Prof. William Taubman

Professor William Taubman is an authority on Russian subjects. He knows more about the erstwhile Soviet Union than anybody else. As an academician he held the position as Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science for more than three decades at the prestigious Amherst College, Massachusetts (US). His close association to Khrushchev's family made him possible to get excess to the personal papers of one of the most remarkable Soviet leaders of the last century. Following the release of his massive biography on Khushchev, professor Taubman talked to Ashok Patnaik on the rise and fall of Khrushchev. 

Q: What fascinated you to write a biography on one of the most enigmatic political figures of the twentieth century?

The very fact that Khrushchev was so enigmatic was one of the things that inspired me to write about him. That, plus the fact that his role was so central in Soviet and cold war history, and that he was so vital, colorful, and contradictory a character. How did a man with two or three years of elementary education in a village school manage to rise into Stalin's inner circle? How did a decent man end up complicit in Stalinist mass murders? Why, having nearly covered himself in blood at Stalin's behest, did Khrushchev turn against Stalin in his famous 1956 "secret speech"? How did it happen that Khrushchev's pursuit of East-West detente helped to trigger the cold war's worst crises in Berlin and Cuba? These are among the questions my book tries to answer.

Why did Khrushchev de-Stalinize Russia? What were the causes that paved way for these unbelievable yet far reaching metamorphoses?

Khrushchev opted for de-Stalinization for a variety of reasons, some admirable, some not so. One motivation was to try to cleanse socialism, in which he deeply believed, of its Stalinist stain. Another was to make amends for his own complicity in Stalin's crimes and reclaim his identity as a decent man. In addition, there was political calculation at work: By being the first to denounce Stalin he was trying to cover up his own complicity while blaming Stalin's other henchman, who were Khrushchev's rivals in the struggle to succeed Stalin.

Khrushchev's historic speech in 1956 had put the erstwhile Soviet Union on a different platform altogether. He put an end to state terror and left his country with a hope of individual freedom …

Khrushchev put an end to sort of "arbitrary terror on a mass scale" that characterized the Stalin era, but not to the more limited and targeted political repression which continued under him and his successors. Not only did the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 result in some 20,000 Hungarian casualties, but the KGB arrested hundreds of Soviet citizens who protested that Khrushchev's "secret speech" hadn't gone far enough, and condemned Moscow's crushing of the Hungarian revolution.

There's a certain section of intelligentsia who do not dispute that Khrushchev's social and economic reforms did bring a measure of relief to the civilized world but he committed crimes in his won way that went largely unnoticed …

As indicated earlier, and explained in detail in my book, especially in Chapter 5, Khrushchev never fully admitted or satisfactorily explained the crimes he committed or supported. To do so would not only have compromised his own reputation, but would have undermined his regime's legitimacy. One may understand the political calculation that lay behind this reticence, while condemning his behavior on moral grounds. In 1960s Khrushchev's popularity was on decline and members in the Politburo were tired of his erratic leadership and radical reforms. Could this be the reason why Brezhnev, Podgorny and Shelepin hatched a plot in 1964 against Khurschev? The men who plotted against Khrushchev in 1964 were indeed tired of his erratic leadership and radical reforms, and that was one reason why they moved to oust him. But they were also impatient to gain power themselves, and once they did so, they proved no more adept at leading the USSR than Khrushchev had been. Whereas his leadership had been impulsive and unpredictable, theirs led the USSR into a protracted period of stagnation, which led to an attempt at reforms (those carried out by Gorbachev) far more radical than any Khrushchev attempted.

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(As told to Ashok Patnaik)