Reviews of Books
1098
and ABBOTT
GLEASON, editors. Nikita Khrushchev. Translated by
DAVID GEHRENBECK, EILEEN KANE, and ALLA BASHENKO. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2000. Pp.
viii, 391. $45.00.
WILLIAM TAUBMAN, SERGEI KHRUSHCHEV,
This book is a gem for Khrushchev watchers. Chapters
are based on presentations at a conference, held at
Brown University, to mark the centenary of Nikita
Khrushchev's birth. Most of the authors are Russian,
ranging from professional historians to Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita's son, who is a senior fellow at Brown.
One, Oleg Troyanovsky, was a top foreign policy aide
to Khrushchev, and another, Georgi Shakhnazarov,
advised Mikhail Gorbachev. Three specially commissioned chapters have been added. There are many fine
essays, but two are outstanding: one by Elena Zubkova
on Khrushchev's rivalry with Georgi Malenkov and the
other by Nancy Condee on cultural codes of the thaw.
Condee aptly sums up Khrushchev when she writes
that he wanted to be Joseph Stalin's successor but not
his heir. In other words he wanted to be a civilized
Stalin. He was, after all, his only role model. Both,
among other things, shared a disdain for specialists
who set limits to what could be done. They believed
Bolsheviks could climb any mountain if inspired to do
so. Khrushchev's pet scientists were the quacks Trofim
Lysenko, who promised Khrushchev the earth, and
V. R. Vilyams, the grasstand guru. Soviet agriculture
paid dearly for their ill-thought-out theories.
A redeeming feature that Khrushchev possessed but
that Stalin lacked was a conscience. The "wonderful
Georgian," V. I. Lenin's phrase, was a hard man until
the end. During the 1930s, Khrushchev, almost without
a second thought, executed Stalin's blood-soaked policies. Vladimir Naumov reveals that Krushchev carried
out Stalin's order of June 1937 to arrest 35,000 people
and execute 5,000 of them in Moscow. He earmarked
2,000 former kulaks, who had migrated to Moscow, as
part of his deadly quota. Wartime suffering changed
him, however. His years as leader can be seen as an
attempt to redeem himself in the eyes of the Soviet
people for the grievous sins he had committed. This is
especially evident after 1961, when voluntarism and
utopianism run riot. He had exhausted himself by 1964
trying to improve everyday life for his fellow citizens.
Several authors point out that Krushchev was uneducated, and this is one explanation for his crude
cultural and religious policies. He surprised a British
ambassador once, however, by quoting a passage from
Leo Tolstoy. On returning to the embassy, the envoy
located the passage and discovered that Khrushchev
had remembered it accurately. Although Khrushchev
knew his Russian classics, he disliked jazz, Ilya Ehrenburg, and abstract art. To Condee, he reveals a twentieth-century antipathy to modernism. He saw himself
as a conductor. "Just as a conductor sees to it that all
the instruments in his orchestra shall sound in harmonious accord, so in sociopolitical life the Party directs
the efforts of all Soviet men and women towards the
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
attainment of a single goal" (p. 173). This explains
Khrushchev's opposition to economic incentives in
agriculture and industry. William J. Tompson, in a
sharply focused chapter on economic reform, points
out that Khrushchev always preferred administrative
solutions in the search for greater efficiency. For him,
the party was always a better manager than any farm
chair or enterprise director. This spared the Soviet
Union the erratic economic-based reforms of the
Gorbachev era.
The irony of the period is that Khrushchev believed
that the country was poised for economic takeoff in its
battle with the United States. His overweaning confidence in foreign policy was fueled by the astonishing
Soviet achievements in space. The leap toward communism, taken in 1961, was also an expression of
supreme optimism. In reality, what was regarded as the
takeoff phase turned out to be the zenith of Soviet
economic achievement. Khrushchev, not surprisingly,
was totally bewildered by economic decline. He
shouted at everyone in sight, but the fault lay not with
perronnel. The planned economy, as Gorbachev demonstrated, could not be successfully reformed.
The central mystery of the Khrushchev era was his
decision to dethrone Stalin. Naumov stater that
Lavrenti Beria was preparing to use his colleagues'
complicity in terror against them. This is why Khrushchev raised the question of Stalin's crimes before any
of his colleagues. Nikolai Barsukov sees him as being
the first to sense the need to do this. The Pospelov
commission, in December 1955, was the result and
allowed Khrushchev to influence the pace of the
revelations.
Given that Khrushchev favored strong party management of industry, why did he set up the sovnarkhozes in the spring of 1957? The answer, supplied by
Tompson, is that the reform was tactical. It was to gain
the support of local party leaders in his conflict with his
opponents, which culminated in the June 1957 clash.
Khrushchev knew that there would be a challenge from
the conservatives, who had their power bases in the
government ministries. He took the initiative and
brought the simmering conflict to a head. This epitomized his leadership style: act before your opponents.
The military helped Khrushchev to win in June 1957
but feil out with him afterward. This was due to the
enormous cost of the armed forces and new weapons.
The military always wanted more, and Sergei Khrushchev demonstrates that this was not possible if living
standards were to rise.
The foundation of Khrushchev's foreign policy was
the conviction that a nuclear or conventional war
between the superpowers was not a viable option for
either side. He blustered and threatened the West in
order to improve the Soviet Union's world standing. In
all the crises he provoked, he always pulled back from
the brink. Vladislav Zubok, analyzing the Berlin conflict of 1959-1963, concludes that all he was trying to
achieve was to force the West to accept the division of
Germany. This was the first step toward turning Ger-
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Europe: Early Modern and Modern
many into a positive force for peace in Europe. Oleg
Troyanovsky states that Khrushchev and John F.
Kennedy developed great respect for each other in the
wake of the Cuban missile crisis. Had they continued
in office, the disarmament of the Gorbachev era might
have been achieved earlier.
Georgi Shakhnazarov and Peter Reddaway compare
the Khrushchev and Gorbachev eras. The former, a fan
of Gorbachev, and the Jatter a fan of neither, predictably do not see eye to eye. To Shakhnazarov, Gorbachev was an emerging social democrat but to Reddaway he remained a Marxist.
Finally, what did the Soviet people think of Khrushchev? Not much, according to Iuri Aksiutin. He quotes
a Radio Armenia joke: "Why did the legendary
Khodzha Nasreddin promise the emir it would take
him exactly twenty years to teach a donkey to speak?
Well, he was smart. He knew that by that time either
the emir would have passed away or the donkey would
have dropped dead!"
MARTIN MCCAULEY
Emeritus,
University of London
GALINA MIKHAILOVNA IVANOVA. Labor
Camp Socialism:
The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System.. Edited by
DONALD J. RALEIGH.
Translated by CAROL FLATH. (The
New Russian History.) Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe.
2000. Pp. xxiv, 208. Cloth $62.95, paper $24.95.
Until the Soviet Union fell apart, no full and honest
history of the system of concentration camps known as
the Gulag could be written. Most of the archives
housing needed information were closed to historians,
and in the USSR the subject was taboo. Nonetheless,
we knew a lot about the camps. A few Western
historians, most notably George Leggett and Lennard
D. Gerson, managed to piece together fairly detailed
histories of the Cheka, the earliest incarnation of the
Soviet political police, from published sources. Dissidente and emigrés like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Varlam Shalamov, Evgeniia Ginzburg, and Nadezhda
Mandel'shtam wrote stories and memoirs derived from
personal experiences in the prisons and camps of
Joseph Stalin's era. And a few historians, including
Solzhenitsyn, Robert Conquest, and Roy Medvedev,
have attempted to synthesize this information into
more general histories of the "terror" and the camps.
Mmost all of this was written from the prisoners'
perspective. We have lacked institutional histories
examining the purposes of the camps, their establishment, and operation as seen by Soviet administrators.
This brief survey is meant to fill some of those gaps. It
is a compendium of information dug from recently
opened archives—some of which are closed againabout the development of the system of camps and
colonies with a particular look at the economy and the
personnel of the Gulag.
Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova's first brief chapter
provides a good statistical summary of people impris-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1099
oned, exiled, and executed by the tsarist government,
particularly in the last interrevolutionary years, 1906–
1917. She discusses also the use of prisoners for
labor—political prisoners were not required to workand the government's recognition that it tost more to
exile prisoners to labor projects than to imprison them.
The second chapter, by far the longest, discusses the
establishment and growth of the Soviet camp system.
Readers hoping for an insider's view of the camps,
perhaps insights to Soviet leaders' thinking about
them, will not find that here. Ivanova mentions a few
interesting events along the way, such as the brief
failed attempt by the Commissariat of Justice in the
early 1920s to abolish the camps in favor of prisons and
the use of prisoners of war to mine radioactive ores,
but most of the chapter is taken up with a chronological progression of the namen of the institutions that
administered the camps; the title and date of the laws
that provided them with the authority to arrest, sentence, and execute prisoners; and estimates of the
numbers of prisoners interned and executed in some
years. Readers might be surprised in a few places by
the author's choice of words. She makes no attempt to
conceal behind more customarily "objective" language
that she is writing about a system she despises.
The third chapter on the economy of the camps
explores the use of prisoners for many types of labor
and the continuing effort to make the camps a productive part of the Soviet economy. Ivanova discusses
efforts at mining, timbering, the construction of canals,
railroads, factories, and dwellings, and the use of
Soviet and POW scientists in technical projects. She
cites government reports to show that prisoner labor
was approximately fifty percent as productive as free
labor, that almost all camp projects failed to achieve
their planning goals, and that only in rare exceptions
did camps pay for their own existence.
The last chapter investigates the personnel of the
Gulag, both in the central organs of administration
and in the camps themselves. Ivanova discusses the
growth of the administration and the increasing domination of Russians (as opposed to Latvians, Jews, and
others) at the center. She briefly explores their numbers, social origins, level of education, pay, and privileges and recounts the difficulties the authorities had
recruiting enough personnel to staff the system, particularly the most remote camps. Former Red Army
soldiers made up ninety-five percent of the camp
guards, whose dreadful work led to high ratel of
alcoholism and suicide.
By way of conclusion, the author provides her
estimates of how many prisoners passed through and
perished in the Gulag. According to her reckoning, the
number of prisoners held at any one time peaked in
1950 at about 2 8 million, and altogether more than 20
million perished in the Gulag. She does not explain
how she arrived at these numbers, however, and notes
earlier in the book that official statistics are thoroughly
unreliable. This book is a small, useful collection of
facts about the Gulag, but readers might wish at many
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2001