Conversations with Stalin by Milovan Djilas

Author:Milovan Djilas
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

6

We returned via Kiev, and at our wish and that of the Soviet Government we remained two or three days to visit the Ukrainian Government.

The Secretary of the Ukrainian Party and Premier of the Government was N. S. Khrushchev, and his Commissar for Foreign Affairs was Manuilsky. It was they who met us and it was with them that we spent the entire three days.

At the time, in 1945, the war was still on and one was permitted to express modest wishes. Khrushchev and Manuilsky expressed one—that the Ukraine might establish diplomatic relations with the “people’s democracies.”

However, nothing came of it. Stalin soon enough encountered resistance even in the “people’s democracies,” so that it hardly would occur to him to strengthen any Ukrainian separateness. As for the eloquent lively old veteran Manuilsky—a minister without a ministry—he later gave speeches in the United Nations for two or three years, only to disappear one day and to sink into the anonymous mass of the victims of Stalin’s or someone else’s displeasure.

Khrushchev’s destiny was quite different. But at that moment no one could have surmised it. Even then he was in the top political leadership—and had been since 1939—though it was considered that he was not as close to Stalin as Molotov and Malenkov were, or even Kaganovich. In Soviet top echelons he was held to be a very skillful operator with a great capacity for economic and organizational matters, though not as a writer or speaker. He came to leadership in the Ukraine after the purges of the mid-thirties, but I am not acquainted with—nor was I then interested in—his part in them. But it is known how one rose in Stalin’s Russia: certainly by dint of determination and dexterity during the bloody “anti-kulak” and “anti-Party” campaigns. This would have had to be especially true for the Ukraine, where in addition to the afore-mentioned “deadly sins” there was “nationalism” as well.

Though he had achieved success while still relatively young, there was nothing surprising about Khrushchev’s career in the light of Soviet conditions: he made his way through schools, political and other, as a worker, and climbed the Party ladder by means of his devotion, alertness, and intelligence. Like most of the leaders, he belonged to the new postrevolutionary Stalinist generation of Party and Soviet officials. The war found him in the highest position in the Ukraine. Because the Red Army had to withdraw from the Ukraine before the Germans, he was given a high political post in it, but not the highest—he was still in the uniform of a lieutenant general. He returned as chief of the Party and the Government in Kiev after the expulsion of the Germans.

We had heard somewhere that he was not a Ukrainian by birth, but a Russian. Though nothing was said about this, he himself avoided mentioning it, for it would have been embarrassing if not even the Premier of the Ukrainian Government was a Ukrainian! It was indeed unusual even for us Communists, who were

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