Le Fameux Nikita

deposed, October 1964

Who was Khrushchev? Today’s young (and not so young) people are probably better prepared to answer this question than “Who was Lenin?”

Khrushchev was the one who sought to plant corn all over the place and who pounded his desk at the UN with his shoe.*

This is what everyone remembers about Nikita Sergeyevich, although it has been a long time since anyone used his patronymic. At best he’s Khrushchev, at worst Khrushch (a kind of beetle), but often just Nikitka.

A popular song about how Russian rulers have fared in the eyes of history has the following to say about Khrushchev:

Khrushchev, Nikita, though barely three feet tall,
Did do some things that were not bad at all:
He gave us virgin lands, brand new,
He saw that to the moon we flew,
Made friends with Burma’s chief U Nu.

But in October, he sorta got kicked out,
That’s when the bitter truth we learned about:
With all that corn he went too far,<
Saw Nasser got a Golden Star,**
And did more things that were bizarre.

Хрущев Никита, хоть он ростом был с аршин,
Но дел великих он немало совершил:
При нем пахали целину,
При нем летали на Луну
И лучшим другом стал великий вождь У Ну.

Но в октябре его немножечко того,
Тогда всю правду мы узнали про него:
Он кукурузу насадил,
Гамаль Насера наградил
И еще много кой-чего наворотил.

This ditty, which has many variations, as one might expect from a work of folklore, is rather loose with the facts. The Virgin Lands Campaign, an effort to expand the Soviet Union’s cultivated land, was indeed carried out under Khrushchev; the flying to the moon was by an unmanned probe – still, no small achievement; and U Nu was not exactly the “chief” of Burma, but its prime minister.

Still, the song does reflect a higher truth. The Soviet space program made great strides under Khrushchev, achieving a long list of “firsts,” including the first man in space. When, after returning to Earth, Yuri Gagarin made a ceremonial report of his trip on Red Square, it was to Khrushchev that he reported. (After Khrushchev was deposed, the film of Gagarin’s appearance in front of Lenin’s Mausoleum cuts off at the moment when the cosmonaut walks up to… someone. Now, who could that be?)

The above song also does not mention Nikita Sergeyevich’s greatest act: his bold move to openly condemn Stalin, despite opposition from the majority of his colleagues in the Soviet leadership. Today, Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the 20th Party Congress might seem excessively cautious and incomplete, but in 1956 it was like a bolt of lightning before a cleansing storm. Its impact is hinted at in the Congress’ transcript. The delegates, who were accustomed to maintaining a reverent silence during their leaders’ speeches, broken only by occasional outbursts of “thunderous applause, turning into an ovation,” were not able to contain themselves. The transcript makes frequent mention of “noise” and “loud noise” in the auditorium.

Thanks to Khrushchev, millions were released from camps and exile. The condemnation of Stalin was not as strong or thoroughgoing as it might have been, and the rehabilitation process had flaws, so that returning prisoners were not always able to reintegrate into normal life. What is more, the vast majority of those who interrogated, tortured, and sent “enemies of the people” to their death lived out their lives unperturbed. And it was they who finally sent Nikita Sergeyevich into retirement in October 1964. Despite all this, Khrushchev deserves great respect and gratitude for his February 1956 speech, and for the fact that so many people had their freedom restored.

Nikita Sergeyevich deserves just as much gratitude for the fact that he freed millions from the quotidian nightmare of communal apartments and cramped and shoddily built barracks that often lacked the most basic amenities. He achieved this through an aggressive program to quickly erect concrete-slab buildings with apartments that were small and poorly constructed, but private.

One version of the song quoted above lists among the “bitter truths” we learned about him that he “joined the floor to the ceiling” ( «пол с потолком соединил»), in other words he built tiny apartments out of prefab concrete slabs where it was impossible to hammer a nail into the wall and where the kitchens were so small that in order to open the refrigerator, people sitting around the kitchen table had to move out of the way.

Later, these buildings were derisively labeled khrushchoby, combining the name of the First Secretary who built them with the word for tenement ( trushchoba), and today, those who still live in these five-story walkups dream of nothing more than escaping them. But at the time, millions of families rejoiced at having a private corner to call their own: their own kitchen, where nobody was looking over their shoulder to see what they were cooking, where they could feel confident no one would spit in their simmering pot, and where they could gather around the kitchen table with friends or family and get their true feelings off their chest without fear of prying ears – or simply come home and see no one but those near and dear to them.

Truth be told, all this is now mostly forgotten in Russia today. We have forgotten the return of innocent prisoners; the move to new apartments; the Thaw; the appearance of new or long-forgotten literature; French cinema; Yves Montand’s tour of the Soviet Union; the youth festival that was our first, in essence, contact with foreigners; the flood of excellent Soviet films; singing bards chronicling Soviet life; the Sovremennik Theater, and much, much more.

Of course this list of positives can be counterbalanced against a list of negatives that cast a pall over the Khrushchev era: the shameful trial of Boris Pasternak, the doomed attempt to “catch up with and surpass America,” the mad promise that “in 20 years, the current generation will be living under communism,” the outburst at the Manezh art exhibit, the shooting of peaceful demonstrators in Novocherkassk, the persecution of the clergy, the bread shortages.

But it is this very contradiction that makes the Khrushchev era so fascinating, its amazing combination of great achievements and monumental failures. “The last romantic” is what the journalist Anatoly Strelyany once called Khrushchev. Having risen through the ranks during the brutality of Stalinism and earning himself a place within the tyrant’s inner circle, Nikita Sergeyevich still managed to retain a romantic belief in the idea that, if we all pulled together, we could surpass America and build a communist utopia.

How did this generally magnificent and even tragic figure, captive to his own misguided visions, his education, and the thinking of the age he lived in – how did this outstanding man turn into the butt of jokes, a rotund baldy who banged his shoe at the UN or proclaimed corn to be “the queen of the fields!”

Probably the KGB put a great deal of effort and creativity into transforming Khrushchev from a great leader into a laughingstock. Their task was made easier by the fatigue felt by Soviet society by the time they heard about Khrushchev’s sudden “retirement.”

But why was it so easy for us to forget everything achieved during his time and accept the relabeling of the Thaw as “the era of volunteerism,” ignoring the great advances in science, the arts, and our material wellbeing?

That same song offers one answer to that question:

And we keep moving forward, and upward toward the sky,
And if a person’s time does come eventually to die,
That is the point of history,
That very selfsame history,
That cannot, even slightly, tell a falsehood or a lie.

А мы все движемся и движемся вперед
И если кто-нибудь когда-нибудь помрет
На то она история
Та самая, которая
Ни слова ни полслова не обманет не соврет…

NOTES

* A story which may or may not be apochryphal. See Russian Life, Sept/Oct 2010.

** In May 1964 Khrushchev made Egyptian president Gamal Nasser a Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded him a Gold Star.