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Taking Over. In the Ukraine, Khrushchev (at 43) became absolute boss of a country three times the size of England and almost as populous. He spoke Russian with a phony Ukrainian accent, put on an embroidered Ukrainian shirt and wore a kartuz (workingman's cap). He went everywhere, bawling out party organizers, bureaucrats and collective farm managers, but he listened carefully to the agricultural experts sent in from Moscow. He exchanged quips with the farmers, drank buckets of vodka, and got a laugh out of most situations. Behind the facade of bonhomie he was ruthlessly liquidating all who stood in the way of Stalin's plans. Stubborn peasants were turned over to his friend, NKVD Colonel Ivan Serov. and shipped off in boxcars to Siberia; Jewish culture in the Ukraine was (to use a recent Communist phrase) "wiped out."
But Khrushchev's principal and most expert job was reconstructing the Ukrainian Communist Party. The old leaders, including his predecessor Stanislav Kossior, were executed, and the membership recast. The new party was a tight, tough instrument of Stalinist policy.*
Khrushchev subsequently had his ups and downs with Stalin. In World War II (and after becoming a full-fledged member of the Politburo), he was sent back to the Ukraine.
Last February, at the 20th party congress in Moscow, he elected to tell party leaders about some of his troubles with Stalin.
During the first German attack on the Ukraine, Khrushchev had called Stalin to ask for more guns, but Stalin had refused to answer the phone, put Malenkov on the line instead to say that all available guns were being sent to Leningrad. Later, after the Red army counterattacked Kharkov, Khrushchev had called Stalin at his summer resort to ask for a change of plan. Again Stalin had got Malenkov to say no, with the result that Kharkov was lost and the overextended Red army driven back across the Don. The old dictator had also treated him contemptuously, Khrushchev complained, called him Khokhol, a derogatory Russian name for a Ukrainian. "Khokhol, dance the gopak," Stalin had ordered at a Kremlin party. The gopak is a fast, vigorous Ukrainian dance, and the 52-year-old Nikita had danced it. Stalin, in his last days, said Khrushchev tearfully, "was so sickly suspicious and obsessed" that he often looked at people like Khrushchev and asked: "Why are you so shifty today? Why have you today turned your eyes the other way? Why do you not look me straight in the face?"
But it was not fear of Stalin that made Khrushchev accept the job of secretary of the Moscow region party committee in 1949. Three years later, at the 19th party congress, it was plain gratitude which made him say, "Our beloved Stalin, great leader and genius-like teacher," as he accepted one of the ten key secretaryships of the new party Central Committee. The truth was Stalin liked and encouraged Khrushchev. Immediately after the dictator's death Khrushchev had inherited enough of Stalin's power within the party structure to take over the party secretaryship, Stalin's old job, from Georgy Malenkov, who became Premier.
Jeweled Cuff Links. The Soviet story in the past three years is largely the story of Nikita Khrushchev's effort to wear the mantle of Stalin's leadership.