She herself had undergone the carnivorous ones, living in the urine-stinking corner of what had once been a grand mansion block, losing two husbands, murdered by the system, and having her son imprisoned by it for years. In 1914, when there had been life and hope in St Petersburg, she had been the subject of a superb portrait, by Nathan Altman, and there had been others, in the early twenties, in the period when the Revolution still allowed an innovative cultural life. These paintings, like so many others of that period, had been shoved into basements of the Russian Museum, stored by heroic men and women who knew the secret, and they reappeared only two generations later. Anna Akhmatova’s own poems only officially came back to life in 1987, though they were of course well-known by word of mouth before then. Around the time of Pipes’s visit, not long after Stalin’s death, victims of the system had begun to reappear: products of the camps that were dotted around the north and east of this enormous country, their faces gaunt and toothless, expressing ruined lives. There were tens and then hundreds of thousands of them, and everyone knew what had happened to them. Khrushchev was associated with their release, and in later years he took great pride in it, even regarding this as the main achievement of his life. That was right.
On 25 February 1956, at the 20th Party Congress, he gave one of the most famous speeches ever made. In it — it was put together at the last minute, was being scribbled even after the congress had started — he denounced the ‘cult of personality’. This was code for the monstrous crimes that Stalin had committed against the Party (the even more monstrous ones against society as a whole were ignored). He repeated this five years later, and this time together with the removal of Stalin’s corpse from the Kremlin Mausoleum. Lenin was to reign alone in it, though most of the corpse was made of wax, the original having been attacked by a fungus when it was wrapped in the flag of the Paris Commune, presented by the French government. Khrushchev wanted to get back to Lenin, and especially to the Lenin of 1921, who had carried through economic reform and a flexible response towards the West.
He himself hardly looked like one of Anna Akhmatova’s ‘vegetarians’: on the contrary, a coarse little man, bullying in style, embarrassingly ignorant of Russian culture. As Party boss in Moscow, he tore down old buildings with a vengeance, and when he ran Kiev or Lvov in the Ukraine, he behaved brutally and sometimes, as he himself admitted, murderously. He had survived in Stalin’s closest circle because he could act the peasant clown, and because he could handle the drink that Stalin poured into men, in the expectation that at some point their eyes would flash the truth, as to what they had in mind. His name was not on the mental list drawn up by Stalin for the last great purge, and he played his game carefully, not asserting himself too much and too early. He ostentatiously talked about reform in agriculture and in the Party, to which he wanted the secret police to be subordinated; and he showed willingness to talk to the West, with disarmament in the air. Then Khrushchev kept the powerful interests in check, because he maintained, as apparent equal as head of state in 1955, the blockheaded Nikolay Bulganin, in the name of conservatism and even friendship with China. It was not really until 1957, when he crushed a last-minute rebellion by the old guard, that Khrushchev had power enough to run the Party and the State, in the style of Stalin. But at least he was determined that the Soviet peoples should not have to go on living like dogs. He could show that Stalin had been grossly mistaken, that Communism could both go on developing its power and would also improve the Russians’ miserable standard of living. Why did they live like dogs, whereas their system could put a living dog into orbit round the Earth?
A Khrushchev would have things to think about. Aside from the grand apartment overlooking the Moskva river and offices in the Tsars’ Kremlin, he had elaborate semi-palaces to which he could retire, whether in the Moscow suburbs or at Pitsunda, on the Black Sea. The Pitsunda place had a huge swimming pool with a view out over the sea, and its glass front could be opened and shut at the touch of a button. Communism had proved itself: it had turned Russia into a superpower, able to defeat Germany at last. Again and again he would go back to this theme, and lectured the Americans that, when they had seized Alaska, they could only do so because the Russian army was feeble, its soldiers flapping in baste shoes. The whole Stalin epic had changed that, though he thought the cost was unnecessarily, cruelly high. Khrushchev therefore had some cards to play and he could look the American President in the eye. In October 1957, timed for the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution, there was a symboclass="underline" Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, fired into orbit round the Earth. That little spot of light, moving visibly at night at some speed in the sky, was the calling card of Communism and of Russia’s emergence at last. The Americans had tried to compete, but had failed, farcically, to put even a football-sized one into space: their rocket had risen for a few yards and then settled back on its socket. In other matters, again, the USSR impressed. The violinist David Oistrakh and the pianist Svyatoslav Richter were household names in western Europe and at the Brussels Exhibition of 1958 the Soviet pavilion, with its recordings, caused spines to tingle, whereas the American one just showed off creature-comforts. Khrushchev beamed, and a 21st Party Congress solemnly announced in January 1959 that the USSR would ‘catch up’ by 1970. In October 1961 that turned into ‘1966’; by 1980 there was supposed to be ‘super-abundance’, a claim answered by an historical laugh when the time came. But there were many people in the West who agreed, including the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan (in his diary).
In fact most of it came from the pre-revolutionary world. There was a superb mathematical and musical tradition in old Russia, and Sputnik owed most to equations produced by a Tatar-Polish theoretical physicist called Konstantin Cholkovsky in 1903: even in his native Kaluga at that time, electro-magnetism and the name of James Clerk Maxwell were known. The Bolsheviks had some understanding of what was going on, and did not, initially, make problems for men such as Cholkovsky (who died in 1935 at a great age). Another learned man of the old order, Vladimir Vernadsky (born in 1863: his brother, a notable historian of Russia’s Tatar aspect, emigrated) stayed on, and in 1922 guessed that there was ‘a great revolution’ coming, ‘a source of power’ that would have something to do with radium, on which he became an expert. Scientific institutes were important to the Bolsheviks, and the 17th Party Congress in 1934 announced that the Soviet Union was to be ‘the most technologically advanced state in Europe’. There was some international collaboration (most notably with Piotr Kapitsa, born in 1894, who spent twelve years at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, in the era of Rutherford and the splitting of the atom; but of course there was a strong German link as well). The scientific intelligentsia of that era were extraordinarily well-rounded men and women, good on their music and literature (one of the outstanding Soviet nuclear physicists was Yuli Khariton, born in 1904, who had studied at Cambridge, like Kapitsa, and, back home, had to do with the founding of the Writers’ House). Of course they took their role very seriously indeed, Kapitsa writing to Stalin to say that scientists were the new patriarchs — patriarchs having become quite obsolete.