The Naked Communist (32 page)

For awhile there was an ominous silence in Moscow.

Toward the latter part of 1954 it became apparent that serious political adjustments were going on inside Russia. A bellicose, bullet-headed personality named Nikita S. Khrushchev and a punctilious party politician named Nikolai Bulganin began to appear more frequently in the news. An ex-Soviet official (Nikolai E. Khokhlov) declared this to be a bad sign. He described Khrushchev and Bulganin as promoters of world Communism, in contrast to Malenkov and Beria who wanted first to improve living conditions for Russians.

In the fall of 1954, Khrushchev and Bulganin led a delegation to Peiping. There the Chinese were given instructions to prepare for an assault on Formosa. From this, it became apparent that completely new lines of power had been drawn in Russia. Eventually it came out that Malenkov had deserted his partner, Beria, and joined forces with the new Khrushchev-Bulganin forces. In the latter part of December, Beria and three of his aides were shot. Malenkov was summarily demoted but he had switched sides in time to save his life. Bulganin took his place and Khrushchev hovered in the background setting policy and announcing the new slogans, "return to heavy industry -- armaments" and "the growing of food by decree."

Meanwhile the Chinese Communists had also caught the spirit of the new leadership and began fronting for Moscow by tantalizing the democracies with the shocking announcement that they had deliberately held back U.S. officers and men in violation of the prisoner-exchange agreement at the close of the Korean War.

The armistice agreement at Panmunjom had specifically provided that all U.N. prisoners who desired repatriation would be returned even though some of them might be charged with some crime. Now, however, the Chinese Communists were defiantly announcing that they had secretly held back a number of American prisoners because they were charged with espionage or some other type of crime. U.S. indignation reached a white heat as many Americans began to realize for the first time how completely impossible it is to depend on a Communist pledge.

In spite of public indignation, however, American feelings were somewhat compromised at this particular moment by a rapidly growing desire on the part of many citizens to forget the whole foreign "mess" and get on with home-front developments which promised to provide an all-time record of American free enterprise prosperity.

Mao Tse-tung accurately diagnosed this national feeling as an anti-war sentiment, and he therefore accelerated his campaign of propaganda throughout Asia by representing the United States as a "paper tiger." He taunted the United States with additional disclosures of illegally-held American prisoners of war and by open implication boastfully defied the United States Government to try and do something about it.

He became so enthusiastic in his campaign that he finally decided to prove the impotency of American influence to the entire world by acting on Khrushchev's fighting orders and strike at Formosa. In a matter of weeks the offshore islands in the hands of the Nationalists began to be bombed from the Chinese mainland. It was the preliminary phase of an all-out attack on Chiang Kai-shek's last outpost.

This was a highly critical hour for the United States since she had committed herself to defend Formosa. If she wavered, the light of freedom could very easily go out in Southeast Asia. One-half billion "neutral" Asians also watched keenly as U.S. leaders measured the risk and fathomed the depths of their own moral convictions.

Early in February, 1955, the Chinese Reds and the other World Communists got their answer. It was a U.S. Congressional resolution supported by both parties which confirmed the authority of the President of the United States to throw the Seventh Fleet into the Formosa Straits and give orders to wage an all-out war if attacked. This would obviously include the use of nuclear weapons.

The "little nations" of South East Asia stood up and cheered. It was apparent that the U.S. not only had the will to talk "massive retaliation" but the will to wage it. At the Afro-Asian conference at Bandung several of the little nations boldly showed their colors. They badgered the Chinese Communist delegates with cries of "Communist colonialism" and "Communist aggression." It was a severe blow to the prestige and propaganda of Mao Tse-tung and his Communist backers in Moscow.

Within a matter of weeks the "stand firm" policy of the U.S. and her Pacific Allies began bearing miraculous fruit. Orders went out from Moscow that coexistence was once more the sweet theme of the hour. The Chinese began releasing U.S. prisoners they had held illegally. The issue of Formosa was allowed to slip quietly into the background. Khrushchev extended an invitation to the United States to exchange visitors -- editors, congressmen, farmers -- he even said he might come himself sometime. All over the world the hard-knuckled tension of the ten post-war years began to subside. There seemed to be general satisfaction with the new and unexpected turn of events throughout the world and the democracies settled back once more to the pursuit of their own normal domestic affairs.

But in the midst of it all came a sinister warning from military intelligence. Reports indicated that while the emphasis of "soft" policies toward the democracies was being promoted abroad a tough, imperialistic policy was being fed to the troops at home. Soviet troops were being taught that the "importance of the surprise factor in contemporary war has increased enormously," and "the Communist Party demands that the whole personnel of our Army and Navy should be imbued with the spirit of maximum vigilance and constant and high military preparedness, so as to be able to wrest the initiative from the hands of the enemy, and, having delivered smashing blows against him, finally defeat him completely."
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All this had a familiar spirit. It reminded alert Americans of a significant statement made by Dimitry Z. Manuilsky who represented the USSR in presiding over the Security Council of the United Nations in 1949. At the Lenin School of Political Warfare in Moscow he had taught:

"War to the hilt between communism and capitalism is inevitable. Today, of course, we are not strong enough to attack.... To win we shall need the element of surprise. The bourgeoisie will have to be put to sleep. So we shall begin by launching the most spectacular peace movements on record. There will be electrifying overtures and unheard of concessions. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to cooperate in their own destruction. They will leap at another chance to be friends. As soon as their guard is down, we shall smash them with our clenched fist!"
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Chapter Ten
Communism Under Khrushchev

By 1955 it was vividly apparent that the most vicious kind of political in-fighting was being waged in Moscow by the Communist contestants for Stalin's throne. Already Beria and his aides had been shot. There were signs of vast power shifts behind the scenes and out of the rancor and roar of the secret battle in the Kremlin the personality which seemed to be emerging on top of the conspiratorial heap was Nikita Khrushchev.

Of all the contenders for power in Russia, Khrushchev was probably the least well known in the West. Therefore, a U.S. Congressional committee decided to get the Khrushchev story. They invited anyone who had known Khrushchev to come in and testify. A stream of witnesses responded, but the story they told was gruesome and ugly. The hopes of many Western diplomats for improved Russian relations collapsed as they heard the record of the Red leader with whom free men would now have to deal. Here was no ordinary Communist politician or party hack. Khrushchev was revealed to be a creature of criminal cunning with an all-consuming passion for power.

Many of the witnesses told of the early days when Khrushchev was first grasping for power and recognition. They revealed that his loyalty to Communism was the blind, senseless kind. Having been raised almost an illiterate; Khrushchev did not get his elementary education until after he had become a full-grown adult. As a boy he had been a shepherd, later learning the trade of blacksmith and locksmith.

At 17 he ran away from the obscure Ukrainian village of Kalinovka where he had been born April 17, 1894. For several years Khrushchev was a roaming itinerant worker but in 1918 he joined the Communist Party and fought with the Red Army during the Russian civil war. In 1922 he commenced his first formal education which lasted three years. By 1929 his dogged party loyalty had won him a berth in the Joseph Stalin Industrial Academy, and by 1931 he had become a local party official in Moscow.

Khrushchev soon won favor with Stalin by joining in a drive to purge Stalin's enemies from the local party machinery. More than 500 men and women were turned over to the secret police for execution. Later Stalin said that while Khrushchev was repulsive to him, he was impressed with the Ukrainian's capacity to kill or turn on old friends when party policy demanded it. Stalin therefore assigned Khrushchev the task of going back to the Ukraine and forcing his own people to live under the lash of total Communist suppression. The Red leaders had been using wholesale executions to stifle resistance. Khrushchev said he had a better way. He would use mass
starvation
! Witnesses to this man-made famine told of the suffering and death:

Nicholas Prychodoko:
I observed covered wagons moving along the street on which I lived and also on other streets in Kiev. They were hauling corpses for disposal.... These were peasants who flocked to the cities for some crust of bread.... My personal friend ... was a surgeon at a hospital in the Ukraine.... He put a white frock on me, just as he was in a white frock, and we went outside to a very large garage in the hospital area. He and I entered it. When he switched on the light, I saw 2,000 to 3,000 corpses laid along the walls.

Mr. Arens:
What caused the death of these people?

Mr. Prychodoko:
Starvation.

Mr. Arens:
What caused the starvation?

Mr. Prychodoko:
... We found some statistics in hiding places in the cellar of the Academy of Sciences. They revealed that the food in 1932 was sufficient to feed all Ukrainians for 2 years and 4 months. But except for about 10 percent, the crop was immediately dispatched from the threshing machines for export to parts outside of Ukraine. That was the cause of the hunger.

Mr. Arens:
Why did the Communist regime seize the crops in Ukraine during this period?

Mr. Prychodoko:
Because at all times there was ... various kinds of resistance to the Communist government in Ukraine and the collectivization drive in Moscow....

Mr. Arens:
How many people were starved to death by this man-made famine in Ukraine in the thirties?

Mr. Prychodoko:
It is estimated to be 6 to 7 million, most of them peasants.
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Witnesses testified that after millions of lives had been destroyed under Khrushchev's administration, the collectivized farms were finally set up. Khrushchev was rewarded in 1934 when Stalin appointed him to the powerful Central Committee of the Communist hierarchy in Moscow.