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czechoslovakia

Ifirst encountered Czechs in 1915 when I was employed as a maintenance machinist at the electric power plant of a coalmine in Pastukhovka near Yuzovka (now Donetsk). Those working at the mine were mainly prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian army, who were highly varied in their ethnic composition. Among them were Czechs, Slovenians, Hungarians, Italians, and Germans. I remember Wehlmann, an Austrian German who was a noncommissioned officer. The conditions of life for the prisoners of war were

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rather free, the same as for Russian workers. They were housed in large dormitories that the miners called balagany.1 As a maintenance machinist I sometimes needed helpers, depending on the type of work being done. The engineer, whose name was Frolov, would assign the necessary number of helpers, most often prisoners of war. A Hungarian prisoner of war named Albert Pop, a peasant from Transylvania, a good and pleasant fellow, worked with me almost constantly. Pop said that Wehlmann (we communicated by gestures and mimicry and isolated words) was a bad man, that he was writing everything down, and when he returned to Hungary he would report it all to his superiors. In short, Wehlmann was acting as a spy.

The mine was located on territory that belonged to the Don Cossack Host, and so it was Cossacks that served as guards and police. They were on guard duty outside the dormitory, armed with revolvers and swords, and kept some sort of account of the prisoners, rather primitive and not at all strict, because the prisoners actually would go off walking in the fields quite freely, beyond the borders of the miners’ settlement. Also they came back when they felt like it. There were no standard times for sleep or rest. There were instances when I would leave the settlement at Pastukhovka to go visit my relatives [in Yuzovka], and a prisoner of war would stay at my apartment. He would spend the night at my place to guard the house so that it wouldn’t be burglarized. He might not sleep at the dormitory for two or three nights in a row, depending on how many days I was away. When I visited my parents I walked 25 versts from the house in Pastukhovka. My father was working at the Uspenskaya mine at that time. It was too far to walk all in one Sunday. After all, to go there and back by foot was a distance of some 50 versts.2 I could allow myself such visits only if I didn’t have to work for three days in a row—at Easter and at Christmas, major holidays when sometimes people didn’t work for five days in a row.

There were not many Czechs among the prisoners of war, actually only two. They didn’t work with me regularly. They were educated men; they had some sort of technical education, and they stood out distinctly because of their outward appearance, their neatness, and their precise and self-disciplined manner. I felt great respect for them. It was easier for me to talk with them because Czech is also a Slavic language. If we spoke without hurrying and with pauses between words we understood one another. It was not only about work that we talked. They themselves saw what needed to be done when they were helping me. These were intelligent and cultured people, and they knew perfectly well how to do the work. We talked about the war, and the Czechs were the main ones who did the talking. They had surrendered voluntarily. They hadn’t been captured but had seized an opportunity to cross over

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to Russia’s side. I know of such cases during World War II as well. In that war I encountered a small number of Czechs who had been serving in Hitler’s army. For example, I remember an incident I’ve told about earlier on the Southern Front when a Czech came over to our side of his own accord. Our military reported that they had captured a prisoner. When they brought him in he told me he had decided to come over to our side. One night, taking advantage of the darkness, he had crossed over with a machine gun in his arms, but he had a hard time finding our people. He barely found anyone he could surrender to. Later we joked about the fact that sometimes people claimed to have captured a prisoner when the prisoner himself had been looking for someone to surrender to. But of course in combat conditions they always reported that at the risk of their lives they had captured a prisoner.

The two Czechs I was working with [at Pastukhovka], who had become prisoners of war in 1915, told about the national movement among the people in the Czech regions [mainly Bohemia and Moravia], about the Slavophile3 sentiments that had grown strong there. They also mentioned the name Masaryk to me.4 I liked them a lot and enjoyed inviting them to my house and treating them to tea with jam. In response to my hospitality, they proposed: “Mr. Khrushchev, if you wish, we could organize some training sessions at your home and teach you mechanical drawing.” As a maintenance machinist such lessons would have been useful for me; in fact, it had been my dream to obtain such technical education and instruction. I replied that I would take advantage of their kindness with great pleasure. They gave me several lessons, but it only lasted a short time because they were soon sent off somewhere when Czech prisoners of war began to be brought together into military units for the organization of a special corps.5 That’s how I lost contact with them, but good memories of them have stayed with me. These people called themselves our brothers and said they didn’t want to fight against the Russians. They wanted to live in peace. Of course those conversations were of a broad and general nature, far removed from the concept of an internationalist working-class brotherhood. Their ideas were based more on Slavic kinship.

I must confess that I had never previously heard anything about Slavophiles, although by that time I was already reading proletarian newspapers. My first involvement with reading Social Democratic publications happened when I was working as an apprentice at the Bosse machinery plant. At first I began reading the Bolshevik paper Zvezda (Star) and then the Bolshevik paper Pravda (Truth).6

Later I had direct personal interactions with Social Democrats, but it was more on the basis of an understanding of the need for workers to unite against

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the factory owners. As for getting into the theoretical fundamentals of Marxist doctrine, on that I was rather weak. In 1922 they wanted to make me manager of some mines, but I refused, because I was asking the district party committee to send me to study at the workers’ school in Yuzovka. I had to exert a lot of effort to achieve what I wanted. The secretary of our district committee was Avraamy Pavlovich Zavenyagin, the future deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR.7 I had friendly relations with him, and in the end I convinced him and was released from the obligation of carrying out the decisions of the RCP(B) district committee to take over as manager of the Shcheglovsky group of mines, where I had once worked. I had worked there in 1914 at a mine owned by Gorshkov. The mine was named Albert after his son, and in 1915 I moved 4 versts from there to the electric power plant at the Pastukhovo mines [in Pastukhovka].

During the civil war I learned from the newspapers that Czech military units had been formed. They were used by the enemies of Soviet power against the Red Army.8 But I didn’t encounter them on the front lines. I read some details about them in Furmanov’s book Chapayev.9 There were a number of Czech internationalists, however, who supported our revolution. My next direct encounter with representatives of the Czech people was in 1935, when I was working as a secretary of the party’s Moscow city and province committees. The Seventh Congress of the Communist International [acronym, Comintern] was held in Moscow that year. I was one of the delegates from the AUCP(B) at the Congress. When the sessions ended, a decision was made by the party’s Central Committee that the Moscow party organization should arrange a dinner for the members of the congress. I was a host at the dinner, a kind of master of ceremonies, and I became acquainted with the delegates who were representing fraternal Communist parties.

That’s where I first met Klement Gottwald.10 I knew him before that from press reports, but I hadn’t met him in person. To help me preside over the dinner, I proposed that an assistant master of ceremonies be chosen who, first of all, should possess all the good qualities of a Communist, that is, who knew how to stand up for himself and his comrades; second, someone who was well acquainted with the other participants at the dinner. I proposed a candidate who I thought was the best—Dmitry Zakharovich Manuilsky.11 Everyone applauded, accepting his candidacy. Manuilsky was a very witty man, and I asked him to sit next to me so I could hand over the reins to him. Later when we worked together in Ukraine, where he was foreign minister for the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, he often reminded me of that episode. I always remember Manuilsky with warm feelings. He loved to

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drink, but he did so in moderation, and I never saw him even get tipsy, let alone drunk.

Cachin12 came over to that table. I had known of him from a distance, but now we became acquainted. He and Manuilsky embraced and kissed, during which time Cachin made some sort of an argument, and it was obvious that it embarrassed Manuilsky. It turned out that the Frenchman had drunk a little too much and was trying to convince everyone that Manuilsky was really the father of the French Communist Party. I assumed that there was a large proportion of truth in that, because Manuilsky lived for a long time as an émigré in France. He was fluent in French and subsequently carried out assignments for the Comintern, putting his talents to use when the French Communist Party was organized.

Of the foreign Communists who were present, I knew Comrade Togliatti13 best of all. His articles often appeared in our press, and he often gave reports at our party’s Moscow city organization. As I’ve said, I also became acquainted with Gottwald and his wife at that Comintern congress. She made a somewhat peculiar impression on me. We all lived an ascetic life at that time. That was expressed both in our clothing and our manners. But she showed up wearing fancy ornaments and, in our view, seemed to be under petty bourgeois influence. Gottwald himself, however, enjoyed high respect and solid authority.

The Czechoslovak problem confronted me head on in 1938 when I was a member of the Military Council of the Kiev Special Military District. The USSR had a treaty with Czechoslovakia, under which we were obligated to provide military assistance to Czechoslovakia in the event that France provided such assistance.14 When the German menace was hanging over Czechoslovakia’s head, we were given orders to bring our troops out of the barracks and advance to the Polish border in a state of combat readiness, ready to march in the direction of Lvov. That was the shortest route to Czechoslovakia, through southern Poland.15 Things ended up at Munich, as is generally known, with the French and British betraying Czechoslovakia, and Hitler soon incorporated that country into his Third Reich without a war.16 As for Poland, it categorically refused to allow our troops to cross its territory, let alone to take joint action with the USSR against the aggressor. This was a kindness that the Polish government did for the Germans. The Polish foreign minister traveled to Berlin, and Nazi leaders from Berlin arrived in Poland, demonstrating the friendship between Poland and Germany.17 The tactic of the German Nazis was to destroy their victims one by one, and they put this policy into effect rather skillfully. Czechoslovakia’s province of Sudetenland was the first victim. The region had a mainly German population. Then all

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of Czechoslovakia fell [in June 1939]. And soon the same fate befell Poland [in September 1939].

Our people who were in Prague after it was occupied by the Germans reported on their impressions. The Czechs were walking around dully, like flies in autumn. They didn’t raise their eyes from the ground. That’s how mournfully they suffered through the situation. Of course our people sympathized with them and understood the disaster that had overtaken the Czechs. Slovakia was made a separate state as an ally of Nazi Germany. And five years later I was fighting side by side with the Czechs, together on the front lines, where a Czechoslovak battalion, operating as a distinct unit and commanded by Colonel Ludvik Svoboda, was fighting as part of the Red Army.18 It distinguished itself in battle near Kharkov at the village of Sokolovo. After the liberation of Kharkov General Vatutin19 and I went to visit the Czechoslovaks. A brigade was formed from the battalion and Colonel Svoboda was summoned to Moscow. In his absence we talked with the command staff of that military unit and got acquainted with the fighting men.

That brigade made a good impression on me. It included, in particular, many people who spoke Ukrainian fluently, because they came from Transcarpathia, which before World War II was part of Czechoslovakia, and the Communists of Transcarpathian Rus [also known as Ruthenia] belonged to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Somewhat later I made Svoboda’s acquaintance. Under the constitution of Czechoslovakia, the formation of political organizations in military units was forbidden; thus it would seem that the Communist organization in that brigade was functioning illegally. But Svoboda followed a certain standard procedure: he would summon the leaders of the Communist Party organization in the brigade, tell them the tasks confronting their unit, and state what political work should be carried out among the troops. Thus, in fact, the party organization was functioning openly. And it couldn’t have been otherwise. After all, this brigade was taking part together with our troops in combat operations against Hitler’s forces on Soviet soil. With my own eyes I saw in detail how this brigade, which later became the First Czechoslovak Army Corps, headed by Svoboda, distinguished itself during the offensive in Ukraine in fall 1943, in the liberation of Kiev, and later at the approaches to the Carpathian Mountains.

When our Front had crossed the Carpathians and liberated Transcarpathian Rus, the leading figure in that region was, as I have told before, Ivan Ivanovich Turyanitsa.20 He was a product of the local Ukrainian population and ardently pursued the line that Transcarpathia should be unified with the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. At a meeting with active party members of the

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Transcarpathian region, which at that time was an independent republic—it had not recognized the Czechoslovak government leadership, but was not yet part of Soviet Ukraine—I made the acquaintance of Czech Communists who arrived at the meeting and also insisted that Transcarpathia should be part of Ukraine.21 Later that is what happened, but the decision was made in Moscow, where an agreement was reached with the émigré leadership of Czechoslovakia. When a new government was formed in Czechoslovakia it traveled to its homeland through Kiev. I received the government delegation there and assisted in its travel through Soviet territory until it reached the Czechoslovak state, which had been liberated by our troops.

Czechoslovakia’s ambassador to the USSR at that time was Fierlinger, a Social Democrat who later became a Communist. He understood the need for strengthening solid friendship with the Soviet Union. I don’t know what his personal fate was after the events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia,22 but I considered him a decent and honorable person. However, I remember the following unpleasant episode. Stalin expressed lack of confidence in him. For Stalin the reason was very persuasive. Fierlinger’s wife was French. I personally had no doubt whatsoever about his political reliability, but Stalin’s distrust hung over his head like a threatening cloud back then. Stalin had mercy on him, didn’t have him arrested. But because of Stalin’s suspicions, a certain negative aftertaste remained whenever there were meetings in which he participated.

I didn’t know Gottwald very well, although I did meet him once in the Crimea. Stalin called me up. I sensed that he was in a good mood. He invited me (which was the same as ordering me) to come to the Crimea: “Come on down as soon as you can. Gottwald is here, and he simply can’t live without you. He insists you must come without fail.” The next day I was in the Crimea. Stalin was living there in the former tsar’s palace at Livadia,23 where the Yalta Conference of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill took place in [February] 1945. Gottwald was put up in the Livadia palace, and I was given a room there as well. The huge palace also had an adjacent servant’s building, where the tsar’s retinue was housed when he came to Yalta. Our discussions were held mainly at dinnertime. Gottwald’s wife was also present. The conversations were sometimes casual in nature and sometimes intensely political. Stalin encouraged Gottwald to drink, but even without that Gottwald had a weakness for wine. So no great effort was required of Stalin to get Gottwald to drink. In fact the opposite was true; he had to be restrained in order to guard his health. His wife, a very large woman, knew her husband’s weakness, but she herself loved to drink. As a result, when Stalin poured out one more glassful she considered it one too many for her husband and said: “Comrade Stalin,

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allow me. I will drink it on his behalf and mine.” A lot of jokes and humorous remarks started up over that, but that didn’t free Gottwald of the obligation to participate in the next round. He often ended up drinking more than he should. His organism had already been weakened, and he rather easily became intoxicated.

Of the conversations that deserve mention, I remember the following.24 Gottwald asked Stalin the following question: “Why do your people in Czechoslovakia steal our technological secrets? They’re swiping everything that’s possible to swipe. Of course we see what’s going on, and that offends us. We take it as an insult. We have no secrets from you. If you have a need for some technological innovations, designs, or blueprints, just say so, and we’ll give them to you. That would be much better. Comrade Stalin, not only do we not wish to keep any secrets from you, but in general we are immediately agreeable to becoming part of the USSR. Let’s sign a treaty incorporating Czechoslovakia as part of the Soviet Union.” Stalin immediately rejected this proposal. He objected categorically, and I think he was right to do that. As far as the [stealing of] technological secrets goes (and that did take place), Stalin didn’t make any particular denials. He simply got around it by saying: “Yes, yes, anything is possible.”

On another occasion Stalin began asking me: “Is Gottwald right when he says that they’re getting a yield of 250–300 centners per hectare for sugar beets, when in Ukraine before the war the average yield was 150–160 centners per hectare?”

“Yes, Comrade Stalin, that’s true.”

This information was totally new to him, and he didn’t understand how it could be possible.

I explained: “Not only in Czechoslovakia but in Poland too the yield for sugar beets is much higher than in Ukraine. The information from our agronomists is that in Czechoslovakia and Poland a nasty insect pest that devours a large part of our sugar-beet crops—a kind of weevil—does not exist. Besides, Poland and Czechoslovakia get more rainfall in the summer than the beetgrowing regions of Ukraine. In their countries, small areas are devoted to growing sugar beets, and the farms are privately owned, better cultivated, and better fertilized. I don’t know how much more mineral fertilizer they have for their sugar-beet crops, and that’s also an important factor, but they do make wide use of organic fertilizer in the form of manure for their sugar-beet crops.”

The main question was the quality of work in the tending of the crops. At collective farms in our country where there were good work brigades, as at the farm of Mariya Demchenko,25 the yield we obtained was also 500 centners

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per hectare. That was a fantastically high yield for those times! The people who did that work were awarded the Order of Lenin for their heroic labor, but such yields remained isolated cases in our country. Stalin was irritated by this information. He very much wanted to show Gottwald the superiority of the socialist way of engaging in agriculture and the superiority of the collective farm system. How could these Czechs measure up to what we were doing! So he ordered me to debate with Gottwald on the question of agriculture, but I stated immediately that there could be no debate on this question, because I knew that Czech agriculture was on a higher level than ours and in particular that their sugar-beet yield was much higher.

When we met at the dinner table again, later on, and had an exchange of opinions on this subject, Gottwald was literally beaming over the fact that he had been right and had told Stalin the truth. On top of all that, the highest yields for sugar beets in our country were those we harvested in Ukraine, whereas in the Russian Republic (the RSFSR) with the exception of the Kuban region the yield is only half as much.

At that time Stalin had swept through many of the fraternal countries with the broom of his repression, but so far Czechoslovakia had not been touched in real earnest. Stalin directed his feelings of dissatisfaction along this line, and said to Gottwald: “How do things stand with you in regard to the purges? Your Chekists [security police] are probably not working well, so you fail to see where your enemies are.”

Gottwald answered boldly: “Comrade Stalin, we have no traitors in our party, and I will explain why. We had a strong party before the war. It remained a legal party in capitalist Czechoslovakia, so our enemies didn’t have any special need to send secret agents into our party. They knew everything about us already. Our meetings were held openly. The work of the party was conducted openly, in the public eye, so that both friends and enemies knew exactly all the steps that the Communist Party took.”

That answer upset Stalin terribly, and in Gottwald’s absence, in our inner circle, he said: “What a blind kitten that Gottwald is. He doesn’t understand that it’s impossible not to have enemies inside the party!”

Of course enemies existed, but Gottwald considered the main enemy to be the class enemy; that is, it was clear enough which side people were on in the class struggle being waged in Czechoslovakia, and that struggle would successfully lead to the victory of the working class. However, Stalin proposed that Gottwald accept our Chekists as advisers, stating that they had the necessary experience and could help expose hidden enemies. Gottwald agreed to the proposal, and he could not have disagreed. Such disagreement would have

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meant arousing Stalin’s distrust completely, which would have been even worse. Our “advisers” were sent. They had already “done their work” of destroying innocent and honest cadres in other fraternal countries; they had done that work good and proper. And soon incriminating “materials” against specific leaders of Czechoslovakia began arriving in Moscow, particularly denunciations of Slansky, as well as a number of other comrades.26 I didn’t know Slansky personally, but I did know that as general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia he had enjoyed the trust and respect of the party and the people. And suddenly they made an “enemy of the people” out of him.

When he received that information Stalin was triumphant. He had been proved right, and Gottwald, who had tried to convince Stalin that there were no enemies of the people in the Czechoslovak party, had been proved indeed to have been a blind kitten, incapable of realizing that right under his nose enemy work was going on. At that point Gottwald surrendered, and the “meat grinder” of bloody slaughter began operations in Czechoslovakia, similar to the operations in our country before the war.

Soon Stalin died. A delegation from the Czechoslovak government headed by Gottwald came to Stalin’s funeral. At the funeral, Gottwald caught a very bad cold, fell ill, and soon died.27 Bulganin went to his funeral representing our country as minister of defense of the USSR. The death of Gottwald aroused feelings of alarm in us. After all, he had been the main figure responsible for friendly relations between our parties and countries. We trusted Gottwald and considered him a reliable link. Antonin Zapotocky28 was named Gottwald’s successor as president. He was a veteran Communist, a tried and tested individual. Although a former Social Democrat he aroused no suspicion in us.

However, Cepicka29 caused us some embarrassment. Cepicka had replaced Svoboda as Czechoslovakia’s minister of defense in 1950. He was married to Gottwald’s daughter, a circumstance he made skillful use of. He had been educated at a law school. When he was appointed minister of defense (while Stalin was still alive), he made a display of hyperactivism. Stalin trusted him.

Cepicka was a real “go-getter,” a man who knew how to get ahead in this world. He had a glib tongue and could present a report skillfully; he knew how to have a “productive” conversation with another person and make an appropriate impression on that person. Meanwhile General Svoboda was relieved of his duties as deputy chairman of the Czechoslovak government. When a new leadership was coming in, in Czechoslovakia, after the deaths of Stalin and Gottwald, we justifiably began to regard Cepicka simply as a careerist. We assumed that he was mainly attracted by the career position of being

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minister of defense and wearing a military uniform, and we expressed our opinion to the Prague leadership.

A Soviet delegation had been sent to the Tenth Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia [in 1954]. It was proposed that I head the delegation, and during my attendance at sessions of the congress I noticed how weighty was the authority Cepicka enjoyed in the Politburo.30

While we were still preparing for the visit, we discussed problems that our delegation might encounter in Czechoslovakia, and I expressed a desire to meet with General Svoboda, because I assumed that he was undeservedly out of favor. He was working somewhere with a job as something like an accountant. Much better use could be made of him. He had been a prominent military commander. He should again be raised to a position of authority and restored to an active part in the work of the government. It would have been simply embarrassing and shameful if I had gone to Czechoslovakia and not met with the man I had fought side by side with as part of the First Ukrainian Front, where I had been a member of the Military Council. He had been one of my subordinates, and was I now suddenly to forget him? He had fought with merit and been awarded an Order of Lenin. Thus, for me not to meet with him would have simply been a lapse of propriety. My colleagues agreed with me, and I was accordingly given official instructions to go visit him, shake his hand, and bring him some typical gifts from our country—caviar and souvenirs of that sort.31

[After Gottwald’s death in March 1953] the new party leader in Czechoslovakia was [Antonin] Novotny, formerly the first secretary of the party committee in Prague.32 I had not previously been acquainted with him. He held the post that Slansky had held before the latter’s arrest. Good relations were established between him and me, as they were with the minister of internal affairs, Barak, who was a good friend of the Soviet Union. Later Barak was arrested [in 1962] and condemned while Novotny was in the leadership. I must admit that I felt very sorry for Barak, but I could say nothing in his defense because facts were presented at the trial that one could not overlook.33 Besides, we tried to be cautious in relation to internal policies of other Communist parties. Therefore, if we were informed about something that we didn’t agree with, although we would express our doubts, most often we avoided such questions.

For the time being all I said to our Czechoslovak friends was that I wanted to meet with General Svoboda and asked whether they had anything against my meeting him. I began to explain that I felt it would be improper not to meet with him, not to go see him [in the light of our previous acquaintance]. My

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request was met with a rather energetic protest, and those who protested directed their energy toward demonstrating that Svoboda deserved no political confidence, nor did he deserve being paid any other attention. All sorts of arguments were made. The one who had the most prejudiced attitude toward Svoboda was Cepicka, but his heated arguments did not represent a proof for me. I understood that if Svoboda’s authority was revived as a military professional who had fought on the Soviet side against Nazi Germany, it could threaten the position held by Cepicka. But Novotny and Zapotocky also argued heatedly against Svoboda. One of their arguments was that during the 1948 revolution, when the Czechoslovak bourgeoisie wanted to get rid of the influence of the Communist Party and when the working class on the contrary wanted to overthrow the previously existing government, and did so, Svoboda had been minister of defense, and in that capacity had remained a trusted confidant of President Benes and had refused to go along with the aims of the Communist Party.34

I then said: “We must approach this question in a cooler, calmer, more collected manner. It seems to me that none of you worked hard enough at winning Svoboda over. I consider it a major merit on Svoboda’s part that he didn’t bring out the army to oppose the Communist takeover [in 1948]. Consequently, he did not support the bourgeois government and its president [Benes]. Even if he showed some wavering, he did nothing harmful to the revolution carried out under the leadership of the Communist Party. Therefore he should not be isolated; on the contrary, you should try to bring him closer and make him your ally, who would participate in building socialism under the leadership of the Communist Party.” When Cepicka, Novotny, and the others again began to sharply object and I saw that they would try to rebut my remarks, I added: “This is your internal affair. I don’t want to impose anything on you. But I would ask that you take an understanding attitude toward my personal request. I would like to visit Svoboda, shake his hand, and give him a gift in my name and on behalf of the Soviet Union as a sign of our recognition of his participation in the war against our common enemy.” At that point they no longer objected, but their attitude toward the idea was rather cold. This was unpleasant for me, but I went and made the visit anyhow.

They assigned someone to escort me, and we headed for some location in an outlying part of Prague or beyond the city limits. A man in civilian clothes came out of a small house. It was Svoboda, with his wife and teenage daughter. I said a hearty hello, shook his hand, presented him with the souvenir that had been prepared for him, but keeping in mind the attitude of the Czechoslovak leadership toward my visit, I didn’t go inside his house. All of this was bitter

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and offensive for me to see and hear. I didn’t have sufficient confidence in what his antagonists had said, and I thought a lack of understanding was being displayed here. Instead of restoring a man like that to a place in the leadership, they were pushing him away. Subsequently Svoboda did join the Communist Party, left his job as an accountant, and began working with the volunteer military association. Evidently my appeal to the leadership of Czechoslovakia and my arguments in Svoboda’s favor had some effect.35

Let me go back to the conversation with Gottwald in the Crimea that I have mentioned earlier. Stalin at that time raised the question of whether we should send our troops into Czechoslovakia. What reason was there for that? The Cold War was heating up. Good relations with our former allies had broken down, relations established through our joint actions against Nazi Germany. The president of the United States, Truman, did not have a mind that could truly grasp problems of state, and he pursued a spiteful policy in relation to the USSR. His personal qualities can be judged by the fact that he physically struck a journalist who had criticized his daughter, saying she wasn’t a good singer.36 And this from a president of the United States? His country did impermissible things back then. U.S. planes violated the borders and flew over the territory of the USSR, not to mention Czechoslovakia. They flew over Czechoslovakia every day, especially its western borders. That’s why Stalin developed some anxiety that U.S. troops might invade the territory of Czechoslovakia and restore the capitalist government that had been overthrown there in 1948. That’s what prompted Stalin to suggest that we send our troops into all the “people’s democracies.” Our troops were already deployed in Poland, Hungary, and Romania, but not in Bulgaria or Czechoslovakia.

Gottwald reacted in a very correct way to Stalin’s proposal: “Comrade Stalin, you can’t send Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia. Not in any way. Because that would completely ‘spoil the porridge’ and create unbelievable difficulties for our Communist Party. There is a very good attitude now among Czechs and Slovaks toward the Soviet Union. If troops were introduced, it would create a new situation. It would be as though we were no longer an independent state. Previously we were a dependency of the Germans, part of the AustroHungarian empire and part of Germany. And now would we again be losing our freedom? I request very strongly that you not do that. If the Americans were to violate our borders, that would be a different question. That hasn’t happened thus far, and so I ask you not to send your troops.” Stalin agreed. He had just been probing to see how Gottwald would react. No firm decision had ripened in his mind, and that’s why he didn’t undertake any action along

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those lines. I would argue that what he did was correct, because otherwise Soviet-Czechoslovak friendship might have come to an end.

Stalin never again raised that question during his lifetime. We were even less inclined to raise such a question after 1953 during my leadership of the USSR, during the presidency of Zapotocky in Czechoslovakia and after he was replaced in that post by Novotny. The chairman of the Council of Ministers of Czechoslovakia was Siroky.37 Novotny told me that Siroky was displeased with his post. It seems that there was an agreement between the Czechs and Slovaks that they would take turns; that a Czech would hold the post of president for one term, and in the next term it would be held by a Slovak. When Gottwald was president he was accepted by both Czechs and Slovaks.38 Then the Czech Zapotocky became president. The Slovak Siroky aspired to that post after Zapotocky. But the leadership, consulting among themselves with Siroky present, again appointed a Czech. Siroky, as I have said, became chairman of the Council of Ministers. My reply to Novotny was that this was their internal affair. Besides, Novotny informed us that Siroky had been in Slovakia when it was an ally of Hitler during the war. He had been a Communist engaged in illegal activity and had been arrested by the Gestapo, been imprisoned, and then escaped. In this connection a certain political distrust of Siroky had developed. But I think if you take a prejudiced approach toward anyone, if you approach a person with the preconception that he is an enemy who has not yet been exposed, and you imagine that he escaped from prison with the help of the Gestapo as a way for him to penetrate the underground movement, if you have such a desire, you can dig up any kind of “confirming evidence.” But if you take a trusting attitude, it’s a different matter. I never noticed anything bad about Comrade Siroky from that point of view.

We had no grounds to express lack of confidence in Novotny either, especially since he was saying something that was not just his private opinion, but the opinion of a certain circle in the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. I say this to give a more precise sense of the atmosphere that had built up around Siroky when he was expecting to be appointed president. Perhaps he displayed his dissatisfaction somehow, and that was taken personally by the Czech Novotny, who at that time was holding the post of president. This is a complicated question, to which I didn’t give much thought at that time. I considered it an internal affair of that country. But wasn’t this a factor soon after, when Siroky was relieved of his duties as chairman of the Council of Ministers and Lenart39 was promoted to replace him? It’s true that Lenart was also a Slovak. He later became first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia. He was a young man. I didn’t

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know him personally. But people in the apparatus of the CPSU Central Committee knew him because he had studied in Moscow. Naturally we had nothing against him. We liked him, and we considered him a capable political leader for whom we had great hopes.

Now I want to tell about a conversation that occurred between Novotny and me after the CPSU Twentieth Congress. It had a depressing effect on me. During the Twentieth Congress everyone found out that Stalin had abused power, but we still trembled before the authority that Stalin had held in the past, so much so that we were unable to condemn his atrocities at the top of our voices. In this we were going against the Russian proverb that says, “You can’t keep washing a black cat until it turns white.” Today there’s no longer any doubt that the cat was black. Yet back then we still kept trying to wash him clean. We tried to convince ourselves that some devil had led him astray, and that the devil had been Yagoda at one time, Yezhov at another, and Beria at another. We shouldn’t have done things that way. I have already told about the big internal struggle connected with the report at the Twentieth Congress. The main opponents of giving that report had been Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov. Voroshilov has now been buried with honors, in the city of Lugansk. At one time it had been called Voroshilovgrad, and now it has had its old name restored to it.40 How many people were destroyed as a result of this man’s actions, and how many millions perished during the war, for whose deaths People’s Commissar of War Voroshilov bears the responsibility? The title “first marshal” has been restored to him.41 Sometimes things like that happened. I consider that another consequence of the fact that we have not yet freed ourselves from the habit of trembling in front of the figure of Stalin. We haven’t got up enough courage to call things by their real names.

Such crimes cannot be forgiven! Forgiveness is like giving a blessing. If you forgive one criminal, you’re blessing other potential criminals to go ahead and commit new crimes.

So then, on assignment from the CPSU Central Committee we held talks with representatives of the Communist parties from the fraternal countries, explaining to them in detail our understanding of what had happened in the past, what was being disclosed and how, and we entrusted them with all the materials from the Twentieth Congress. The Polish comrades “helped” us. The text of my speech at the closed session of the Congress about Stalin’s abuses of power ended up, to put it colorfully, being sold at farmers’ markets in Poland for one ruble per copy. Then people in other countries quickly learned about the content of that document. When I had a conversation with Novotny I was surprised by his reaction. He trembled and had a furiously

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negative reaction: “No, Comrade Khrushchev, things were not like that in our country. In our country everything was done according to the law. Juridically speaking, the arrests were completely justified, as were the severe sentences.” My reply was this: “Comrade Novotny, we recommend that you take another look because we already have some experience in this matter. We also thought that everything was being done according to law, that the arrests and executions were justified, and that these people actually had been enemies of the people. Today our legal experts have examined the dossiers on the basis of which the trials and executions were carried out, and it is now clear that

those people should not have been arrested or even detained.” Novotny said: “No, it was not like that in our country!”

I said: “Well, look, in your country you executed Slansky, the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, along with others. I remember very well that Stalin argued with Gottwald that you must have enemies of the people in your party because even in the Soviet Union there were many enemies. Gottwald replied that in your country there were no enemies. Then Stalin sent Chekist ‘advisers’ who quickly did find enemies.”

Novotny repeated: “No, that was not a matter of Stalin’s instructions.”

I too, repeated: “Comrade Novotny, this is your internal affair. It’s simply that I have been assigned by our leadership to advise you once again to look at everything. Why do we give this advice? Because time will pass, and this question will come up again. Documents will be brought out and everything will turn against you. If you want the truth to triumph, it’s better to display some initiative now. Look at all the documents, and if there were unjustified arrests and sentences, you have to tell the party and the people that honestly. I don’t know who in your country was guilty of evildoing, but it’s better for you personally to take the initiative. You will also have to live through the reaction of your people in connection with those painful events of the past. On the other hand, you would have taken the initiative in exonerating those unjustly sentenced. If you don’t do that, the time will come when you will be made to answer for it, and then you’ll find yourself in a different situation.”

I repeated to him the arguments I had made against Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and others during the Twentieth Congress. At that time Voroshilov had objected, saying: “We’ll be made to answer for it.”

I had replied: “Yes, we’ll be made to answer. Anything can happen. But let’s honestly and sincerely confess what we knew and what we didn’t know. Then the attitude in the party and among the people will be different. Because we told the people everything we knew at that time.”

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In Czechoslovakia in the 1950s they didn’t draw the conclusions they should have, although in all the other fraternal countries rehabilitation and exoneration of all those who had innocently suffered was carried out. Only the leaders of Czechoslovakia held to the old positions. Stalinist positions, if we are to put it bluntly. It was Stalin’s advisers who found the “enemies.” On the basis of fabricated materials people were arrested and executed. Those decisions remained in force, unquestioned. Novotny didn’t understand his responsibility; he didn’t understand the significance and necessity to restore human justice and political purity. Novotny didn’t make the decision that was needed.42 And now everyone knows how it all ended for Czechoslovakia in 1968 and afterward. I foresaw that; it could have ended in no other way. I greatly regret that Comrade Novotny didn’t listen to my advice then. Siroky has also departed from the political arena. At any rate I’m unable to find out anything about him from the press.43

Then Husak44 emerged on the main arena. What did I know about him? Nothing. I have a vague recollection that Novotny mentioned his name in some conversation, saying that there were some nationalistically minded people in Slovakia, that in general the Slovaks were nationalists and it was very difficult to come to agreement with them. He was suggesting that Husak also was engaged in persistent and active nationalist propaganda and organizational work against the leadership of Czechoslovakia at that time. Was that so? By the way, feelings of Slovak nationalism did not interfere with love for the Soviet Union. The same was true of the Czechs in my time.

I was in Czechoslovakia one summer at some major factories. Novotny and I were walking through a foundry. The conditions of work in a foundry are well known to me, from the time when I worked as a young man at a machinery plant. Silence reigns. The workers are bent over, getting the forms ready for the steel to be poured. As we were walking by, one man suddenly stood up and ran over to the box where his personal effects were kept. As it turned out, a hole had been dug in the ground there, to keep a pitcher of beer cool. He ran back with the pitcher and offered me some beer, the traditional national drink of the Germans and Czechs. Nothing is done there without beer. They even bring it to work and drink it instead of water. In our country that would be considered drunkenness, but not there. I drank a little (after all, Czech beer is the best in the world) and thanked the worker. Other manifestations of a good and friendly attitude toward us could be found everywhere, especially in the countryside.

As you drove through the streets you could tell what people’s attitudes were. People immediately give themselves away with the looks on their faces and

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in their eyes. And how else could people behave toward the Soviet Union, which had done so much for Czechoslovakia? The people knew very well what the Soviet Union had done in 1938, when there was the threat that they would lose their independence and that Hitler would seize the Czech state. They knew that we energetically proposed to France to begin military activities if any moves were made toward occupying Czechoslovakia. The French refused. People in Czechoslovakia know that we asked the Poles to allow our troops to pass through. We brought our troops up to the Polish border and intended to go through Polish territory to provide aid to Czechoslovakia, regardless of what position Poland took. In the concluding stage of the war, when Soviet troops smashed Hitler’s forces and took Berlin, Prague had not yet been liberated. The threat of destruction still hung over the city. The Prague proletariat rose up in rebellion. It fought one on one against Hitler’s troops. It was an unequal struggle. The workers appealed to the Soviet Union for fraternal aid, and Marshal Konev received the order to move his tank troops from Germany to provide assistance. Assistance was provided. Prague was saved and liberated forever from the Nazi occupation by Soviet troops. The Czechoslovak people knew that very well. They remembered and appreciated it, and they expressed their appreciation in their good attitude toward the Soviet Union and the peoples of the USSR.

I must say that we often conducted ourselves rather clumsily, although sincerely. We had no self-seeking aims in our friendship with Czechoslovakia. I’m talking about the time after Stalin’s death. We did everything to help develop its economy. Everyone knows today that raising the economic level in any country can be done only as the result of the extensive and intensive development of science, technology, and invention. If other countries have rich natural resources or wide fields, economic development can be based on that, and a rise in the people’s living standards can be assured. However, Czechoslovakia did not posses those attributes. It did not have rich mineral deposits. Uranium had been mined, but, as I recall, that was dying out. Czechoslovakia is very densely populated, and therefore not only could it not export agricultural products; it was forced to buy them from abroad. In short, the Czechs could rely only on their intelligence and ability to organize production. By developing foreign trade they could keep their people’s living standards on a high level. That’s something the people of Czechoslovakia are fully capable of because they are people with a high level of culture.

The consumer goods and machinery in Czechoslovakia were better than in the other socialist countries. Whenever the question of buying a machine in Czechoslovakia came up, we did so by an exchange of goods in kind

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(tovaroobmen). If we wanted to buy the same products on the capitalist world market, we would first have to sell goods that would earn hard currency; most often raw materials. Then we used that hard currency to buy a machine from a capitalist country. Such commercial operations were more difficult for us, and therefore we appealed to Czechoslovakia [to supply us with machinery in an exchange of goods in kind (tovaroobmen)].

Sometimes Czechoslovakia faced a situation in which it, too, had to sell goods on the capitalist market to obtain hard currency for the purchase of consumer goods that could not be obtained on the socialist market. A conflict of interest between the buyer, the side placing the order, and the seller, the one delivering the goods, could be noted when the Czechoslovaks decided in favor of selling their products on the capitalist market [rather than selling them to the Soviet Union or another socialist country]. In all the socialist countries people did that [sold products on the world market to obtain hard currency], but I sometimes heard comments expressing offended feelings: “Those Czechs—they’re really mercenary traders. They won’t sell their goods to us. They sell them abroad.” The same thing was said about the Romanians.

I always tried to explain, as much as I could, that the reason for this was not an absence of friendly relations or a lack of respect toward some country. It was dictated by the conditions in which Czechoslovakia lived. It had to be understood that, at least for the time being, it could not satisfy its needs at home without trading on the capitalist world market. We could not provide everything for Czechoslovakia through our own market. I said: “One must take a cautious and solicitous attitude toward Czechoslovakia and not lock it into trading only with socialist countries. We should view this policy of the leaders of the Czechoslovak state without jealousy. For now, living standards in Czechoslovakia are higher than in the USSR. But that is the result of history. The line we should take is not to lower their standard of living by exhausting Czechoslovakia’s resources, but on the contrary to raise living standards by developing our economy. That will raise living standards for all the peoples of the socialist countries. The task is not to impoverish but to enrich, to have higher living standards by raising the economic levels of those countries that don’t have such a high living standard for now. What does that mean—a high standard of living or the opposite? It’s a relative concept. A person who is well provided for wants to have more. And that’s normal.”

I remember that great damage was done to Czechoslovakia by the policies of the Chinese. Czechoslovakia needed customers to place orders. When China began to industrialize, it placed a large load [of orders] with Czechoslovak industry, and the Czechs had a proper appreciation of that. It was to their

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advantage. But after Mao dreamed up the “great leap forward,” China suddenly stopped placing the orders it had previously placed with Czechoslovak industry.45 Novotny told me that they could suffer a general economic collapse because these orders had been withdrawn. The Czechoslovak factories were not able to sell any goods, and consequently people were not being paid and the entire process of production was disrupted. Novotny therefore flew immediately to Moscow to consult with us on what to do.

After discussing the situation, we instructed the USSR State Planning Commission to look into the matter together with officials of the Czechoslovak State Planning Commission: if there were some items from the canceled orders that the Czechs could not sell on the Western market, perhaps we could purchase them to meet our needs. We took a lot on our shoulders at that time. Production of some of the machinery and equipment they were building for China was close to completion or had been completed, while the rest was at various uncompleted stages. Some of the orders placed by China were unique—items we couldn’t make use of anywhere. The Czechoslovak government couldn’t sell them on the Western market either, because they were produced on special order from China. This created a difficult economic situation in Czechoslovakia. It seems to me there is no situation to which a solution cannot be found. But the solution is not always economically expedient. This had been a hostile act on Mao’s part. A real partner doesn’t act that way. But he felt bound to nothing and bound by nothing. He began to pursue an unrestrained policy in which any and all means to an end were acceptable.

Our policy line also dealt blows sometimes to Czech and Slovak honor and self-respect, especially the line taken in our press. You can read in our papers and hear on the radio that such-and-such a machine is being built, which was designed with Soviet aid. You often hear reports that something is being processed in Czechoslovakia with Soviet aid. But there is a total absence of reports that anything is being developed or produced in our country with Czechoslovak aid. There are no reports balancing this one-sided approach. The Czechs of course don’t say anything to us, but it must be understood that they’re insulted by our lack of appreciation for their technological skills and intelligence. It’s well known that the Czechs are good scientists, engineers, and economists. They produced excellent weapons in a number of defense sectors earlier than we did, and we used their ideas and their labor. Suddenly here’s such an arrogant attitude, which is totally unjustified, and it wounds people where they are most sensitive. This isn’t taken into account in our country. This approach is like the one taken by the old-time merchants, that

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if you’re rich and powerful, you can turn your back on others, not even look at them, and even tread on your partner’s toe where he has a painful corn. What does that mean? Get your foot out of my way! Move quicker! It always makes me suffer when they make such irresponsible declarations, especially when broadcast by the radio station Mayak.46 Maybe it’s not intentional, but they have such an uncaring attitude toward our friends. The insults keep piling up, and they may ruin the relations between our countries.

To this day I don’t understand how we could have reached such a state of relations with Czechoslovakia. How could we have got into the state of affairs of the events of 1968? I cannot in any way agree that the Czechoslovaks were giving into imperialist propaganda or wanted to restore the capitalist mode of production. I don’t believe it! This contradicts all my understandings about the progressive nature of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Hasty conclusions are drawn by those who think that discontent had affected the broad masses. And then there came the invasion of Czechoslovakia by our troops. Then came the revival of Stalinist practices. On television I have watched sports presentations conducted in Czechoslovakia. A big public meeting was held before a ski jump demonstration. Thousands of people gathered. Using standardized clichés, the official speaker began bowing down verbally before the leadership of the country. Why was this necessary? It’s a sporting event, and they begin by referring to Husak, after which there was some pathetic clapping of hands. It was obvious that the crowd that had gathered had no respect for him. But when it was Svoboda’s turn to be mentioned, the reaction was more friendly. Once our troops had been sent into Czechoslovakia, reason required that they be withdrawn as quickly as possible. That’s the only way a brother country can be made a real friend. Of course troops can be kept there, and any manifestation of resistance can be suppressed by force.

But most people regard our actions as a lack of respect for the sovereignty of the Czechoslovak state, and they base their attitude toward us accordingly. I don’t think it requires any special effort to prove this. That public meeting that I saw on television revealed a lot. The presence of our troops in Czechoslovakia is not based on the Potsdam Agreement, as it is in Poland and East Germany. In my opinion this was an expression of irrationality, and actions were taken too hastily. I’m not going to go into this question at length now. History will sort it out. But nowadays the general interpretation is that it was inevitable, unavoidable, and even useful. That it has improved and strengthened the friendship between our countries. But here there can be different understandings of the situation. I belong to the category of people who think that friendship is strengthened not by occupying someone else’s country—even

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though it was all made official and justified by the signing of some sort of agreement after the fact.

In this connection, I remember Comrade Gottwald again. He was an intelligent man. He understood the moods of the Czechs and Slovaks, and when the conversation began about the possibility of sending Soviet troops to Czechoslovakia, he, as I have said, demonstrated to Stalin that it should not be done; that it would damage our friendship. Today, so many years later, it’s impossible not to appreciate the correctness of Comrade Gottwald’s warning. Even today what he said is correct. I think that, as the saying goes, the mills will grind and there will be flour [that is, everything will turn out all right in the end] and that the people of Czechoslovakia will walk in step with the other peoples of the socialist countries, above all with the Soviet people. Our people and our party are the sincere friends of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and of the Czechoslovak people. We have one goal in common: fraternal cooperation of all people who are fighting for socialism, fighting for communism.

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