Another Soviet Rehab : Khrushchev Put Back on the Pedestal

To be a successful Soviet historian, an old joke goes, you’ve got to have a knack for predicting the past.

As a case in point, this country’s changing view of Nikita S. Khrushchev is surely one of the most vivid examples.

After a decade of adoration by Soviet media while he served in one of the world’s most powerful jobs, the Communist Party’s general secretary was deposed overnight in a bloodless coup in October, 1964.

His name was excised from history books, his face was air-brushed out of official photographs and he was ushered into obscurity and unwilling retirement.

‘Crying All the Time’

“Granddaddy is crying all the time,” one of Khrushchev’s grandsons is said to have told his principal at a Moscow school when asked in 1965 how his grandfather spent his time.

Now, however, the historical perspective on Khrushchev is being revised again. The Soviet leader, who died in 1971, is increasingly being touted as a kind of godfather of perestroika --a precursor of the reforms being pursued by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev--who was limited only by the poor luck of being sandwiched between the wickedness of Josef Stalin and the stagnation of Leonid I. Brezhnev.

The clearest sign of this transformation was an exhibit opened to the public in Moscow’s Youth Palace this summer depicting Khrushchev’s six years as Communist Party chief as a sort of golden age.

The exhibit featured pictures of some of those exiled by Stalin, with Khrushchev praised as their savior. There was a kitchen display from a typical 1940s communal apartment shared by 13 families, with the reminder that Khrushchev eased overcrowding and built single-family apartments for hundreds of thousands. There were photographs of Khrushchev with world leaders and Soviet writers, actors and painters.

Peasant Shirts

Even some of Khrushchev’s embroidered peasant shirts, the attire that made him the butt of private jokes after he was ousted from the country’s top job, could be seen, like trophies, in a glass case.

What was actually on display at the exhibit was the Soviet process of remaking history.

Khrushchev’s case may be an outstanding example of that process, but it is far from the only one. Virtually every leader since the Bolshevik Revolution, as well as some of the country’s greatest artists and scientists, have been touched by the vagaries of Soviet history. There is even a word-- rehabilitatzia-- to refer to the process of restoring the reputation of once-maligned Soviet citizens.

Among the notable examples:

-- Leon Trotsky, a Communist revolutionary who helped establish the Soviet state, lived to see historians acting under Stalin’s orders obliterate his role in the country’s birth. Trotsky was assassinated by Stalin’s agents in Mexico in 1940. His historical role has still not been thoroughly re-evaluated here, although a newspaper broke ground this summer by publishing one of his political tracts.

-- Nikolai I. Bukharin, whom V. I. Lenin once called “the favorite of the whole party,” also played an instrumental role in the formation of the Soviet state. In 1938, after a show trial, he was shot as an enemy of the people. But state historians rethought that view, and just a year ago the Communist Party daily Pravda called Bukharin “one of the outstanding figures in the history of the party.”

Even Lenin himself, the founder of the Soviet state, has not been able to avoid the pitfalls of Soviet history. Long viewed as unimpeachable, he was described just this summer, in an article published in a literary journal, as being intolerant and even cruel to those who disagreed with him.

In Khrushchev’s case, the revision of history is so great that public criticism of him today, however well-founded, seems passe.

Why has the turn-around in the official record of those years been so dramatic? Some have speculated that it is, in part, the work of Gorbachev, who may see just a bit of himself in Khrushchev.

“Gorbachev, like many of today’s Politburo members, became active in the party during the Khrushchev years. Perhaps to some extent he identifies with the former leader,” said Vitaly A. Korotich, editor of the liberal weekly journal Ogonyok. “So, as a historical figure, Khrushchev is being dusted off and placed on a pedestal.”

There may good reason for the comparison--and even for Gorbachev to fear that he could be swept up in a similar swing of the pendulum.

Both Khrushchev and Gorbachev are viewed as reformers who shook up the Communist Party, stripping authority from party bureaucrats who hold immense behind-the-scenes power. In Khrushchev’s case, that factor contributed to his downfall.

In August, the daily Moskovskaya Pravda even dared to compare the rule of the two leaders and ask, without drawing a definite conclusion: “Could 1964 happen today?”

Campaign Began 2 Years Ago

The transformation of Khrushchev did not occur overnight. It began in earnest two years ago, first with newspaper articles that mentioned his name and then with small gatherings held in his honor by victims of Stalin and their offspring.

But it was this summer’s exhibit that, according to the weekly Moscow News, finally destroyed “the conspiracy of silence around Khrushchev.”

Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, said he has received dozens of letters every month from people who stood by silently for years while his father was a nonentity but who now want to praise him.

“The first thing that is mentioned is how he put an end to the Stalin repressions. Because people are so focused on that, they often overlook his other accomplishments,” the younger Khrushchev, 58, said in an interview.

“But I’m just glad that his role in history can now be discussed openly. That alone is a big improvement.”

Lauded for Freeing Thousands

Khrushchev is lauded primarily for halting the executions carried out under his predecessor and releasing thousands from exile and prison.

The exhibit featured a barbed-wire enclosure with a mirror behind it, so that visitors looking at the display saw themselves imprisoned. Here, fresh flowers were placed daily, and the elderly gathered to exchange names and memories.

The parade of photographs and paintings, banned in the Soviet Union for more than two decades, celebrated Khrushchev’s life. He was seen arguing the merits of Soviet and American life with then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon in the famous “Kitchen Debate,” strolling with former President John F. Kennedy and standing with his arm around the shoulder of Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

He was cited as the founder of the country’s space program and its premier patron of the arts. A display of tall stalks of wheat accompanied praise for Khrushchev as a savior of agriculture--even though in the past he was criticized for his often-erratic farm policies.

No Shoe-Banging

Notably absent was the famous photograph of Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table at the United Nations--a display of behavior that made him something of a laughingstock.

Also unmentioned was the fact that the five-story apartment buildings hastily erected during Khrushchev’s era were later nicknamed “Krushchovi trushobi “--Khrushchev’s slums.

In perhaps the most poignant of the photographs, never before shown publicly here, Khrushchev was pictured in his largely solitary existence after his downfall: walking alone in the woods, reading Pravda at his dacha and sitting on a wooden bench, his eyes shaded by a white hat.

There were, of course, no photographs from the low point of his political life: the meeting in which he was told he must relinquish his post.

The story of that session, however, is also beginning to emerge as the public is encouraged to sympathize with Khrushchev.

‘Burst Out Crying’

Peter Y. Shelest, a former Central Committee member, recalled in Moscow News this month the moment when Khrushchev, having been summoned home urgently from a vacation in the south, was told by his colleagues that he was being replaced.

“Nikita Sergeyevich burst out crying, sobbing,” Shelest said. “I’ll remember that face until the day I die.”

On that day, according to modern Soviet historians, printing presses were stopped throughout the country so that censors could delete from newspapers, magazines and books any mention of the leader.

Soviet schoolchildren were later taught that Khrushchev had requested retirement. Only in the last few years have they learned otherwise.

In the Soviet Union, another joke goes, the future stays the same. It is only the past that changes.