The Red Flag: A History of Communism (63 page)

It was no surprise that Khrushchev should have spent so much time worrying about
Not by Bread Alone
. It was an extraordinarily popular novel: ‘Everywhere, in the subway, in the streetcars, in the trolley-buses – young people, adults, and seniors’ were reading it. Mounted police, fearful of unrest, patrolled meetings organized by readers to discuss it. Journals were flooded with letters calling for a purge of the targets of the book – the bureaucrats. Some used language strongly reminiscent of the 1937 Terror. A bricklayer from Tashkent wrote that the novel showed the need for struggle against ‘hidden enemies, the survivals of capitalism in the people’s and our own mind’.
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It is unsurprising that Khrushchev and his advisers found the novel so difficult to categorize, for it was a
roman à thèse
(and rather a crude one at that) which understood and sympathized with Khrushchev’s almost Romantic ideas, but also explained why it would always fail. The novel is the story of Lopatkin, an idealistic young physics teacher of the late 1940s. He designs a machine for the centrifugal casting of drainpipes, but although the machine is excellent, he is thwarted at every turn by Stalinist bureaucrats. Chief villain is the ambitious careerist Drozdov. Drozdov is a typical Stalinist of the post-Stalin imagination. He is socially aspirant and a lover of luxury who refuses to associate with ordinary people. He is also a philistine technocrat, whose bed-time reading includes Stalin’s very un-idealistic chapter on dialectical materialism in his
Short Course
of party history. Drozdov describes his philosophy thus: ‘I belong to the producers of material values. The main spiritual value of our time is the ability to work well, to create the greatest possible quantity of necessary things… The more I strengthen the [economic] base [of society], the firmer
our state will be.’
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For Lopatkin, this is an extreme form of ‘vulgar Marxism’. Men need ideals; they cannot live ‘by bread alone’. Lopatkin, though, is in a small minority: cynical bureaucrats hound him and steal his ideas, and eventually succeed in having him banished to a prison camp. Whilst he is there, his friend Professor Galitskii constructs his machine and shows that it works, and when he is released, he is rehabilitated and given a prestigious job. But the corrupt circle of bureaucrats – a ‘hidden empire’, as Dudintsev calls it – remains in power, as materialistic and cynical as ever. They accuse Lopatkin of being a selfish individualist. Now he is a success, why doesn’t he reenter the ‘Soviet collective’ of good ol’ boys, and buy himself a car and a
dacha
?
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The novel ends with Lopatkin leaving industry to enter politics, vowing to fight the bureaucrats.

Not by Bread Alone
was typical of the novels of its time. It condemned the callous technocracy it saw as typical of late Stalinism, and called for a new Romantic Marxism of creativity, feeling and democracy. This was also the message of Ilya Ehrenburg’s
The Thaw
of 1954, whose title came to define the whole period. The theme chimed with Khrushchev’s view that in everybody lay an innate creativity. If only officials encouraged it to flourish, economic miracles would ensue. In many ways, of course, this Romantic message was close to Stalin’s campaigns against bureaucracy in the late 1920s. But Dudintsev, like Khrushchev, refused to return to the old class-struggle rhetoric of the 1930s. As in the past, the villains were the bureaucrats, but the hero was now an educated person, not a horny-handed worker. Even so, the novel’s overall message was deeply disturbing for Khrushchev. Dudintsev was implying that the elite could not be reformed. The system would be saved by
individual
creativity; the Soviet ‘collective’ had been corrupted by greed and selfishness.

It turned out that Dudintsev’s pessimism was more realistic than Khrushchev’s utopianism. Khrushchev hoped to revive the idealistic campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s, stripping them of class conflict and workerist exclusivity whilst purging them of the old Stalinist austerity. But he and his allies found themselves confronting a bureaucracy intent on preserving its power; a population more interested in bread than Marxist enthusiasm; and a disaffected intelligentsia, often idealistic but slowly losing its faith in the virtues of the collective spirit.

Khrushchev outlined his new vision of Communism in a long speech
at the twenty-second party congress in 1961. Like Tito, he was appealing to a radical Marxism with some elements of Romantic utopianism, and it is notable that editions of the early Romantic Marx were now appearing in Russian for the first time. For Khrushchev, Lenin and Stalin had, in effect, postponed Communism to the distant future. ‘Socialism’, with its inequalities of income, its use of money to incentivize people to work, and its all-powerful state, would continue for some time. But Khrushchev was impatient, and believed the Soviet people had waited long enough. In 1959 he set up a commission to look into how the USSR might speed up the journey to Communism. It came up with a new party programme, which predicted that the party would build Communism ‘in the main’ by 1980. Khrushchev had hoped that the programme could promise all of Marx’s desiderata, the withering away of the state included. But wiser heads prevailed, and all talk of withering was removed. ‘Communism’ in the 1961 USSR denoted a combination of collectivism, a society in which work would become ‘genuine creativity’, and consumption (a rather loose translation of Marx’s material ‘abundance’). Even so, this was a far cry from the Romantic thinking of the 1840s. Society would be disciplined, but ‘that discipline will depend not on any coercive means, but on fostering a feeling of duty to fulfil one’s obligations’.
⁵⁶
This would transpire within the next twenty years, but Khrushchev insisted that the time was ripe for the end of repression immediately. Indeed, the ‘class struggle’ was formally ended. The ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, founded by Lenin, was abolished. The USSR now included all classes, and was described as an ‘All-People’s State’; one class, the proletariat, and its vanguard, the party, no longer lorded it over the others.

How, though, could Khrushchev reconcile the dream of creative work and the promise of outpacing Western living standards? Marx’s Communism did indeed promise material abundance: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’ But the principles of Western consumerism had more to do with desires than need. Also, Western consumer culture – with its focus on the home, the nuclear family and the individual – was deeply corrosive of Communist collectivism. The Czech Zdeněk Mlynář understood how dangerous Khrushchev’s new consumerist goal was for the Communist system:

The scale of the task confronting Khrushchev became evident in the dramatic ‘kitchen debate’ between Khrushchev and US Vice-President Richard Nixon in 1959. As part of Khrushchev’s new ‘peaceful competition’ between ideologies, the Americans were allowed to stage an exhibition in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, which included a model six-room ranch house, its kitchen packed with the latest appliances. The two leaders, equally brittle and belligerent, found themselves confronting one another. Khrushchev was rattled when told that a typical American steelworker could buy this $14,000 house. In a reply that convinced no one he blustered: ‘You think the Russians are dumbfounded by this exhibition. But the fact is that nearly all newly-built Russian houses have this equipment. You need dollars in the United States to get this house, but here all you need is to be born a citizen.’
⁵⁸

Khrushchev did what he could to make the boast come true. The most visible signs of change were the thousands of new low-rise apartment buildings in the towns. They were small and cheaply built – they soon acquired the nickname ‘
khrushchoby
’, merging ‘Khrushchev’ with the word
trushchoby
(‘slums’). But this was an enormous advance on Stalinist housing policy, which had poured resources into a few high-prestige skyscrapers, leaving ordinary people to live in cramped communal apartments, sharing kitchens and bathrooms. Khrushchev’s goal was to give every family (admittedly often multi-generational) its own apartment. Yet he was insistent that greater consumption should not engender petty-bourgeois individualism. The authorities encouraged public dining rooms, neighbourhood committees, apartment-block wall newspapers and ‘open-door days’, when families would invite anybody from the building to drop in and engage in wholesome sociability. Sewing and knitting were discouraged as dangerously individualistic activities.
⁵⁹

The modernist buildings themselves were an implicit attack on old
High Stalinism. The USSR now endorsed a version of the modernism of the 1920s and 1930s – the high point of international Communism. It was engaged in an ideological competition with the West, and needed to present a more modern and cosmopolitan image.
⁶⁰
The fussy, elaborate style of late Stalinism was regarded as ‘petty-bourgeois’, philistine kitsch – the type of art liked by the crass Drozdov and his philistine chums. Officials even launched campaigns to persuade ordinary Soviet people to throw out their sets of miniature carved white elephants – an ornament as popular amongst Soviet households as the china flying ducks that populated Western living rooms in the 1960s.
⁶¹

The greatest symbol of the modernity of the Communist project, however, lay not in the boxy apartments that clustered around the metropolises of Eastern Europe, but in the sputnik satellite floating in the vastness of outer space. The Soviet space project had its origins in early scientific utopianism, and especially in the work of the pioneering theorist of space travel Konstantin Tsiolkovskii and his Society for Studies of Interplanetary Travel founded in 1924. In the 1930s Marshal Tukhachevskii championed the cause of rocket science. But with his disgrace in 1937, many of his scientist protégés were imprisoned and some even executed. In the early 1940s the baton of the space project passed to Malenkov, and the scientists – including several previously arrested as ‘enemies of the people’ – were now recruited for the atomic missile project. By the 1950s the entire programme, which had benefited enormously from hardware and expertise developed by the Nazis, had come under the protection of Khrushchev, who hoped to transform the Soviet armed forces and end its reliance on soldiers and tanks. The world became aware of the first spectacular success of the Soviet rocket programme when, on 4 October 1957, radios broadcast the beeps from the first sputnik artificial satellite. More triumphs were to follow: the first journey into space by an animal (a dog – ‘Laika’) and then, most impressively, the first human space journey by the pilot Iurii Gagarin in April 1961.

Khrushchev marked Gagarin’s mission with the most lavish public celebrations since 1945 and could not hold back his tears at the ceremony. For him, the success of Gagarin’s ‘Vostok-1’ (‘East-1’) rocket was proof that the USSR had become a modern country. The Americans were rattled. The Democratic Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, a militant Cold Warrior, declared that the sputnik launch was a ‘devastating blow’
to American power and called on President Eisenhower to announce a ‘week of shame and danger’. Convinced that there was a huge ‘manpower gap’ between Soviet and American scientists, Jackson and his allies persuaded a tight-fisted president to sign the National Defense Education Act into law. Federal spending on education doubled and included massive funds for science and the study of the Communist and developing world – laying the foundations for American pre-eminence in higher education and advanced research.

The space programme might have planted in the minds of its enemies the idea of the USSR as a land of enlightened, rational citizens, but the transformation of image into reality proved a far greater challenge. After a period of relative tolerance during wartime and the late Stalinist period, Khrushchev returned to the atheism of the 1920s and 1930s, closing churches and introducing new courses on ‘scientific atheism’ into universities. Party propagandists, in their efforts to spread atheism, declared the Gagarin journey proof-positive of God’s non-existence.

The Soviet Union, then, had spectacularly reclaimed its earlier status as the acme of modernity after the ‘dark ages’ of post-war obscurantism. But how was modernization – of both defence and living standards – to be paid for? Khrushchev’s solution lay in his new, more inclusive and non-violent form of mobilization. He was convinced that would achieve much more than either Stalin’s bullying or capitalism’s incentives. He relaxed the old disciplinarian regime in factories, and workers were given more freedoms in the hope they would work harder. He was also determined to shake up complacent officialdom. But this emphasis on inclusivity and participation did not amount to the end of the privileged position of the Communist Party. Indeed, he expected the party to take a leading role in mobilizing the masses. One of his first initiatives was to scrap the industrial ministries – the home of the arrogant Drozdovs as he saw it – and give power to local party bosses through new regional economic councils. Khrushchev expected that party people, as ideological enthusiasts, would be much better able to enthuse the masses than the staid state bureaucrats. The old 1930s campaign style was back. Party officials, desperate for promotion, made impractical promises to achieve economic miracles. Even the disgraced Lysenko returned, as Khrushchev believed his promises to improve wheat output.