The bone curtain
ROBERT CONQUEST
Power in the Kremlin Michel Tatu (Collins 84s) Michel Tatu is uniquely qualified among pre- sent analysts of the Soviet scene. His reports to Le Monde during the period 1957-64 are the undoubted high point of Moscow-based journalism in this generation, with their relia- bility as to fact and perceptiveness as to political nuance. He was deservedly lucky: the dates, it will be seen, cover almost precisely the period during which a skilled reporter could find, practically as in a civilised country, at least a few sources who would tell or hint some of the truth of what was actually going on. Better still, M Tatu was able to send it out without the certain risk of expulsion (even when he re- counted the proceedings of the disgusting writers' meetings at which Pasternak was vilified by a group of what one might well call, in the old Stalinist phrase, 'literary hyenas). Nowadays such freedom is inconceivable.
This was only one of the ways in which the Khrushchev interlude, however inadequate it appeared at the time, must now be looked back on as, comparatively speaking, a veritable Camelot. This book, covering the period 1960-67, is a record of its decline and fall and the establishment on its ruins of the narrower and nastier successor regime. It is by far the most impressive work in the field for many years. No one with any sort of need to follow Soviet affairs can afford to be without it.
At first sight this microscopic examination of Soviet internal politics—that is to say of the struggle among the handful which constitutes all theiive politics there is in the Soviet Union =may in itself appear a specialised interest, like entomology. But the conduct and motives of this limited fauna do, as it happens, connect with the gravest world problems. M Tatu establishes the backgrounds and careers of the present leaders with exemplary skill, and follows- the (often muffled) controversies which have marked the period in the clearest fashion. The fine detail itself is illuminating. We see, for example, that among the main groups struggling for power are two based respectively on the party machines in Dniepropetrovsk (Brezhnev) and Kharkov (Podgorny)--as if the us were a plum disputed between the izpwar,,,i1 groups of a couple of talifornian towns (San Diego, say, and Sacramento). Such are the reasons for the promotion of fourth-raters like Trapeznikov, now head of the Science Depart- ment of the Central Committee (and attacked as such by Academician Sakharov), dredged up by Brezhnev from petty bullying on the 'dull Moldavian steppe.'
M Tatu incidentally traces for Podgorny a career of less obvious terrorism than for most of the others. In addition, it does seem that he inherited (as far as anyone did) the Khrush- chevite cadres and traditions. Partly, indeed, this was merely a matter of his being forced into that inheritance by the earlier defection of the others, and so becoming a rallying point for the remnants of the defeated faction. But this has always been the case for some grouping in recent years (Khrushchev kept his strength in the immediate post-Stalin months as a protector of the more extreme young Stalinists). It is a question, for the moment, not of bona fides, but of whether a rallying ground for at least some sort of resistance to the current neo- Stalinism may emerge. Since it is a popular programme, even in the party, it seems that,, as before, some faction must pre-empt the position, which might suggest a faint hope of further advance. But one would have to be very san- guine to make much of this in the present gloomy situation.
Scraping the barrel for any other grounds for optimism, one is reduced to noting that rumour, the more credible because it was contrary to the natural guess, said of the decision to invade Czechoslovakia that it was undertaken against the advice of Suslov, Shelepin and Kosygin. However that may be, these three are men who, though notorious for dull dogmatism in the Stalin and post-Stalin periods, are still bright in comparison with their present colleagues— not necessarily less hostile in principle to democracy, even Czechoslovak style, but at least able to react not simply in Pavlovian slaverings and jerkings. Shelepin, as Tatu shows, was certainly an advocate of the aggressive line in the Middle East last year; and needless to say, there is no reason to rely on greater love of the West from Suslov or Kosygin, always advocates of dogmatic authoritarianism. It is rather a matter, now, of -mere minimal intelli- gence. Such men, with all their faults, are at least not quite extrusions of the lowest-com- mon-factor feelings of the baser grades of the New Class, ectoplasm of the apparat.
But even allowing for these, it is remarkable how little individuality emerges in the current rulers. Malenkov, Beria, Molotov, Khrushchev were all colourful personalities, even if the colours were sometimes rather ghastly ones. They had standing with the population and party. They had definite policies. They were a leadership to be taken more or less seriously. Even in the last phase, a Russian writer com- mented: `Khrushchev is a total empiricist, a. dull man, entirely engrossed in his immediate affairs'; but 'as for the other leaders, Brezhnev is a lecherous toady, Suslov an anonymous illiterate . .
After the Second World War, Litvinov used to take foreign diplomats and correspondents aside and warn them that Stalin and his col- leagues were thoroughly ignorant of the outside world, and that this constituted a terrible danger. But ignorance is a relative term. The present rulers are almost literally deprived of any genuine notion of 'outside.' Moreover, things are getting worse. The man appointed last year to take charge of relations with, foreign._ CommunistAtates,1Katushev, has had no experi- ence whatever in anything to do with that sphere, even by Soviet standards: he has spent his brief career in provincial politics at Gorki, in the Russian heartland. Nor should we be misled by the fact that Soviet moves are explained and justified in marxist language. It is a fairly easy routine to pick up, and the rulers employ 'ideologists' fairly skilled in wordplay, who bear about as much relation to Marx as a gangland lawyer drafting legal wangles for a hoodlum does to Blackstone.
If the present situation is worse than at any time since Stalin's death, this is surely partly due to a rather neglected fact: that those at present on top are the first generation of rulers who are actually the products of the Stalin system. Their predecessors, though they all played murderous roles in the purges, had already risen to positions of influence before the system started. They were at least the manufacturers of terror rather than its products, Frankensteins rather than Monsters. But those who came up with Kosygin, Brezhnev, Suslov, Kirilenko and the others in 1936-38 all qualified mainly by the ruthless servility of their denunciations of colleagues. They were, as a close observer noted at the time, 'morally and intellectually crippled.' And so the sequence Lenin-Stalin-Malenkov-Khrush- chev-Brezhnev is like (even physically, though that may be accidental) a chart illustrating the evolution of the hominids, read backwards. Who knows what shambling Dusk-Man awaits us next: Kirilenko, perhaps, or Shelest? The main reflection arising from M Tatu's percep- tive work is a gloomy one : that it is difficult to be optimistic about the prospects of peace when vast military power is in the hands of men one could hardly trust with a catapult.
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