The Last Mujik KHRUSHCHEV-MAN OF CONTRADICTIONS

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29189, 27 April 1960, Page 16

The Last Mujik KHRUSHCHEV-MAN OF CONTRADICTIONS

(By

ISAAC DEUTSCHER]

London, April 10—As one| listens to »Khrushchev or watches him, one senses the samouchka, the self-taught man, in him. Strictly speaking, he is not selftaught, for although he started out as a shepherd and miner and owed his first successes to selfeducation, he eventually sat at the feet of professors and scientists at Moscow's Industrial Academy. Yet, he is still full of the samouchka’s self-consciousness. [More knowledgeable than most; [Western statesmen, he has not! yet learned, and will never learn, | to take his education for granted.! He seems to be full of wonder |at his own intellectual attainments, ;as if he were saying to himself: “It is I, Nikita, the shepherd and the miner, who has read all these books and has learned all these difficult things”; and he must have been saying this to himself for 30 or 35 years. He loves to display erudition; and whenever an opportunity offers itself, he throws at you his clusters of facts and data, as if he were reciting, without a hitch, a freshly learned textbook lesson. Apart from this foible, he also has a valuable quality which is sometimes found in the selfeducated: the conviction that education is a never-ending labour. At the age of 67 he is still trying to absorb new facts and data and is busy collecting crumbs of knowledge. From his journeys he brings back bagfuls of such crumbs and unpacks them with a flourish before his audiences. In this, too, he is. up to a point, typical, for Russia today is still the eager samouchka, both sublime and ridiculous in her craving for education, her serious concern with self-improve-ment, her thrill and crude pride in achievement, her inability to take herself for granted, her need to draw self assurance from selfdisplay and self-advertisement, and her touchiness and emotional vulnerability. New National Character

Scratch many a Sputnik-con-scious Russian and you will find the old mujik. This is not surprising. Only a short time ago the barefoot, bearded, and illiterate peasant represented the true image of Russia; it was he that Stalin had pressed into the industrial marathon rtace that was to usher us into' interplanetary space. Now the engineer and the student are the representative national types. But it is precisely because the transformation has been accomplished at such breathtaking speed that the old national character is so strong in the new. Russia remains a complex combination of backwardness and progress, although the proportions of these elements have vastly changed. Of this, too, Khrushchev is to some extent representative. You need not even scratch him to get at the mujik. He has the peasant's sturdiness, stubbomess, and calculating and distrustful mind, but also the peasant’s folklore and wit and bonhomie. He comes from that stock of RussoUkrainian workers who never strayed far away from their native rural parish pump, and wherever he is, in Kiev or Moscow, in Philadelphia or Versailles, the smell of his Kalinovka pump is with him. Watch him on any of his trips abroad, when he is invited to inspect a shiningly modern industrial plant. More often than not his face gets tired and bored; his eyes have an uncomprehending look; and his talk with managers and engineers is perfunctory or impatient. He will say frankly that amid the complexities of modern technology he (the graduate of Moscow's Industrial Academy!) is out of his depth; and he will relate that when he was shown the first Sputnik he could not make head or tail of what his scientific advisers were telling him about it. But follow him when he is taken out to a farm to inspect cornfields and cowsheds. Then he regains his verve, and his eyes light up as he samples lumps of soil, corn-ears, and milky udders; he praises or finds fault with the way his host does the planting and threshing; he drinks, he jests, and he pats the farmer's big belly. He is back in his element. It is the same with him in Russia. On those infrequent occasions when he speaks on industrial affairs, he boringly roads his speech from a paper prepared for him by an industrial brains trust. It is when he finds himself on the fields of a kolkhoz (collective farm) that he has his field day. He likes to be thought of

as the Soviet Union’s agronomist-in-chief, though one suspects, of course, that his agricultural expertise is that of the shrewd peasant, not of the agronomist. As he never stops urging farmers to grow maize, the popular wit has given him the untranslatably comic nickname Kukuruznik (the maize boy). Maize is probably very important for Russia, for feeding her cattle, increasing her meat supplies, and improving nutritional standards. Still, his maize-mania is too much even for the most patient and the most mule-like of his compatriots . . .

I have said that one can see in Khrushchev the interplay of Russian backwardness and progress. Therein lies a great part of his strength, but also his weakness. Despite all his dynamic reformist activity, he represents more the backwardness than the progress; and the balance between the two is changing rapidly all the time. The majority of the Soviet population consists already of urban workers and intelligentsia; and the proportion of the town dwellers is constantly rising. So is the proportion of the educated people; already now there are about 14 million graduates of universities and colleges, and nearly 45 million graduates of secondary schools. More and more people are growing up with a thoroughly modern outlook. You may scratch them as much as you like, and you will not find the mujik any longer. To these people Khrushchev is already a clumsy anachronism. They would like to see at the head of party and State a man, or rather men, far more expressive than he is of the needs and desires of an industrial society living under a planned economy. Recently “Pravda”—or was it “Izvestia”?—admitted that only a couple of years ago the intelligentsia were “prejudiced” against Khrushchev; but now, the paper assured us, the prejudice has been dispelled. Has it really? The intelligentsia have not been allowed to have their say about this. Probably some of Khrushchevs domestic reforms and moves in foreign policy have softened the “prejudice.” But the intelligentsia would still prefer the national leadership to be more “liberal,” more up to date, and more intelligent than it is. Problem of Succession

Nor is the great mass of the skilled and advanced workers over-impressed with the kukuruznik. They are just a bit too mature for his artful dodging and clowning; and they dislike his pro-mu jik bias. It was no matter of chance that at the last session of the Central Committee (in December, 1959) Khrushchev’s policy was criticised on the ground that it offered the farmers benefits denied to workers and State employees, and Khrushchev had to promise solemnly that he would not allow this to go on. By the some token he is certainly the hero of the kolkhozniki and of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers (whose earnings he has been raising systematically), and of all those, even among the intelligentsia, whose ties with rural Russia are close and strong. This is quite enough to give him wide support at present and probably also in the next few years. But with Khrushchev nearing the close of the biblical span of life, Russians are already beginning to think of the new problem of succession. No-one can foresee who exactly his successor or successors will be. They may come from outside the present official hierarchy or from those teams of relatively unknown men who make policy and take important decisions during the many weeks and months of Khrushchev’s journeys abroad. (It is. anyhow, they that even now rule the country, which they could not do under Stalin, who never left Russia lest anyone should take any decision or “plot” against him behind his back.)

Whoever comes after Khrushchev will belong to a generation different from his and will be of quite a different outlook. The new crisis of succession will therefore pose as many problems as Stalin'S death posed; and it will lead to no fewer, and to even more startling, changes. If today the Russians think of Stalin with a shudder of revulsion and awe, in 10 years they will probably think of Khrushchev with a condescending smile as of the last mujik who spoke on behalf of Russia to the world.—(World Copyright Reserved.)