January 6, 1958

Nikita Khrushchev: Up From the Plenum

The symbols of 1957 were two pale, clear streaks of light that slashed across the world's night skies and a Vanguard rocket toppling into a roiling mass of flame on a Florida beach.

With the Sputniks, Russia took man into a new era of space, and with its advances in the art of missilery, posed the U.S. with the most dramatic military threat it had ever faced. And with the Vanguard's witlessly ballyhooed crash at Cape Canaveral went the U.S.'s long-held tenet that anything Communism's driven men could do, free men could do better. Whatever the future might bring, in 1957 the U.S. had been challenged and bested in the very area of technological achievement that had made it the world's greatest power.

The shock wave from that reversal ran, perceptibly and profoundly, through the world's watching millions, disturbing the U.S.'s friends, cheering its enemies, swaying the uncommitted, as eyes in African jungles and Asian market places, in European town squares and American suburbs strained skyward for a glimpse of Russia's tiny moons. In 1957, under the orbits of a horned sphere and a half-ton tomb for dead dog, the world's balance of power lurched and swung toward the free world's enemies.

On any score, 1957 was a year of retreat and disarray for the West. For Britain and France, the U.S. allies who fill out the world's Big Four, the year's theme was a recessional. Sir Anthony Eden, physically sick and spiritually drained after the fiasco at Suez, resigned as Prime Minister. His successor put out a White Paper proclaiming that Britannia was done with ruling the waves, was thinning out the proud red line of far-flung posts on which the sun never set, and withdrawing to a more realistic stance as a tidier, tighter nuclear power. Guy Mollet, the other architect of the Suez failure, fell from power in his turn, but France fought out its frustrations in Algeria, where 39,931 perished in the year's most bitter war.

Ritual & Blunder. Moving to order the political disorder left in the Middle Eastern land asking for help against Communist attack. The President's pledge and the Sixth Fleet's presence gave Jordan's spunky young King Hussein heart to eject ministers talking of Soviet alliance and to line his country up in the ranks of the West. But when the Soviets countered with a coup that put pro-Communists on top of Syria's army, the U.S. blundered into trouble, airlifting arms to neighboring Jordan with such zealous haste that even its Arab friends felt obliged to pledge ritually their support to the Syrians in the name of Arab unity. At home, the big U.S. news of 1957 was the unhappy sight of paratroopers with bayonets, called out reluctantly by President Eisenhower to enforce a federal court order admitting Negro pupils to Little Rock's Central High School over the defiance of Arkansas' Governor Orval Faubus.

Unquestionably, in the deadly give and take of the cold war, the high score for the year belongs to Russia. And unquestionably, the Man of the Year was Russia's stubby and bald, garrulous and brilliant ruler: Nikita Khrushchev.

So Far So Fast. In any year, Khrushchev was as extraordinary a dictator as the world has ever seen. Not since Alexander the Great had mankind seen a despot so willingly, so frequently, and so publicly drunk. Not since Adolf Hitler had the world known a braggart so arrogantly able to make good his own boasts. In 1957 Nikita Khrushchev did more than oversee the launching of man's first moons. He made himself undisputed and single master of Russia. Few men had traveled so far so fast.

As 1957 opened, Khrushchev and his policies were in jeopardy. His denunciation of Stalin and his proclaimed "separate roads to socialism" had resulted in rebellion in Hungary, defiance in Poland and denunciation by the world. The restless spirit of dissent seethed in Rumania, in East Germany, even in docile Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. In France and Italy, in every Western country, the Communist parties were in turmoil; everywhere veteran comrades were resigning in outrage over his brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolt. At the December 1956 Plenum of the Communist Party Central Committee in Moscow, he was conspicuously not one of the speakers.

In 1957's twelve months, Nikita Khrushchev, peasant's son and cornfield commissar scorned by the party's veteran intellectuals, disposed all his serious rivals--at least for the time. For good measure, he turned on the Soviet Union's No.I soldier and war hero, Marshall Georgy Zhukov, dismissed him with an airy promise of "some job for which he is experienced and qualified." He reorganized Soviet industry, laid down the law to Soviet intellectuals, stemmed the tide of desertions from the Western Communist parties, soothed the incipient rebellion in the satellites, and got from China's Mao Tse-tung a showpiece pledge of allegiance.

Internationally, he achieved what the Czars had long desired: a foothold for Russia--however uncertain it might be--in the Middle East. He proved the foothold's reality by a war scare that set the world's nerves on edge, creating it with one brash rocket-rattling threat against Turkey, then dispelling it with one cocktail-party crack as soon as his pro-Communists had consolidated their control of Syria. More than any other man, Nikita Khrushchev dominated 1957's news and left his mark--for good or evil--on history.

Pigs & Sandhogs. Few would have picked Khrushchev as Joseph Stalin's heir. This was the muzhik from Kalinovka whom Stalin commanded to dance the gopak, the hayseed at whom Beria sneered years ago as "our beloved chicken statesman," "our potato politician." When Stalin put Nikita in charge of the Moscow party back in the '30s, Khrushchev used to don navies' rough clothes, crawl down to visit the sandhogs tunneling out the new subway, take a hand with a pneumatic drill, and talk with the lads in the unprintable language for which, even in the Kremlin, he is famous. The palace courtiers dubbed him "Comrade Lavatory Lover" because Nikita not only insisted on equipping the Moscow metro with the world's best subway toilets, but often broke in rudely on conference speakers: "All right, all right, comrade, you have achieved this and that, but what about lavatories in your factory? How many lavatories? What is their cultural state?"

Sent by Stalin to the Ukraine, Khrushchev skipped theories and philosophies, talked pigs and potatoes with peasants and workers. "Comrades!" he cried. "Socialism means first of all full stomachs, felt boots and sheepskin jackets." In those down-on- the-farm days, Khrushchev opposed building a rocket-research center near Dnepropetrovsk. "Rockets are the weapons of imperialist aggressors, not the weapons of the peace-loving U.S.S.R.," he told a visiting Kremlin bureaucrat.

Fish in Water. Nikita Khrushchev was not a student of Marxist theory. As peasant and sometime miner, he did not, finish elementary school, did not begin serious reading until he entered an adult training class at the age of 27. Unlike Malenkov or Molotov, doctrinaire intellectual theoreticians, Khrushchev learned his Communism not out of a book but by contact. Alone among Stalin's lieutenants, he lived and spoke as a man who moves in Communism as a fish in water, oblivious of dialectical debate or moral pang. Drunk or sober, he never seemed to worry about what he said, who was listening, how it might diverge from the current line. A man in motion, he had the air of a man who never looked nervously back over his shoulder in his life.

Khrushchev recognized what his rivals did not. By terror and personality, Stalin had built Russia into a technological and military power. But at Stalin's death, the technocrats were coming to political maturity. A man encouraged to think at his job could not be forbidden to think the moment he stepped outside the laboratory. The peasants, filled with new chauvinistic pride after Russia's armies had defeated Hitler, would be demanding butter and neckties. Uninterested in fomenting world revolution, they wanted a better life at home. Coldly and pragmatically, Khrushchev recognized that in post-Stalin Russia, terror on the Stalin scale would not produce results.

The Fable. Stalin's successors installed the potato politician in the tyrant's key job as First Party Secretary because they never supposed such a clodhopper could fill such shoes. But Khrushchev, as ruthless as any of Stalin's other minions (he killed 3,000 party men in the Ukraine duringWorld War II) used the job to build a party machine in his own image, replaced so many regional and local secretaries that he came to the crucial 20th Party Congress in February 1956 with some 500 delegates in his pocket; the Central Committee that the delegates chose became the instrument with which he destroyed his rivals in 1957. In a burst of typical frankness, Khrushchev told Western reporters a fable:

"Once upon a time," said Nikita, "there were three men in a prison. They were a Social Democrat, an anarchist and a humble little Jew--a half-educated little fellow named Pinya. They decided to elect a cell leader who would watch over distribution of food, tea and tobacco. The anarchist, a big, burly fellow, was against such a lawful process as electing authority. To show his contempt for law and order, he proposed that insignificant little Pinya be elected. They elected Pinya. Things went well, and they decided to escape. The Social Democrat had a good intellect; he made the plan to tunnel. The brawny anarchist did the digging. But they realized that the man to go first through the tunnel would be shot at by the guard. They all turned to the big, brave anarchist, but he was afraid to go. Suddenly, poor little Pinya drew himself up and said: `Comrades, you elected me by democratic process as your leader, therefore I will go first.'

"Little Pinya, that's me.

"No matter how humble a man's beginning," he added, explaining his own fable, "he achieves the stature of the office to which he is elected."

Counter-Revolution. After the glum December Plenum, Nikita set to work. Like the practical man he is, he recognized that his liberalization had gone too far. In November 1956, when Hungary was fighting for its freedom, Nikita had lurched up to U.S. Ambassador Charles Bohlen at a Moscow party and said: "I want to talk to you about Suez." "I want to talk to you about Hungary," replied Bohlen. "What are you going to do about it?" Khrushchev exploded. Pumping his fist in a series of short uppercuts, he shouted: "We will put in more troops--and more troops--and more troops--and more troops--until we have finished them."

To patch the dike of Communist unity, he charged off to Prague, to East Berlin, to Bucharest, received one satellite delegation after another in the Kremlin. He offered loans here, concessions there. "You like workers' councils? Take them. We won't criticize you," he said in a speech to the Czechs.

Cracking down on the critics who had risen in the thaw after his own attacks on Stalin, he persuaded Gomulka to stifle the young bloods who had stirred Poland. "We are all Stalinists," he announced. "God grant that every Communist be able to fight as Stalin fought." ("We say the name of God," explains Khrushchev, "but that is only a habit. We are atheists.") To Westerners who predicted that his de-Stalinization program could be used to topple the Soviet empire, he shouted: "You will no more succeed at this than you will succeed in seeing your ear without a mirror."

But in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, he told the hard- lining bosses of those satrapies that they no longer had anything to fear from the Kremlin. "As the saying goes," he told the Czechs, "trust in God and look out for yourself. When you walk among dogs, don't forget to carry a stick. After all, that is what a hound has teeth for, to bite when he feels like it."

Bark on the Wind. The December Plenum had conservatively cut back Khrushchev's expansive plans for agriculture and industry. Nikita's reply was to organize some 514,000 "discussion" meetings across the country, in which his loyal party workers exhorted the comrades to back Nikita's dreams of Russia's future. Nikita himself launched an attack on Moscow's desk-bound administrators. "Bureaucrats sprout like mushrooms after a rainfall," cried Nikita. In May the Supreme Soviet voted to hand over industrial control to Khrushchev by scattering Moscow's managerial elite among 105 new economic regional councils--all tightly supervised by his regional party henchmen.

As the new class of government managers and engineers was blown from desks and dachas to the four corners of the Siberian steppes. Khrushchev roared of for his old corn-belt stamping grounds to deal with Soviet Russia's biggest worry the farm problem.

"You must plant potatoes in square clusters. You must grow cabbage and as my grandmother did," he lecture cloth-capped peasants. He admitted that his plans for planting corn ("sausage on the stalk") had not panned out so well everywhere. "If you cannot catch the bird of paradise," he advised, "better take a wet hen." Bidding for the farm vote, he promised the collectivists lower taxes and an end to compulsory delivery to the state from their private plots, then crowed "Within the next few years, we shall catch up with the U.S. in per-capita production of meat, milk and butter."

The West would call him crazy, said Nikita. His answer was to quote a Russian proverb: "The dog barks and the wind carries the sound away." Barked Nikita: "This program is stronger than the H- bomb. If we catch up with the U.S., we will have hit the pillars of capitalism with the most powerful torpedo yet."

The Old Cell Game. Khrushchev's Presidium rivals thought Khrushchev was overdoing it. They had thought so ever since he rose in the Kremlin's Great Hall at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 to deliver his weeping, three-hour indictment of Stalin as a "murderer" and "maniac." They sprang their showdown last June, and it was a close thing. The majority present voted to deny Khrushchev the chair, and Bulganin took over. Did the Old Guard think that because they had destroyed Stalin's police power, they could vote Khrushchev freely out of his job as they had voted Malenkov out before him? Khrushchev fought back, and the old commissars learned that the new party boss swung a new kind of political power. According to an East German radio report. Marshal Zhukov sent out his aircraft to fetch Khrushchev's Central Committee henchmen to Moscow. In the final vote all joined to censure the "antiparty group" except Molotov, who stubbornly abstained. Molotov, the last living collaborator of Lenin: Kaganovich, the first sponsor of Nikita's career; Malenkov, Stalin's designated successor--all were shipped off to
obscure posts in remote areas. The dictator jounced off to visit the Czechs. In Slovakia, he airily dismissed the anti-party group: "As they say, a scabby sheep got into a good flock. We took the sheep by the tail and chucked it out."

Zhukov was next. The marshal had emerged from the June fight with more power than ever, and he was going around telling Khrushchev's propaganda boys not to confuse his army's disciplined efficiency with their lectures about the party's supremacy. It was an awkward time for Khrushchev to strike; by then the marshal was touring Yugoslavia as Tito's honored guest, and the preparations for celebrating the Soviet's 20th anniversary were well under way in Moscow. But Khrushchev struck. His party machine whirred soundlessly. Within a week after Zhukov's return to Moscow, the Soviet Union's top soldier and war hero made an abject confession of "errors," and Khrushchev told foreign reporters with boozy insouciance: "In life, one cell must die and another take its place. But life goes on. Marshal Zhukov did not turn out well as a political figure, but he was a good marshal and a good soldier." Just then, Sputnik II shot into space, and its roar drowned out the hubbub over Zhukov's fall.

In the Middle East Nikita Khrushchev posed as an altruist. Advancing $563 million in arms and economic aid to the Arab nationalists of Syria and Egypt, he cried: "Is Nasser a Communist? Certainly not. But nevertheless we support Nasser. We have only one objective, that the peoples be freed from colonial dependence." Last week Pravada offered the pro-Western Arab states of Lebanon. Saudi Arabia and Iraq "ready Soviet Union cooperation in economic development," if they too would accept "the same [i.e., neutralist] principles" as Syria and Egypt.

In the eyes of those who go by appearances, Nikita changed the face of Russia. Instead of the remote, terrifying, frozen face of Stalin, he presented the jouncy, faintly ridiculous figure of the cartoonists' politician: he kissed babies, was smeared with villagers' vermilion paste on a visit with Nehru, rummaged among cornstalks as though he were running for office. In his trips abroad, he was as folksy as an overweight Will Rogers, carefully avoided any association with the skulking, oldtime conspiratorial local Communists, managed to suggest that Communist parties are as respectable as Christian Democrats or Tories. After de-Stalinization. Italy's Communist party lost 250,000 members and its inner discipline. Last week three of five party members attended their cell meetings-reportedly the highest proportion since 1946.

Nikita's success was ratified at the ceremonies celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Soviet revolution in Moscow last November. China's Mao was so convinced of the rightness of Khrushchev's policy reversal that he led the way for the adoption of Khrushchev's manifesto. Mao formally acknowledged the Soviet party's "leading role among the Communist and workers' parties," added: "China does not even have a quarter of a Sputnik and the Soviet Union has two."

On the Move. At home, Khrushchev nominated himself as spokesman of the New Class in the Soviet Union. He was careful to disassociate himself from Stalin's terror, and the New Class was grateful. Khrushchev himself told British Laborite Aneurin Bevan the story of how it had been before. Presidium members, said Khrushchev, drew up a plan to decentralize the economy after World War II, and Voznesensky, the chief economic planner, took it to Stalin. "Voznesensky came back," said Khrushchev, "and told them Stalin had denounced him as a traitor to socialism. This made them angry because Voznesensky had merely done what they had told him to do. They went to Stalin next day and told him this: that it was their collective plan, not Voznesensky's; that he had been unfair to Voznesensky and ought to apologize to him. `I can't,' said Stalin. `He was shot this morning.'"

Having blandly appropriated the defeated Malenkov's consumer- goods program, he promised 250 branches of Moscow's huge GUM Department Store in the capital's outskirts and is building 20 blocks of apartment buildings to give some of the elite's rising expectations a littlehouseroom. Said one proud engineer: "It is time for others to think of us as other than backward. We are moving, and Khrushchev is helping us move."

In 1957 the Russians opened on the Volga the world's largest hydroelectric station, developed west of the Urals the world's biggest new oilfield, built at Dubna, outside Moscow, the world's largest synchrocyclotron (particles accelerator). In 1957 Russia graduated three times as many engineers as the U.S. and published five times as many book titles. In the judgment of their U.S. peers, Russian scientists in 1957 excelled in such fields as astrophysics, very high energy studies, cosmic-ray research and certain branches of higher mathematics, and ran close to U.S. performance in oceanography, cryogenics and geology. The Russians moved up in air defense, long-range bomber capacity, and in reorganizing their traditionally massive ground forces into small, fast-moving units capable of using tactical atomic weapons. Says General Maxwell Taylor: "The equipment display in the 7th of November Moscow parade included numerous such weapons, one at least a tactical army missile of greater range than any presently operating in the U.S. Army."

A Little White Ball. Nikita has made the most of his shiny new rockets, in hand or in prospect. Just before the NATO summit meeting, Russia showered the U.S.'s allies with letter threatening destruction if they accepted U.S. missiles. "We do not want to continue the arms race," Nikita told visiting U.S. Publisher William Randolph Hearst Jr. "We have already won over you. Your cities and bases could be stricken from the face of the earth. Your overseas bases are yours, but they are surrounded by the peoples of those countries. You will see--one day they will awaken from their slumber and recognize the folly of depending on NATO and such alliances for their protection. "But he ordered his diplomats to break off disarmament talks at the U.N. and rejected the new overtures made by the NATO leaders at the Paris meeting.

He has exploited the Sputniks at home and abroad. In one Moscow theater, the lights go down after each performance, and the audience cheers as a little white-lighted ball orbits over it from the ceiling. "People of the whole world are pointing to the satellite and saying that the U.S. has been beaten," he crowed at an East German embassy reception, and the lesson has not been lost on the undeveloped countries. "If the Russians are so oppressed, how could Russian talent be so creative?" asked a Ghanaian schoolmaster.

Mixed Gains. 1957's triumphs may not be permanent for Nikita Khrushchev. In the Middle East, Russia's callous manipulation of Syria for its own ends alarmed as many Arabs as it impressed. In the satellites, Poland's army is still restive. At home, the virgin lands Khrushchev plowed for grain are Russia's dust bowl; in 1957 they yielded a much lower harvest than the year before. At the same time that he promised a lot more housing and clothing, he boosted the goals of Communism's sacred heavy industry yet higher; by September he was forced to postpone the goals by scrapping the five-year plan for a seven-year plan ending in 1965. His foreign economic program is not going down well with Soviet citizens, who growl like any taxpayers at shelling out for others. The stubby little peasant worries lest the scientific and technological elite become an independent power force. He has slashed the high salaries some scientists have been getting. The party must reign supreme in the laboratory, too.

The Sputniks he sent whirling into outer space aroused the U.S. giant to its danger as nothing else could have. President Eisenhower, throwing off the effects of a slight stroke, risked health and leadership to journey to Paris and rally NATO to new heart. The U.S.'s European allies brushed aside Russia's threatening letters, joined with the U.S. to face in new unity the psychological pressures built up by the Soviet's scientific breakthrough.

At 63 Nikita himself does not yet have absolute power, is still best described as chairman of the gang. And to control such a gang, as Nikita well knows, takes far more political skill than Stalin ever required. Khrushchev's Russia needs its thinking men--its scientists and its technicians--and Khrushchev must allow them to think. They demand respect. They can do without Khrushchev, but Khrushchev cannot do without them. Within the party there may be younger men who will overtake him when he slows or stumbles. But in 1957, Nikita Khrushchev outran, outfoxed, outbragged, outworked and outdrank them all.