RUSSIA AFTER KHRUSHCHEV “THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE ARE RECOVERING THEIR NERVE”

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30636, 30 December 1964, Page 8

RUSSIA AFTER KHRUSHCHEV “THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE ARE RECOVERING THEIR NERVE”

IBy

a correspondent of “The Times” lately in Russia!

z /Reprinted by arrangement)

Since Khrushchev’s fall it is difficult to get any official indication of new policies, but the atmosphere has changed. People in nussia seem pleased that Khrushchev has gone and they tell you that he was not popular. At first sight this is surprising. Two or three years ago the same people would tell you that things were all right under Khrushchev but there was foreboding about what might happen after he went.

Nobody seems to think much of the present rulers. The current political joke runs: “How are we going to live now? The same as before?” The Russian for this last phrase is “po prezhnemu?” The other Russian replies with a pun on the new leader's name: “po Brezhnevu”. There is no gloating over Khrushchev’s fate but one is told with a wry smile that he has been given a flat on the same staircase and the same floor as Molotov, and “No; common misfortune has not made them friends.” No-one can deprive Khrushchev of the merit of having closed the concentration camps and cut back the secret police, and of gearing the Soviet economy to produce houses and consumer goods as well as guns and sputniks. For some years after Stalin the Russians were grateful for this and fearful of a relapse to Stalinism. Sinister things can still happen in Russia but evidently the danger of an outright return to Stalin’s methods is now felt to be over and people look for further advance. Main Grievances Moreover Khrushchev was felt to be rash and unpredictable. His support for Cuba brought Russia uncomfortably near the brink, and his mishandling of agriculture is beginning to be evident to all. He may have inherited an impossible situation from Stalin and last year’s drought was bad luck, but after more than 40 years Soviet agriculture ought to have built up enough reserves to face even the worst natural calamities. Townspeople are on the whole reasonably satisfied with the steady progress of the last few years in housing and material conditions generally. There have been some strikes, to be sure, and even some serious riots; the Soviet Government tries to conceal these things, and that tempts one to exaggerate their importance, but the Soviet townsmen’s main grievances are of another kind. In particular, educated people resent increasingly that they cannot travel freely abroad, that they cannot meet whom they like, read what they like, dance as they like, and make up their own minds about abstract art. Fearful Hunger Townspeople, at any rate in the big cities, were cush-

ioned by imports against the worst effects of last year’s crop failures, but in parts of the countryside there was fearful hunger. The best that can be said is that so far as one knows, no one actually died of starvation. However, it is the townsman who calls the tune, and the Soviet intelligentsia know even less about how the peasants live than their ancestors did 100 years ago. Most of them do not seem to know that even now there is much hunger in some parts of the countryside. One might have expected that if Khrushchev was not popular his fall would give pleasure. But no. The manner of his removal gave great offence. Patriotic Russians say, “I no longer understand anything.” You might think that Stalin's cynicism had accustomed the Russians to sudden changes without convincing explanation. But Stalin was different. Stalin was a big man in the midst of great events, for all his iniquity, and Russians will put up with much from a big man. Under Stalin people were stunned and so frightened that they gave up thinking about politics, except in the most perfunctory way. Now at last, 11 years after Stalin’s death, the numbness of the “Stalinshchina" seems to be wearing off, and Russians expect their governments to treat them as responsible people. So far, the public relations of the Brezhnev-Kosygin Government are a failure. No doubt the Russians would respond to a bold lead even now but time is creeping on. One gets the feeling that the reputation of the Communist Party has suffered a serious blow, though one does not hear the Soviet citizens put it like that; even now noone is bold enough to question the party's moral authority as such. But that Soviet cockiness has gone. Listening To 8.8. C. One is asked: “Who started the cold war? You or we?" And if one answers, that on the whole they started it, though we were by no means free from blame, the answer

is accepted; at any rate there is no arguing back, as there would have been even a year ago. The 8.8. C. both In Russian and English is a major source of news and there is no inhibition about having the 8.8. C. blaring away even in the presence of informers. Recently some foreign visitors were driven round a provincial town in an official car whose radio seemed to be permanently tuned to London: one day they got a concert of Irish songs broadcast from the town hall of Nottingham. Russians say: “We have to listen to the 8.8. C. now in order to learn what is happening in our own country " And on th? other side, a re cent visitor to Soviet Central Asia was kept in touch with the progress of the British election almost hour by hour and was told, “The Queen has sent for Mr Wilson” almost as soon as the 8.8. C. broadcast the news.

The New America Even those who are too young to remember seem to know that the half has not been told them about Stalin’s misdeeds. Russian patriotism burns as brightly as ever, but there is. at least among some, a new readiness to consider whether Russia's industrial might is entirely a Soviet creation. After all. in the early years of this century, 10 years before the revolution, the poet Blok wrote a famous poem on Russia as “the new America.” It would be easy to make too much of these things, and it is early days to judge whether this change of atmosphere is going to be permanent The Kremlin stands secure, and has ample means of imposing its will. It would be absurd to suggest that spectacular changes are on the way. But the fall of Khrushchev is a milestone in the revolution of Soviet society.

The Russian people are recovering their nerve. They are almost prepared to look their own Government in the eye and are beginning to resent being treated like children. It would be too much to say that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is losing its nerve, but the party’s selfconfidence is not what it was.