The trial of Leonid K

• Last Updated: May 08. 2009 1:24AM UAE / May 7. 2009 9:24PM GMT

Leonid Khrushchev died a war hero in 1943, 13 years before his father denounced Stalin. Now Russians are told he was a traitor. Peter Savodnik reports on the invisible campaign to defame the father with the invented sins of the son.

On March 11, 1943, the last day of his life, Leonid Khrushchev, the eldest son of Nikita Khrushchev, was flying his Yak-76 fighter plane somewhere in the skies above Kaluga, about 120 miles southwest of Moscow. At the time, Western Russia was the epicenter of the war with Nazi Germany. The younger Khrushchev, 26, widely regarded as a daring if sometimes reckless pilot, was believed to have been shot down by a German Fw 90 plane. Neither the plane nor Khrushchev’s body were ever found. “He was a hero,” his daughter, Yulia Khrushcheva, 68, says of her father, who was posthumously decorated by his military superiors.

For many years, these were the facts surrounding Leonid Khrushchev’s death. But at some point in the years immediately following the 1991 Soviet collapse, other “facts” emerged: Leonid had been captured by the Germans, or had landed safely and gone into hiding, or had given up critical information to the Nazi high command in exchange for his life. Now, instead of one official explanation for Leonid’s death, there were many explanations, all of which revolved around a central belief – that Leonid was a coward and a traitor and that, by extension, his father, the former Soviet premier, was a coward and a traitor, and that, by extension, his repudiation of Stalinism and the opening up of Soviet society in the late 1950s and early 1960s were a betrayal of the motherland.

The exact provenance of this new history of the death of Leonid Khrushchev is hard to pinpoint – therein lies the most Russian aspect of this quintessentially Russian story – but this much is clear: when these new stories, which seem to date back to the late 1960s, began to re-emerge in the 1990s, they were simply rumors, neither official dogma nor widely believed. But in the early part of this decade, as power in Russia concentrated again in the hands of a strongman, these new accounts – all variations on the same theme – coagulated into a fully articulated theory, with its own premises and conclusions and its sundry proponents and expert witnesses, and suddenly the story of Leonid Khrushchev’s death was a mystery and a scandal, and no one could be sure what had really happened 60 years ago.

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The significance of the details of Leonid Khrushchev’s death extends far beyond the narrow slice of history that is March 11, 1943 or even the entire Second World War. As is often the case, the particulars – the what, where, when, how and why – are really symbols of something much bigger. These more abstract values or political ideas or historical interpretations are only tenuously connected to the events in question, and the people who square off against each other, who fight for one camp or another, are engaged in a struggle over the meaning of Soviet history, whether they know it or not. Leonid Khrushchev, in the end, is but a minor figure in this debate: it is his father who resides at the very heart of this titanic battle for Russia’s conception of Russia.

For Nikita Khrushchev, 38 years after his death, still remains a controversial figure in Russia. For most of his career, Nikita Sergeyevich was very much a part of the Soviet-Stalinist system: From the February 1917 overthrow of the tsar through most of the 1920s, he served in a series of capacities as a party apparatchik in Ukraine; by 1932, he was a senior official in Moscow’s party organisation; by 1934, he was head of that organisation; three years later, he was sent back to Ukraine to run the party operation there; and in 1949 – having weathered one of the most brutal occupations in history, purged the Ukrainian apparat (in Stalinesque fashion) of numerous “enemies of the state” and overseen a marked improvement in the grain harvest – he returned to Moscow, this time to join Stalin’s inner circle as a Central Committee secretary.

By the time Stalin died in March 1953, Khrushchev was one of the five or 10 most powerful people in the Soviet Union. But few, if any, of his fellow insiders considered him a potential successor. (William Taubman, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, calls Nikita Sergeyevich “the heir nonapparent.”) Cultivating his image as a bumbling peasant – Taubman portrays Khrushchev as the butt of many of Stalin’s jokes at the dictator’s late-night dinner parties – none of Khrushchev’s better educated, more sophisticated, openly ambitious rivals ever appear to have suspected that Khrushchev might win out. But by 1956, he had eliminated all of them, including Georgi Malenkov, who briefly ran the country following Stalin’s death, and Lavrenty Beria, the former head of the secret police who orchestrated the Great Purges of 1937-1938. It was on February 25, 1956, less than two months shy of his 60th birthday, that Khrushchev would deliver his famous, four-hour “secret speech,” which would include a devastating attack on Stalin, unleash waves of discontent across the communist world and cement Khrushchev’s reputation as a reformer and a Westerniser.

Much of what Khrushchev did after the secret speech was in keeping with Marxist ideology and Soviet planning: the construction of public-housing projects, the (attempted) rejuvenation of the agricultural sector, a renewed emphasis on scientific exploration and high culture, and the declaration that communism (as a fact and not just a theory of organisation or economic determinism) would be achieved by 1980. But none of that seems to have mattered much – to the men who ousted him from the Kremlin in 1964, or to the many conservative critics who came years later. What infuriated them was Khrushchev’s move, beginning with the secret speech, to open a conversation about Stalin, to denounce a dictator and dictatorship – a task subsequently taken up with zeal by the intelligentsia. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s publication of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” in 1962 in the journal Noviy Mir, has been called the apex of the Khrushchev thaw.) It was this conversation that defined Khrushchev as a reformer and therefore, in reactionary circles, as – just as Peter the Great, Alexander II and, later, Mikhail Gorbachev were thought to be suspect, or alien, or un-Russian. (It is not an accident that Khrushchev is not buried in the Kremlin wall, like Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev, but relegated to a far-flung plot in Novodevichy Cemetery, in Moscow.)

At the time of the Soviet collapse, Khrushchev seemed simultaneously vindicated and marginalised: his efforts to humanise Soviet life had been realised in Gorbachev’s glasnost. But glasnost had spiralled out of control, and the idea that had animated Khrushchev, Gorbachev and other reform-minded Soviets – to repair the system without abandoning it – was now hopelessly dated. Indeed, the moral and political yearnings of the reformers had betrayed the emptiness and unsustainability of the Soviet state, and throughout the 1990s, Russia waged a relentless, often crazed war against its prior self. In just eight years under Boris Yeltsin, the country migrated from a rusting socialism to a quasi-capitalism: there were elections (albeit tainted, often rigged), and there was a bustling, if chaotic, media, and there was an influx of American and European products, fashions and technologies. The whole psychology of Russia, the expectations and understandings of the relationships between the individual and the state and the state and civil society, seemed to have evolved – sloppily, unevenly – in a democratic direction.

Russia, and then the Soviet Union, had spent the past few centuries swinging periodically from an inward-looking authoritarianism to just this sort of frenetic, often destabilising democratisation, and each time Russia had opened up, for a few years, or maybe a little more, the reformers would rally around the hope that finally – finally! – the end of history had arrived, and the swinging would stop, and Russia would escape the schizophrenic oscillation and move confidently and permanently in the direction of reason, liberty, individual rights and self-government. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the activists who had embraced perestroika thought the escape from history was complete. Now, they imagined, Russia had made a decision that could not be reversed: the inexorable force of a new openness, they believed, had transformed an ancient, peasant civilisation into a nascent democracy.

The era of Vladimir Putin, who became president on December 31, 1999, has since provided evidence that Russia had escaped little, if anything, and that the old, authoritarian impulses are still very much a part of the national consciousness. But it is not enough, in Russia, to assert the rightness of an idea or theory of government. It is necessary to quash the opposition: he who becomes tsar must make sure that all those who would oppose his leadership are exiled. And so the emergence of Putin, and the re-emergence of the semi-Soviet police state, dictated that liberalism and its exponents would have to be overturned, to ensure that no more Khrushchevs or Gorbachevs would emerge from within the system to challenge its authority.

Khrushchev, who had planted the seedling of the Soviet demise, quietly and almost magically morphed into a force for bad, the antithesis of what the new leadership represented, which meant that he would have to be countered, undermined, repudiated: if one wanted to curry favour with the Kremlin one might train his sights on Nikita Sergeyevich, in a book, a newspaper, maybe on a nationally broadcast television programme. This was never stated, of course. There were no memos or secret speeches. Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev would never deign to get involved in this sort of thing.

The best recent example of this two-step process – in which the leader signals some vague wish or discontent and his minions subsequently bend over backward to fulfil that wish or correct the perceived injustice – was on display in Putin’s remarks at a June 2007 conference of high-school teachers in Moscow. As the historian Orlando Figes recounts in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Putin denounced the “mess and confusion” that had afflicted the teaching of Russian history. Four days after the conference, the Duma introduced a law, which was quickly passed, giving the Ministry of Education the right to choose which textbooks should be published and used in Russian schools. Government officials at the conference promoted – and soon adopted – a textbook whose main author, Alexander Filippov, was the employee of a pro-Kremlin think-tank. The office of the president, which commissioned the book, had issued instructions to Filippov and his co-authors to portray Stalin as “good” (because he “strengthened vertical power”), Khrushchev as “bad” (“weakened vertical power”), and Brezhnev as “good” (“for the same reasons as Stalin”).

“That is the nature of the secretive and despotic system,” says Nina Khrushcheva, Yulia’s daughter and an international-relations professor at The New School in New York. “The tsar doesn’t need to give orders. There are a lot of bureaucratic well-wishers who think, ‘I’m sure he’d love it. The tsar would appreciate what I do.’” In other words, the campaign to defame Leonid Khrushchev and Nikita Khrushchev and the whole liberal project was understood, the way so many things in Russia are understood, by Russians, if not by anyone else.

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All of this has prompted the Khrushchev family, led by Yulia Khrushcheva, to take legal action in an attempt to clear Leonid’s name. But it is an impossible battle, and the case cannot be won. Everyone in the family knows this. It’s not simply a question of politics or Russia’s hopeless legal system, which would alone probably pre-empt any possibility of justice. The truly insurmountable challenge facing the Khrushchevs is that no one knows exactly whom they should be suing.

This is a quagmire that could only be imagined in Russia, where the tsar or first secretary or president is enveloped by a quasi-mystical aura. It is almost certainly the case that Putin has neither done anything libellous nor ordered anyone else to do anything libellous. But he symbolises a politics, an authoritarian tradition, that is necessarily at odds with Khrushchev’s legacy, and, as a symbol, he has inspired others to build up his own, vaguely Stalinist tradition and to break down that of Khrushchev. Any attempt to locate the first contemporary instance of anti-Khrushchev libel is ill-fated: the accused libeller can always find another libeller who came before, or someone who might have been a libeller, or someone whose words, viewed through a certain prism, might lead some people to wonder what they were supposed to think. There is, in fact, an infinite regress of libellers and potential libellers that leads, asymptotically, to the tsar, who never says anything or issues any dictates, who is protected by people who believe there is value in executing orders that have not even been ordered.

Putin, of course, is no Stalinist, but he certainly believes in a very strong, centralised state that squeezes out competing sources of power, and envisions the people not as a citizenry but as a rowdy, often dangerous horde of serfs in need of a firm hand. It is no accident that the 100th anniversary of Brezhnev’s birth in 2006 was celebrated with a wave of heartwarming propaganda – Putin has adopted many of the same words and themes that characterise or are believed, today, to characterise the Brezhnev era. At the top of that list: stabilnost, or stability.

In fact, the antecedents of today’s anti-Khrushchev mythmaking date to the reign of Brezhnev, who sought, with his neo-Stalinist allies, to minimise and simultaneously demonise Khrushchev and all the democratic forces he had (unwittingly) unfurled. That was when the first whiff of anti-Leonid propaganda was aired, and it has served as the basis for the “new history” that courses through today’s Russia. According to Sergei Khrushchev, 74, the Soviet premier’s son and Leonid’s half-brother, the story of Leonid’s treachery was fabricated in 1967 by KGB and military officials, who spread rumours that newly discovered documents proved Leonid had surrendered to the Germans and betrayed his country before being recaptured and executed by Soviet intelligence. “Father allegedly begged Stalin on his knees to forgive his son,” Sergei Khrushchev writes in his memoirs, “but Stalin refused, saying: ‘My son was also captured. He behaved like a hero, but I refused to exchange Field-Marshal Paulus [whom the Soviets had captured] in exchange for him.’”

In the 1970s, the anti-Khrushchev fervour died down, and then it disappeared, and then, in the last decade of the life of the Soviet Union, all the major Khrushchev themes – openness, expression, a respect for human life, a certain humanity – were resurrected in the guise of glasnost and perestroika. One of the many, many ironies of this liberalisation was that the liberalisers came under attack from people quick to make use of the freedoms the liberalisers had made possible. Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin were subjected to relentless criticism and ridicule. The whole historical record was up for review. Now that Russians were free to speak openly, they wanted to talk about everything that had just happened: the past and its many discontents. This conversation was not limited to reformers and democrats who sought a full-throttled confrontation with the Soviet past: the purges, the camps, the famines, collectivisation, the whole, decades-long horror show. Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk – historians, journalists, KGB colonels, survivors of the camps and the descendants of the men who had built, manned and overseen those camps.

Among them was Sergo Beria, who, in 1994, published a book about his father called My Father Lavrenty Beria. It is here that some of the first glimmerings of the post-Soviet anti-Khrushchev emerged into daylight. Beria, as is known, was the architect of the purges and the terror, the head of the secret police, the evil mastermind of the Stalinist programme (if it’s possible to say that Stalin required an evil mastermind). Setting aside all of Khrushchev’s half-crazed strategies for revivifying socialism – say, planting corn in Kazakhstan – and his innumerable antics and eccentricities, this much can be said for certain: he performed a great and noble deed when he had Beria arrested in the summer of 1953 and executed that December. Few men have so deserved to die. Naturally, Sergo Beria felt differently. His book enumerates, at length, Khrushchev’s many “betrayals” – including Khrushchev’s admittedly Stalinesque handling of the case against Lavrenty Beria, and his tendency to lie about or whitewash his own complicity in the Stalin-era purges. “It’s a sort of favourite indoor sport of Russian polemicists with scores to settle,” says Taubman, a political scientist at Amherst College. “Soviet memoirs and probably post-Soviet, too, are full of accounts based on something other than the most honestly rendered set of evidence.”

Nina Khrushcheva says Sergo Beria’s book is not the Khrushchev family’s concern. “He has a right to speak his mind, and we have a right,” she says. Referring to Stalin’s one-time rival Nikolai Bukharin, who was executed by Beria’s secret police in 1938, Khrushcheva says: “Maybe the Bukharin descendants should sue.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev rarely figured in public conversation: the man who headed the USSR at the apex of its power hardly seemed relevant to the chaos of a crumbling empire. But then Russia appeared to return to its former self – the unprecedented, quasi-anarchic openness of the 1990s came to an end, the secret police resurfaced, and at some point in the early part of this decade the name Khrushchev, instead of fading from the historical record, became a contested part of it again. It’s impossible to pinpoint the first anti-Khrushchev salvo, but by 2003, the campaign had reached critical mass. One typically non-committal but damning headline that year on Pravda.ru declared: “Some people blame Leonid Khrushchev for high treason, and others say he died a hero.” In the same year, the former Soviet defence minister Dmitry Yazov published a book, Blows to Fate, in which Leonid is once again dubbed a traitor and Stalin deemed the saviour of the Russian motherland. (Yazov, one of the coup plotters who briefly overthrew Gorbachev in August 1991, was given the Order of Merit by Putin in 2004 for service to the nation.)

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In 2005, the state-run television network Channel 1, the biggest, most-watched station in Russia, aired an eight-part mini-series called A Star of the Age, about the Second World War-era actress Valentina Serova and her husband, the poet Konstantin Simonov. Leonid Khrushchev figures only briefly; even so, one episode manages to squeeze in a full airing of the new account of his death. Khrushchev-fils is portrayed as a Benedict Arnold who defected to the Nazis and was later recaptured by the Red Army. Khrushchev-père (played by movie star Viktor Sukhorukov) is seen begging Stalin for mercy. Stalin, betraying a hitherto undocumented sense of fairness, explains that he cannot help Leonid – “What would I tell the other fathers?” says the Soviet dictator – shortly before Leonid is executed.

The Khrushchev family filed suit in a Moscow city court against Channel 1, charging the producers of the mini-series with defamation. “This is about defending a person who never did anything wrong, regardless of the fact that he is my father,” Yulia Khrushcheva says of the lawsuit. “And it is for Nikita Sergeyevich. This is a great injustice to his name.”

It should not come as a great surprise that the lawsuit has been languishing in various courts for nearly four years. Russia, after all, lacks anything akin to an independent judiciary, so all the testimony, argument and documentary evidence – establishing everything from Leonid’s parentage to the spelling of his name to his service in the air force to the date of his death – have done little to clear his name. Indeed, judges at the Moscow city court, appeals court and Supreme Court, where lawyers for the Khrushchev family have filed numerous motions, have ignored or flatly refused to consider the case, citing technicalities real and imagined.

So, in June 2007, the family took its case to the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg. Case No. 32680-07, Khrushcheva v. Russia, has not gone anywhere – a Court spokeswoman said it could be another year or so before the Court decides whether to move forward with a formal investigation – but it has prompted Russian officials to rethink their strategy. Nina Khrushcheva says Moscow’s Basmanny Court, since learning the family had appealed to Strasbourg, has indicated a certain willingness to consider its claim. Ole Solvang, the executive director of Russian Justice Initiative, a Dutch group that provides legal assistance to victims of human-rights abuses in Chechnya, says the government may be seeking a “friendly settlement,” one that would avoid a high-profile sifting through of all the documents and testimony surrounding Leonid’s death.
But a settlement, friendly or otherwise, seems unlikely since it is Leonid’s name, his public standing, that is in question. Far from backing down, the Khrushchevs in the past year have ramped up their offensive: The family lawyer, Vitaly Galkin, filed another lawsuit last summer against the Russian publisher Eksmo-Algoritm, which released an encyclopaedia in 2006, in which one volume, Epokha Stalina (The Epoch of Stalin), dedicates several pages to claims that Leonid was a Nazi sympathiser.

Pro-Kremlin forces, meanwhile, employ Soviet-style debate tactics when it comes to the former communist leader, denying that there is an anti-Khrushchev campaign while simultaneously furthering it. Khrushchev, they say, is a relic of a now-dead country – a minor figure who barely warrants official notice. “I’ve never heard Putin or Medvedev say anything nice about Stalin, and I’ve never heard them say anything bad about Khrushchev,” says Vyacheslav Nikonov, a Kremlin-friendly political analyst at Moscow’s Fond Politika who served in the Duma from 1993 to 1995. Younger Russians, he says, “don’t know the name” Khrushchev. Then comes the attack. Leonid Khrushchev, Nikonov adds, “was a traitor. That’s what I know from my grandfather.” This, of course, is an unverifiable statement. Who can argue with a conversation between a grandfather and a grandson? Nikonov offers no evidence to support his grandfather. But that’s not the point. The point is to suggest; soon, the suggestions will evolve into a belief, which will evolve into an orthodoxy.

Sergei Khrushchev compares today’s anti-Khrushchev propaganda to the early twentieth-century, anti-Semitic campaigns designed to build support for a flagging tsar. “Then they defended their God against the Jews,” says Khrushchev, who teaches international relations at Brown University. “Now they try to defend Stalin. They need to explain that it was Khrushchev who did it” – who brought shame on the Soviet Union. Amir Weiner, a Stanford historian who is an expert on Soviet totalitarianism, agrees with the Khrushchevs that the case against Leonid is bogus. “There is no proof for Leonid Khrushchev’s defection or collaboration with the Germans,” Weiner says. But he is sceptical of the family’s claim that the Russian government today is intentionally maligning the Khrushchev name. “The Kremlin per se has no interest in depicting the son of a Soviet leader as a traitor,” Weiner says. “The Great Patriotic War … is too important to the authorities and for the majority of the Russian population to be stained by such innuendo, which most historians reject in any case.”

Ultimately, as the Khrushchev family has discovered, identifying the all-important guilty party is mind-bogglingly difficult. Imposing order and process on the protracted defamation of a man’s character over many years in multiple media requires identifying suspects and motives. There are motives, to be sure. But it’s not at all clear that there are suspects.

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The quixotic legal struggle to clear Leonid Khrushchev’s name may seem a minor footnote, a historical irony that pits the heirs of one supreme leader against the power of another. But it represents precisely the kind of self-criticism that Russia has spent the better part of the past decade running away from. This process, which began under Gorbachev and petered out under Yeltsin before being aggressively opposed under Putin, is a precondition for any liberalisation. At its heart, at the core of the much-needed Russian conversation about Russia – Stalin, the meaning of the Gulag, the purges, the centuries-old tension pitting Westerniser against Slavophile – is Nikita Khrushchev. It was Khrushchev who embodied the Soviet dream, the rise of the peasant-worker to the highest echelons of the Soviet superstructure, and, at the same time, it was Khrushchev who gave voice to the contradictions, the inequities and iniquities of the system, who symbolises this double consciousness of contemporary Russia.

Nikonov, from the Fond Politika, claims this conversation is already taking place. “There has always been a conversation, and that will continue,” he says. “But it’s not a political issue any more. There are all sorts of discussions about Napoleon in France, but it’s not a political issue. It’s just something historians or academics do from time to time.” That may be true, but the fact that journalists are murdered in broad daylight in Moscow and that it’s illegal to assemble in large numbers – the Kremlin sent riot police to Vladivostok in December to put down an anti-Putin rally – and that there is no independent legislature or judiciary all suggest that, perhaps, the conversation needs to take place outside the realm of historians and academics. It is precisely because there is a functioning criminal-justice system in France while the all-powerful Russian state seems unable to find those responsible for the death of anti-Kremlin reporter Anna Politkovskaya that the French are able to ponder Napoleon in lecture halls and the Russians must debate Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev on live television.

The important question is what Khrushcheva v. Russia says about Russia today. Another way of putting the same query is to ask: “What do Russians today think of Khrushchev?” Or, better yet, “What do Russians think of democracy?” Russians might well ask what “democracy” means. The advocates of a freer Russia have routinely failed to say exactly what this place would look like, how it would be experienced, how people would pay for milk or a slab of meat. They have fought to open up the old country, and they have expected that whatever came next would be better, but they have neglected to explain that the linear path out of the ancient, pendulum swing is a process marked by uncertainty and failure en route to a more developed polity. They have failed to contextualise and explain – to lead.

To ask Russians what they make of Nikita Khrushchev today is to ask them what they think of his leadership. It was a half-measure: it pointed the way out of the dark, but it did not delineate a trajectory to anywhere in particular. Like the court case meant to rehabilitate his name, confined to a permanent stasis, Khrushchev inhabits an ill-defined purgatory, neither saint nor demon. To the question “What do Russians think of the former Soviet premier?” there is today no longer a single answer imposed from above – and this, strangely enough, may be a sort of progress.

Peter Savodnik has written for GQ, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Time and other publications. He lives in New York.