Khrushchev on Khrushchev: My father the reformer

by Sergei Khrushchev

Stalin had died and a new Soviet leadership, including my father, had to decide: Should they continue to prepare for war with the United States, or try to drive the Americans into peace?

After World War II, the Soviet Union lay in ruins. Most towns and villages were in rubble, the people suffering from the lack of food. To make life bearable for the Russian people, the country needed money, and lots of it. The Soviet Union needed to cut defense spending, but to do this we had to know the intentions of the West. Were they ready to talk, or would they start a war at the first possibility? We constantly expected American aggression, and we were ready to fight to the last drop of blood -- as we did with the Nazis.

I remember when General Eisenhower was elected president in 1952. I was a college freshman then. For us, this election was a signal: the Americans had elected a general to the presidency because they had decided to start World War III. That was the state of mind of both the Soviet authorities and the common people (but of course Americans were just as afraid of us as we were of them).

Faced with this situation, my father made a courageous decision. During the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party he not only denounced Stalin -- starting the democratization of Soviet society -- but he also declared as dead the Marxist doctrine on the inevitability of the war between Socialism and Capitalism. We wanted to, and could, live in peace with the West.

Prior to that meeting, in which he made his famous speech, a dispute started with Stalinist hard-liners -- who feared they would be held responsible. My father told them: we all stood behind Stalin, and we are all responsible for what had happened. But we cannot follow the old, blood-stained way. We should tell the truth to the people, and let them decide our fate.

My father spent a restless night before his speech. He did not rule out the possibility that he might be arrested. Finally, he made his speech, and country turned away from Stalinism. The hard-liners insisted on a closed-door policy for the speech. My father had to comply, but he managed to secure the right to brief Communist Party Members on his address. That was six million people, plus Komsomol (Soviet Communist Youth) members -- an additional 18 million people. It is difficult to maintain secrecy under such conditions.

Allen Dulles also helped my father to publicize the speech's text. The CIA got a copy of it and spread it widely. Now everybody knew about Stalin's crimes.

The next step was to reform the Soviet armed forces, which in 1955 was 5.5 million people strong. My father's opinion was that the Soviet Union could not, and should not, keep armed forces equivalent in size to the Americans. We should save money. We needed to build houses, to develop agriculture, to explore the "Soviet Wild West" -- more than 60 billion acres of farmland in the eastern part of the country.

Father thought we should estimate for ourselves the minimum size force the Soviet Union needed to protect its national security. He started with the navy. At the time, a debate was underway over a 10-year development program worth around 130 billion rubles. The admirals needed money, but my father had doubts.

"We are a land-based country," he said. "We are not going to attack the United States from the sea, so why do we need to spend so much on an ocean-going fleet?" But the admirals insisted. My father tried another approach, asking the Supreme Commander of the Navy, Admiral Kuznetsov: "If you get now what we are planning to have in 10 years, will we be able to beat the Americans?" The admiral answered: "No." The ocean fleet, therefore, was not built -- let the U.S. rule the waves -- and we spent the money on housing. At the same time we started to decrease the size of our armed forces -- in 1956 by 640,000. Between 1953 and 1963 the army decreased by three million people.

The first time my father ever met with Western leaders was in Geneva in 1955. Sitting at the table side-by-side with President Eisenhower, he was surprised when time for a speech came. The U.S. president carefully (like a schoolboy) read a text submitted by the U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. My father was puzzled: if the U.S. president is so dependent on others, then who in fact is in charge of foreign policy -- the president or those who are behind him? But in general, my father concluded it was possible to keep peace with the West, but only from a position of strength -- otherwise the West would screw Russia.

In any country, democratization and loosening restrictions on authority is a dangerous process. The slightest mistake could bring chaos and bloodshed. This was also true regarding the Soviet Union. It was particularly difficult for my father, because the reform process -- the destruction of Stalinism while turning the country towards democracy -- came under constant pressure from the West. In the midst of the Cold War, the main purpose of the U.S.A.'s propaganda assault was not to help reforms in the Soviet Union, but to destabilize it, along with its allies.

Unfortunately, reforming Stalinism was not without bloodshed. Very sad. But there could have been more of it if the intervention of the Soviet armed forces had not prevented civil war in Poland, or did not stop the bloody violence in Hungary. Probably the intervention in Hungary should have come earlier, without the time lost; both sides then would have had less casualties. Not everybody agrees with me, but blood is the same color and pain is the same to every human being; any differences are not related to ideology. Let's remember how much blood was shed in Hungary in 1919 and 1948. And not only in Hungary.

In comparison, in modern, supposedly democratic Russia, the lack of political power has caused mistakes in attempts at reform -- mistakes that have claimed the lives of more than 100,000 Russians who have given their lives in brutal guerrilla and regional wars.

The 1953-1956 episode of the Cold War series is a particularly good lesson for young politicians. They will be responsible for how peaceful or violent our future will be.

Sergei Khrushchev is the son of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. A Senior Fellow at the Thomas J Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, Khrushchev served as editor of his father's memoirs and is author of "Khrushchev on Khrushchev: An Inside Account of the Man and His Era, by His Son."