father returned to Moscow on September 6.

97 Richard Sorge, Vasily Porik, and Fritz Schmerkel On September 4 and 5, 1964, most of the central newspapers in the

Soviet Union published articles about the exploits of a German by the name of Richard Sorge, who had warned Stalin about the coming German invasion and even gave a date for the beginning of the attack, June 22, 1941.

Richard Sorge, Vasily Porik, and Fritz Schmerkel

517

Stalin had not believed Sorge, and what’s more, he placed Sorge in the category of a potential “enemy of the people” and ordered that he be recalled to Moscow and investigated. Sorge did not go to Moscow; instead the Japanese “investigated” him. In October 1941 the Japanese arrested Sorge, accused him of spying, and, as was customary with regard to agents of foreign intelligence agencies who had been exposed, they proposed to Stalin an exchange for a Japanese spy who had been arrested in the Soviet Union. Stalin did not reply. The Japanese waited until 1944, and having realized that no answer would be forthcoming, they hanged Sorge on November 7, 1944, as a kind of gift to Stalin on the anniversary of the October Revolution. In the Soviet Union, people had forgotten about Sorge, or more exactly, they didn’t know about him. His name was gathering dust in the archives of the intelligence agency. Richard Sorge would have remained in a state of oblivion for many long years if not for an unusual set of circumstances. The Germans and the Japanese remembered Sorge, and throughout the years after World War II they argued about whether he was or was not a spy, and if he was a spy, who he was spying for. For the Russians? Or perhaps for the Americans? In the early 1960s a Franco-Italian film director, Yves Ciampi, produced a documentary with the intriguing title, in French, of Qu’est-ce que vous etais, Monsieur Sorge? (Who Are You, Mr. Sorge?). One can’t help wondering if this film was intentionally sent to the Soviet Union, arriving by unknown paths. In those days, we mainly watched Soviet films made in our own country or those purchased from member countries of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon). Foreign currency, which was always in short supply, was not wasted on films. No one even suggested that we buy Western films, but sometimes someone would send a film for us to look at. It is possible that the movie about Sorge was not sent just in the normal course of things, but that it was done with a special intention of trying to finally disclose the secret of who Sorge was. On his days off, after lunch, Father would usually watch a movie at the dacha. At first there would be a newsreel, and then a documentary from a series called “Science and Technology,” and then new popular-science films, and finally a feature film, such as the one about Sorge. On that day, for some reason, we didn’t go out to the dacha but had a film showing at the Conference Center in the Vorobyov Hills district (then called Lenin Hills). We liked the film and when the lights were turned on the whole family, including Father, following up on the film’s title in Russian, asked the question: “Yes, who in the world are you, Mr. Sorge?” This was the first time Father had ever heard Sorge’s name, but unlike the filmmaker it was easy for him to satisfy his curiosity. On his return to our residence he picked up the phone and dialed the number of the chairman of the KGB, and asked him: “Who actually was Mr. Sorge?” Semichastny, the KGB

518

Downfall: 1964

chairman, could not answer, but he promised to look in the archives. The next day a report lay on Father’s desk: Sorge had been a Soviet intelligence agent, and the story told about him in the film was true. “In return for all that this German did for the Soviet Union, he received the hangman’s noose, and Stalin helped the Japanese put that noose around his neck!” Father was furious. “That seems to be the case,” Semichastny confirmed. “That is not only an injustice, it is a crime.” Father’s indignation intensified. “We must reestablish the truth. Maybe it’s late in the day, but injustice must be corrected.” Semichastny was given the order to lift the veil of secrecy covering Sorge and to disclose everything that was known about his life. On September 4, 1964, Pravda published a major article under the heading “Comrade Richard Sorge.” On September 5, a Saturday, Izvestia ran an article titled “The Exploits of Richard Sorge.” Father assigned Mikoyan to draft a decree awarding Sorge the honorary title Hero of the Soviet Union. The wheels in the bureaucratic machinery began to turn. Meanwhile, October came and Father was removed from power. On October 27, 1964, Mikoyan carried out his assignment and presented the draft decree to the CC Presidium for confirmation. Those present knew that Khrushchev had initiated this project and reacted coldly. “Is it really necessary to award him the title of Hero?” Podgorny muttered. “This should be studied further,” said Shelepin in agreement.1 Reason prevailed, however. On November 5, 1964, Mikoyan signed a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and Sorge became officially a Hero of the Soviet Union. A street in Moscow was named after Sorge, after Father’s time, but without Khrushchev that might not have happened at all, or it might have happened much later, possibly decades later. During the last year of Father’s time in power, the names of other heroes of World War II, people who under Stalin had been called traitors, were brought back from oblivion. On July 21, 1964, Lieutenant Vasily Vasilyevich Porik was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. In 1942 he had been captured by the Germans. In accordance with Stalin’s will, Porik, along with millions of other prisoners of war, was branded a “traitor to the fatherland,” and his family was subjected to repression. The fact that Porik in that very same year escaped from a prison camp located in France, hunted for the French partisans and found them, and soon became one of the leaders of the underground resistance center in France—no one in Moscow was interested in that, nor in the fact that Porik died heroically on July 22, 1944. Through all those years he was listed as a traitor to the homeland. It was only in 1964 that this “mistake” was corrected. On October 6, 1964, another “mistake” was corrected with regard to Lance Corporal Fritz Schmerkel of the German Wehrmacht. At the very beginning of

Day by Day

519

the war, in the fall of 1941, he was serving in the first artillery regiment of the 186th Infantry Division of Germany’s Fourth Army, which was carrying out a powerful and dangerous offensive aimed at Moscow. Schmerkel voluntarily joined the Smolensk partisans (the Soviet anti-Nazi guerrilla movement). He told them where and when military trains would be passing through and also when and where police raids were scheduled. His collaboration continued for about three years, but the German authorities finally tracked Schmerkel down, and on February 21, 1944, they executed him. According to Stalin’s twisted laws, this German did not qualify for the status of Hero, and Schmerkel was forgotten just as Sorge had been. Now at last he was being remembered.

98 Day by Day On September 3, 1964, the first planes landed at the new international

terminal at the airport near Moscow called Sheremetyevo-II. On September 7, Father went to Luzhniki stadium, where an international exhibition of road-building equipment was being held. For him, roads were a constant headache, especially the rural ones that ran through the fields. Without such roads the Virgin Lands would be worth only half their value. Not only did the grain have to be harvested, but it also had to be delivered to the consumer, not spilled on the bumps of the roughly graded roads, which also turned to soup whenever it rained. But what was the use of talking about improving the roads if we didn’t have the money? A decision was made in 1964 to build more roads, and to begin right away. Father wanted to look at the exhibition to see what might be suitable for us among the pieces of equipment not yet being produced in our country. He took a good look and made notes to remind himself later, but he never had a chance to make use of them. On September 8, 1964, in the Kremlin, Father met with exemplary cotton workers from the Golodnaya Steppe region in Central Asia along with builders of the Kara-Kum Canal. After saying goodbye to the cotton growers, he met for several hours with V. F. Marchuk, director of the Krasny state farm in the Crimea. Equipment had recently been purchased in the United States to turn the Krasny farm into a factory farm for poultry. At the end of their conversation, Father told Marchuk that in the near future he would stop by to visit and see

Day by Day

519

the war, in the fall of 1941, he was serving in the first artillery regiment of the 186th Infantry Division of Germany’s Fourth Army, which was carrying out a powerful and dangerous offensive aimed at Moscow. Schmerkel voluntarily joined the Smolensk partisans (the Soviet anti-Nazi guerrilla movement). He told them where and when military trains would be passing through and also when and where police raids were scheduled. His collaboration continued for about three years, but the German authorities finally tracked Schmerkel down, and on February 21, 1944, they executed him. According to Stalin’s twisted laws, this German did not qualify for the status of Hero, and Schmerkel was forgotten just as Sorge had been. Now at last he was being remembered.

98 Day by Day On September 3, 1964, the first planes landed at the new international

terminal at the airport near Moscow called Sheremetyevo-II. On September 7, Father went to Luzhniki stadium, where an international exhibition of road-building equipment was being held. For him, roads were a constant headache, especially the rural ones that ran through the fields. Without such roads the Virgin Lands would be worth only half their value. Not only did the grain have to be harvested, but it also had to be delivered to the consumer, not spilled on the bumps of the roughly graded roads, which also turned to soup whenever it rained. But what was the use of talking about improving the roads if we didn’t have the money? A decision was made in 1964 to build more roads, and to begin right away. Father wanted to look at the exhibition to see what might be suitable for us among the pieces of equipment not yet being produced in our country. He took a good look and made notes to remind himself later, but he never had a chance to make use of them. On September 8, 1964, in the Kremlin, Father met with exemplary cotton workers from the Golodnaya Steppe region in Central Asia along with builders of the Kara-Kum Canal. After saying goodbye to the cotton growers, he met for several hours with V. F. Marchuk, director of the Krasny state farm in the Crimea. Equipment had recently been purchased in the United States to turn the Krasny farm into a factory farm for poultry. At the end of their conversation, Father told Marchuk that in the near future he would stop by to visit and see

520 Downfall: 1964 how things were going and acquaint himself with the subtleties of this new type of poultry farming from across the ocean. That evening he and Mama hurried to the Bolshoi Theater, where the La Scala opera company from Milan was performing Puccini’s Turandot. The tour by this famous Italian company had begun on September 5, but that was the day Father returned from Czechoslovakia, not in time to attend their first performance. Our parents liked the opera. Father was openly enthusiastic about it, but Mama commented patriotically that our own opera singers were just as good. Here we encountered one more new phenomenon: the newspapers reported that “N. S. Khrushchev and his spouse were present at the theater.” They had always gone to the theater together, or almost always, but when official announcements appeared in the press about such things, only Father was mentioned. Mama remained in the shadows. Now they decided to bring her out of obscurity in the Western manner. I don’t know how correct it was to do that. For many people the reference to the “spouse” sounded a discordant note. That’s what Russia is like. On September 9, 1964, again in the Kremlin, Father received India’s defense minister, Yashwantrao Chavan. What they talked about I don’t know, and whatever agreements they came to soon lost any significance for Chavan. After October, Father would be faced with the prospect of starting everything over again with entirely different people. Entering Father’s office after Chavan left was an old acquaintance from France, Canon Félix Kir, mayor of Dijon. During Father’s visit to France in March 1960 he had especially requested that his schedule include a visit to Dijon, where Canon Kir had promised to arrange a warm welcome for him. Apparently it was going to be too warm. The Vatican was not pleased by Canon Kir’s friendship with Khrushchev, and during Father’s visit to Dijon, the pope sent Canon Kir to a remote monastery by special decree. But the people of Dijon, even in the absence of the mayor, gave Khrushchev a warm welcome. People stayed around until late at night in front of the mayor’s residence, where Father was staying. Canon Kir did not break off his ties with Father even after the latter’s retirement. He sent greetings to Khrushchev on every holiday, and in September 1971 he sent condolences to Mama on the occasion of Father’s death. On September 10, the Moscow newspapers published the “memorandum” of Palmiro Togliatti, who had been general secretary of the Italian Communist Party since 1926. This was a letter addressed to Khrushchev, which Togliatti had given to Ponomarev. Togliatti, on the eve of his death, wrote about the future of the Communist movement and about the different approaches that movement could take; that is, he was talking about what would soon be called EuroCommunism as distinct from Soviet Communism. The details of that letter are not relevant. Father agreed with Togliatti on many points, but after Togliatti’s death his letter took on the aura of a dissenter’s testament that was supposedly being kept secret from the public by the Soviet

What Kind of Army Do We Need?

521

leadership. In order to do away with unnecessary rumors, Father ordered that Togliatti’s “testament” be published without any cuts or abridgments. That same evening, our parents went to the Bolshoi Theater again. All day Father had been praising the Italian singers, so that Mikoyan decided to follow in Father’s footsteps, but the other members of the CC Presidium declined, citing the press of business. My parents invited us children to go as well, at least those who were available that evening. Verdi’s Il Trovatore was performed, the singing was excellent, and everyone enjoyed it immensely. The performances by La Scala at the Bolshoi Theater continued to the end of September. They had five different operas in their repertoire, but after September 10 Father did not manage to get to the theater again. His schedule for all the rest of September was completely filled up, down to the last minute, both days and evenings. We never suspected then that this ordinary occurrence, going to the theater on September 10, would be Father’s last time, and it was also the last time our whole family went together to the theater at all. From September 11 to 18, the president of India, Sarvapali Radhakrishnan, was a guest in Moscow. Father met him at Vnukovo airport. On September 12 they had a discussion in the Kremlin, and both men spoke at a large public meeting in honor of this important guest held in the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses.

99 What Kind of Army Do We Need? On September 14, 1964, Father went to a military proving ground at

Kubinka (about forty-eight kilometers west of Moscow), where new models of tanks and artillery, including salvo-firing systems, were demonstrated along with other weapons for use by our ground forces. A detailed account of this visit is in my book Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower. Here I will take up only the question of military spending, which is connected to the main theme of this book—reform of the Soviet economy. People gathered in a small headquarters building for an exchange of impressions immediately after the weapons had been demonstrated. I was there too, because our Special Design Bureau No. 52 presented a new cruise missile, the S-5, to be used by our land forces. Father began the conversation by talking about the new tanks. First he expressed his delight, saying he was thrilled by what had been accomplished. “You can’t compare these tanks at all to the ones

What Kind of Army Do We Need?

521

leadership. In order to do away with unnecessary rumors, Father ordered that Togliatti’s “testament” be published without any cuts or abridgments. That same evening, our parents went to the Bolshoi Theater again. All day Father had been praising the Italian singers, so that Mikoyan decided to follow in Father’s footsteps, but the other members of the CC Presidium declined, citing the press of business. My parents invited us children to go as well, at least those who were available that evening. Verdi’s Il Trovatore was performed, the singing was excellent, and everyone enjoyed it immensely. The performances by La Scala at the Bolshoi Theater continued to the end of September. They had five different operas in their repertoire, but after September 10 Father did not manage to get to the theater again. His schedule for all the rest of September was completely filled up, down to the last minute, both days and evenings. We never suspected then that this ordinary occurrence, going to the theater on September 10, would be Father’s last time, and it was also the last time our whole family went together to the theater at all. From September 11 to 18, the president of India, Sarvapali Radhakrishnan, was a guest in Moscow. Father met him at Vnukovo airport. On September 12 they had a discussion in the Kremlin, and both men spoke at a large public meeting in honor of this important guest held in the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses.

99 What Kind of Army Do We Need? On September 14, 1964, Father went to a military proving ground at

Kubinka (about forty-eight kilometers west of Moscow), where new models of tanks and artillery, including salvo-firing systems, were demonstrated along with other weapons for use by our ground forces. A detailed account of this visit is in my book Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower. Here I will take up only the question of military spending, which is connected to the main theme of this book—reform of the Soviet economy. People gathered in a small headquarters building for an exchange of impressions immediately after the weapons had been demonstrated. I was there too, because our Special Design Bureau No. 52 presented a new cruise missile, the S-5, to be used by our land forces. Father began the conversation by talking about the new tanks. First he expressed his delight, saying he was thrilled by what had been accomplished. “You can’t compare these tanks at all to the ones

522 Downfall: 1964 we had during the war. Not even the best of those.” An almost involuntary expression of regret burst from his lips: “If only we had had tanks like this back then.” There was an approving buzz from those present, but Khrushchev suddenly changed his tone: “We are reenacting the experience of World War II, without analyzing it critically.” He gave the designers the credit due to them, saying that without any doubt they deserved praise for what they had produced, but that the orders they had been asked to fill were faulty. “And they are the ones who placed the orders,” said Father, pointing at the marshals who were present. “They define what we need and what we don’t need. And one gets the impression that to them everything is needed.” Father paused and looked around at those present. A tense silence hung in the room. He continued with the assertion that we must look at the army and its tasks and purposes in a different way. “Are we getting ready to conquer someone?” Father’s eyes bored into Marshal Malinovsky, who was sitting next to him, and then answered his own question: “No! Why then do we need all these weapons that we’ve seen today?” Father went on to describe what a nuclear war would be like. He had been thinking about that for a long time. As early as 1959 he had written a memorandum for the CC Presidium on the subject, and he had spoken about it at the Defense Council meeting in Fili the previous year. (One may also read about that meeting in Fili in Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower.) What had previously appeared merely as hints had now grown into a conviction: war between the two giants, the Soviet Union and the United States, was impossible. Nuclear weapons made war pointless. There could be no winner in such a war. And in Father’s opinion, the use of such weapons could not be avoided. Even if both sides were inclined not to use them at first, nevertheless if one side thought it was losing the war, it would have an irrepressible desire to change the course of events to its own advantage by resorting to a nuclear strike, or as a last resort, just for revenge, it would reach for the hydrogen bomb. “If we rule out the possibility of a conventional war between the Soviet Union and the United States, between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, then why do we need this whole array of weapons?” Father continued: “It’s all very good, very modern, but it costs enormous sums. Our country has no money to spare. Therefore we must think very seriously about what kind of army we need and decide what kind of weapons to arm it with. But we must economize on this, providing only what is really necessary, and transferring our resources thus freed up to peaceful uses, for housing, for consumer goods. “But if we give you free rein, you’ll leave our country with no pants to wear.” Father was trying to relax the tension and, in making this joke, gave Malinovsky a friendly poke in the ribs. The joke did not come off. Malinovsky forced a sour smile. There was silence in the room. Many remembered Father’s speech at the Defense Council

What Kind of Army Do We Need?

523

in Fili. His return to that subject boded no good—a new reorganization, a further reduction of the army. The generals did not approve of that. After all, the glory of a strong state is its army, and the costs were not their concern. They correctly anticipated his subsequent remarks. He began to talk about a “compact,” highly professional army and a territorial militia, and about releasing more people from military service to add to the work force that our country so badly needed. He emphasized that he was talking about not only what kinds of weapons to buy but also how many. After all, weapons quickly become obsolete. Why do we need thousands of tanks and thousands of planes if no war is knocking on our door? This is money taken out of the mouths of the people and thrown to the winds. No, he was not calling for disarmament—that was a tempting dream, but not realizable at present. The army needed to have the most modern weapons at its disposal, but in reasonable quantities. No more than that. The assortment of types of weapons should be approached with equal frugality. It cost many millions to engage in serial production of different types of tanks and artillery with similar combat capabilities. These costs could be avoided if only the one best tank was selected, and so forth. “But you want to have a good reputation. You don’t want to spoil your good relations with your suppliers, so you buy up everything they offer, at the people’s expense.” Father flung this reproach at those sitting in the audience. In response there came a muffled grumbling. Father spoke a little bit more about thriftiness and about the fact that the army exists to defend the people, not the people for the army. Finally, he stopped talking. No other speakers were scheduled. Again Father thanked his listeners for all the work they had done. With a scraping of chairs, everyone rose from their seats, but no one headed for the doors. They let Father go first, and the marshals followed behind him. I hurried to catch up. When I came up to Father he was talking quietly with Malinovsky about something. The marshal was listening to what Father was saying with a sort of doomed look on his face. From the military men’s point of view, the demonstration of new weaponry had not gone well. In fact, the opposite had happened. Proud of what he had accomplished, Malinovsky had expected that the purchase of these new weapons would be approved. Everything had gone wrong. Now new discussions were in the offing, with unknown results. Or more exactly, the results were too easy to guess. The supreme commander-in-chief (Khrushchev) was in the mood to “dump” the army. That was the only way the marshal could perceive the proposed shift to this mythical concept, a territorial militia. At that point neither Malinovsky nor Khrushchev knew that very soon nothing of importance would depend on the supreme commander-in-chief; his proposals would be of no interest to anyone, and no one would carry out his orders. Exactly one month remained until “the end.”

524 Downfall: 1964 We rode home in silence. Father was sitting in front. In back, besides me and the perennial chief of the bodyguard, the seats were occupied by Brezhnev and Kirilenko.

100 Day by Day On September 15, 1964, Egyptian premier Ali Sabri flew to Moscow.

He was a guest of the Soviet Union until September 23. Again there was a welcome at Vnukovo airport and at talks in the Kremlin, but these were not just for the sake of protocol, as with Indian president Radhakrishnan, who in fact had no decisive influence in his own country. These talks were serious and businesslike, because Ali Sabri was Nasser’s right-hand man. That same day, after his talks with Ali Sabri, Father received a Japanese parliamentary delegation in the Kremlin. It was headed by a man named Fukunaga, chairman of the Committee for Parliamentary Affairs in Japan’s Chamber of Deputies. The subject of discussion was a peace treaty between the Soviet Union and Japan, and the fate of two islands—Habomai and Shikoyan. Back in 1956, Khrushchev had promised to give those islands to Japan in exchange for the signing of a peace treaty, but the Americans had intervened and things had come to a halt. In 1964, contacts with Tokyo were resumed, and now both sides were groping for a way out of the dead end. It was necessary to start negotiations over again from the beginning. By autumn “the light at the end of the tunnel” was visible, and Japanese delegations were constant visitors in Moscow. At a CC Presidium meeting on September 17, Father proposed that the Twenty-Third Party Congress, which he considered would be his last, be convened in late 1965 or early 1966. His stern instructions to Ustinov were also recorded at that session: “No factory with backward technology is to be built, and this ‘ban’ is to be extended to the whole chemical industry. The technology for producing vinol can be purchased in Japan.”1 The same old question was under discussion: how to get new chemical plants built. Should we use our own, homegrown technology, which was just being developed, or use Soviet gold to purchase foreign licenses and technology that were more advanced and had already been tested? The Finance Ministry was being tightfisted with the gold, and Father grumbled about its miserly

524 Downfall: 1964 We rode home in silence. Father was sitting in front. In back, besides me and the perennial chief of the bodyguard, the seats were occupied by Brezhnev and Kirilenko.

100 Day by Day On September 15, 1964, Egyptian premier Ali Sabri flew to Moscow.

He was a guest of the Soviet Union until September 23. Again there was a welcome at Vnukovo airport and at talks in the Kremlin, but these were not just for the sake of protocol, as with Indian president Radhakrishnan, who in fact had no decisive influence in his own country. These talks were serious and businesslike, because Ali Sabri was Nasser’s right-hand man. That same day, after his talks with Ali Sabri, Father received a Japanese parliamentary delegation in the Kremlin. It was headed by a man named Fukunaga, chairman of the Committee for Parliamentary Affairs in Japan’s Chamber of Deputies. The subject of discussion was a peace treaty between the Soviet Union and Japan, and the fate of two islands—Habomai and Shikoyan. Back in 1956, Khrushchev had promised to give those islands to Japan in exchange for the signing of a peace treaty, but the Americans had intervened and things had come to a halt. In 1964, contacts with Tokyo were resumed, and now both sides were groping for a way out of the dead end. It was necessary to start negotiations over again from the beginning. By autumn “the light at the end of the tunnel” was visible, and Japanese delegations were constant visitors in Moscow. At a CC Presidium meeting on September 17, Father proposed that the Twenty-Third Party Congress, which he considered would be his last, be convened in late 1965 or early 1966. His stern instructions to Ustinov were also recorded at that session: “No factory with backward technology is to be built, and this ‘ban’ is to be extended to the whole chemical industry. The technology for producing vinol can be purchased in Japan.”1 The same old question was under discussion: how to get new chemical plants built. Should we use our own, homegrown technology, which was just being developed, or use Soviet gold to purchase foreign licenses and technology that were more advanced and had already been tested? The Finance Ministry was being tightfisted with the gold, and Father grumbled about its miserly

“We’ve Talked and Talked, but We Cannot Get Anything Done”

525

attitude. He argued that the technology purchased abroad would pay for itself a hundred times over. Then, for the last time, Father tried to have the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy sent out to the countryside, to the Voronovo state farm in the Kursk region. Volovchenko, the minister of agriculture, objected. Father yielded, and gave an assignment to the commission that had been studying this problem for a number of years: to give due consideration to the whole matter once again.

101 “We’ve Talked and Talked, but We Cannot Get Anything Done” On the morning of September 22, a Tuesday, Father invited four men

to his office to discuss the first outlines of the next five-year plan, for 1966– 1970. The four men were Aleksandr Rudakov, the Central Committee secretary in charge of industry and construction; Dmitry Ustinov, chairman of the AllUnion Economic Council (Vsesoyuzny Sovnarkhoz); Aleksei Goreglyad, first deputy chairman of the State Planning Committee (its chairman, Lomako, was on vacation in the Crimea during September); and Vladimir Starovsky, chairman of the Central Statistical Administration. They conferred for more than two hours, but even so they could come to no agreement. For the time being, the question of the next five-year plan was not settled. To convey the atmosphere of the discussion, I will quote some excerpts from remarks Father made, and will, as much as possible, refrain from commenting from my own point of view. In this first excerpt Father expresses his agreement with Starovsky: “The designing and building of plants and factories equipped with the most modern and complex technology cannot in any way be squeezed into a five-year plan. Possibly we should divide the fifteen-year period remaining from 1965 until 1980 into two parts: a seven-year plan followed by an eight-year plan, or an eight-year plan followed by a seven-year plan. Let the State Planning Committee think about which would be better.” “Production of consumer goods must be developed more boldly,” Father outlined the tasks for the future. “Our main goal is to satisfy people’s needs. Human beings must be placed first. And the means of production must serve

“We’ve Talked and Talked, but We Cannot Get Anything Done”

525

attitude. He argued that the technology purchased abroad would pay for itself a hundred times over. Then, for the last time, Father tried to have the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy sent out to the countryside, to the Voronovo state farm in the Kursk region. Volovchenko, the minister of agriculture, objected. Father yielded, and gave an assignment to the commission that had been studying this problem for a number of years: to give due consideration to the whole matter once again.

101 “We’ve Talked and Talked, but We Cannot Get Anything Done” On the morning of September 22, a Tuesday, Father invited four men

to his office to discuss the first outlines of the next five-year plan, for 1966– 1970. The four men were Aleksandr Rudakov, the Central Committee secretary in charge of industry and construction; Dmitry Ustinov, chairman of the AllUnion Economic Council (Vsesoyuzny Sovnarkhoz); Aleksei Goreglyad, first deputy chairman of the State Planning Committee (its chairman, Lomako, was on vacation in the Crimea during September); and Vladimir Starovsky, chairman of the Central Statistical Administration. They conferred for more than two hours, but even so they could come to no agreement. For the time being, the question of the next five-year plan was not settled. To convey the atmosphere of the discussion, I will quote some excerpts from remarks Father made, and will, as much as possible, refrain from commenting from my own point of view. In this first excerpt Father expresses his agreement with Starovsky: “The designing and building of plants and factories equipped with the most modern and complex technology cannot in any way be squeezed into a five-year plan. Possibly we should divide the fifteen-year period remaining from 1965 until 1980 into two parts: a seven-year plan followed by an eight-year plan, or an eight-year plan followed by a seven-year plan. Let the State Planning Committee think about which would be better.” “Production of consumer goods must be developed more boldly,” Father outlined the tasks for the future. “Our main goal is to satisfy people’s needs. Human beings must be placed first. And the means of production must serve

526 Downfall: 1964 that purpose. Previously we posed that task in the opposite way.” These issues had already been discussed on July 24, 1964, at a session of the Council of Ministers. Father had thought everything over again and felt reinforced in his conviction that the direction chosen was the correct one. The rest of the conversation on September 22 boiled down to one question: how to carry out the tasks that had already been decided on. Above all, it was necessary to reach “the world level” of technology—that is, the average level of productivity in the world economy. “Ask our scientists to analyze the productivity of foreign firms in comparison with ours.” Then Father addressed Ustinov: Invite people who know their way around in matters of technology and economics, people like Nikolai Fedorenko, director of the Institute of Mathematic Methods in Economics. I have read his articles, but I haven’t had time yet to read his book, which he sent to me. These scientists ought to function like a barometer for us, keeping track of the ups and downs in the world, the development of technology and of the world economy, and report to us about those in a timely way. On the basis of their recommendations, let’s purchase licenses abroad and start planning with that world level of technology and productivity as our starting point. I repeat, we have to purchase such advanced technology abroad, together with the licenses to use it. Purchasing licenses is the only solution. We cannot ignore foreign advances in science. We cannot live in conditions of economic autarky. Some people have explained to me that they did not purchase a chemical plant for the production of vinol because in Leningrad we are about to produce our own vinol. And for how many years have they led us around by the nose like that! . . . Today foreign companies are knocking on all our doors, offering credit to purchase all the most advanced technology. . . . For the next seven years our scientists will be trying to catch up with the level that the West has reached today, but meanwhile the West will go even further ahead! . . . Unfortunately Rudnev [chairman of the State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research] doesn’t see this. He is an honorable person, a decent man, but he likes to avoid troublesome problems, and he has begun caulking up all the cracks in the doors to the offices of his committee so that no troublesome bacilli can get in. Take the example of the Japanese. They rose again from the ashes, from a primitive economic condition. They purchased licenses, copied what others had produced, and then began to make their own contribution, and now they’re beating America. But as for us, we know everything, we understand everything, we talk and talk, but we can’t get anything done, and we conceal our inability and lack of knowledge from ourselves. This comes from our having swelled heads. What we are doing is terrible. We are on the borderline between winning glory and collapsing in shame. We cannot build new plants and factories with a technological level that is already a thing of the past abroad. . . . What are we doing for the chemical industry? No other country has such a low technological level as we do in this sector. For some types of products, the useful output is 10 percent in our country, but for the Japanese it’s 40–50 percent. That is a shameful thing for our party. . . . Our foreign trade organizations conduct negotiations without any clear policy at all. From the Dutch we purchased two or three factories that

“We’ve Talked and Talked, but We Cannot Get Anything Done”

527

produce vinol, but I’m afraid we purchased something that is not needed today. I have a report lying in front of me that says the Dutch equipment has the capacity to produce 180 tons of vinol, whereas the Japanese can produce 360 tons, although in both cases the same amount of equipment is at work!

Here Rudakov made a comment that the Japanese were not producing vinol anymore, but had gone over to the production of polypropylene. “Then let’s buy polypropylene,” Father agreed. “But I would like to receive a well-informed technical conclusion about that. I had been told that vinol is the cheapest material for producing ropes, fishing nets, tarpaulins, conveyor belts, and transmission belts.” Then the discussion turned to housing. Ustinov complained that the planned pace of construction by 1970 would not meet the planned target of twelve square meters per person. Only eight square meters per person would be achieved. Father agreed that we did not have enough resources, even though no one in the world was building as much as we were. He proposed that now “the network of childcare centers should be expanded, providing free meals at those centers, and we could hold off for about five years with the idea of free housing, at any rate in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev. We have already built the equivalent of three Moscows, and it is still not enough.” “For large cities,” in Father’s opinion, “the solution is housing cooperatives.” The future owners would finance the housing construction out of their own pockets.1 All of this had also been discussed on July 24. And that is understandable. The basic trends of economic development for the immediate future had already, for all practical purposes, been outlined. Now Father was trying, together with the others, to find the most effective means of realizing these goals. In modern parlance this is called “brainstorming.” Noontime was approaching. A secretary reminded Father that it was time to have lunch, after which new visitors would be waiting for him. After lunch he met with Viktor Stepanovich Fyodorov, chairman of the State Committee for Chemistry, and then with the Cuban ambassador to the Soviet Union and Cuba’s party secretary for Oriente province, Jorge Risquet Valdes. On September 23, he accompanied Ali Sabri to Vnukovo airport, and subsequently took a flight of his own to the missile range at Tyura-Tam (Baikonur). There they were showing new strategic missiles and space technology to the top government and military leaders. (An account of his trip there is in Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower.) He returned to Moscow in the afternoon on September 25, and toward evening convened the CC Presidium to report on his trip. He noted that along with the achievements, which were noteworthy, “the maintenance of the missile range was somewhat wasteful. Each type of missile had its own separate launching site, with all supportive equipment, which is the same from one site to another. That probably costs millions and may be excessive.”2

528 Downfall: 1964 On the next day, a Saturday, Father met with his assistants in the morning, and at 10:30 A.M., as had been agreed, Ustinov and Goreglyad came into his office, together with Kosygin, who had joined them on the way. A joint session of the CC Presidium and the Council of Ministers had been scheduled for 11 A.M. On the agenda was continuation of the discussion about the five-year plan for 1966– 1970. Father looked over the material that had been prepared. Goreglyad reported on the changes made in the document as a result of the previous discussion, and at 10:55 A.M. they all went together to the meeting room of the CC Presidium. To begin with, a limited number of Presidium members dealt with current and ongoing matters—a request from Cuba to supply armaments and from Czechoslovakia for grain. Then they discussed Goreglyad’s proposals. He himself did not speak. There was no need for that because his report had been distributed to Presidium members earlier. According to Malin’s notes, among those taking part in the discussion of the report were Mikoyan, Rudakov, Polyansky, and Ponomarev. Some time still remained before the larger session, and Khrushchev took the floor. He spoke about priorities. These were the same as in his speeches of July 24 and September 22. This testifies that he had already defined his position on the main questions. At first he repeated his essentially innocent idea that it would be expedient to think about a seven-year plan and an eightyear plan instead of three five-year plans for the period 1965–1980. I have already presented his arguments. Kosygin did not want to part with the customary five-year plan, and he interrupted Father with his opinion: “It’s necessary to take a ten-year period as a basis—that is, two five-year plans, the first being an operational plan, and the second a prognosis. Everything will come out quite splendidly, a tremendous plan, prospects for development of heavy industry, electric power, the chemical industry, metallurgy, mining—all of that taken together will give us the opportunity to draw up a very interesting plan.” Essentially Kosygin’s plan adhered to the customary strategy of giving priority to the development of producer’s goods, whereas Father had different priorities. “In this eight-year plan,” said Khrushchev, continuing to speak in terms of the time period he liked, “the main task is the production of consumer goods in order to satisfy the growing needs of our people. We need to keep at the top of the list, both in quantity and in level of technological development, the means of producing consumer goods. Our purpose is not to develop industry for its own sake. That is not a purpose but an end in itself. Every effort must be made to produce consumer goods. That must be emphasized clearly and distinctly!” As far as the lengths of time were concerned, Father did not insist. “For me it does not have great importance,” he stated in a conciliatory way, but immediately repeated his arguments as to why a seven-year plan and an eight-year plan would be better. No one argued against him. Three weeks later this remark that “it does not have great importance” would be used against Father at the CC Presidium meeting of October 14, where Polyansky reminded Father that “the idea of an eight-year plan and a seven-year plan had not been sanctioned in advance by the CC Presidium.”3

“We’ve Talked and Talked, but We Cannot Get Anything Done”

529

Father then proclaimed, for the umpteenth time, the demand that we orient toward the world level of productivity. Here again I resort to citing excerpts, because only Father’s living speech is capable, even partly, of conveying to the reader the emotions that drove him at that time. He repeated, and I repeat after him. But what can you do? This is what actually happens in real life. Anyone’s thoughts inevitably center on the subject that concerns him most: We are so used to stewing separately in our own juice, doing everything ourselves, ignoring cooperation with foreign companies to the detriment of our own economy. This is the result of swellheadedness, the desire to use our own strength to do everything, while people in other countries are offering us the purchase of advanced technology on favorable terms, plants and equipment and licenses. . . . It is stupid not to make use of that. . . . If we include in our planning now something that already existed in the world ten to twenty years ago, then our plants and factories, whose life span will be about twenty years, will remain behind the world level of productivity not just by ten to twenty years but by thirty to forty years. . . . The capitalists put a plant into operation in two years. It takes us five, and all because we don’t provide for comprehensive delivery of equipment. . . . The capitalists propose to sell us plants that are completely ready for production, all they have to do is hand us the keys. But our design bureaus, which only have laboratory models, argue that we can do all this ourselves. But the transition from the experimental stage to full factory production technology takes years. Out of considerations of prestige and of not spending foreign currency, we refuse to buy licenses and plants that are completely ready to operate, and as a result we lose several times more than we think we are saving.

Father then insisted on the immediate purchase of licenses: “Otherwise we are threatened with finding ourselves in a condition of autarky, self-isolation.” “. . . Actually that is the main thing I wanted to say. I have raised crucial questions about the plan under discussion. There are many other problems, but the person giving the report [Goreglyad] will talk about them.” Father ended his emotional speech with those words. Ustinov asked him to speak again “about industrial construction from the point of view of fulfilling the plans for this year and the future. For us that will be the basis for proceeding further.” Father did not object in essence, but they were already late for the larger meeting, and no time was left to continue the discussion. “Nikita Sergeyevich, talk about the correct proportions in the plan.” Kosygin wouldn’t give him a chance to get up from his chair. “But then what will the person giving the report have to talk about?” Father joked his way out of it. He had already stated that the main thing, and all the rest, including proportions in the plan, was up to the Kosygins and the Goreglyads.4 At this point Malin’s notes indicate that people had already gathered in the Kremlin’s Sverdlov Hall. Among them were secretaries of republic-level and province-level party committees, the heads of regional economic councils and province Soviets, and members of the Council on Science and the Presidium

530 Downfall: 1964 of the Academy of Sciences, all of whom had been invited for an expanded session of the CC Presidium and the Council of Ministers. At this larger session Khrushchev presided. He gave the floor to Goreglyad, who spoke for more than an hour, his speech overflowing with figures, statistics, and percentages of growth. Then discussion and debate began. That part was not recorded by a stenographer. After the session ended, the members of the Presidium and the Central Committee secretaries had an exchange of opinions in a recreation room. “Well, comrades, what’s your opinion?” Father was curious. “Fine, excellent,” came the harmonious reply. “Brezhnev made the biggest effort of all,” Shelest noted in his diary. Shelest was one of the most active conspirators. “It was painful and embarrassing to listen; in fact it became simply awful. What a repulsive thing hypocrisy is. No one had the courage to speak the truth.”5 What truth was there to speak? To judge by the stenographic record, Father was saying sensible and, in my view, obvious things. On October 13, this same secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Pyotr Shelest, stated that “at the last session about the plan they had understood nothing,” but he did not specify exactly what they had not understood.6

102 Galyukov Calls Me While Father was at Tyura-Tam (Baikonur) inspecting rockets and

missiles, I received a phone call from Vasily Ivanovich Galyukov, an assistant and former bodyguard of Nikolai Grigoryevich Ignatov. Ignatov had until recently been a Central Committee secretary and member of the CC Presidium. Now Ignatov was chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation. Galyukov asked if we could meet. We did so in the evening of September 24 and “took a stroll” for more than an hour in the woods near the Ring Road in Moscow. He told me about the conspiracy against Khrushchev by Brezhnev and Shelepin—or was it by Shelepin and Brezhnev? (To this day, historians argue about which of the two held first place among the conspirators.)

530 Downfall: 1964 of the Academy of Sciences, all of whom had been invited for an expanded session of the CC Presidium and the Council of Ministers. At this larger session Khrushchev presided. He gave the floor to Goreglyad, who spoke for more than an hour, his speech overflowing with figures, statistics, and percentages of growth. Then discussion and debate began. That part was not recorded by a stenographer. After the session ended, the members of the Presidium and the Central Committee secretaries had an exchange of opinions in a recreation room. “Well, comrades, what’s your opinion?” Father was curious. “Fine, excellent,” came the harmonious reply. “Brezhnev made the biggest effort of all,” Shelest noted in his diary. Shelest was one of the most active conspirators. “It was painful and embarrassing to listen; in fact it became simply awful. What a repulsive thing hypocrisy is. No one had the courage to speak the truth.”5 What truth was there to speak? To judge by the stenographic record, Father was saying sensible and, in my view, obvious things. On October 13, this same secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Pyotr Shelest, stated that “at the last session about the plan they had understood nothing,” but he did not specify exactly what they had not understood.6

102 Galyukov Calls Me While Father was at Tyura-Tam (Baikonur) inspecting rockets and

missiles, I received a phone call from Vasily Ivanovich Galyukov, an assistant and former bodyguard of Nikolai Grigoryevich Ignatov. Ignatov had until recently been a Central Committee secretary and member of the CC Presidium. Now Ignatov was chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation. Galyukov asked if we could meet. We did so in the evening of September 24 and “took a stroll” for more than an hour in the woods near the Ring Road in Moscow. He told me about the conspiracy against Khrushchev by Brezhnev and Shelepin—or was it by Shelepin and Brezhnev? (To this day, historians argue about which of the two held first place among the conspirators.)

Galyukov Calls Me

531

On Sunday, during a walk in the meadows at the Gorki-9 dacha, I told Father everything. He asked me not to say anything about it to anyone. I felt I had done my filial duty and tried to put any further thoughts about the conspirators out of my mind. On the morning of September 28, Father received the Cuban minister of communications, and then, taking Kosygin and Podgorny with him, he went to a scientific institute for motor vehicle engines. There they were shown new dump trucks with capacities of twenty-seven tons, forty tons, and sixty tons. Production of these trucks would soon begin in Belorussia and at the Kremenchug auto plant in Ukraine. Father remembered the days of his youth when ore was transported by wheelbarrow or in the best of cases in little rail cars, yet here, in contrast, we had such horsepower. He sincerely rejoiced in our accomplishments, and I would say he was happy. Then the guests were taken to see passenger cars of various types. Father resumed an earlier conversation about how good it would be if all bureaucrats had to drive around in the more modest automobile, the Moskvich (meaning “Muscovite”); he himself rode in one and liked it. Kosygin, and even Podgorny, were usually quick to pick up and run with any comment by Father, but this time they remained gloomily silent. In the evening of that same day Father made introductory remarks at a celebration held in the Bolshoi Theater in honor of the 100th anniversary of the First International, and then he listened to a long and boring speech by Boris Ponomarev. At 9:30 A.M. on the following day, September 29, Khrushchev met with the deputy foreign minister Vasily Vasilyevich Kuznetsov, who was preparing for a visit to Moscow by the president of Indonesia, Sukarno. At 10 A.M. Father headed for Vnukovo airport to greet “his friend Karno,” then accompanied him to his residence and returned to the Kremlin. There Goreglyad and Rudakov were waiting for him. On the basis of the results of the discussion on September 26, they had prepared new amendments to the plan. Members of the editorial group that worked with Father, the chief editors of Pravda and Izvestia, came with him. The meeting was interrupted briefly by a formal visit from Sukarno, and then the discussion continued until almost the end of the working day. Toward evening there was a reception for the minister of trade and supply of Sri Lanka, T. B. Ilangaratne. The last person to pop in to see Father for ten minutes was his deputy Veniamin Dymshitz. Then, when it was really evening, there was an official dinner in the Kremlin in honor of President Sukarno. Leonid Zamyatin, who was then in charge of the press for the Foreign Ministry, subsequently repeated a sentence he claimed Father uttered at that dinner: “Tomorrow I am leaving for two weeks for a vacation in Pitsunda, and when I return I’m going to knock the main cork out of the neck of the bottle.” Father did not develop his remarks any further. Zamyatin thought that Father meant the conspirators, the Brezhnev-Shelepin group, and claims that Father shook his finger at them threateningly. This is a naive supposition. One does not

532 Downfall: 1964 behave that way with conspirators. One does not threaten them with the shake of a finger, but rather takes measures, preferably preventive measures, as Father did at one time with Zhukov. Moreover, in situations like that, one does not leave the capital city and go on vacation for two weeks. The stenographic record of Father’s speech at the dinner in the Kremlin on September 29 has now been published, and there is not one word in it about “the main cork in the neck of the bottle,” but of course that does not prove anything. Father might have made that remark, not in his speech, but in passing, during a conversation.1 And yet several passages in the stenographic record are of interest: “My friends wanted to send me away from Moscow,” Father complained jokingly to Sukarno, “but I said that you won’t succeed in doing that until I have a chance to meet with my friend and brother [Sukarno] and have a talk with him. Then they said: ‘All right, but tomorrow [September 30] you must leave Moscow.’” Who these “friends” were Father did not reveal, but in his speech, which takes up three pages, Mikoyan is repeatedly named. Mikoyan this, Mikoyan that. Is this accidental? A form of friendly teasing? Or did Mikoyan insist more energetically than others that Father should go on vacation right then, no later than the next day? For me this is an unsolved riddle. It is not excluded that Father did not believe very much in the reality of the conspiracy, that he overestimated himself and his own powers. More than that, on Monday, September 28, he actually told the potential conspirator Podgorny about my report, and when he went on vacation he left Podgorny “in charge” and assigned him to conduct CC Presidium meetings. Also, Father singled out Polyansky and Shelepin, who also figured in the information provided by Galyukov—he asked them to prepare some materials by the time he returned, what materials I now cannot say, but they were materials for the forthcoming Central Committee plenum scheduled for November. (I described this incident in detail in my book Khrushchev on Khrushchev.) By the expression “the main cork in the neck of the bottle,” Father, whether he actually said that or not, would in all likelihood have meant the Moscow bureaucracy, and on the eve of new reforms he really did intend to clear the space around him. In the coming reforms Father proposed to rely on “younger people,” as opposed to the “oldsters” who had grown accustomed to the existing system and had rooted themselves in it. Besides, he more than once repeated that younger, more energetic people, below the age of forty, ought to be brought into positions of power. But it was not appropriate to talk about such measures beforehand, when he was only getting ready to begin his purge of the CC Presidium. The guarantee of success would have been a surprise attack. In 1952, when Stalin announced the new composition of the CC Presidium after the Nineteenth Party Congress, he surprised all his “comrades-in-arms.” That included Khrushchev, Mikoyan, and Molotov, and probably all the others, who did not leave any memoirs behind. Members of the old Politburo to the end of their days could never figure out who had suggested those names to Stalin.

Galyukov Calls Me

533

It is most likely that no one else drew up that list of names and gave it to Stalin, a man who did not entrust such matters to others. He had been thinking for a long time about “the changing of the guard,” and he himself made that timely selection of “replacements” for his “comrades-in-arms.” When he suddenly announced his list of Presidium members at a Central Committee plenum, Stalin was ensuring himself against any conceivable, or more likely inconceivable, accidental occurrences. The plenum voted “aye” in unison in its customary way. But Father did not take precautions. On September 17 he spoke openly about the desirability of having a younger CC Presidium, and he did so at a session of that presidium itself. Malin noted laconically: “There were quite a few people who took two-month vacations,” that is, older people who needed additional rest. And further: “There are three levels in the leadership—the young, the middle-aged, and the old.” The discussion was obviously about renewing and rejuvenating the leadership. An indirect confirmation of this was the question taken up at that same meeting of the Presidium having to do with Minister of Culture Furtseva. The last line of Malin’s notes for that session states that it was necessary “to single out younger women for advancement.”2 Father shared his plans in more detail with Mikoyan, “blabbing” to him— we will forgive the usually proper and correct Mikoyan for using this word— and he did this in the presence of others as well. He said it was desirable “to enlarge the Presidium by bringing in more young people—Shelepin, Semichastny, and others, and among that number he even named Satyukov [chief editor of Pravda], Goryunov [general director of TASS, the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union], and his own son-in-law Adzhubei [chief editor of Izvestia]. But for a long time he didn’t undertake anything. Of course, some of these youngsters were capable people. But not all of them were mature enough for the CC Presidium.” (This was said by Mikoyan, who had become part of the top leadership of the country at the age of twenty-five. He himself had matured sufficiently at that age.) I continue quoting from Mikoyan: “To bring in a large group of new people meant, as it had for Stalin in 1952, the possibility of easily and without being noticed getting rid of anyone. And people were afraid.”3 Father really did not take any precautions. He even told me in September about his plans to rejuvenate the CC Presidium at the next Central Committee plenum in November. As in his conversation with Mikoyan, he even named names: Shelepin, Andropov, Ilyichev, Polyakov, Satyukov, Kharlamov, and Adzhubei. “They are more lively than the ‘oldsters,’ they easily take up new things, develop new ideas that are tossed out to them, and they in turn bring up lots of effective, businesslike suggestions.” Father expanded on this theme. “Not only is it more interesting to work with them but also, even now, they are playing a role that is by no means insignificant; in fact, their part in deciding most party and government matters may already be greater than that of official voting members of the CC Presidium.”

534 Downfall: 1964 Thus all that remained was to formally confirm the existing status quo. Everyone knew about Father’s intentions, both the candidates for promotion and the “potential retirees.” Moreover, as we now know, listening devices had been installed in our home in 1964. In the light of incautious conversations by Father, his “blabbing,” as Mikoyan put it, the haste with which the “oldsters” proceeded, is not hard to understand. Their elementary sense of self-preservation urged them to get rid of Khrushchev without delay. But what motivated the conspirators Shelepin and Semichastny, the “youngsters”? In November, Shelepin himself and an entire cohort of his supporters would become members of the CC Presidium and within a year or a year and a half the Twenty-Third Party Congress would be held, and at which they would have a real possibility and the legal right to take supreme power in the country. But they were in even more of a hurry than the “oldsters,” pushing the indecisive Brezhnev to take more decisive actions, literally dragging him along with a rope. Some historians make the general assumption that it was not Brezhnev and Podgorny who stood at the head of the conspiracy but Shelepin and Semichastny. I cannot agree with that. Shelepin did not have the necessary authority with the secretaries of the party’s province committees, and Semichastny had even less. They would not have even dared to start conversations with those secretaries, and therefore they were not suitable as leaders of the conspiracy. However, in Moscow they were extraordinarily active. Why were Shelepin, Semichastny, and their allies in such a hurry? Perhaps they were afraid they would be left behind by the others? And yet without the KGB—that is, without Semichastny—neither Brezhnev and Polyansky nor Podgorny and Shelest would have dared to lift a finger. Moreover, if the Shelepin group had “exposed” the conspirators, they themselves would have been left without any serious rivals. Their actions do not lend themselves to logical explanation. At least I myself cannot understand them. And Father himself could not imagine such things. Even after my warning, he maintained full confidence in both of them, Shelepin and Semichastny.4 Their behavior can be explained only by their self-assured lack of farsightedness, or to put it more simply, their stupidity. That diagnosis is confirmed by the events that followed after Father was removed from power. In the post-Khrushchev era, Shelepin revealed himself to be a rigid Stalinist, a man disinclined toward any reforms, and with no taste for economics. And what was worse, Semichastny blindly followed Brezhnev, falling for the bribe of being awarded a general’s uniform. Father had transformed the KGB into a civilian organization without insignia, and any new chairperson of the KGB who had previously held no military titles acquired none. Shelepin did not aspire to the rank of general, but Semichastny very much wanted to put on trousers with general’s stripes down the legs. He kept trying to persuade Father to grant him such a military title, but without results. Brezhnev promised immediately to make him a colonelgeneral. And that’s what Semichastny became. Even on the cover of his book of memoirs, he had a photograph of himself wearing a dress uniform showing his

Vacation in October

535

rank. By making Semichastny a general, Brezhnev considered his obligations fulfilled. Semichastny never rose higher to become a marshal, as Beria had done. Brezhnev, on the other hand, did gain status as a Marshal of the Soviet Union. What nonsense sometimes guides human actions, and what petty trifles may determine the fate of a country. A melancholy conclusion might be drawn from what has been said. If the events of October 14, 1964, had not occurred and if Father had brought the “youngsters” to power, most likely things would not have turned out any better. And it is not accidental that, later on, Brezhnev easily got rid of Shelepin, Semichastny, and their allies.

103 Vacation in October The morning of September 30 began with a meeting between Father

and Sukarno. From ten to eleven o’clock they had a one-on-one conversation and then they also talked in the presence of other official representatives of both countries. At noon Khrushchev said goodbye to Sukarno and within an hour flew to the Crimea. As I have said, he assigned Podgorny to conduct sessions of the CC Presidium in his absence. On the eve of his flight departure he asked Mikoyan to meet with Galyukov, cross-question him about everything, and then inform Father about it. Mikoyan was also getting ready to go on vacation. “I think Brezhnev and Podgorny are involved in this affair.” Mikoyan says in his memoirs that this was his own sour reaction to Father’s request. “But with regard to Shelepin and Semichastny I cannot judge. I don’t know them.”1 Father did not want to go into the matter. As I have already noted, he trusted Shelepin and Semichastny. Father’s plane landed at Simferopol in the Crimea toward evening on September 30. Polyakov, the Central Committee secretary responsible for agriculture, flew with him. Shelest and other Ukrainian leaders met them at the airport. Shelest knew everything. Brezhnev had held his first conspiratorial conversation with Shelest back in March. Precisely because of this knowledge he behaved in a servile manner. I would say that he was particularly ingratiating. By the time they reached the vacation villa at Livadia, it was getting dark. Father refused the suggestion that they all have dinner together. He asked to be excused. He was very tired.

Vacation in October

535

rank. By making Semichastny a general, Brezhnev considered his obligations fulfilled. Semichastny never rose higher to become a marshal, as Beria had done. Brezhnev, on the other hand, did gain status as a Marshal of the Soviet Union. What nonsense sometimes guides human actions, and what petty trifles may determine the fate of a country. A melancholy conclusion might be drawn from what has been said. If the events of October 14, 1964, had not occurred and if Father had brought the “youngsters” to power, most likely things would not have turned out any better. And it is not accidental that, later on, Brezhnev easily got rid of Shelepin, Semichastny, and their allies.

103 Vacation in October The morning of September 30 began with a meeting between Father

and Sukarno. From ten to eleven o’clock they had a one-on-one conversation and then they also talked in the presence of other official representatives of both countries. At noon Khrushchev said goodbye to Sukarno and within an hour flew to the Crimea. As I have said, he assigned Podgorny to conduct sessions of the CC Presidium in his absence. On the eve of his flight departure he asked Mikoyan to meet with Galyukov, cross-question him about everything, and then inform Father about it. Mikoyan was also getting ready to go on vacation. “I think Brezhnev and Podgorny are involved in this affair.” Mikoyan says in his memoirs that this was his own sour reaction to Father’s request. “But with regard to Shelepin and Semichastny I cannot judge. I don’t know them.”1 Father did not want to go into the matter. As I have already noted, he trusted Shelepin and Semichastny. Father’s plane landed at Simferopol in the Crimea toward evening on September 30. Polyakov, the Central Committee secretary responsible for agriculture, flew with him. Shelest and other Ukrainian leaders met them at the airport. Shelest knew everything. Brezhnev had held his first conspiratorial conversation with Shelest back in March. Precisely because of this knowledge he behaved in a servile manner. I would say that he was particularly ingratiating. By the time they reached the vacation villa at Livadia, it was getting dark. Father refused the suggestion that they all have dinner together. He asked to be excused. He was very tired.

536 Downfall: 1964 The next morning they all went together to the Yuzhny state farm, which raised poultry, and then to the neighboring Krasny state farm, headed by Marchuk, about whom I wrote earlier. It was a factory farm for producing broiler chickens. To judge from Shelest’s diary, Father conducted himself as usual, looking into the essence of everything, wanting to know about the care and feeding of the chickens. The farm workers were supposed to follow the American instructions for feeding the birds, but they preferred to do it their own way, and therefore were not increasing the weight of the chickens properly. Father was upset. “We built a facility in the Crimea, a state farm that I visited in 1964. Our efforts there were defeated,” Father wrote many years later. “To our misfortune, we don’t even know how to take what exists in capitalist agriculture and transfer it to our own country.”2 Shelest was expecting a reprimand, but none was forthcoming. For the first time in many years, the report on local operations by the Crimean poultry breeders left Father, if not completely indifferent, then almost indifferent. He berated them for not adhering to the instructions for the American poultry factory technology, but he did it merely as a formality. Shelest commented that Khrushchev seemed to him in a downcast mood, less confident than usual. Khrushchev complained about Brezhnev, calling him a “hollow man.” About Podgorny Khrushchev said that, so far, he had not seen any great performance from him, that he had expected more. “He cursed the ideologists roundly, calling them dogmatists who were divorced from real life. He called Suslov a ‘man in a box.’” (This is a reference to Chekhov’s short story Chelovek v futlyare [Man in a Box], about a person who was completely closed off and preoccupied with protecting himself and isolating from others.) I am quoting from Shelest’s memoirs. “Our CC Presidium is an old man’s association,” Shelest went on to quote Father’s words. “We have to think about this. It’s made up of many people who love to talk but not to work. We’re going to convene a plenum [of the Central Committee], and there we’ll put everyone in his place, telling each one where he will have to work. I am now past seventy. My energy and vigor are far from what they used to be. We have to think about worthy replacements. We are not eternal. A few years will go by and many of us will have gone to our rest. I am in favor of promoting younger people to leadership work, people around forty or forty-five years old.” On that same day, Shelest reported to Brezhnev and Podgorny about his conversation with Khrushchev. “Brezhnev had a foreboding that if matters were left until a plenum in November,” Shelest recalls, “he himself would be the first one to ‘be put in his place.’ He had a deathly fear of the upcoming plenum, and the only thing left for him was to either ‘force matters’ with Khrushchev or give up. The latter option was something we feared most of all and we insisted that the matter be taken care of very quickly.”3

Vacation in October

537

Meanwhile in Moscow, more and more new people were being drawn into preparations for “the operation.” A special role in putting together an antiKhrushchev majority at the forthcoming extraordinary session of a Central Committee plenum was played by Nikolai Romanovich Mironov, who since 1959 had headed the Central Committee department for “administrative bodies.” Father knew him well. Under Khrushchev, Mironov had worked as a party secretary for Kirovograd province in Ukraine in the late 1940s. When Stalin had a group of high-ranking secret police officials including Abakumov arrested, Mironov was transferred to work in the Ministry of State Security (MGB) as head of the administration for military counterintelligence. Later he headed the KGB in Leningrad province. Frol Kozlov had brought Mironov to work in the Central Committee, but at heart Mironov was a Brezhnev man. Before the war, they had worked together in Dneprodzerzhinsk in Ukraine, where they had become friends. Mironov was a convinced Stalinist and did not like Khrushchev. He readily accepted Brezhnev’s proposal to collaborate in the conspiracy. In accordance with the duties of his office, he communicated with secretaries of the party’s province committees, government ministers, top-level generals—with all those who constituted the “nomenklatura” of the Central Committee. Thus, without arousing any suspicions, he could feel out anyone in that category and, if their reaction was positive, draw them into the conspiracy. Ustinov was busy working on the “industrialists.” Here is what Vladimir Novikov recalled: “In September 1964 one evening Ustinov invited me to come see him,” recalled Vladimir Nikolayevich Novikov. I was responsible at that time for the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance [Comecon], and my office was on the same hallway in the Kremlin as Ustinov’s office. I stopped in to see him. Sitting there with him was Aleksandr Mikhailovich Tarasov, Ustinov’s deputy in the Supreme Economic Council. [Tarasov would become minister for the auto industry in the Kosygin government.] Right off the bat, a conversation started about the forthcoming plenum, not in November as scheduled, but within a matter of days. I was asked to prepare two speeches that would expose and denounce the “barbarities committed by Khrushchev,” one speech for Ustinov the other for myself. “Is Khrushchev being removed?” I asked. Ustinov confirmed it. “What’s the position of the military men and the KGB?” I wanted an exact idea of the disposition of forces. “Everything is in order. They are with us.” That was the reply I received. I agreed. Readers might have various judgments about me for that, but that’s what happened. Over the course of three days, Tarasov and I prepared everything. Ustinov inserted some corrections, and now all that remained was to await the arrival of Khrushchev. What is my opinion of Khrushchev? He had a native intelligence. I do not think that his experiment with the regional economic councils was a mistake.

538

Downfall: 1964 The requirements of life itself gave rise to that. Khrushchev was very quick about resolving operational problems.4

Among Shelepin’s people, Nikolai Grigoryevich Yegorychev distinguished himself by being especially active. According to his own words, he won the support of the following people to back the conspirators: Mstislav Keldysh, president of the Academy of Sciences; Vyacheslav Petrovich Yelyutin, (minister of higher and middle special education; Anatoly Ivanovich Kostousov, chairman of the State Committee for Machine-Building; Yevgeny Fyodorovich Kozhevnikov, chairman of the State Committee for Transport Construction; Vasily Yakovlevich Isayev, chairman of the executive committee of the Leningrad Soviet; Georgy Ivanovich Popov, first secretary of the party’s Leningrad city committee; and Vladimir Alekseyevich Kirillin, vice president of the Academy of Sciences. As for Suslov, Yegorychev tried to start a conversation with him in June 1964 in Paris, where they found themselves together as part of a Soviet delegation, but Suslov declined to discuss the subject. The same sort of thing happened with another party official, the Lithuanian Antanas Snechkus, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party. Yegorychev approached him without success in August 1964 in the town of Palanga, after having gone there especially to try “building bridges.” Yegorychev also had bad luck with Vasily Sergeyevich Tolstikov, secretary of the party’s Leningrad province committee. According to Yegorychev’s account, Tolstikov did not understand what was under discussion and tried to convince him that “Khrushchev is first-rate, a fine fellow!” “Tolstikov remained deaf to my arguments,” Yegorychev concludes. “An openly negative attitude toward the plans for removing Khrushchev was also taken by Mikhail Avksentyev Lesechko, deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers,” Yegorychev continues. “I knew him well from my earlier work in a party district committee in Moscow. He was the director of a factory in our district, which produced calculators and tabulators. He said in a conversation with me: ‘Keep this in mind—after Khrushchev things will not be better.’”5 Father decided not to stay in the Crimea. He complained to Shelest about the weather. And it actually was not very pleasant. A cold wind was blowing constantly, and when it died down, it was replaced by drizzle. Father’s spirits were in tune with the weather. He felt gloomy, and he didn’t want to stay in one place. On October 2, Shelest accompanied Father to the Simferopol airport. Father had decided to fly to Pitsunda, where on October 3 he received a group of Japanese parliamentarians headed by Aiichiro Fujiyama. The next day he met with parliamentarians from Pakistan. Meanwhile Mikoyan had invited Galyukov to come see him on October 2, after work, at his residence in the Lenin Hills. That evening sticks in my memory because of how cold it was, and the next morning, snow fell in Moscow. At Mikoyan’s request I sat in a corner of his office and took notes on his conversation

Vacation in October

539

with Galyukov. The discussion left a bad taste in my mouth. Mikoyan’s behavior seemed insincere to me. He was obviously trying to insure himself—either against future events, or simply out of an old custom he had acquired in the Stalin era, a mere habit. Galyukov also sensed Mikoyan’s lack of interest and had a troubled look on his face when he left. It seemed as though he was regretting ever becoming involved in this dangerous business. And he was not wrong. Later we both found ourselves firmly under the thumb of Semichastny, who kept close track of every step we took. Mikoyan flew to Pitsunda the next morning. He landed at 2:40 P.M. at the airport in Adler. I arranged to have a leave from work and one week later also flew to Pitsunda. When I arrived there I found an almost idyllic atmosphere. Father was taking walks in the park with Mikoyan, swimming in the pool, and watching movies in the evening. Only one of his assistants had gone there with Father—Vladimir Semyonovich Lebedev. The editorial group and the stenographers had remained in Moscow, waiting from one day to the next to be summoned, but the call never came. Also missing at Pitsunda was the usual head of Father’s guards, Colonel Litovchenko. Semichastny had sent him off on vacation. In his place they temporarily appointed his deputy, Major Vasily Bunayev. From Moscow I had brought the first issue of a new magazine, Khimiya i Zhizn (Chemistry and Life). It turned out to be colorful and attractive, just the kind of thing Father had talked about when he proposed that a popular publication be issued that would bring information to the ordinary person about the changes introduced into Soviet life by advances in chemistry. I thought Father would be overjoyed, but he only leafed through the magazine and left it lying on the dinner table. On the morning of October 12, 1964, three Soviet cosmonauts, Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov, and Boris Yegorov, went into orbit around the Earth. In the afternoon Father and Mikoyan spoke with them by special radio transmission and in the evening there was a phone call from Moscow, insistently “urging” that Father return to Moscow. He asked, “What’s this all about?” Supposedly, in the preparations for the November plenum, problems had come up that could not be solved without him. We had no doubts about what kind of problems those were—neither Father nor myself nor Mikoyan.

540 Downfall: 1964

104 What’s This All About? Throughout the three weeks that had gone by since my first meeting

with Galyukov, my conscience had been gnawing at me: Had I done the right thing by responding to Galyukov’s phone call and then telling Father about it? After all, Galyukov had denounced old friends of Father’s. And it really was a denunciation, pure and simple. Father didn’t seem to believe what I had told him. If he had believed it, he would have acted differently. He would not have left Moscow, but instead would have gathered reliable people around him, and quite a few such people were to be found. Now, after the phone call from Moscow, my doubts fell away. Galyukov’s report had turned out to be true, and Father’s old comrades turned out not to be such good comrades. My doubts fell away, but confusion remained as to why Father had behaved so illogically. Only much later did I understand the reasons for his behavior. Did Father believe what Galyukov reported? Today it seems to me more likely that he did than that he didn’t. Perhaps he didn’t believe it completely. He had his doubts. He wanted it to be mistaken. After all, these people were not only his comrades-in-arms but also friends. Their own coming to power was connected with Father. They had worked together before the war, had gone through the war together, and had returned together to peaceful labor. It was Father who brought many of them from Ukraine to Moscow, and he saw in them a firm support for himself, people who could be trusted. And now for such a thing to happen! But after all, they were politicians . . . But why did Father not even try to thoroughly verify the information given him by Galyukov? Mikoyan’s meeting with Galyukov could not be taken seriously. Such behavior was not consistent with Father’s character. He was an energetic and decisive person. In 1957, in an analogous situation, when Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, and others had plotted against him, he speedily brought in the army and the state security agencies on his side. It’s true that Galyukov reported that Semichastny was in the camp of his opponents. But what about Malinovsky! Father had every reason to count on him. Let me remind readers that in 1943, after the suicide of a member of the military council of the army commanded by Malinovsky, Stalin raised the axe over the commander, and it was only with great difficulty that Father, who was a member of the military council of the

What’s This All About?

541

Stalingrad Front, which included Malinovsky’s army among others, succeeded in warding off the blow. Malinovsky knew about this, and he must be given credit for the fact that when Shelest sounded him out on a preliminary basis, Malinovsky responded unequivocally: “I am not about to interfere in internal political problems.”1 But Father didn’t even try to call Malinovsky on the phone. He left Moscow, giving his opponents freedom of action there. There can be only one explanation for such behavior: he simply did not want to offer resistance. But why? Evidently because, after his seventieth birthday, he was seriously getting ready to retire. Then everything came together coincidentally. In such a situation he had to choose between, on the one hand, a former guard working for Ignatov, this Galyukov, whom he did not know, and on the other, fellow comrades who had been tested many times. His psychological state can be judged from an episode that at first glance does not seem very important. Dmitry Polyansky was a deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. He acted in Father’s behalf during his vacation. In one interview, Polyansky recalled a telephone conversation he had had with Khrushchev that October. From Pitsunda, Khrushchev made a phone call to talk with the acting chairman of the Council of Ministers about some issue of the moment. At the end of the conversation, in saying goodbye, Father asked what seemed to be a neutral question. “Well, how are you there without me?” “Everything’s normal,” Polyansky replied. “We’re waiting for you.” “Ah, so you’re waiting?” Father repeated the statement with melancholy irony. His politician’s instincts were calling on him to fight, but Father was very much disinclined to rely on his instincts at that time. Now let us suppose that he had set aside his doubts and thrown himself into battle. There was a radical difference between 1964 and 1957. At that earlier time, he was fighting against open Stalinists. The question then was: What road would our country take? The old Stalinist path? Or would it move toward universal humanism? The fate of our country depended on the outcome of that battle. Father took up the challenge and was victorious. But now, in 1964, it was his own comrades who were sitting in the CC Presidium, people he himself had selected during the previous seven years. No, he did not consider them ideal, and at the next plenum he was getting ready to replace one or another person, but nevertheless . . . He and they had worked at the same task, for better or worse, but it had been their common cause and they had done it together. Now they were being accused of deciding to speed up the natural course of events, to accomplish today what was already scheduled for tomorrow, and should he get into a fight with them over that? His own people? For what?!

542 Downfall: 1964 I am not taking into account the fact that in 1964 Father could not have been victorious. Neither the apparatus of the party and government nor the army and KGB supported him—and they were the real participants in the drama. The people were taking no part. Their place was in the audience, which was separated from the stage by a deep orchestra pit. Father’s time had passed. But he did not know it. What would have awaited our country and Khrushchev in the event of his victory? The logic of such a struggle is uncompromising. The winner is obliged to remove the losers from the political arena. Stalin decided such questions in his own “cardinal” way, but in a civilized world defeat means retirement or passing over into opposition status. Thus a victorious Khrushchev would have had to remove his closest comrades-in-arms from party and government business, people whom he had selected himself over the previous years and to whom he was getting ready to transfer power. Then what would happen? Then it would be necessary to find new people, but in the same sphere, close to the top of the pyramid of power. He would have to search again in an area from which he had already selected those who were the best, in his opinion. This would disturb and trouble the country, and after all that, he himself would retire and leave the country in the hands of these new people. Inevitably a thought would arise such as the following: “Would they be any better than the old ones? Is the game worth the candle?” Obviously Father thought that it was better to let fate decide things and not interfere in the natural course of events. If we make this assumption, his departure on vacation to Pitsunda is a logically explicable step. And so is the fact that my conversation with Galyukov had no consequences. It also explains why Podgorny was left with the full complement of power in his hands. And it explains the phone conversation with Polyanksy, in which Father more or less shook his finger at him. Father did not want to take action. If Galyukov was mistaken, it would be better not to make accusations against his friends for no good reason. If Galyukov was right, then let it happen. Whatever will be will be. He himself was ready to depart from the scene. I never talked with Father on this subject. Memories of those days in October 1964 were too painful for him. But on my own I thought a great deal about the events of those weeks. I cannot find any other explanation. It may be that others think differently, and this is their right. What remains for us is only guesswork and conjecture, trying to make a logical construction. The truth went with Father to the grave.

The Denouement

543

105 The Denouement After he finished talking with Moscow, Father asked Bunayev to get

a plane ready for the afternoon of the following day, because in the morning he had promised to receive Gaston Palewski, the French government minister for scientific research. In the afternoon of October 13, the plane landed at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, with Father and Mikoyan aboard. It was Indian summer. A warm sun was shining, still giving off heat as though it were not yet autumn. A light breeze stirred the few remaining yellow-green leaves of the birches and aspens that grew thickly at the edge of the airfield. The ladder rolled up to the airplane and there appeared in the doorway the first secretary of the Central Committee, chairman of the Council of Ministers, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. Mikoyan followed behind him. He was Father’s friend and comrade-in-arms, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and bringing up the rear were various assistants and guards and among them myself. Only two people were by the ladder to greet the arrivals: Semichastny, chairman of the KGB, and Mikhail Georgadze, a secretary for the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. It was Semichastny’s responsibility to deliver Father and Mikoyan to the Kremlin without incident. There the other members of the CC Presidium were waiting for them. Today they did not crowd around the foot of the ladder by the airplane as usual, striving to be the first to shake Father’s hand, the first to report about the latest successes, the first to obtain his consent for something very important, and so on. Now that they had finally decided to get rid of Father, they nervously waited for him in the Kremlin. At the previous day’s session of the CC Presidium it had seemed that all arrangements had been made, the roles had been assigned, who was to say what. But at heart they felt uneasy; chills were running up and down their spines. How would it all turn out? What might Khrushchev bring with him? The cowardly Brezhnev, by sending Semichastny to the airport, even advised him to carry a loaded pistol in his pocket. But there was no need for a pistol. Father shook Semichastny’s hand and simply asked: “Where is everyone?” When he received the answer: “They are waiting for you in the Kremlin,” he said with a smile to Mikoyan, as though nothing had happened, “Let’s go, Anastas!”

544 Downfall: 1964 The door of the long, black limousine slammed shut and the car set off on its journey. Behind it was another limousine with Father’s bodyguards in it, and very close behind that was Semichastny’s smaller car. He reported by radiotelephone to Brezhnev: “I met him. Everything’s going according to plan. We’re heading for the Kremlin.” The reassuring news from Semichastny for some reason only added to the anxiety of those waiting for Father. Brezhnev was more nervous than the others. He was imagining his own inglorious ouster, and perhaps something worse. He smoked cigarettes one after the other, puffing away, putting one out in the ashtray and then lighting the next. The one who conducted himself most calmly was Shelepin. He already pictured himself as head of state. He was thinking, “We’ll dump Khrushchev and then everything in our country will be well in hand.” Brezhnev would be no obstacle for him. After scrupulously calculating the chances for success, Suslov and Kosygin were untroubled. They sat calmly in their usual places at the Presidium table. The removal of Khrushchev was a “done deal,” a matter that had already been decided, and they could only win from that event. Several people had recently been promoted by Father. They were secretaries of the Central Committee but not yet members of the CC Presidium: Leonid Ilyichev, Vladimir Polyakov, Aleksandr Rudakov, and Vladimir Titov. They nursed hopes that were not to be realized, that this time too Father would extricate himself and turn out to be the winner. He had been in worse scrapes. At the same time, they were weighing the odds: Who to place their bets on, Brezhnev or Shelepin, if Khrushchev lost? There were two other “young” protégés of Father, Yuri Andropov and Pyotr Demichev, who were not concerned. They had made their choice and placed winning bets, having assured both Brezhnev and Shelepin of their support. The rest of the Presidium members had no doubts about the outcome of the conspiracy and were preparing themselves to anathematize the man who just yesterday had been “our dear Nikita Sergeyevich.” They were certain that their zeal would be rewarded, regardless of whether Brezhnev or Shelepin came out on top of the pyramid of power. In this way, half an hour of anxiety crawled by. Finally the doors of the meeting room swung open. The first to enter was a frowning Khrushchev, and behind him was Mikoyan, with head lowered. When he entered the room, Father looked around. Those present were sitting around the table that was used for Presidium meetings. Only the chair for the person who would preside at the meeting remained empty. That was his seat. He sat down in it for the last time and after a moment of silence inquired about the nature of this urgent matter for the sake of which they had torn him away from his vacation, summoning him from Pitsunda. A tense silence now hung in the air—even though roles had been assigned to everyone the previous day, with even the order in which everyone would

The Denouement

545

speak already determined. Brezhnev was supposed to go first, but there was something catching in his throat. Finally he gathered up his courage and began to speak uncertainly, with interruptions, all the while turning some pages lying in front of him that had been torn from a large notepad. The kangaroo court that would forever change the fate of an enormous country had begun. Those present included all the members and candidate members of the Presidium, along with the secretaries of the Central Committee. The only exception was Presidium member Frol Kozlov, who had not yet recovered from his stroke. Father, who usually reacted in a lively way to speeches by others, this time sat in silence, staring fixedly at the empty table in front of him, which had none of the usual piles of reports, draft decrees, and other materials prepared for the session. Brezhnev gradually became bolder and began pouring out, one after another, the accusations that had been put together earlier: “Why did you divide the party’s province committees into industrial and agricultural? What was the sense of going from a five-year plan to an eight-year plan? Why did you send so many memoranda to Presidium members?” In conclusion, he accused Father of not dealing in a correct and polite manner with his comrades and then he fell silent.1 Father shook himself awake, lifted his head, looked around at those present, and, as though forcing himself to speak, said the following: “I always considered all of you and still consider you my friends and co-thinkers, and I regret that sometimes I allowed myself to be irritable.” He was not about to fight. He had made that decision earlier. Nevertheless he could not restrain himself and began to respond to the accusations: “Everyone voted unanimously to divide the party’s province committees into industrial and agricultural. That is the only thing that will ensure more effective leadership of an economy that is becoming increasingly complex. In my memoranda I shared my thoughts with the comrades about reforming the country. After all, things are not going along all that brilliantly, and something has to be done.” At this point Father broke off, changed his tone, and admitted he had been incorrect in dealing with members of the Presidium and assured them that, so far as it was within his power . . . but he did not finish the sentence and fell silent. In keeping with the scenario, the next speaker was Shelest, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party. Subsequently, in his memoirs, Shelest wrote more sympathetically about Father, but on that day in October he was a “hawk,” he poured accusations down on Father as though from a cornucopia: “In 1957 you promised to catch up with America in the production of meat, milk, and butter per capita, but you did not. You talked about solving the housing problem and did not solve it. In 1962 you promised to increase wages for those earning less and you did not do it. The

546 Downfall: 1964 republics [that is, the constituent republics of the Soviet Union] had rights and responsibilities, but you left them with only responsibilities.” Father listened closely to Shelest. The words had a devastating ring to them, but he countered: “That’s all correct, with the exception of your point about the republics. They have more rights than previously.” Here Shelest had exaggerated. “The only thing is, why among us is only one person to blame for everything? It’s true that all the victories are attributed to that one person also. This kind of thing has been going on since time immemorial. The tsar was given credit for everything. After 1917 there was no tsar anymore, but the thinking had not changed. And it has remained unchanged still for all these many decades.” The division of the province committees into industrial and agricultural especially aroused Shelest’s dissatisfaction (as well as that of all the other speakers). The same was true for Khrushchev’s proposal about reorganization and professionalization, which had been sent out in a memorandum in July 1964, as well as the proposal for “de-party-ization”—that is, the removal of formal party control over the rural interdistrict production administrations. The speakers, one after another, kept emphasizing these topics. The general opinion was expressed most clearly and distinctly by Polyansky. He did not speak until the second day, but he presented his views in writing, and that document has been preserved in the archives. I now quote an excerpt from it that echoes the words of Shelest: “The main purpose of this reorganization was to reduce the role of the party’s committees to zero in the interdistrict production administrations, to transform the party committees into mere appendages of the economic bodies.” That was what Polyansky wrote, and he continued: “How else can his [Khrushchev’s] words be understood, words he expressed recently at a CC Presidium meeting: ‘How good it is that the party committees have now been moved into the background, and during my trip [in August 1964 through agricultural regions] the heads of the production administrations were brought to the forefront. That is very good. That means the right conclusion were drawn from my memorandum [of July 18, 1964].’” “During that trip,” Polyansky stated further, “Khrushchev did not find time to talk with even one of the secretaries of the party organizations at collective farms and state farms or the party committees of the interdistrict production administrations. But would it really be appropriate for the comrades to rejoice in the fact that the party committees have been moved to the background? He even proposed that the party committees at the production administrations be eliminated and replaced with directors of political departments with the rank of deputy head of the production administration. And recently he said it might be expedient to eliminate the interdistrict production administrations altogether. But that would mean eliminating the rural party organizations as well. This is what we have come to!”2 After Shelest, the next person to speak was Gennady Voronov, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation. He had joined the plot

The Denouement

547

to remove Khrushchev without any special enthusiasm. In August 1964, while Father was inspecting the harvest in the Virgin Lands, Brezhnev accompanied Voronov on a hunting trip at Zavidovo and spent an entire night trying to persuade him to join the plot, showing him lists of Central Committee members with checkmarks next to the names of those already leaning in Brezhnev’s direction; in the end, Voronov agreed. Relations between Khrushchev and Voronov had been steady and even; Voronov firmly defended his opinions without fawning on Khrushchev or indulging in laudatory speeches.3 Voronov, like everyone who had spoken before him, complained about the lack of a collective leadership. He took offense at the fact that during the past three and a half years he had not been able even once to express his opinion to Father. (I don’t know how it was on working days, but on days off, in the hunting season, both summer and winter, Voronov invariably went to the Zavidovo hunting preserve and there he and Father talked about everything.) Voronov also accused Khrushchev of reviving the cult of personality. Father’s speeches and photographs filled the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and not only the front pages. On the other hand, Father was always traveling around the country and speaking at conferences, whether it be of collective farmers or people in the chemical industry or other such gatherings. His speeches, as was the custom in such cases, were indeed printed on the front pages of the newspapers. It’s hard to understand where Father found the energy for everything he did. After all, in 1964 he turned seventy. Things had not been going particularly well in the previous two years, and all of Father’s thoughts were centered on how to correct the situation. He proposed one innovation after another. All his suggestions were greeted with cries of “Hurrah!” and first of all by his “close comrades-in-arms” in the CC Presidium. Father interpreted these verbal outpourings by his colleagues as approval of his thoughts and proposals. And now his “co-thinkers” took the liberty of saying that they had not in fact thought what he supposed. Further, Voronov recounted something he had once been told by Frol Kozlov, who was not present at that session of the CC Presidium.4 As I have said, Voronov quoted Kozlov along these lines: “Don’t get involved in affairs that Khrushchev is in charge of.” Voronov then complained that Father had once called him a “cross between an engineer and an agronomist,” which to my mind is not at all insulting. A political leader in a country with a centralized state-run economy is by his very nature not so much a politician as a manager, and any manager is obliged to have some familiarity with all sorts of things, things he is bound to encounter in his work. That is, such a leader necessarily has to be a kind of hybrid, a cross between this, that, and the other thing. Then came the standard complaints about constant reorganizations. Everyone was sick of them. Voronov also complained about Father’s “assault” on the rural interdistrict production administrations, even exclaiming with heartfelt emotion: “How can you humiliate the party’s district committees that way!”

548 Downfall: 1964 Father’s latest memorandum to his Presidium colleagues also displeased Voronov. “In your recommendations it’s impossible to figure out what’s right and what’s not!” he shouted, obviously overstating his case. In my opinion, Father expressed his thoughts clearly, but of course one had to be willing to listen. I have quoted from his speeches in previous chapters in some detail and I will not repeat that here. “Retire him on a pension.” That was how Voronov concluded his remarks. The next speaker was Shelepin. He strewed his accusations left and right, but unlike Voronov, did not make them specific. Demagogically he lumped everything together: there was an “intolerable” situation in the leadership, and “dubious people” around Father, and a cult of personality, and a decline in the yearly gross domestic product, and Father’s preoccupation with automatic milking machines, and the “divorce” of science from production. Shelepin was particularly indignant about Father’s intention to look into what actually happened in our country during the period of collectivization, in 1929–1932. Father was getting ready to talk about that at the forthcoming November 1964 plenum of the Central Committee, and he was not going to limit himself to the lines prescribed by the ideological authorities at that time. “He has gathered up material about the period of collectivization!” Shelepin’s voice nearly broke into a screech. “He said that it was women who made the October Revolution!” The industrial-agricultural division of the party’s province committees and the professionalization of economic management in general were denounced by Shelepin as not simply mistakes but theoretical errors. Father’s foreign policy was also not to Shelepin’s taste: “We need to be stricter with the imperialists,” was Shelepin’s advice. “The slogan ‘If the Soviet Union and the United States come to an agreement everything will be fine’ was incorrect. The position toward China was correct, but the line should be carried out more flexibly.” Shelepin laid a great many complaints at Father’s feet. Malin’s notes on what he said are set down in small, tightly condensed handwriting taking up almost two complete pages. Finally Shelepin wore himself out. He ended his remarks and took his seat without saying anything about what Father’s fate should be. Shelepin simply had written him off, no longer took him into account. Then the following people took the floor: Kirilenko, Mazurov, Yefremov, Mzhavanadze. Their speeches of accusation were as alike as two twins. Khrushchev had wanted to eliminate the party’s district committees, had wanted to reduce and debase the role of the party, and the most important thing: there had been enough reforms. Right after Mzhavanadze the party’s chief ideologist, Suslov, rose to speak. He did not talk about the various reorganizations or even about the elimination of the party’s rural district committees. What concerned him was something else. Although “the general line is correct . . . people have started to engage in conversations of their own more frequently, and that is dangerous. Things must

The Denouement

549

go through party channels.” Further on, Suslov repeated the standard set of accusations and concluded his speech with the following remarks: “Talented, but too hasty, too much noise and commotion in the press, lack of aplomb in foreign policy. In his conversations with Japanese specialists he said much that was superfluous. [On September 15, 1964, Father had met with a Japanese delegation and talked about the prospects for trade and the lack of prospects for returning two islands to Japan as long as Japan remained in a military alliance with the United States. What was superfluous in this I do not know.] The role of the CC Presidium and plenums must be raised higher.” Suslov did not say anything directly about what fate should befall Father. He was being cautious. Viktor Grishin, chairman of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, tried to sweeten the pill. He had worked with Father since 1949, when Khrushchev had returned to Moscow from Ukraine. Grishin’s conscience was bothering him, but he did not dare to oppose the others. “Among the people sitting here, you have real friends,” Grishin began. Brezhnev gave a sudden start, and Grishin immediately “corrected himself.” He said: “And we must say to you forthrightly that the way things are going cannot be continued.” Brezhnev gave a sigh of relief. “He tried to do his best and accomplished a lot, but the comrades are correct in saying that all successes were being attributed to Khrushchev.” At first Grishin could not decide how to address Father, by his last name or in the more polite way (in Russian culture) of using his first and middle names, but he finally chose to take some distance and called him by his last name. “There are negative personal qualities”—this is what Malin noted—“a lack of desire to take the collective into account, dictatorial behavior. There is not a collective leadership . . . He showed no interest in the trade unions . . .” After Grishin’s speech, the decision was made to break off until the next day. It was getting late, and everyone ought to speak their minds on this question. When he returned home, Father went for a long walk alone along the asphalt pathway that went around our residence next to the high walls that surrounded No. 40 Vorobyov Highway (Vorobyovskoye Shosse). In some ways the walk that he took was reminiscent of a wolf circling the perimeter of its cage in a zoo, round and round, round and round. When he finally came back into the house, he picked up the “Kremlin” telephone and dialed the number of Mikoyan’s residence. He lived nearby, two houses away. “Anastas, tell them that I’m not about to fight. Let them do what they want. I will submit to any decision.” Father said this all in one breath, then was silent for a while, and finally ended the conversation thus: “With those others, with the Stalinists [and Father meant Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, and Shepilov, who joined them] we disagreed on fundamental principles. But these . . .”

550 Downfall: 1964 Father could not find the appropriate word. “You are behaving correctly, Nikita.” Mikoyan chose his words cautiously and uncertainly. Neither of them had any doubts that Semichastny was listening with both ears. “But I think you will still have work to do, some compromise ought to be reached. After all there has been so much together . . .” Father was not about to listen to anything more. He hung up the phone. A few minutes later, Semichastny called Brezhnev and reported on Khrushchev’s decision to give up without a fight. On the next day, October 14, Polyansky was the first to speak. He was a smooth-talking, thirty-two-year-old agronomist and organizer from the Crimea. He had been the secretary of the party’s Crimea province. Father had taken note of him back in the late 1940s and had guided his career and cleared a path for him ever since then. Today Polyansky was unceremonious in his attitude toward Father. Unlike Grishin, he showed no recollection of their friendship of long standing. “The line of the party congresses has been correct,” we read in what Malin recorded from Polyansky’s speech. “But the way the line has been carried out by Comrade Khrushchev is a different matter. This meeting of ours today is a historic one . . . Khrushchev has become different than he was. In recent times he has tried to raise himself above the party. You have denounced Stalin to an indecent extent. In the first years things went well in agriculture, but later there was stagnation and disillusionment. There was a shortage of 78 billion rubles. (Polyansky was Khrushchev’s deputy in the Council of Ministers and was in charge of agriculture, and the search for those missing 78 billion rubles came under his jurisdiction.) Leadership by memorandum. Lysenko is an Arakcheyev in science.5 “You [Khrushchev] have expressed stupidities on price policy. For two years you have not received ten academicians from the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy, and yet you’ve received capitalists at the drop of a hat.” The former agronomist from the Crimea especially aimed his fire at the totally innocent phenomenon of hydroponics, which had recently arrived from the West and which Father actively promoted—that is, the growing of greenhouse-type vegetables, not in wooden boxes filled with soil and held together by rusty nails, but in plastic troughs on top of gravel through which solutions containing liquid fertilizer flowed. Calculations showed that this new technology was more economical and with it one could finally succeed in arranging for fresh cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, and the like, to be delivered year-round to the tables of city dwellers. “He intended to force us to take this up as well!” Polyansky was sincerely indignant. Of course the speaker was not really interested in hydroponics as such, but from that day on everything that had originated with Father was anathematized. “You are a difficult person. You should resign from all your posts and retire, but you will refuse to simply surrender.” Polyansky did not know about the

The Denouement

551

conversation between Khrushchev and Mikoyan that Semichastny had eavesdropped on. The former chief archivist of Russia, Rudolf Pikhoya, argues convincingly that Polyansky’s written remarks, in which he accused Khrushchev of all conceivable and inconceivable transgressions, had in fact not been written by Polyansky. People from the KGB, who were professionals in the business of “exposing” people, wrote it. Semichastny himself admitted that this was true and even reported the details. He had given two people the special assignment of typing the text. They were typists who had already retired from the KGB, and they did the work at home.6 Brezhnev had not allowed Polyansky to present his remarks at the beginning of the CC Presidium meeting. He would have sounded too brazen. Brezhnev assigned the delicate task of opening the discussion to Suslov. Polyansky submitted the second copy of his text to the General Department of the Central Committee. Evidently the first copy remained in the possession of Semichastny. In the early 1990s, Pikhoya discovered the text in the Central Committee archives. When he told Semichastny about his discovery, the latter became uneasy. He had assumed that all copies had been destroyed and that no traces had remained. Polyansky was finishing his remarks when Shelepin interrupted: “Comrade Mikoyan is taking an incorrect position. Let’s listen to what he has to say!” Mikoyan rightly deserved his reputation as an extremely resourceful politician and always managed to maintain his own opinion about things, both under Stalin and under Khrushchev. And now it was his opinion that “the criticism of Khrushchev will be useful, but as a general rule, the post of party leader should be separated from that of head of the government. Kosygin should be appointed to the latter post. Khrushchev should be relieved of some of his burdens, but he ought to remain in the leadership of the party.” Mikoyan could not have failed to understand that he was not only in a minority, but a minority of one, that he would not be forgiven for making that speech, but he had decided, in view of his age, not to conceal his true thoughts. They did not forgive Mikoyan. The following year, when he reached seventy, he too was sent into retirement. The speaker after Mikoyan was Sharaf Rashidov, secretary of the Central Committee of the Uzbekistan Communist Party. He echoed previous speakers almost word for word. He held no animus against Father, but he was accustomed to following “proper procedures,” which had been established long before and not by him. After Rashidov, Kosygin took the floor. He expressed his “satisfaction at the course of the discussion. They were following the correct line. There was unity in the Central Committee and its Presidium. The plenum would undoubtedly support them in all respects.” “You have circulated letters containing flattery, but none with critical content.” Kosygin berated Father for that.

552 Downfall: 1964 There was a disparity between his words and the testimony of Semichastny, according to whom Father had demanded that even the most angry anonymous letters should be brought to him and read, including those where “Nikita” was cursed with foul language.7 We will not judge Kosygin too severely. He was informed about the conspiracy only at the last minute, and he who had been Father’s trusted right-hand man had had to reorient himself on the fly. “On the question of cadres. You do not take pleasure in the growth of people.” Kosygin himself didn’t understand very well what he himself was saying. Or perhaps he did understand perfectly well! Kosygin could not have failed to know about Khrushchev’s plans to “renew the cadres” at the forthcoming plenum, his plan to promote younger people to replace those who had “grown.” “The report by Comrade Suslov [about ideology] at first praised [Khrushchev] and then discredited him [and rightly so].” Kosygin was rolling up his sleeves. Brezhnev nodded approvingly. “He organizes all the plenums himself. He has monopolized military matters. His attitude toward the fraternal socialist countries is characterized by his remark: ‘If there is grain, sacks will be found [for us to fill for them].’” Kosygin went on for a long time. Such a long time that Brezhnev tapped meaningfully on the dial of his wristwatch. “Convene a plenum,” Kosygin spoke more quickly. “Separate the posts of head of the party and head of the government. [He already knew that the latter position was predestined for him.]. Establish an official post, second secretary of the Central Committee. [He had Podgorny in mind.] You [Khrushchev] should be relieved of all your posts.” After Kosygin it was Podgorny’s turn to speak. He spoke angrily and unrelentingly and was not ashamed of the way he expressed himself. I will cite only a few passages from his speech: I agree with the speeches everyone has made except for that of Mikoyan. There have been colossal mistakes in carrying out reorganizations. His references to Stalin are beside the point. He himself does everything worse. Dividing the province committees into industrial and agricultural was stupidity. There is disorder in our relations with the socialist countries, and that is also your fault. It is impossible to talk things over with Khrushchev. Separate the posts [of head of party and head of government]. That should be decided at the plenum. What will be the response to Khrushchev’s retirement internationally and domestically? There will be a response, but nothing significant will happen.

At that moment the door of the Presidium’s meeting room opened and Brezhnev’s secretary stuck his head in, then he himself entered the room, on tiptoes for some reason, and hurried over to Brezhnev to whisper in his ear. Brezhnev pointed at Podgorny as much as to say “that’s enough, sit down.” Podgorny took his seat with an air of dissatisfaction. He had no sooner gotten rid of one boss and another was already ordering him around.

The Denouement

553

The secretary had violated the rules, according to which no one was allowed into the Presidium room during a meeting unless they were summoned, and the secretary had done so because Semichastny had been telephoning him repeatedly, pleading and demanding that Brezhnev be brought to the phone. Brezhnev announced a break in the session for a few minutes and left the room. “What’s happened?” he nervously asked after picking up the phone. Semichastny’s reply came down to the following: He had been assigned to gather together members of the Central Committee, not all of them, but the ones with whom matters had already been arranged in advance with regard to the shift of power in the Kremlin or those who the conspirators thought they could rely on. Ever since the day before these people had been lounging around in the corridors of the Kremlin, swapping rumors, making guesses about what was going on at the Presidium meeting, and bombarding Semichastny with questions, asking when they would finally be allowed to assemble in the Kremlin’s Sverdlov Hall and have everything reported to them. By noontime on October 14 many had begun to grumble, and the especially obstreperous ones were threatening to start the session of the Central Committee plenum by themselves without the Presidium. After all, according to the party rules, it was the plenum that elected the Presidium and not the other way around. Such remarks were being made jokingly, with a smile on the face, but Semichastny was seriously frightened. At a time of change, any joking, especially this kind of joking, was dangerous. Today the conspirators at the very top were carrying out intrigues against Khrushchev, so why couldn’t the members of the Central Committee do the same kind of thing, take power into their own hands, not limit themselves to removing Khrushchev but electing new people and changing the composition of the Presidium entirely? That was why Semichastny had decided to speed Brezhnev up. He was requesting, if not demanding, that things be wrapped up, and before it was too late the action should be moved to the plenum—the plenary session of the Central Committee as a whole. This should be done that very day so that the “operation” could be completed before evening. “I cannot stand to go through a second night like this,” Semichastny declared to Brezhnev. “Not everyone has spoken yet.” In Brezhnev’s view, every last person needed to speak, to implicate themselves in front of others. Thus Brezhnev could not bring himself to say either yes or no. Inwardly he was afraid of the plenum, but when Semichastny threatened that if things were delayed further he would not take any responsibility for the results and could not vouch for anything more, then Brezhnev gave in and asked for just a little more time. “Thirty minutes later he called me.” That is what Semichastny told V. A. Starkov in 1988. Starkov was the chief editor of the weekly Argumenty i Fakty (Arguments and Facts). “He asked me to calm everyone down, and said that everything was going according to plan. The members of the Presidium had spoken, and there only remained some candidate members and Central Committee

554 Downfall: 1964 secretaries who were present. They should be given three or four minutes each so that they could make their positions unambiguously clear, and then at 6 P.M. there would be the plenum. “That suits me,” Semichastny answered Brezhnev. “Can I announce it?” “Yes, announce it! We have given orders to our agencies, and you should do the same in the line of your duties.” With these words Brezhnev ended the conversation and hung up the phone.8 When Brezhnev returned to the Presidium meeting room, he took the floor himself and hastily put an end to the discussion. “I agree with everyone. I have walked the same path with you [Khrushchev] since 1938. Together with you I fought against the anti-party group in 1957, but I cannot compromise with my conscience. Khrushchev should be relieved of his posts [as head of the party and head of the government], and those posts should be separated.” Those who had not yet spoken were now limited to three minutes, and literally to a couple of words each. Andropov: “I support the proposal.” Ponomarev: “I support it.” Ilyichev: “I agree.” Demichev: “I agree.” Rudakov: “I agree.” Brezhnev rose from his seat, but Mikoyan, for the second time, took the floor, and this time too he commented in his own way: “I have said what I thought. I agree with the majority. Khrushchev told me that he did not intend to fight for his posts.” Mikoyan went on to describe briefly Father’s phone call of the previous night. Brezhnev did not react to his words, but the others gave sighs of relief. They were afraid Father might try to alter the situation to his own advantage at the Central Committee plenum. And the devil only knew what he might accomplish with all the energy he had. Shvernik was the last to speak: “Nikita Sergeyevich has behaved incorrectly. He should be deprived of his posts.” Father had sat there frowning the whole time. Now it was his turn to speak, and to speak for the last time. “I cannot fight with you,” Father began, his voice sounding throaty. “Together we overcame the anti-party group. We are co-thinkers.” Father was silent for a moment, searching for the necessary words. “I value your honesty,” he started again. “At different periods of time I have related to those of you who are present in different ways, but I always had a high regard for you. I ask Comrade Polyansky and Comrade Voronov to forgive me for my rudeness. That was not done out of animosity. “My main mistake was that in 1958 I took the bait and agreed to hold both posts, head of the party and head of the government. I displayed weakness by not offering resistance. “I acknowledge that I was rude toward Sakharov and also Keldysh.

The Denouement

555

“The questions of grain and corn, the interdistrict production administrations, the division or nondivision of the province committees, all of that is up to you to deal with now.” Father further talked about his position on international questions—the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin crisis, the situation in the socialist camp—and concluded with these words: “Everything must be done so that cracks and fissures do not appear between our countries. I am not asking you for mercy. The question has been settled. I already said yesterday [on the telephone with Mikoyan] that I will not fight. After all, we are co-thinkers. Why should I go looking for black paint to smear you with?” Again Father stopped talking. A feeling of being insulted got the better of him and he resumed: “It’s true that you have gathered together here and have smeared me with manure, but I cannot object.” But he caught himself right away and began to speak in a different tone, I would say a more elevated tone: “Despite everything that is happening, I rejoice that the party has at last matured to the extent that it has become capable of establishing controls over any of its members, no matter how high a position he might hold.” (Father repeated similar words to me when he stopped in at home between the session of the Presidium and the Central Committee plenum, where he would formally renounce power.) “During the last few years I have felt that I was not coping with the entire heap of problems before me,” he said in conclusion, “but life is an insistent thing. It always seemed that one more year was needed, but I admit I had gotten a swelled head. I request that you relieve me of my posts. You yourselves can write the statement and I will sign it. “It’s up to you to decide my subsequent fate. Whatever you tell me I will do. I will live wherever you say.” Father’s gaze swept over all those present and he sighed heavily: “I thank you for our work together, thank you for your criticism, although it is belated.” He took his seat and immediately, as though by the wave of a magic wand, a carefully typed statement about his retirement appeared in front of him: “. . . in connection with advanced age and a worsening state of health.” Grishin and Ilyichev had drafted the statement in Father’s name. The manuscript of this draft statement is preserved in the Russian State Archive of Modern History (RGANI). But it is not clear whose handwriting graces this document, Grishin’s or Ilyichev’s. Most likely it is Ilyichev’s. (Ironically enough, Ilyichev had already been sentenced to the same fate as Khrushchev—that is, removal from the top leadership.) The fact that Ilyichev helped draft Khrushchev’s resignation statement was either a Machiavellian form of revenge by Suslov, if Suslov assigned Ilyichev to do that, or it was Ilyichev’s own vain attempt to ingratiate himself with the new people in power. Father carefully read the brief text consisting of only a few lines, smiled bitterly, and drew a Parker pen from his pocket. How many documents he had signed during his time in power, documents that had changed the face of our country, international agreements, and here he was to place his last signature on a document. He removed

556 Downfall: 1964 the cap from the fountain pen, and then for some reason glanced at the pen point sticking out from the gold body of the pen, and then he signed. At the last moment his hand traitorously trembled, the signature came out appearing somewhat uncertain, in some respects like the signature of an old man. But he found the strength to say some parting words to his former comrades-in-arms: “If things go well with you, it will only be a cause for rejoicing for me. I will follow your activities in the newspaper reports.”9 Now there remained the final torment—the plenary session of the Central Committee. Before the session the victors decided to have lunch, as usual, right there in the Kremlin. Father had introduced this custom—dining together there saved time and provided an additional, informal opportunity for an exchange of views. But this time Khrushchev did not go to the dining hall. He now had nothing to talk about with the others. He went home, to the residence in the Lenin Hills. I was waiting for him there. I was in an agony of suspense over what I knew would inevitably happen. To calm my nerves, I was walking in the yard. Good luck had brought continued warmth, the sunshine of Indian summer. Around 2 P.M. the officer on duty at Father’s Kremlin office called to say, “Nikita Sergeyevich has left.” The heavy iron gates to the grounds of our residence opened slowly and a black limousine crept in. Father had returned. It was my turn to sigh with relief. In those days, Stalin’s techniques and methods had not yet disappeared into the haze of history. I hurried to meet him. But he was very slow getting out of the car, holding on to his black briefcase, a gift from some Argentinian visitors. He did not head for the house, but went in the opposite direction, down the asphalt walkway, which was bordered by young birch trees, their golden leaves gleaming in the sun. When I caught up with Father, he shoved the briefcase into my hands. “That’s it—I’m retired,” Father sighed, rather than saying those words. “I was not about to have dinner with them.” A new stage in his life was beginning. What lay ahead? No one knew. One thing was clear. It did not depend on us. The only thing left for us was to wait. “I signed a statement myself. A request to be relieved for reasons of health . . . What remains now is for this to be formally approved by the plenum. I said I would abide by discipline, and would carry out all decisions made by the Central Committee. I also said I would live wherever they told me to: in Moscow or somewhere else.” Father anticipated my questions, and then stated: “If in my time I accomplished one thing only, changed our life so that it was possible to remove the top person without bloodshed but simply by voting, I would feel I had not lived my life in vain . . .” After lunch he went for a walk. Nothing was as usual on that day—neither the walk in the middle of a workday nor that walk’s destination, or rather, lack of destination. Previously his walks had been in the evening, an hour’s walk after work, in order to shed the wearying tensions that had built up during the day, and after refreshing himself that way, he would look at the evening’s mail.

The Denouement

557

That one hour was strictly measured, no more, no less. But this day the documents in his briefcase remained there—materials for the next session of the CC Presidium, a translation of the doctrine being put forward by US defense secretary Robert McNamara, and news reports from TASS. Those documents were fated to remain lying there unread and forgotten to the very end of Father’s life. He never looked in that briefcase again. We walked along in silence. Lazily trotting beside us was Arbat, my sister Lena’s German shepherd. He had been indifferent to Father before, had taken no special notice of him. He would come over to him, wag his tail, and then be off about his business. But now he took not one step away. From that day on, Arbat followed Father constantly. “But who did they appoint?” I couldn’t keep quiet. “Brezhnev will be first secretary; and Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers—a worthy candidacy.” Father’s custom of evaluating people, measuring their suitability for one or another post, came into its own. “Back when Bulganin was relieved of his duties in 1958, I am the one who proposed him [Kosygin] for that post [head of the government]. He knows the economy well and will cope with the task. As for Brezhnev, it’s harder to say. His character is like modeling clay. He gives in too much to the influence of others . . . I don’t know if he will have the strength of will to pursue the correct policy line. Well, that’s no concern of mine anymore. I’m a pensioner now. My job is to keep off to the side.” We did not return to the subject of power in the Kremlin anymore that day nor in years to come. What Father was like after our walk and how he was when he came back from the Central Committee plenum—I have no clear memory of those things. Meanwhile during lunch at the Kremlin, Brezhnev had not yet determined conclusively how to conduct the plenum. Two reporters had been prepared: Polyansky and Suslov. Polyansky was “raring to go.” He wanted blood. But Brezhnev was afraid about the accusations that would be spelled out in the text—that they could be applied not just to Khrushchev, and that Polyansky might get carried away and then no one at the plenum would be able to control the situation. Semichastny, before lunch, had also poured oil on the fire. “You’re taking so long that either you or Khrushchev might end up in prison,” said Semichastny, terrifying Brezhnev. “During the past day I have overheard people talking, this one and that one. Some are suffering and want to save Khrushchev. Others are calling for you to be saved. Still others are asking, ‘What are you and the Cheka [the KGB] just sitting around for, doing nothing?’”10 Brezhnev decided to give Suslov the floor to read the written report to the plenum. Suslov was an old hand at such things. In 1957 he had given the report in the case of “the anti-party group” of Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, and Shepilov. And in that same year he had read the denunciation of Marshal Zhukov. The dry and laconic Suslov could retain control of the present situation.

558 Downfall: 1964 He would not let passions get out of hand. The Presidium members did not object. They preferred not to have any debates at all. But the decision not to have discussion would be completely unexpected for Central Committee members. Nothing like that had ever happened. Ritual required everyone to speak, to achieve unanimous condemnation of whomever had been condemned. “I also did not know that there would be no debate,” Semichastny recalled in 1988. “I think that they acted not without having a little tsar inside their heads. They did not know where things would go and how it would affect them. There might be a discussion . . . I think these old men had thought it all out and were afraid for their . . . bones. They did everything they could do not to open up debate at the plenum. Such a terrible mess might get started at Sverdlov Hall in the Kremlin. I sat and observed. The worst toadies were shouting: ‘Expel him from the party! Put him on trial!’ Those who were more levelheaded sat there in silence. So there was no serious, critical, analytical discussion, such that would make you feel the authority of the Central Committee. Everything had been decided at the Presidium meeting; the decision had been hashed and rehashed and then thrown at the members of the plenum: “Vote!” Another participant in the plenum also speaks about the absence of debate. That was one of Shelepin’s supporters, Yegorychev, who said: “Now, after so many years have gone by, it is also clear that Brezhnev was opposed to having speeches at the plenum, and for good reason. During debates, in the heat of the moment, something might be said that later would tie his hands. And Brezhnev obviously had other plans even then.”11 Father listened without raising his head as Suslov read his report. Nor did he raise his head during the voting. When a brief intermission was announced, he left Sverdlov Hall and did not return to it. He got in a car and went home. Brezhnev and Kosygin were appointed to their posts in his absence. Actually, the intermission was announced precisely with the sole purpose of letting Father leave the hall. An account was given subsequently by one of Father’s supporters—Olga Ilyinichna Ivashchenko, who in 1964 was a secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. At the beginning of October 1964 she found out about the events that were being prepared and tried to reach Father by the government telephone system. She did not succeed in reaching him. Access to Khrushchev was being reliably blocked. Also she was not admitted to the Central Committee plenum, and neither was a pro-Khrushchev member of the Central Committee, Zinovy Timofeyevich Serdyuk, who was also first deputy chairman of the Soviet Communist Party’s Control Commission under the Soviet Central Committee. Soon after, they were both released from the posts they held, expelled from the Central Committee, and sent into retirement. Among the Soviet people, Father’s retirement was received with relief. For the “man in the street,” the hope was that with the departure of the never-resting Khrushchev, everything would settle down and life would become better. “As I walked into the newspaper office where I worked, the news came about the

The Denouement

559

changes in the Kremlin and there was a celebration,” the journalist Anatoly Strelyany reports. “Tamara G. (who is now a solidly respectable lady, the head of a department, and a grandmother) danced on a table. Confidently and in unison we all expected things to get better.” Routine functionaries on all levels celebrated the victory: there would be an end to innovations. They would not be jerked around anymore, transplanted from place to place, required to plow the Virgin Lands, to build five-story apartment buildings with prefabricated units, to develop the chemical industry, and to plant corn. At last a time of stability would set in. They turned out to be right. With Father’s departure, the period of reforms came to an end. Our country entered the era of stagnation. The pace of growth in industry and agriculture slowed down from year to year, signaling unambiguously that change was required and that without it there would be economic collapse. But in Russia, rarely is any attention paid to such signals. People merely hope that perhaps things will turn out all right. And that’s what they did on this occasion in 1964. While some were celebrating victory, Father faced the task of reconciling himself to defeat. On the evening of that same memorable day, October 14, Mikoyan came to visit Father. After the Central Committee plenum a meeting of the CC Presidium had been held. Mikoyan was delegated to inform Khrushchev about the decisions that had been made. They sat at the table in the dining room and Father asked that tea be served. He loved tea and drank it from a delicate transparent glass that had a handle the same way that a teacup has a handle. He had brought this back with him from the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). This unusual glass for drinking tea pleased him greatly, and he always bragged about it to guests, showing them how convenient it was for drinking hot tea without burning your fingers. Tea was served. “I was asked to let you know the following,” Mikoyan began, speaking uncertainly. “Your present country place [the Gorki-9 dacha] and your city apartment [the residence in the Lenin Hills] will remain at your disposal for life.” “All right.” Father’s response was indefinite. It was hard to tell whether that indicated gratitude or simply that he had heard what was said. After thinking a little, he repeated what he had already told me: “I am ready to live wherever they tell me.” “Your bodyguard and service contingent will also remain, but the people will be changed.” Father said “M-hm,” showing he understood what was meant. “A pension of 500 rubles a month will be allotted and you are assured the use of a car,” continued Mikoyan, faltering. “They want to maintain your status as a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, although it’s true that a final decision has not been made. I further proposed that a position be created for you as consultant to the CC Presidium, but my proposal was rejected.”

560 Downfall: 1964 “You did that in vain. They would never agree to that. What good am I to them after everything that has happened. My advice and inevitable interference would only tie their hands. And even meeting with me would give them no pleasure.” Father emphasized this impersonal word “them” each time he spoke it. “Of course it would be good to have something to do. I don’t know how I’m going to live as a retiree with nothing but time on my hands. But you made that proposal in vain. Nevertheless, thank you. It’s nice to feel there’s a friend nearby.” It was as though Father could see into the future. Within a week, all those promises seemed to Brezhnev to be excessive. We were moved out of the residence in the Lenin Hills and from the Gorki-9 dacha. And of course, as far as Father acting as a consultant, that was now out of the question. The very mention of his name came to be considered seditious. To the end of his days, not one of the politicians, of their own free will, ever met with him. The conversation ended. Father accompanied Mikoyan out onto the porch of our residence. During all those days in October the weather continued almost summerlike. It was warm and sunny on that day too. Mikoyan embraced Father and kissed him. At that time among the leaders it was not customary to kiss, and everyone was touched by this farewell. Mikoyan walked quickly to the gates. He was a short man and his modest figure soon disappeared around the corner. Father gazed after him. They never met again.

106 After Khrushchev Brezhnev, the newly elected first secretary of the party, together with

Podgorny, Polyansky, and the new head of government, Kosygin, celebrated the fact that Khrushchev had been relieved of his duties—or more exactly, that they had been relieved of him—with a grandiose hunting expedition to Zavidovo followed by a feast at the hunting lodge. Shelepin asked if he might join the hunting party, although he had never gone hunting before. He had no high regard for that form of entertainment, but he was afraid of letting his “allies” out of his sight. A plenum of the Central Committee was held in November 1964. Not for a reformation, as Khrushchev had intended, but for a restoration. The plenum restored the unity of its province committees, ending their division into industrial

560 Downfall: 1964 “You did that in vain. They would never agree to that. What good am I to them after everything that has happened. My advice and inevitable interference would only tie their hands. And even meeting with me would give them no pleasure.” Father emphasized this impersonal word “them” each time he spoke it. “Of course it would be good to have something to do. I don’t know how I’m going to live as a retiree with nothing but time on my hands. But you made that proposal in vain. Nevertheless, thank you. It’s nice to feel there’s a friend nearby.” It was as though Father could see into the future. Within a week, all those promises seemed to Brezhnev to be excessive. We were moved out of the residence in the Lenin Hills and from the Gorki-9 dacha. And of course, as far as Father acting as a consultant, that was now out of the question. The very mention of his name came to be considered seditious. To the end of his days, not one of the politicians, of their own free will, ever met with him. The conversation ended. Father accompanied Mikoyan out onto the porch of our residence. During all those days in October the weather continued almost summerlike. It was warm and sunny on that day too. Mikoyan embraced Father and kissed him. At that time among the leaders it was not customary to kiss, and everyone was touched by this farewell. Mikoyan walked quickly to the gates. He was a short man and his modest figure soon disappeared around the corner. Father gazed after him. They never met again.

106 After Khrushchev Brezhnev, the newly elected first secretary of the party, together with

Podgorny, Polyansky, and the new head of government, Kosygin, celebrated the fact that Khrushchev had been relieved of his duties—or more exactly, that they had been relieved of him—with a grandiose hunting expedition to Zavidovo followed by a feast at the hunting lodge. Shelepin asked if he might join the hunting party, although he had never gone hunting before. He had no high regard for that form of entertainment, but he was afraid of letting his “allies” out of his sight. A plenum of the Central Committee was held in November 1964. Not for a reformation, as Khrushchev had intended, but for a restoration. The plenum restored the unity of its province committees, ending their division into industrial

After Khrushchev

561

and agricultural, abolished the interdistrict production administrations, and gave all power back to the party’s rural district committees. The bureaucracy returned to its customary peaceful way of life. As a sign of gratitude for their support, Brezhnev made Shelest and Shelepin full members of the CC Presidium, and Demichev became a candidate member of the Presidium; formerly he had merely been a secretary of the Central Committee. Demichev was one of Shelepin’s people. In conclusion, the plenum removed Adzhubei from the Central Committee, and Polyakov was deprived of the title of secretary of the Central Committee. For the time being, they did not touch Ilyichev. Father remained a rank-and-file member of the Central Committee, although it’s true they “did not recommend” he be invited to the plenum. He was indignant, but could do nothing about it. Semichastny finally received the general’s uniform he had so greatly desired, with stripes down the sides of the trousers. By one stroke of the pen he was transformed from a lieutenant in the reserves into an active-duty colonel-general. Having redistributed portfolios, the new government, as was customary, undertook to correct the mistakes of the previous administration, mistakes both real and imagined. Of course no government gets by without making some blunders. As before, the Ukrainians set the tone. On November 6, 1964, Shelest declared, in a Pravda article titled “The Struggle to Raise Agricultural Production,” that in the previous few days the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party and the Ukrainian Council of Ministers had adopted a resolution abolishing the restrictions they themselves had imposed a few years earlier on the private plots of collective farmers. They recommended that the earlier size of those private plots be maintained, and that peasants be allowed to keep livestock and poultry for their personal use. Local government bodies were given the obligation of assisting collective farmers who worked well on the collective to obtain feed and fodder.1 On the level of the Soviet Union as a whole, no resolution had been passed limiting the private plots around the homes of collective farmers, and therefore there was no need to make changes in that respect. As I have already written, Father talked about the advisability of bringing together the gardens scattered around in the villages to form one consolidated piece of land. Agricultural machinery could be used on a large area like that, and the machinery could be improved, but that should be done only with the agreement and consent of the collective farmers themselves. Matters never went beyond words, however, and with the exception of Ukraine, nothing was undertaken locally along those lines. In Ukraine the excessively zealous Shelest had ordered private plots to be cut down in size, which of course seriously upset the villagers. Fortunately, even there, matters never went beyond surveying the private plots to determine their size. Now Shelest was correcting his own “unjustified” excesses. On December 11, 1964, Father was relieved of his duties as chairman of the Constitutional Commission, and at the same time the plans for the new constitution were canceled, including its clauses about alternative candidates in

562

Downfall: 1964

elections, limits on terms in office for the highest government posts, and a professionalized parliament. In March 1966, at the Twenty-Third Party Congress, the clause in the party rules limiting membership in party committees to two terms was abolished, the CC Presidium was renamed the Politburo, the first secretary of the Central Committee was renamed the general secretary, and of course Khrushchev was not elected a member of the new Central Committee. Brezhnev was a man of weak character, who owed his entire career to Khrushchev. All the indications are that his conscience bothered him, constantly reminding him of the treachery he had committed. Because of that same weakness of character, he needed to be propped up with constant reminders of his own “correctness,” and accordingly Khrushchev had to be demonized. But Brezhnev could not bring himself to start an open anti-Khrushchev campaign, though Shelepin and Semichastny urged him to do so. There simply ceased to be any mention of Khrushchev’s name, either favorable or unfavorable. In the Crimea there was a village named Nikita, with a botanical garden of the same name, and Brezhnev had to drive past that every time he went to the government villa at Livadia. The village was renamed Botanicheskoye, so that Brezhnev would not be annoyed by it. Things went so far that when the archives department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry published the correspondence between Premier Khrushchev and President Eisenhower, the letters from the Soviet side were signed “Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers,” without any person’s name. There was abstract chatter about “voluntarism” and “subjectivism,” concepts that lacked any specific content. If we think about the meaning of these terms, “voluntarism” essentially denotes the capacity of a leader to make decisions and take responsibility for them, and “subjectivism” suggests that this leader has his own opinions. Whether these qualities are used for good or evil is a separate question that has nothing to do with “voluntarism” and “subjectivism” in and of themselves. However, these really meaningless labels were applied broadly and became part of everyday usage. Many compilations of speeches written by Father—or more exactly, dictated by him—were shredded, including the eight-volume collection on agriculture. To me, as to most Russians at that time, those speeches were boring. I came to appreciate them only after I began to write this book. It is a common practice in Russia for books to be destroyed as soon as their authors fall into disfavor. Most of the gifts presented to Father by foreign visitors also disappeared. Mama sent to the Central Committee offices everything that, in her opinion, was valuable. There, a special room was assigned for them. When Father “went into retirement,” some items were stolen by officials who had now gained power, but most were sent to museums. The museum people soon received orders to “write those things off” and destroy them because “they were of no artistic or historical value.” But Brezhnev could not “delete” Khrushchev from his own memory, and to his dying day Brezhnev continued to seek justification for what he had done, could not find it, and inwardly hated Father for that more and more intensely.

After Khrushchev

563

In the spring of 1965 they began to take up “the legacy of Khrushchev” more seriously. At a Central Committee plenum convened on March 24, 1965, Brezhnev gave a report on agriculture. It was quite colorless, lacking the kind of specific examples and statistics that Khrushchev usually provided—points he dredged up from his memory now and then, departing from his written text and engaging in a dialogue with his audience. Brezhnev read directly from the paper in front of him without any departures, but he did read with expression, pronouncing his words distinctly, without lisping or slurring. His report focused on the “negative.” In the seven-year plan (1959–1965), 70 percent growth had been projected, but in fact only 10 percent had been achieved. The annual increase in gross domestic product had fallen from 7.6 percent in the period 1955–1959 to 1.9 percent in the period 1959–1964. Also, in 1964 there were only half as many large-horned cattle as there had been during the previous five-year period (1955–1959), the number of hogs, sheep, and poultry had also declined, and according to the statistics, the average milk output per cow had declined by 370 kilograms annually. In 1955–1959 there had been an increase in yield per hectare of 1.7 percent, but in 1960–1964 it was only 0.8 percent. He was really saying nothing new. Father, before his retirement, had constantly stressed the same problem. “After 1959, growth stopped!” Brezhnev exclaimed with pathos. But he got his figures mixed up, or more likely he juggled them intentionally. According to the 1971 statistical compilation titled Selskoe khoziaistvo SSSR (Agriculture of the USSR), the number of large-horned cattle in the years 1959–1964 did not decline, but rose from 70.8 million to 85.4 million, and the same with sheep, from 129 million in 1959 to 133.9 million in 1964. The number of hogs actually did drop, from 48.7 million in 1959 to 40.9 million in 1964. This happened precisely in 1964! Because of the poor harvest in 1963 (and the consequent feed shortage), many hogs were sent to the slaughterhouses in 1964. In 1962, on the other hand, the number of hogs had gone as high as 70 million. Then there was a sharp drop, but the number rose again to 52.8 million in 1965. This breed of animal multiplies quickly. It is not unusual for one sow to have a litter of a dozen or so. Those are the statistics. I did not find statistics on poultry, but I think the picture would be similar in that case as well. As for the grain yield per hectare, owing to insufficient fertilizer it was “in the hands of God,” that is, it depended on the weather. If rain came in time, the yield increased. If there was drought, the opposite happened. In most of the instances cited by Brezhnev, he took 1959—the first year of the seven-year plan— as his starting point, but when it came to yield per hectare he started with 1960. It’s really quite simple: in 1959, 10.4 centners per hectare were harvested, but in 1960 the figure was 10.9 instead of 10.4. If you compare 1959 with 1964, the increase comes out to be greater, but if you make the comparison between 1960 and 1964, it comes out less. In fact, the figures cited by Brezhnev are “the work of the devil,” the result of juggling. From 1955 to 1959, the yield per hectare rose from 8.4 centners to

564 Downfall: 1964 10.4; that is an increase of 2 centners per hectare (because there had been a bad harvest in 1955). But from 1959 to 1964, the total increase was only 1 centner per hectare. But if you compare the data from 1956 to 1959, the total increase was only half a centner per hectare (because there had been a good harvest in 1956), whereas from 1959 to 1964 the increase was a full centner. In other words, statistics can be manipulated and don’t really tell us much of anything. Regardless, the slower rate of growth in gross domestic product is actually a serious danger signal. It occurred not only in agriculture but also, though less noticeably, in industry. Father was preparing to undertake a new reform precisely in order to counteract this negative trend. But Brezhnev did not make a peep about transferring decisionmaking power to managers, that is, to directors of enterprises, nor about limiting government interference in their affairs, nor did he refer to the experiments along those lines that had gone on for three years. He blamed “voluntarism” and “subjectivism” for all the difficulties and disasters, and promised that now that “voluntarism” and “subjectivism” had been eliminated, things would improve. Brezhnev had a simple solution for the grain problem. Beginning in 1965 and continuing for the next five years, until 1970, he proposed to reduce the amount of grain procured by the government from 64 million tons to 54.4 million tons. Yet according to the estimates of the State Planning Committee, in order to meet the needs of our country’s population, which would grow from 229 million persons in 1964 to 250 million in 1970, it was necessary to harvest between 224 and 236 million tons of grain and correspondingly to deliver 40 percent of the total harvest to the government procurement agencies, which meant approximately 90–100 million tons.2 The shortfall would be made good, Brezhnev suggested, by purchasing grain from abroad. That was the difference in principle between Khrushchev, who focused on the development of our own agricultural resources and considered the importing of grain in 1963 to have been a shameful thing both for himself and for our country, and Brezhnev, who saw nothing to be ashamed of in buying grain from the rest of the word. Further, Brezhnev proposed to increase centralized capital investments in agriculture. Here he followed in Father’s wake. It was under Khrushchev that the government had expanded direct investments in agriculture from 985 million rubles in 1953 to 5.1 billion rubles in 1963. During the same period the annual income of collective farmers had risen accordingly, from 3.8 billion rubles to 16 billion, and their fixed capital assets of the collective farms had risen from 5.4 billion to 29.9 billion rubles (all figures being in post-1961 rubles, from after the monetary reform).3 It’s true that, as Brezhnev said, the main growth had come in 1954–1958, when agriculture received 11.3 percent of all capital investments, whereas in the “seven-year plan” of 1959–1968 only 7.5 percent was allocated to agriculture. Hence all the problems.

After Khrushchev

565

Father considered reducing subsidies a matter of principle. There had been enough of relying on the government. The time had come for the peasants to learn how to earn their own living and pay their own way. After all, even in the government budget, money doesn’t come from nowhere. In order to pay more to one person, money had to be taken away from another. Father based his view on the results of the Khudenko experiment. The state farms that Khudenko managed were flourishing without government subsidies. Brezhnev also considered it necessary to stimulate the producers by further raising procurement prices for wheat and rye by approximately one ruble per centner. And if an amount of grain above the plan was delivered, the government would pay an additional 50 percent. According to the plan, the quantity to be procured was over 50 million tons. The added ruble or ruble and a half per centner turned out to mean more than half a billion rubles added to the expenditures part of the budget. Procurement prices for meat also increased, by 55–70 percent. These measures were effective—there’s no denying it. Father had also raised prices, from 97 kopecks for a centner of wheat in 1952 to 7 rubles, 56 kopecks in 1963; from 2 rubles, 3 kopecks for a centner of beef to79 rubles, 90 kopecks; and from 6 rubles, 72 kopecks for ham to 98 rubles (these numbers again being calculated in the new rubles of January 1961 and after).4 The additional budget money was obtained by raising prices on other goods. Consequently, for a long time, producers had not been able to understand what was to their advantage and what was not. That was why in 1959 there had been a decision to make a transition to “transparent prices on a uniform basis,” which meant that retail prices had to realistically reflect procurement price, as well as the real costs of production, including fair compensation of peasant labor. By 1962 it had become definitively clear that mindless subsidizing was not so much helping agriculture as it was confusing and undermining relationships within the socialist economy, which even without that were increasingly complex. However, it was not a simple matter to return to a natural pattern of relations between producer and consumer. Everyone remembered only too well what had happened at Novocherkassk in 1962, when Khrushchev had tried in June to raise retail prices on meat and milk to balance out the higher procurement prices the government had started paying for those products in May. The Novocherkassk events marked the beginning of a search for other ways of increasing the level of efficiency in agriculture. It was actually after those events that the discussion touching on profit unfolded and the preparations for a new reform were begun. Unfortunately, Brezhnev did not give much thought to where the additional funds would come from. In his view, that was the concern of the specialists at the State Planning Committee, the Finance Ministry, and the State Bank. That’s what they had been given those seats in office for. But the specialists were not magicians. They could only transfer resources from one part of the budget to

566

Downfall: 1964

another, thus stimulating growth in one area by letting it slow down in the area that had been bled dry by the loss of its resources—or they could simply print more money and thereby balance the quantity of goods on the store shelves with the amount of money in consumers’ pockets, moving toward the deliberate creation of shortages in retail trade. I do not remember which path was actually chosen at that time—probably both. In addition, Brezhnev spoke about the need to increase production of agricultural machinery and about irrigation, in essence repeating what Khrushchev had said at the two preceding “agricultural” plenums, and proposed, quite wisely, that the collective farms be taxed on the basis of net profits rather than total output. If we abstract from some of the rhetoric, the plenum report was following a familiar course, “the continuation of Khrushchev’s agrarian reforms as they had been conceived as early as 1953.”5 But as Brezhnev himself rightly explained in his report, the principles embodied in the 1953 reforms had exhausted themselves by 1959. To keep moving forward, something new was required, and for the previous three years Father had actually been engaged in searching for that something new. How far and in what direction Khrushchev might have gone in his reforms one can only guess, but the path taken by Brezhnev of budgetary infusions into agriculture could only have a temporary effect. Brezhnev’s reform was like a worn-out battery that will still take a charge but after an hour or two runs out of juice, and this time for good. At the end, the plenum of March 1965 also decided some personnel matters. Mazurov was elected a full member of the CC Presidium, and he was made first deputy to the chairman of the Council of Ministers (that is, first deputy premier). In this way, Brezhnev sought to create a counterweight to Kosygin (the chairman of the Council of Ministers), who was not obligated to Brezhnev and was independent of him. Brezhnev’s old friend Ustinov was made a candidate member of the Presidium and also became a Central Committee secretary. Brezhnev feared Podgorny, a pushy man who was now “second secretary” of the Central Committee, and to be on the safe side Brezhnev decided to expand the CC Secretariat by adding someone personally loyal to himself. At the same time, to please Suslov, Ilyichev was removed as a secretary of the Central Committee. This purge of top-level personnel did not affect the “unsinkable” Mikoyan. Despite his closeness to Khrushchev, Mikoyan kept all his posts, remaining a member of the CC Presidium and chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (titular head of state). This gave rise to many of rumors and speculations about Mikoyan’s role in this whole business. Some gossiped that he not only had participated in the conspiracy but also had even played a key role: he had interviewed Galyukov in just the way the conspirators needed, had dispelled Father’s suspicions, and had kept very close track of Khrushchev up to the last minute. I don’t know what to say.

After Khrushchev

567

This theory is quite logical and seems to be confirmed by the facts, but in my view it does not correspond at all to Mikoyan’s true nature. Most likely, from the very first, Mikoyan was carefully calculating every step he took, so as to come out on the winning side of whatever course events might take, as had happened many times in the past. He had behaved that way in June 1953, at the time of Beria’s arrest, and in June 1957, when the “antiparty group” of Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, and others had been defeated, and he chose the same strategy in October 1964. He had no doubt that everyone would find it useful to have a “wise Armenian” at hand, but he miscalculated. Not only did Brezhnev have no use for a “wise Armenian”; he was simply annoyed by Mikoyan’s presence. Also, Brezhnev had his own need for the post Mikoyan was occupying as chairman of the Supreme Soviet. At the very first opportunity, in late 1965 when Mikoyan turned seventy, Brezhnev pensioned him off and transferred Podgorny, who constantly inspired Brezhnev’s suspicions—moving him from the position of “second secretary” in the Central Committee to the mainly honorary post of chairman of the Supreme Soviet. To the end of his days, Mikoyan tried to convince everyone that he had left his posts voluntarily, that he could not and did not want to work with “that crowd.” But we know the value of such statements by those who have been forced to retire. After Father’s retirement the general mood in our country began to change before our very eyes. As early as November 24, 1964, the formerly reformist newspaper Izvestia ran an article by F. Tabeyev, first secretary of the party committee in charge of the Tatar Republic, with a headline calling for “Providing a Scientific Foundation for Economic Research.” He argued that the generally accepted means of assessing the efficiency of an enterprise based on the “normative value” of its output had long since proven its correctness in practice. There was no point in changing, and the talk about profit was simply harmful. The leaders of the regional economic councils remained silent. They were waiting to see what “the bosses” in Moscow would do. The advocates of reform, not understanding that the era of reforms was ending, nevertheless continued to push forward their proposals. Out of inertia the newspapers published them, not yet fully realizing that they were products of the past, the Khrushchev past. On December 4, 1964, Belkin and Birman managed to squeeze one of their old-new articles about profit as a universal measure of success into Izvestia. They spoke of “free” prices that would be set in agreement with the consumer, about ending government control over the number of workers employed at an enterprise and over its wages fund. In general they talked about everything that had not yet become seditious, but in Father’s absence it had lost any relevance. A plenum of the Central Committee that opened on September 27, 1965, discussed the question of “improving the management of industry [by] perfecting and strengthening economic incentives for industrial production.” And it drew a balance sheet on reformism.

568 Downfall: 1964 As head of the government, Kosygin gave the main report. Two-thirds of it, as well as the resolution adopted at the end of the plenum, dealt with restoring the central ministries and eliminating the regional economic councils. From the very beginning, those regional councils had stuck in Kosygin’s craw. And even at the end of his career, at a Politburo session on March 30, 1972, he commented that they were “a manifestation of nationalism.”6 In 1965, vague rumors circulated in Moscow that Podgorny had spoken up in favor of the regional economic councils and was supported by local leaders. Podgorny and Kosygin, it was said, fought each other fiercely. Brezhnev remained neutral. Kosygin won. In the last third of his report, Kosygin spoke about some freedoms to be granted to directors of enterprises. This was in fact a concession to the overthrown Khrushchev. And Kosygin won fame for this very concession. The assignment of priorities in his report—two-thirds on restoring the vertical, topdown lines of authority, and one-third on freedom to the enterprises—that expressed better than anything else the essence of Kosygin’s “reformism.” His passion for order, his desire to have everything arranged in the proper categories, and his conviction that everything would work properly of its own accord if only the categories were strictly adhered to—he was noted for that. He insisted that all state functions be carried out on the basis of the established hierarchy, that everything had to “go through proper channels.” Orders came from the top down, and reports on the implementation of those orders came from the bottom up. “Kosygin had the reputation of being an experienced economic manager, although he had too strong a bent toward purely administrative measures.” That’s a quotation from the memoirs of Mikoyan, who is cautious as ever.7 I too remember a few episodes from the new era of orderliness that was setting in. Thus my superior, the rocket scientist Vladimir Chelomei, tried to report over the direct wire to the head of the government about the successful launching of his intercontinental ballistic missile. The rocket and missile designers Korolyov, Yangel, Chelomei, and Makeyev had become accustomed to telephoning Father immediately after the launching of a rocket or missile, to cheer him with the news of the latest success—or, with voice lowered, to report on a failure. Kosygin picked up the phone and listened to Chelomei’s ecstatic report without any emotion. Then his only response was: “Why are you telling me all this? Don’t you have a minister of your own to report to?” You should have seen the look on Chelomei’s face. I will take the liberty of giving one more typical example. In 1965–1966, Chelomei came up with the idea for the first manned orbital space station, called Almaz (Diamond). The work to be done was enormous, with hundreds of enterprises and dozens of ministries participating. The drafting of a government decree began. The main person in charge of the project, Volodya Polyachenko, went around with the draft of the decree day after day to the ministries and other government offices concerned, gathering signatures. That took more than a year.

After Khrushchev

569

When the last official had signed the decree, by then the signature of the first person who signed was no longer valid; the time limit had expired. Now it was necessary to start over from scratch. Much later, in the 1990s in the United States, at a gathering of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, I attended a session on rockets and missiles. A certain Lieutenant Colonel Smith from the US Air Force Academy gave a report on the structure of the space research program in the Soviet Union. The whole government hierarchy was displayed on placards with little squares linked by colored arrows. The head of the government was at the top, the chief designer was at the bottom, and between them was a labyrinth of state committees on this or that and chief administrations of various ministries. The speaker was flawlessly accurate about all the intricacies of this arrangement, but his conclusion was rather dismaying: this kind of structure could not possibly work. But it did work. Soviet achievements in the space program were proof of that. When my turn to speak came, I explained that Korolyov, for example, did not communicate with some clerk in a state committee, as was required by the schematic diagram, but instead he called Khrushchev directly. If the chief designer’s proposals were approved, Father and Korolyov would jointly put the pressure on the bureaucracy, not going from the bottom up but from the top down, and with all the weight of the Number One person in the government. Entropy receded and all the wheels began to turn. Why do I tell about this? Lieutenant Colonel Smith assumed correctly that such a complicated, centralized bureaucratic structure was incapable of functioning, and unfortunately Kosygin did not understand this in 1965 nor until the end of his days. He wasted all his efforts trying to refine and improve the bureaucracy, inserting new parallel and vertical lines of command. I have a dual attitude toward Kosygin the bureaucrat and Kosygin the person. I have already spoken about his bureaucratic tendencies, and they were the source of the personal drama he experienced as a government leader. But if we talk about his decency as a human being, I must say that among the high-ranking politicians I knew, aside from Father of course, I would say that Kuusinen and Kosygin, and to a certain extent Mikoyan, had decent, human qualities. Also Nikolai Ryzhkov, although I did not know him personally. No one else comes to mind. Now a few words about the last third of Kosygin’s report, covering his reforms affecting directors of enterprises. To begin with, I will quote from Viktor Belkin, a witness to and participant in the drafting of this part of the report by the new head of government. “Khrushchev had been removed, and the country’s new leaders were busy first of all with the elimination of Khrushchev’s legacy—abolishing the regional economic councils and restoring the ministries that were in charge of various sectors of the economy,” Belkin wrote. Nevertheless, Kosygin, who up until shortly before had put the brakes on reforms in every way he could, in his new post had to take up those very same reforms. He set up a commission headed

570 Downfall: 1964 by the deputy chairman of the State Planning Committee, Anatoly Korobov. Three men were appointed to assist Korobov. One of them was Leonid Vaag, a former member of the commission established by Rudnev, head of the State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research, on orders from Khrushchev (see Chapter 90, “All Power to the Director!”). Korobov’s chief assistant was to be Ivan Malyshev, deputy head of the Central Statistical Administration, who had also participated in that earlier commission, along with Vaag. The third man was academician Trapeznikov, a colleague and co-thinker of Belkin and Birman. Malyshev preserved what he could from the draft produced by Rudnev’s commission under the State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research, and Kosygin made this truncated version public at the September 1965 plenum of the Central Committee.8 As sometimes happens in life, Kosygin, when he inherited the post of head of government, also inherited, without wishing to, one of Khrushchev’s “heresies.” Kosygin understood that people were waiting for action to stimulate the economy and that he could not get away with doing anything other than restoring the central ministries and all their bureaucracy. Naturally he knew about the experiments that were under way, and he also realized he could not completely ignore their positive results. Things had moved too far along for that. Thus circumstances forced him to adapt to “Khrushchev’s reforms.” As a result he became famous—and rightly so—as the initiator of the “Kosygin reforms.” The essence of the reforms was to give freedom of decisionmaking to directors of enterprises, although this was on a limited and only temporary basis. I will list the fragments of “Khrushchev’s reforms” that survived after all the editing—and all the accompanying “leakage.” The planning targets handed down from above to the enterprises were reduced in number. The work of the enterprise was now evaluated not only on the basis of the quantity of goods produced but also on the basis of profit. The enterprise was allowed to dispose of its profits on its own. But not all the profits. Only the amount earned above the plan. This could be spent on bonuses or other awards, or on the further development of production, or on improving the conditions of daily life for the workers. Depending on the results of an enterprise’s performance during one year, if the year ended successfully, everyone was paid an additional monthly salary as a bonus. Also some less significant liberties and privileges were provided for. Certain limits, established by the ministries and the State Planning Committee, were imposed on the “freedoms” granted to directors of enterprises. They included the quantities of goods produced as well as their type and variety, the wages fund, the expected amount of profit and future profitability, the amount of obligatory payments by the enterprise to the government budget and the sums to be allocated to the enterprise from the budget, and lastly the amount of centralized capital investment, along with a plan for the introduction of new technology and what was called “indicators of material-technical supply.” Thus in the “Kosygin reforms,” only the horns and hoofs remained of what Father

After Khrushchev

571

had intended. He had wanted to reduce the enterprise’s relationship with the government to merely paying a certain amount—a previously agreed-on percentage of profits—to the government budget annually. After reading the text of the Kosygin report, Trapeznikov joked bitterly: “If you take a fine Swiss watch and remove some of its tiny cogwheels, it won’t tell time anymore.” That’s what happened with the reforms. By September 1965, more than one of the tiny cogwheels had been removed. One of the most painful losses was the definitive renunciation of a realistic and “transparent” pricing system—with prices that would clarify relations between producer and consumer. Instead, there was a return to Stalin’s system of “cross-pollination” between different sectors of the economy. This meant—and I do not hesitate to use this word—voluntaristic reallocation by the central government of resources from enterprises operating efficiently to those operating at a loss. That alone ruled out any prospect for these reforms to become an effective long-term strategy. In October 1965, when the man who originated the idea of a realistic pricing system, Viktor Belkin, visited the office of the newly appointed head of the State Planning Committee, Nikolai Baibakov, with a project for the reform of prices, Baibakov chased Belkin out of his office without letting him finish. Belkin did not poke his nose in again at the offices of either the State Planning Committee or the Council of Ministers. All that remained for him to do was to express his injured feelings to those of us who were his colleagues at the Control Computers Institute. Kosygin did try to undertake something new in industry. But in agriculture, the authorities tried to eliminate any recollection of Khudenko’s experiment. Khudenko continued to work at only one of the three state farms he had been managing. At that one, the Akchi state farm, he was reassigned to serve as the farm’s “economist.” In 1987, in the Gorbachev era, the weekly paper Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette) published an article titled “The Drama at Akchi.” It described the tragic fate of the Akchi state farm and of Khudenko himself, telling how the promising initiative of 1962–1964 was snuffed out. Khudenko, along with the director of the Akchi state farm, Mikhail Vasilyevich Lee, continued to hold on somehow until the end of the 1960s. Then everything fell apart. In June 1970 the farm was shut down—because it was “operating at a loss,” according to the official version. Only Belkin remembered what actually happened in June 1970. “The Akchi experiment should be ended in short order.” This is how he described the regime’s official position. “It is June already, and in August-September Khudenko will sell the farm’s products, make a profit, and then it will be harder to deal with him.” These “concerns” were expressed by Ye. Zakshevsky, at a meeting of the Collegium of the Kazakhstan Ministry of Agriculture. Zakshevsky was the head of its economic planning department. “The state farm’s account at the bank must be frozen immediately,” ordered the minister of agriculture, M. G. Roginets.

572 Downfall: 1964 The account was frozen. There turned out to be 2.1 million rubles in it, even before the profits that would come in from the current year’s harvest. At the same time, before Khudenko, the total worth of that state farm had never gone higher than 1.6 million rubles.9 But no one was interested in those impressive results. Khudenko was accused of committing economic crimes and expelled from the party for “theft.” In 1973 they put him in prison. In 1974, three years after Father’s death, Khudenko died in a prison labor camp. Such is the sad story. Nevertheless, despite the removal of the tiny cogwheels, the Kosygin reforms somehow or other did work, at least for the first three years.10 As a result, the eighth five-year plan, for 1966–1970, in its rate of growth, turned out to be “the most successful in the postwar years,” with the total increase in the gross domestic product amounting to 41 percent. By comparison this was 32 percent in the seventh five-year plan and 28 percent in the ninth five-year plan. As Belkin states, “The real income of the population during the eighth five-year plan increased by almost one-third, while in the previous sevenyear plan it had been only 20 percent.” Different figures circulated around the world. Soviet historians spoke of a 78 percent increase in the Soviet economy during the eighth five-year plan, but the CIA in the United States estimated the increase in the Soviet gross domestic product to have been only 5 percent.11 “Within a year, that is, by the end of 1966, it became evident that it was necessary to develop a reform of the economy, but under the conditions of a revived administrative-command system such a development proved unrealizable. In 1968 they put the brakes on reform, and the most consistent advocates of reform, the so-called ‘devotees of market socialism,’ were ostracized, but this time things went by without repression.” That is how the Russian professor Viktor Belkin summed up the reforms of the 1960s.12 In Belkin’s view, the departure from the policy of decentralization and the return to the old pattern of control by the central ministries in Moscow doomed the economy of the Soviet Union to slow extinction: 5.7 percent growth in 1971–1975 (or 3.1 percent according to the data of the CIA); 4.3 percent (or 2.2 percent) in 1976–1980; 3.6 percent (or 1.8 percent) in 1981–1985; and 3.2 percent (or 2.2 percent) in 1986–1987. These figures are from a statistical table presented by an American professor, Matthew Evangelista, and they confirm Belkin’s conclusions.13 After 1987 the death agony began. It could not have been otherwise. The Kosygin reforms tried to combine two incompatible actions: restoration of all power to the ministries, and the granting of “freedom” to the enterprises—which, however, remained completely dependent on the ministries. Kosygin, without wishing to do so or understanding what he was doing, made the economic system unstable. In order to survive, it had to become one thing or the other—either a centralized system under the ministries; or a decentralized system, run by the enterprise directors,

After Khrushchev

573

a market-type economy, as under the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union from roughly 1922 to 1928. The consequences of the choice that was made were not limited to purely economic ones. Emancipation of the directors from the all-powerful ministries would have led inevitably to the democratization of the whole society. Just as the rise of the “third estate” in Western Europe brought a transformation, whether peaceful or not, from absolute monarchy to parliamentary democracy, the Soviet “third estate,” the enterprise directors, after winning their economic freedom, could not have helped but demand rights that would be firmly established under the law and in a constitution clearly spelling out the relations between them and the political authorities. And that is the fundamental basis of democracy. As a special kind of monument to the Kosygin reforms, there remained the blunt, book-shaped blocks of buildings that stand on New Arbat Avenue in the center of Moscow. Only after the “Kosygin plenum” of September 1965 did those become administrative buildings. Before that they had been designed to serve as residential housing. After the “Kosygin reforms,” however, there turned out to be a “shortage” of office space for the multitude of revived ministries with their thousands and thousands of officials. Thousands, even millions of square meters were needed for them. Kosygin of course ordered that the apartment projects on New Arbat Avenue be turned into office space for the ministries. This rearrangement cost a pretty penny, but no expense was spared. The newly revived ministries required space. The hour of the triumph of the bureaucracy had struck. Within approximately a year, the officials had occupied “their” multistory buildings, and in the evenings the gloomy unlighted windows stared out, unseeing, from these book-shaped structures. Only on some holidays did they come to life. The lights in the windows of selected offices were left on at night, and the lighted windows of each building formed a pattern, with one letter of the alphabet shining from each, producing the acronyms KPSS or SSSR (for the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, respectively). The Kosygin reforms in their essence were merely an aftershock left over from the reformist intentions of the Khrushchev era, which had passed into history. That is what the Kosygin reforms are notable for. After them the era of stagnation set in. It was accompanied by thoughtless and senseless wasteful spending. In addition to agriculture, Brezhnev undertook to “correct” other “excesses” committed by Khrushchev. He set about restoring the military’s surface fleet, strategic aircraft, and ground forces. Unlike Father, Brezhnev felt no remorse about spending money, nor did he think about how deep, or shallow, our country’s pockets might be. He wanted to please everyone, especially the military men, and each branch of the armed forces (army, navy, and air force) insisted it must maintain parity with the corresponding branch in the United States. Because of all this, the Soviet armed forces gradually grew in number from 2.5 million to 5.5 million, that is, they returned to the number of personnel that

574 Downfall: 1964 had existed at the end of the Stalin era in 1953. At the shipyards, more and more new submarines, battleships, and even aircraft carriers were being built. Military aircraft of all types could be counted in the thousands. It was the same with tanks. By the end of the 1980s, their number had passed the 40,000 mark. More than 7,000 atomic cannons were produced. Father had considered it appropriate to limit the number of such nuclear weapons to two—not thousands of them, but simply two—one atomic cannon and one atomic mortar. They would be trundled out onto Red Square during military parades to show the enemy what our capabilities were, but at the same time no resources were squandered on them. The strategic missile forces were also expanded unjustifiably. It is well known that Father was favorably disposed toward missiles, but hardly anyone knows that he set a ceiling of approximately 500 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 500 nuclear warheads. According to the calculations of the General Staff, that quantity was fully capable of destroying the infrastructure of the United States. In Khrushchev’s opinion, that ruled out the possibility of an attack on us by the United States, which meant that it also ruled out the need for production of conventional weapons in larger quantities. After Khrushchev a first-strike theory regained a dominant position—that is, a theory about nuclear strikes against missile launching sites. According to the advocates of this theory, the Americans would have to launch 1,000 of their missiles to knock out our 500 missiles. To neutralize those 1,000 US missiles, the Soviet side had to have 2,000 missiles, and then the Americans in turn would go up to 4,000, and so on without end. Our military-industrial complex and its US counterpart were “helping each other,” each devouring the government budget the way rats devour a pie. Naturally, the smaller the pie, the quicker it gets devoured, and the Soviet pie was several times smaller. In 1961, President Eisenhower, when he left the White House, warned his fellow citizens against the “military-industrial complex.” If it gained too much power, whether in the United States or in the Soviet Union, the threat of a catastrophe would result. Whichever side proved to have the weaker economy would be the first to perish. Seeking to maintain parity in all spheres, navy with navy, air force with air force, and so forth, both sides spent approximately the same amount on “defense.” But in terms of percentages, the share of the economy that went to the military in the Soviet Union significantly exceeded that in the United States. As a result, the money that Father counted on for improving the life of the people all went down the drain. Year after year the store shelves in the Soviet Union became barer and barer until they finally became completely bare. In the 1980s, 20 percent of Soviet families continued to wait for new apartments. Spending on healthcare declined from 6 percent of the gross domestic product in the 1960s to 3 percent at the beginning of the 1980s, with all the consequences that followed from that. The situation was made worse by Brezhnev’s slothful personality. He did not want to trouble himself by talking with scientists or dictating endless memoranda. His assistants would read draft statements to him after his speechwriters

After Khrushchev

575

had produced them, or they might read drafts of laws drawn up by official bodies. Sometimes he would listen to this material as it was read to him, but at other times he would capriciously demand not to be disturbed. Karen Brutenets, deputy head of the Central Committee’s International Department, one of Brezhnev’s countless speechwriters, gives the following recollection of his “work” with Brezhnev at the Zavidovo hunting preserve: “Brezhnev spent more and more time hunting—and took up government affairs only in the intervals between his pursuit of wild game. On one occasion it was necessary for him to decide an urgent matter. He was having dinner after successfully ‘ambushing’ a wild boar. And all of a sudden one of his assistants who had been invited to have dinner with him, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Aleksandrov-Agentov, started talking about the enormous influence Japan had in the contemporary world. It was a natural topic for conversation among top government people. But Brezhnev became extremely irritated, and sharply rebuked his assistant for disturbing his peace while he was having dinner.”14 On another occasion, also at Zavidovo and also during a meal, Brezhnev blasted another assistant who had dared to disturb him with “documents.” “You give me no peace!” he shouted indignantly, threw the papers on the floor without reading them, and returned to his discussion of a skillful shot he had made while hunting. If we make a parallel with pre-revolutionary Russia, Brezhnev was the Soviet version of Tsar Nicholas II, that notoriously weak-willed autocrat of “all the Russias.” They both focused more on the trophies they brought home from hunting or on other pleasures of their private lives. Such matters interested them more than the country they were ruling over. In his diary, Nicholas II would list the number of crows he had killed on his morning walk and the amount firewood he had sawed that day. In the same way, Brezhnev made a personal list of the friends to whom he would send, via the official courier service, cuts of meat from the haunch of the wild boar he had shot that day. The lives of both these Russian “sovereigns” consisted of episodes like that. They were kind to their friends, but indifferent toward their country. Both Brezhnev and Nicholas II, without wishing to, did everything possible and impossible toward the destruction of their own country. Both of them, so gentle in personal matters and so subject to skillful female manipulation, would suddenly become obstinate, not wishing to hear wise counsel from anyone—whether it be Nicholas II refusing to listen to his ministers Sergei Witte or Pyotr Stolypin, or Brezhnev not wanting to hear from his adviser Gennady Voronov. Both men were eager at the first opportunity to get away from their advisers, those uncalled-for and tiresome people. Meanwhile the country was going to ruin at a faster and faster pace, sinking ever deeper into chaos and entropy, which always ended with an explosion, a revolution. Without Nicholas II, a Vladimir Lenin would never have climbed so high. Lenin’s rise was the result of the destructive rule of his predecessor. Likewise, the rule of Leonid Brezhnev paved the way for Boris Yeltsin.

576 Downfall: 1964 Brezhnev and Kosygin, with their senseless and exorbitant spending over the course of two decades, bled the economy dry, and we all ended up as we did. In October 1964, Russians could not have foreseen in their worst nightmares that by turning away from the road of reform, the Soviet Union would lose everything—it would lose out in the economic competition with the West, it would lose the Cold War, and most important, the Soviet regime would squander its own country’s fortune, casting to the four winds the well-being of our people, which in previous years had become more and more substantial. A genuine awareness of the reasons for what happened does not come quickly and easily, and possibly it may never come, but finding someone to put the blame on and to shove the responsibility onto—that can always be done if that is what one wishes.

Part 5 Epilogue

107 Summing Up After a little while, and only a little while, the Manège incident will be forgotten . . . But for a long time people will still live in the housing he [Khrushchev] built—people whom he set free . . . Tomorrow or the day after, no one will continue to bear a grudge against him. But only after many years will we come to realize the full significance he had for all of us . . . In our history there have been plenty of villains, powerful ones, striking and impressive. Khrushchev is that rare, though contradictory, figure who embodies not only goodness but also an awful lot of personal courage of a kind that it wouldn’t be bad for all of us to have.

That is film director Mikhail Romm’s summation of Khrushchev. (As readers will recall, I quoted Romm at length in Chapters 41 and 44 about the Manège incident and its consequences.)1 “After my death, the good things I’ve done will be placed on one side of the scales, and the bad things on the other. And the good that I’ve done for people will weigh more.” That is how Father summed up his own life. Let us also place the eleven years of Khrushchev’s rule on the scales and sum up the balance. The propaganda of the Brezhnev era implied that Khrushchev’s time had been a continuous succession of failures, but without citing any statistics or giving any intelligible or convincing explanations. After Brezhnev the Soviet system was declared to be “totally unreformable, fit only for the scrap heap,” while for some reason the negative attitude toward the Khrushchev era persisted and became even more negative. I cannot agree with either point of view. In fact, everything is reformable, and Khrushchev succeeded with his reforms more than his predecessor Stalin and his immediate “heir” Brezhnev. It is only the incompetents, who broke everything apart, who keep repeating the phrase “not reformable,” muttering it to themselves endlessly. But that’s what incompetent people do. I do not believe in the kind of reform based on the dreamed-up scenarios of dogmatics who don’t have much familiarity with real life. In fact, reform, like war, consists of a series of battles, some victories and some defeats. The overall success or failure of a campaign is defined in terms of gains or losses, not by those who dreamed up the campaign but by those who carried it out. If

579

580 Epilogue in the end you have gained more than you have lost, you are a successful reformer. If not, you’re not. Unfortunately, gains and victories are not eternal. New rulers can cancel out the gains of either the generals or the reformers of earlier times. It is sufficient to recall the example of Tsar Peter III, who withdrew Russian troops from German territory that had been conquered with the blood of Russian soldiers and the skill of Russian commanders during the reign of his predecessor, Empress Elizabeth (daughter of Peter the Great; she reigned from 1741 to 1762). Peter III gave up Berlin without obtaining anything in return. One may feel pained by that loss, but there is no reason to lump together the incompetent, alcoholic Tsar Peter III and his predecessor Elizabeth, even if her accomplishments crumbled to dust. Even sadder is the fate of the reforms begun in the nineteenth century by Tsar Alexander II (who ruled from 1855 to 1881). All his efforts were reduced to nothing by his successor tsars, Alexander III (who ruled from 1881 to 1894) and Nicholas II (who ruled from 1894 to 1917). This eventually brought the country to the point of a revolutionary explosion and the subsequent tribulations of the Russian Civil War and the famine and massive terrorism that accompanied and followed that tragic conflict. After the destruction of World War II, Russian society finally entered a historical stage that is normal for all civilized communities—a stage of reform, in which the country makes adjustments to correspond with changed external conditions. I am referring to the eleven-year period under Khrushchev. Something began to be accomplished during that time, and people began to feel confidence in the future. Then the old pattern repeated itself. The reforms of Khrushchev, just like those of Alexander II, were reduced to nothing during the period of rule by Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s supposed “heir.” What followed in turn after him, in 1991, was a counter-revolution—or what might now be called restoration. And the whole cycle has started over again. You get the feeling that Russia is trapped under an evil spell. It keeps trying to break out of that spell, but no matter how hard it tries, it cannot. And this closed circle under enchantment is made worse by Russian maximalism. At each historical turn, the new rulers raze to the ground everything that had been constructed earlier—“down to the very foundations.” The new rulers start again, from the ground up, erecting their own edifice according to their own design. That was how Tsar Peter I (Peter the Great) acted. He not only made his boyars cut their beards and wear Western-style clothing, instead of the Orientalstyle caftans of old Muscovy that reached down to the ground; he also threw out all the potential for change that had built up before his coming to power. Lenin, in his own way, repeated what Peter the Great had done, declaring all of Russia’s previous history to be “one huge mistake.” The generation of anti-Communists who came to power in the 1990s, acting like the Bolsheviks of the early twentieth century, followed in the footsteps of both Peter and Lenin, lulling themselves to sleep with fairy tales about carrying on glorious causes that had long since moldered in the dust of history—

Summing Up

581

that of Stolypin, of Tsar Alexander III, and of Ioann Kronshtadtsky (John of Kronstadt), a turn-of-the-century religious leader, little known today, who lived from 1829 to 1908. (Kronshtadtsky’s real name was Vladimir Ivanovich Sergeyev, and during his lifetime he was considered by some to be a virtual saint.) On the basis of these fantasies they threw out everything built up by more recent predecessors. For example, Stolypin and his reforms are not the real issue here. Those had been eradicated much earlier by successive governments, and they were no longer applicable for current use. Here too it turns out that a new structure has barely been built up to the second floor when a new generation of “builders” tears it down, digs up its foundations, and puts up new walls of their own. This is repeated, decade after decade, century after century. At the same time, Russia’s more pragmatic neighbors, despite all the most dreadful calamities, have contrived somehow to preserve the achievements of preceding generations, and their state systems and societies keep growing, one floor above another. The whole thing is simply shameful, and makes one want to throw up their hands in disgust. Today, as I write these lines (in 2007), the post-Yeltsin leaders are trying to restore what was destroyed, and they have accomplished something. Hope has reappeared in our country, and may God grant that the same fate does not befall their reforms. I am often asked to name Khrushchev’s main achievement and worst mistake. For a long time I felt at a loss. What achievement to select among so many, and what mistake to choose as the worst? Then it dawned on me. His main mistake was that he undertook all of that—putting up five-story apartment buildings, cultivating the Virgin Lands, promoting corn, developing missiles and the space program, undertaking de-Stalinization and democratization. He could have lived for his own pleasure, remodeling the palaces of the tsars and having new architectural masterpieces built. And he would have lived to a ripe old age. He would have left a monument to himself in works of architecture instead of the five-story prefabricated apartment buildings. He could have left a legacy of beautiful parks with fountains and marvelous trees instead of the epic campaign for corn. As for ordinary Russians and their lives, they have always been thought about last, if at all. The only thing is that such a life did not appeal to Father, and he lived his life in his own way, with no regrets. In this book I have tried to investigate what actually happened in the Khrushchev era. I dare to hope that I have succeeded to some extent. The main question is: Did he bring about what he planned? Yes—and no. An unbiased look at the Khrushchev era will show that he undoubtedly succeeded in realizing much of what he intended. Not everything and not in full, but in 1964 Russians lived better than they had in 1953. Not as much better as Father had proposed, and not as much better as they themselves would have wanted, but much better, in greater prosperity, in new apartments, and with

582 Epilogue certainty about what the next day would bring. “I will not say that everyone lived well, but they never lived better, either before or after.” These are the words of a post-Soviet historian, Barsukov.2 The statistics, both Soviet and Western, testify that the high point for living standards in Russia in the twentieth century was in the mid-1960s. There are generalized indicators of the “health” of any given nation. The first of these is life expectancy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, before the October Revolution, Americans lived fifteen years longer than Russians on average. The Stalin-era repression and World War II reshuffled all the statistical “cards.” After World War II, the conditions of existence in the Soviet Union gradually normalized. From 1955 on, the average life expectancy for Soviet citizens steadily rose. In 1955–1956 it was 67 years of age, compared to 47 in the prewar years of 1938 and 1939. From 1958 to 1962, life expectancy increased from 68.5 to 69.5. By 1964 it had reached 70.5. For comparison, life expectancy for Americans remained at 70 for 1958 and 1960 and 1962, and only in 1964 did it increase slightly, to 70.25. Then the statistical curves diverge. As early as 1968, life expectancy fell in the case of Russians, just a small drop so far, to 69.8 years. But for Americans it rose to 70.5. By 1980 the gap had widened. In the United States, life expectancy passed 74 years, but in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, up until 1985, it varied slightly between 67.7 and 69 years. By the end of the twentieth century, the disparity in average life expectancy between the United States and what was now post-Soviet Russia had returned to the numbers we started out with at the beginning of the twentieth century, a difference of fifteen years.3 In the years 1962–1964, the highest birthrate ever was recorded in the Soviet Union, an indicator of people’s confidence in the future. At the same time, the survival rate for infants doubled (that is, infant mortality was cut in half). In 1926, 79 infants per 1,000 births did not survive their first year. In 1953 the figure dropped to 68, and in 1964 only 29 out of 1,000 infants did not survive.4 The picture is similar with the male mortality rate. By 1965 it had fallen to its lowest level in the twentieth century.5 As a result, in the years 1953–1964 the total population of our country steadily increased—from 178.5 million in the early 1950s to 229.2 million in 1964. Let me cite another economic parameter. Beginning from 1957 the effectiveness of economic activity was evaluated as a ratio comparing capital investment to total annual output. The lower this ratio was, that is, the greater the output per ruble invested, the better. According to statistics cited in reports by the World Bank for 1995, these figures were the lowest in the Khrushchev decade. In the 1950s the figure was 1.6 and in the first half of the 1960s it was about 2, but then it began to grow steadily and reached 2.9 during the 1970s. The Soviet economy under Khrushchev, from 1953 to 1964, can be likened to the so-called Asian Tigers in the period of their most rapid growth (for Japan the figures were between 2.3 and

Summing Up

583

3.2; for South Korea, between 2.8 and 3.7; and for Taiwan, between 2.6 and 3.1). Here too the figures show to our advantage. These generalized conclusions are also confirmed by other indicators, such as the output per worker. In the years 1928–1939 the average figure in the Soviet Union was 2.9. From 1940 to 1949 it was 1.9, and in the years 1950–1959 it jumped to 5.8, but after that it fell. In the years 1960–1969 it was already down to 3.0, and in the years 1970–1979, down to 2.4, while in the years 1980–1987 it was down to 1.4. The same picture can be seen with regard to capital investments per worker. In the years 1928–1939 the figure was 2.9; in 1940–1949, 1.9; in 1950–1959 it reached the peak of 7.4, then fell to 5.4 in 1960–1969, 5.0 in 1970–1979, and 4.0 in 1980–1987. And here are some curious statistics about the rebuilding of the infrastructure. I obtained them from a statistical compilation called Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR (National Economy of the USSR) that was published annually. Calculations begin with the year 1970. Infrastructure younger than 5 years old in 1970 constituted 41.1 percent of the economy; that between 6 and 10 years old was 29.9 percent; and between 11 and 20 years old constituted 20.9 percent; while infrastructure that was older than 20 years was only 7.8 percent of the economy. As the years went by, this proportion changed. The infrastructure gradually got older. I have decided not to pile figures upon figures, and in confirmation of what I am saying will give only the average figures. In 1970 the average age for infrastructure was 8.30 years; in 1980 it was 9.31 years; in 1985, 9.91 years; and in 1989, 10.32 years. Now, on to housing. As I have mentioned, the five-story housing built with prefabricated panels is not in favor today. Undoubtedly, the five-story buildings made with prefabricated panels have become dilapidated, but all expectations were that they would be torn down as early as the 1980s. The “panel-construction revolution,” a product of Khrushchev’s initiative, was a sign of the times, an expression of the conditions then prevailing. In this case Father was running neck and neck with other countries of Europe, above all England. After the destruction by German bombing in World War II, they too were suffering from a housing shortage and eased the shortage with the help of reinforced concrete panels. From 1950 to 1960 the available housing in the Soviet Union more than doubled.6 To express this in more specific figures, in the years 1952–1958 about 380 million square meters of housing were made available for use, then in the years 1959–1965 another 767 million square meters became available, an annual average increase of 109 million square meters.7 In 1950, 5.3 million people moved into new apartments; in 1951, 5.4 million did so; in 1954, the figure was 6.5 million; in 1956, 7.8 million; in 1957, 10.1 million; in 1958, 11.5 million; in 1959, 12.6 million; in 1960, 12 million; in 1961, 11.3 million; in 1962, 11.2 million; in 1963, 11 million, and in 1964, 10.3 million.8

584 Epilogue In the later years, 1961–1964, the number of people receiving new housing was reduced, not because the number of square meters made available had become smaller, but because in those years design of apartments of larger size with improved floor plans had begun. To sum up the total, from 1953 through 1964 almost two-thirds of the population of our country bettered their housing conditions. In the cities, they received new apartments, and in the villages, new houses were built. Those who remained in older housing were able to expand into rooms that had been abandoned by their neighbors, who had moved to new locations. Simultaneously with the new housing, infrastructure to accompany it was built. In 1964 alone, construction included new schools for 1.6 million pupils, childcare centers for 546,000 children, new hospitals with 55,000 hospital beds, and so forth. I cannot fail to mention that in those same years, pipelines for natural gas began to spread across the entire country and gas stoves were installed in people’s apartments. From 1958 to 1965 the number of apartments with natural gas increased five times over, from 2 million to 10.4 million.9 And now for a few words about the income of the population. From 1958 through 1964 alone, wages rose on average from 67.9 rubles per month to 98.7 rubles per month—that is, wages rose by almost 50 percent over this period.10 A pension law adopted in 1956 set the retirement age for men at sixty and for women at fifty-five, and the ceiling for pensions was raised to 120 rubles per month.11 In 1958 a stop was put to the practice of forcing Soviet citizens to “voluntarily” buy government bonds, which actually reduced the annual income of working people by one month’s salary and sometimes the equivalent of two months’. This decision also stopped the creation of a government financial pyramid. Although it was unlike the pyramids built in other times and other places, it was done by force. It’s true that, at the same time, the maturation of these government bonds was postponed by twenty years. Of course, it would have been better to stop forcing people to buy these bonds while also continuing to pay for those that had matured. But such payments would have been at the expense of new housing construction or the development of agriculture. That is, at the expense of the same ordinary people. Opinions differ about this. As in the case of any financial pyramid, this one too will find its defenders. In the wake of the increase in personal income, the structure of personal spending also changed. The sale of retail goods from 1958 to 1964 increased from 68 billion rubles to 105 billion, and that of durable goods rose especially quickly, which always testifies to the increased well-being of a population. For example, in 1960 Soviet citizens purchased 4 million radios, 500,000 television sets, 1 million washing machines, and 500,000 refrigerators. But in 1965 the corresponding figures were 5 million, 3.3 million, 3 million, and 1.5 million. I have intentionally chosen years that Brezhnev officially declared to have been a period of decline.12

Summing Up

585

Parallel with the increased prosperity of people, the workweek was shortened. A decree of March 8, 1956, shortened the workday by one hour on days before holidays, and at the end of 1960 a transition was made from the eighthour workday to the seven-hour workday. Later (in 1967) the forty-hour workweek with two days off each week was introduced. The living conditions of the peasants also improved. The collective farms established under Stalin had paid their members on the basis of so-called workdays, giving them a share of the total product that remained after the collective farm had paid its obligations to the government. In fact this had reduced the payments received by the farmers to a symbolic amount, sometimes nothing at all. A decree of March 6, 1956, provided that collective farmers would be paid in advance, every month, an amount equivalent to one-fourth of all the income the collective farm was likely to earn in that month plus an advance of half of what the government would pay the farm for both obligatory and nonobligatory delivery of agricultural products. In 1957 and 1958 the private plots of land adjoining the homes of collective farmers, and of industrial and blue-collar workers, were released from obligatory payments to the government of shares of the products grown on those plots. In 1958, collective farmers were given individual passports, and thus for the first time in history obtained the right to leave their place of residence without asking permission from the authorities—although it took more than a decade, up to 1973, before this right was fully implemented for all peasants. In 1964, provisions were made for the pension system to be extended to collective farmers. Only a growing economy could make possible the increase in wages and pensions and reduction of the workday. And growing it was. The portion representing income was growing not just at the expense of traditional branches of industry. New chemical plants paid for themselves in two or three years. Father called them “money factories.” Four years after the cultivation of the Virgin Lands began, that agricultural area became profitable. I don’t want to sound as though I am making unsubstantiated statements, so I will cite a number of figures. I will begin with industry, comparing 1950, the last year of the final “Stalin” five-year plan, with 1964. The growth, as we see in the table, was quite substantial, but industry had also grown in previous times. Something else, however, was dragged up out of the quagmire and set into motion, something that had seemed irretrievable, the bogged-down wagon of agricultural production, and that was Khrushchev’s accomplishment. During the eleven years from 1953 to 1964, the total production of agricultural goods increased by 75 percent.13 Although the population of the country increased at the same time, by 41.2 million people, or, if we round it off, by 20 percent, it is evident even to a nonspecialist that an additional quantity of food of no small size had appeared on each person’s table.14

586 Epilogue Industry Production, 1950 and 1964 Type of Industry Cloth (million meters) Shoes (million pairs) Electric power (billion kilowatt hours) Oil (million tons) Natural gas (billion cubic meters) Cement (million tons) Fertilizers (million tons) Steel (million tons) Coal (million tons)

1950

1964

3.9 226 91 55 30 10 9.6 45 391

9.1 486 459 229 110 64 25.4 62 554

Sources: Central Committee report to the Twentieth Party Congress, published in Pravda, February 15, 1956; and Central Statistical Administration report “O vypolnenii 1964 goda” (On the Fulfillment [of the Economic Plan] in 1964), published in Pravda, January 30, 1965.

What did this additional product consist of? The grain yield increased from 82.5 million tons in 1953 to 152.1 million tons in 1964, and the lion’s share of the added product can be attributed to the Virgin Lands. In 1953, Siberia and Kazakhstan contributed on average 35 percent of the harvest for the Soviet Union as a whole. But in 1964 this figure was 55 percent. In 1953, government procurements of grain amounted to 31.1 million tons (of all types of grain), but in 1964 these amounted to 68.3 million tons.15 From 1953 to 1964, meat consumption increased from 5.8 million tons to 10 million tons, of milk from 36.5 million tons to 72.6 million tons, and of eggs from 16.1 billion (by the piece) to 29.1 billion.16 These impressive successes in raising livestock and poultry were achieved not only as a result of reduced entropy but also, and primarily, as a result of the forced introduction of a new crop—corn. It became the main source of feed and fodder for dairy cows, beef cattle, hogs, chickens, and the like. The general health of the economy of any country is measured by the size of the gross domestic product (GDP). The figures differ with regard to the Soviet period, which is understandable: statistics is a politicized branch of knowledge and reflects the interests and prejudices of the groups ordering the statistics. According to Soviet data, the increase in the national income from 1951 through 1958 was on average 11.4 percent; from 1958 to 1961 it was 9.1 percent; and from 1961 to 1965 it was 6.5 percent. The corresponding CIA figures for Soviet GDP are 6.0, 5.8, and 4.8 percent.17 Compared to the rate of growth of GDP (both in the Soviet Union and in the United States), these figures were quite respectable, but the reduced tempo in the early 1960s was cause for alarm. Father was also worried about it, and that is precisely why he undertook to carry out a new reform. History has confirmed the correctness of the policy course Father was groping toward. Even the “Kosygin reforms,” which had been purged of Khrushchev’s

Summing Up

587

so-called radicalism, ensured substantially increased growth for the economy. I have no doubt that the medicine chosen by Father to cure the first symptoms of illness shown by the Soviet economy would have led to its complete recovery. Of course I’m not talking about Father as such. The time allotted to him by history was running out, or had almost completely run out. If his successors had continued to move in the direction he chose—decentralization—if they had placed the burden of the fight against entropy on the shoulders of enterprise directors, by 1980 the country might have reached the level of economic growth envisaged by the State Planning Committee over a twenty-year period, a projection that was embodied in the 1961 party program. Whether the society would then have been called “communist” or something else is an entirely different matter. The name is not the issue. In confirmation of what I am saying I will quote again from academician Zelenin: “Khrushchev’s conception is close to that of the contemporary Chinese model of a market economy and differs fundamentally from the Stalin model of a ‘system of commodity production of a special kind.’”18 We are convinced that the Chinese model has proved to be more than successful. That could have happened in our country as well, fifteen years before Deng Xiaoping. But it did not happen. By his nature, Father was a rational person and could not tolerate wastefulness or anything that to him seemed wasteful, from unnecessary ornamentation in architecture to unproductive defense spending. He considered it possible to spend money on armaments and the maintenance of an army only within the limits of what was necessary for the security of the country, and not one kopeck more. He gave preference to diplomacy to achieve his purposes. He skillfully combined negotiations with pressure on the opponent, up to and including international crises, thus forcing the United States, against its own will, to recognize the equal military power of the Soviet Union. The security of the country was reliably guaranteed by a nuclear missile shield, which allowed Father to begin the radical reduction of the conventional armed forces, from 5.5 million personnel in 1953 to 2.5 million in 1964, and his aim was by the end of the 1960s to bring that number down to half a million. Not only did he economize on resources this way, but also the growing economy received the clear minds and strong bodies it so much needed. Father also stopped the construction of the surface ships for the Oceanic Blue Water Navy. He did not see any use for such vessels. We were a continental power that did not depend on shipping routes across the oceans, as the United States and Western Europe did. Everything we needed for our existence—grain, petroleum, natural gas, metal—we could produce ourselves, and deliver it to the end users over dry land. Cruisers and aircraft carriers for making foreign visits and carrying out naval maneuvers for show—that was too expensive a pleasure to indulge in. The entire history of Russia confirms this. The fleets built up by Peter the Great with such hardship rotted away unused by his

588 Epilogue successors. Russian naval squadrons hardly ever made an appearance beyond the Black Sea and the Baltic with the exception of some excursions into the Adriatic in the eighteenth century and into the Korean Strait in 1905, where the Russian fleet was regrettably destroyed by the Japanese near Tsushima. During the Crimean War (1854–1855), no better use could be found for the Black Sea fleet than to sink it to form an obstacle blocking the entry to the Gulf of Sevastopol. To this day, Father is denounced for having destroyed the naval glory of Russia. But he had to choose between naval glory and housing, including for naval officers and sailors. Either cruisers, if someone could explain what they could contribute to the security of our country, or apartments. For the cost of one cruiser, thousands of apartments could be built. Father preferred the apartments, and he was not wrong. In the 1970s and 1980s the surface fleet was “restored,” but it did not bring our country any glory or any useful advantage, only troubles and worries and spending to “refurbish” warships that never found any use and ended up rusting on scrap heaps. Father also dealt “strictly” with strategic air force planes. Specialists concluded that Soviet bombers had no chance of reaching targets in the United States in the face of US antiaircraft defenses. In the age of missiles, such aircraft became an incomparable burden for the budget. Father reduced the production of tanks, artillery, and other weapons, and was getting ready to reduce that production still further before his ouster. He wanted it reduced to a level that was rationally sufficient. As a result, substantial resources were freed for transfer to housing, agriculture, and other needs. In the Soviet Union and in the United States in those years the newspapers often printed illustrations showing an aircraft carrier or a bomber and next to it illustrations of houses, hospitals, and schools, indicating how many such things could be built for the same amount of money spent on aircraft carriers and bombers. The reason so much was built in those years in our country was that our resources were disposed of rationally. Gaining the status of a world superpower while at the same time reducing the armed forces and military spending—hardly anyone in history has succeeded in doing that. What other achievements should we recall? After Stalin’s death, Russians once again began to make the acquaintance of foreigners. In 1953 only 43 visitors came to the Soviet Union from Western countries, but by 1956 the number had grown to 2,000. By 1964, however, the number was already 20,000. Most of them were businesspeople, the most daring of whom wanted to see for themselves what the possibilities of this new market might be. In the wake of the businesspeople, soon came tourists.19 The years of Father’s rule were marked by the dismantling of Stalin’s GULAG (the Russian acronym for the State Administration for Prison Camps). Political prisoners returned from behind the barbed wire to a normal life. The secret police lost their former status over and above the party and the government.

Summing Up

589

They were transformed into a mere “committee” attached to the Council of Ministers, and according to the table of ranks, that was even lower than the Ministry of Agriculture, while the chairman of this new Committee of State Security (Russian acronym, KGB) was a civilian without any military insignia. Literary magazines that had been shut down in the 1940s were revived and new ones were founded. Old authors returned from oblivion and new ones appeared. Poets read their verses in front of crowds of thousands in city squares, in the Great Hall of Moscow’s Polytechnic Museum, and at Luzhniki stadium. Fear gradually faded from our society’s consciousness. In his memoirs, Father urged that this process be carried further: “We simply must be bolder about providing an opportunity for the ‘creative intelligentsia’ to express themselves, to be active, to create. To create!”20 The conflicts that poets and artists had with the authorities, including with Khrushchev himself, although they resounded very loudly, had results that differed from those in preceding periods of Soviet history. In the end, they only stirred the air, with serious consequences no more. The first dissidents made their appearance. The authorities did not know how to proceed and began making mistakes. They were adjusting themselves to the new situation. Their opponents were also adjusting. “In the ten-year period of Khrushchev’s rule there occurred the highest point of development for Soviet science.” This assertion was made by Vitaly Yurevich Afiani, chief archivist for the Russian Academy of Sciences.21 With regard to religion, matters stood somewhat differently. Marxism gradually degenerated from a scientific theory into “the only correct doctrine of world-historical significance”—that is, something similar to the Bible, the Torah, or the Koran; in other words, Marxism became a new religion. Its religious attributes became ever more clearly defined: portraits of Lenin replaced the icons in the “holy corner” of peasants’ huts. No speech or publication could appear without suitable quotations from the new “Apostles.” Most newly arising religions ruthlessly destroy their predecessor religions. The Christians fought furiously against the pantheons of Hellenistic and Roman deities and other rival cults, such as Mithraism, destroying what they could and borrowing the rest for their own needs. Temples of Zeus and Athena were turned into Christian churches. In the Soviet Union this same, well-worn path was followed. Many churches were torn down or transformed into stables, storehouses for vegetables, scientific laboratories, social clubs, movie theaters, or museums. It seemed that the old religion was doomed. Father even joked once that during his lifetime he would succeed in shaking the hand of the last priest. Khrushchev did not fight against religion the way the Bolsheviks had fought in the years after the revolution. He did not have churches blown up or items confiscated from them, nor did he send priests into internal exile. Churches were closed, rural ones above all, because of an alleged “lack of attendance,” just as at the very beginning of the twenty-first century rural schools in Russia were closed because of an alleged “lack of pupils” to attend them. In

590 Epilogue 1953, there were 13,508 churches in the Soviet Union; in 1964, there remained 7,873, slightly more than half. The Russian Orthodox Church did not die, but the history of its post-Soviet revival is not relevant to the subject of this book. Could Father have accomplished something further? Probably. He could have reestablished justice once and for all by restoring the Volga German Autonomous Republic and finally solving the problem of the Crimean Tatars. He could have completed his reform of the armed forces. He could have reformed the economy so as to bring our country to a state of abundance by 1980, as promised in the party program, to a decent existence for all the people, which through some misunderstanding we called “communism.” He could have had the new constitution approved and continued to democratize the Soviet Union, breaking the chains of a slavish consciousness in our society, the tendency to worship tyrants, because as Father saw it, Stalinism was a system fit only for slaves. He could have rejuvenated the CC Presidium and turned power over to a new generation . . . to Shelepin and Semichastny?! Shelepin most likely would have turned back the hands of time. It’s anyone’s guess which ruler would have been worse, Shelepin or Brezhnev. Father could have accomplished much more. But at the same time he couldn’t. He didn’t have the strength to complete what he had begun. He relied more and more on his successors, and so it didn’t really matter whether they took power in 1964 or, as he expected, in 1966 after the Twenty-Third Party Congress. But he relied on them in vain. I will end this chapter as I began it. In 1964, Khrushchev’s reforms were broken off. They were brought to an abrupt end, just as those of Alexander II had been. For example, the Tsar-Emancipator, Alexander II, never managed to sign a decree that in time would have brought Russia to a kind of “constitutional” monarchy. On March 1, 1881, he died at the hand of liberals, who thereby opened the road for the restoration of “stability.” On October 14, 1964, fortunately they did not kill Khrushchev, but they drove him from power, also in the name of “stability.” I don’t know why such things have happened in Russia since time immemorial. Why does a fate like that befall every reformer, whether it be Alexander II, Emperor of All the Russias, or Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party? In the first instance the restoration of “stability” ended up causing a revolution, and in the second, a counter-revolution. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Why? What for? I have no answer.

Biographical Notes on the Cast of Characters

This list of brief biographies consists mainly of individuals from Rus-

sian and Soviet history who are mentioned in the text but not likely to be well known to readers in the English-speaking world of the twenty-first century. Among them are figures from various fields, such as government and politics, science and technology, agriculture, engineering, the arts, and so forth. Not included here are people who are generally well known in the West— celebrities like Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, Benny Goodman, prominent politicians such as presidents of the United States or British cabinet members, most rulers of other countries, such as the shah of Iran, the king of Afghanistan, Fidel Castro of Cuba, and the like. Also not included are familiar figures from Russian and Soviet history, such as Russia’s great writers, who are well known to the world. Also not included are many individuals of minor significance who are referred to only in passing in the book. Usually their position in Soviet society is mentioned in the narrative, such as for provincial officials who make only a brief appearance—among them Butusov, Zolotukhin, and Kovalenko, or Kuznetsova, director of the Bolshevichka clothing factory, one of the fortyeight enterprises involved in Khrushchev’s experiment with changed methods of economic management. In selecting biographical information about Communist Party and Soviet government officials, I used two sources: Gosudarstvennaia vlast SSSR—Vysshie organy vlasti i upravleniia i ikh rukovoditelei, 1923–1991: Istoriko-biograficheskii spravochnik (State Power in the USSR—The Highest Bodies of Government and Administration and Their Leaders, 1923–1991: A Historico-Biographical Handbook), compiled by V. I. Ivkin and published in Moscow by Rossiyskaya Politicheskaya Entsiklopediya (ROSSPEN) in 1999; and Tsentralnyi Komitet KPSS, VKP(b), RKP(b), RSDRP(b), 1917–1991: Istoriko-biograficheskii spravochnik (Central Committee of the CPSU, AUCP[B], RCP[B], and RSDLP[B], 1917– 1991: A Historico-Biographical Handbook), compiled by Yu. V. Goryachev and published in Moscow by Parade Publishing House in 2005. (For the latter title, “CPSU,” “AUCP[B],” “RCP[B],” and “RSDLP[B]” are the acronyms for the various official names of the Soviet Communist Party.) 591

592 Biographical Notes For artists and writers who appear in my narrative, I decided to use only one source: the Bolshoi entsiklopedicheskii slovar (Great Encyclopedic Dictionary), compiled by the editors of the Bolshaya rossiyskaya entsiklopediya (Great Russian Encyclopedia) in St. Petersburg and Moscow and published by Noring in 2002. Of course, such information can be found in other sources, but there is a simple reason for my choice of this one reference work. Without excessive detail, it is sufficiently extensive and authoritative, providing information about people who at the end of the twentieth century still remained significant, if only marginally. In other words, a natural selection has taken place of those who deserve to be remembered, in contrast to those who, in the opinion of an authoritative group of editors, have sunk into oblivion. In later editions, after 2002, this process of selection continued, but it seemed to me that this cutoff date was neither too close nor too far from the events described. And that was exactly what was needed, at least in my opinion. Readers may disagree with me. That is their right. And they can turn to other, more specialized sources to find information that is lacking here.1 * * * Adzhubei, Aleksei Ivanovich (1924–1993). Newspaper editor; Khrushchev’s son-inlaw (married Rada Khrushcheva in 1949); 1952–1959, an editor, then deputy chief editor, then chief editor at Komsomolskaya Pravda (Komsomol Truth), main newspaper of the Young Communist League (Komsomol); 1959–1964, chief editor of Izvestia, the main government newspaper; after Khrushchev’s ouster, Adzhubei was made the head of a department at the magazine Sovetsky Soyuz (Soviet Union). Akhmadulina, Bella (Izabella) Akhatovna (1937–2010). Soviet poet; her collections of lyric verse include, among many others: Struna (String [of an Instrument], 1962), Uroki muzyki (Music Lessons, 1970), Svecha (Candle, 1977), Taina (The Secret, 1983), and Sad (Garden, 1987); a collection of her translations from Georgian is titled Sny Gruzii (Dreams of Georgia, 1977); published a prose work in 2005: Mnogo sobak i sobaka (Many Male Dogs and a Female); awarded the State Prize (1989). Akhmatova, Anna Andreyevna (real last name, Gorenko) (1889–1966). Russian and Soviet poet, one of the “Acmeist” school of the early twentieth century; collections of her lyric verse include Vecher (Evening, 1912), Chyotki (Rosary, 1914), and Beg vremeni (The Racing of Time, 1909–1965); her other works include a cycle of autobiographical poems titled Rekviem (Requiem, 1935–1940), the long-verse narrative Poema bez geroya (Poem Without a Hero, 1940–1965), and poems about Pushkin; in 1946, she was criticized harshly by Stalin and Zhdanov, and although she was not arrested, no publication of her works was permitted until after Stalin’s death. Aksyonov, Vasily Pavlovich (1932–2009). Soviet and American writer; one of the originators of the genre of “slangy” prose about young people in the 1960s, with such short novels as Kollegi (Colleagues, 1960), Zvyozdny bilet (Ticket to the Stars, 1961), and Zatovarennaia bochkotara (Surplus Barrelware, 1968), and the novel V poiskakh zhanra (In Search of a Genre, 1978). Emigrated to the West in 1980; among his works published abroad were the novels Ozhog (The Burn, 1980) and Ostrov Krym (The Island of Crimea, 1981), the short novel V poiske grustnogo bebi

Biographical Notes

593

(Searching for Melancholy Baby, 1986), and the trilogy Moskovskaia saga (Moscow Saga, 2001). Aleksandrov, Anatoly Petrovich (1903–1994). Soviet physicist; author of works on dielectrics (nonconductors) and on the electrical and mechanical attributes of polymers; in 1941, helped develop a magnetic system for protecting ships against mines; developed atomic reactors for electric power plants and for submarines, icebreakers, and other ships; in 1953, became a full member of the Academy of Sciences, and its president from 1975 to 1986; awarded the Lenin Prize (1959) and the State Prize (1942, 1949, 1951, 1953); thrice Hero of Socialist Labor (1954, 1960, 1978). Alekseyevsky, Yevgeny Yevgenyevich (1906–1979). Soviet government official; in 1932, became deputy people’s commissar, then people’s commissar, for water management in the Tajik Soviet republic; in the later 1930s, worked in various regional agricultural administrations in central Russia; served in World War II; 1946–1963, deputy minister of agriculture responsible for irrigation in the Ukrainian Soviet republic; 1963–1965, chairman of the state committee overseeing irrigation-based agriculture, under the Soviet State Planning Committee; 1965–1979, headed the Soviet Ministry for Land Reclamation and Water Management. Alikhanov, Abram Isaakovich (1904–1970). Soviet physicist; specialist on the nucleus of the atom, and on cosmic rays; participated in developing nuclear accelerators and heavy water–moderated nuclear reactors; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1943; awarded the State Prize (1941, 1948, 1953); Hero of Socialist Labor (1954). Andronov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1929–1998). Artist known for his “severe style” and such dramatic landscapes as Night in Soligalich, analytical self-portraits, and mosaic panels such as Man and the Press, displayed in the office building of the newspaper Izvestia (1977); awarded the State Prize (1979). Andropov, Yuri Vladimirovich (1914–1984). Party and government official from November 1982 to February 1984; from 1938 to 1951, worked in the Young Communist League in Yaroslavl and later in the Karelian Soviet republic, where he also worked in the party apparatus; 1951–1953, worked for the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party; 1954–1957, Soviet ambassador to Hungary; 1957–1967, headed the newly created CC Department for Liaison with Socialist Countries; became a secretary of the Central Committee in 1962; after Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, Andropov became a candidate member of the CC Presidium (Politburo); 1967–1982, chairman of the Committee of State Security (KGB), replacing Semichastny; in 1973, became a full member of the Politburo; in 1982, succeeded Brezhnev as general secretary of the party’s Central Committee; in June 1983, became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (formal head of state); died in February 1984. In the 1964 plot to remove Khrushchev, his leanings were toward the Brezhnev-Podgorny group. Relations between him and Khrushchev had been purely businesslike. Antonov-Ovseyenko, Vladimir Aleksandrovich (1883–1939). Russian revolutionary and prominent political figure in the Soviet era; in 1917, during the October Revolution, he directed the seizure of the Winter Palace, and later was one of the organizers of the Red Army. From 1922 to 1924, headed the Political Directorate of the Soviet armed forces; from 1924 to 1934, Soviet ambassador to Lithuania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia; in 1934, headed the procurator’s office of the Russian Federation; in 1936, assigned to Barcelona, Spain, where he served as Soviet consul; in 1937, recalled from Spain and briefly appointed people’s commissar of justice for the Russian Federation; a victim of Stalin’s repression, he was arrested and shot; posthumously rehabilitated. Aristov, Averky Borisovich (1903–1973). Party and government official; 1932–1939, engineer at a factory, then a researcher and teacher; earned a candidate’s degree in

594 Biographical Notes technical sciences in the field of metallurgy; beginning in 1939, active in party work, serving as a secretary, then first secretary of various province committees in Siberia; 1955–1960, secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party; 1957–1961, deputy chairman of the Central Committee’s Bureau for the Russian Federation; 1957–1962, member of the CC Presidium; 1961–1971, Soviet ambassador to Poland; 1971–1973, Soviet ambassador to Austria. Arutunyan, Aleksandr Grigoryevich (1920– ). Soviet composer and pianist; among his compositions are vocal symphonic works such as Cantata on the Motherland (1948), a symphony (1957), and the opera Sayat-Nova (1969); awarded the State Prize (1949); named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union (1970). Ashkenazy, Vladimir Davidovich (1937– ). Soviet pianist; won first prize in a piano competition in Brussels in 1956 and at the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow in 1962; after leaving the Soviet Union in 1963 and taking up residence, first in London, later in Iceland, then in Switzerland, he branched out from his career as a pianist to become an orchestra conductor as well, serving as principal conductor or visiting conductor of orchestras in many countries of Western Europe and North America as well as Japan and Australia. Babel, Isaac Emmanuilovoch (1894–1940). Soviet writer, best known for his collections of stories Konarmiya (Red Cavalry, 1926) and Odesskiye rasskazy (Odessa Tales, 1931); also wrote the plays Zakat (Sunset, 1928) and Mariya (1935); arrested on false charges during the Stalin-era repression, in 1939; died in confinement; posthumously rehabilitated. Baibakov, Nikolai Konstantinovich (1911–2008). Soviet government official; originally, by profession, an engineer in the oil industry; 1944–1955 and again 1963– 1965, people’s commissar of the oil industry; 1955–1957, chairman of the state commission overseeing long-term planning of the Soviet economy; 1958–1963, chairman of regional economic councils for the Northern Caucasus and Krasnodar territory; 1965–1986, chairman of the Soviet State Planning Committee. Balanchine, George (real name, Georgy Melitonovich Balanchivadze) (1904–1983). Graduate of the Imperial Ballet School; worked at the Lithuanian Theater of Opera and Ballet (now under Soviet auspices) from 1921 to 1924, when he emigrated; worked in Paris, then in New York, where in 1934 he organized and directed the American Ballet School and the American Ballet Troupe; in 1948, became head of the New York City Ballet. Barayev, Aleksandr Ivanovich (1908–1985). Soviet agronomist; author of works on soil-preserving systems of crop cultivation in areas exposed to wind erosion; headed the Institute of Grain Growing in Kazakhstan; became a member of the Academy of Agriculture in 1966; awarded the Lenin Prize (1972); Hero of Socialist Labor (1980). Basov, Aleksandr Vasilyevich (1912–1988). Party official; had a candidate of science degree in agriculture; 1954–1955, one of the secretaries of the party’s Rostov province committee; 1955–1960, chairman of the executive committee of the Soviets of Rostov province; 1960–1962, first secretary of the party’s Rostov province committee; relieved of his post in 1962, but remained a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party; 1965–1966, after Khrushchev’s ouster, became minister of agriculture of the Russian Federation; then served as Soviet ambassador to three countries: Romania, 1966–1971; Chile, 1971–1973; and Australia, 1973–1979; retired in 1979. Belashova, Yekaterina Fyodorovna (1906–1971). Sculptor; her works include Nepokorennaya (Woman Unsubdued, 1957) and Pushkin in 1837 (1964); became a corresponding member of the Academy of Arts in 1964; named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union (1963); awarded the State Prize (1967).

Biographical Notes

595

Belkin, Viktor Danilovich (1922– ). Russian economist; began work in 1948 in the Moscow division of the Central Statistical Administration under the Council of Ministers; from 1956, worked in research institutes of the Academy of Sciences; 1959–1964, took an active part in developing economic reform measures in the Soviet Union. Beria, Lavrenty Pavlovich (1899–1953). Notorious as Stalin’s chief state security official from 1938 to 1953; born to a Georgian peasant family in Abkhazia, he is said to have joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1917; in 1919, he also served in counterintelligence for the Musavat (Azerbaijan nationalist) regime, and after that, in Soviet agencies of repression; 1929–1931, Beria was chairman of the Transcaucasian and Georgian OGPU (Unified State Political Organization—name of the Soviet state security agency from 1923 to 1934), then the leader of party organizations in Georgia and Transcaucasia. In 1934, became a member of the Soviet party’s Central Committee; in 1939, a candidate member of the Politburo; then in 1946, a full member. According to political prisoners who encountered Beria, he liked to personally interrogate his recent Communist Party comrades who had been arrested, for which purpose he used a buffalo-hide whip, made especially to his orders; he is said to have enjoyed indulging in life’s pleasures, including a promiscuous and predatory lust for women—and he had a taste for luxury, designing and furnishing many residences himself. In 1945 he became a Marshal of the Soviet Union, and supervised development of the Soviet atomic bomb; after Stalin’s death, in March 1953, Beria became first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers (with Malenkov as chairman) and minister of internal affairs (secret police) until his arrest in June 1953; sentenced to death by military tribunal and executed in December 1953. Beshchev, Boris Pavlovich (1903–1981). Soviet government official; in 1935, graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Rail Transport, then worked in various engineering positions; 1937–1944, chief official at several different railroads: the Ordzhonikidze railroad (Northern Caucasus), the October line (Moscow-Leningrad), and the Kuibyshev line (Moscow-Kuibyshev [now renamed Samara]); in 1944, became a deputy people’s commissar in the People’s Commissariat of Railroads (renamed Ministry of Railroads); in 1946, he became first deputy minister, and from 1948 to 1977 the top minister, in charge of the Ministry of Railroads. Bondarev, Yuri Vasilyevich (1924– ). Soviet writer; known for his novels Batalyony prosyat ognya (The Battalions Are Calling for Artillery Fire, 1957), Silence (1962), Goriachii sneg (Hot Snow, 1969), Bereg (The Shore, 1975), and Vybor (The Choice, 1980); his prose cycle Mgnoveniia (Moments, 1981–1987); and his cycle of screenplays for films about the Great Patriotic War (against the Nazi German invasion, 1941–1945), titled Osvobozhdenie (Liberation, 1970–1972); awarded the Lenin Prize (1972) and the State Prize (1977, 1983); Hero of Socialist Labor (1984). Brezhnev, Leonid Ilyich (1906–1982). Party and government leader from 1964 to 1982; born in Ukraine, began work life as a land surveyor (from 1927 to 1930 worked as a land-use manager), then studied metallurgy; at end of 1937, after the latest wave of arrests in Ukraine, assigned to head a department of the party’s Dnepropetrovsk province committee and, in 1939, became secretary of that committee; in May 1938, made the acquaintance of Khrushchev, who had become first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party at the beginning of 1938; during the Great Patriotic War (1941– 1945), Brezhnev worked as a political official in the Soviet army; after the war, was secretary of the party’s Zaporozhye province committee, then of its Dnepropetrovsk province committee, then was secretary of the Central Committee of the Moldavian Communist Party; in 1954, became second secretary, and in 1955–1956, first secretary

596 Biographical Notes of the Kazakh Communist Party; in 1956, became a secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and, after supporting Khrushchev at the June 1957 plenum, a member of the CC Presidium; in 1963, he was made second secretary of the Central Committee (replacing Frol Kozlov as the likely successor to the first secretary, Khrushchev). After the ouster of Khrushchev in October 1964, Brezhnev did indeed become first secretary (the old title “general secretary” being restored in 1966). From 1977 until his death, Brezhnev was also head of state (chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet). Together with Podgorny, Brezhnev had headed the group of older party officials who plotted the removal of Khrushchev in 1964. Before that, Brezhnev had distinguished himself by his arrant and unrestrained tendency to “sing Khrushchev’s praises.” Brodsky, Joseph Aleksandrovich (1940–1996). Russian poet who was expelled from the Soviet Union in June 1972 and ended up in the United States that same year; his early work was distinguished by irony and the expression of strong emotions (nadlom) and harshness concealing inner pathos; his later work was more meditative, with highly complicated associations of images; his verse collections include Ostanovka v pustyne (A Stop in the Desert, 1967), Konets prekrasnoi epokhi (The End of a Beautiful Era, 1972), Chast rechi (A Part of Speech, 1972; published in English as A Part of Speech, 1977), Urania (To Urania, 1987), and V okrestnostiakh Atlantidy (On the Outskirts of Atlantis, 1995); among his other writings are essays—the English essay collection Less Than One (1986) being especially well known—novellas, and plays; awarded the Nobel Prize in literature (1987); appointed US Poet Laureate (1991). Brovka, Petrus (1905–1980). Belorussian Soviet poet and prose writer; collections of his lyric poetry include A dni idut . . . (And the Days Go By . . . , 1961) and Duma o bessmertii (The Thought of Immortality, 1973); author of the novel Kogda slivaiutsa reki (When Rivers Merge, 1957); awarded the State Prize (1947, 1951) and the Lenin Prize (1962); named People’s Poet of Belorussia (1962) and Hero of Socialist Labor (1972). Bruk, Isaak Semyonovich (1902–1974). Specialist in the field of electric energy systems and computer technology; in 1939, became a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. Bukharin, Nikolai Ivanovich (1888–1938). Russian revolutionary and major political figure of the Soviet era; 1917–1918, leader of the Left Communists; 1918–1929, editor of Pravda; member of the Bolshevik Central Committee from 1917 to 1937, and of the Politburo from 1919 to 1929; from 1919 to 1929, member of the executive committee of the Communist International; in 1928–1929, accused of heading a “right deviation” in the party; expelled from the Politburo in 1929, he was given lesser assignments: member of the presiding committee of the Supreme Economic Council from 1929 to 1932, and of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry beginning in 1932; from 1934 to 1936, chief editor of Izvestia; in February 1937, arrested on Stalin’s orders and executed after the third Moscow show trial (March 1938); posthumously rehabilitated in the Gorbachev era. Bulganin, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1895–1975). Party and government official; born in Nizhny Novgorod, he began work as a desk clerk; in 1917, graduated from a vocational school, where he was trained as an electrician, and joined the party; 1918– 1922, worked in the Cheka (secret police); 1922–1931,worked in industry; 1931– 1937, chairman of the executive committee of the Moscow City Soviet; 1938–1944, deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars; during the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), member of military councils of various fronts; 1944–1946, deputy people’s commissar of defense; in 1946, became first deputy minister, and from 1947 to 1949 minister, of the armed forces and deputy chairman of the Council of

Biographical Notes

597

Ministers and chairman of its Committee No. 2 (jet propulsion technology); in 1950, became first deputy chairman, and from 1955 to 1958, chairman of the Council of Ministers and concurrently minister of defense from 1953 to 1955; in June 1957, he joined the pro-Stalin attempt to remove Khrushchev as party leader, but after its defeat, Bulganin was not removed from the party’s CC Presidium until 1958, when he became chairman of the State Bank; from 1958 until retirement in 1960, chairman of the Stavropol regional economic council; he had been a member of the party’s Politburo (Presidium) from 1948 to 1958, and a Marshal of the Soviet Union (1947–1958). Burlatsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1927– ). Party official and journalist; doctor of philosophy (1964); 1952–1953, worked in the Academy of Sciences presidium; 1953– 1961, worked for the party journal Kommunist; 1961–1963, worked in Central Committee department in charge of relations with East European countries (Andropov was head of the department). Burlatsky never worked as an aide for Nikita Khrushchev, nor as a speechwriter, nor as a member of Khrushchev’s editorial group, as Burlatsky later claimed. After Khrushchev, 1965–1967, worked for leading party newspaper Pravda; 1967–1972, worked at the Institute of World Economy and later at the Institute of Sociology, both of the Academy of Sciences; 1982– 1991, worked for Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette); 1989–1991, was elected to the Supreme Soviet and after that retired and was appointed chairman of Russian Political Science Association. Published several books, among them Mao Zedong (1978), Leader and Advisers (1990), and Machiavelli Quest (1997). Burlyuk, David Davidovich (1882–1967). Brother of Vladimir; one of the founders of Russian futurism; poet and artist; emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1920. Burlyuk, Vladimir Davidovich (1886–1917). Brother of David; also a futurist. (Vladimir Burlyuk is not listed in the Bolshoi entsiklopedicheskii slovar. Neither is the Burlyuks’ sister, Lyudmila Davidovna Burlyuk, also a futurist.) Bykhovsky, Boris Yevseyevich (1908–1974). Parasitologist in the field of Monogenea and other groups of flatworms (Platyhelminthes) and their ecology; from 1964, member of Academy of Sciences. Chakovsky, Aleksandr Borisovich (1913–1994). Soviet writer; 1962–1988, chief editor of Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette) and active member of the conservative group opposed to the liberal Tvardovsky; his novels include Eto bylo v Leningrade (It Happened in Leningrad, 1944), Blockade (1968–1975), Victory (1978–1981), and Nuremburg Ghosts (1987–1989); awarded the Lenin Prize (1978) and the State Prize (1950, 1983); Hero of Socialist Labor (1973). Chelomei, Vladimir Nikolayevich (1914–1984). Soviet rocket scientist, specialist in the field of vibration theory, principal designer of rockets, missiles, and spacecraft; graduated from the Kiev Aviation Institute in 1937; from 1954, general designer in Moscow, overseeing design of cruise and ballistic missiles, military satellites and space stations, the two-stage rocket UR-500, and the three-stage space buster Proton, capable of lifting twenty tons into orbit; also lectured for thirty years at the Bauman Higher Technical School in Moscow; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1962; awarded the Lenin Prize (1959) and the State Prize (1967, 1974, 1982); twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1959, 1963). Choibalsan, Khorlogiyn (1895–1952). Mongolian political and military leader; one of the founders of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP) in 1921, the same year in which that party proclaimed an independent Outer Mongolia, giving it the name Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR); 1939–1952, premier of the MPR and first secretary of the Central Committee of the MPRP. Chukhrai, Grigory Naumovich (1921–2007). Film director; films include Forty First (1956), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Chistoye nebo (Clear Sky, 1961), Memory

598 Biographical Notes (1971), Life Is Beautiful (1980), and I Will Teach You to Dream (1984); awarded the Lenin Prize (1961). Chukovsky, Kornei Ivanovich (real name, Nikolai Vasilyevich Korneichukov) (1882– 1969). Children’s writer, literary critic, translator; his books for children include Moidodyr, tarakanishche (1923), Aibolit (Ouch-It-Hurts, 1929), and Mukha-tsokotukha (The Loudly Clattering Fly, 1923); his works of literary criticism include Masterstvo Nekrasova (The Craftmanship of [Nikolai] Nekrasov, 1961) and books on Anton Chekhov and Walt Whitman; From Two to Five (1928) discusses the psychology of children’s speech; his memoirs and diaries have also been published. Cyrankiewicz, Józef (1911–1989). Polish government official; 1947–1952 and 1954– 1970, chairman of Council of Ministers of Poland; 1970–1972, chairman of State Council of Poland (formal head of state); 1948–1972, a leader of the United Polish Workers Party; before that, leader of the Polish Socialist Party, which in 1948 merged with the Polish Communist Party and created the United Polish Workers Party. Deineka, Aleksandr Aleksanrovich (1899–1969). Painter and graphic artist; among his works, which are monumental in form and dynamic in composition, are The Defense of Petrograd (1928), Future Pilots (1930), The Defense of Sevastopol (1942), and A Good Morning (1959–1960). Dementyev, Andrei Dmitryevich (1928– ). Lyric poet; verse collections include Rodnoye (Inborn, 1958), Naedine s sovestsyu (Alone with One’s Conscience, 1965), Rozhdenie dnia (Birth of the Day, 1978), and Kharakter (Character, 1986); also authored longer narrative poems; awarded the State Prize (1985). Dementyev, Pyotr Vasilyevich (1907–1977). Soviet government official, aeronautical engineer; in 1932, began work in the aircraft industry; 1941–1953, first deputy people’s commissar (then first deputy minister) of the Soviet aircraft industry; 1953– 1977, headed the Ministry of Aircraft Production (a state committee). Demichev, Pyotr Nilovich (1918–2010). Party and government official; chemical engineer by profession; 1945–1962, worked as a party official in Moscow and in Moscow province, where he made Khrushchev’s acquaintance; 1953–1956, an aide to Khrushchev; 1956–1958, secretary of the party’s Moscow province committee; 1960–1962, first secretary of the party’s Moscow city committee; in 1961 became a secretary of the party’s Central Committee and in 1962 the chairman of the Central Committee’s department on the chemical industry; after Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964, Demichev was elected a candidate member of the CC Presidium (Politburo), retaining that position until 1988; from 1974 to 1986, he was also minister of culture. In the plot to remove Khrushchev, Demichev joined the Shelepin group. His relations with Khrushchev had always been purely businesslike. Derzhavin, Gavrila Romanovich (1743–1816). Russian poet of the classical school; author of triumphal odes dedicated to important events such as military victories and accessions to the throne, as well as reflective poetry on religious and philosophical themes and lyrics depicting landscapes and celebrating the joys of everyday life. Dorodnitsyn, Anatoly Alekseyevich (1910–1993). Mathematician and specialist on geophysics and mechanics; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1953; author of works on dynamic meteorology, aerodynamics, and differential equations; awarded the Lenin Prize (1963) and the State Prize (1947, 1951); Hero of Socialist Labor (1970). Dubček, Alexander (1921–1992). Czechoslovakian politician; in 1944, took part in anti-German uprising in Slovakia; 1951–1960, secretary and first secretary in several regional party committees in Slovakia; in 1969 and 1989, chairman of the Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia; 1960–1968, secretary and first secretary of the Central Committee of the Slovakian Communist Party; 1968–1969, first secretary

Biographical Notes

599

of the Central Committee of Czechoslovakian Communist Party; was forced to retire in 1969. Dubinin, Nikolai Petrovich (1907–1998). Soviet scientist in the field of genetics; specialist in genetics of populations and the effects of radiation in space on genetics; survived Stalin’s repressions in 1948 and continued to work, first in the field of forestation and then in ornithology; in 1957, became director of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Siberian division of the Academy of Sciences, and in 1966 became director of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences; awarded the Lenin Prize (1966); Hero of Socialist Labor (1990). Dygai, Nikolai Aleksandrovich (1908–1963). Soviet government official in industry and construction; by profession, a construction engineer; beginning in 1935, was engaged in the construction of factories in the Urals region; in 1946, became deputy minister, then minister, for the construction of military and naval enterprises in the Soviet Union as a whole; 1949–1957, headed the Ministry of Construction; in 1957, became deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation; 1961–1963, chairman of the executive committee of the Soviets of Moscow city. Dymshitz, Veniamin Emmanuilovich (1910–1993). Soviet government official; prominent figure in Soviet metallurgy; beginning in 1957, chief engineer on the construction project of building a steel plant in Bhilai, India; 1959–1962, held a ministerial post in the Soviet government; 1962–1985, one of the deputies to the chairman of the Council of Ministers; retired in 1985. Dzhavakhishvili, Givi Dmitryevich (1912–1985). Georgian government official; beginning in 1934, worked in his profession as a geological engineer; 1942–1952, held various posts in the government of the Georgian Soviet republic and in the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party; 1952–1953, chairman of the executive committee of the Soviets of Tbilisi city (capital of Georgia); 1953–1975, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Georgian Soviet republic; retired in 1975. Ehrenburg, Ilya Grigoryevich (1891–1967). Soviet Russian prose writer and poet; author of two picaresque-style novels of adventure, Julio Jurenito (1922) and Burnaya zhizn Lazika Roitshvantsa (The Stormy Life of Lazik Roitschwantz, 1928); his 1923 book Trinadtsat’ trubok (Thirteen Pipes) contained a group of novellas; his historical novels include Padenie Parizha (The Fall of Paris, 1942) and Burya (The Storm, 1947); noted for his anti-Nazi journalism during World War II; also published collections of lyric poetry and translations of the French poet François Villon; in the post-Stalin era, his short novel Ottepel (The Thaw, 1954) had considerable political impact, as did his memoirs, Liudi, gody, zhizn (People, Years, Life, 1961– 1965); actively promoted the policy of peaceful coexistence with the West; awarded the State Prize (1942, 1948) and the International Lenin Prize “for strengthening peace among the peoples” (1952). Falk, Robert Rafailovich (1886–1958). Russian artist; notable among his still lifes and landscape paintings is The Bay at Balaklava (1927); the portraits he painted have a remarkable plasticity, expressive imagery, and richness of color. Fedin, Konstantin Aleksandrovich (1892–1977). Russian writer; one of the “Serapion Brothers,” a writers’ group formed in the early 1920s and dissolved in the later 1920s; his novels include Goroda i gody (Cities and Years, 1924), Bratya (Brothers, 1927), and the trilogy Early Joys (1945), An Extraordinary Summer (1947), and The Bonfire (1961–1965); in the years 1941–1968, he also wrote works of literary criticism and memoirs, such as Gorky Among Us (1941–1968); awarded the State Prize (1949); Hero of Socialist Labor (1967). Fedorenko, Nikolai Prokofyevich (1917–2006). Economist; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1964; author of works on problems of attaining optimal functioning of the national economy; awarded the State Prize (1970).

600 Biographical Notes Fedoseyev, Pyotr Nikolayevich (1908–1990). Philosopher; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1960, and was its vice president from 1962 to 1967 and from 1971 to 1978; author of works on historical materialism and the theory of scientific socialism; awarded the State Prize (1983); Hero of Socialist Labor (1978). Firsov, Vladimir Ivanovich (1937–2011). Poet; collections of his civic-minded verse include Predannost (Loyalty, 1964), Chuvstvo Rodiny (Feeling for the Motherland, 1971), and Zvyozdnaya pesnya neba (Star Song of the Sky, 1985). Furtseva, Yekaterina Alekseyevna (1910–1974). Party and government official; in 1928, she started out as a textile worker (weaver); 1930–1937, worked in the Young Communist League (Komsomol); in 1941, graduated from the Moscow Institute of FineChemicals Technology; 1942–1950, second secretary then first secretary of the party’s Frunze district committee in Moscow; in 1950, promoted by Khrushchev, who was then first secretary of the party’s Moscow city committee, to be second secretary of that committee; 1954–1957, first secretary of the Moscow city committee; 1956–1960, secretary of the party’s Central Committee; 1957–1961, member of the CC Presidium; in 1960 became head of the Ministry of Culture. Gagarin, Yuri Aleksandrovich (1934–1968). Soviet cosmonaut; first human being to orbit the Earth in space flight (April 12, 1961); later headed the Center for the Training of Cosmonauts; died in an accident during a training flight in a MIG-15 jet. Gamzakhurdia, Konstantin (1891–1975). Georgian writer who was a victim of repression under Stalin; author of historical novels such as The Right Hand of the Great Master (1939) and David the Builder (1941–1962), and novels about rural life in Georgia such as Flowering of the Vine (1956); translated Dante’s Divine Comedy into Georgian. Georgadze, Mikhail Porfiryevich (1912–1982). Party and government official; began as a specialist in the mechanization of agriculture; 1941–1954, worked in the apparatus of the Georgian Ministry of Agriculture, and became Georgia’s minister of agriculture; 1954–1956, secretary of the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party; 1956–1957, first deputy chairman of Georgia’s Council of Ministers; 1957–1982, secretary of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Gerasimov, Sergei (1906–1985). Film director; named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union in 1948; his films include Semero smelykh (Seven Brave Men, 1936), Uchitel (Teacher, 1938), Maskarad (Masquerade, 1941), Molodaya gvardiya (Young Guard, 1948), Tikhii Don (The Quiet Don, 1957–1958), Leo Tolstoy (1984); awarded the Lenin Prize (1984) and the State Prize (1941, 1949, 1951, 1971); Hero of Socialist Labor (1974). Gibson-Watt, David (1918–2002). British Conservative politician, farmer, and forester; descendant of James Watt, inventor of the steam engine; 1956–1974, member of Parliament for Hereford; in 1976, became president of the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society, and was chairman of its council from 1976 to 1994; in 1979 he was named Baron of the Wye for Radnor district; 1987–1990, chairman of Timber Growers United Kingdom. Ginzburg, Aleksandr Iliich (1936–2002). Student at Moscow University, School of Journalism, from 1956 to 1959; in 1959 he started the underground poetic journal Syntax, which featured the works of unofficial poets; in 1960 he was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison; in 1966 he joined the dissident movement, for which he was arrested several times and sentenced to prison; in 1979 he was exchanged, together with four other dissidents, for two Soviet intelligence officers who had been arrested in the United States; after that he lived in the United States and later in France. Ginzburg, Yevgeniya Solomonovna (1904–1977). Studied at Kazan State University, graduated in 1924 as historian; worked in Kazan as teacher and journalist; arrested

Biographical Notes

601

in 1937 and spent ten years in prison and at Kolyma prison camp; rehabilitated in the Khrushchev era; author of memoirs about the repression and prison camps under Stalin, titled Krutoi marshrut (Journey into the Whirlwind, 1967; 1975–1977); mother of Soviet writer Vasily Aksyonov. Gladilin, Anatoly Tikhonovich (1935– ). Soviet writer, one of the initiators of the “new prose” school; his works include the short novels Khronika vremyon Viktora Podgurskogo (Chronicle of the Times of Viktor Podgursky, 1956) and Evangelie ot Robespyera (The Gospel According to Robespierre, 1970), and the novel Prognoz na zavtra (The Forecast for Tomorrow, 1972), as well as many short stories; in 1976 he emigrated from the Soviet Union to France, where he lives today; his works published abroad include the novels Menya ubil skotina Pell (I Was Killed by a Swine Named Pell, 1986) and Ten’ vsadnika (Shadow of the Horseman, 2000). Glazunov, Ilya Sergeyevich (1930– ). Soviet painter, graphic artist, portraitist; his works include very large canvases with multiple figures and images, such as Mystery of the Twentieth Century and Eternal Russia; in 1983 he was the designer for a production at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera about the legendary town of Kitezh; founder and rector of the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. Glushchenko, Nikolai Petrovich (1901–1977). Soviet painter whose poetic landscapes include Kiev in March (1947), Places Where Lenin Was (1966–1970), and Orchard in Bloom (1973); named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union (1976). Glushko, Valentin Petrovich (1908–1989). Soviet scientist; pioneer in space rocket technology; designed the first electrothermal rocket engine in the world (1929– 1933) and some of the first liquid-fuel rocket engines (1930–1931); 1946–1974, worked on the design of engines for rockets designed by Korolyov, Yangel, and Chelomei; 1974–1989, general designer of Soviet space stations Salut and Mir, and Soviet space shuttle Energiya-Buran; in 1958, became a member of the Academy of Sciences; awarded the Lenin Prize (1957) and the State Prize (1967, 1984); twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1956, 1961). Glushkov, Viktor Mikhailovich (1923–1982). Soviet mathematician; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1964; author of works on the designing of computers and their application for use in the economy; awarded the Lenin Prize (1964) and the State Prize (1968, 1977); Hero of Socialist Labor (1969). Gomulka, Wladislaw (1903–1982). Polish political figure; in 1942, one of the organizers of the Polish Workers Party (PWP), which replaced the Polish Communist Party after it was disbanded by Stalin in 1937 during the period of repression; 1943– 1948, general secretary of the PWP; 1949–1955, put under house arrest, on Stalin’s order, for his positive view on Yugoslavian independent policy provided by Josip Tito; 1956–1970, first secretary of the United Polish Workers Party, born from the merging of the Polish Workers Party with Polish Socialist Party in 1948; retired in 1970. Gonchar, Oles (real name, Aleksandr Terentyevich) (1918–1995). Ukrainian writer of the “moral-esthetic school.” Author of a trilogy, Znamenostsy (The Standard-Bearers, 1948), about the Great Patriotic War (the Nazi-Soviet war of 1941–1945); his novels, aside from Tronka (1963), include Tavriya (Tauria, 1952), Perekop (The Isthmus of Perekop, 1957), Sobor (Cathedral, 1968), Tsiklon (Cyclone, 1970), Bereg liubvi (The Shore of Love, 1978), and Tvoia zaria (Thy Dawn, 1980); awarded the State Prize (1948, 1949, 1982) and the Lenin Prize (1964). Gorbatov, Aleksandr Vasilyevich (1891–1973). Soviet general; arrested on false charges in 1938, when he was aide to a commander of a cavalry corps, then released in 1941; he described this ordeal in his memoirs Gody i voiny (Years and Wars, 1964, published in English as Years Off My Life, 1965) during the Great Patriotic

602 Biographical Notes War (1941–1945) and after, occupied a series of command posts; Hero of the Soviet Union (1945). Gorshkov, Sergei Grigoryevich (1910–1988). Soviet admiral; joined the navy in 1927; during World War II commanded flotillas on the Sea of Azov and the Danube; 1955–1956, first deputy commander of the navy; 1956–1985, commander in chief of the navy; promoted to rank of admiral in 1967; twice Hero of the Soviet Union (1965, 1982). Grechko, Andrei Antonovich (1903–1976). Soviet general; Marshal of the Soviet Union (1955); during the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) and after, occupied a series of command posts; 1960–1967, commander in chief of the armed forces of the Warsaw Pact countries; in 1967, became Soviet minister of defense; 1973–1976, member of the Central Committee Politburo; twice Hero of the Soviet Union (1958, 1973). Grechukha, Mikhail Sergeyevich (1902–1976). Soviet Ukrainian party and government official; began party work in 1926; from 1938 to 1939, he was first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party’s Zhitomir province committee; 1939–1954, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic; 1954–1961, first deputy chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Ministers; 1961–1976, adviser to the government of Ukraine. Gribachev, Nikolai Matveyevich (1910–1992). Soviet poet and prose writer; author of short stories, novellas, and political journalism; poetry collections include Po dorogam voiny (On War’s Roads, 1945) and Song of the Stars (1978); awarded the Lenin Prize (1960) and the State Prize (1948, 1949); Hero of Socialist Labor (1974). Grishin, Viktor Vasilyevich (1914–1992). Party official; joined the party in 1939; from 1950 to 1952, he worked in the party’s Moscow Committee, making the acquaintance of Khrushchev, who valued Grishin but had no illusions that this protégé would set the world on fire; from 1952 to 1956, Grishin was perennially second secretary of the Moscow party committee under two different first secretaries (Nikolai Mikhailov and Ivan Kapitonov); in 1956, Grishin was appointed head of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions; in 1961, out of respect for the position he held, Grishin was elected to the CC Presidium; he retained his high rank until 1986, when he was pensioned off under Gorbachev. In the 1964 plot to remove Khrushchev as party leader, Grishin joined the Brezhnev-Podgorny group, which had better prospects, in his estimation, than the Shelepin group. Although part of the conspiracy, he displayed no special activity. Relations between him and Khrushchev had been steady and comradely, but not particularly close. He was not one of the bootlickers. Gromyko, Andrei Andreyevich (1909–1989). Soviet diplomat and government official; from 1936 to 1939, he was a research fellow at the Institute of Economics under the Academy of Sciences; in 1939, began work as a diplomat; from 1943 to 1946, Soviet ambassador to the United States; from 1946 to 1948, Soviet representative to the UN Security Council; from 1952 to 1953, Soviet ambassador to Great Britain; from 1949 to 1952, and again from 1953 to 1957, first deputy to the Soviet foreign minister, then foreign minister of the Soviet Union from 1957 to 1985; from 1983 to 1985, first deputy to the chairman of the Council of Ministers; from 1985 until retirement in 1988, chairman of the Supreme Soviet (formal head of state); from 1973 to 1988, member of the Politburo. Gubkin, Ivan Mikhailovich (1871–1939). Founder of petroleum geology in Russia; from 1920 to 1925, he directed research on the Kursk magnetic anomaly; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1929; predicted and substantiated the presence of petroleum in the Volga region (the “Second Baku”) and in Siberia; awarded the Lenin Prize (1929).

Biographical Notes

603

Husak, Gustav (1913–1991). Czechoslovakian politician; during World War II he took part in the resistance movement against German occupation, and in 1944 he was a leader of the uprising in Slovakia; 1946–1950, prime minister of Slovakia; in 1950, during the period of repression under Stalin, was removed from all his positions and imprisoned until 1960; in 1967 he was deputy prime minister of Czechoslovakia; 1969–1987, first secretary, then general secretary, of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party; 1975–1989, president of Czechoslovakia; was forcibly retired in 1980. Ignatov, Nikolai Fyodorovich (1914–1967). Party official (not to be confused with Nikolai Grigoryevich Ignatov); 1934–1944, served in the Soviet army; 1944–1960, worked in Moscow as a secretary of one of the party’s district committees, as a secretary of the party’s Moscow city committee, as chairman of the executive committee of the Soviets of Moscow province, and as deputy head of the regional economic council of Moscow province; he and Khrushchev knew each other well from party work in Moscow; 1960–1965, first secretary of the party’s Oryol province committee; 1965–1967, deputy minister of one of the ministries of the machinebuilding industry. Ignatov, Nikolai Grigoryevich (1901–1966). Party and government official; in 1917, as a young worker, joined the Red Guard; 1918–1932, served in the Red Army and the security police (Cheka and OGPU); in 1934, began work as a party official; in 1936, secretary of a district committee in Leningrad; 1937–1957, secretary of party province committees in different parts of the country—Kuibyshev, Oryol, Leningrad, and Voronezh provinces—and secretary of the party’s Krasnodar territory committee; in between his work as a province (or territory) committee secretary, for half a year in 1952–1953, Ignatov was a secretary of the Central Committee; 1957–1961, member of the CC Presidium and a secretary of the party’s Central Committee; in 1960–1962, deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers; from December 1962 until his death in 1966, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, remaining in that post even after Khrushchev’s ouster, despite his extremely active role in the plot to remove Khrushchev. Ignatov took on much of the most dangerous preliminary work in the conspiracy against Khrushchev, persuading some secretaries of the party’s province committees to join the conspiracy. He collaborated with both the Brezhnev-Podgorny group and that of Shelepin-Semichastny, calculating that at a decisive moment he could seize the initiative and assume power himself. While Khrushchev was party leader, Ignatov’s direct interactions with him were servile, but his true attitude was lordly and contemptuous. Ilyichev, Leonid Fyodorovich (1906–1990). Party and government official; 1938–1958, assigned to the Soviet press, serving as editor of the party journal Bolshevik, and of the newspapers Izvestia and Pravda, and as head of the Foreign Ministry’s press department; 1958–1961, headed the Central Committee’s department for agitation and propaganda; 1961–1965, a secretary of the Central Committee; in 1962, became a member of the Academy of Sciences; in 1965, he was sent into “honorary exile,” being appointed as a deputy minister of foreign affairs. Ilyichev did not take part in the 1964 plot to remove Khrushchev. His attitude toward Khrushchev when the latter was party leader had been rather servile. Ioganson, Boris Vladimirovich (1893–1973). Soviet painter belonging to the school of “socialist realism”; named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union in 1943; became a member of the Academy of Arts in 1947 and its president from 1958 to 1962; in the late 1920s, his canvases, such as The Workers’ School in Session (1928), were brightly colored and clearly composed; among his paintings of the 1930s was At an Old Urals Factory (1937); in the 1950s he painted a monument work, Lenin

604 Biographical Notes Speaking at the Third Congress of the Young Communist League; awarded the State Prize (1941, 1951); Hero of Socialist Labor (1968). Ivashchenko, Olga Ilyinichna (1906–1990). Ukrainian party official; engineer by training; from 1933, worked in the Kiev electro-mechanical factory; from 1950 to 1954, second secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party’s Kiev province committee; after 1954, a secretary of the Ukrainian party’s Central Committee; retired in 1965. Kadar, Janos (1912–1989). Hungarian politician; during World War II, one of organizers of the movement against the Hungarian alliance with Germany; after the war, part of the leadership of Hungarian Communist Party and in 1948 became minister of interior (secret police); in 1951 he was arrested and spent these years in prison, until 1953; in 1954 he was rehabilitated and in 1956 became deputy prime minister in Imre Nagy’s government; after suppression of the 1956 uprising he was appointed prime minister (1956–1958 and 1961–1965); 1965–1988, first secretary and then general secretary of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party; 1965–1988, president of Hungary; resigned in 1988. Kaganovich, Lazar Moiseyevich (1893–1991). Began working life as a shoemaker; before 1917, participated in underground party activity; 1918–1921, held various party and government posts in Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh, and Tashkent; in 1924, became a secretary of the party’s Central Committee (and from then on was a perennial supporter of Stalin’s faction in the party leadership, and promoted Khrushchev); 1925–1928, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, then worked again in the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik); in 1930, elected first secretary of the party’s Moscow province committee and of its Moscow city committee, and also a member of the Politburo; 1935–1937, people’s commissar of communications, then people’s commissar of heavy industry; in 1938, became a deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars; 1939–1949, people’s commissar of the oil and fuel industry; 1942–1945, member of the State Defense Committee; after the war, occupied a number of leading party and government posts in Ukraine, in the Soviet Council of Ministers, and in central ministries of the Soviet Union; remained a member of the party’s CC Presidium until 1957, when he helped lead an attempt to oust Khrushchev as party leader; 1957–1961, director of Ural potassium plant; retired in 1961. Kalmykov, Valery Dmitryevich (1908–1974). Soviet government official; electrical engineer; beginning in 1929, worked at the Moscow electric cable factory Moskabel; beginning in 1935, worked at research institutes for the shipbuilding industry; in 1949, became head of the main administration for missiles in the Ministry of Shipbuilding; from January 1954 to 1974, was at various times minister of the radio industry or chairman of the State Committee for Radio-Electronics, and was responsible for the development of electronic equipment, including guidance systems for missiles. Kantorovich, Leonid Vitalyevich (1912–1986). Soviet mathematician and economist; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1964; author of works on functional analysis and computer mathematics; initiator of linear programming; helped develop the theory of optimization in the management of the economy and utilization of natural resources; awarded the Lenin Prize (1965), the State Prize (1949), and the Nobel Prize in economics (1975). Kapitsa, Pyotr Leonidovich (1894–1984). One of the founders of low-temperature physics and the physics of strong magnetic fields; discovered the superfluidity of liquid helium; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1939; awarded the State Prize (1941, 1943) and the Nobel Prize in physics (1978); twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1954, 1974).

Biographical Notes

605

Kargin, Valentin Alekseyevich (1907–1969). Soviet physicist and chemist; specialist on polymers; developed polymer modification methods; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1953; awarded the Lenin Prize (1962) and the State Prize (1943, 1947, 1950, 1969); Hero of Socialist Labor (1966). Katayev, Valentin Petrovich (1897–1986). Soviet writer; began as a romantic in the 1920s and became a pillar of socialist realism from the 1930s on; his many novels include Forward, Time! (1928), Son of the Regiment (1945), and Small Iron Door in the Wall (1964); author of memoirs Svyatoi kolodets (Sacred Well, 1966), Trava zabveniia (Herb of Forgetfulness, 1967), and Almaznyi moi venets (My Wreath of Diamonds, 1978), and the play Squaring the Circle (1978); awarded the State Prize (1946); Hero of Socialist Labor (1974). Kazakevich, Emmanuil Genrikhovich (1913–1962). Soviet writer; his works about the Great Patriotic War and postwar life include Zvezda (Star, 1947), Dvoye v stepi (A Twosome in the Steppes, 1948), Vesna na Odre (Spring on the Oder, 1949), as well as short stories and a novel about Lenin, Sinyaya tetrad’ (The Blue Notebook, 1961); awarded the State Prize (1948, 1950). Kazakova, Rimma Fyodorovna (1932–2008). Soviet poet; author of love lyrics as well as civic verse; also a translator; her verse collections include V taige ne plachut (In the Taiga They Don’t Weep, 1965), Pomniu (I Remember, 1974), and Ruslo (Channel, 1979). Kazanets, Ivan Pavlovich (1918– ). Ukrainian party and government official; metallurgy engineer; 1937–1952, worked in various positions in metallurgic plants in Ukraine; later occupied various regional-level party posts; 1960–1963, second secretary of the Ukrainian party’s Central Committee; 1963–1965, chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Ministers; in 1965, became Soviet minister of ferrous metallurgy; retired in 1985. Kekkonen, Urho Kaleva (1900–1986). President of Finland from 1956 to 1981; from 1936 on, held many ministerial posts in the government of Finland, including that of foreign minister in 1952–1953 and 1954; from 1950 to 1956, he was frequently prime minister (with brief periods out of office). Keldysh, Mstislav Vsevolodovich (1911–1978). Soviet scientist in the fields of mathematics and mechanics; president of the Academy of Sciences from 1961 to 1975, having become a member in 1946; author of fundamental works on mathematics (theory of the functions of a complex variable, functional analysis, etc.), aerohydrodynamics, and the theory of vibrations; directed research on many problems of aviation and atomic technology, and computational and machine mathematics; led a number of Soviet space programs, including manned space flights; awarded the Lenin Prize (1957) and the State Prize (1942, 1946); thrice Hero of Socialist Labor (1956, 1961, 1971). Khachaturyan, Aram Ilyich (1903–1978). Soviet composer; named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union in 1954; noted for his ballet Spartacus (1954); wrote music for films, as well as two symphonies and many concertos; awarded the Lenin Prize (1959) and the State Prize (1941, 1942, 1943, 1946, 1950, 1971); Hero of Socialist Labor (1973). Khariton, Yuli Borisovich (1904–1996). Soviet physicist; author of works on the physics of combustion and explosion; from 1939 to 1941, together with Yakov Zelgovich, was the first to make a computation of the chain reaction in uranium fission; Khariton was the chief designer of the Arzamas-16 (or Sarov) center for the production of nuclear weapons; became a full member of the Academy of Sciences in 1953; awarded the Lenin Prize (1957) and the State Prize (1949, 1951, 1953); thrice Hero of Socialist Labor (1949, 1951, 1954).

606 Biographical Notes Kharlamov, Mikhail Averkiyevich (1913–1990). Soviet government official; 1958– 1962, head of the press department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry; 1962–1964, chairman of the State Committee for Radio and Television under the Council of Ministers; 1964–1968, deputy chief editor of the State Publishing House for Political Literature (Gospolitizdat); 1968–1975, head of the department on the history of diplomacy at the Soviet Foreign Ministry; 1975–1980, first deputy to the Soviet representative at the United Nations. Khlebnikov, Velemir (real name, Viktor Vladimirovich) (1885–1922). Soviet mathematician, poet, and prose writer; futurist of the “Budetlyan” group; irrepressibly preoccupied in his poetry with word creation on a highly abstruse level; published several long narrative poems, including Voina v myshelovke (War in a Mousetrap) in 1919, and from 1920 to 1921, Ladomir, Zangezi, and Noch pered Sovetami (The Night Before the Soviets); also wrote short stories and dramas, as well as a series of prose essays, Doski sudby (Panels of Fate), published in 1922. Khrennikov, Tikhon Nikolayevich (1913–2007). Soviet composer; his operas include V buryu (Tempest, 1939), Frol Skobeyev (1950), Mat (Mother, 1967), and Zolotoi telenok (Golden Calf, 1985); author of several operettas, symphonies, and concerts, as well as music for films and theatrical performances; named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union in 1963; 1948–1991, general secretary of the Composers Union; awarded the Lenin Prize 1974) and the State Prize (1942, 1946, 1952, 1967); Hero of Socialist Labor (1973). Khutsiyev, Marlen Martynovich (1925– ). Soviet film director; named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union in 1968; his films include Vesna na Zarechnoi ulitse (Spring on Zarechnaya Street, 1965), Zastava Ilyicha (The Gate of Ilyich, 1963), Iul’skii dozhd’ (July Rain, 1967), Byl mai mesyats (It Was the Month of May, 1970), Posleslovie (Afterword, 1983), and Beskonechnost’ (Endlessness, 1992); awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation (1993). Kibalnikov, Aleksandr Pavlovich (1912–1987). Soviet sculptor; noted for monument statues of Chernyshevsky (Saratov, 1953), Mayakovsky (Moscow, 1958), and Tretyakov (Moscow, 1980), and the war memorial at the Brest Fortress (1971); awarded the Lenin Prize (1959) and the State Prize (1949, 1951). Kirichenko, Aleksei Illarionovich (1908–1975). Party official; 1953–1957, member of the party’s CC Presidium and, concurrently, first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party’s Central Committee; 1957–1960, continued as CC Presidium member and became “second secretary” (not a formal position in the hierarchy of the Central Committee); briefly regarded as Khrushchev’s presumed successor, but in 1960 was sent to Rostov province to be the party secretary there; removed from the CC Presidium in 1961. Kirilenko, Andrei Pavlovich (1906–1990). Party official; his career started in Ukraine; from 1944 to 1955, he was a party secretary in province committees of Zaporozhye, then Nikolayev, then Dnepropetrovsk, after which he moved to the Urals; from 1955 to 1962, he was first secretary of the party’s Sverdlovsk province committee. In October 1961, at the Twenty-Second Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Khrushchev suggested that Kirilenko be elected as a candidate member of the CC Presidium to represent the Urals region, on an equal basis with representatives of other regions—Vladimir Shcherbitsky representing Ukraine; Kirill Mazurov, Belorussia; Sharaf Rashidov, Central Asia; and Vasily Mzhavanadze, Transcaucasia— but Kirilenko’s name was left off the list at the postcongress Central Committee plenum. People simply voted for the list, without asking why Kirilenko’s name was not there. A few months later, when Mikoyan took an interest and asked what had happened, Khrushchev answered without trying to hide it: “I was tired out and forgot.” On April 25, 1962, at a Central Committee plenum, Kirilenko was elected to

Biographical Notes

607

the CC Presidium, no longer merely as a candidate, but as a full member. He was transferred to Moscow and made first deputy chairman of the Central Committee’s Bureau for the Russian Federation. In November 1962, Kirilenko replaced Gennady Voronov as head (first deputy chairman) of that bureau, a post he retained until 1966. From 1966 until his retirement in 1982, Kirilenko continued as a secretary of the Central Committee, and from 1962 to 1982 as a member of the party’s CC Presidium (Politburo). In the 1964 plot to remove Khrushchev, Kirilenko firmly adhered to the Brezhnev-Podgorny group, but because of his habitually nonassertive character, he remained in the shadows and displayed no initiative. When Khrushchev was party leader, Kirilenko was somewhat obsequious toward him, though their relations were mostly businesslike. Kirillin, Vladimir Alekseyevich (1913–1999). Soviet physicist and government figure; vice president of the Academy of Sciences from 1962 to 1965, after becoming a member in 1962; author of works on solid-state thermodynamics and magnetohydrodynamic generators; 1965–1980, deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and chairman of the State Committee for Science and Technology (formerly the State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research); awarded the Lenin Prize (1959) and the State Prize (1951, 1976). Kisunko, Grigory Vasilyevich (1918–1998). Soviet specialist in radio-electronics; 1954–1956, one of the designers of the antiaircraft missile defense system around Moscow; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1958; was one of the chief designers of Soviet anti–ballistic missile systems; in 1961, was the first in the world to accomplish the interception and destruction of the warhead of a ballistic missile (the R-12 missile; or in NATO terminology the SS-3); in 1987, became head of a laboratory in the Institute of Theoretical Problems of the Academy of Sciences; awarded the Lenin Prize (1966); Hero of Socialist Labor (1956). Kochetov, Vsevolod Anisimovich (1912–1973). Soviet writer; in 1961, became editor of the literary magazine Oktyabr (October); author of the novels Zhurbiny (The Zhurbins, 1952), Sekretar obkoma (Party Secretary of the Province Committee, 1961), and Chego zhe ty khochesh (“What Is It That You Really Want?” 1969); committed suicide. Koptyaeva, Antonina Dmitryevna (1909–1991). Soviet writer on themes of love and family life and one’s place in society; her novels include Comrade Anna (1946), the trilogy Ivan Ivanovich (1949), and On the Ural River (1969–1978); awarded the State Prize (1950). Korneichuk, Aleksandr Yevdokimovich (1905–1972). Ukrainian playwright and public figure, active in the world peace movement; in 1960, awarded the International Lenin Prize “for strengthening peace among the peoples”; his plays include Gibel eskadry (Destruction of the Squadron, 1933), Platon Krechet (1943), V stepiakh Ukrainy (In the Steppes of Ukraine, 1939), and The Front (1942); in 1939, while living in Kiev, married Wanda Wasilewska, and the couple became close friends with Khrushchev, the party leader in Ukraine at the time; Korneichuk’s postwar plays include Makar Dubrava (1948) and Pamyat serdtsa (Heart’s Memory, 1969); awarded the State Prize (1941, 1942, 1943, 1949, 1951); Hero of Socialist Labor (1967). Korolyov, Sergei Pavlovich (1906/1907–1966). Graduated in 1929 from the aeromechanics faculty of the Moscow Higher Technical School and in 1930 from the Moscow Glider Pilots School; in 1932, became head of the Group for the Study of Jet Motion; designed first Soviet rocket-powered glider and cruise missile; detained from 1938 to 1940 in Kolyma detention camps, then from 1940 to 1944 in “special” NKVD design bureaus in Moscow and Kazan; released in 1944; designed the first Soviet multistage intercontinental rocket, the artificial Earth satellite Sputnik (1957),

608 Biographical Notes and the spaceship Vostok, on which Yuri Gagarin made the first manned space flight; also designed several other Earth satellites and the manned spaceship Voskhod; launched the first spacecraft to the moon, Venus, and Mars; member of Academy of Sciences in 1958; awarded the Lenin Prize (1957); twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1956, 1961). Kosygin, Aleksei Nikolayevich (1904–1980). Top party and government official; graduated from the Kirov Leningrad Textile Institute in 1935; in the late 1930s, during the height of Stalin’s repression, rose from foreman in a Leningrad factory to deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (Council of Ministers), a position he held from 1940 to 1953; from 1953 to 1954, minister of the consumer goods industry; from 1953 to 1956 and from 1957 to 1960, continued as a deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers; in 1958, Khrushchev considered Kosygin a suitable candidate to head the government, but the members of the CC Presidium persuaded Khrushchev to change his mind and become chairman of the Council of Ministers himself; from 1960 to 1964, Kosygin was first deputy chairman; then from 1964 to 1980, he did become chairman of the Council of Ministers; he was a member of the party’s Politburo (Presidium) from 1948 to 1952 and from 1960 to 1980. Kosygin did not take part in the conspiracy to remove Khrushchev. When Kosygin was told about the forthcoming change of leadership, Kosygin matter-of-factly inquired what position the army and KGB had taken. Having received a satisfactory answer, he joined the conspiracy. Relations between him and Khrushchev had always been friendly. Kotsyubinsky, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1864–1913). Ukrainian author who wrote in a masterfully lyrical-psychological manner; known for his short stories and the novella Fata Morgana (1904–1910). Kozlov, Frol Romanovich (1908–1965). Top Party and government official; in 1923, started out as an industrial worker; in 1928, became an engineer at a metallurgical plant in Izhevsk; in 1939, began party work in Izhevsk, then served in the apparatus of the party’s Central Committee and Kuibyshev province committee; in 1949, became secretary of the party’s Leningrad city committee, and in 1953, first secretary of its Leningrad province committee; in 1957, became a member of the party’s CC Presidium; in 1957–1958, headed the government of the Russian Federation, then became first deputy to Khrushchev as chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers. In May 1960, Kozlov was regarded as Khrushchev’s likely successor, but on April 11, 1963, he suffered a severe stroke and never returned to work. He was removed from the CC Presidium in early 1965, and died later that year. Kozlov did not take part in the plot to remove Khrushchev. Relations between him and Khrushchev were friendly: they stood on an equal footing, and although disagreements between them were not rare, they usually managed to find common ground. Kucherenko, Vladimir Alekseyevich (1909–1963). Soviet government official; civil engineer; beginning in 1933, worked at construction sites in Ukraine and the Urals region; from 1943, directed restoration of Ukrainian industrial enterprises destroyed in World War II; in 1954, became head of the construction department of the Moscow City Council; from 1955 to 1956, he was deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers and, concurrently, from 1955 to 1961, chairman of the State Committee for Construction (Gosstroi); in 1961, was elected president of the Academy of Construction and Architecture; in 1963, became head of the Ministry of Construction while remaining deputy chairman of Gosstroi. Kunayev, Dinmukhamed Akhmedovich (1912–1993). Top party and government official in Kazakhstan; beginning in 1939, worked at several copper-smelting complexes in Kazakhstan; 1942–1952, deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (later the Council of Ministers) of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic; 1952–1955,

Biographical Notes

609

president of the Kazakh Academy of Sciences; 1955–1986, by turns either chairman of the Kazakh Council of Ministers or first secretary of the Central Committee of the Kazakh Communist Party; 1971–1987, member of the Soviet Communist Party’s Politburo; Kunayev was removed from his top post in Kazakhstan and the Politburo in December 1986, and retired in January 1987. Kurchatov, Igor Vasilyevich (1903–1960). Soviet scientist and statesman; head of the nuclear weapons and atomic energy program; earlier, did research on ferroelectricity and nuclear isometrism; in World War II, worked on the demagnetizing of Soviet naval vessels; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1943; from 1943 to 1960, head (director) of Laboratory No. 2 (the Institute of Atomic Energy); awarded the Lenin Prize (1957) and the State Prize (1942, 1949, 1951, 1954); thrice Hero of Socialist Labor (1949, 1951, 1954). Kuusinen, Otto Vilgelmovich (1881–1964). Finnish socialist, and later a prominent figure in the Soviet Communist Party; in 1905, graduated from Helsinki University; 1911–1921, chairman of the executive committee of the Social Democratic Party of Finland, which at first was a legal party but after the defeat of the revolution in Finland was driven underground; 1921–1939, secretary of the executive committee of the Communist International; 1940–1956, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Karelo-Finnish Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (which in 1956 was reestablished as the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic); 1957–1964, secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and member of the CC Presidium. Kuznetsov, Aleksei Aleksandrovich (1905–1950). Party official; in 1938, became second secretary of the party’s Leningrad province and city committees, and in 1945, first secretary of those committees; 1939–1949, secretary of the party’s Central Committee; 1944–1949, member of the Central Committee’s Organizational Bureau and Secretariat and simultaneously “in charge of cadres”; Stalin even referred to Kuznetsov as his successor, but in 1949, in connection with the so-called Leningrad affair, Stalin turned against him and had him arrested; in 1950 he was shot; rehabilitated in Khrushchev era. Lakshin, Vladimir Yakovlevich (1933–1993). Soviet literary critic; close associate of Tvardovsky on the editorial board of the literary magazine Novy Mir; author of articles, memoirs, literary portraits, and studies of such great writers of nineteenthcentury Russia as Chekhov, Tolstoy, and the playwright Aleksandr Ostrovsky. Laktionov, Aleksandr Ivanovich (1910–1972). Soviet painter; noted for conveying the illusion of exact representation of material objects, and also for his portraits, such as that of the cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov (1969); became a member of the Academy of Arts in 1958; named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union (1969); awarded the State Prize (1948). Landau, Lev Davidovich (1908–1968). Soviet theoretical physicist; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1946; author of works on magnetism, superliquidity and superconductivity, solid-state physics, plasma physics, the nucleus of the atom and its elementary particles, quantum electrodynamics, and astrophysics, among other subjects; coauthor with Yevgeny Lifshitz of a classic textbook on theoretical physics; awarded the Nobel Prize in physics (1962), the Lenin Prize (1962), and the State Prize (1946, 1949, 1953); Hero of Socialist Labor (1954). Lavrentyev, Mikhail Alekseyevich (1900–1980). Soviet mathematician and specialist in the science of mechanics; member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (1939) and of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1946); 1946–1948, vice president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; 1949–1952, director of the Institute of Applied Mechanics and Computer Technology; 1950–1953 and 1955–1957, academic secretary of the physical and mathematical sciences division of the Soviet Academy

610 Biographical Notes of Sciences; in 1957, became vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences; 1957–1975, chairman of the Siberian division of the Soviet Academy of Sciences; awarded the Lenin Prize (1958) and the State Prize (1946, 1949); Hero of Socialist Labor (1967). Lebedev, Vladimir Semyonovich (1915–1967). Party official; from 1942 to 1953, worked in the apparatus of the party’s Central Committee at various posts in the Propaganda Department; in 1953, became one of Khrushchev’s aides, part of his editorial group; after Khrushchev’s ouster, from 1964 until death in 1967, was a junior editor at the State Publishing House for Political Literature (Gospolitizdat). Leonov, Leonid Maksimovich (1899–1994). Soviet writer whose prose is distinguished by a richly colorful style; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1972; his novels include The Badgers (1924), The Thief (1927), The Russian Forest (1953), and Pyramid (1990); also author of the play The Golden Carriage (1964). Leontief, Wassily (1906–1999). US economist; originally educated and trained in St. Petersburg, Russia; emigrated to the United States in 1931; developed the “inputoutput” method of mathematical economic analysis with the aim of studying the links between different sectors of the economy and comparing the balances among those sectors (this method is widely used around the world in the practical work of predicting and programming economic processes); awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1973; became a foreign member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1988. Lifshitz, Benedikt Konstantinovich (1886–1938). Russian futurist poet and painter; friend of the Burlyuk brothers (David and Vladimir); arrested in 1937 and executed in 1938. (Lifshitz is not listed in the Bolshoi entsiklopedicheskii slovar for 2002.) Lifshitz, Yevgeny Mikhailovich (1915–1985). Soviet theoretical physicist, specializing in the fields of ferromagnetism, molecular interactions, and relativist cosmology; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1979; as coauthor with Lev Landau of a fundamental introduction to theoretical physics, Lifshitz systematized Landau’s thoughts and presented them in clear language; awarded the Lenin Prize (1962) and the State Prize (1954). Lomako, Pyotr Fadeyevich (1904–1990). Soviet government official; 1927–1932, studied at the Moscow Institute of Economics, then graduated from the Moscow Institute of Nonferrous Metals and Gold; 1932–1939, held various posts in the aluminum industry; 1939–1940, deputy head of the People’s Commissariat of the Nonferrous Metallurgical Industry, and then from 1940, head of that commissariat (which later became the Ministry of Nonferrous Metallurgy); 1957–1960, chairman of the Krasnoyarsk regional economic council; 1961–1962, deputy chairman (under Khrushchev) of the Central Committee’s Bureau for the Russian Federation; 1962– 1965, chairman of the State Planning Committee; 1965–1986, again head of the Ministry of Nonferrous Metallurgy; retired in 1986. Lomonosov, Vladimir Grigoryevich (1928– ). Soviet Communist Party official; metallurgical engineer by profession; 1953–1957, worked at a Moscow metallurgical plant; in 1957, became active in party work in Moscow; 1962–1964, chairman of the Central Asia Bureau of the Central Committee; 1965–1976, second secretary of the Central Committee of the Uzbekistan Communist Party; 1976–1983, deputy chairman, and later chairman, of the State Committee for Labor and Social Issues under the Soviet Council of Ministers; 1983–1989, headed the group of party advisers in Afghanistan; retired in 1989. Lukyanenko, Pavel Panteleimonovich (1901–1973). Soviet plant breeder; in 1926, graduated from the Kuban Agricultural Institute; 1930–1956, worked at the Krasnodar Experimental Station; in 1956, became deputy director for plant breeding at the Krasnodar Agricultural Research Institute; developed many strains of winter

Biographical Notes

611

wheat, including the famous Bezostaya-1; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1964; awarded the Lenin Prize (1959) and the State Prize (1946 and, posthumously, 1979); twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1957, 1971). Lunacharsky, Anatoly Vasilyevich (1875–1933). Party and government official; “commissar of enlightenment” in the Soviet government in November 1917, having been a party member since 1896; from 1929 to 1933, chairman of the academic council of the Congress of Soviets (Central Executive Committee); in 1930, became a member of the Academy of Sciences; also in 1930, represented the Soviet Union at the League of Nations in Geneva; in 1933, appointed Soviet ambassador to Spain. Lysenko, Mikola Vitalyevich (1842–1912). Ukrainian composer and folklorist; founder of the Ukrainian national school of musical composition; his operas include Taras Bulba (1890) and Aeneid (1910); from 1868 to 1910, composed a cycle of vocal music based on the poems of Taras Shevchenko (the great national poet of Ukraine); Lysenko also organized Ukrainian national choral groups. Lysenko, Trofim Denisovich (1898–1976). Soviet agronomist; in 1938 became head of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agriculture, and in 1939 became a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences; awarded the State Prize (1941, 1943, 1949); Hero of Socialist Labor (1945). Lyubimov, Yuri Petrovich (1917– ). Soviet actor and director; made his debut in the wartime film Bespokoinoye khozyaistvo (Troubled Household, 1946); from 1946 on, he was with the Vakhtangov Drama Theater in Moscow; in 1964, started his own company at the Taganka; retired in 2011 and after that worked as freelance theatrical director; awarded the State Prize of the Soviet Union (1952) in 1992, he was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation (1996); People’s Artist of the Russian Federation (1992). Malenkov, Georgy Maksimilianovich (1902–1988). Participant in the Russian Civil War of 1918–1921; joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1920; from 1921 to 1925, studied at the Moscow Higher Technical School (now Moscow Technical University); beginning in 1925, an official in the apparatus of the party’s Central Committee; beginning in 1930, headed the Central Committee’s department overseeing the leading bodies of the party’s Moscow Committee (secretaries of all the city’s district committees, including Khrushchev, came under his jurisdiction); in 1939, became the Central Committee secretary “in charge of cadres” and Stalin’s righthand man; together with Molotov, Malenkov noted down the instructions given at meetings with Stalin; in 1941, Malenkov became a candidate member of the Central Committee’s Politburo (later called the Presidium), and in 1946 he became a full member, until 1957; during the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), he was a member of the State Defense Committee; from 1946 to 1953, he was a deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, then chairman from 1953 to 1955, the deputy chairman again from 1955 to 1957; in June 1957, he was part of the pro-Stalin group in the Presidium that opposed Khrushchev; defeated, he was removed from the Presidium and from all his previous posts and appointed director of the UstKamenogorsk hydroelectric power plant, and then of the Ekibastuz thermoelectric power plant (both in Kazakhstan); retired in 1961. Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich (1878–1935). Russian artist; founder of “suprematism” around 1910; produced his Black Square canvas in 1913; in the early 1920s, joined the “production art” trend, which celebrated the machine; in the 1930s, turned toward representational painting, as in Girl with Red Staff (1932). Malin, Vladimir Nikiforovich (1906–1982). Soviet Communist Party official; 1939– 1947, secretary of the Central Committee of the Belorussian Communist Party; 1949–1952, secretary of the party’s Leningrad City Committee; 1952–1954, served in the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party as an official with the

612 Biographical Notes title “inspector”; 1954–1965, headed the General Department of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party; 1965–1979, headed the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. Malinovsky, Rodion Yakovlevich (1898–1967). Soviet general; commanded various armies and army groups in World War II, becoming a Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1944; from 1947 to 1953, commander of the Far Eastern military district; 1956– 1957, first deputy minister of defense and commander in chief of ground forces; 1957–1967, defense minister and Marshal of the Soviet Union (1944); Hero of Soviet Union (1945, 1958). Maltsev, Terenty Semyonovich (1895–1994). Innovative Soviet crop specialist in the 1930s at a collective farm in the Shadrinsk district, Kurgan province (western Siberia); became director of the experimental station at this farm in 1950; developed a new system of soil tillage that used plowing without a moldboard, less than a foot deep, along with shallow tillage and optimal planting times, a system developed for, and widely applied to, the Black Earth region just east of the Urals; in 1956, became an honorary member of the All-Union Academy of Agriculture; awarded the State Prize (1946); twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1955, 1975). Malyshko, Andrei Samsonovich (1912–1970). Soviet Ukrainian poet; author of lyric verse and songs as well as long narrative poems; collections of his poetry include Polden veka (Midday of the Century, 1960) and Avgust dushi moei (August of My Soul, 1970); awarded the State Prize (1947, 1951, 1969). Marchuk, Guriy Ivanovich (1925– ). Soviet mathematician; became a full member of the Academy of Sciences in 1968; author of works on applied mathematics and computer mathematics; awarded the Lenin Prize (1961) and the State Prize (1979); Hero of Socialist Labor (1975). Marr, Nikolai Yakovlevich (1865–1934). Russian Orientalist and linguist; became a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1909; wrote fundamental works on the languages of the Caucasus region, as well as the history, archaeology, and ethnography of the Caucasus. He put forward the “Japhetic theory” (a new doctrine of languages), contending that the origin of languages could be reduced to a small number of universal elements. In the 1930s this theory was given official status; its critics were persecuted and even subjected to repression. Stalin, in 1952, in one of his last published writings, criticized Marr’s theory, and now everything was reversed. Supporters of the theory were expelled from the universities and criticized, but for the time being were not arrested. After Stalin’s death, in March 1953, the disagreement among linguists lost its “urgency.” Matskevich, Vladimir Vladimirovich (1909–1998). Soviet government official; 1955– 1961 and 1965–1973, head of the Ministry of Agriculture; 1961–1965, chairman of the executive committee of the Soviets of the Virgin Lands territory in the Kazakh Soviet republic; 1973–1980, Soviet ambassador to Czechoslovakia; retired in 1980. Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich (1893–1930). Russian futurist poet; friend of Lifshitz and the Burlyuks; his works include, besides many short poems, the verse tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky (1913) and the long narrative poems Oblaka v shtanakh (A Cloud in Trousers, 1915), Fleita-pozvonochnik (A Flute of Vertebrae, 1916), Voina i mir (War and Peace, 1916), Misteriya-Buff (Mystery Bouffe, 1918), 150,000,000 (1921), Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1924), Khorosho (All Right, 1927), and Vo ves’ golos (At the Top of My Voice, 1930); wrote two plays in verse: Klop (The Bedbug, 1928) and Banya (The Bathhouse; 1929); committed suicide. Mazurov, Kirill Trofimovich (1914–1989). Party and government official; from 1942 to 1947, he was a secretary, then second secretary, then first secretary of the Central Committee of the Young Communist League of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist

Biographical Notes

613

Republic; from 1947 to 1950, he was second secretary, then first secretary, of the Minsk city party committee; from 1950 to 1953, he was first secretary of the Minsk province committee of the Belorussian Communist Party; from 1953 to 1956, he was chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic; in 1956, Khrushchev proposed that Mazurov become first secretary of the Central Committee of the Belorussian Communist Party, a post he held until 1965; from 1965 until retirement in 1978, he was first deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers and a member of the Presidium (Politburo) of the Central Committee. In the 1964 plot to remove Khrushchev, Mazurov sided with Brezhnev-Podgorny, in order to protect himself. His relations with Khrushchev had always been friendly and businesslike. In cases where they disagreed, Mazurov firmly defended his views. At times, in the heat of the moment, Khrushchev threatened to remove Mazurov from his posts, but after passions had cooled, did not carry out the threat. Mikhailov, Nikolai Alexandrovich (1906–1982). Party and government official; 1922– 1933, blue-collar worker at a Moscow metallurgic plant; 1932–1937, held different positions at Moscow’s local newspapers; 1938–1952, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Young Communist League (Komsomol); 1952–1953, secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party; 1953–1954, first secretary of the Moscow party committee; 1954–1955, Soviet ambassador to Poland; 1955–1960, Soviet minister of culture; 1960–1965, Soviet ambassador to Indonesia; 1965–1970, chairman of Printing Committee at the Soviet Council of Ministers; retired in 1970. Mikhalkov, Sergei Vladimirovich (1913–2009). Soviet poet and prose writer; his popular children’s verse includes Dyadya Styopa (Uncle Steve) and A chto u vas? (“What Do You Have There?”); also wrote fables and satirical comedies, such as Krasny galstuk (The Red Necktie, 1947) and Dorogoi malchik (Dear Boy, 1971); coauthored the national anthem of the Soviet Union (with G. A. El-Registan), the first version in 1943, the second in 1977, and the third, which became the anthem of post-Soviet Russia, in 2002; awarded the Lenin Prize (1970) and the State Prize (1941, 1942, 1950, 1978); Hero of Socialist Labor (1973). Mikoyan, Anastas Ivanovich (1895–1978). Party and government official; in his youth, graduated from a seminary in Georgia; took part in the 1917 revolution and was active in party work from then on; from 1926 to 1955, Mikoyan was the people’s commissar of domestic and foreign trade, and was responsible for the supply of food and consumer goods; in 1935, he was made a member of the Central Committee Politburo, a position he retained until 1966; from 1937 to 1955, he was a deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (Council of Ministers); from 1955 to 1964, first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers; from 1964 to 1965, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (removed as chairman in December 1965 but remained a member of the Presidium until his retirement in 1974). Mikoyan took no part in the conspiracy to remove Khrushchev. Relations between them had always been friendly; although they frequently argued over one issue or another, they maintained their friendship. Mikoyan, Artyom Ivanovich (1905–1970). Soviet aircraft designer; brother of Anastas Mikoyan; beginning in 1940, was chief designer, then designer-general and head of the design bureau OKB-155; together with Mikhail Gurevich, developed the MIG fighter plane series (the acronym MIG stands for “Mikoyan and Gurevich”); in 1968, became a full member of the Academy of Sciences; awarded the Lenin Prize (1962) and the State Prize (1941, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1952, 1953); twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1956, 1957). Mirshakar, Mirsail (1912–1993). Tajik poet; his narrative poems include Nepokoryonnyi Pyandzh (The Untamed River Panj, 1949), Lenin na Pamire (Lenin in the

614 Biographical Notes Pamirs, 1958), and Liubov i dolg (Love and Duty, 1962); also wrote plays, such as Bitva v pustyne (Battle in the Desert, 1974); awarded the State Prize (1950). Molotov, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich (real name, Skryabin) (1890–1986). Born in Vyatka province to the family of a moderately wealthy burgher; at the age of fifteen, took part in the 1905 revolution; joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDRP) in 1906; took part in the 1917 revolution; in 1919, served as chairman of the executive committee of the Soviets of Nizhny Novgorod province, then as secretary of the party’s Donetsk province committee; from 1920 to 1921, he was first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party; in March 1921, became a secretary of the party’s Central Committee, where he functioned as one of the chief supporters of Stalin; in 1926, Molotov was made a member of the Politburo (supporting Stalin in the fight against the Zinoviev opposition and the United Left Opposition); in 1930, Stalin made Molotov chairman of the Soviet Council of People’s Commissars, replacing the “right oppositionist” Aleksei Rykov in that post; Molotov remained Soviet premier until 1941, working closely with Stalin in carrying out the Great Terror of 1936–1938 (the arrest and/or execution of hundreds of thousands of party and government officials as well as ordinary citizens); in 1939, Stalin made Molotov people’s commissar of foreign affairs so that he could negotiate the StalinHitler pact; Molotov remained in that post until 1949, then again was Soviet foreign minister from 1953 to 1956; from 1942 to 1956, Molotov was also first deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of People’s Commissars (Council of Ministers); in June 1957, together with Malenkov, Kaganovich, and others, Molotov led a proStalin attempt to oust Khrushchev as party leader; defeated, he was removed from the Presidium and sent as Soviet ambassador to Mongolia until 1960; from 1960 to 1962, he was Soviet representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency; retired in 1962, but lived to the age of ninety-six. Mukhitdinov, Nuriddin Akramovich (1917– ). Soviet Uzbek party and government official; 1951–1953, chairman of the Uzbekistan Council of Ministers; 1955–1957, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Uzbekistan Communist Party; 1957– 1961, member of the CC Presidium and of the Secretariat of the Soviet Communist Party; in October 1961, demoted to deputy chairman of the Central Association of Consumer Cooperatives (Tsentrosoyuz); later he occupied various minor government positions; retired in 1987. Mzhavanadze, Vasily Pavlovich (1902–1988). Soviet Communist Party official; served as a political official in the Soviet army; in 1944, became a lieutenant-general; from 1947 to 1953, he was a member of the military council of three military districts: Kharkov, Kiev, and Cis-Carpathian; acquainted with Khrushchev since the war; after Stalin’s death and the arrest of Lavrenty Beria in 1953, on Khrushchev’s recommendation, Mzhavanadze became first secretary of the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party, a post he held until his retirement in 1972; although of Georgian nationality, he had no roots in Georgia; from 1957 to 1972, he was a candidate member of the Central Committee Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party. In his work as a high-ranking party official, Mzhavanadze was not particularly successful, but he distinguished himself as Number One in corruption in the postwar era. In response to complaints from Georgia about this corruption, Khrushchev declared more than once that Mzhavanadze ought to renounce all his posts, but Khrushchev did not follow through on this threat. It was then that Mzhavanadze decided to side with Brezhnev, thus holding on to his post for eight more years after the ouster of Khrushchev in 1964. As long as Khrushchev was party leader, Mzhavanadze was quite servile toward him. Nalbandyan, Dmitry Arkadyevich (1906–1993). Armenian painter, portraitist, and landscape artist; became a member of the Soviet Academy of Arts in 1943; named

Biographical Notes

615

People’s Artist of the Soviet Union in 1969; his paintings on historical themes include Power to the Soviets, Peace to the Peoples (1950) and a group portrait of outstanding figures in Armenian culture (1974–1976); awarded the Lenin Prize (1982) and the State Prize (1946, 1951); Hero of Socialist Labor (1976). Nasser, Gamal Abdul Hussein (1918–1970). Leader of the Egyptian revolution of 1952 and all Arab nations at large; in 1935, participated in anticolonial and anti-British demonstration and was wounded; in 1937, joined the Egyptian armed forces and first studied and then taught at Egypt’s state military academy; in 1948, participated in the Arab-Israeli War; in 1954, became prime minister of Egypt and undertook a policy of independence beginning with nationalization of Suez Canal (1956); from 1958 to 1961, he was a president of United Arab Republic (Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iraq); in 1961, he began modernization of the Egyptian economy; shocked by defeat in the Six Day War (1998) against Israel. Neizvestny, Ernst Iosifovich (1925– ). Russian sculptor and graphic artist; His bestknown work is the monument at the grave of Nikita Khrushchev (1974); made many sketches for monument projects that were never begun; awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation (1995). Nekrasov, Viktor Platonovich (1911–1987). Soviet Russian writer, especially noted for his World War II novel In the Trenches of Stalingrad (1946), for which he won the State Prize in 1947; also wrote the screenplay for the 1957 film Soldiers; author of short stories and the novel Kira Georgievna (1961), as well as memoirs and commentary, including Po obe storony okeana (On Both Sides of the Ocean, 1962), Zapiski zevaki (An Idler’s Sketches, 1976), and Po obe storony steny (On Both Sides of the Wall, 1980). Nemchinov, Vasily Sergeyevich (1894–1964). Soviet economist and statistician; author of fundamental works on statistics and on the methodology for calculating labor productivity and for modeling the functioning of the economy; one of the first to introduce mathematical methods into Soviet economics; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1946; awarded the Lenin Prize (1965, posthumously) and the State Prize (1946). Neporozhny, Pyotr Stepanovich (1910–1999). Soviet government official who specialized in hydroelectric power construction; from 1962 to 1963, he headed the Ministry of Energy and Electrification; from 1963 to 1965, he was chairman of the State Committee for Energy and Electrification, following which he again headed the Ministry of Energy and Electrification until his retirement in 1985. Neprintsev, Yuri Mikhailovich (1909–1996). Soviet painter and graphic artist; became a member of the Academy of Arts in 1970; typical of his highly expressive genre paintings is Rest After Battle, better known as Vasily Tyorkin (1951), which illustrates a scene from Tvardovsky’s famous poem; also known for his dramatic series of etchings Leningraders (1960–1967); awarded the State Prize (1952); named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union (1965). Nesmeyanov, Aleksandr Nikolayevich (1899–1980). Soviet scientist specializing in organic chemistry; founder of a scientific school on the chemistry of electro-organic compounds; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1948, and from 1951 to 1961 was its president; awarded the Lenin Prize (1966) and the State Prize (1943); twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1969, 1979). Novikov, Ignaty Trofimovich (1907–1993). Soviet government official; engineer; minister for construction of electric power plants; 1958–1962, worked on construction of hydroelectric power plants; 1962–1983, deputy premier of the Soviet Union and chairman of the State Committee for Construction (Gosstroi); retired in 1983. Novikov, Vladimir Nikolayevich (1907–2000). Soviet government official; engineer; in 1928, began work in the city of Izhevsk at factories, starting as a technician and

616 Biographical Notes by 1939 rising to chief engineer and then factory director; in 1941, became a deputy to Dmitry Ustinov, the people’s commissar for armaments; continued to work as a deputy minister until 1957, when he was transferred to become the chairman of the Leningrad regional economic council; in 1958, promoted to deputy chairman of Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation; 1960–1980, deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers (that is, deputy premier of the Soviet Union) in charge of economic cooperation with East European countries, and at the same time, in 1960 and until 1962, became chairman of the Soviet State Planning Committee; retired in 1980. Novotny, Antonin (1904–1975). Joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1921; 1938–1941, participated in the resistance to the German occupation; 1941– 1945, arrested and sent to Manthausen concentration camp; 1945–1951, secretary of the Prah party committee; from 1951, member of the party’s Central Committee Presidium; 1953–1968, first secretary of Central Committee; 1957–1968, president of Czechoslovakia; retired in 1968. Nuzhdin, Nikolai Ivanovich (1904–1972). Soviet biologist; graduated from the Yaroslavl Pedagogical Institute in 1929; beginning in 1935, worked at the Institute of Genetics under the Academy of Sciences; author of works on genetics, doctrine of evolution, and radiobiology; on October 23, 1953, at the same time that Sakharov was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences, Nuzhdin was elected a corresponding member. Okhlopkov, Nikolai Pavlovich (1900–1967). Soviet actor and theater director; his stage career started in 1918; began work with the Meyerhold theater in 1923; from 1930 to 1937, headed the Realist theater; from 1943 to 1966, principal director at the Mayakovsky theater in Moscow; played leading roles in such films as Lenin in October and Alexander Nevsky; named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union in 1948; awarded the State Prize (1941, 1947, twice in 1949, twice in 1951). Okudzhava, Bulat Shalvovich (1924–1997). Popular Soviet balladeer (performing his own songs, accompanying himself on the guitar), poet, and prose writer; his collections of verse include Mart velikodushny (The Magnanimous Month of March, 1967), Arbat, moi Arbat (The Arbat [District of Moscow], My Arbat, 1976), Posvyashchaetsa Vam (This Is Dedicated to You, 1988), and Milosti sudby (The Mercies of Fate, 1993); author of the short novel Bud zdorov, shkolyar (Stay Healthy, Schoolboy, 1961) and the historical novels Bedny Avrosimov (Poor Avrosimov, 1969), Puteshestvie diletantov (The Journey of the Dilettantes, 1976–1978), and Svidanie s Bonapartom (Interview with Bonaparte, 1983); he was popular among the youth, awarded the State Prize (1991). Ovezov, Balysh (1915–1975). Turkmen party and government official; from 1933, active in the work of the Young Communist League and the Turkmenistan Communist Party; 1943–1946, second secretary of the party’s Ashkhabad province committee, then of the Tashauz province committee; 1946–1951, one of the secretaries, then first secretary, of the Central Committee of the Turkmenistan Communist Party; 1951–1958 and again 1959–1960, chairman of the Turkmenistan Council of Ministers; 1958–1959, chairman of the executive committee of the Soviets of Ashkhabad province; 1960–1969, again first secretary of the Turkmenistan party’s Central Committee; retired in 1970. Paasikivi, Juho Kusti (1870–1956). President of Finland from 1946 to 1956; was prime minister in 1918 and again from 1944 to 1946; played a key role in peace negotiations with the Soviet Union in 1920 as well as in 1944. Paton, Boris Yevgenyevich (1918– ). Soviet scientist; specialist on welding; son of Yevgeny Paton; in 1953, became director of the Welding Technologies Research Institute in Kiev, under the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; from 1962, president

Biographical Notes

617

of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; member of Khrushchev’s Council on Science; awarded the Lenin Prize (1957) and the State Prize (1950). Paton, Yevgeny Oskarovich (1870–1953). Soviet scientist; specialist on welding; became a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1929, and was its vice president from 1945 to 1952; author of numerous works on electric welding; initiator of welding techniques for tank armor, the hulls of ships, and bridge construction; awarded the State Prize (1941); Hero of Socialist Labor (1943). Paustovsky, Konstantin Georgyevich (1892–1968). Soviet Russian writer; master of lyrical prose, noted for his descriptions of the gentle, unassuming beauty of nature in central Russia; his works include Kara-Bugaz (1932), Colchis (1934), Tale of the North (1939), and Kniga o tvorchestve (A Book About Creativity, 1955); from 1945 to 1963, wrote his epic autobiography, Story of My Life. Pavlov, Sergei Pavlovich (1929–1995). Party and government official; 1959–1969, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Young Communist League (Komsomol); 1969–1983, chairman of a state committee, under the Council of Ministers, on sports and physical fitness; in 1983, Soviet ambassador to Mongolia. Pervukhin, Mikhail Georgyevich (1904–1978). Party and government official; beginning in 1929, worked as an engineer at Mosenergo (the Moscow electric power grid) and at power plants in the suburbs of Moscow; in 1937, became the head of Mosenergo, and in 1938, deputy people’s commissar, then commissar, for the Soviet electrical industry; in 1940, became a deputy to the Soviet premier; in 1952, was made a member of the party’s CC Presidium; in 1955, first deputy to the Soviet premier; in 1957, became head of the Ministry of Medium Machine-Building (in charge of atomic power); in June 1957, he supported the attempt by the Stalinists to oust Khrushchev, and was expelled from the CC Presidium and appointed chairman of the State Committee for Economic Relations with Foreign Countries, under the Council of Ministers; in 1958, was made Soviet ambassador to East Germany; from 1963 to 1965, worked at the Supreme Council on the National Economy, and from 1965 at the State Planning Committee. Petrakov, Nikolai Yakovlevich (1937– ). Soviet economist; specialist on price formation and on the methodology for optimization of economic processes; in 1990, became a full member of the Academy of Sciences, in 1990, as an adviser to Gorbachev, drafted a plan for reforming the Soviet economy. Plastov, Arkady Aleksandrovich (1893–1972). Soviet painter; became a member of the Academy of Arts in 1947; named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union in 1962. Plisetskaya, Maya Mikhailovna (1925– ). Soviet ballerina; performed at the Bolshoi Theater from 1943 to 1988; especially noted for her performances in Swan Lake (1947), Don Quixote (1951), Anna Karenina (1972), and The Seagull (1980); named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union (1959); awarded the Lenin Prize (1964); Hero of Socialist Labor (1985). Pliyev, Issa Aleksandrovich (1903–1979). Soviet general; during World War II, commanded a cavalry division, and then, during and after the Battle of Stalingrad (during which he and Khrushchev became acquainted), commanded a cavalry corps; in 1944, became commander of mixed groups (cavalry and motorized troops); 1958–1968, commander of the Northern Caucasus military district; in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, commander of Soviet military group in Cuba and promoted to four-star general; twice Hero of the Soviet Union (1944, 1945). Podgorny, Nikolai Viktorovich (1903–1983). Party and government official; metalworker; 1921–1923, secretary of a county committee of the Young Communist League in Poltava province; 1926–1931, at the Kiev Technological Institute of the Food Industry; 1931–1939, engineer in the Ukrainian sugar industry; in 1938, made the acquaintance of Khrushchev; 1939–1940, deputy people’s commissar of the

618 Biographical Notes food industry of the Ukrainian Soviet republic; 1940–1942, deputy people’s commissar of the Soviet food industry; 1942–1944, director of the Moscow Technological Institute of the Food Industry; 1944–1946, deputy people’ commissar of the food industry of the Ukrainian Soviet republic; 1946–1950, permanent representative of the Ukrainian Council of Ministers to the Soviet Council of Ministers; 1950– 1953, first secretary of the Kharkov province committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party; in 1953, became second secretary of, and in 1957 until 1963 first secretary of, the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party; 1960–1977, member of the Central Committee Presidium (Politburo) of the Soviet Communist Party; in June 1963, moved to Moscow and became the Central Committee secretary responsible for the food industry and the provisioning of the population; after Khrushchev’s ouster in October 1964, and Mikoyan’s retirement in 1965, Podgorny became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (formal head of state); he aspired to more than that, but Suslov and Kirilenko gradually pushed Podgorny back, so that he was unable to exercise much real power; retired in 1977, at which time Brezhnev replaced him as formal head of state. Podgorny was one of the initiators of the 1964 plot to remove Khrushchev, playing a leading role in tandem with Brezhnev. But Podgorny deferred to Brezhnev because of the latter’s higher position in the system of bureaucratic ranking. While Khrushchev was leader, Podgorny behaved in a servile, even bootlicking, manner toward him. Khrushchev’s attitude toward him was always friendly. Polikarpov, Dmitry Alekseyevich (1905–1965). Party and government official; 1954– 1955, secretary of the party’s Moscow city committee; in 1955, secretary of the Writers Union; 1955–1962, head of the Cultural Department of the party’s Central Committee; 1962–1965, deputy head of the Ideological Department of the Central Committee; in 1965, again head of the committee’s Cultural Department. Pologova, Adelaida Germanovna (1923–2008). Soviet sculptor; sharply expressive compositions, often of polychrome ceramics, interacting with their surroundings, such as Boy Not Afraid of Birds (1964) and Motherhood (1989); awarded the State Prize (1989). Polyakov, Vasily Ivanovich (1913–2003). Soviet agrarian journalist and party official of the Khrushchev era; in 1946, wrote on agriculture in Pravda; in 1953, became a member of Khrushchev’s editorial group; 1960–1962, chief editor of the newspaper Selskaya Zhizn (Rural Life); in 1962, became a secretary of the Central Committee and chairman of its Bureau on Agriculture; in November 1964, after Khrushchev’s removal, was appointed executive secretary of Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta (Economic Gazette). Polyakov did not take part in the conspiratorial preparations for the ouster of Khrushchev. When Khrushchev was party leader, relations between them had been restrained and purely businesslike. Polyansky, Dmitry Stepanovich (1917–2001). Party and government official; agronomist by profession; until 1935, worked and studied in Ukraine; 1940–1949, worked as a party official in various posts in Siberia and in the apparatus of the party’s Central Committee; 1949–1955, first secretary of the party’s Crimean province committee, in which capacity he came to know Khrushchev; 1955–1957, first secretary of the party’s Chkalov (Orenburg) province committee; 1957–1958, first secretary of the party’s Krasnodar territory committee; 1958–1962, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation (head of government of the Russian Federation); in 1962, became a deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, and was Khrushchev’s right-hand man for agriculture; Polyansky was a member of the CC Presidium (Politburo) from 1960 to 1976; in 1965, after Khrushchev’s ouster, Polyansky was appointed first deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, but in 1973, because of Polyansky’s excessive ambitions, Brezhnev removed him

Biographical Notes

619

from that post and made him minister of agriculture, a post he remained in until 1976; from 1976 to 1982, served as Soviet ambassador to Japan, and from 1982 until his retirement in 1987 as Soviet ambassador to Norway. Polyansky took an active part in the 1964 conspiracy to remove Khrushchev, balancing between the Brezhnev-Podgorny group and that of Shelepin-Semichastny. At the same time, he aspired to his own special role in the post-Khrushchev leadership: he pictured himself as above both Brezhnev and Shelepin. Polyansky’s relations with Khrushchev, while the latter was the top leader, were steady and even, not at all servile; in cases where they disagreed, Polyansky expressed his opinions uninhibitedly, which sometimes led to heated arguments. Ponomarev, Boris Nikolaevich (1905–1995). Party official; historian; beginning in 1920, active in the Young Communist League (Komsomol); 1936–1942, worked at the executive committee of the Communist International; in 1948, began work in the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, first as deputy head and later as head of the Central Committee’s International Department; 1961–1986, secretary of the party’s Central Committee; 1972–1986, candidate member of the CC Politburo. Posokhin, Mikhail Vasilyevich (1910–1989). Soviet architect; designed the high-rise apartment building on Insurrection Square (Ploshchad Vosstaniya) in Moscow (1954), the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin (1961), the New Arbat district of central Moscow (1964–1969), and the Soviet pavilion at the Montreal World’s Fair (1967) and at the Osaka World’s Fair (1970); 1962–1982, chief architect of Moscow; awarded the Lenin Prize (1962) and the State Prize (1949, 1980). Prokofyev, Aleksandr Andreyevich (1900–1971). Soviet Russian poet; his verse, suffused with optimism, was oriented toward the dialect and folklore of the Russian north; collections of his poetry include Polden (Midday, 1931) and Priglashenie k puteshestviyu (Invitation to a Journey, 1960); wrote the narrative poem Russia (1944); awarded the Lenin Prize (1961) and the State Prize (1944); Hero of Socialist Labor (1970). Promyslov, Vasily Fyodorovich (1908–1992). Soviet government official; 1959–1963, chairman of a state committee on construction under the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation; 1963–1986, chairman of the executive committee of the Moscow City Soviet (equivalent of mayor of Moscow); retired in 1986. Pryanishnikov, Dmitry Nikolayevich (1865–1948). Soviet soil scientist; founder of the agrochemical school in Russia; in 1916, he worked out a theory on the role of nitrogen in plant nutrition; member of Soviet Academy of Sciences (1929) and of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agriculture (1935); author of works on the liming of acid soils and on the use of fertilizers generally; his textbook Agrokhimiya (Agrochemistry, 1940) became world-famous; awarded the Lenin Prize (1926) and the State Prize (1941); Hero of Socialist Labor (1945). Pustovoit, Vasily Stepanovich (1886–1972). Soviet plant breeder; worked out a highly effective system for breeding sunflowers and developed twenty high-oil, blightresistant varieties; in 1956, became a member of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agriculture, and in 1964 a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences; awarded the Lenin Prize (1959) and the State Prize (1946); twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1957, 1963). Rashidov, Sharaf Rashidovich (1917–1983). Uzbek party and government official; poet and prose writer; in 1944, secretary of the party’s Samarkand province committee; 1947–1949, chief editor of the main newspaper of the Uzbek Soviet republic, Kzyl Uzbekiston (Red Uzbekistan); in 1949, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbek Soviet republic (formal head of state); in 1959, head of the Uzbek Communist Party, a post he kept until his death; 1959–1963, won distinction

620 Biographical Notes because of the successful irrigation and cultivation of the Golodnaya Steppe region, which developed into one of the main cotton-growing areas of Uzbekistan; after his death, during the Gorbachev era, he was accused of monstrous corruption, but in the independent state of Uzbekistan (since 1991) he was elevated to the status of national hero. In the 1964 plot to remove Khrushchev, Rashidov sided with Brezhnev and Podgorny, but made no display of activity. His relations with Khrushchev had been purely businesslike. Khrushchev valued Rashidov’s flair as an organizer and his ability to focus on the essentials. Raskolnikov, Fyodor Fyodorovich (1892–1939). Revolutionary leader of the Kronstadt sailors in 1917; prominent figure in Soviet politics and military affairs, and later a diplomat; 1918–1921, deputy people’s commissar of the navy and member of the Revolutionary Military Council on the Eastern Front; commanded the VolgaCaspian flotilla and the Baltic fleet; 1921–1923, Soviet ambassador to Afghanistan; 1930–1938, Soviet ambassador to Estonia, then Denmark, then Bulgaria; when recalled to Moscow by Stalin in 1938, he feared for his life, refused to return, and published an open letter denouncing Stalin; assassinated by an agent of Stalin’s in 1939 as an “enemy of the people.” Raspletin, Aleksandr Andreyevich (1908–1967). Soviet scientist in the field of radio technology; chief designer of missile systems for antiaircraft defense, including the S-75 (SAM-2), which brought down the American U-2 plane on May 1, 1960; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1964; awarded the Lenin Prize (1958) and the State Prize (1951); Hero of Socialist Labor (1956). Remeslo, Vasily Nikolayevich (1907–1983). Soviet plant breeder; 1958–1964, deputy director at the Mironovskaya Experimental Station, becoming its director in 1964; Remeslo worked out methods of creating high-yielding varieties of wheat; developed seventeen new varieties of winter wheat, including the world-famous Mironovskaya-804; became a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1974, and of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agriculture in 1964; awarded the Lenin Prize (1963) and the State Prize (1979); twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1966, 1977). Rikhter, Svyatoslav Teofilovich (1915–1995). Soviet pianist; named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union in 1961; awarded the Lenin Prize (1961), the State Prize of the Soviet Union (1951), and the State Prize of Russian Federation (1995); Hero of Socialist Labor (1975). Romm, Mikhail Ilyich (1901–1971). Soviet film director; his films include Trinadtsat (Thirteen, 1937), Lenin v Oktyabre (Lenin in October, 1937), Lenin v 1918 (Lenin in 1918, 1939), Devyat dnei odnogo goda (Nine Days of One Year, 1962), Obyknovenny fashizm (Ordinary Fascism, 1966); awarded the State Prize (1941, 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951). Rozhdestvensky, Robert Ivanovich (1932–1994). Soviet Russian poet; his lyrics express civic concerns and comment on current events; his verse collections include Rovesniku (To My Contemporary, 1961), Golos goroda (Voice of the City, 1977), and Vozrast (Age, 1988); author of the narrative poems Letter to the Thirtieth Century (1963) and 210 Steps (1978); also wrote popular song lyrics; awarded the State Prize (1979). Rudakov, Aleksandr Petrovich (1910–1966). Party official; engineer working in machine-building; 1949–1954, headed several departments of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, first the department on coal, then the department on heavy industry, and last the department overseeing the leading bodies of the party; in 1954, became head of the department on heavy industry of the Central Committee; in 1962, became a secretary of the Central Committee and chairman of the Central Committee’s Bureau for Industry and Construction; in 1966, was relieved of all his

Biographical Notes

621

posts. Rudakov did not take part in the plot to remove Khrushchev. His relations with Khrushchev had always been purely businesslike. Rudnev, Konstantin Nikolayevich (1911–1980). Soviet government official; 1953– 1961, deputy minister, then minister, of the defense industry; 1961–1965, one of many deputy premiers of the Soviet Union (deputy to the chairman of the Council of Ministers), simultaneously heading the State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research (whose name was changed in 1963 to State Committee for Science and Technology); 1965–1980, headed a ministry for the production of instruments, automation devices, and control systems. Rumyantsev, Aleksei Matveyevich (1905–1993). Soviet economist and party official; graduated in 1926 from the Kharkov Institute of the National Economy; in 1960, elected a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and in 1966 a full member; 1946–1949, secretary of the party’s Kharkov province committee; 1949–1950, headed the economics department at the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute; 1950–1952, director of the Institute of Economics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; 1952–1955, headed various departments of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party; 1955–1958, chief editor of the party journal Kommunist; 1958–1964, chief editor of the Prague-based magazine Problems of Peace and Socialism; 1964–1965, chief editor of Pravda; after 1965, held various offices in the Soviet Academy of Sciences system. Rykov, Aleksei Ivanovich (1881–1938). Joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDRP) in 1898; active participant in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917; in November 1917 and after, held various posts in the Soviet government, including chairman if the Soviet Council of People’s Commissars (Soviet premier) from 1924 to 1930; was a member of the party’s Politburo from 1922 to 1930; from 1928 to 1930, together with Nikolai Bukharin, Nikolai Uglanov, and others, actively opposed Stalin, especially the latter’s policy of forced collectivization of agriculture; accused of “right deviation” and of heading a “right-wing opposition”; in 1930, removed from the Politburo and the premiership; 1931–1936, people’s commissar of posts and telegraph; arrested on February 27, 1937, on Stalin’s orders; was one of the main defendants in the third Moscow show trial in March 1938, together with Bukharin, and with him was executed after the trial; posthumously rehabilitated in the Gorbachev era. Ryzhkov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1920– ). Party and government official; in 1929, graduated from the Urals Polytechnic Institute; 1953–1975, worked at factories in the Urals, rising from foreman to general director; in 1975, moved to Moscow, where he became secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party; 1981–1991, member of the Central Committee Politburo; chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers (Soviet premier) from September 1985 to December 1990 at which time he retired; 1995–2003, member of the lower chamber of the Russian parliament (the State Duma); from 2003, member of upper chamber of parliament (Soviet of Federation). Sakharov, Andrei Dmitriyevich (1921–1989). Soviet theoretical physicist; later a prominent dissident; author of works on thermonuclear reaction and controlled thermonuclear synthesis, magnetic retention of high-temperature plasmas, the physics of elementary particles, astrophysics, gravitation, and cosmology; earned his doctorate in physico-mathematical sciences in 1947; worked with leading quantum physicist Igor Tamm on the hydrogen bomb that was tested in August 1953; youngest scientist ever to be elected member of Academy of Sciences (1953); in 1958, submitted a memorandum to Khrushchev proposing halt to nuclear weapons testing; in 1968, removed from military work and returned to Lebedev Institute as

622 Biographical Notes senior scientific associate, where he resumed theoretical research into elementaryparticle physics, gravitation, and cosmology; in 1970, together with other physicists, set up a committee for human rights; in 1975, awarded Nobel Peace Prize for activity in defense of human rights; in 1980, after condemning invasion of Afghanistan, exiled to Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) and placed under house arrest; in 1986, telephoned by Gorbachev and invited to return to Moscow; in 1989, was elected a deputy to the Supreme Soviet; awarded the Lenin Prize (1956) and the State Prize (1953); thrice Hero of Socialist Labor (1953, 1956, 1962). Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail Yevgrafovich (real last name, Saltykov; pen name, N. Shchedrin) (1826–1889). Russian writer and journalist, best known for his satirical works; from 1868 to 1884, editor of the journal Otechestvennye Zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland), serving as coeditor with the poet Nikolai Nekrasov until 1878; collections of his shorter satirical works include Gubernskie ocherki (Provincial sketches, 1856–1857), Pompadury i pompadurshi (Pompadours and Pompadouresses, 1863–1874), Skazki (Fables, 1882–1886), and Poshekhonskaya starina (The Old Days in Poshekhonie, 1887–1889); his novels include Istoriia ognogo goroda (The History of a Certain City, 1869–1870) and Gospoda golovlyevy (The Golovlyov Family, 1875–1880); he also wrote a book of essays, Za rubezhom (Abroad, 1880–1881). Satyukov, Pavel Alekseyevich (1911–1976). Soviet journalist and party official; 1944– 1946, held various posts in the Press Department of the party’s Central Committee; 1946–1949, chief editor of the newspaper Kultura i Zhizn (Culture and Life); in 1949, became a deputy editor of the party’s main paper, Pravda, and in 1956 its chief editor; at the same time, he was a member of Khrushchev’s private editorial group; in December 1964, two months after Khrushchev was ousted, Satyukov was appointed executive secretary of the journal Partiynaya Zhizn (Party Life); in 1971, became chief editor of the editorial board for popular science programs on the Soviet Union’s central television channel. Savin, Anatoly Ivanovich (1920– ). Soviet scientist specializing in space guidance systems, including radar for reconnaissance satellites targeting enemy ships in the oceans and defending satellites in orbit; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1948; awarded the Lenin Prize (1977) and the State Prize (1946, 1949, 1951, 1981); Hero of Socialist Labor (1976). Sedov, Leonid Ivanovich (1907–1999). Soviet mathematician and specialist in the field of mechanics; author of works on hydromechanics and aeromechanics, continuum mechanics, modeling theory, and similarity theory; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1953; awarded the State Prize (1952); Hero of Socialist Labor (1957). Semichastny, Vladimir (1924–2001). Party and government official; at first worked in the Young Communist League (Komsomol) of Ukraine; in 1944, transferred by Khrushchev from the post of secretary of a district committee in the city of Donetsk to head a department in the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Komsomol; his career continued at a headlong pace: in 1947, secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Komsomol; in 1958, first secretary of the Central Committee of the unionwide Komsomol; in 1959, head of the department overseeing the leading bodies of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, then second secretary of the Central Committee of the Azerbaijan Communist Party; in 1961, chairman of the Committee of State Security (KGB) under the Council of Ministers; according to Anastas Mikoyan, Khrushchev was planning to promote Semichastny in November 1964, to member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party; after the ouster of Khrushchev, Semichastny was awarded the rank of colonelgeneral (for his services in the successful operation to remove Khrushchev), but he

Biographical Notes

623

was soon replaced as head of the KGB, in 1967, by Yuri Andropov. Semichastny took an active part in the plot to remove Khrushchev, functioning as Shelepin’s right-hand man in that undertaking. Before then, aside from Khrushchev’s solicitous attitude in protecting and promoting Semichastny, interactions between them had been work related. Semyonov, Nikolai Nikolayevich (1896–1986). Soviet chemist and physicist; one of the founders of chemical physics as a field of science; proposed a general quantitative theory of chain reactions (1934) and a theory of thermal explosions with a mixture of gases (1949); became a full member of the Academy of Sciences in 1932; awarded the Lenin Prize (1976), the State Prize (1941, 1949), and the Nobel Prize in chemistry (1956); twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1966, 1976). Serbin, Ivan Dmitryevich (1910–1981). Party official; in 1935, graduated from Moscow University, then worked at a machinery plant in Podolsk in Moscow province; beginning in 1942, held various posts with the party’s Central Committee in the departments on industry and transport, and on the defense industry; from 1958 to 1981, headed the Central Committee department on the defense industry. Serdyuk, Zinovy Timofeyevich (1903–1982). Party official; 1937–1961, held various party posts in Ukraine and Moldavia; 1961–1966, first deputy chairman of the party’s Control Commission under the Central Committee; because he was viewed as Khrushchev’s protégé, Serdyuk was forced to retire in 1966. Serov, Ivan Aleksandrovich (1905–1990). Soviet four-star general; 1925–1939, served in Red Army as artillery officer; 1939–1941, people’s commissar of the interior (secret police) in Ukraine, where he met with Khrushchev; 1941–1947, deputy people’s commissar of the interior of the Soviet Union; 1947–1953, first deputy minister of state security; 1954–1958, head of the KGB; 1958–1963, head of the Chief Military Intelligence Administration (Russian acronym, GRU), and served as deputy chief of the General Staff of the Soviet armed forces; in 1963, demoted to major-general (one star) as punishment for friendly relations with Colonel Oleg Penkovsky (the British spy) and made assistant commander of the Turkestan military district; retired in 1965. Serov, Vladimir Aleksandrovich (1910–1968). Soviet painter; became a member of the Academy of Arts in 1954 and its president in 1962; best known for such works as Petition-Bearing Peasants Visit Lenin (1950) and Lenin Issues the Decree on Peace (1957); awarded the State Prize (1948, 1951); named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union (1958). Shchedrin, Rodion Konstantinovich (1932– ). Soviet composer; noted for his operas derived from the writings of Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov: Anna Karenina (1972), The Seagull (1979), and Lady with a Dog (1985); composed the vocal piece Poetoriya, with words by the poet Andrei Voznesensky, and the oratorio Lenin in the Hearts of the People (1969); among his other works are two symphonies and many concertos; named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union (1981); awarded the Lenin Prize (1984), the State Prize of the Soviet Union (1972), and the State Prize of the Russian Federation (1992). Shcherbitsky, Vladimir Vasilyevich (1918–1990). Soviet Ukrainian party and government official; 1961–1963, chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Ministers; 1963– 1965, first secretary of the Ukrainian party’s Dnepropetrovsk committee; 1965– 1972, again chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Ministers; in 1972, he became first secretary of the Ukrainian party’s Central Committee, but was removed after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1989. Shchipachev, Stepan Petrovich (1898–1979). Soviet Russian poet; author of love poems and poems about nature, as well as poetry on social and political topics; his verse collections include Stikhotvoreniya (Poems, 1948) and Tovarishcham po

624 Biographical Notes zhizni (To My Comrades on the Road of Life, 1972); his narrative poems include Domik v Shushenskom (The Little House in Shushenskoye, 1944), Pavlik Morozov (1950), and 12 mesyatsa vokrug Solntsa (Twelve Months Around the Sun, 1969); awarded the State Prize (1949, 1951). Shelepin, Aleksandr Nikolayevich (1918–1994). Party and government official; member of the party’s Central Committee Presidium (Politburo) from 1964 to 1975; by professional training a historian; beginning in 1940, an official in the Young Communist League (Komsomol), becoming a secretary of its Central Committee in 1943; from 1952 to 1958, first secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee; in 1958, on Khrushchev’s initiative, he was transferred from the Komsomol to take charge of the Cadres Department of the party’s Central Committee; also in 1958, he was made chairman of the KGB, remaining in that post until 1961; from 1961 to 1967, secretary of the party’s Central Committee and simultaneously, from 1962 to 1965, chairman of the party’s Control Commission under the Central Committee and Council of Ministers, as well as deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. Thus Shelepin became one of the most powerful officials in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev had suggested that, at a Central Committee plenum scheduled for November 1964, Shelepin be made a member of the CC Presidium. Khrushchev regarded Shelepin as one of his possible successors, sometimes giving him precedence over Brezhnev. Khrushchev planned a major change of leadership at a proposed Twenty-Third Party Congress in 1965. However, when the ouster of Khrushchev occurred in October 1964, Shelepin quickly became a full member of the Presidium. In July 1967, he was made chairman of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. In 1975, after Brezhnev removed him from the Politburo, Shelepin served, until his retirement in 1984, as deputy chairman of the State Committee for Professional-Technical Education. Shelepin, who headed the “youth wing” of the plot to remove Khrushchev, had always been demonstratively servile toward him. Shelest, Pyotr Yefimovich (1908–1996). Ukrainian party and government official; in 1923, started out as an industrial worker and activist of the Young Communist League (Komsomol); in 1932, worked as an engineer in a metallurgical plant in Mariupol; in 1935, graduated from the Mariupol Metallurgical Institute; in 1938, after serving in the Red Army, was a shop foreman at a plant in Kharkov; in 1940, began work as a party official, serving as secretary of party city committees in Kharkov and Chelyabinsk; also served as an official for the party’s Central Committee at an airplane factory in Saratov; 1948–1954, director of aircraft factories, first in Leningrad, then in Kiev; in 1954, became second secretary of the Kiev city committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, then second secretary (and from 1957 first secretary) of its Kiev province committee; in 1963, became first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party and a member of the party’s CC Presidium. As party leader of Ukraine, Shelest promoted autonomous economic development and defended Ukrainian language and culture, bringing him into conflict with Brezhnev and other members of the Politburo (the renamed CC Presidium of the Communist Party, as of 1966); he was ousted as Ukrainian party leader in May 1972 and removed from the Politburo in the context of an official campaign against Ukrainian “nationalist” tendencies as well as his long-standing conflict with Shcherbitsky, who was supported by Brezhnev; in 1972, Shelest was made one of many deputies to the chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers (i.e., to Kosygin), then director of a defense enterprise near Moscow until his retirement in 1973. Shelest and Khrushchev had never been close acquaintances; their interactions were entirely work related. In 1964, Shelest took a very active part in the plot to remove Khrushchev, and after the ouster of the latter was elected to full membership

Biographical Notes

625

in the party’s CC Presidium (on November 16, 1964), but the Brezhnev leadership never allowed Shelest to play more than a secondary role. Shepilov, Dmitry Trofimovich (1905–1995). Party and government official; in 1922, began work at various procurement posts and at publishing houses, and studied at an agricultural institute in Moscow; in 1935, began work in the Agricultural Department of the party’s Central Committee, and in 1937 at the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union; 1941–1946, served as a political official in the Soviet army; 1947–1952, again worked in the Central Committee apparatus, including a period as first deputy head of the committee’s Propaganda Department; 1952–1956, chief editor of Pravda; 1955–1957 (with interruptions), secretary of the Central Committee; 1956–1957, Soviet foreign minister. He was a Khrushchev protégé, but in June 1957, at the last minute, when he decided that Khrushchev was doomed, Shepilov joined the pro-Stalin group that attempted to remove Khrushchev from power but was defeated. From 1957 to 1960, he was deputy director of the Institute of Economics of the Kirgiz Soviet republic’s Academy of Sciences; from 1960 until retirement in 1982, worked in the archives administration of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union. Shokin, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (1909–1988). Soviet government official; electrical engineer; in 1934, began work in the shipbuilding industry; in 1943, worked at the Council for Radar Location under the State Defense Committee; beginning in 1949, served as deputy minister of various electronics-related ministries; 1961–1965, chairman of the State Committee for the Electronics Industry under the Council of Ministers; 1965–1988, head of the Ministry of the Electronics Industry. Sholokhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1905–1984). Soviet prose writer; best known for his two-part novel Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home to the Sea (1928–1940), about the dramatic fate of the Don Cossacks in World War I and the Russian Civil War, highlighting the nationalities question and the problem of the individual in the midst of revolution; his short stories about the Don region, Donskie rasskazy, were published in 1929; also known for his novel about collectivization, Virgin Soil Upturned (1932–1960), and for his writings about the Nazi-Soviet war of 1941–1945, They Fought for Their Country (1943–1969) and the short story Sudba cheloveka (The Fate of a Man, 1956–1957); awarded the Lenin Prize (1960), the State Prize (1941), and the Nobel Prize in literature (1965); twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1967, 1980). Shostakovich, Dmitry Dmitryevich (1906–1975). Russian composer; his work includes fifteen symphonies, as well as quartets, preludes, fugues, and music for ballet, films, and the theater; also a pianist; from 1939 to 1943, taught at the Leningrad Conservatory, and from 1943 to 1948 at the Moscow Conservatory; in 1948, he was denounced by top Soviet leader Andrei Zhdanov, on Stalin’s orders, and remained in official disfavor until after Stalin’s death; in 1954, awarded the title People’s Artist of the Soviet Union; from 1957 to 1960, secretary and then, from 1960 to 1968, first secretary of the Composers Union of the Russian Federation; awarded the Lenin Prize (1958), the State Prize (1941, 1942, 1946, 1950, 1952, 1968), and the International Peace Prize (1954); Hero of Socialist Labor (1966). Shuisky, Grigory Trofimovich (1907–1986). Khrushchev’s most trusted assistant; Khrushchev jokingly called him “the boyar Shuisky,” referring to a famous figure in Russian history (from the Time of Troubles after the reign of Ivan the Terrible); following Khrushchev’s ouster, his former assistant Shuisky somehow continued to work for the party’s Central Committee, as a consultant to the Central Committee’s Ideology Department on matters involving newspapers, magazines, and publishing; in 1965, became a consultant to the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department.

626 Biographical Notes Shvernik, Nikolai Mikhailovich (1888–1970). Party and government official; took part in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917; from 1920 to 1928, held various party and government posts, siding with Stalin in the internal party disputes (against the 1923 Left Opposition, the Zinoviev Opposition, and the “right deviation”); in 1929, became chairman of the metalworkers union, then in 1930 replaced Nikolai Tomsky (the “right deviationist”) as head of the Soviet trade unions, remaining in that post until 1944; from 1944 to 1953, first deputy and then chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (formal head of state); 1952–1953 and 1957–1966, member of the party’s CC Presidium; 1952–1956, again headed the Soviet trade unions; 1956– 1966, chairman of the party’s Control Commission under the Central Committee; in 1956, was appointed chairman of a commission on the rehabilitation of victims of Stalin-era repression; retired in 1966. Shvernik’s relations with Khrushchev were always mutually respectful and businesslike. Skryabin, Konstantin Ivanovich (1878–1972). Soviet helminthologist; author of works on the morphology, taxonomy, and ecology of helminths, especially parasitic worms in the intestines of farm animals and humans; founder of the Soviet scientific school of helminthology; became a full member of the Academy of Sciences in 1939; awarded the Lenin Prize (1957) and the State Prize (1941, 1950); Hero of Socialist Labor (1958). Smelyakov, Yaroslav Vasilyevich (1912–1972). Soviet Russian poet of romantic inclination; political prisoner under Stalin from 1934 to 1937; he somehow survived and was “rehabilitated” in 1956; his books of poetry include Rabota i lyubov (Work and Love, 1932), the long narrative poem Strogaya lyubov (Stern Love, 1956), and Razgovor o glavnom (Conversation about the Main Thing, 1959). Smirnov, Leonid Vasilyevich (1916–2001). Soviet government official; in 1939, graduated from the Novocherkassk Industrial Institute in Rostov province, then worked as an electrical engineer at various factories in Novocherkassk; in 1952, became director of the N-586 missile plant in Dnepropetrovsk, which later became famous as the “Yuzhmash” plant (where Mikhail Yangel was chief designer for missile and space technology); from 1961 to 1963, Smirnov was chairman of the State Committee for Defense Technology; from 1953 to 1985, he was a deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and chairman of the Military-Industrial Commission of the Council of Ministers; retired in 1985. Smirnov, Sergei Sergeyevich (1915–1976). Soviet Russian author who wrote mainly about the unknown heroes of the war against Nazi Germany, such as in his documentary account of the 1941 battle for the Brest Fortress, Brestskaya Krepost (1957); awarded the Lenin Prize (1965). Smirnov, Vasily Aleksandrovich (1904–1979). Soviet Russian writer; secretary of the board of the Soviet Writers Union from 1954 to 1959; his novels Synovya (Sons, 1940) and Otkrytie mira (Discovery of the World, 1947–1971) described village life in old Russia and its transformation after the revolution. Sobolev, Leonid Sergeyevich (1898–1971). Soviet Russian author primarily of sea stories, such as his collection of short stories Morskaya Dusha (Nautical Soul, 1942) and his novel Kapitalny Remont (Major Repair, 1932–1962); awarded the State Prize (1943); Hero of Socialist Labor (1968). Sofronov, Anatoly Vasilyevich (1911–1990). Russian poet, playwright, and prose writer; known for his patriotic plays Moskovskii kharakter (Muscovite Strength of Character, 1948) and Beketov’s Career (1949); also wrote lyrical poetry and a novel in verse, V glub vremeni (Into the Depths of Time, 1978–1981); awarded the State Prize (1948, 1949); Hero of Socialist Labor (1981). Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich (1918–2008). Russian writer; intransigent opponent of the Soviet government; a Russophile and monarchist. His short novel One Day

Biographical Notes

627

in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in 1962, followed by Matryona’s House in 1963 and two other short works in the magazine Novy Mir. After Khrushchev’s removal from power, Solzhenitsyn’s work was banned in the Soviet Union, and he had several novels published abroad, beginning with Rakovy korpus (Cancer Ward) and V kruge pervom (First Circle), both in 1968. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. From 1971 to 1991, he worked on and published abroad a ten-volume political novel aimed against the Bolshevik Revolution, Krasnoe koleso (The Red Wheel). His works of political journalism include the three-volume Arkhipelag GULAG (The Gulag Archipelago, 1973), Zhit’ ne po lzhi (Do Not Live by the Lie, 1973), Kak nam obustroit Rossiyu? (How Can We Rebuild Russia? 1990), Russkii vopros k kontsu 20-go veka (The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century, 1994), and Dvesti let vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together, 2003). His autobiography, Bodalsa telyonok s dubom (The Oak and the Calf) was published in 1975. Awarded the Nobel Prize in literature (1970) and the State Prize of the Russian Federation (2007). He returned to Russia in 1994, became close friends with Vladimir Putin, and was widely promoted as an author of “classic” Russian literature. Starovsky, Vladimir Nikonovich (1905–1975). Soviet government official; from 1919, worked in the field of statistics and accounting; graduated from Moscow University in 1926; 1927–1939, worked as a teacher; 1939–1940, deputy head of the Central Economic Accounting Administration of the State Planning Committee (Gosplan); in 1940, became head of Gosplan’s Central Statistical Administration and concurrently, from 1941 to 1948, deputy chairman of Gosplan; from 1948 until retirement in 1975, head of the Central Statistical Administration under the Council of Ministers; became a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in 1958; Hero of Socialist Labor (1975). Sternberg, Rudy (1917–1978). British petrochemical manufacturer and exporter; in 1975, was made Baron Plurenden of Plurenden Manor in the county of Kent; born to a Jewish family in Thorn, Austria, he went to London in 1937 to study chemical engineering and remained there through World War II; in 1945, became a British citizen; established a plant that produced Bakelite, a synthetic product widely used for insulating electrical apparatus and for a great many other commercial purposes, and became a multimillionaire; in the early 1960s, Sternberg’s company was one of the ten largest in Europe. Stil, André (1921–2004). French novelist, writer of short stories, poet; took part in the resistance movement against the German occupation of France in World War II; 1950–1959, chief editor of the newspaper L’Humanité; his works include the trilogy The First Clash (1951–1953) and the novels Romansonga (1976) and Dieu est un enfant (God Is a Child, 1979). Stoletov, Vsevolod Nikolayevich (1906–1989). Soviet biologist and educator; 1951– 1959, first deputy minister and then minister of higher education for the Soviet Union; 1959–1971, minister of higher education for the Russian Federation; 1971– 1981, president of the Soviet Academy of Pedagogy; retired in 1981. Stolypin, Pyotr Arkadyevich (1862–1911). Prime minister of Russia under Tsar Nicholas II from 1906 to 1911; previously, from 1903 to 1906, he had been governor of Saratov province, then minister of internal affairs; directed the suppression of peasant uprisings in the 1905 revolution and its aftermath; introduced the socalled troikas, three-member military courts operating “out in the field,” in local areas, with highly accelerated procedures, handing out death sentences, which were carried out on-the-spot without the right of appeal. (Stalin later copied Stolypin, setting up NKVD troikas during the Great Terror of 1936–1938; also, the cattle cars used to deport prisoners in the Stalin-era repression were still called “Stolypin

628 Biographical Notes cars.”) Because of the mass executions under Stolypin, deputies in the State Duma began to refer to the hangman’s noose as a “Stolypin necktie.” At the same time, Stolypin began to implement an agrarian reform that had been designed by his predecessor, Prime Minister Sergei Witte. This reform allowed peasants to leave the village communes and become individual owners of a portion of the land formerly owned in common; it also encouraged peasants to move to virgin lands in Siberia and Kazakhstan, where they could also own the land as individuals. This reform stirred discontent among large landowners, including Tsar Nicholas II, because it deprived them of the low-paid labor of peasants from the impoverished village communes. Stolypin also dissolved the State Duma and had new elections held under more restrictive electoral laws, allowing the most conservative parties to gain a majority in the Third Duma, in 1907. Thus he earned opposition from both the left and the right, and was assassinated in Kiev by a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party who was also an agent of the secret police. Strumilin, Stanislav Gustavovich (original last name, Strumillo-Petrashkevich) (1877– 1974). Soviet economist and statistician; 1921–1937 and 1943–1951, worked in the State Planning Committee; in 1931, became a member of the Academy of Sciences; wrote numerous works on economics and statistics, on making demographic predictions, and on political economy and the history of economics; helped develop the first system in the world for calculating material balances; awarded the Lenin Prize (1958) and the State Prize (1942); Hero of Socialist Labor (1976). Surikov, Vasily Ivanovich (1848–1916). Russian painter; one of the group known as the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki); his works are distinguished by breadth and polyphony of composition, and by richness and vividness of color; among his bestknown works on themes of Russian history are The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy (1881), Menshikov in Siberian Exile at Beryozovo (1883), The Boyar’s Wife Morozova (1887), and The Conquest of Siberia by Yermak (1895); also painted portraits and watercolors. Surkov, Aleksei Aleksandrovich (1899–1983). Soviet poet; author of heroic and patriotic verse in such collections as Rovesniki (People of My Age, 1934) and Miru-mir (Peace to the World, 1950); also wrote the lyrics to some popular Russian songs; awarded the State Prize (1946, 1951); Hero of Socialist Labor (1969). Suslov, Mikhail Andreyevich (1902–1982). Party official; in 1937, began party work in southern Russia, in Rostov province and elsewhere; 1939–1944, first secretary of the Ordzhonikidze (previously and currently Vladikavkaz) territory committee of the party; 1944–1946, chairman of the party’s Bureau for the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, under the Central Committee; in 1946, began work at the party’s Central Committee in Moscow; 1949–1951, intermittently served as chief editor of Pravda; 1947–1982, Central Committee secretary with special responsibility for questions of ideology; in 1952, was appointed head of the Central Committee’s Ideological Commission; from 1953 to 1964, Suslov was regarded as the party’s “chief ideologist,” and even more so from 1965 to 1982, under Brezhnev; 1952– 1953 and 1955–1982, member of the CC Presidium (Politburo). Suslov did not take part in the 1964 plot to oust Khrushchev. About a week before the October meeting at which Khrushchev was removed, when Suslov was told about the upcoming event, he cried out in panic: “There’ll be civil war!” After he had calmed down and reviewed the balance of forces, he joined the conspiracy. Before that, Suslov had supported Khrushchev, but personal relations between them had never been close. Tamm, Igor Yevgenyevich (1897–1971). Soviet theoretical physicist; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1953; author of works on plasma quantum theory, radiation theory, solid-state physics, and elementary-particle physics; awarded the

Biographical Notes

629

State Prize (1948, 1953) and the Nobel Prize in physics (1958); Hero of Socialist Labor (1953). Tanner, Väinö Alfred (1881–1966). One of the main leaders of the Social Democratic Party of Finland, which he chaired from 1919 to 1926 and from 1957 to 1963; from 1926 to 1927, prime minister of Finland; from 1939 to 1940, foreign minister of Finland, during the “winter war” with the Soviet Union; in 1946, convicted as a war criminal for his role in Finland’s alliance with Nazi Germany during World War II and sentenced to five and a half years in prison, but in 1948 the Finnish government released him; Tanner’s second turn as chairman of the Social Democratic Party (1957–1963) caused a split in the party. Tarkovsky, Andrei Arsenyevich (1932–1986). Soviet film director; first film was Katok i skripka (Skating Rink and Violin, 1961); after Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan’s Childhood, 1962), he attracted much attention with his 1971 film Andrei Rublyov, about the fifteenth-century Russian icon painter; Tarkovsky’s later films include Solaris (1972), Zerkalo (Mirror, 1975), The Stalker (1980), Nostalgia (1983), and Zhertvoprinoshenie (The Sacrifice, 1986); lived in Paris from 1982 until his death; posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize in 1990. Thomson, Roy Herbert (1894–1976). British media entrepreneur; founded his first radio station in North Bay, Ontario, Canada, in 1931, and in 1934 began publishing his first newspaper, the Timmins Daily Press, in Ontario; over the years he became the owner of 200 newspapers in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, among them The Scotsman (Edinburgh) and the Sunday Times (London), as well as radio and television stations, including Scottish Television, a commercial network broadcasting from Glasgow. Thorez, Maurice (1900–1964). General secretary of the Communist Party of France from 1930 to 1964; member of French parliament from 1932 to 1964; minister in the French government from 1945 to 1947. Timiryazev, Kliment Arkadyevich (1843–1920). Russian scientist; extensive research on photosynthesis; in 1871, became a professor at Moscow’s Petrovskaya Agricultural and Forestry Academy (after Timiryazev’s death in 1920, his name was attached to this institution); in 1878, became a professor at Moscow University, from which he resigned in 1911 to protest the tsarist government’s repression of students; Timiryazev was one of the Russian scientists who supported the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, after which, in 1920, he was elected as a deputy to the Moscow City Soviet. Tito, Josip Broz (1892–1980). Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman; was in Russia in 1915 as a prisoner of World War I; in 1920, back in Yugoslavia, he joined the Communist Party; from 1934, served in party leadership; 1935–1956, worked in headquarters of the Communist International in Moscow; from 1937, chairman (general secretary) of the party; during the German invasion of Yugoslavia in World War II, Tito was commander in chief of the National Liberation Army; after the war, he was head of government (1945–1953) and then president of Yugoslavia (1953– 1980). Titov, Vitaly Nikolayevich (1907–1980). Party and government official; engineer who worked in machine-building; in 1947, became a functionary in the Kharkov province committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, then held other high posts in the Ukrainian party; in 1961, was transferred to Moscow to head the Central Committee’s department overseeing the leading bodies of the party; in 1962, became the Central Committee secretary “in charge of cadres”; in 1965, after Khrushchev’s ouster, he was sent off to work in the Central Committee of the Kazakhstan Communist Party, serving as second secretary until 1970; from 1971 to 1980, he was first deputy of the permanent Soviet representation at the Council for Mutual

630 Biographical Notes Economic Assistance (Comecon). Titov took no part in the conspiratorial preparations to remove Khrushchev as party leader. Relations between them always remained purely businesslike. Togliatti, Palmiro (1893–1964). Italian politician; one of founders of Italian Communist Party; 1927–1964, general secretary of its Central Committee; from 1926, when the Communist Party was banned by Mussolini, he lived in exile in France; from 1935, served as a Komintern secretary; in 1939, he was arrested but released and deported to the Soviet Union; 1940–1944, during World War II, lived in the Soviet Union; 1944–1946, minister and vice premier in several Italian governments; in 1948, he was shot three times and severely wounded; 1948–1964, member of the Italian parliament. Tolstikov, Vasily Sergeyevich (1917–2003). Graduated in 1940 from the Leningrad Institute of Rail Transport; 1940–1946, served in the Soviet army; 1946–1952, worked in construction organizations in Leningrad; in 1952, began party and government work; 1960–1970, was successively a secretary, then second secretary, then first secretary of the party’s Leningrad province committee; 1970–1978, Soviet ambassador to China; from 1979 until his retirement in 1982, Soviet ambassador to the Netherlands. Tolstoy, Aleksei Nikolatevich (1882–1945). Soviet Russian writer; he at first opposed the Bolshevik Revolution and emigrated, but returned in 1922 and became one of the most popular Soviet writers, known especially for his historical novels Peter I (1929–1945) and a trilogy about the Russian Civil War, Khozhdenie po mukam (The Road to Calvary, 1922–1924); also wrote the satirical novel Adventures of Nevzorov (1924) and the novel Giperboloid inzhenera Garina (The Hyperboloid of the Engineer Garin, 1925–1927; published in English as The Death Box, 1937), as well as many short stories; awarded the State Prize (1941, 1943, 1946). Tomsky, Nikolai Vasilyevich (1900–1984). Soviet sculptor; producer of monuments and decorative works, most notably a monument to Kirov in Leningrad (1938) and a monument to Lenin in Berlin (1970), as well as numerous busts, including a gallery of heroes of the Great Patriotic War (1947); named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union (1960); awarded the Lenin Prize (1972) and the State Prize (1941, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1952, 1979); Hero of Socialist Labor (1970). Trapeznikov, Vadim Aleksandrovich (1905–1994). Soviet specialist on electric machines and transformers, automation and remote control, scientific and technological advances, and economics; member of the Academy of Sciences in 1960; in 1959, chairman of the national committee on automatic regulation of production operations; in 1965, first deputy chairman of the State Committee for Science and Technology under the Council of Ministers; awarded the State Prize (1951); Hero of Socialist Labor (1965). Troyanovsky, Oleg Aleksandrovich (1919–2003). Soviet diplomat; 1958–1964, assistant to Khrushchev for diplomatic affairs; 1941–1942, served in the military; 1942– 1953, worked as a journalist and later in the Foreign Ministry; 1953–1958, aide to the Soviet foreign minister, first Molotov, then Shepilov and Gromyko; 1958–1967, aide to the chairman of the Council of Ministers, first Khrushchev, then Kosygin; 1967–1976, Soviet ambassador to Japan; 1976–1986, Soviet ambassador to the United Nations; from 1986 until his retirement in 1990, Soviet ambassador to China. Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin Eduardovich (1857–1935). Russian rocket scientist; while working as a schoolteacher, developed theoretical foundations for rocketry and space flight; also authored works on the design of dirigibles and other aircraft. Tsvetayeva, Marina Ivanovna (1892–1941). Russian poet; best known for her short, deeply moving lyrics; author of several books of poems, including Versty (1921),

Biographical Notes

631

Remeslo (1923), and Posle Rossii (After Russia, 1928), as well as long narrative poems, including Krysolov (Rat Catcher, 1925), Nachalo Kontsa (Beginning of the End, 1926), and Poema gory (Poem of the Mountain, 1926); also wrote prose works, including memoirs about other Russian writers; emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1922 but returned in 1939; committed suicide in 1941. Tulaikov, Nikolai Maksimovich (1875–1938). Agronomist and soil scientist; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1932; wrote works on dry farming, plant physiology, agrochemistry, and soil science; awarded the Lenin Prize (1929); arrested in 1937 and died in prison; posthumously rehabilitated. Tupolev, Andrei Nikolayevich (1888–1972). Soviet aircraft designer; worked on hoversleighs, speedboats, reconnaissance planes, fighter jets, the first Soviet heavy bomber (ANT-4), and the first Soviet hydroplane (ANT-8); 1937–1941, arrested and imprisoned; involved in designing more than a hundred military and passenger planes, including the ANT-25 (flew over the North Pole to the United States in 1937), the TU-104 (first jet passenger plane), and the TU-114 (first passenger plane to fly from Moscow to Washington, D.C., without landing); his planes set seventyeight world records; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1953; awarded the Lenin Prize (1957) and the State Prize (1943, 1948, 1949, 1952, 1972); thrice Hero of Socialist Labor (1945, 1957, 1962). Tvardovsky, Aleksandr Trifonovich (1910–1971). Soviet Russian poet; best known for his long narrative poems Strana Muraviya (The Land of Muravia, 1936), Vasily Tyorkin (1941–1945), Dom u dorogi (The House by the Roadside, 1946), Za dalyu—dal’ (Horizon Beyond Horizon, 1953–1960), Tyorkin na tom svete (Tyorkin in the Other World, 1963), and Po pravu pamyati (By Right of Memory, 1987); also published many collections of short poems and wrote prose works, including literary criticism; twice chief editor of the literary magazine Novy Mir (1950–1954 and 1958–1970); in 1961, at the Twenty-Second Party Congress, was elected an alternate member of the Central Committee; awarded the Lenin Prize (1961) and the State Prize (1941, 1946, 1947, 1971). Ulbricht, Walter (1893–1973). German politician; in 1912, joined the Socialist Party; in 1918, participated in the German revolution; 1929–1933, member of Reichstag of South Westphalia; 1933–1937, in exile in Paris and Prague; 1937–1945, in exile in Soviet Union; in 1949, deputy prime minister of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany); 1950–1971, general secretary and then first secretary of the Central Committee of the German Socialist United Party, created after the 1946 merger of the German Communist Party and the German Socialist Party; from 1971, honorary chairman of the party; 1960–1971, chairman of the State Council of German Democratic Republic (formal head of state); retired in 1971. Ungaretti, Giuseppe (1888–1970). Italian modernist poet, journalist, essayist, critic, and academic; recipient of the inaugural 1970 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. A leading representative of the experimental trend known as Ermetismo (Hermeticism), Ungaretti was one of the most prominent contributors to twentiethcentury Italian literature. Influenced by symbolism, he was briefly aligned with futurism. Ungaretti debuted as a poet while fighting in the trenches, publishing one of his best-known pieces, L’Allegria (The Joy). During the interwar period, Ungaretti was a foreign-based correspondent for Il Popolo d’Italia and La Gazzetta del Popolo. While briefly associated with the Dadaists, he developed Hermeticism as a personal take on poetry. After spending several years in Brazil, he returned home during World War II, and was assigned a teaching post at the University of Rome, where he spent the final decades of his life and career. Uspensky, Gleb Ivanovich (1843–1902). Russian writer who realistically described the lives of the urban poor and the social conflicts in the countryside subsequent to the

632 Biographical Notes 1861 abolition of serfdom, notably in Power of the Soil (1882), a semi-journalistic account of peasant life. Ustinov, Dmitry Fyodorovich (1908–1984). Party and government official; 1938–1941, director of an arms plant in Leningrad; 1941–1953, people’s commissar of armaments; 1953–1957, minister of the defense industry; 1957–1963, deputy chairman and head of the Military Industrial Committee; 1963–1965, first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and chairman of the Supreme Council on the National Economy; 1965–1976, secretary of the party’s Central Committee with responsibility for the defense industry; 1976–1984, minister of defense and Marshal of the Soviet Union; 1976–1984, member of the Central Committee Politburo. Varentsov, Sergei Sergeyevich (1901–1971). Soviet general; during World War II, deputy commander and commander of artillery in several armies and groups of armies; after the war, commander of artillery at various locations; 1952–1955, head of the main artillery directorate of the Soviet army; 1955–1961, commander and marshal of artillery of the Soviet army; 1961–1963, commander in chief of missile forces and artillery. In 1963, Varentsov was stripped of title Hero of the Soviet Union, demoted from marshal to major-general (one star), and forced to retire, in view of his personal friendly connection with the British spy Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who was his aide during World War II. Varga, Yevgeny Samsonovich (1879–1964). Soviet economist; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1939; his main works were on the political economy of capitalism; awarded the Lenin Prize (1963). Vasilevsky, Aleksei Mikhailovich (1895–1977). Soviet military commander; Marshal of the Soviet Union (1943); captain in the tsarist army during World War I; joined the Red Army in 1918 and fought in the Russian Civil War; 1942–1945, during World War II, became deputy chief and then chief of the General Staff; 1945–1946, commander in chief of Soviet forces in the Far East (routing the Japanese in Manchuria and Korea in August 1945); 1946–1949, again chief of the General Staff; 1949–1953, headed the Ministry of War; 1953–1957, first deputy minister of defense; 1959–1977, general inspector of the Ministry of Defense. Vasilyev, Sergei Aleksandrovich (1911–1975). Soviet Russian poet; author of satirical verse and parodies, and the verse trilogy Portret partizana (Portrait of a Partisan, 1938–1943). Vasnetsov, Andrei Vladimirovich (1924–2009). Soviet artist who produced monumental paintings as well as mosaics, sculptures, and bas reliefs; in 1988, became chairman of the Artists Union and a corresponding member of the Academy of Arts; named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union (1991); awarded the State Prize (1979). Vasnetsov, Yuri Alekseyevich (1900–1973). Soviet graphic artist and engraver; creator of highly colorful illustrations, suffused with the spirit of Russian folklore, in such children’s books as Ladushki (Little Beloveds) and Raduga-duga (Rainbow Arc); named People’s Artist of the Soviet Union (1966); awarded the State Prize (1971). Vekua, Ivan Nestorovich (1907–1977). Soviet mathematician and specialist in mechanics (as a branch of physics); author of works on differential and integral equations, functions theory, and shell theory; became a full member of the Academy of Sciences in 1958; awarded the Lenin Prize (1963), the State Prize (1950 and, posthumously, 1984); Hero of Socialist Labor (1969). Vilyams, Vasily Robertovich (1863–1939). Russian and Soviet agricultural scientist; 1922–1925, rector of the Moscow (Timiryazev) Agricultural Academy; joined the party in 1928; became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1931; his concept of the grass-field rotation system dominated Soviet agriculture from the 1930s into the 1950s.

Biographical Notes

633

Volovchenko, Ivan Platonovich (1917–1998). Soviet government official; agronomist; in 1951, became director of the Petrovsky state farm in Lipetsk province; 1963– 1965, head of the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture; 1965–1972, first deputy minister of agriculture of the Soviet Union; 1972–1975, minister of state farms of the Russian Federation; 1975–1979, deputy minister of agriculture of the Soviet Union; 1977, attaché in the Soviet embassy in Berlin. Voronov, Gennady Ivanovich (1910–1994). Party and government official; in 1937, began party work after having graduated from the Tomsk Industrial Institute; 1939– 1955, secretary, then third secretary, second secretary, and finally first secretary of the party’s Chita province committee. It was in Chita that Voronov made Khrushchev’s acquaintance, in 1954, when the latter was returning from his first visit to China, stopping at major cities in order to familiarize himself with Siberia. Khrushchev liked Voronov because of his thoroughness and firm, businesslike manner. In 1955, Voronov was made deputy minister of agriculture for the Soviet Union; 1957– 1961, first secretary of the party’s Chkalov (Orenburg) province committee; in 1961, became a member of the party’s CC Presidium; 1961–1962, deputy, then first deputy chairman (under Khrushchev), of the CC Bureau for the Russian Federation; 1962–1971, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation. Brezhnev removed Voronov from the latter post because of his intractability. From 1971 until his retirement in 1973, Voronov was chairman of the Committee of People’s Control; he remained a member of the CC Presidium (Politburo) from 1961 to 1973. Voronov did join the 1964 plot to remove Khrushchev, though without any special enthusiasm. In August 1964, while Khrushchev was inspecting the harvest in the Virgin Lands, Brezhnev accompanied Voronov on a hunting trip at Zavidovo and spent an entire night trying to persuade him to join the plot, showing him lists of Central Committee members with checkmarks next to the names of those already leaning in Brezhnev’s direction; in the end, Voronov agreed. When Khrushchev was party leader, relations between him and Voronov had been equable. Voroshilov, Kliment Yefremovich (1881–1969). Joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1903; participated in the revolutions of 1905, February 1917, and October 1917 and in the Russian Civil War; in 1918, he was a Red Army commander at Tsaritsyn, but was removed for refusal to follow orders from Moscow; joined with Stalin to form the so-called Military Opposition to a centralized, disciplined Red Army structure and to the utilization of former tsarist officers in the service of the Soviet government; in 1919, together with Semyon Budyonny, helped organize a Red cavalry army; in 1921, became commander of the Northern Caucasus military district, and then of the Moscow military district; in 1925, became people’s commissar of military and naval affairs; 1926–1960, member of the CC Politburo (Presidium); in 1934, became people’s commissar of defense; in 1935, awarded the title Marshal of the Soviet Union; in 1940, became deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars; during the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), occupied a number of leading posts; in 1946, became deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers; 1953–1960, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (formal head of state); from 1960, member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Voznesensky, Andrei Andreyevich (1933–2010). Soviet Russian poet; noted for his lyric poetry, containing extravagant metaphors and similes and complex assonance and rhyme schemes; his collections of verse include Treugolnaya grusha (The Triangular Pear, 1962), Antimiry (Anti-Worlds, 1964), Vitrazhnykh del master (Master of Stained Glass Work, 1976), and Aksioma samoiska (Axiom of the Search for the Self, 1990); his long narrative poems include Mastera (Masters, 1959), Longjumeau (1963, about Lenin in France), Oza (1964), and Avos (1972); also wrote two rock

634 Biographical Notes operas, in 1981 and 1986, as well as memoirs in prose; awarded the State Prize (1970). Vuchetich, Yevgeny Viktorovich (1908–1974). Soviet sculptor; noted for his monument memorials to Soviet soldiers, such as in Berlin’s Treptow Park (1946–1949), and on Mamai Hill in honor of the Battle of Stalingrad (1963–1967); among his many smaller-scale sculptures is the statue of Soviet general Ivan Chernyakhovsky (1945); awarded the Lenin Prize (1970) and the State Prize (1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1959); Hero of Socialist Labor (1967). Wasilewska, Wanda (1905–1964). Polish writer and political figure; daughter of conservative Polish politician Leon Wasilewski, one of leaders of the Polish Socialist Party, a close ally of the Polish dictator Józef Pilsudski, and foreign minister from 1918 to 1919; after graduation from Yagellon University in 1927 with a doctorate in philosophy, she worked as a schoolteacher in Krakow; in 1934, moved to Warsaw, worked in the teachers’ trade union, and edited Plomyk magazine; published the novel Appearance of the Day in 1934 and then the novel The Motherland in 1935; in 1938, she was fired for organizing the teachers’ strike, worked as a freelance journalist, and wrote two new novels, The Earth in the Yoke and Flame on Marshes, published in 1938 and 1939, respectively; imprisoned for her political activity in Poland by the Pilsudski regime, Wasilewska escaped to the Soviet Union in September 1939 and became a Soviet citizen; 1940–1941, wrote another novel, Stars in the Lake, published in 1945–1946 after the Great Patriotic War; during the war, Wasilewska worked as a propagandist and also wrote the novel The Rainbow, published in 1942), about life in a Ukrainian village under German occupation, and later wrote the script for the 1944 movie based on the book; 1941–1942, editor of the newspaper Za Radiansku Ukrainu (For a Soviet Ukraine); 1943–1945, editorin-chief of the newspaper Wolna Polska (Free Poland) and 1943–1945, chair of the Union of Polish Patriots in the Soviet Union. After World War II, she lived in Kiev and wrote the trilogy Song on the Stream (1940–1952) and the novels It Is Simply a Love (1946), Rivers in Fire (1951), and An Inevitable Fight (1958); awarded the State Prize (1943, 1946, 1952); won the US Academy Award (Oscar) for best script for the film Rainbow (1944). Witte, Sergei Yulyevich (1849–1915). Russian economist and government official; in 1892, became finance minister as well as minister of railroads, beginning construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad; in 1893, was made a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Russian Federation; in 1903, became chairman of the Council of Ministers (in effect, prime minister); worked out the basic principles for an agrarian reform, which became known as the Stolypin reform after being carried out by his successor as prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, beginning in 1906. Witte was influential in persuading Tsar Nicholas II to issue the October Manifesto (1905), promising civil liberties to the people and greater participation in the election of a State Duma, a parliament whose approval would be required for any law to take effect and thus create the appearance of a constitutional monarchy. Nicholas felt obliged to issue this manifesto in order to end the nationwide general strike that was under way at the time, but he never forgave Witte and forced him to retire in 1906. Out of favor with royalty, Witte remained under police surveillance for the rest of his life. After retirement he wrote three volumes of memoirs and secretly arranged for them to be published in Germany. Witte’s memoirs were not published in Russia until after the revolution, in 1923–1924, when the more moderate New Economic Policy had begun, and were not published again until 1960, during the Khrushchev era; a third edition appeared in the 1990s. Yakir, Iona Emmanuilovich (1896–1937). Took part in the revolutions of February and October 1917; in the Russian Civil War, held various political-military posts; in

Biographical Notes

635

1921–1924, commander of the Crimean and Kiev military subdistricts, then of the Kiev military district; 1925–1937, commander of the Ukrainian (Kiev) military district; in 1935, given the title “army commander of the first rank”(five-star general); in 1937, executed on Stalin’s orders along with most of the top command of the Soviet armed forces; posthumously rehabilitated in 1956. Yangel, Mikhail Kuzmich (1911–1971). Soviet rocket and missile designer; in 1930, entered the Moscow Aviation Institute, where in 1934 he joined the team of aircraft designer N. N. Polikarpov; worked at the design bureaus of Nikolai Polikarpov, Artyom Mikoyan, and V. M. Myasishchev; in 1954, was appointed head of the design bureau OKB-586 (later renamed Yuzhmash, meaning “southern machine plant”) in Dnepropetrovsk, where he was chief designer for missile and space technology and designed such missiles as those designated in the Soviet Union as R-12, R-14, R-17, and R-36 (in NATO terminology, respectively, SS-3, SS-4, SS7, and SS-18); became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1966; awarded the Lenin Prize (1960) and the State Prize (1967); twice Hero of Socialist Labor (1957, 1971). Yefremov, Leonid Nikolayevich (1914–2007). Soviet government official; from 1946 to 1962, he was successively secretary of party committees in Kuibyshev, Kursk, and Gorky provinces; in 1962, was elected a candidate member of the party’s CC Presidium, and also first deputy head of the CC Bureau for the Russian Federation, responsible for agriculture; in 1965, because the new party leadership had no special use for him, he was sent to be secretary of the Stavropol party committee; from 1970 until his retirement in 1988, served as first deputy chairman of the State Committee for Science and Technology. In the 1964 plot to remove Khrushchev, Yefremov played no active role, not joining any of the groups involved in the plot. When Khrushchev was party leader, relations between them had been purely businesslike. Yegorychev, Nikolai Grigoryevich (1920–2005). Party and government official; engineer; from 1954, worked in the Central Committee party apparatus; 1961–1967, second secretary, then first secretary, of the party’s Moscow city committee; 1967– 1970, deputy minister for production of tractors and other agricultural machinery; in 1971–1984, Soviet ambassador to Denmark. Yelyutin, Vyasheslav Petrovich (1907–1993). Soviet government official; scientist specializing in metallurgy; in 1962, became a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences; 1926–1951, taught and served as provost at various technical schools, and fought in World War II; from 1951 until his retirement in 1985, deputy minister, then minister, of higher education and specialized secondary education. Yermilov, Vladimir Vladimirovich (1904–1965). Soviet literary critic; in the 1920s, leader of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), but in the 1930s supported Stalin’s line of merging all groups into a single Soviet Writers Union; awarded the State Prize (1950). Yevtushenko, Yevgeny Aleksandrovich (1933– ). Soviet Russian poet; themes span the lyrical to the political; his many collections of verse include Shosse Entuziastov (Highway of Enthusiasts, 1956), Intimnaya lirika (Intimate Lyrics, 1973), and Grazhdane, poslushaite menya (Listen to Me, Fellow Citizens, 1989); has also published long narrative poems, such as Bratsky GES (The Bratsk Hydroelectric Plant, 1965), as well as translations; among his most powerful and effective political poems are “Babyi Yar” (1961), “The Heirs of Stalin” (1962), and “Tanks Roll Through Prague” (1968); his novels include Yagodnye mesta (Wild Berries, 1981) and Ne umirai prezhde smerti (Don’t Die Before You’re Dead, 1994); his memoirs are titled Volchyi pasport (Wolf’s Passport, 1998); among his films are Detskii sad (Kindergarten, 1984) and Pokhorony Stalina (Stalin’s Funeral, 1990); has lived in

636 Biographical Notes the United States since 1991, teaching at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma; in 2005, he compiled a comprehensive, five-volume anthology of Russian verse; awarded the State Prize (1984). Yezhevsky, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (1915– ). Soviet government official; 1956– 1957, first deputy minister for tractor and agricultural machinery production of the Soviet Union; 1957–1962, head of a department of the State Planning Committee; 1962–1980, chairman of the All-Union Association for Agricultural Technology (renamed State Committee for Supplying Agriculture with Machines and Technology in 1978); 1980–1988, minister in charge of production tractors and other agriculture machines; retired in 1988. Yezhov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1895–1940). Began factory work at the age of fourteen; joined the Communist Party in 1917 or 1918 (after it was in power); served in the Russian Civil War and then did local party work in Kazakhstan; in 1927, began work in the apparatus of the party’s Central Committee (promoted as a supporter of Stalin’s faction); 1929–1930, deputy people’s commissar of agriculture (during Stalin’s drive for “all-out collectivization of agriculture”); 1930–1934, head of the Central Committee’s Personnel Department and Personnel Assignment Department (“in charge of cadres”); 1934–1936, head of the Central Committee’s Industrial Department; in 1936, became a Central Committee secretary, chairman of the party’s Control Commission, and deputy chairman of the Reserves Committee of the Council of Labor and Defense; 1936–1938, people’s commissar of internal affairs (the secret police, who carried out the most murderous phase of Stalin’s Great Terror). In 1938, Yezhov was demoted to people’s commissar of water transport; in 1939, he was arrested and executed “for criminal activity”—that is, for following Stalin’s orders. Zababakhin, Yevgeny Ivanovich (1917–1984). Soviet physicist; author of works on hydrodynamics, explosion theory, and shockwaves; chief designer of the Urals center for the production of nuclear weapons; became a full member of the Academy of Sciences in 1968; awarded the Lenin Prize (1958) and the State Prize (1949, 1951, 1953); Hero of Socialist Labor (1953.) Zakharchenko, Vasily Dmitriyevich (1915–1999). Soviet journalist and writer; during World War II, military correspondent on the front lines; in 1957, graduated from and then taught at the Moscow Institute of Literature; 1954–1984, editor in chief of Tekhnika molodtozhi (Technic for Youth); 1991–1999, editor in chief of the magazine Chudesa i priklyucheniya (The Miracle and Adventures); 1954–1991, member of the Soviet Peace Committee; author of many popular scientific books, scripts for documentary films, and poems. Zakharov, Gury Filippovich (1926–1994). Soviet graphic artist; noted for his engraving and line-drawing techniques; among his rural and urban landscapes are Ferapontovo (1967) and Rozhdestvensky Boulevard (1975); his still lifes and thematic compositions are notable for their lyric quality, inner dynamism, and light, airy strokes; named Honored Artist of Russian Federation (1968). Zasyadko, Aleksandr Fyodorovich (1910–1963). Party and government official; 1943– 1946, deputy people’s commissar of the coal industry; 1946–1947, deputy minister for the construction of fuel enterprises; 1947–1948, minister of the coal industry of the western regions of the Soviet Union; 1948–1955, minister of the coal industry for the whole of the Soviet Union; 1956–1958, deputy chairman of the State Planning Committee (Gosplan); from 1958 to 1962, deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and, concurrently from 1960 to 1962, chairman of the State Economic Council. Zhdanov, Andrei Aleksandrovich (1896–1948). Soviet party official; active in the revolutionary movement from 1912; took part in the 1917 revolution; 1918–1920,

Biographical Notes

637

party political official in the Red Army; 1920–1934, held various party posts in the provinces of Tver (renamed Kalinin in 1931) and Nizhny Novgorod (renamed Gorky in 1932); in 1930, became a member of the Central Committee Politburo; in 1934, was a Central Committee secretary and simultaneously secretary of the party’s Leningrad province committee; in 1946, by order of Stalin, Zhdanov spoke out, with devastating criticism, against a number of prominent Soviet writers (in particular Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko) and musicians (in particular the composer Dmitry Shostakovich). Zhebrak, Anton Romanovich (1901–1965). Soviet geneticist and seed selectionist; worked on theory of hybridization, polyploid speciation, and immunity of plants; from 1940, full member of the Academy of Sciences of Belarus, and its president from 1945 to 1948; after 1948, when Stalin started his second wave of persecutions against geneticists, Zhebrak lost his position as president of the Academy of Sciences, but he was not arrested. Zhukov, Georgy Konstantinovich (1896–1974). Soviet general; served in the tsarist army during World War I; joined the Red Army in 1918; joined the Communist Party in 1919; from 1920 to 1940, occupied various command posts; in June 1940, became commander of the Kiev special military district, where he worked with Khrushchev; during the Great Patriotic War (the Nazi-Soviet war of 1941–1945), occupied a series of important command and staff positions; organized the defense of Leningrad (September 1941) and of Moscow (October 1941 to January 1942), and is generally credited for the Soviet victory in the Battle of Moscow; in 1943, awarded the title Marshal of the Soviet Union; from November 1944 to June 1945, commander of the First Belorussian Front in the final offensive against Germany; in 1946, became commander in chief of Soviet ground forces; in 1947, was reduced by Stalin to the rank of commander of the Odessa military district, then of the Urals military district; in 1953, after Stalin’s death, Zhukov, on Khrushchev’s initiative, was made first deputy minister of defense and then, in 1955, minister of defense; in February 1956, became a candidate member of the party’s CC Presidium and then, in June 1957, a full member; in October 1957, accused of plotting against Khrushchev and sent into retirement. Zinoviev, Grigory Yevseyevich (real name, Yevsei-Gersh Aronovich Radomyslsky) (1883–1936). Professional revolutionary and prominent figure in the early Soviet government; joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (RSDRP) in 1901; one of Lenin’s closest lieutenants in the Bolshevik wing of the RSDRP from 1908 to 1917, when they were living abroad; in April 1917, returned with Lenin from Switzerland to Russia; in December 1917, Zinoviev became chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and continued until 1926 as the top party official in that city (renamed Leningrad in 1924); from 1919 to 1926, chairman of the executive committee of the Communist International; member of the party’s Central Committee from 1907 to 1927 and of its Politburo from 1921 to 1926; from 1925 to 1927, fought with Stalin for power but was defeated and expelled from the party in 1927, then reinstated in 1928 after he capitulated to Stalin; from then until 1931, was assigned to insignificant posts; arrested and executed in August 1936 after the first of the three major Moscow trials of 1936–1938, in which he and his close political ally Lev Kamenev were the chief defendants; posthumously cleared of all charges in the late 1980s. Zoshchenko, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1894–1958). Soviet Russian satirical writer; collections of his short stories include Michel Sinyagin (1930), Vozvrashchennaia molodost (Youth Relived, 1933), and Golubaya kniga (Book of Pale Blue, 1934– 1935); his short novel Pered voskhodom solntsa (Before Sunrise) was published in 1943; in 1946, he was criticized harshly by Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov for alleged “defamation of Soviet reality”; although he was not arrested, his works were no longer published while Stalin was alive.

Endnotes

Chapter 1 1. The peasants’ market was a place where the producer (the peasant) could sell products directly to the consumer at a price they both agreed on. It was an important part of the Soviet economy, because not everything could be bought in government stores. Throughout the period of Soviet rule, the peasants’ markets played a big part in supplying food for ordinary people. 2. See the Russian edition of the memoirs of N. S. Khrushchev, Vremia, liudi, vlast (Time, People, Power), Moscow: Moskovskie Novosti, 1999, vol. 4, pp. 151–152. The corresponding passage is in the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 2, Reformer (1945–1964), University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006, p. 410. 3. See V. D. Belkin, Ternistyi put’ ekonomista: vospominaniia o prozhitom i razmyshleniia o budushchem (An Economist’s Thorny Path: Reminiscences of the Past and Thoughts on the Future), Moscow: Delo, 2003, p. 29. Also, see Milton Gilbert and Irving B. Kravis, An International Comparison of National Products and the Purchasing Power of Currencies, Paris: Organization for European Economic Cooperation, 1953. 4. See Belkin, An Economist’s Thorny Path, p. 30.

Chapter 2 1. Prezidium TsK KPSS, 1954–64, T.1, Chernovye protokolnye zapisi zasedanii: stenogrammy (CC Presidium of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], 1954–64, vol. 1, Rough Notes and Stenographic Records of Presidium Meetings), Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003, p. 485. 2. Krasnye Vorota (Beautiful Gate) was the name of one of the gates in the walls of old Moscow, and hence also the name of the district of the city around it. In this case, the Russian word krasny meant “beautiful,” rather than “red,” which is now the word’s primary meaning. Similarly, the original meaning of the name Krasnaya Ploshchad (Red Square) was “Beautiful Square.” 3. The quotation is from an 8-volume collection of Khrushchev’s speeches and writings on agriculture, N. S. Khrushchev, Stroitelstvo kommunizma v SSSR i razvitie selskogo khoziaistva (The Building of Communism in the USSR and the Development of Agriculture), Moscow: Gospolitizdat (State Publishing House for Political Literature), 1962–1964 (hereafter cited as Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture), vol. 5, p. 37. There also exists a 6-volume translation by the US government agency Joint Publications Research Service; see The Building of Communism in the USSR and the Development of Agriculture, Washington, D.C.: US Office of Technical Services, n.d.(date of publication not available). 4. This quotation is from Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 5, p. 35.

639

640 Endnotes to Pages 14–46 5. See p. 334 in the 1995 English translation of Gogol’s play by Christopher English, published by Oxford University Press. 6. The remarks by Khrushchev quoted in the preceding paragraphs are from Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 480–487. 7. Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 5, p. 210. 8. Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 313–352. 9. Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 333–341. 10. Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 347–348.

Chapter 3 1. See Mikoyan’s memoirs, Tak bylo (That’s How It Was), Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1999, p. 609. 2. See the State Archives of the Russian Federation, collection (fond) 428, register/ list (opis) 3, file (delo) 363, sheet (list) 5. 3. For this statistic of approximately 200,000, see the State Archives of the Russian Federation, collection (fond) 5, register/inventory (opis) 30, file (delo) 346, sheet (list) 89. 4. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 525–529.

Chapter 4 1. See Nina Voronel, Bez prikras (Without Embellishment), Moscow: Zakharov, 2003, pp. 254–261. 2. Yevpatoria (also spelled “Eupatoria”) is a port city on the west coast of the Crimean peninsula, on the Black Sea, about sixty-four kilometers north of Sevastopol; in 1970 it had a population of about 80,000; besides being a resort area, its economic activities included manufacturing, fishing, and shipping. 3. Here Nina Voronel is somewhat mistaken. The new law was adopted not a year later but in a quicker, more efficient fashion.

Chapter 5 1. These decrees are among those listed in the State Archives of the Russian Federation, collection (fond) 9474, register/inventory (opis) 10, file (delo) 238, sheet (list) 153.

Chapter 6 1. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 508, 516–520.

Chapter 7 1. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 509. 2. V. A. Nevezhin, Zastolnye rechi Stalina (Stalin’s Dinner Speeches), Moscow, 2003, p. 543.

Chapter 9 1. See Khrushchev’s 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 7, p. 24.

Endnotes to Pages 46–55

641

2. For the second quotation, see Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 404–405. For the first quotation, see Nikolai Barsukov, “Kommunisticheskie illiuzii Khrushcheva” (Khrushchev’s Communist Illusions), in the Moscow journal Dialog, no. 5, 1991, p. 77. Barsukov held a candidate’s degree in historical sciences and for most of his life worked at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Among other things, he worked on the minutes or other records kept of Khrushchev’s conversations with fellow leaders of his time. After 1964, those records were considered “seditious.” As it turned out, Barsukov was the only person who read them, and he preserved them. After living with them for so many years, he came to regard them as his personal property. Therefore, when Yeltsin came to power and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, its archives in effect became ownerless. The unemployed Barsukov took them home, thus stealing them or saving them, depending on one’s point of view. In my view, he saved them. After everything had calmed down somewhat, Barsukov began to publish material on the topic of Khrushchev. Unfortunately, he has already passed away. 3. For the quotations in the preceding paragraphs, see Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 393–395, 397–412. 4. The figures in the preceding paragraphs are from the stenographic record of the Twenty-Second Party Congress, Dvadtsat vtoroi syezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza: stenograficheskii otchet, Moscow, 1961, vol. 1, p. 169. 5. Here, as in other manifestations of economic profundity, each economist calculated in his own way and stuck firmly to the statistics he had come up with. For example, Viktor Belkin gives the following figures: in 1987, according to data from the State Committee for Statistics, the national income of the Soviet Union was 41 percent of that in the United States, when calculated at the official exchange rate, but when calculated in terms of parity in purchasing power, it went as high as 67 percent. When Belkin’s different method of calculating was used, however, this figure dropped to 20 percent. The State Committee for Statistics did not publish any figures on gross domestic product (GDP), but the CIA calculated that the GDP of the Soviet Union was 55 percent of that of the United States. Belkin did not agree with the CIA. He gave a figure of only 14 percent. Another economist, A. Oslund, cited a figure of between 21 and 34 percent, whereas Belkin’s colleague Igor Birman gave 20–25 percent. (See Belkin, An Economist’s Thorny Path, p. 115.) I am not about to judge who was right and who was not, and probably no one else will either. 6. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 510–511. See also the stenographic record of the Program Subcommission meeting of February 8, 1961, in the Russian State Archive of Modern Social and Political History (RGASPI), collection (fond) 586, register/inventory (opis) 1, item (yedinitsa khraneniya) 68, sheets (listy) 1–10. 7. V. I. Novikov, “V gody rukovodstva N. S. Khrushcheva” (In the Years of Khrushchev’s Leadership), in the Moscow publication Voprosy Istorii (Problems of History), no. 1, 1989, pp. 112–113. 8. See RGASPI, collection (fond) 586, register/inventory (opis) 1, file (delo) 305, sheet (list) 1. 9. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 510–516. 10. See F. M. Burlatsky, Glotok svobody (A Gulp of Freedom), Moscow: Kultuia, 1997, vol. 1, p. 98. 11. The quotation is from the stenographic record of the Twenty-Second Party Congress, pp. 200–201. 12. See RGASPI, collection (fond) 586, register/inventory (opis) 1, file (delo) 300, sheets (listy) 48 and 58; also file 298, sheet 63. 13. See Barsukov, “Khrushchev’s Communist Illusions,” p. 82. 14. See Nikolai Barsukov, “N. S. Khrushchev o proyekte Tretyei programmy KPSS” (N. S. Khrushchev on the Draft of the Third Program of the CPSU), in the Moscow publication Voprosy Istorii (Problems of History), no. 8, 1991, pp. 6–8. See

642 Endnotes to Pages 60–87 also the stenographic records of the meetings of the Program Commission, in RGASPI, collection (fond) 586, register/inventory (opis) 1, item (yedinitsa khraneniya) 68.

Chapter 10 1. Nuriddin Mukhitdinov, Reka vremeni (The River of Time), Moscow: Rusti-Rosti, 1995, pp. 520–524. 2. Ibid. 3. Nikolai Stepanovich Zakharov, Skvoz’ gody (Through the Years), Tula: Grif, 2003, pp. 272–275.

Chapter 13 1. See Vladimir Semichastny, Bespokoinoe serdtse (Restless Heart), Moscow: VAGRIUS, 2002, pp. 55–57.

Chapter 14 1. Quoted by N. P. Fedorenko in his memoir Vospominaya proshloye, zaglyadyvaya v budushcheye (Remembering the Past, Looking to the Future), Moscow: Nauka (Science), 1999, pp. 54–55. 2. See the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 2, pp. 373–374. The Russian wording of these quotations is in Vremya, lyudi, vlast, vol. 4, pp. 120–122. 3. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 373 (for the English translation); and vol. 4, p. 120 (for the Russian original). 4. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 1, p. 136. 5. See the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 2, p. 375. The Russian wording is in Vremya, lyudi, vlast, vol. 4, p. 122. 6. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 6, pp. 142–143.

Chapter 15 1. See Pravda, November 24, 1961. 2. See Pravda, November 25, 1961.

Chapter 16 1. See P. S. Neporozhny, Dnevniki 1935–85 (Diaries of 1935–1985), Moscow: Energoatomizdat (Electric Power and Atomic Energy), 2000, p. 157.

Chapter 17 1. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 6, p. 345. 2. See Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1967: statisticheskii ezhegodnik (The National Economy of the USSR in 1967: A Statistical Yearbook), Moscow, 1968, p. 59. 3. See the CIA report “SOV-88-10068,” dated September 1988, p. 9. (This was a review of the Soviet economy “in the light of glasnost” and an evaluation of predictions the CIA had made earlier.) 4. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 5, p. 419.

Endnotes to Pages 87–113

643

5. See ibid., vol. 6, p. 22. 6. See Selskoe khoziaistvo SSSR: statisticheskii sbornik (Agriculture of the USSR: A Statistical Compilation), Moscow, 1971, p. 151. 7. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 6, p. 347. 8. See the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, special folder (osobaya papka) 734, sheets 2–3. 9. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 6, pp. 350–353. The Central Committee plenum to assess the economic results for the year was not held in December, as in previous years, but in March of the next year, 1962. 10. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 6, pp. 351, 353, 363. See also Selskoe khoziaistvo SSSR, pp. 289, 299, 307, 314. In the latter compilation, at the beginning of each paragraph the figures are given for the amount sold; and at the end, the amount produced. These figures do not tally, which is only natural. In agriculture, not everything produced is delivered for sale. A significant amount is consumed locally by the producers, supplied to the armed forces, added to the government-held reserves, and so on. 11. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 6, pp. 162–163.

Chapter 18 1. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 6, pp. 296, 301.

Chapter 19 1. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 6, pp. 282–285. 2. See ibid., vol. 6, p. 449. 3. See ibid., vol. 6, pp. 371–388.

Chapter 20 1. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 7, pp. 56–60. 2. See ibid., vol. 6, pp. 398, 411. 3. See ibid., vol. 6, p. 403. 4. See Anatoly Strelyany, “Poslednii mechtatel” (The Last Romantic), in the Moscow monthly Druzhba Narodov (Friendship of the Peoples), no. 11, 1998, p. 206.

Chapter 21 1. Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000, pp. 468–482. 2. See P. S. Neporozhny, Energetika glazami ministra: dnevniki, 1931–1985 (Energy, Seen with the Eyes of a Government Minister: Diaries, 1931–1985), Moscow: Energoatomizdat (Electric Power and Atomic Energy), 2000, p. 114. 3. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 560.

Chapter 22 1. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 641. 2. The lives of Alfred Sarant (Filipp Staros) and his friend Joel Barr (Joseph Berg) are described in detail in a book by Steven T. Usdin, Engineering Communism: How

644 Endnotes to Pages 115–149 Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. They are also discussed in a Russian book by Aleksandr Feklisov, Priznanie razvedchika: missiya (Confessions of an Intelligence Agent: The Mission), Moscow: OLMA, 1999, pp. 151–158, 466–478.

Chapter 23 1. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 7, p. 49. 2. See Yuri Bagreyev and Vladislav Pavlyutkin, “Novocherkassk, 1962: tragediya na ploshchadi—materialy rassledovaniya Glavnoi voyennoi prokuratury, 1991 god” (Novocherkassk, 1962: The Tragedy in the City Square—Materials from the 1991 Investigation by the Chief Military Procurator’s Office), in the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), October 7, 1996, p. 7. See also V. A. Kozlov, Massovye besporyadki v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve (Mass Disorders in the USSR Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev), Novosibirsk: Sibirskii Khronograf (Siberian Chronograph), 1999, pp. 301–383.

Chapter 24 1. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 568. 2. See ibid., vol. 1, p. 560.

Chapter 25 1. For the preceding two quotations, see Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 671–672. 2. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 7, p. 139. 3. Ibid., vol. 7, p. 140.

Chapter 27 1. See Belkin’s article “Zadalis’ li reformy Gaidara?” (Were Gaidar’s Reforms Successful?), in the magazine Novy Mir, no. 1, 2002. 2. See Vasily Vasilyevich Katanyan, Prikosnovenie k idolam (Adjacency to the Idols), Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1997, p. 39. 3. See Aleksei Adzhubei, Te desyat let (Those Ten Years), Moscow: Sovetskaya Rossiya, 1989, p. 304. 4. See Aleksei Adzhubei, Krushenie illiuzii (The Collapse of Illusions), Moscow: Interbook, 1991. 5. See V. Belkin and I. Birman, “Tsena i pribyl” (Price and Profit), Izvestia, October 29, 1962. 6. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 7, pp. 370–371. 7. The figures I have given here were taken from various publications about Khudenko, including V. Kokashinsky, “Eksperiment v Akchi” (An Experiment in Akchi), Literaturnaya Gazeta, May 21, 1969; A. Vaksberg, “Komu eto nuzhno?” (For Whom Is This Necessary?), Literaturnaya Gazeta, January 21, 1987; V. Belkin and V. Pereverzev, “Drama Akchi” (The Drama of Akchi), Literaturnaya Gazeta, April 1, 1987; and Belkin, An Economist’s Thorny Path, pp. 79–91. After October 1964, and up until the late 1980s, there was a prohibition against mentioning Khrushchev and his

Endnotes to Pages 150–183

645

era, and so the date for the beginning of Khudenko’s experiment was changed from 1961 to 1967; some of these authors (not Belkin of course) were willing to do that without a moment’s hesitation. 8. The preceding figures are taken from P. M. Kolovangin and F. F. Rybakov, Ekonomicheskoe reformirovanie Rossii v XX veke (Economic Reform of Russia in the Twentieth Century), St. Petersburg: Petropolis, 1996, pp. 22–23. 9. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 637–640. 10. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 7, p. 379. 11. This quotation is from Khrushchev’s memoirs (Russian edition, Vremia, liudi, vlast, vol. 4, pp. 126–128; English edition, Memoirs of N. S. Khrushchev, vol. 2, pp. 380–381). 12. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 573. 13. See ibid., vol. 1, p. 575. 14. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 7, pp. 163–177. 15. See ibid., vol. 7, p. 176. 16. See Pyotr Yefimovich Shelest, Da ne sudimy budete (That You Be Not Judged), Moscow: Edition Q, 1995, p. 157. 17. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 7, pp. 323, 327–328. 18. See ibid., vol. 7, pp. 366–367. 19. See ibid., vol. 7, p. 368. 20. See ibid., vol. 7, pp. 368–370. 21. See Plenum TsK KPSS, 15–19 dekabria 1958: stenograficheskii otchet (CC Plenum of the CPSU, December 15–19, 1958: Stenographic Record), Moscow: Gospolitizdat (State Publishing House for Political Literature), pp. 77–78.

Chapter 30 1. S. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower; pp. xiii– xviii and 501–662.

Chapter 32 1. For the preceding quotations, see Aleksandr Pyzhikov, Khrushchevskaia ottepel, 1953–1964 (The Khrushchev Thaw, 1953–1964), Moscow: OLMA, 2002, p. 302. 2. See the Russian State Archive of Modern History (RGANI), collection (fond) 5, register/inventory (opis) 5, file (delo) 441, sheets (listy) 49–50, 80–85.

Chapter 33 1. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 164.

Chapter 35 1. The quotation is from a report by the Central Statistical Administrationdated December 20, 1961, titled “Ob itogakh obsledovaniia biudzheta naseleniia za 9 mesiatsev 1962 goda i o vliianii na biudzhet semyi povysheniia roznichnykh tsen na miaso, miasnye produktsii, i maslo zhivotnoe” (Results of an investigation into the [family] budgets of the population for nine months of the year 1962, and the effect on family budgets of the increase in retail prices for meat, meat products, and animal fats).

646 Endnotes to Pages 183–207 2. See Selskoe khoziaistvo SSSR, 1971, pp. 289, 299, 303, 314. 3. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 7, p. 24.

Chapter 36 1. See Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1967, p. 59. 2. See KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh syezdov, konferentsii, i plenumov TSK (The CPSU in the Resolutions and Decisions of Congresses, Conferences, and Central Committee Plenums), Moscow, 1986, vol. 10, p. 289. 3. Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 7, pp. 317–318. 4. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 628–631, 635–636. 5. Ibid., pp. 586–587. 6. Ibid., pp. 658–659. 7. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 7, p. 191; see also Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 642. 8. Ibid., vol. 7, pp. 302–304, 385. 9. See the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, special folder (osobaya papka) 734, sheets (listy) 2–3. 10. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 7, pp. 301–305. 11. Ibid., vol. 7, pp. 305, 388. 12. See Selskoe khoziaistvo SSSR: statisticheskii sbornik (Agriculture of the USSR: Statistical Handbook), Moscow, 1971, p. 287. 13. These figures are taken from the book by Ilya Yevgenyevich Zelenin, Agrarnaia politika N. S. Khrushcheva i selskoe khoziaistvo (Agriculture and Khrushchev’s Agrarian Policy), Moscow: RAN, p. 189.

Chapter 37 1. Tvardovsky’s “Rabochie tetradi 60-kh godov” (Working Notebooks [i.e., “editor’s journals”] of the 1960s) were published in the Moscow-based literary monthly Znamya, no. 7, 2000. For the cited quotation, see pp. 130–131 in that issue of Znamya. 2. Tvardovsky, Working Notebooks of the 1960s, pp. 130–131. 3. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 596–597. 4. Translator’s note—At one time Stalin had referred to Soviet citizens as “vintiki” (literally, “little screws”), that is, “little cogs in the great machine of the Soviet state.”

Chapter 38 1. See Kultura i vlast, ot Stalina do Gorbacheva: apparat TsK i kultura, 1958–1964 (Culture and Power, from Stalin to Gorbachev: The Central Committee Apparatus and Culture, 1958–1964), Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005, pp. 361–363. 2. See Vladimir Lakshin, “Novy Mir” vo vremena Khrushchev (Novy Mir in the Khrushchev Years), Moscow: Knizhnaya Palata, 1991, p. 75. 3. “Kulak” was a term applied to relatively well-to-do peasant farmers. At the time of “all-out collectivization” in the early 1930s, Stalin declared the kulaks to be “enemies of the people.” He called for the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” and had them arrested and sent to Siberia on a mass scale involving hundreds of thousands of people. 4. Lakshin, Novy Mir in the Khrushchev Years, pp. 76–77. 5. Ibid., p. 77. 6. Tvardovsky, Working Notebooks of the 1960s, pp. 135–137. 7. Lakshin, Novy Mir in the Khrushchev Years, p. 137.

Endnotes to Pages 208–250

647

8. Tvardovsky, Working Notebooks of the 1960s, p. 140. 9. Kornei Chukovsky, Dnevnik (Diary), 1901–1969, vol. 2, Moscow: OLMA, 2003, p. 362. The Black Hundreds were extreme right-wing, anti-Semitic, proto-fascist groups that appeared in tsarist Russia in the early twentieth century, roughly 1902–1917. They enjoyed the official encouragement of the tsarist regime and were often organized by the police.

Chapter 39 1. For more about Belyutin, see the article “Moscow Has No Need for El Greco,” Moscow News, no. 35, September 10–16, 2001. 2. For Mikhailov’s January 1960 letter to the CPSU Central Committee, see Kultura i vlast: ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, pp. 343–344. 3. The quotation is from Adzhubei, Those Ten Years, p. 315. 4. English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 2, p. 558.

Chapter 40 1. The text of the letter from the “group of artists” has been published in Istochnik (Source), the journal of the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, no. 6, 2003, pp. 107–108. 2. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 648. 3. The stenographic record is in the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, collection ( fond) 52, register/inventory (opis) 1, file (delo) 329, sheets (listy) 85–111. Its title is “Vyskazyvaniia N. S. Khrushcheva pri poseshchenii vystaki proizvedenii moskovskikh khudozhnikov 1 dekabria 1962 g., v stenograficheskoi zapisi Nadezhdoi Gavrilovoi” (Statements by N. S. Khrushchev on His Visit to the Exhibit of Works by Moscow Artists on December 1, 1962, a Stenographic Record Made by Nadezhda Gavrilova). It has also been published in Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev: dva tsveta vremeni (Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev: Two Colors of Time), Moscow: International Democracy Foundation, 2009, vol. 2, pp. 522–532. 4. See Yuli Krelin, Izvivy pamyati (Twists and Turns of Memory), Moscow: Zakharov, 2003, pp. 99–100. 5. See Eliy Belyutin, “Khrushchev i Manezh” (Khrushchev and the Manège), in the magazine Druzhba Narodov (Friendship of the Peoples), no. 1, 1990, pp. 136–161; and Mikhail Romm, Ustnye rasskazy (Oral Histories), Moscow: Kino-Rezhisser (Film Director), 1991, pp. 123–156. 6. Boris Zhutovsky, “Ya bolen vremenem” (I Am Ill from the Times [I Live In]), in the magazine Ogonyok, no. 15, 1989, pp. 18–19. 7. The reference is to the Kurchatov Institute’s Atomic Research Center in Moscow. 8. On June 21, 1962, the CC Presidium decided to establish a special All-Union Art Lottery to support painters, sculptors, and other artists. In this lottery, one could win a work of art as a prize. The Presidium also decided to include works from the visual arts as prizes in other types of lotteries in the union republics. In those lotteries, the prizes included money and such items as washing machines, cars, and bicycles.

Chapter 41 1. See Mikhail Romm, Kak v kino: ustnye rasskazy (Like in the Movies: Some Oral Histories), Moscow: Dekom, 2003, pp. 179–214. This book contains Romm’s taperecorded reminiscences in transcribed form; hence the name “Oral Histories.”

648 Endnotes to Pages 251–294 2. See Aleksandr Yesenin-Volpin, A Leaf of Spring, New York: Praeger, 1961. 3. Romm, Kak v kino. 4. See the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 2, p. 559. 5. The letter was published in Istochnik (Source), the journal of the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, no. 6, 2003, p. 168.

Chapter 42 1. According to the stenographic record, the second session was held on December 26, not December 25, and began at 2 P.M., not 4 P.M. 2. Ilyichev’s memorandum to Khrushchev was published in Kultura i vlast: ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, pp. 382–383.

Chapter 43 1. See Stanislav Rassadin, Samoubiytsy (Suicides), Moscow: Tekst, 2002, pp. 468– 469. 2. See Viktor Nekrasov, “Po obe storony okeana” (On Both Sides of the Ocean), Novy Mir, no. 12, 1962, pp. 121–122.

Chapter 44 1. This stenographic record is in RGASPI, under the title “Vstrecha rukovoditelei partii i Pravitelstva s predstaviteliami intelligentsi, 7–8 marta 1963 goda” (Meeting of Leaders of the Party and Government with Representatives of the Intelligentsia, March 7–8, 1963), collection (fond) 17, register/inventory (opis) 165, folder (delo) 163. 2. See Yevtushenko’s memoir Volchyi pasport (Wolf’s Passport), Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1998, pp. 281, 471–477. (In tsarist Russia, volchiy pasport was a slang term for an internal passport with a notation indicating the holder’s political unreliability; the term persisted into or was revived in the Stalin era.) Yevtushenko arrived in Paris in early 1963, and spent three weeks there. Before that he spent a full month in West Germany. 3. These excerpts are from an article by Voznesensky, “Goluboi zal Kremlya” (The Kremlin’s Light-Blue Hall), reprinted in the supplement to vol. 4 of Vremia, liudi, vlast, the Russian edition of Khrushchev’s memoirs, pp. 554–562. Voznesensky’s article is not included in the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev. 4. See Tainstvennaia strast: roman o shestidesiatnikakh (Secret Passion: A Novel About the People of the Sixties), Moscow: Sem’ Dnei (Seven Days), 2009, p. 130. 5. See Kultura i vlast: ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, p. 591.

Chapter 45 1. See Prezidium TsK for the relevant pages for April 25, 1963, pp. 702–715.

Chapter 47 1. Ehrenburg’s letter of February 13, 1963, is published in Kultura i vlast: ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, pp. 576–578, 589–581. 2. See Kultura i vlast: ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, pp. 646–648. 3. See Lakshin, Novy Mir in the Khrushchev Years, p. 148.

Endnotes to Pages 295–340

649

4. See Tvardovsky, Working Notebooks of the 1960s, p. 153. 5. See the magazine version of Adzhubei’s book Those Ten Years in Znamya, no. 7, 1988, p. 99. 6. Tvardovsky, Working Notebooks of the 1960s, pp. 153–154. 7. Glavlit was the Soviet acronym for the Main Administration on Literature, the chief censorship organization. 8. Lakshin, Novy Mir in the Khrushchev Years, pp. 152–154.

Chapter 48 1. See Kultura i vlast: ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, pp. 634–638. 2. These were the administrative measures that the artist Nikonov complained about, as mentioned in the report from the CC Ideological Department that I quoted earlier. 3. For the Russian text of the chapter “Ya ne sudya” (I Am Not a Judge), see the Russian edition of Khrushchev’s memoirs, Vremia, liudi, vlast, vol. 4, pp. 271–286. The corresponding English translation is in Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 2, pp. 545–562.

Chapter 51 1. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 679–680. 2. Ibid. 3. See Raisa Berg, Sukhovei: vospominaniia genetiki (Dry Wind: Memoirs of a Geneticist), Moscow: Pamiatniki Istoricheskoi Mysli (Monuments of Historical Thought), 2003, p. 302. 4. See the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 1, p. 210; and the Russian edition, Vremia, liudi, vlast, vol. 1, p. 213. 5. Quoted from Vek Lavrent’eva (The Age of Lavrentyev), Novosibirsk: Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SO RAN), 2000, pp. 67–68. 6. English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, p. 498. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 500. 9. Ibid., pp. 500–501. 10. Ibid., p. 501. 11. The quotations are from The Age of Lavrentyev, pp. 221–222. 12. The quotation is from The Age of Lavrentyev, p. 223.

Chapter 53 1. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 680. 2. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 716–717.

Chapter 54 1. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 677. 2. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 690. 3. See the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 2, p. 294. 4. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 676. 5. See the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 2, p. 295. 6. The preceding quotation is from an article by Viktor Turovstev titled “Preksrasny chelovek i rukovoditel” (A Fine Man and a Fine Leader) in N. G. Yegorychev: politik i

650 Endnotes to Pages 340–372 diplomat (N. G. Yegorychev: Politician and Diplomat), Moscow: Kniga i Biznes (Book and Business), 2006, p. 338. 7. Turovstev, A Fine Man and a Fine Leader, p. 338. 8. The English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 2, pp. 261–262; also, the Russian edition, Vremya, lyudi, vlast, vol. 4, p. 21. 9. Ibid.

Chapter 55 1. Prezidium TsK, vol. 3 (Resolutions), pp. 437–445. 2. See Adzhubei’s memoirs, The Collapse of Illusions, pp. 268–269. 3. See Norman Cousins, The Improbable Triumvirate, New York: Norton, 1962. 4. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 714–715, and vol. 3 (Resolutions), pp. 468–473. 5. For a brief biography of Garst, see the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 3, p. 919. 6. On Garst, see Harold Lee, Roswell Garst: A Biography, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1984; and the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 3, p. 919.

Chapter 56 1. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 789, 673–675. 2. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 679–689.

Chapter 57 1. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 671. 2. See Mukhitdinov, The River of Time, pp. 515–516. 3. See Mikoyan, That’s How It Was, p. 611. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., pp. 548–553. 6. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 858. 7. R. G. Pikhoya, Sovetsky Soyuz: istoriya vlasti, 1945–1991 (The Soviet Union: A History of [Soviet] Power, 1945–1991), Moscow: RAGS, p. 264.

Chapter 58 1. See Selskoe khoziaistvo SSSR, p. 172. 2. Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, special folder (osobaya papka) 734, sheets (listy) 2–3. 3. Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 7, p. 436. 4. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 465–466. 5. See Shelest, That You Be Not Judged, p. 421. 6. Zelenin, Agriculture and Khrushchev’s Agrarian Policy, p. 102. 7. See the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 2, p. 332. A subsurface tiller is an implement designed to loosen soil below the surface; subsurface tillage (or subtillage) is a method of stirring the soil with underground blades that leave stubble or other vegetation on or near the surface. 8. Zelenin, Agriculture and Khrushchev’s Agrarian Policy, p. 102. 9. See Shelest, That You Be Not Judged, p. 176. In the Russian text, Shelest uses the term pood, a Russian unit for measuring weight, equal to 36.11 pounds avoirdupois. In the translation, I have converted poods to tons.

Endnotes to Pages 373–387

651

10. See Shelest, That You Be Not Judged, p. 172. 11. Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 8, p. 264. 12. Selskoe khoziaistvo SSSR, p. 152. 13. Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 8, p. 265. 14. See the article by Valentina Gavrilovna Fyodorova, head of the Center for Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences, that appeared in Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent Gazette) on February 2, 1999. 15. See Pravda, October 14, 1963, p. 2, for the speech by Khrushchev at the October 13 session of the Supreme Soviet. See also Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 8, p. 190. Also, New York Times, October 8, 1963; and Aleksandr Pyzhikov, Khrushchevskaia “ottepel” (The Khrushchev “Thaw”), Moscow: OLMA, 2002, p. 161. 16. See Pikhoya, The Soviet Union, p. 370. 17. Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, special folder (osobaya papka) 734, sheets (listy) 2–3. 18. N. B. Lebina and A. N. Chistikov, Obyvatel i reformy (Reforms and the Ordinary “Man-in-the-Street”), St. Petersburg: DV, 2003, p. 235. 19. See Lakshin, Novy Mir in the Khrushchev Years, p. 163. (I quoted Lakshin frequently in Chapters 38–47 on Khrushchev’s relations with artists, writers, and other intellectuals.)

Chapter 59 1. Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 8, pp. 26–27. 2. Ibid., vol. 8, p. 51. 3. Ibid., vol. 8, p. 35.

Chapter 60 1. Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 8, p. 49–57.

Chapter 61 1. Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 8, p. 63. 2. Ibid., vol. 8, pp. 67, 69, 74, 76–79, 81. 3. Selskoe khoziaistvo SSSR, pp. 246–249.

Chapter 62 1. Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 8, pp. 91–102, 206, 213. 2. Ibid., vol. 8, p. 129. 3. Ibid., vol. 8, pp. 153–156. 4. Ibid., vol. 8, pp. 163–164, 200.

Chapter 63 1. Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 8, pp. 114–124. 2. Ibid., vol. 8, p. 105. 3. Ibid., vol. 8, pp. 271–273. 4. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 762–763, 767.

652 Endnotes to Pages 387–419 5. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 767, 771–773. 6. Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 8, pp. 273–274, 336.

Chapter 64 1. Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 8, pp. 243–255.

Chapter 65 1. The Kosygin-Mao meeting is described in detail by the former Soviet diplomat Oleg Troyanovsky in his book Cherez gody, cherez rasstoianiia (Across the Years, Across Great Distances), Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1997, pp. 351–353.

Chapter 67 1. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 735.

Chapter 68 1. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 735. 2. See Lebina and Chistikov, Reforms and the Ordinary “Man in the Street,” p. 289. 3. Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 62.

Chapter 70 1. Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 8, p. 149. 2. Ibid., vol. 8, pp. 135–151. 3. Ibid., vol. 8, p. 175.

Chapter 71 1. Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 8, pp. 467, 542. 2. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 732. 3. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 763–764, 766.

Chapter 73 1. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 718.

Chapter 74 1. P. S. Neporozhny, Dnevniki, 1935–1985 (Diaries, 1935–1985), Moscow: Energoatomizdat (Electric Power and Atomic Energy), 2000, p. 77. 2. Semichastny’s memorandum was published in Kultura i vlast: ot Stalina do Gorbachev, pp. 685–689.

Endnotes to Pages 422–442

653

Chapter 75 1. See Zelenin, Agriculture and Khrushchev’s Agrarian Policy, p. 211. 2. For the text of this report, see Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 8, pp. 465–552. 3. Ibid., vol. 8, pp. 477–480. 4. Ibid., vol. 8, p. 513. 5. Ibid., vol. 8, pp. 521–533. 6. Ibid., vol. 8, pp. 534–538. 7. The quotation about Finley is from a different memorandum, dated July 18, 1964. See the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, collection (fond) 3, register/inventory (opis) 30, file (delo) 260, sheet (list) 9.

Chapter 76 1. See the stenographic record of the CC Presidium meeting of December 23, 1963, in Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 795. Also see “Opyty zhizni” (Experiences and Experiments of a Lifetime), in The Age of Lavrentyev, pp. 67–68.

Chapter 77 1. See Leonid Mlechin, Zhelezny Shurik (Iron Shurik), Moscow: Yauza-Eksmo, 2004, pp. 378–379. The name “Iron Shurik” was widely used to refer to the hard-liner Aleksandr Shelepin. Mlechin’s book was brought out by two Moscow publishers, Yauza and EKSMO. “Shurik” and “Shura” are two of many nicknames in Russian formed from the proper name “Aleksandr”; among others are “Sasha” and “Alik.” 2. Quotations from Yegorychev are from N. G. Yegorychev: Politician and Diplomat, a book of reminiscences by some Muscovites about their former leader, Yegorychev having been top party boss in Moscow for many years. 3. See Mlechin, Iron Shurik, pp. 377–378. 4. See N. G. Yegorychev: Politician and Diplomat, p. 97.

Chapter 78 1. The documents by Polikarpov and Semichastny were published in Kultura i vlast: ot Stalina do Gorbacheva, pp. 743–747.

Chapter 79 1. Khrushchev memoirs, the Russian edition, Vremia, liudi, vlast, vol. 2, pp. 543– 545, 556–557; also, the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 3, 364– 366, 378–379.

Chapter 80 1. See Nikita Khrushchev 1964: stenogrammy plenuma TsK KPSS i drugie dokumenty (Nikita Khrushchev 1964: Stenographic Records of the CPSU CC Plenum and Other Documents), Moscow: Materik (Continent), 2007. This collection came out under the auspices of the International Democracy Foundation, an organization started by a

654 Endnotes to Pages 443–465 former member of the Gorbachev-era Politburo, Aleksandr N. Yakovlev (1923–2005). The typescript of Khrushchev’s unedited speech of July 11, 1964, is in RGANI, collection (fond) 2, register/inventory (opis) 1, file (delo) 747, sheets (listy) 1–22, copy (ekzemplyar) 119. 2. See Khrushchev’s memorandum to the CC Presidium dated July 8, 1964, and titled “O rukovodstve selskim khoziaistvom v sviazi s perekhodom na put’ intensifikatsii” (On leadership in agriculture in connection with our switching over to the road of intensification), in the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, collection (fond) 3, register/inventory (opis) 30, file (delo) 260, sheets (listy) 6–68. The cited information about Remeslo and Lukyanenko is from sheets 10–11 of the memorandum. 3. See Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 7, p. 347. 4. Ibid., vol. 7, pp. 218–219, 246–247, 258. 5. Translator’s note—The aphorism quoted here is a parody of a popular saying among the radical Russian intelligentsia in the 1860s, 1870s, and after: “Poet is something you may not be, / But being a citizen—is obligatory.” [Poetom mozhesh ty ne byt’ / A grazhdaninom byt’ obyazan.] The saying was taken from a poem by Nikolai Nekrasov. 6. The memorandum is in RGANI, collection (fond) 5, register/inventory (opis) 30, file (delo) 430, sheets (listy) 82–194. It was also published in an article by A. A. Fursenko and V. Yu. Afiani, “U kogo nauka, u togo budushchee” (Whoever Has Science Has the Future), in the Moscow journal Istoricheskie Zapiski (Historical Notes), no. 8 (126), 2005, pp. 417–440. The journal is produced by the publishing company Nauka (Science). 7. See The Age of Lavrentyev, p. 443. 8. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 788–789.

Chapter 81 1. Lavrentyev’s memorandum to Khrushchev is in The Age of Lavrentyev, pp. 444– 445. 2. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 782–783, 892–815.

Chapter 83 1. See Strelyany, “The Last Romantic,” p. 225. 2. See Khrushchev’s memorandum to the CC Presidium dated July 18, 1964, and titled “O rukovodstve selskim khoziaistvom v sviazi s perekhodom na put’ intensifikatsii” (On leadership in agriculture in connection with our switching over to the path of intensification), in the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, collection (fond) 3, register/inventory (opis) 30, file (delo) 260, sheets (listy) 6–68. 3. See Utrennoe zasedanie Plenuma TsK KPSS, 11 iiulia 1964: nepravlennaia stenogramma (Morning Session of the Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee, July 11, 1964: Unedited Stenographic Record), pp. 1–22. 4. This document was published in Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 114–133. It may also be found in RGANI, collection (fond) 52, register/inventory (opis) 1, file (delo) 258, sheets (listy) 92–133. 5. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 863. 6. This complaint, from the party’s Rostov province committee, was reprinted in Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 275. 7. See the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, collection (fond) 3, register/inventory (opis) 30, file (delo) 200, sheets (listy) 159–170.

Endnotes to Pages 465–475

655

8. See RGANI, collection (fond) 5, register/inventory (opis) 45, file (delo) 357, sheets (listy) 101–102. 9. See Resheniia partii i pravitelstva po khoziaistvennym voprosam, 1917–1967 (Decisions of the Party and Government on Economic Questions, 1917–1967), Moscow, 1968, vol. 5, pp. 451–458. 10. The preceding information is from documents in RGANI, collection (fond) 5, register/inventory (opis) 45, file (delo) 357, sheets (listy) 103–114 and 159–175.

Chapter 84 1. The preceding quoted passage appears in Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 64. The original typescript is in RGANI, collection (fond) 2, register/inventory (opis) 1, file (delo) 744, sheets (listy) 2–6.

Chapter 85 1. See Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 53. 2. The stenographic record of the meeting of the Constitutional Commission on July 16, 1964, was published in Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 65–69. The last sentence of the quotation is from p. 68. See also RGANI, collection (fond) 52, register/inventory (opis) 1, file (delo) 440, sheets (listy) 18–27. 3. RGANI, ibid., sheets 43–45 and sheet 6. 4. Ibid., sheets 49–50.

Chapter 86 1. See the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 3, p. 493; in the Russian edition, Vremia, liudi, vlast, vol. 3, p. 109. 2. See Lunkov’s book Russkii diplomat v Yevrope (A Russian Diplomat in Europe), Moscow: OLMA, 1999, p. 139. 3. See Leonid Mlechin, Ministry inostrannykh del (Ministers of Foreign Affairs), Moscow: Tsentropoligraf, 2001, p. 374.

Chapter 87 1. See also the Soviet leader’s comments about collectivization in the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 2, pp. 303–307. 2. “All-out collectivization” (sploshnaya kollektivizatsiya) was the euphemism used by the Stalinist authorities for the forced collectivization imposed on the peasantry in the early 1930s. 3. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 864. 4. See Zelenin, Agriculture and Khrushchev’s Agrarian Policy, p. 229.

Chapter 88 1. The speech was published in Pravda on October 16, 1964. 2. See Stepan Mikoyan, Vospominaniia voennogo letchika-ispytatelia (Memoirs of a Military Test Pilot), Moscow: Tekhnika Molodezhi (Technology of Youth), 2003, pp. 352–353.

656 Endnotes to Pages 482–505 Chapter 90 1. The normativ stoimosti obrabotki was a standardized amount set by a government body, such as the State Planning Committee, based on past performance, general economic conditions, and the like, and said to represent the economic value of a given production process. One might also describe it as the standard value of a particular type of processing or manufacturing work. 2. The term prodnalog is usually translated as “tax in kind.” The term was introduced at the beginning of Lenin’s New Economic Policy in 1921 and referred to a certain quantity of food products that, from then on, the peasant would be obliged to pay to the Soviet government. The “tax in kind” replaced the grain requisitioning practiced by the Soviet authorities under the policy of “war communism” that prevailed during the Russian Civil War of 1918–1921. 3. That phrase “22–40 times more” is recorded in Malin’s notes from the CC Presidium meeting of January 9, 1964. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 819. 4. See Sovety Narodnogo khoziaistva i planovye organy v tsentre in na mestakh, 1917–1923 (The Councils of the National Economy and the Planning Bodies [of the USSR] in the Center and in Local Areas), Moscow, 1957, p. 150. See also Svod zakonov SSSR (The Law Code of the USSR), 1930, pt. 1, no. 8, article 97. 5. See Viktor Belkin, “Zadalis’ li reformy Gaidara?” (Were Gaidar’s Reforms a Success?), in Novy Mir, no. 1, 2002. 6. Igor Birman, Ya—ekonomist (I Am an Economist), Moscow: Vremya (Time), 2001, pp. 249–253.

Chapter 91 1. The stenographic record of Khrushchev’s speech at this meeting is in RGANI, collection (fond) 52, register/inventory (opis) 1, file (delo) 266, sheets (listy) 130–141. The speech was also published by the International Democracy Foundation in Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 69–79.

Chapter 92 1. The translation provided to Khrushchev at that time differed in part from the original English-language article by Max Frankel. 2. This stenographic record may be found in RGANI, collection (fond) 52, register/inventory (opis) 1, file (delo) 416, sheets (listy) 1–12. It was also printed in Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 79–85. 3. This is the end of the passage quoting Shevchenko, as reported by Strelyany in “The Last Romantic,” p. 226. 4. Strelyany, “The Last Romantic,” p. 226. 5. The following excerpts are from the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 2, pp. 340–346; in the Russian edition, Vremia, liudi, vlast, vol. 4, pp. 92–97. 6. Viktor Sukhodrev, Yazyk moi—drug moi (My Friend, the Tongue in My Head), Moscow: AST, 1999, pp. 57–61.

Chapter 93 1. I am quoting excerpts from the page proofs of Morgun’s book Kak spasali Barayeva (How Barayev Was Saved), which the author sent to me, but with no indication of publication information, such as date and place.

Endnotes to Pages 505–532

657

2. Zelenin, Agriculture and Khrushchev’s Agrarian Policy, p. 211. 3. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 831–832. 4. See the memorandum by Khrushchev dated July 18, 1964, in the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, collection (fond) 3, register/inventory (opis) 30, file (delo) 260, sheets (listy) 6–68.

Chapter 94 1. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 833. 2. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 836–837. 3. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 839–841, 843. 4. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 844. 5. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 839.

Chapter 96 1. See the stenographic record of the CC Presidium meeting of September 10, 1964, in Prezidium TsK, vol. 3, pp. 853–857. 2. For the preceding quotations about Novotny, see the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 3, pp. 689–690; in the Russian edition, Vremia, liudi, vlast, vol. 3, pp. 289–290.

Chapter 97 1. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 875.

Chapter 100 1. See Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 858. Vinol is a strong synthetic polymer, derived from polyvinyl alcohol, used to make strong fabric, fiber, ropes, cables, fishing nets, tarpaulins, strong transmission and conveyor belts, and the like.

Chapter 101 1. The transcript of this discussion was published in the journal Istochnik (Source), no. 6, 2003, pp. 183–188. Istochnik is the newsletter of the Presidential Archive of the Russian Federation, which also gives the information for finding this document in the archives. 2. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 860. 3. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 863. 4. For the sources of the material quoted in the preceding paragraphs, see Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 860. See also Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 142–149, which provides the information for finding the relevant document in RGANI. 5. Shelest, That You Be Not Judged, p. 215. 6. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 863, 868.

Chapter 102 1. The stenographic record of this speech was published in Nikita Khrushchev 1964, pp. 151–153.

658 Endnotes to Pages 533–558 2. Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, p. 858. 3. The preceding quotations are from Mikoyan’s memoirs, Tak bylo (That’s How It Was), Moscow: VAGRIUS, 1999, p. 602. 4. Mikoyan, That’s How It Was, p. 602.

Chapter 103 1. Mikoyan, That’s How It Was, p. 602. 2. See the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 2, pp. 367–368. 3. Shelest, That You Be Not Judged, pp. 219–221. 4. See the memoir by Vladimir Novikov, “V gody rukovodsta Khrushcheva” (In the Years of Khrushchev’s Leadership), in the Moscow journal Voprosy Istorii (Problems of History), no. 1, 1989, pp. 115–116. 5. N. G. Yegorychev: Politician and Diplomat, p. 108.

Chapter 104 1. See Shelest, That You Be Not Judged, p. 215.

Chapter 105 1. Here and further on, the quotations are from Prezidium TsK, vol. 1, pp. 862–872. 2. For the source of the quotation from Polyansky, see Nikita Khrushchev 1964, p. 191. 3. For the source of the account of Voronov’s recruitment to the conspiracy, see his memoir “Ot ottepeli k zastoiu” (From the Thaw to Stagnation), in Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev: Materials for a Biography, p. 218. 4. Some authors have failed to understand Malin’s notes, which said the following, quoting Voronov: “Kozlov said: ‘Don’t get into questions like that, Comrade Khrushchev is in charge of them.’” Some authors interpreted such passages as the words of Kozlov himself, imagining that he was actually at the meeting of the CC Presidium, and this has produced confusion around this question. In particular, see R. G. Pikhoya, Sovetskii soiuz: istoriia vlasti, 1945–1991 (The Soviet Union: A History of Soviet Power, 1945– 1991), Moscow: PAGS, 1998, p. 264. 5. Translator’s note—Arakcheyev was a notoriously harsh, dictatorial, dogmatic, and obscurantist top government official under Tsar Nicholas I in the early nineteenth century. 6. Rudolf Pikhoya, Moskva, Kreml, vlast: 40 let posle voiny (Moscow, the Kremlin, and Power: 40 Years After the War), Moscow: AST, 2007, pp. 465–469. 7. See Semichastny, Restless Heart, p. 208. 8. See ibid., p. 366. Semichastny’s interview with V. A. Starkov was in September 1988, and a copy of it, fourteen typed pages long, is in my archives. 9. Shelest, That You Be Not Judged, p. 236. 10. Here I quote again from the previously cited September 1988 interview with Semichastny by V. A. Starkov, pp. 1–3 of the fourteen-page typescript, which is in my personal archives. 11. The quotation is from Yegorychev’s speech at a conference on Khrushchev’s centenary (the hundredth anniversary year of his birth), held at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, on December 3, 1994.

Endnotes to Pages 561–584

659

Chapter 106 1. See P. Ye. Shelest, “V borbe za podyom selskogo khoziaistva” (In Fighting for Agricultural Growth), Pravda, November 6, 1964. 2. See Zelenin, Agriculture and Khrushchev’s Agrarian Policy, p. 217; see also Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 8, p. 276. 3. Khrushchev, 8-volume collection on agriculture, vol. 8, p. 393. 4. Ibid., p. 467. 5. Zelenin, Agriculture and Khrushchev’s Agrarian Policy, p. 26. 6. L. Mlechin, Brezhnev, Moscow: Prospekt, 2006, p. 197. 7. Mikoyan, That’s How It Was, p. 604. 8. See Viktor Danilovich Belkin, “Zadalis li reformy Gaidara?” (Did Gaidar’s Reforms Turn Out to Be a Success?), in the Moscow journal Novy Mir (New World), no. 1, 2002, p. 175. 9. The preceding account is taken from Belkin’s memoirs, An Economist’s Thorny Path, pp. 84, 87. 10. See P. M. Kolovangin and F. F. Rybakov, Ekonomicheskoe reformirovanie Rossii v XX veke (Economic Reforms in Russia in the Twentieth Century), St. Petersburg: Petropolis, 1996, p. 26. 11. See Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999, tab. 3, p. 105. 12. See Belkin, “Did Gaidar’s Reforms Turn Out to Be a Success?” pp. 175–176. 13. See Evangelista, Unarmed Forces, tab. 3, p. 105. 14. See Karen Nersessovich Brutenets, Tridtsat let na Staroi ploshchadi (Thirty Years at Old Square [location of the Central Committee offices]), Moscow: Mezhdunarodnykh Otnoshenii (International Relations), 1998, p. 267.

Chapter 107 1. For this quotation from Romm, see Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev: Materials for a Biography, p. 5. 2. Nikolai Barsukov, “Kommunisticheskiye illiuzii Khrushcheva” (Khrushchev’s Illusions About [Living Under] Communism), in the Moscow journal Dialog, no. 5, 1991. 3. Life-expectancy statistics are from Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR za 70 let: iubileinyi statisticheskii sbornik (Seventy Years of the USSR National Economy: Statistical Handbook for the Jubilee [Seventieth] Year), Moscow: Finansy i Statistika (Finances and Statistics), 1987, p. 409. See also Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook 2003, Washington, DC, 2003. (Life expectancy is calculated for those born in the year indicated.) 4. Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1964, p. 34. 5. See World Bank, Indicators of World Development 2002, Washington, DC, 2002. 6. Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1964, p. 610. 7. Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1970: statisticheskii sbornik (National Economy of the USSR in 1970: Statistical Compilation), Moscow, 1971, p. 538. 8. Ibid., p. 545. 9. See R. G. Pikhoya and P. T. Timofeyev, eds., Sudby reform y reformatorov v Rossii (The Fate of Reforms and Reformers in Russia), Moscow: RAGS, 1999, p. 312. 10. Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1964, p. 555.

660 Endnotes to Pages 584–592 11. See Pravda, May 9, 1956. 12. The source of these figures is a book published by the Soviet government, XX syezd KPSS i ego istoricheskie realii (The Twentieth Congress of the CPSU and Its Historical Realities), Moscow: Gospolitizdat (State Publishing House for Political Literature), 1991, p. 172. 13. Selskoe khoziaistvo SSSR, pp. 35–48. 14. Naselenie SSSR: statisticheskii sbornik (Population of the USSR: Statistical Compilation), Moscow, 1988, p. 8. 15. See Selskoe khoziaistvo SSSR, pp. 152, 160; see also Strana Sovetov za 50 let: statisticheskii sbornik (50 Years of the Land of the Soviets: Statistical Compilation), 1972, pp. 138–139. 16. Selskoe khoziaistvo SSSR, p. 245. 17. See Evangelista, Unarmed Forces, tab. 3, p. 105. 18. Zelenin, Agriculture and Khrushchev’s Agrarian Policy, p. 283. 19. See English, Russia and the Idea of the West, p. 62; and Lebina and Chistikov, Reforms and the Ordinary “Man in the Street,” p. 289. 20. See the English edition, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 1, p. 562. 21. See V. Iu. Afiani and S. S. Ilizarov, “My razgonim k chertovoi materi Akademiiu nauk” (We Will Send the Academy of Sciences Off to the Devil’s Grandmother), in the Moscow journal Voprosy Istorii Estestvoznaniia i Tekhniki (Problems of the History of the Natural Sciences and Technology), no. 1, 1999.

Biographical Notes on the Cast of Characters 1. There are no entries in the Bolshoi entsiklopedicheskii slovar for 2002 for the following artists, poets, and literary critics, although information about them appears elsewhere: Drevin, A.; Golitsyn, Illarion Vladimirovich (1928–2013); Gribkov, Lyutsian; Kotov, Vladimir Petrovich (1928–1975); Mechnikov, Leonid; Mironov, Viktor; Mordvinov; Rabichev, Leonid Nikolayevich (1923– ); Rossal, A.; Shorts, Vladimir Antonovich (1926– ); Starikov, D.; Surovtsev, Yuri Ivanovich (1931–2001); Zhutovsky, Boris Iosiphovich.

Index

Abel, Rudolph, 99 Abramtsevo arts community, 301 Academy of Arts, 211 Academy of Sciences: appointments controversy in, 445–455; Council on Science and, 326; Khrushchev’s criticism of, 442–444; Mathematics Institute of, 312–315; Novosibirsk branch of, 112; politicization of, 443–455; Siberian division of, 317 Adzhubei, Aleksei: censorship of Yevtushenko and, 195–200, 204; dismissal from Izvestia, 303; on five-day work week, 471; IlyichevSuslov rivalry and, 212–214; Khrushchev’s ouster and, 533; Manège scandal and, 222, 228, 244, 247; meeting with Pope John xxiii, 345–346; political reforms and, 476; post-Khrushchev removal of, 561; as Pravda editor, 33, 142–144, 171; on Tvardovsky, 298–299; West German visit by, 480 Adzhubei, Rada, 345, 480 Afghanistan, Khrushchev’s relations with, 136–137 Afiani, Vitaly Yurevich, 589 African students, conflicts in Moscow with, 406 Agrarian Union (Finland), 81–83 agricultural development: agrochemistry expansion, 376–378; in Central Asia, 133– 135; dust storms of 1963 and, 367–375; economic reforms of 1961 and, 49, 87–90; genetics research and, 311; in Georgia, 12–15; innovations in 1963 in, 327–330; Khrushchev’s policies for, 25–26, 94–96, 403, 406–410, 419–424, 459–466, 504– 508; mechanization and, 190; “patronage” aid programs and, 177–180; plant genetics and, 442–443; political disputes over, 74–80; in post-Khrushchev era, 561–566, 571–576; poultry consumption and, 378– 379; professionalization and specialization

in, 138–155, 460–466; proposals in 1964 for, 421; setbacks in 1962 for, 186–190; single standard pricing system and, 113– 127; state farm bureaucracy and, 148–149. See also collective farming; grain harvests; meat production agricultural production: drought and dust storms of 1963 and, 373–374; innovations in, 327–330, 495–496 Agricultural University, 451 air force, Khrushchev’s reform of, 588 Akademgorodok (“Academy Town”), 80–83 Akchi state farm, 571 Akhmadulina, Bella, 191, 223, 259, 277–278 Akhmatova, Anna, 191, 268 Aksyonov, Vasily, 191, 219, 259; at Sverdlov Hall conference, 269, 272, 281–287 Aleksandrov, Aleksandr Danilovich, 317 Aleksandrov, Anatoly Petrovich, 110 Alekseyevsky, Yevgeny, 421 Alexander I (Tsar), 170 Alexander II (Tsar), 38, 157–158; reforms of, xiii, 580, 590; serfdom abolished by, 76 Alexander III (Tsar), 158; reforms of, xiii, 580–581 Alikhanov, Abram, 444 All-Russia Exhibition Center, 434 All-Union Association for Agricultural Technology, 421 All-Union Congress of Soil Scientists, 371 All-Union Council of Consumer Cooperatives (Txentrosoyuz), 355 All-Union Council on the National Economy, 493 All-Union Research Institute on Vegetable Oil and Essential-Oil Plants, 445 Almaz (Diamond) space station, 568 alternative energy sources, 426 aluminum industry, expansion of, 403–404 Ambartsumyan, Viktor Amazspovich, 18 American Heritage Science Dictionary, 7–8 Andersen, Hans Christian, 217

661

662 Index Andronov, Nikolai, 210, 264 Andropov, Yuri Vladimirovich, 51, 156, 213, 219; Chinese policies and, 290; film censorship and, 291; Manège scandal and, 238–240; ouster of Khrushchev and, 554; Yugoslavia trip in 1963 by, 396 anti-Communists, ascendancy in 1990s of, 581–582 anti-party group: communist ideological reforms and, 45; political strategies of, 69–71, 557, 567; repentance by, 413; term limits proposal and, 65–68 anti-Semitism, Babyi Yar massacre and, 29–30 Antiworlds (Voznesensky), 480 Antonov, Aleksei Konstantinovich, 488 Antonov-Ovseyenko, Vladimir, 191 apartment construction, media coverage of, 26–34 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 214 applied sciences, policies involving, 449–455 Argumenty i Fakty (Arguments and Facts) journal, 553 Aristov, Averky, 10–11, 48; dismissal of, 69–71 Armenia, Soviet power in, 18–19 artists: activism in 1962 of, 191–200; bulldozing of 1974 exhibit and, 245–246; in Khrushchev era, 589; Khrushchev’s relations with, 299–306, 419–420; at Lenin Hills conference, 250–256; Manège scandal and, 220–248; new generation of, 209–220; public support for, 215; Silver Age of Russian culture and, 272; at Sverdlov Hall conference, 269–287; traditionalist and modernist camps, 214–220; Western prominence of, 289 Artists Union, 22, 191, 218–220, 437 Artists Union of the Russian Federation, 300 Aruntunyan, Aleksandr, 284 Ashkenazy, Vladimir, 101–102 Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan, 130–135 Asimov, Isaac, 52 Astana, naming of, 17 Aswan High Dam, 432–434 atheism, in Soviet era, 30–32 Atlas, Z. B., 487 Australia: dust storms in, 370; grain sales to Soviet Union, 374 authoritarian tradition in Russia, personality cults and, 37–38 Azerbaijan Communist Party, 73, 182 Azgur, Zair, 285 Babel, Isaac, 191 “Babyi Yar” (Yevtushenko), 30 Babyi Yar massacre, 29–30 Baibakov, Nikolai, 571 Balanchine, George, 104 Balanchivadze, Meliton, 104 Baltic-Black Sea Canal project, 84–85

Balzan, Eugenio, 344 Balzan Foundation, 344–345 Balzan Prize, 344–345 Barak, Rudolf, 515–516 Barayev, Aleksander, 74, 79–80, 188–189, 371–372, 421, 504–508 Barr, Benjamin, 107, 110–113 Barr, Joel, 106–108 Barsukov, Nikolai, 54, 582 Basov, Aleksander Vailyevich, 14, 119–121 Batista, Fulgencio, 159–160 Battista, Giovanni, 210 Battle of Borodino, 169–170, 268 Battle of Stalingrad, 132 BBC broadcasts, jamming in Russia of, 347–348 Belin, I. V., 126–127 Belkin, Viktor, 393; currency reforms and, 6–7; economic reforms and, 139–140, 144–145, 393, 487, 491, 567, 569–572; mathematical economics and, 312; on state farm policies, 571–572 Bellucci, Michele, 209. See also Belyutin, Mikhail Bellucci, Paulo Stefano, 209 Belorussia, Khrushchev’s visits to, 93–94, 414–416 Beloyarsky nuclear power plant, 428 Belyaevo district (Moscow), bulldozing of 1974 exhibit in, 245–247 Belyutin, Eligiy, 209–211, 218; on CC Ideological Commission session, 256–259; Khrushchev’s meeting with, 300–301; on Lenin Hills conference, 251–255; Manège scandal account, 224, 226–227, 231–240, 244, 247–248; on ouster of Khrushchev, 302–306; painting collection of, 304; Sverdlov Hall Conference described by, 270, 281, 286–287 Belyutin, Mikhail, 209–210 Ben Bella, Ahmed, 433–434 Benton, W., 436 Berg, Joseph. See Barr, Benjamin Beria, Lavrenty, 322–323, 567 Beshchev, Boris Pavlovich, 103 Bezostaya-1 wheat strain, 443 Bezzubik, Vladimir (Khrushchev’s physician), 43 Biology Center at Pushchino, 100 Birman, Igor, 144–145; economic reforms and, 393, 487, 491, 567; mathematical economics and, 312 birthrate, statistics under Khrushchev, 582–583 Black Earth regions, dust storms in, 369–375 The Black Square (Malevich), 217 The Blue Notebook (Kazakevich), 200–201, 217 Bogolyubov, Nikolai, 445

Index Bolshevichka factory, 489–490 Bolshevism, 172; history of, 44; religion abolished by, 31 Bolshoi Theater, Khrushchev’s attendance at, 223, 227, 353, 428, 520–521 “Borodino” (Lermontov), 169 Bowen, Godfrey, 348 Bratislava (supertanker), launching of, 434 bread controls: economic impact of, 187–190, 470–472; grain crop failures and, 374–375 Brecht, Bertolt, 428 Brezhnev, Galya, 28 Brezhnev, Leonid, 35, 415; as CC secretary, 366–367, 478–479; conspiracy against Khrushchev and, 440, 470–472, 530–531, 534–535; Cyprus crisis and, 499–500; economic reforms and, 483; educational reforms and, 458; elimination of regional economic councils by, 159; Fellini film viewing, 291–293; Khrushchev and, xii, 170, 427; Khrushchev monument project and, 225; as Khrushchev’s successor, 560– 576, 579–580; livestock productivity under, 510; Manège scandal and, 227; music preferences of, 223; ouster of Khrushchev and, 543–560; personality and leadership style of, 575; province committee reorganization and, 151–152; Shcherbitsky and, 417–418; Suslov and, 212; US relations with, 395 bribery scandals, reforms of 1962 and, 178–180 Brodsky, Joseph, 21; expulsion of, 425 Brovka, Petrus, 276, 419 Bruk, Isaak, 139–140, 144, 312–313 Brumel, Valery, 27 Brutenets, Karen, 575 Bukharin, Nikolai, 191 Bulganin, Nikolai, 136, 413 Bulgaria, Turkish relations with, 163 Bunayev, Vasily, 539, 543 bureaucracy, criticism of Khrushchev by, 410 Bureau for the Russian Federation (CC), 10–11 Burkov, Boris, 28, 213 Burlatsky, Fyodor, 51, 170 Burlyuk, David, 214 Burlyuk, Vladimir, 214 Butusov, Sergei Mikhailovich, 15 Bykhovsky, Boris Yevseyevich, 447 Byurakan Astronomical Observatory, 18 Byzantine Empire, influence in Russia of, 38 cadres secretary position, 71–73 Cambodia, Soviet relations with, 427 Canada: agricultural development in, 371; grain sales to Soviet Union, 374 cancer research, 135 capron plastics, production of, 331

663

Caribbean crisis, 159–171 car rental services, failure in Soviet Union of, 179 Castro, Fidel, 159–171; Khrushchev and, 227, 418–419; visit to Soviet Union by, 289 Catherine the Great, 364 censorship: relaxation of, 30–34, 218–220, 589; of writers, 201–209, 293–299 Central Asia: dust storms in, 369; Khrushchev’s policies in, 130–135; natural gas pipeline in, 346 Central Committee (CC): Academy Sciences reforms and, 452–453; agricultural production and, 380–381; anti-party group and, 69–71; artists relations with, 210–211, 214, 218; Brezhnev election as secretary of, 366–367; censorship by, 201–209; computer technology initiatives and, 315; conspiracy against Khrushchev and, 440; Control Commission under, 156–157; Cuban missile crisis and, 163–171; housing construction policies and, 342–344; Ideological Department of, 256–261, 289, 299; ideology plenum, 249; Kozlov’s presence in, 20–22; Lysenko’s genetics research and, 311; Manège scandal and, 221, 226–227; May Day proclamations by, 358–360; memorial gifts abolished by, 34; ouster of Khrushchev and, 544–560; personnel reassignments in 1961, 10–19; plenum of 1964 and, 420–421, 441–442; in post-Khrushchev era, 560, 562–580; power structure reorganization and, 156–157; production administrators introduced in, 96–98; province committee reorganization and, 150–155, 157–159; scientific reforms of, 177–180; single standard pricing system proposal of, 113–127; Suslov-Iliyachev rivalry and, 218–220; term limits proposal and, 65–68; Western journalists’ coverage of, 271 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): Cuban missile crisis and, 164–171; economic development statistics for Soviet Union from, 85–90; Soviet growth productions by, 49 Chagall, Marc, 213 Chaliapin, Fyodor, 36 Champollion, Jean-François, 27 Chaplin, Charlie, 213 Charles XII (King of Sweden), 170 Chavan, Yashwantrao, 520 Chekhov, Anton, 536 Chelkash (Gorky), 242 Chelomei, Vladimir Nikolayevich, 100, 105, 110, 445, 568 Chelovek v futlyare (Man in a Box) (Chekhov), 536 Chelyabinsk province, 11

664 Index chemical fertilizers: agrochemistry development and, 376–378; development of, 331; expansion of, 376–378, 385–388 chemical industry: expansion of, 330–332, 337–338, 348, 524–525; proposals in 1964 for, 421 Chernyakhovsky, V., 144 Chief Military Intelligence Administration (GRU), 356 China. See People’s Republic of China Chistikov, A. N. 375 Choibalsan, Khorlogiyn, 225 Chukhrai, Grigory, 276 Chukovsky, Kornei, 180, 208–209, 321 Churchill, Winston, 147–148, 172 Ciampi, Yves, 517 The Classics Destroyed (Neizvestny), 242, 251 Clayton, George, 435–436, 451 Cliburn, Van, 101–102 coal industry, economic reforms in, 47 Cobb Company, 435–436, 451 “Cogs in the Machine” (Vintiki) (Smelyakov), 200 Cold War: Cuban missile crisis and, 159–171; weapons development and, 45 collective farming: debt burden of, 465– 466; government pensions for, 466–467; Khrushchev era reforms of, 585; in postKhrushchev era, 564–565; reform proposals for, 100–101, 190, 379–381, 419–424, 477–478, 512; single standard pricing system and, 113–127 Comecon. See Council for Mutual Economic Assistance Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research, 350 communism: “accomplishments” of, in media coverage, 26–34; ideological reforms of 1961, 44–56 Communist Party: history in Russia of, 44–46; term limits proposal for leaders of, 64–68 competition, Khrushchev’s discussion of, 154–155 Composers Union of the Russian Federation, 303 composite materials, innovations in, 310 computer technology, innovations in, 311–315 Conference Center (Dom Priyomov): Central Committee plenum at, 249–250; Outpost of Ilyich film viewing at, 261–268 Congress of Architects, 33 Constitutional Commission, establishment of, 173–175, 472–474 constitutional reforms, Khrushchev’s initiatives for, 172–175, 472–474 consumer goods: 1963 increases in, 403; declining supplies of, 55–56; demand in 1961 for, 87–90; economic reforms of 1961

and production of, 49; prices increases in 1963 for, 406–407 consumption statistics, for Khrushchev era, 584–585 Control Computers Institute, 139–140, 312 Conversations with Stalin (Djilas), 171 Corriere Della Sera (Evening Courier) newspaper, 344 Cotton prices, 346 cotton production in 1964, 519 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), 392, 402–403; international relations and, 176–180 Council of People’s Commissars, 196 Council on Science, 426, 432, 455; educational reforms and, 456–458; establishment of, 316–327 Cousins, Norman, 346 Craft, Robert, 179 “creative intelligentsia”: Khrushchev’s relations with, 249, 303–306, 419; political activities of, 215–220 Crimean War, 588 criminal activity, currency reforms and, 22–25 Crystal, John, 348 Cuba: missile crisis in, 159–171, 344–345, 393–395; Soviet relations with, 527–528, 531 Cuba—My Beloved (film), 195 “Cuban Mother” (Yevtushenko), 198 currency reforms; criminal activities and, 22–25; initiation in 1961, 3–7 cybernetics, mathematical economics and, 311–315 Cyprus, political crisis in, 499–500 Cyrankiewicz, Józef, 182, 414–415 Czechoslovakia: Communist Party in, 227; grain sales to, 375; Khrushchev’s visit to, 514–516 Dagobert I (King), 210 Daily Express (British newspaper), 309 Dawn of Communism collective farm, 178 “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (Tolstoy), 262 decentralized market economy: currency reforms and, 4–7; entropy in, 7–19 Deineka, Aleksandr, 247, 256 Dementyev, Pyotr, 107 Demichev, Pyotr, 60, 156, 452, 455, 554; in post-Khrushchev era, 561 democracy, absence in Russia of, 39–41, 363–364 Deng Xiaoping, xiii, 391–392, 494, 587 Denisov, D. I., 174 Denmark: Khrushchev’s visit to, 438–441; Soviet relations with, 81 denunciation, Russian tradition of, 267–268 Derzhavin, Mikhail, 200

Index Destruction of the Squadron (Gibel eskadry) (Korneichuk), 277 Deutsche Welle, jamming in Russia of, 347 dictatorship of the proletariat, banishment of, 53–56 diplomacy, Khrushchev’s achievements in, 80–83, 587–591 Djilas, Milovan, 171 Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak), 267, 285 Donbas (Donets Coal Basin), industrial development in, 64–65 Donetsk, 47, 64 Dorodnitsyn, Anatoly, 324, 488 Dorogomilovsky chemical complex, 337–338 Doyenin, Vasily Nikolayevich, 483–484 Drevin, A. Alexandr, 247 drought, grain crop failure and, 368–375 Dubček, Alexander, 514–516 Dubinin, Nikolai Petrovich, 447 dust storms of 1963, grain harvest declines and, 367–375 Dygai, Nikolai, 61 Dymshitz, Veniamin, 146–148, 531 Dzhavakhishvili, Givi, 60 Eastern Europe, grain sales to, 375 East Germany: grain sales to, 375; Khrushchev’s meeting in, 310 Eaton, Cyrus, 424–425 economic reforms: collectivization and, 100–101; cooperation with Comecon and Warsaw Pact countries and, 402–403; heavy industry vs. consumerism and, 32–34; housing development and, 32–34; Khrushchev’s proposals for, xii, 403, 406– 410, 469–472, 481–494, 525–530; Kosygin reforms, xii–xiii, 567–576; mathematics integration into, 311–315; personnel reassignments following, 10–19; in postKhrushchev era, 563–567, 570–576; pricing systems and, 113–127; professionalization and specialization in, 138–155; proposals in 1961 for, 44–56, 85–90; regional economic councils and, 28–34; results in 1962 of, 184–190; State Planning Commission economic development plan, 45. See also currency reforms educational reforms: Council on Science proposals for, 324–325; eight-year school proposal and, 456–458; orthographic reforms of 1964, 458–459; in science, 445–446 egg production, expansion of, 434–436, 464–466 Egypt: Khrushchev’s visit to, 432–434; Soviet relations with, 524 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 191; Khrushchev and, 303; at Lenin Hills conference, 250, 253, 255; memoirs of, 293–295; at Sverdlov Hall conference, 269, 272, 286

665

8-1/2 (film), 291–293 Eighteenth Party Congress (1939), 44 eight-year school proposals, 456–458 Eisenhower, Dwight D.: Castro and, 160; Khrushchev and, 65–66, 170, 562; on military buildup, 574 Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta (Economic Gazette), 144, 148, 481–482, 484, 490 electoral politics: constitutional reforms and, 173–175, 474–476; multiparty system and, 475–478 electric power industry, long-term expansion plans for, 425–426 Electric Power Institute, 42 Eligius (Eloy) (saint), 210 Elizabeth, Empress, 580 embezzlement in post-Stalin era, 20–22 “The Emperors New Clothes” (Andersen), 217 energy production, reforms of 1962 and, 184–190 “Engels complex,” 350 enterprise reforms, proposals in 1962 for, 149–155 entropy, Khrushchev’s reforms as example of, 7–19 environmental policies: dust storms and drought of 1963 and, 370–375; Khrushchev’s initiatives in, 130–135; Lavrentyev and, 320–321 Erkabderm Tage, 440 European Community of Writers, conference of, 293–299 European imperialism, Russia and, 162 Exhibition of Economic Achievements, 348, 405–406, 434; Construction Pavilion at, 332–333 Faibishenko, Grigory (Grisha), 21–25 Falk, Robert, 210, 221–222, 229–230, 247 Farouk, King, 432–434 Federal Republic of Germany, Soviet relations with, 480–481 Fedoseyev, Pyotr, 313, 477–478 Fellini, Federico, 291–293 fertilizer production: chemical fertilizers, 331–332; economic reforms of 1962 and, 188–190; expansion of, 404–405, 425 fiberglass production, reforms of 1962 and, 184–185 Filmmakers Club (Dom Kino), 209, 211, 276 Finkel, I. D., execution of, 57 Finland, Khrushchev’s visit to, 80–83 Finley, George, 424, 427–428 Finley-Moody Trading Corporation, 424, 427–428 Firsov, Vladimir, 257–258 Fitil (The Fuse) (film), 177 five-day work week, debate over, 467–472

666 Index fixed assets, economic reforms and role of, 142 folk music, 216 food prices: in 1963, 406–407; single standard pricing system and, 115–127 forced labor, agricultural development and, 327–328 Ford, Gerald, 170 Foreign Languages Publishing House, 171–172 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), 172 Fourth Symphony (Shostakovich), 99 France: currency reforms in, 4; religion abolished in, 31; Socialism in, 366; Soviets in resistance movement in, 518–519 Frankel, Max, 498 Freeman, Orville, 378–379, 387 Friendship oil pipeline, 99, 179, 406 The Front (Korniechuk), 278 Fujiyama, Aiichiro, 538 Fursenko, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, 10–11 Furtseva, Yekaterina: anti-party group and, 69–71, 211; Glazunov exhibit and, 437; Manège scandal and, 221, 224, 228–231, 233; Suslov and, 276; Tretyakovsky Gallery expansion and, 342 Fyodorenko, Nikolai, 451–452, 488 Fyodorov, Viktor Stepanovich, 527 Gagarin, Yuri, 35, 433 Gaidar, Yegor, xi–xii Galbraith, John Kenneth, 394–395 Galyukov, Vasily Ivanovich, 530–535, 538–542 Gamzakhurdia, Konstantin, 289 Garst, Roswell, 348, 423 Gaugin, Paul, 217 Geddes, Keith, 436 The General Course of Capitalist Development (Strumilin and Varga), 45–46 genetics research: legalization of, 176–177; Lysenko’s contributions to, 311, 442–443; politicization of, 445–455; Stalin’s impact on, 110 “Geologists” (Nikonov), 230 geopolitics, Cuban missile crisis and, 163–171 Georgadze, Mikhail, 543 geothermal energy experiments, 426 Gerasimov, Konstantin, 483 Gerasimov, Sergei, 250, 256 Gerhardsen, Einar, 440 German Democratic Republic (East Germany), 162–163 Germany, Soviet relations with, 80–83 Gibson-Watt, David (Lord), 434 “Gilbert-Kravis” method, currency reforms and, 6–7 Ginzburg, Aleksandr, 259 Ginzburg, Yevgeniya, 219 Gladilin, Anatoly, 191, 419 Glazunov, Ilya, 258, 437–438 Glushko, Valentin, 269

Glushkov, Viktor Mikhailovich, 311–312, 314, 488 Goberman, Iosif Mikhailovich, 315 Gogol, Nikolai, 14, 288 Golitsyn, Illarion, 281–287, 289 Golodnaya Steppe, agricultural development in, 74 Gomulka, Wladislaw, 176, 182, 414–415 Gonchar, Oles, 427 Goodman, Benny, 103–104 The Good Man of Shetsuan (Brecht), 428 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 119, 170, 475, 487, 492–493, 571 Gorbacheva, Raisa, 364 Gorbatov, Aleksandr (Colonel-General), 438 Goreglyad, Aleksei, 525, 528–531 Gorki-9 dacha (government residence), 41–44, 51; Fellini film viewing at, 292–293; garden at, 134–135; Khrushchev and family at, 195–196, 468–472 Gorki Leninskiye farm, 311 Gorky, Maxim, 191, 242 Gorky Park, artists’ exhibitions in, 210 Gorshkov, Sergei, 105 Goryunov, Dmitri Petrovich, 533 The Government Inspector (Gogol), 14, 51 grain harvests: in 1962, 176–180, 186–190, 367–375; in 1964, 459–466, 509–512; agrochemistry expansion and, 376–378; Khrushchev era increases in, 585–586; in post-Khrushchev era, 563–565; single standard pricing system and, 115–127 grass-field rotation system, 77–80; abandonment in 1962 of, 95–96 Great Leap Forward economic plan (China), 390–392 Great Patriot War (Nazi-Soviet war of 1941–1945). See World War II Great Terror of 1937, 78 Grechko, Andrei, 433–434 Gribachev, Nikolai, 253–256, 272, 281, 419 Grinyov, Ivan Grigoryevich, 209 Grishin, Viktor, 549, 555 Gromyko, Andrei, 212; Cuban missile crisis and, 393; Cyprus crisis and, 499–500; Kennedy assassination and, 405 gross domestic product (GDP), Soviet-US comparisons of, 586–587 gross output, economic reforms and concept of, 142 Gubkin, Ivan, 513 gulags, Khrushchev’s dismantling of, 588–589 Gurevich, 505–507 Gwandung circus troupe, 178 Habomai Island, 524 Haekkerup, Per, 405 “The Heirs of Stalin” (Yevtushenko), 194–200, 217, 299

Index Hemingway, Ernest, 172 Hero of Socialist Labor award, to Khrushchev, 34–35, 41 Hero of the Soviet Union: Nasser’s receipt of, 433–434; World War II heroes, 516–519 highway construction: in 1962, 180; in 1963, 332, 336–343; in 1964, 519 historiography, of Khrushchev era, xiv, 172 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Shapiro), 172 Hitler, Adolf, 36–37 homosexuality, in Soviet Union, 223 Horizon Beyond Horizon (Tvardovsky), 205–209 Horowitz, Silva, 141 Horowitz, Vladimir, 141 housing development: economic reforms and changes in, 26, 32–34, 483–486; Kosygin reforms for, 573–576; in Moscow, 130, 429–430; policy changes in 1963 and, 386–388; proposals in 1964 for, 527–530; reforms of 1962 and, 177–180, 184–190; reforms of 1963 in, 332–344; statistics for Khrushchev era, 86–90, 583–584 Hume, Douglas, 393 Hungarian Revolution: Andropov and, 213, 219; Mikoyan and, 20; Petöfi Circle and, 213, 219, 222, 284; Soviet Union influence in, 358, 414. See also Petöfi Circle Hungary: grain sales to, 375; Khrushchev’s visit to, 426 Husak, Gustav, 515 hydroelectric power: Central Asian initiatives for, 132–133; expansion of, 403–404, 419, 425–426; reforms of 1962 and, 184–190 hydroponics, agricultural development and, 329–330 “I Am in My Twenties” (Mnd dvadtstat let, film), 268 Ibarruri, Dolores, 172 IBM Corporation, 310 Ignatov, Nikolai Fyodorovich, 15–16 Ignatov, Nikolai Grigoryevich, 69–71, 354–355, 362, 530 Ilangaratne, T. B., 531 Ilarionova, Mariya, 193 Ilyichev, Leonid Fyodorovich, 90, 156, 173; Academy of Sciences reforms and, 455; Artists Union congress and, 300; conspiracy against, 302; Fellini film viewing, 291–293; Glazunov exhibit controversy and, 438; Ideological Commission sessions and, 259–261, 289; Lenin Hills conference and, 250–256; Manège scandal and, 221, 227– 231, 233, 239–240, 244, 264; new national anthem discussion and, 419; ouster of Khrushchev and, 544, 554–555; in postKhrushchev era, 561; radio jamming

667

policies and, 346–348; Suslov rivalry with, 211–215, 218–220; at Sverdlov Hall conference, 269, 272, 287; Tvardovsky and, 295 income statistics: in 1961, 87–90; in 1962, 183; for Khrushchev era, 584 income taxes, reform in 1962 of, 179–180 India: Chinese conflict with, 195, 202; Soviet relations with, 520–521 industrialization: economic reforms of 1961 and, 49–50; expansion in 1963, 387–388, 407–410; expansion in 1964, 480, 526–530; income statistics and effects of, 183; Khrushchev era reforms of, 585–586; Novocherkassk tragedy and, 113–127; productivity increases and, 55–56, 496– 497; results in 1962 of, 184–190; single standard pricing system and, 113–127; vertical control of, 47 inflation, currency reforms of 1947 and, 3–7 infrastructure statistics, for Khrushchev era, 583 innovation, in centralized economies, 9–10 The Inspector General (Gogol), 288 Institute for Research on Control Computers. See Control Computers Institute Institute of Cybernetics, 311 Institute of Grain Growing, 74, 79–80 Institute of Mathematical Methods in Economics, 313–315 Institute of Physics and Technology, 451 Institute of Physics Problems, 109, 322–323 Institute of Superhard Materials, 181 intercontinental ballistic missiles (IBCM), proposals concerning, 387–388 interdistrict production, proposed expansion of, 388–389, 421, 463–466, 512 International Tchaikovsky Competition, 101–102 international trade relations, economic reforms and, 176–180 Intervision, 98–103 In the Steppes of Ukraine (V stepiakh Ukrainy) (Korneichuk), 277 Ioganson, Boris, 276 Iraq, US presence in, 162–163 irrigation: expansion of, 403–404; proposals in 1964 for, 421; rice cultivation and, 382–385 Isayev, Vasily Yakovlevich, 538 Isayev, Yevgeny, 258 Italy, Communist Party in, 227 Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan’s Childhood) (film), 102 Ivan the Terrible, 21, 38 Ivashchenko, Olga Ilyinichna, 558 Ivashutin, Pyotr, 118, 120 Izvestia, 28, 32, 171; Adzhubei’s dismissal from, 303; dust storms of 1963 covered in, 371; economic articles in, 142–144, 148, 481–483, 485–490, 494–495, 531, 567;

668 Index Glazunov exhibit controversy in, 437; housing development coverage in, 33–34; Manège scandal in, 221, 247; mathematical economics initiatives discussed in, 314; on orthographic reforms, 458–459; Paustovsky article in, 288; relaxation of censorship and, 218; Soviet “Laundromat” story and, 179; Suslov-Iliyechev rivalry and, 212–213; Tvardovsky poetry in, 298–299; Yevtushenko’s poetry in, 195, 199–200 Jack of Diamonds (artists group), 210 Jackson, Michael, 36 Japan: Russian artists’ and writers’ visits to, 272; Russian island dispute with, 524; Sorge’s arrest by, 517 jazz music, Khrushchev’s discussion of, 103–104, 216, 243, 303–304 Jóhannsdóttir, Thórunn, 101–102 Johnson, Lyndon, 395 John XXIII (Pope), 344–346 Joliot-Curie, Frédéric, 437 K-19 submarine disaster, 402 K-19: The Widowmaker (film), 402 Kachalov, Nikolai Nikolayevich, 483 Kadar, Janos, 414–415, 426, 434 Kaganovich, Lazar, 45, 57, 158–159, 240, 249, 413, 540, 557, 567 Kalmykov, Valery, 35, 104–105, 108 Kandinsky, Max, 213 Kantorovich, Leonid, 312 Kapitsa, Pyotr, 321–324, 448 Kargin, Valentin Alekseyevich, 431–432 Karjalainen, Ahti, 82 Katanyan, Vasily, 141 Katayev, Valentin Petrovich, 273 Kazakevich, Emmanuil, 200–202, 217, 303 Kazakhs minority, 17. See also Virgin Lands (Kazakhstan) Kazakov, Matvei, 270 Kazanets, Ivan, 417 KB-2 design bureau, 104–105, 107–108 Kekkonen, Urho, 80–83 Keldysh, Mstislav, 35, 176, 313, 325, 445, 449, 451–453, 538 Kennedy, John F.: assassination of, 405; Balzan Prize nomination and, 344–346; Cuban missile crisis and, 164–171, 393– 395; Khrushchev’s meeting with, 19, 170; nuclear test discussions with, 288 Kennedy, Robert, 167–168 KGB: conspiracy against Khrushchev and, 534; Neizvestny and, 225; Novocherkassk tragedy and role of, 121–127; personnel changes at, 69–71; radio jamming and, 347; reports on Mukhitdinov by, 70 Khanin, Grigory, 85 Khariton, Yuli, 110

Kharlamov, Mikhail, 212–213 Khimiya i Zhizn (Chemistry and Life) magazine, 539 Khitrov, Stepan Dmitryevich, 12–14 Khlebnikov, Velemir, 214 Khrennikov, Tikhon, 179, 276 Khrushchev, Irina (sister of Nikita Khrushchev). See Kobyak, Irina Khrushchev Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich: artistic preferences of, 216–217; artists’ opposition to, 215–220; Balzan Prize nomination and, 344–346; Central Asian visits of, 130–135; Chinese relations with, 178, 302, 389–392; constitutional reforms of, 172–175; Council on Science and, 316–327; Cuban missile crisis and, 159–171; currency reforms under, 3–7; death of, 304; denunciation of Stalin by, 56–64; economic reforms of 1961 and, 8–19, 44–56; family relations, 41–44; genetics research and, 311; health and illnesses of, 93; irrigation and rice cultivation under, 382–385; Kozlov and, 19–22, 351–367; lack of resistance to ouster by, 540–542; legacy of, 579–591; Lenin Hills conference and, 249–256; Manège scandal and, 220–248; mathematical economics initiatives and, 311–315; Mikoyan and, 363–367; monument to, 225–226; Novocherkassk tragedy and, 113–129; ouster of, 301–306, 543–560; personality cult of, 35–41; Scandinavian trip by, 438–441; seventieth birthday celebrations, 427; single standard pricing system of, 113–127; Stalin and, 532–533; successors for, discussion of, 364–367; Sverdlov Hall conference and, 269–287; Tvardovsky and, 201–202, 204–209 Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich (grandson of Nikita Khrushchev), xi–xiv Khrushchev, Sergei (son of Nikita Khrushchev): artistic preferences of, 216– 217; Manège scandal recalled by, 226–238 “Khrushchev inflation,” 99–103 Khrushchev on Khrushchev (Khrushchev), xi–xii, 532 Khrushcheva, Yuliya, 234. See Petrova, Yuliya Khrushcheva Khudenko, Ivan Nikiforovich, 89–90, 94, 97, 148–150, 190, 329, 482–483, 571–572 Khutsiyev, Marlen, 262, 264–268 Kibalnikov, Aleksandr, 341 Kiev: Babi Yar dam collapse, 29–30; subway construction in, 11–12 Kiev Opera Company, 223, 247 Kir, Félix, 520 Kirichenko, Aleksei, 69, 353 Kirilenko, Andrei, 117, 120–123, 152, 227, 291–292, 352, 362, 483–484, 548

Index Kirillin, Vladimir, 176, 325, 538 Kisunko, Grigory, 111 Klin fiber factory, 101 Knorozov, Yuri, 27 Knowles, John, 435–436 Kobyak, Avraam Mironovich, 41–44 Kobyak, Irina Khrushcheva, 41–44 Kobyak, Irma, 41–42 Kobyak, Rona, 42 Kochetov, Vsevolod, 284–285, 304 Kommunist (journal), 141–142 Komsomolskaya Pravda (Young Communist League Truth) publication, 490 Koptyaeva, Antonina, 437 Korneichuk, Aleksandr, 269, 277–278 Korobov, Anatoly, 569–570 Korolyov, Sergei, 35, 110, 112, 405, 568–569 Korotkov, Ivan, 436 Korytny, S. Z., execution of, 57 Kostousov, Anatoly Ivanovich, 538 Kosygin, Aleksei: Baltic-Black Sea Canal project and, 85; British agricultural exposition and, 435–436; Chinese relations with, 392; economic reforms, xii–xiii, 4–7, 14, 49–52, 145–146, 482, 528, 567–576, 586–587; elimination of regional economic councils by, 159; grain shortages of 1963 and, 373–374; industrial development and, 101; Kozlov and, 69–71; Lower Ob hydroelectric plant and, 320, 326; Manège scandal and, 227; mathematical economics initiatives and, 313–314; ouster of Khrushchev and, 531, 557–558; Outpost of Ilyich film and, 262–268; in postKhrushchev era, 560, 566–568; regional reorganization and, 351–352; space program and, 568–569; technological innovations and, 112; technology exhibition of 1963 and, 309; US relations with, 395; Zasyadko and, 147–148 Kosygina, Klavdiya Andreyevna, 264 Kotov, Vladimir, 259 Kotsyubinsky, Mikhail, 289 Kovalenko, Aleksandr, 16 Kozhevnikov, Yevgeny Fyodorovich, 538 Kozlov, Frol, 35; denunciation of Stalin and, 60; as deputy, activities of, 19–22, 25–26; economic reforms and, 146; illness and death of, 360–361; Manège scandal and, 227; Novocherkassk tragedy and, 117–119, 121–123, 125–127; political strategies of, 68–71, 352–367; province committee reorganization and, 152; regional reorganization and, 351–352; Shelepin’s rivalry with, 157; Sverdlov Hall conference, 275; technology exhibition of 1963 and, 309; term limits proposal and, 66; Voronov and, 547; Yugoslav-Soviet relations and, 359–360

669

Kozlov, Nikolai Yakovlevich, 100–101, 336, 340, 343–344 Krasnoyarsk hydroelectric power plant, 346 Krelin, Yuli, 225 Kremlin chimes, restoration of, 403 Kronrod, Ya., 487 Kronshtadtsky, Ioann, 581 Krotov, Viktor Vasilyevich, 489 Kucherenko, Vladimir, 33 Kunayev, Dinmukhamed, 60 Kurchatov, Igor, 110, 316, 323, 444 Kurochkin, Boris, 117 Kursk province, 135–137 Kuusinen, Otto, 58, 569 Kuznetsov, Aleksei, 71 Kuznetsov, Vasily Vasilyevich, 531 Kuznetsova, M., 489–490 Kzyl-KIushmuk gas deposits, 406 labor productivity: agricultural development and, 327–330; economic reforms of 1961 and, 55–56; five-day workweek proposal and, 470–472; labor shortages of 1964 and, 425; single standard pricing system and, 114–127; statistics on, 583; wage increases and, 467–472. See also forced labor Lake Baikal, paper mill complex on, 320 Lakshin, Vladimir, 206–207, 296–299, 375 Laktionov, Aleksandr, 247, 250 Landau, Lev, 180, 322 language reforms of 1964, 458–459 La Scala Opera Company, 520–521 Lavrentyev, Mikhail, 80–83; Academy of Sciences and, 426, 449–455; Council on Science and, 316–321, 323–326; educational reforms and, 456–458 lavsan production, 311, 330–331, 432 Lebanon, US presence in, 162–163 Lebedev, Vladimir, 192–195, 227, 229, 240; Ideological Commission sessions and, 254, 260; Khrushchev’s ouster and, 539; Suslov’s reprisals against, 302; Tvardovsky and, 295–296 Lebina, N. B., 375 Lee, Mikhail Vasilyevich, 571 legal system in Russia, 38–41 Leger, Fernand, 223–224, 228 Leger, Nadia, 224 Lenin, Vladimir, 31, 38, 172, 575; arrest of, 201; economic policies under, 494; political legacy of, 475–476, 581; successor controversies after death of, 364 “Lenin at Razliv” (Nalbandyan), 285 Lenin Hills, housing projects in, 341 Lenin Hills conference, 249–256; Western journalists’ coverage of, 271 Lenin in Longjumeau (Voznesensky), 299–300 Lenin Prize, 424–425, 427 Leonov, Leonid, 288

670 Index Leontief, Wassily, 140 Leontyev, Lev, 487 Lermontov, Mikhail, 169, 215, 277 Lesechko, Mikhail Avksentyev, 538 Leskov, Nikolai, 216 Libedinsky, I., 482 Liberman, Yevsei Grigoryevich, 140–155, 190, 199, 350–351, 359, 393, 484, 487–489 life expectancy, statistics under Khrushchev, xiii, 582–583 Lifshits, Benedikt, 214 linear programming theory, 312 Lisichkin, Gennady, 393, 398, 481–482, 485 Literary Fund, 288–289 literature, in Khrushchev era, 589 Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette), 30, 144, 571 Lithuanian Theater of Opera and Ballet, 406 Litovchenko, Leonid, 43, 539 livestock development: grain harvests and, 368–375; productivity in 1962, 189; proposals in 1964 for, 462–466, 509–512; reform proposals for, 379–381; statistics in 1961 on, 88–90. See also meat production living standards, improvements in, 183, 495–496 Loginov, Yevgeny, 401–402 Lomako, Pyotr, 148, 351, 387, 525 Lomonsosov, Vladimir, 182 The Love for the Three Oranges (Prokofiev), 406 Lower Ob hydroelectric plant, 320 Lukin, Fyodor, 111–112 Lukyanenko, Pavel, 110, 269, 443, 445, 447–448 lumber industry, housing construction and, 336–337 Lunkov, Nikolai, 476 Luzhniki stadium, poetry readings at, 223 Lysenko, Mikola, 223 Lysenko, Trofim, 78, 110, 176–177, 311, 442, 447–448, 462, 505 Lyubimov, Yuri, 428 Machism, 313 Macmillan, Harold, 288 The Madonna and Child with John the Baptist (Battista), 210 Makarios (Archbishop), 499 Makeyev, Victor Petrovich, 568 Malenkov, Georgy, 10, 45, 322, 413; anti-party group and, 557, 567; as cadre secretary, 71–72; ouster of Khrushchev and, 541 Malevich, Kazimir, 217 Malin, Vladimir Nikiforovich, 10–11, 132, 203–204; as Khrushchev’s secretary, 292, 362, 510; ouster of Khrushchev and, 528– 529, 532–533, 548–552

Malinovsky, Rodion, 120––121, 522–523, 540–541 Maltsev, Terenty, 284, 505 Malyshev, Ivan, 481, 485, 487, 570 Malyshko, Andrei, 276, 278 Maly Theater, 288 Malyutin, Pyotr, 123 Mandelstam, Osip, 197 Manège scandal, 220–221, 437, 579; artistic freedom and, 220–248; stenographic record of, 230–233, 241–244 manufacturing industries, single standard pricing system and, 113–127 Manvelov, I., 488 Mao Zedong, 139, 289–290, 389–392 Marchuk, Guriy, 319, 326–327 Marchuk, V. F., 519 Maria Stuart (play), 288 Mariyinsky Theater, 104 Marr, Nikolai, 78 Marx, Karl, 31, 36 Marxism: in Khrushchev era, 589; in Russia, 38–41 material incentive concept: agricultural development and, 329; regional economic reorganization and, 351–352 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Fedoseyev), 313 mathematics, economics integration into, 311–315 Matskevich, Vladimir, 327–328 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 197, 214–215, 259, 277, 280 Mayakovsky Theater, 217 Mazurov, Kirill, 415–416, 418, 548, 566 Mazzolini, Ulisse, 344–345 meat production: improvements in 1962, 189; in post-Khrushchev era, 565; proposals in 1964 for, 423–424, 434; shortages in, 379–381. See also livestock development media coverage: censorship abolishment and, 30–34; of communism’s “accomplishments,” 26–34; Intervision agreement and, 98–103 Mekhanik, S. L., 487 Mekhlis, Lev, 318 Mensheviks, 44, 172 Menshikov, Aleksandr, 513 metallurgy industry, limitations on, 386–388 microelectronics: development of, 104–113; technology exhibition of 1963 and, 309–311 Mićunovi , Veljko, 28, 394 Mikhailov, Nikolai Alexandrovich, 210 Mikhalkov, Sergei, 177, 276, 437 Mikoyan, Anastas Ivanovich: anti-party group and, 69, 567; at Bolshoi Theater, 521; Chinese relations and, 178; Cuban missile crisis and, 164, 227; economic reforms and, 48, 146; educational reforms and, 457–458;

Index Khrushchev and, 425; Kozlov and, 19–22, 69–71, 353–355; Novocherkassk tragedy and, 117–119, 121–123, 125–127; ouster of Khrushchev and, 528, 532–535, 538–540, 543–544, 554, 559–560; in post-Khrushchev era, 561, 566–569; as Presidium secretary, 362–363, 477–478; province committee reorganization and, 152; Sorge incident and, 518; Stalin and, 57, 532–533 Mikoyan, Artyom, 58, 105 Mikoyan, Sergo, 118, 170, 225 Mikoyan, Stepan, 479 military: criticism of Khrushchev by, 410; Khrushchev’s policies concerning, 521– 524, 587–588; post-Khrushchev reorganization of, 573–574; troop withdrawals in Europe and, 414–415 milk production, reform proposals for, 379–381 mineral fertilizers: agricultural production and, 76–80; expansion of, 385–388; grassfield rotation system and, 95–96 minerals extraction, reserves development in, 318 Mironovskaya-804 wheat strain, 443 Mir—segodnya (The World Today) (Romm), 304–305 Mirshakar, Mirsail, 200 Mirvaiz Shah (Prince), 136–137 missile development: microelectronics and, 105; proposals concerning, 387–388 Mlechin, Leonid, 429–430, 476 modernist artists: Lenin Hills conference and, 250–256; Manège scandal and, 221, 229; politics and, 214–220 Mollet, Guy, 366 Molotov, Vyacheslav: anti-party group and, 557, 567; at Gorki-9, 196, 468; Khrushchev and, 10, 45, 149–150, 315, 413, 540; Stalin and, 57, 532–533; term limits proposal and, 65 monuments to Stalin, destruction of, 64 Mordvinov, Vladimir, 210 Morgun, Fyodor Timofeyevich, 504 mortality rates, statistics under Khrushchev, 582–583 Moscow: airport construction in, 519; auto transport system in, 149–150; Khrushchev’s construction plans for, 103; Metro system in, 428–429; reconstruction proposals for, 343–344; streetlights project for, 428–432; subway system construction in, 11 Moscow Artists Club (Dom Khudozhnika), 210 Moscow Artists Union (MOSKh), 210; Manège scandal and, 221; traditionalist domination of, 210, 224 Moscow Art Theater, 288

671

Moscow Conservatory of Music, 101–102 Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology (MIET), 109 Moscow Metro Systems, development of, 340–342 Moscow Printing Trades Institute (Moskovsky Poligrafichesky Institut), 209 Moscow Transport Administration (GlavmosAvtotrans), 314–315 Moscow University, 451 Mostovoi, Viktor, 401–402 motor vehicle development, 531 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 216 Mozhaiskov, I., 487 Mukhitdinov, Nuriddin, 58–62; Kozlov and, 354–355; ouster of, 69–71 Museum of Architecture, 339 music: Ideological Commission sessions discussion of, 258–259; Khrushchev’s preferences in, 216–217 Musicians Union, 191, 214, 218–220 Mussolini, Benito, 36–37, 344 Mzhavanadze, Vasily, 59–60, 548 Nagatino district (Moscow), 103 Nagy, Imre, 213 Nalbandyan, Dmitry, 278, 285–286 Nalivaiko, G. A., 79–80, 188–189, 371–372, 421; Barayev and, 504–508 Napoleon, Russian victory over, 161, 169–170 Narodnoe khoziaistvo (SSSR), 583 Nasser, Gamal Abdul, 432–434 Nasution, Abdullah, 405 NATO, Khrushchev’s diplomacy and, 81–83 natural gas: pipeline construction for, 27, 177– 180, 406, 513; in Siberia, 513–514 Nazi-Soviet war of 1941–1945. See World War II Necklace of the Nile, Khrushchev’s reception of, 433 Nedelin, Mitrofan, 35 Nedelya journal, 222, 230 Neizvestny, Ernst, 210; celebrity status of, 289; Ideological Commission session and, 257–258, 260–261; Khrushchev and, 303; Lenin Hills conference and, 251, 254–255; Manège scandal and, 224–226, 235–244, 246, 264; monument to Khrushchev by, 304; at Sverdlov Hall conference, 276 Nekrasov, Nikolai, 169, 216 Nekrasov, Viktor, 266–267 Nemchinov, Vasily Sergeyevich, 143–144, 311–315 Neprintsev, Yuri, 2550 Nesmeyanov, Aleksandr, 100, 312–313, 449, 451 New Arbat district (Moscow), 103, 332, 336– 337, 342 New Cheryomushki housing project, 334–337

672 Index New Moscow Chemical Complex, 330 “new Russians,” 22 New York Times, 352, 354, 366–367, 403, 413, 418, 427, 480, 498 Nicholas II (Tsar), 38, 158, 374, 580; Brezhnev compared with, 575; peasant communes and, 77; reforms of, xiii Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (Khrushchev), xi–xii, 100, 159, 169, 522 Nikolayev, Anatoly Vasilyevich, 488 Nikolayev, Andriyan, 137, 192, 405 Nikonov, Pavel, 230, 247 Nine Days of One Year (film), 100 Nineteenth Party Congress (1952), communist ideological reforms and, 45 Nixon, Richard, 160 North Korea, Marxism in, 38 Norway: Khrushchev’s visit to, 438–441; Soviet relations with, 81 Novikov, Ignaty, 337, 351 Novikov, Vladimir, 46–47, 49–50, 332; economic reforms and, 139, 145–148, 351 Novocherkassk Engineering and Amelioration Institute, 384 Novocherkassk tragedy, 113–127, 328, 565; political legacy of, 128–129 Novo-Devichy cemetery, Khrushchev’s burial in, 304 Novosti Press Agency, 213; founding of, 27–28 Novotny Antonin, 176, 514–516 Novy Mir (New World), 85, 191–192; Ehrenburg’s memoirs in, 293; Kochetov’s criticism of, 285; Nekrasov’s essays in, 266–267; Tvardovky’s work in, 202, 206–207, 304 nuclear weapons: Academy of Sciences and, 444–445; Cold War development of, 45; in post-Khrushchev era, 574; Soviet development of, 522–524; treaties on, 393–395 Nude (Falk), 251 Nuzhdin, Nikolai, 442–443, 447–448 Obyknovenny fashizm (Ordinary Fascism) (Romm), 304–305 Oceanic Blue Water Navy, 587–588 October 1917 Revolution, Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church and, 31 offshore oil drilling, Khrushchev’s discussion of, 133–134 Ogdon, John, 101 oil fields in Siberia, 512–514 oil imports, economic reforms of 1962 and, 176–180 OKB-52 design bureau, 105 Okhlopkov, Nikolai, 217 Oktyabr (October) magazine, 200, 285 Okudzhava, Bulat, 289

The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway), 172 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Solzhenitsyn), 295; Khrushchev’s support for, 193–195, 200, 203–207, 217, 221; Lenin Prize nomination for, 300, 427 On the Road to Building Communism (Strumilin and Varga), 45–46 Operation Anadyr, 164, 171 Oprichniki, 21 Orbelyan, Kotik, 258–259 Order of the Red Banner, 401–402 orthography, reform of, 458–459 Our Nikita Sergeyevich (film), 34–41 Outpost of Ilyich (film), 261–268, 419 “An Overall, Long-Term Twenty-Year Plan of Economic Development for the USSR,” 48 Paasikivi, Juho, 81 Paasio, Rafael, 81 Palace of Congresses, 44; New Year’s celebration at, 413 Palewski, Gaston, 543 Panfyorov, Fyodor, 437 paper production, expansion of, 403 party cadres: cadres secretary position and, 71–73; Khrushchev and, 17–19; production administrators as replacement for, 96–98 Pasternak, Boris, 267, 277, 285, 305 Paton, Boris, 309, 319, 451–453 Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, 31 “patronage” aid programs, 177–180 Paul, Tsar of Russia, 364 Paustovsky, Konstantin, 288 Pavlov, Sergei, 314 Peasant Bank, 77 peasant communes, history of, 76–77 peasant rights, Khrushchev’s campaign for, 466–472 “peasants’ markets,” currency reforms and, 5–7 Penkovsky, Oleg, 356–357 pension reforms: Khrushchev era reforms of, 584–585; Khrushchev’s campaign for, 466–472 People’s Republic of China: Deng Xiaoping reforms in, xiii, 494; dust storms in, 369; economic growth in, 587; Indian conflict with, 195, 202; Marxism in, 38; Soviet relations with, 178, 227, 302, 389–392, 495–496; Suslov’s critique of, 289–291; Tiananmen Square massacre in, 128–129; Tibet invasion by, 195, 202 Pepin, Ilya, 214 personality cult, Khrushchev and, 34–41 Pervukhin, Mikhail, 322 Peter III (Tsar), 580 Peter the Great (Tsar), 31, 38, 156–157, 170, 364, 513, 581, 587–588

Index Petöfi Circle, 213, 219, 222, 284 Petrakov, Nikolai, 487 Petrova, Yuliya Khrushcheva, 28 Petrovo-Dalneye dacha, Khrushchev’s retirement in, 225, 303 Petrovskaya Agricultural and Forestry Academy, 75, 327–330 Picasso, Pablo, 214, 216–217 Pikhoya, Rudolf, 362 Pilsudski, Józef, 277–278 plastics industry, reforms of 1962 and, 184–190 Plastov, Arkady, 247, 273–274 Platon Krechet (Korniechuk), 277 Plekhanov, Georgi Valentinovich, 172 Plisetskaya, Maya, 323 Pliyev, Issa, 120–122, 125 Podgorny, Nikolai, 11, 60, 182, 223; conspiracy against Khrushchev and, 440, 531–532, 534–536, 552; drought and dust storms of 1963 and, 372–373; election as CC secretary, 416–418; Khrushchev and, 415, 425, 427; political upheavals and, 310, 365–366; in post-Khrushchev era, 560, 566–568; province committee reorganization and, 151–152; Shibayev and, 498; Sorge incident and, 518 poetry: in Khrushchev era, 589; political importance of, 215–216, 304–306 Poklonnaya Gora memorial, 333 Poland: Khrushchev’s visit to, 414; Russian relations with, 160, 427 Polikarpov, Dmitry, 194, 203; Glazunov exhibit and, 437; Ideological Commission session and, 257; Manège scandal and, 221–222, 228 Polish United Workers Party, 414 politics: artists’ activism in 1962 and, 209– 220; collective leadership in Presidium and, 415–416; election of deputies and, 474– 476; at Sverdlov Hall Conference, 269–287 Pologova, Adelaida, 247 Polotsk oil refinery, 348 Polyachenko, Volodya, 568 Polyakov, Vasily, 156, 291–292, 415; postKhrushchev removal of, 561 Polyansky, Dmitry, 58, 151–152, 157; conspiracy against Khrushchev and, 366, 534, 541; economic reforms and, 483, 528; educational reforms and, 457– 458; on livestock policies, 510–511; Manège scandal and, 223, 228–229; ouster of Khrushchev and, 544, 550–551, 557; in post-Khrushchev era, 560 polymer production, Soviet research on, 432 Ponomarev, Boris, 46, 48, 51–52, 291, 528, 554 Popov, Georgy Ivanovich, 538 Popović, Koča, 398 Popovich, Pavel, 137, 192

673

population growth: agricultural consumption and, 368–375; statistics in 1961 on, 87–90 Porik, Vasily Vasilyevich, 518–519 Posokhin, Mikhail, 332, 334–340 Potemkin (battleship), 425 poultry production: in 1964, 519–520; expansion of, 378–379, 434–436, 464–466, 536 Powers, Gary, 99, 401 power structure, Khrushchev’s reform of, 64–68, 97–98, 156–157 Prague Spring, 515 Pravda, 13; agricultural production articles in, 424, 561; articles on Kozlov in, 352; cosmonauts’ wedding coverage in, 405; economic articles in, 148, 481–482, 484– 490, 494–495, 531; Glazunov exhibit controversy in, 437; housing construction policies in, 332; Liberman’s article in, 142– 144, 199; Manège scandal in, 247; May Day proclamations in, 358, 360; poetry excerpts in, 299–300; Satyukov’s dismissal from, 303; Siberian oil fields article in, 512–514; Sorge incident reported in, 518; Stalin’s control of, 37; Tvardovsky’s poetry in, 205; Yevtushenko’s poetry in, 198–200 Precocious Autobiography (Yevtushenko), 273 prefabricated housing: innovations of 1963 in, 333–344; media coverage of, 26–34 Presidium: Academy of Sciences reforms and, 452–453; agricultural policies and, 188, 190, 385–388, 459–466; Ashkebad controversy and, 132–133; August 1964 meeting of, 509–512; candidate members of, 416–417; CC personnel reassignments and, 10, 17–22, 532–536; censorship decisions by, 194–195, 197, 199–200, 203–204; chemical plant expansion and, 185, 331–332; collective farming debates before, 146; collective leadership in, 415; communism building program and, 45–50, 55; Council on Science establishment and, 316; Cuban missile crisis and, 163–164, 169; economic reforms and, 33, 87, 407– 410; fertilizer production discussions and, 95; housing construction policies and, 333, 335–337; income tax moratorium and, 179; industrial expansion and, 185–186, 190, 348; interdistrict production, 388–389; Khrushchev’s final appearance before, 388– 389; leadership turnover discussions and, 66–71; Manège scandal and, 220, 222, 227; microelectronics proposal before, 109; Novocherkassk tragedy and, 119, 124–125; ouster of Khrushchev and, 544–560; patronage aid discussions and, 177–178; power restructuring proposals and, 173; radio jamming policies and, 347–348;

674 Index renamed as Politburo, 562; school reform proposal and, 456–458; Stalin denunciation and, 58–59, 63–65; workers’ council discussion before, 150–152 Presley, Elvis, 36 pricing policies: currency reforms and, 4–7; economic reforms and, 145–155, 183, 571; under Khrushchev, 99–103; in postKhrushchev era, 564–565; single standard proposal for, 113–127 prison camps, Khrushchev’s dismantling of, 588–589 private property: peasant communes and, 77; socialization of, 54–56 Problems of Peace and Socialism (magazine), 142 procurement systems, single standard pricing and, 115–127 production administrators, introduction of, 96–98, 460–466 profit, Khrushchev’s discussion of, 150–155, 493–494 “The Program of Our Party Is Clear” (Mirshakar), 200 Progress Publishers, 171–172 Prokatdetal design bureau, 100–101 Prokatdetal (Rolled Components) plant, 336, 340, 343–344 Prokofiev, Sergei, 321, 406 Prokofyev, Aleksandr, 276, 278 Promyslov, Vasily, 339 Protozanov, Aleksandr Konstantinovich, 512–514 provincial committees, Khrushchev’s reorganization of, 10–19, 151–155, 157– 159, 474–476 Pryanishnikov, Dmitry, 75–79 Ptitseprom (Poultry Industry of the Soviet Union), 464–466 Pugachova, Alla, 36 Pugwash conferences, 424–425 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 214–215, 277–278 Pushkin Museum, exhibits at, 223–224 Pustovoit, Vasily, 110, 445, 447–448 Radhakrishnan, Sarvapali, 521, 524 radios: abolition of registration of, 34; jamming of, 346–348; microprocessing technology and, 108–109 Rahman Tungku, Abdul, 345 railroad technology, exhibition of, 102–103 Rainbow (Wasilewska), 278 Ranković, Alexandr, 90 Rashidov, Sharaf, 60, 74 Raskolnikov, Fyodor, 295 Raspletin, Aleksandr, 111 Rassadin, Stanislave, 266 “Red October” confectionery, 350 “Red scare” in United States, 106

“reeducation programs,” anti-crime measures as, 21–22 regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy): Khrushchev’s creation of, 16; localism of, 186; pressure on Khrushchev from, 28–34; reorganization of, 86–90, 349–352, 568, 572–573 reinforced concrete tubing, development of, 340–341 religion, in Khrushchev era, 589–590 Rembrandt, 216 Remeslo, Vasily, 269, 442–443, 445–448 Repin, Ilya, 216, 321–322 “Report on General Economic Problems and the Development of Economic Science over the Long Term,” 48 revolution of 1905, 158 rice cultivation, irrigation and, 382–385 Rikhter, Svyatoslav, 323 Rockefeller, David, 480 Roerikh, Nikolai, 258 Roginets, M. G., 571 Rokotov, Pyotr (Petya), 21–25 Romania, grain sales to Soviet Union, 374 Romanov, Aleksei Vladimirovich, 292 Romanov dynasty, 37–38 Romm, Mikhail, 100, 224–226; assessment of Khrushchev, 579; on Central Committee meetings, 290–291; films produced by, 304–305; at Lenin Hills conference, 250– 254, 256; at Sverdlov Hall conference, 270–287 Rossal, A., 233 Rozhdestvensky, Robert, 223, 257, 276 RSFSR Artists Union, 210, 218–220 Rubinchik, Ye., 487 ruble-to-dollar ratio, currency reforms of 1961 and, 6–7 Rudakov, Aleksandr, 156, 291–292, 471; economic reforms and, 525, 528, 531; Manège scandal and, 228; ouster of Khrushchev and, 544, 554; technology exhibition of 1963 and, 309 Rudnev, Konstantin, 35, 148, 454, 486–487, 490, 494, 570 Rumyantsev, Aleksei, 141–142 Rusenberg, Julius, 106 Rusk, Dean, 393 Russian Federation: anti-crime measures passed by, 20–22; counter-revolution in, 581; personnel reassignments in 1961 and, 10–11 Russian Orthodox Church: Khrushchev and, 31–32; in Khrushchev era, 589–590; membership in World Council of Churches, 31 Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, 44 The Russian Forest (Leonov), 288 Rykov, Aleksei, 43, 196

Index Sabri, Ali, 524 Sakharov, Andrei, 442, 444, 447–448 Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, 39 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 296 Satyukov, Pavel, 13, 143; dismissal of, 303; Manège scandal and, 228, 239, 244; political reforms and, 476, 533; SuslovIlyechev rivalry and, 212–214; Yevtushenko controversy and, 198–200 Savin, Anatoly, 111 Scandinavia, Khrushchev’s visit to, 438–441 Schmerkel, Fritz, 518–519 school construction, statistics for Khrushchev era, 584 Scientific Council on the Application of Mathematical Methods in Economics, 313 scientific research, Khrushchev’s support for, 148, 177–180, 312–327, 441–455, 464–466 Second law of thermodynamics, 8 The Second World War, 172 Second Vatican Council, 345 Sedov, Leonid, 445 Selskoe khoziaistvo SSSR, 563 Selyunin, Vasily, 85 Semichastny, Vladimir, 72–73, 118, 125, 182, 419–420, 430; Brezhnev and, 535; conspiracy against Khrushchev and, 440, 533, 535, 539–541; Glazunov exhibit controversy and, 437–438; ouster of Khrushchev and, 543–544, 550, 552–553, 557–558; in post-Khrushchev era, 561–562; Sorge incident and, 518 Semyonov, Nikolai, 110, 325, 331, 448, 451 Senin, Ivan Semyonovich, 223 separation of powers, democracy and, 40–41 Serdyuk, Zinovy Tomofeyevich, 558 serfdom, abolishment of, 76 Sergeyev, Vladimir Ivanovich. See Kronshtadtsky, Ioann Serov, Ivan, 69, 356–357 Serov, Vladimir, 228–229, 244; Artists Union congress, 300; Ideological Commission session and, 257, 260, 264; Lenin Hills conference and, 250, 255–256 Shakespeare, William, 428 Shakhnazarov, Georgy, 170 Shapiro, Leonard, 172 Shaposhnikov, Matvei Kuzmich, 121 Shargorodsky (Colonel), 121 Shchedrin, Rodion, 258 Shcherbitsky, Vladimir, 417–418 Shchipachev, Stepan, 272 Shelepin, Aleksandr, 57–58, 63; Brezhnev and, 535; as cadre secretary, 71–73; Central Commission and, 186–188, 533; conspiracy against Khrushchev and, 530–535, 538; interdistrict production and, 512; as KGB head, 69; Khrushchev and, 427, 430; lack of political skills, 365; Manège scandal and,

675

228, 234, 241, 245, 255; Neizvestny investigation by, 260; Novocherkassk tragedy and, 117–118, 120, 132; ouster of Khrushchev and, 544, 548–549; in postKhrushchev era, 560–562, 590; power restructuring of 1962 and, 156–157; province committee reorganization and, 152 Shelest, Pyotr, 153, 269, 370, 372, 417–418; conspiracy against Khrushchev and, 530, 534–538, 545–546; in post-Khrushchev era, 561 Shepilov, Dmitry, 202, 211, 413, 547 Shevchenko, Andrei Stepanovich, 135, 311, 447, 499–501 Shevchenko, Taras, 425 Sheveleva, Yekaterina, 276 Shibayev, Aleksei Ivanovich, 498 Shikoyan Island, 524 ship construction: Khrushchev’s policies for, 104–105, 587–588; post-Khrushchev reorganization of, 574 Shmalgauzen, Ivan, 177 Shokin, Aleksandr, 105, 108, 110–113 Sholokov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 216, 293 Shostakovich, Dmitry, 99, 303 Shpalikov, Gennady, 419 Shrosha, marble from, 11 Shternberg, D. P., 210 Shuisky, Grigory, 51, 420, 455, 499 Shumakov, B. A., 384 Shvernik, Nikolai, 61, 201 Siberia, oil fields in, 512–514 Sik, Ota, 515 Silver Age of Russian culture, 272 simazine herbicide experiment, 135 single standard pricing system, introduction of, 113–127 Sintaksis (Syntax) (Ginzburg), 259 Slovakia, Khrushchev’s visit to, 514–516 Smelyakov, Yaroslav, 200 Smirnov, Leonid Vasilyevich, 112 Smirnov, Sergei, 419, 437 Smirnov, Vasily, 284 The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Hemingway), 172 Sobolev, Leonid, 276 Social Democrats (Finland), 81–83 socialism, evolution in Russia of, 44–45 Socialist International, 366 Socialist Unity Party of Germany, 310 social organizations, electoral politics and, 474–476 Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, 28 Sofiya supertanker, 309 Sofronov, Anatoly, 272 Sokolniki Park, Italian exhibition at, 103 solar power projects, 426 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 192–200, 218; Khrushchev and, 303; at Lenin Hills

676 Index conference, 253–254; Lenin Prize nomination for, 300, 427; prison camp experiences of, 219; Tvardovsky and, 208–209 Sorensen, Theodore, 167–168 Sorge, Richard, 516–519 sovereign power, role in Russia of, 39–41 Sovetskaya Kultura (Soviet Culture), 218 Sovetskaya Rossiya (Soviet Russia) newspaper, 144 Sovetskiy Soyuz (Soviet Union) magazine, 218, 281 Sovetsky Pisatel (Soviet Writer), 293–294 Soviet Artists Union, 228 Soviet Cultural Foundation, 302 Soviet-Finnish War (1940), 321 Soviet Union: China and, 178, 302, 389– 392; Cuban missile crisis and, 159–171; economic and political deterioration in, xiii; Finnish relations with, 80–83; history of border disputes in, 165 space program: Khrushchev’s policies for, 110, 112, 137, 165, 341, 423, 444–445; in post-Khrushchev era, 568–569 Spanish Communist Party, 172 Sperry, Gyroscope, 106 Spiridonov, Ivan, 104 Sputnik launching (1957), 165, 444–445 Stalin, Josef: agricultural development under, 78–80; artistic censorship under, 217–218; cadre secretaries under, 71; Chinese objections to denunciation of, 389; collectivization and deportation under, 477–478; homosexual persecution under, 223; Kapitsa and, 321–322; Khrushchev’s denunciation of, 56–64, 204; legacy of, xii; media censorship under, 30; monetary reforms under, 3; obedience demanded by, 64; paranoia of, 268; personality cult of, 35–37; personnel reassignments by, 10–11; Porik and, 518–519; Presidium restructuring by, 532–533; religion abolished under, 31; remains removed from Mausoleum, 59–64; socialist realist art under, 214; Sorge and, 516–517; third party program of, 44–45; vertical control of industry by, 47; Wasilewska and, 174–175, 278; writers and artists banned by, 191; Yevtushenko’s poem about, 194–200 Stalingrad, renaming of, 64 Stalino, 47, 64 Starant, Alfred, 106–113 Starkov, V. A., 553 Staros, Filipp (pseud.), 106–113 Starovsky, Vladimir, 6–7, 525 State Committee for Automation and Mechanization, 309 State Committee for Cinematography, 276, 292

State Committee for Construction, housing development and, 332, 336–337 State Committee for Coordination of Scientific Research, 148, 316, 454 State Committee for Science and Technology, 326 State Economic Council: economic reforms and, 46, 49–56, 138–155; elimination of, 147–148; power structure reorganization and, 156–157; state-farm bureaucracy, reforms of, 148–149 state institutions, economic reforms and role of, 52–56 state-owned property, economic impact of, 53–56 State Planning Committee, 45–56; BalticBlack Sea Canal project and, 84–85; chemical industry policies and, 330–332; economic reforms of 1962 and, 139–155; economic reforms of 1963 and, 407–410; grain harvest estimations, 376–377; power structure reorganization and, 156–157; province committee reorganization and, 153–155; regional economic councils and, 349–350; scientific research and, 326 State Publishing House for Political Literature, 302 Steinbeck, John, 420 Sterling Group, 434 Sternberg, Rudy (Lord), 434 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 159 Stoletov, Vsevolod, 324 Stolypin, Pyotr, reforms of, 76–77, 581 Straneo, Carlo Alberto, 103 strategic missile forces, post-Khrushchev expansion of, 574 Stravinsky, Igor, 179 Strelyany, Anatoly, 97–98, 462, 499–500, 558–559 Strumilin, Stanislav, 45–46 subway construction, economic reforms and, 11–12 succession, problematic nature of, in Russian history, 363–367 Sukarno, 531, 535 Sukhodrev, Viktor, 503, 505–508 Sulman, Rolf, 261 “Sumy initiative,” 100–101 Supreme Council on the National Economy, 349 Surkov, Aleksei, 294, 297 Suslov, Mikhail Andreyevich, 36, 48, 90; Artists Union congress and, 300; censorship of literature and, 201–202; Chinese policies and, 289–291, 391–392; conspiracy against Khrushchev and, 538; constitutional reforms and, 173–175; criticism of Khrushchev by, 408; Fellini film incident and, 291–293; Glazunov exhibit

Index controversy and, 438; Iliyech rivalry with, 211–214, 218–220, 289; Lenin Hills conference and, 249–256; Manège scandal and, 220–223, 226–248; mathematical economics initiatives and, 313; May Day celebrations and, 358; ouster of Khrushchev and, 302–306, 536, 548–549, 555, 557–558; Outpost of Ilyich film and, 262–268; political offensive of, 220–248, 256–261; Sverdlov Hall conference and, 269–287; traditionalist artists and, 214–215, 217–218; on workers’ pay rates, 483 Sverdlov, Yakov, 270 Sverdlov Hall Conference, political consequences of, 269–287 Sweden, Khrushchev’s visit to, 438–441 synthetic fiber production, expansion of, 425 Tabeyef, F., 567 Taganka Theater, 428 Tamm, Igor, 322, 448 Tanner, Väinö, 81 Taras Bulba (Lysenko), 223 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 102, 420 TASS (Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union), 28 Tchakovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 223 teaching salaries, reform of, 467–472 technological innovation: agricultural production and, 76–80; economic reforms and, 52; exhibition of 1963 and, 309–311; microelectronics development and, 104– 113; policy development for, 185–190 Tereshkova, Valentina, 405 term limits, Khrushchev’s proposals for, 64–68 terrorization, anti-crime measures as, 21–22 theater: Khrushchev’s attendance at, 217, 288; Soviet playwrights and, 277 thefts in post-Stalin era, measures against, 20–22 Thirteen Days (Kennedy), 167–168 Thompson, Llewellyn, 394 Thomson, Roy Herbert (Lord), 500–503, 505–506 three-field system. See grass-field rotation system Tiananmen Square massacre, 128–129 tidal electric power, 426 Timiryazef, Kliment, 75 Timiryazev Agricultural Academy, 75–76, 78, 525 Tito, Josip Broz, 90, 180–182, 359, 396–400 Titov, Vitaly, 156 Titov, Vladimir, 544 Togliatti, Palmiro, 520–521 Tolka (Zhutovsky), 233–234, 251 Tolstikov, Vladimir, 104, 108, 396, 538 Tolstoy, Aleksei, 321

677

Tolstoy, Leo, 193, 262 Tomsky, Nikolai, 211, 341 top-down power structure, decentralized market economy and, 8–19 “To the Sowers” (Nekrasov), 169 tourism in Soviet Union, 399–400, 588–591 traditionalist artists, politics and, 214–220 traffic policies, development and innovation of, 338–342 transportation systems, expansion proposals for, 425 Trapeznikov, Vadim Aleksandrovich, 485–487, 494, 570–571 Treasure Island (Stevenson), 159 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance of 1o48, 81 Tretyakovsky Art Gallery, development of, 342 Triangular Pear (Voznesensky), 259 Tronka (Gonchar), 427 Trotsky, Leon, 172 Troyanovsky, Oleg, 116–117 Tsaritsyn, renaming of, 64 Tselinograd, naming of, 17 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 341 Tsvetayeva, Marina, 321 TU-124 plane crash, 400–402 Tupolev, Andrei, 105, 108, 110, 269, 444 Turkey: Bulgaria and, 163; Cyprus and, 499–500 Tvardovsky, Aleksandr, 192–194, 216, 221; alcoholism of, 297; censorship of, 294–299; death of, 304; Ehrenburg memoirs censorship and, 294–295; at European Community of Writers, 293; Khrushchev and, 200–209, 218, 304; new national anthem proposal and, 419; at Sverdlov Hall conference, 269 Twentieth Party Congress (1956): artistic freedom and, 251; communist ideological reforms and, 45; criticism of Stalin at, 37, 57, 114, 477 Twenty-Second Congress (1961): artistic freedom and, 251; cadre secretary appointments, 73–74; Central Committee elections at, 69–71; constitutional reform proposals at, 173–175; denunciation of Stalin at, 57–64, 194, 477–478; economic council reorganization at, 86–90; ideological reforms of, 44–56; Kozlov and, 25–26; labor wage reforms at, 467–472; power struggles at, 355; Solzhenitsyn’s work and, 194–195, 200; term limits proposal at, 64–68 Twenty-Third Congress (1966): political reforms at, 561–562; term limits removed by, 68 Tyorkin in the Other World (Tvardovsky), 206–207, 295–299

678 Index U-2 incident, 401 Ukraine: agricultural and irrigation development in, 404; artists and writers in, 425; dust storms and drought in, 369–370; industrial expansion in, 425; political realignment in, 416–418; in postKhrushchev era, 561 Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, 309, 451–452 Ukrainian Central Committee, 11; reorganization of, 181–182 Ulbricht, Walter, 137, 176 Uldzhabayev, Tursun, 269 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 296 Union of Journalists, 28 United Kingdom, Soviet Union and, 434–435, 451–455 United States: agricultural cooperation with Soviet Unions, 348; agricultural specialization and professionalization in, 461–462; Aswan High Dam project and, 33; attempted poultry sales to Soviet Union, 378–379; Cuban missile crisis and, 159– 171; democracy in, 40–41; dust storms and drought in, 369–370; economic power of, 162–163; environmentalism in, 320–321; grain sales to Soviet Union, 374; Khrushchev’s relations with, 32–34; Khrushchev’s visit to, 65; Los Angeles riots in, 128; “Red scare” in, 106; Russian artists’ and writers’ visits to, 272; Soviet competition with, 189–190; Soviet growth predictions for, 49; space program in, 569 universal equality, Khrushchev’s economic reforms and principle of, 52–56 Universal Machine-1 (UM-1), 108 Uspensky, Gleb, 274 USSR Council of Ministers, 156–157 Ustinov, Dmitry, 35, 47, 105; chemical expansion policies and, 524–525; economic reforms and, 145–146, 471, 525, 527; electronics innovation and, 347–348; housing policies and, 527–530; industrial expansion and, 529; in post-Khrushchev era, 566; regional economic councils and, 349, 351–352, 359 U Thant, 480 Uzbekistan, agricultural development in, 74 Vaag, Leonid Aleksandrovich, 487, 490, 494, 569–570 Vannikov, Boris, 322 Varentsov, Sergei Sergeyevich, 356–357 Varga, Yevgeny, 45–46 Vasilevsky, Aleksandr Mikhailovich, 132 Vasilyev, Sergei, 272 Vasily Tyorkin (Tvardovsky), 202 Vasnetsov, Yuri, 247 Vechernyaya Moskva (Evening Moscow) newspaper, 325

vegetable farming, Khrushchev’s promotion of, 385–388, 419 Verkhny Ufolei, sculptures from, 11 Verne, Jules, 52 Vigorelli, Giancarlo, 296 Vilyams, Vasily, 75–76, 78–80 Vinogradarsky, Nikolai, 401–402 Virgin Lands (Kazakhstan): agricultural development in, 74–75, 77–80, 149–150, 186–190, 465–466, 503–508; conclusion of development program for, 386; crop failures in, 368–375; daily life in, 346; Khrushchev’s policies in, 17–18, 35–41, 52, 501–503; legacy of, 585–586; statistics in 1961 on, 87–90 visual arts, politics of 1962 and, 209–220 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Mayakovsky), 280 Voice of America, jamming in Russia of, 347–348 Voice of Azerbaijan, jamming in Russia of, 347 Voice of the Vatican, jamming in Russia of, 347–348 Voice of Tirana, jamming in Russia of, 347 Voice of Zion, jamming in Russia of, 347 Volga German Autonomous Republic, 590 Volgograd, renaming of, 64 Volkhonka district (Moscow), 103 Volkov, O., 488 Volovchenko, Ivan Platonovich, 328–330, 421, 525 Vorobyov Hills. See Lenin Hills conference Voronel, Aleksandr, 23, 152 Voronel, Nina, 23 Voronezh, agricultural development in, 13–14 Voronov, Gennady, 11, 362, 404, 464, 546–548 Voroshilov, Kliment, 405, 457 Voznesensky, Andrei, 224, 226, 420; Ehrenburg’s defense of, 295; at Lenin Hills conference, 257, 259; poetry of, 299–300, 304; prominence of, 289; publication of works by, 299–300, 480; at Sverdlov Hall conference, 269, 277–281 Vuchetich, Yevgeny, 264, 333–334 Vukmanović-Tempo, Svetozar, 359–360, 398 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 193 Warsaw Pact, 402–403; Soviet troop withdrawals and, 414 Washington, George, 40 Wasilewska, Wanda, 174, 269, 277–280; death of, 301 Wasilewski, Leon, 277 Welding Technologies Research Institute, 309, 319 Western Europe, Russian artists’ and writers’ visits to, 272 Western journalists: celebrity of Russian writers and artists and, 289; economic

Index reform coverage by, 484; at Sverdlov Hall conference, 271 West Germany: Soviet relations with, 81; Yugoslav workers in, 399–400 wheat, genetics research on, 442–443 Wilde, Oscar, 223 Williams, Robert, 75 wind power projects, 426 “winter war” of 1939-1940, 81 Witte, Sergei (Count), 77 working conditions, Khrushchev era reforms of, 585 World Bank, 433; economic statistics on Russia from, 582–583 World Council of Churches, Russian Orthodox Church membership in, 31 World of Arts group, 210 World War II, 210: geopolitics and, 165–171; Poklonnaya Gora memorial, 333; power restructuring following, 162; reforms in Russia after, 580; Soviet heroes of, 516–518 writers: activism in 1962 of, 191–200; banning of, 191; criticism in 1964 by, 419–420; Khrushchev’s relations with, 288–289, 299–306, 589; Silver Age of Russian culture and, 272; at Sverdlov Hall conference, 269–287; Western prominence of, 289 Writers Club (Dom Literatorov), 225 Writers Union, 22, 191, 214, 218–220, 284, 287, 427: Khrushchev’s discussion of, 288–289 Yaguzhinsky, Pavel, 156–157 Yakir, Iona, disappearance of, 57 Yangel, Mikhail Kuzmich, 110, 112, 136, 568 Yefremov, Leonid Nikolayevich, 16, 227–228, 463, 548 Yegorychev, Nikolai, 337, 339, 396, 428–432, 538, 558 Yeltsin, Boris, 196, 575 Yelyutin, Vyasheslav, 176–180, 324, 538 Yesenin-Voplin, Aleksandr, 251, 259 Yeshov, Nikolai, 71–72 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 30; denunciation of, 420; Ehrenburg’s defense of, 295; execution of father, 219; Ideological Commission testimony, 257–259; Khrushchev and,

679

260–261, 289, 303; Lenin Hills conference and, 255–256; poetry readings by, 223, 259; publication of poetry by, 191–200, 204, 215, 218, 299; residence in US, 304; at Sverdlov Hall conference, 269, 287; Western travels of, 273, 287 Yezhevsky, Aleksandr, 421 Young Communist League, Central Committee of, 314 Young Pioneers, 113 Yugoslavia: border opening in, 399–400; Khrushchev’s 1963 trip to, 396–398; Soviet Union and, 180–182, 357–360; workers’ councils in, 28 Yuzovka, 64 Zababakhin, Yevgeny, 110 Zahir Shah, Mohammed, 136–137 Zaitsev, I., 482–483 Zakharchenko, Vasily, 34, 437 Zakharov, Nikolai, 58, 61–63, 120, 490 Zakharov, S. N., 487 Zakshevsky, Ye., 571 Zamyatin, Leonid, 516, 531 Zastava Ilyicha (film). See Outpost of Ilyich (film) Zasyadko, Aleksandr, 46–47, 49–51, 115; alcohol problems of, 146–147; economic reforms and, 138–155, 487; mathematical economics and, 314; regional economic councils and, 349–350 Zelenin, Ilya Yevgenyevich, 370–371, 422, 477–478, 587 Zelenograd, microtechnology development in, 109 Zhdanov, Andrei, 45, 221, 259 Zhebrak, Anton Romanovich, 447 Zhelezngorsk, 135–137 Zhemchuzhina, Polina, 196 Zhou Enlai, 392 Zhukov, Georgy, 413, 532 Zhutovsky, Boris, 226, 233–235, 246–247; celebrity status of, 289; Khrushchev and, 303; at Sverdlov Hall conference, 270 Zinoviev, Grigory, 201 Znanaie (Knowledge) educational association, 28 Zolotukhin, Grigory Sergeyevich, 15 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 191

About the Book

A full reckoning of Nikita Khrushchev’s accomplishments and failures

cannot be complete without looking beyond his foreign policy initiatives to assess his efforts to introduce domestic policy reforms in the Soviet Union. Sergei Khrushchev tells the full story of those efforts during the years immediately before his father’s ouster—and of the intrigues and struggles for power that went along with them. In many ways, as his son shows, the premier’s reforms anticipated those that Deng Xiaoping successfully pursued later in China. But within only a few short years after Nikita Khrushchev was forced to retire, they had been largely abandoned. Why that happened is one of the questions that Sergei Khrushchev seeks to answer in this book, as he draws on archival records, memoirs, and his own personal recollections to provide a comprehensive account of the 1961– 1964 period. Sergei Khrushchev was senior fellow in international studies at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies from 1991 to 2012. He is author of Khrushchev on Khrushchev and Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower and editor of the three-volume Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev.

680