In the West his policies were dubbed de-Stalinization. This was understandable since Khrushchëv had devoted an entire report to denouncing Stalin. But Khrushchëv himself talked instead of a campaign to eliminate ‘the cult of the individual’.13 This was not an inappropriate term even though it was so euphemistic. For Khrushchëv kept Stalin’s kolkhozes in agriculture and his capital-goods priority in industry; he also refrained from rehabilitating Trotski, Bukharin and the various other communists alleged to have been foreign spies. Much remained in place that would have been congenial to Stalin.
Despite the limited nature of the closed-session speech, however, Khrushchëv was already experiencing difficulty in Moscow, where the Presidium baulked at his efforts to publicize the report. Only a brief summary was published in the press. Even this caused a furore. Many citizens were astounded by what was revealed about the 1930s and 1940s. It was not news to them that abuses of power had occurred: practically every household in the land had at least one relative who had fallen victim to the Gulag. But not everyone, especially amidst the generations born and educated under Stalin, had known that Stalin was the instigator of the horrors recounted by Khrushchëv. In Georgia he was venerated as a national hero although he had executed many Georgians. A riot took place in Tbilisi. Yet by and large, the revelations evoked an enormous sense of relief, and the decrease in overt political intimidation was enjoyed even by Stalin’s admirers.
Nevertheless Khrushchëv and his historians, crafty as they had been in formulating the case against Stalin, had not been quite crafty enough. They had done an efficient job solely in relation to the pre-war USSR. Since Lenin had founded the Soviet state, a ‘return to Lenin’ was an attractive path to recommend to comrades at home. But this could not be the case for the other countries of Eastern Europe or indeed for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. They had been conquered not in the Civil War but in Stalin’s military campaigns of 1944–5 – and now Khrushchëv, the Soviet communist leader, was claiming that Stalin was a mass murderer. The closed-session speech gusted away the rags of legitimacy claimed by communism in the countries of the Warsaw Pact.
First to express discontent were Polish industrial workers. As the rumours spread in Poland about Khrushchëv’s closed-session speech, they went on strike. Poles had always known that Stalin had been a wrong ’un, but Khrushchëv’s confirmation of this gave them irrefutable grounds for revolt. Compromises were swiftly agreed. Władisław Gomułka, the veteran communist imprisoned by Stalin in 1948 for showing too much care for Polish national interests, was released and, with much grumpiness, Khrushchëv assented to his becoming First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party.14 This manoeuvre was combined with police action in Warsaw. The strikes faded and order was restored. But the episode was yet another indication of the unpopularity of the Soviet Army, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the KGB throughout Eastern Europe. No Presidium member took seriously the official Soviet trumpetings about the fraternal feelings felt by the peoples of the Warsaw Pact towards the USSR.
Gomułka’s transfer to supreme power was the most spectacular example of the trend towards compromise. The Kremlin already in Beria’s time had slackened the pace of ‘Sovietization’ in Eastern Europe. Changes of personnel had been undertaken so as to hasten the acceptance of reforms. In particular, campaigns for agricultural collectivization had been halted. Recalcitrant Stalinists had been reprimanded in mid-1953, and told to adopt the Kremlin’s new course of policies.
But things went badly for the USSR. Rákosi was replaced as governmental premier by Imre Nagy but remained leader of the Hungarian party. Only after Khrushchëv’s speech to the Twentieth Congress in Moscow was Rákosi at last constrained to step down entirely. By then Budapest’s workers and intellectuals were pressing for the regime’s fundamental reform.15 Nagy’s Hungarian patriotism proved stronger than his Marxism-Leninism and he went along with the crowds, trusting that Moscow would not resort to forcible intervention. He also assumed that the West would lean on the Soviet Union to respect Hungary’s sovereignty. On 23 October a popular disturbance took place in Budapest. In the following week a revolt against Soviet domination occurred; and the courageous but naïve Nagy, a communist who had fallen foul of Rákosi in the late 1940s, continued to believe that a political compromise could be reached with Moscow. Visits by Mikoyan, Malenkov and Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador to Budapest, failed to induce a more realistic judgement.
On 4 November 1956 the tanks of the Soviet Army moved against the rebels. Resistance was fierce but futile. The Hungarian revolt was castigated by Khrushchëv as a counter-revolution inspired by the West, and Nagy fled to the safety of the Yugoslav embassy; but he was tricked into leaving it and taken into custody – he was executed in 1958 for refusing to repent of his actions. The NATO countries refused to intervene on Hungary’s side. The joint attack by British, French and Israeli forces on the Suez Canal preoccupied the West at the time; but in any case the great powers flinched from risking the outbreak of a Third World War. A tame Hungarian regime was set up in Budapest under János Kádár, and the countries of the Warsaw Pact were put on notice that, under Khrushchëv as under Stalin, no challenge to the Kremlin’s dominance would be tolerated.
The prestige of Khrushchëv, who had been hailed around the world as the hero of the Twentieth Party Congress, tumbled; but this did not bother him as much as the criticism he suffered in the Presidium. Already in June he had been compelled to agree to an official resolution playing down the abuses of power by Stalin. The Polish strikes and the Hungarian revolt gave further stimulus to his critics. Printed copies of the closed-session report were destroyed before they could be distributed. Legal publication in the USSR did not occur until the rule of Gorbachëv, and for this reason the report became known as ‘the secret speech’. Khrushchëv began to avoid overt commitment to reform; such was his discomfiture that at the end of the year he denounced anti-Stalinist novels such as Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone as being anti-Soviet. Khrushchëv had not attained supreme office to preside over the collapse of the post-war order in the USSR and its subject states.
But it was only a matter of time before Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich mounted an assault on him. On 18 June 1957 they struck. At a Presidium meeting lasting three days, Khrushchëv was outnumbered and defeated. Rather than simply sack him, Molotov and his friends had hit on the device of abolishing the post of Party First Secretary.16 In this way they hoped to win over those leaders alarmed by the renewal of dissension in the Kremlin. For any other contender for the leadership this might have been the end of the matter, but Khrushchëv staunchly insisted that the right to dismiss him lay with the Central Committee. With the assistance of Marshal Zhukov as Minister of Defence, Central Committee members were flown to Moscow to attend an emergency plenum. Some of them banged on the doors of the Presidium as it discussed Khrushchëv’s fate. The Central Committee plenum commenced on 21 June and resulted in a resounding victory for Khrushchëv.
Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich – along with their last-minute ally D. T. Shepilov – were dismissed from the Presidium by the Central Committee. Into the Presidium came Zhukov, Frol Kozlov and other figures who had stood by Khrushchëv in the crisis. Khrushchëv had won because his amalgam of policies continued to appeal to Central Committee members. Also important was the suspicion that his opponents, were they to achieve victory, might revert to terror. After the plenum, Kaganovich had rung up Khrushchëv pleading for mercy. Khrushchëv issued a contemptuous retort: ‘Your words yet again confirm what methods you intended to use for your vile ends … You measure other people by your own standard. But you are making a mistake.’17 Such self-righteousness would have been more plausible if Khrushchëv had not had Beria shot in 1953. In his favour, however, it deserves stress that his mercy towards the ‘Anti-Party Group’ was an important break with Stalin’s practices. Khrushchëv guaranteed that internal élite disputes should be conducted without manacles and rifles.
The policy of ‘socialist legality’ had been proclaimed since 1953. This did not signify that the USSR was meant to become a law-based state: Khrushchëv provided a system under which the constitution and the law would be enforced solely insofar as communist party rule was preserved. The Presidium’s dominance over high state policy remained in place. If Hungary needed invading or a summit with the American president arranging or a new crop imposing on the kolkhozes, this was normally done by the Presidium. Thus the Central Committee was able to intervene in discussions on policy only at the Presidium’s request – and this happened most decisively when the Presidium was itself divided. Yet the Central Committee had had a taste of power; and Mikhail Suslov, when pleading with the Central Committee to vote for Khrushchëv at the June 1957 plenum, took the liberty of noting the need for Khrushchëv to end his sharp-tongued, overbearing behaviour towards colleagues.19
For a while Khrushchëv seemed to take Suslov’s words to heart. He consulted often with Presidium and Central Committee members and published the proceedings of Central Committee plenums. Power at the centre was exercised more formally than before 1953. Party bodies met regularly and asserted control over the other public institutions. The party inherited by Khrushchëv grew in size as a recruitment campaign gathered strength. When Stalin died, there were nearly 6.1 million members; by 1961 there were 9.7 million.20 Khrushchëv also started to show considerable contempt for the desk-bound bureaucracy of the communist party apparatus. He wanted action in society, and he set an example by visiting factories, mines and kolkhozes. The party had to be mobilized so that the party might mobilize society.
The change in the party’s condition, however, had its limits. The party set policies, but these policies continued to be conditioned by the existing interests of groups, organizations and institutions. Thus the Soviet Army impeded a reconsideration of military priorities. Khrushchëv preferred nuclear weapons to the more traditional armed forces on grounds of cheapness as well as deterrence. Marshal Zhukov argued strongly against Khrushchëv. From Khrushchëv’s standpoint, Zhukov had outlived his usefulness as soon as the Anti-Party Group had been defeated. Khrushchëv moved with dispatch. In October 1957 a startled Zhukov was pitched into retirement. Nevertheless the Soviet Army command remained a serious constraint on the Presidium’s freedom to govern. So, too, were the economic ministries that could in practice choose which of the various priorities set for them by the Presidium they would pursue.
While the Presidium could push its policies upon the ministers as party members, the ministers in their turn had access to the party’s decision-making; and, much as he altered the party’s apparatus, Khrushchëv retained the system of economic departments in the Secretariat.21 As ever, the officials in such departments did little to inhibit the inclinations of ‘their’ ministries. The entanglement of party and government was strengthened in March 1958 when Khrushchëv, having waited his chance to get rid of Bulganin who had supported the Anti-Party Group, took over the post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers. The head of the party now also became head of the government.
Having worsted the Anti-Party Group, Khrushchëv at last felt well placed to rectify the inadequacies in consumer-goods production in Soviet factories.22 Malenkov’s priority became his own. This adjustment of policy, however, unsettled the institutional support that had facilitated his rise to power since Stalin’s death; the traditional lobbies in the army and the heavy-industrial civilian administrations were appalled by what they saw as his treachery. Conflict was avoided mainly because Khrushchëv did not push his wishes too hard. In any case he adhered to his original contention that agricultural improvements remained more urgent than changes in industrial investment policy. He expressed his opinion as follows: ‘It is important to have good clothing and good footwear, but it is still more important to have a tasty dinner, breakfast and lunch.’23 Khrushchëv also vetoed suggestions that Soviet automotive plants should produce cars for purchase by the private citizen.24
Thus his basic economic preferences were much more conventional than appeared from his declarations about the need to satisfy all the aspirations of Soviet consumers. The incidence of such declarations increased in the late 1950s, and his confidence in his own judgement on the entire range of official policies was extreme. Khrushchëv, the Party First Secretary and the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, led from the front.
His colleagues noticed the paradox that the politician who denounced the ‘cult of the individual’ was zealous in accumulating prestige. A day would not pass without his picture appearing in the press. The practice was resumed of prefacing books with mandatory eulogies to the party’s leader. Khrushchëv secured additional publicity for himself by appointing his son-in-law Alexei Adzhubei as editor of Izvestiya. He had a keen eye for self-advertisement (although the photograph of him wrapped in a bearskin rug probably confirmed the Western image of the threat posed by each Soviet leader!). Significantly, he stopped short of commissioning a full-scale biography: presumably his criticism of Stalin’s vanity-publishing ventures dissuaded him from such an attempt. But this was a rare instance of restraint. Khrushchëv demanded and obtained adulation from the press, radio, cinema and television.
It was this ebullience that had powered his rise from unpropitious social origins. As a lad in the village of Kalinovka in Kursk province, Khrushchëv had worked as a shepherd. In adolescence he had drifted – like many other young Russians – to the Don Basin and signed on as a miner. In the First World War he was active in the labour movement. In the Civil War he fought on the Red side, becoming a Bolshevik in 1918. His exuberant intelligence was coupled to ambition. After rising through the local party network in Ukraine, in 1929 he undertook training at the Industrial Academy in Moscow. Despite his inadequate formal education, he made further headway after taking up the cudgels against Bukharin in the struggle over the First Five-Year Plan. Kaganovich, who already knew him in Ukraine, helped to bring him to the attention of Stalin himself.
By 1935 Khrushchëv was leading the Moscow City Party Committee and three years later he became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine. In the Great Terror he was an unflinching purger, but he was also a dynamic administrator. In 1941 he became the main political commissar on the Southern front. His career was not without its setbacks. Stalin’s moods were hard to anticipate and Khrushchëv had sometimes carried metal-working instruments in his jacket in case he were suddenly to be cast down from office and were to need to seek factory employment.25 Yet Khrushchëv survived, and was honoured with the joint appointment as leader of the party and the government of Ukraine in February 1944. In December 1949, when he was recalled to Moscow as Central Committee Secretary, it had obviously been Stalin’s intention to use him as a political counterweight to Malenkov.
He relished the grandeur of supreme authority from the mid-1950s, and was delighted when his grandson enquired: ‘Grandad, who are you? The tsar?’26 He also liked his vodka and was given to earthy anecdotes and crude outbursts. A more careful First Secretary would not have said to Western politicians: ‘We will bury you!’ Nor would any alternative Soviet leader in 1960 have banged a shoe on his desk at the United Nations to interrupt a speech by the delegate from the Philipp
ines. In power, he had a wonderful time. He adored gadgets, and welcomed scientists to his dacha. Never having been an avid reader, he got distinguished authors to read their works aloud to him. He fancied himself as a thinker with a practical bent. Going to the USA in September, he admired the fertile plains of maize and on his return he instructed all kolkhozes and sovkhozes to grow it. Khrushchëv was ever the enthusiast.
But his impulsiveness irked his colleagues. The maize campaign was a case in point. Leading Soviet agronomists told him that it was a crop unsuited to many regions of the USSR. But he rejected their advice. Khrushchëv, like Stalin before him, always assumed he knew best, and he disrupted the work of any institution which opposed his policies. Even the Party Central Committee’s activities were impaired. Since Khrushchëv was not always able to secure its approval, he introduced outsiders to its proceedings so that they might help to put pressure on its members. In the process he undermined the very patterns of consultation and procedural regularity that he had once helped to establish.
Thus, having used the party apparatus as a means of taking supreme power, he attempted to reduce its capacity to constrain him; and he convinced himself that the party’s problems stemmed from the kind of officials he had inherited from Stalin. In 1961 he brought in a rule confining them to three periods of tenure of office:27 job insecurity for his erstwhile supporters increased. At the same time he was a sucker for flattery. A. M. Larionov, the first party secretary in Ryazan province, inserted himself into Khrushchëv’s affections by claiming an unprecedented expansion in local meat production. Larionov had achieved this only by killing off an inordinate number of livestock and by buying the remainder from outside his area. Found out, Larionov committed suicide in 1960. But Khrushchëv blundered on regardless. A vast turnover of personnel occurred in the late 1950s.
The Penguin History of Modern Russia Page 41
