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| Two funerals plus the legacy of Khrushchev |
| 2009-08-02 |
| By NINA KHRUSHCHEVA My great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, has been on my mind recently. I suppose it was the 50th anniversary of the "kitchen debate," which he held with Richard Nixon that first triggered my memories. NIXON But the funeral the week before last in Budapest for Gen. Bela Kiraly, who commanded the Hungarian Revolution's freedom fighters in 1956, and last week's funeral in Warsaw for philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, whose break with Stalinism that year inspired many intellectuals (in Poland and elsewhere) to abandon communism, made me reconsider my grandfather's legacy. I'm not really familiar with Kolakowski. From what I know of him from a very few people who knew him, Kiraly was a genuine hero. The world is a colder, more insipid place without him. The year 1956 was the best of times and the worst of times for Khrushchev. His "secret speech" that year laid bare the monumentality of Stalin's crimes. Soon, the gulag was virtually emptied; a political thaw began, spurring whispers of freedom that could not be contained. In Poland and Hungary, in particular, an underground tide burst forth demanding change. I can remember a brief flood of "Hunkies" arriving while I was still in grade school. Some new faces at school, later some stories from the grown-ups... Hungary, of course, had its short and glorious revolution. That first war among socialist states shattered the myth of inviolable "fraternal" bonds between the Soviet Union and the captive nations of Eastern Europe. But Khrushchev never envisioned the Soviet breakup as part of his thaw. So the Red Army invaded Hungary -- on a scale larger than the Allies' D-Day invasion of Europe in 1944. "Oh, dear! It's terrible!" quoth what would become today's liberalism at the time. "But we can't get involved, of course!" Bela Kiraly, released from a sentence of life in prison (one of four death sentences he received from the Communists having been commuted) was offered the job of commander of the Hungarian National Guard and the defense of Budapest. His task was to knock the ragtag freedom fighters into an army, but there wasn't time to stop the Soviet advance. So, after a week of heroism he and a few thousand of his men crossed the border into Austria and exile. The revolt began as a student demonstration. The Hungarian version of the basij fired on them, and the revolt spread like wildfire, with the freedom fighters taking control of the country. The Sovs announced that they were willing to discuss withdrawing troops. Instead, they invaded. 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Russers were killed in the conflict, and 200,000 Hungarians fled as refugees. Kids my age played at taking out tanks with Molotov cocktails. Over the years, a mutual friend often tried to introduce me to Gen. Kiraly, but, to my regret, that meeting never happened. Any man who would frame the four death sentences he had received (one signed by Khrushchev, another by Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador in Budapest in 1956) and hang them in his drawing room has the sort of quirky humor I relish. I'm not sure how he walked, the size of the testicles he was lugging around... And from what I know of the man and his history, particularly his work in Hungary after 1989, I can only wish that my great-grandfather could have met him. I don't think they'd have gotten along. In fact, I'm sure they didn't. Certainly, Kiraly would not have hesitated to meet the man who ordered the invasion. After all, when he learned that one of the Russian generals who had led the invasion was still alive in 2006, Kiraly invited him to Budapest to join the 50th anniversary celebrations. When Gen. Yevgeni Malashenko declined in fear that he might be arrested, the 94-year-old Kiraly flew to Moscow, where he spent a long weekend reminiscing and going to a banya for retired Red Army generals. Ghosts tend to be still after 50 years. I doubt he'd have wanted to get together with him on the fifth anniversary. Maybe if the freedom fighters had won, but not otherwise... Kolakowski, on the other hand, was someone I knew. We frequently met at conferences, where it was always a delight to hear him speak Russian -- a Russian that had the accent and elegance of Tolstoi and Pushkin, not the degraded Russian bark of Vladimir Putin. Brezhnev, at least in his later years, sounded like he was drunk when he spoke. I think it was a combination of his stroke and the amount of alcohol he actually consumed, which was not inconsiderable... Like Kiraly, in 1956, Kolakowski turned against the Communist Party he had once joined in the hope, formed in the charnel house that the Nazis had wrought in Poland, that it would build a better world. If you actually bring a mind to the event, you won't get much out of joining a party that provides all the answers unless you get a seat by the fire. Once there, you still might not like what you find. Kolakowski, modern Poland's most acclaimed philosopher, quickly learned that mendacity was the true building block of Communism, and he withdrew from it in horror. Nothing more cynical than a congress of idealists when they don't think they're being watched... By 1968, the Polish regime could no longer tolerate his presence. He was expelled from his post at Warsaw University and, when he went to teach abroad, the government forced him into exile by never allowing him to return. Given the time, the place, and the regime, he got off easy... The question for me is how these three men with such different backgrounds and trajectories -- Khrushchev, a Russian peasant turned proletarian who became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party; Kiraly, a Magyar soldier of old world Europe, steeped in aristocratic traditions; and Kolakowski, a gentleman scholar from Warsaw more attuned to Jansenist heresies than the perverse logic of Leninist dialectics -- could ultimately contribute to the same goal: the resurrection of liberty in Europe. Intentionally or un-... Khrushchev did not really know anything other than communism. He tried to humanize it and undo the cruelty of Stalinist orthodoxy, but never doubted that the Leninist system was the way of the future. Everyone who rejoices in the successes achieved in our country, the victories of our party led by the great Stalin, will find only one word suitable for the mercenary, fascist dogs of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite gang. That word is execution.Kiraly, who subscribed to the old codes of military honor (he would be named a Righteous Gentile at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, for the hundreds of Jews he saved by keeping them with his army during World War II), saw that very system as the enemy of his country and its liberty. The objectives of the Revolution were most clearly formulated in the sixteen points proposed by the youth of the university, often misinterpreted. These included the following:But today Khrushchev is remembered mostly for his contribution to the demise of Stalinism and -- via Mikhail Gorbachev whose hero he was -- ultimately for helping to bring about communism's demise. Kiraly and Kolakowski became voices of moderation and reconciliation in the Hungary and Poland that emerged out of communism's darkness at noon. Khrushchev was, I think, an under-appreciated figure. He was the supreme apparatchik during the Stalin years, the master of intrigue in the three years immediately following Stalin's death. By rights, Beria should have had him disposed of on his march to becoming Stalin II. Instead, Beria's picture ended up getting erased from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, to general amusement around the world. The Secret Speech in 1956 could have represented a turning point, but you can take the boy to the top of the apparatus, but you can't take the apparatus out of the boy. Virgin Lands was more than just more of the Soviet same -- Brezhnev was the guy in charge. It was an absolute flop, complete with press gangs rounding up "volunteers." The Cuban missile crisis was crude brinksmanship. The space program was his major accomplishment, which was pretty monumental. But he'll be remembered for banging his shoe on his desk at the UN and for his boasting: This is what America is capable of, and how long has she existed? 300 years? 150 years of independence and this is her level. We haven't quite reached 42 years, and in another 7 years, we'll be at the level of America, and after that we'll go farther. As we pass you by, we'll wave "hi" to you, and then if you want, we'll stop and say, "please come along behind us." ... If you want to live under capitalism, go ahead, that's your question, an internal matter, it doesn't concern us. We can feel sorry for you, but really, you wouldn't understand. We've already seen how you understand things.After Khrushchev's removal he was replaced by Brezhnev, initially in tandem with Kosygin. Brezhnev locked onto power the way Khrushchev never had, and held on for year after dreary, barely changing year. As Leonard lapsed further and further into actual senility, so did the Soviet Union. The men who immediately succeeded him -- Andropov and Chernenko -- were not only aged but they were averse to change for either better or worse. By the time Gorbachev arrived on the scene the system required much more than perestroika. And the August Revolutionaries made sure in the end that even such perestroika as may have worked was replaced by something else entirely. Nina Khrushcheva, author of "Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics," teaches international affairs at The New School and is senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #4 Nikita K. also played a valuable (if political) role at Stalingrad. As a child, I always thought of him as a colorful chap - I'll never forget the UN shoepounding act - trulyof peasant stock and proud of it. Finally, remember the good "Twilight Zone" episode with a kicker ending featuring Nikita? |
| Posted by: borgboy 2009-08-02 20:20 |
| #3 Here's an article on the subject([The Trial of Leonid K]), and a post at Chicagoboyz about the article ([Gossup, Rumors, History]). |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2009-08-02 19:06 |
| #2 On a more serious note, have you been keeping track of the Kremlin's latest revisionist history regarding Khrushchev? |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2009-08-02 18:22 |
| #1 Reminds me of an old joke.... You know what Leonid Brezhnev's last words were? "Andropov my coat at the cleaners." |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2009-08-02 17:57 |