Sergo Anastasovich Mikoyan, Ph.D, is a specialist in Latin American history, and the son of Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan (1895-1978), a Soviet leader with particularly good political skills, having served Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. In 1956, Sergo Mikoyan was a graduate student at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations (MGIMO); his father Anastas was then first deputy prime minister. Russian Life contributing editor Tamara Eidelman interviewed Mikoyan in November about the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, which took place in February 1956, and where Khrushchev delivered his now famous “Secret Speech,” exposing the Stalinist Terror and Cult of Personality.
Did you discuss political questions at home?
After Stalin’s death, yes. Before Stalin’s death, we knew that we were being bugged and did not have unnecessary conversations. If we had to discuss something, we talked outside. [After Stalin’s death] they were probably bugging our apartment as well, and even after my father’s death, but I no longer paid any attention to it.
Did you sense the coming changes before the 20th Congress?
I knew what was happening. I knew the two people who made a huge contribution to Khrushchev’s decision to prepare and read the report at the Congress. Unfortunately, historians know almost nothing about these two people: Alexei Vladimirovich Snegov and Olga Grigorevna Shatunovskaya.
Snegov had been a member of the party since 1917, and in his youth was an organizer alongside [Vyacheslav] Molotov’s wife and even knew her before Molotov did. Then he was in party work, but in 1937 was working in my father’s apparatus and ended up in prison. In 1938, after [Lavrenty] Beria took the post of Narkom at the NKVD, a small number of people were let out of prison, Snegov among them. He came to my father and explained everything that had happened. My father recommended that he go to Sochi and check into a sanatorium and not come back [to Moscow] for as long as possible. He promised to inform Snegov when it would be safe to return, since he understood that Snegov’s release might end up being temporary. But Snegov, a confirmed Bolshevik, did something rather stupid. He said that he would go away only after his Party Card was returned to him. He was so insistent, that my father called [Matvey Fyodorovich] Skiryatov in the Party Control Commission and requested the swift return of Snegov’s Party Card, as he had just been released from prison. As soon as Snegov showed up to pick up his Party Card, he was once again arrested, and he returned [to freedom] only 17 years later. During this time, he passed through all of the circles of hell. They even led him off to be shot, but then did not shoot him. He was in Butyrka and Sukhanovo prisons. His back was covered with marks from floggings; he was missing a finger on one hand.
Olga Shatunovskaya worked with [Stepan] Shaumyan in Baku in 1918, and therefore knew my father from an early age. Then she worked in Moscow and met Khrushchev, and worked with him from 1936-7 in the Moscow Party Committee. She was also arrested, and spent some 10 years in the camps, then was exiled.
In 1954, both of these people returned to Moscow, and, with the help of Lev Shaumyan [Stepan Shaumyan’s son] succeeded in meeting with my father, talked with him and related what went on in the prisons. As strange as it may sound, much of this was unknown to my father. He had not any conception of the massive scale of the repressions. Olga related an interesting story about how, in one of the camps where she had been, there were ten thousand women. A Japanese spy was brought to the prison and she spoke very directly: “I am an actual spy. I know why I am in prison. But you cursed Bolsheviks are in prison for no reason whatsoever...”
Their stories had a great deal of influence on my father, and he related them to Khrushchev. In fact, to Snegov belongs the phrase, which both Khrushchev and my father used in their memoirs: “If you do not dissociate yourself from Stalin at the first Congress after his death, and if you do not recount his crimes, then you will become willing accomplices in these crimes.”
I was present when they told their stories, and I saw how my father was surprised and taken aback. When Olga Shatunovskaya spoke of the spy in the camp, he even called in my mother and said, “Ashkhen, come here, listen to what she is saying,” and he asked her to repeat her story.
In particular, it was under the influence of these stories that we understood that practically no one who was arrested was guilty of any crime. After the 20th Congress, my father created 93 commissions which visited the camps in order to free people. They did not consider individual cases but simply looked at the article of law in question. If an individual had been convicted under Article 58 for sabotage, terror, anti-Soviet opinions or actions, then he or she was immediately set free, because it was clear that there were no guilty parties convicted under this article.
Snegov understood that the public had to be prepared, so he wrote an article which, today, is perhaps not that interesting, but which played a huge role at the time. He wrote his article for the journal Party Life, about the Sixth Party Congress, and showed how, on many issues, Stalin differed with Lenin during his lifetime. Prior to the 20th Party Congress, it was practically impossible to say anything about this. He caught Stalin in many deviations from the Lenin line. It was quite difficult to get this article published. And here again my father placed an important role, reading through the article in draft form, editing it. And it was published.
It was all part of the preparation for Stalin’s unmasking.
Did your father discuss with you how Khrushchev’s report on the Cult of Personality was prepared?
Up until the last minute there was a battle over this report. In the Presidium of the Central Committee, Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov all spoke categorically against it being given. They proposed tabling it until a later date. Then they came up with another course of action: to delegate the preparation of this report to the editor of Pravda at that time, [Pyotr] Pospelov, thereby hoping to decrease the report’s significance. Pospelov was a Stalinist; he had selected materials for Stalin’s Short Course [History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course]. But this Stalinist, working with the materials provided by the NKVD, could not hold back his tears. Khrushchev correctly understood the situation, however, that a report of such significance should be given by the top person in the Party, and he decided to deliver it himself.
What was the situation like in the Congress? Did people suspect the changes that were coming?
Prior to the report – some five or six days before – my father spoke at the Congress and sharply criticized Stalin. And there was quiet indignation in the hall. No one cried out, but my uncle, [the aircraft designer] Artyom Ivanovich, was a guest at the Congress. That evening, he came by the house and said: “Your father has made a huge mistake. He spoke critically of Stalin and the Party bosses sitting around me were quite upset. This could end badly for him.” He said the same thing to my father: “Anastas, you have made a huge mistake.” My father answered that such a reaction in the hall signifies that they even fear a dead man, but that soon they would hear much more. My father’s speech was a trial balloon. In truth, Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov fought to the end. Their final condition was that the report be delivered only after the elections to the Central Committee and the Politburo. They feared that their role, as accomplices of Stalin, would have an effect on the outcome of the elections. Therefore, the final session of the Congress was held after elections to the leadership organs. The foreign delegations were not invited. It was a closed session. Representatives of socialist countries were later given a copy of the report in printed form.
Do you recall the evening of that fateful day?
Once again my uncle Artyom Ivanovich came by. We all sat around the table and my father recounted to him and all of us exactly what had happened at the closed session. He said that the report provoked a furor, that everyone sat completely flabbergasted; some were horrified, others were insulted, and still others were indignant on Stalin’s behalf. There were of course still many Stalinists in the Party apparat. And I can actually relate something from a reception I was personally at, a year after the Congress. Khrushchev obviously understood that Stalinists comprised a certain part of the Party apparat, and he himself was an inconsistent person. Perhaps [Mikhail] Suslov said something to him, but at this reception Khrushchev said that “the term ‘Stalinist’ has come into use, and many consider this to be a bad thing. But what is so bad? For we all worked alongside Stalin for many years. He was our leader. And, in that sense, we are all Stalinists.” And the hall was filled with the sound of applause.
How did the country react to what had happened?
A wise decision was made to read Khrushchev’s secret speech to every party organization in the country. As a result, the entire country found out about it within the space of a month. Every party member came home and told everyone he could about it. I remember how the speech was read out in our institute. Everyone there was shocked.
How did you start to feel changes after the 20th Congress?
The greatest significance was that, after the speech, the great fear disappeared. The great fear became a small fear. Prior to this, people feared that they could disappear with one wrong word. Now there began to be talk of justice, of legality. Articles and publications began to appear. It was quite simply an explosion of sorts.
And how did the students react to the changes? And the graduate students and professors at your institute?
At MGIMO, of course, everything was discussed. But I should note that, at the institute, there were many soldiers. And there were many Stalinists in their number. In any event, they remembered how they went off to battle with the words: “For the Homeland, For Stalin!” For them, discussing this was difficult. There were heated debates about Stalin’s role during the war. Khrushchev went a bit too far on this when he said that Stalin did not use a map but a globe: “What kind of Supreme Commander was he, if he led in military matters by using a globe?!” Of course, Stalin had maps. There was a globe in his office, but this means nothing. Many military types at that time criticized Khrushchev for saying that. RL
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