Khrushchev in the Kremlin

Policy and Government in the Soviet Union, 1953–64

Jeremy Smith, Melanie Ilic, Jeremy Smith, Melanie Ilic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136831812
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

This book presents a new picture of the politics, economics and process of government in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. Based in large part on original research in recently declassified archive collections, the book examines the full complexity of government, including formal and informal political relationships; economic reforms and nationality relations in the national republics of the USSR; the treatment of political dissent; economic progress through technological innovation; relations with the Eastern bloc; corruption and deceit in the economy; and the reform of the railways and construction sectors.

The book re-evaluates the Khrushchev era as one which represented a significant departure from the Stalin years, introducing a number of policy changes that only came to fruition later, whilst still suffering from many of the limitations imposed by the Stalinist system. Unlike many other studies which consider the subject from the perspective of the Cold War and superpower relations, this book provides an overview of the internal development of the Soviet Union in this period, locating it in the broader context of Soviet history.

This is the companion volume to the Jeremy Smith and Melanie Ilic's previous edited collection, Soviet State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev (Routledge, 2009).

1
Introduction

Jeremy Smith

Nikita Khrushchev did not stride on to the stage of world history so much as wander casually on to it. Even with the elimination of the man regarded as the most powerful in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death – Lavrenti Beria – several greater luminaries outshone the man from Ukraine: not just the veterans of the Revolution and long-time Stalin lieutenants Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich and Anastas Mikoyan, but also the rising star Georgy Malenkov. And yet Khrushchev not only rose to dominate them, he was eventually able to impose his own style of governance and range of policies. The extent to which this represented a genuine departure from the Stalin period has been hotly debated by scholars. Did the Communist system developed by Stalin undergo any fundamental revision? Did Khrushchev have any vision beyond the need to retain power for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and make the economy operate more smoothly? How far was he prepared to go in reaching accommodation with the capitalist West? For Khrushchev’s contemporaries, these were far from purely academic questions. For those on the left like Isaac Deutscher, Khrushchev offered the opportunity to redeem the values of the Russian Revolution and escape from the distortions of Stalinism.¹ At the other extreme, conservative politicians maintained that, since Communism was fundamentally evil, it was beyond reform. Khrushchev himself, the ‘Butcher of Budapest’ as William Buckley called him, was no different from Stalin, someone who ‘murders people without regard to race, color, or creed’. A consequence of this view – thankfully one that did not prevail – was that negotiation with the Soviet leader was impossible, even in the extreme circumstances of the Cuban missile crisis.² US Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy at least viewed Khrushchev as somebody they could do business with (to paraphrase British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s later assessment of Mikhail Gorbachev). A mutual respect of sorts grew up between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, while Kennedy’s more cynical view was tempered by a realist recognition that Khrushchev was, after all, a human being: ‘We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.’³ This attitude saw the superpowers through some of the biggest international crises of the Cold War. Later assessments present Khrushchev as possibly well intentioned, but someone who was at best trapped within the confines of the system that had promoted him, at worst a Stalinist who had no real intention of reforming the system beyond a mild relaxation of the methods of Terror that had been central to Stalin’s rule.

For the most part, this debate has focused on the significance of the 1956 Secret Speech denouncing Stalin, and the most obvious political characteristics of the regime: continuing use of repression, though in a milder form; a flourishing but heavily circumscribed cultural scene; selective restoration of nationality rights; public consultation without any real democracy; and so on. While these questions remain central, the recent research presented in this book and its companion volume, Soviet State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev, makes it possible to address the question of Khrushchev’s place in the history of the Soviet Union from a variety of different angles.

From the middle of the 1980s and the launch of perestroika in the Soviet Union, a substantial part of the literature on Khrushchev and his era has been devoted to comparisons between Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev. In personality and background the two could scarcely have been more different, but they did address similar challenges and faced similar obstacles. In particular, the attempt to bypass bureaucracy and improve economic efficiency through decentralization, and the reforms of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself – both issues that are addressed in this volume – hold important parallels with Gorbachev’s efforts. While frequent allusion is made throughout the volume to the Gorbachev comparison, we set ourselves a different task in our project. The evident fact that Khrushchev failed in many aspects of his reform programme and was eventually overthrown because of it, while Gorbachev, by pushing reform efforts that bit further, contributed to the collapse of the communist system, appears to provide ample evidence that the system was essentially non-reformable.⁴ A different perspective on this question can be achieved, however, by comparing the Khrushchev period with the Stalin period. Going beyond the relaxation of state Terror as a method of rule, in examining the utopianism of the Khrushchev project, the concern for welfare, rights and standards of living, and the emergence of a pluralism of sorts, and by looking at the short- and long-term consequences of reform, we find that the Soviet Union did change in important ways after Stalin’s death. Khrushchev cannot take all the credit for this. The Soviet Union when he came to power was a very different place from how it had been when Stalin rose to prominence. It was in the 1950s that Russia became, for the first time, a predominantly urban society. It was, moreover, a highly educated one. Stalin, by contrast, had begun his rule over a largely illiterate peasant population. Less dramatic but equally significant social transformations had taken place by Gorbachev’s time, and if we can associate a frustrated quasi-middle class with the eventual fall of communism, we can also credit the educated city dwellers of the 1950s with sustaining Khrushchev’s reform programme. On the other hand, our research found some support for the notion that, already in the Khrushchev era, long inculcated Stalinist values and attitudes persisted and were at odds with the reforming tenor of the times, presenting obstacles to progress. At the very top, this was most of all evident in the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian rising, which Miklóssy (Chapter 10) shows was in general out of character with the regime’s policy in Eastern Europe. A more frequent problem was the persistence of the Stalinist hangover at lower levels of the Party, as is most clearly illustrated in the chapters by Khlevniuk and Vasiliev (Chapter 11 and 8, respectively), and which provided serious barriers to other areas of reform.

Greater (though not unlimited) access to Soviet archives from the period has provided the raw material from which a reassessment of the Khrushchev period can be made, and this is what we set out to achieve in a project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2005 to 2008. But of equal importance was the precise object of our study. The focus in this volume is on a number of key policy areas: policy towards dissent; nationalism; economic decentralization (the sovnarkhoz reform); policy towards the West in technology exchange, and towards Eastern Europe in political and economic reform; agriculture; railways; and construction. While this list of case studies of significant policy initiatives in the Khrushchev era is by no means exhaustive, it is sufficient to lead us to a number of important conclusions.

We were not working on a blank canvas. In addition to the numerous studies produced during Khrushchev’s time and by historians since, we were not the first to work in Soviet archives for the period. Most recent studies fall into one of two categories: biographical works, many of which are summarized by Ian Thatcher in Chapter 2 of this book; or culture and cultural politics, which are well represented in the volume The Dilemmas of Destalinisation.⁵ The juxtaposition of both sets of writings poses something of a paradox. The biographies, very much in line with earlier writings, overwhelmingly provide a view that Khrushchev was inadequate as a leader, both in his leadership style and in his intentions. Consequently he was unable (or unwilling) to break fully with Stalinism, and what changes he did make served only to weaken the regime and his own position until that became untenable in 1964. The picture we now have of the culture of the period, by contrast, is extremely dynamic. It was here that the ‘thaw’ was most immediately felt, and for a while the Soviet Union witnessed an explosion of cultural originality that had not been seen under Stalin. Admittedly the process was short-lived and limited, leading to a cynicism among the original beneficiaries of the thaw, which contributed to the later stagnation – a process that is wonderfully brought to life in Olga Grushin’s recent novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov.⁶ The dynamism of the cultural sphere and the simultaneous failure of politics can be reconciled by reference to relative regime weakness of the time. But this volume presents a two-fold challenge to this characterization of the Khrushchev era: first by reconsidering the nature of politics from 1953–1964, and second by looking more closely at specific policy areas and seeking explanations for both the achievements and the failures.

In Chapter 2, Ian Thatcher presents an assessment of Khrushchev’s leadership, which differs from that offered by most biographies. By looking beyond characterizations of Khrushchev’s ‘crudeness’ and treating his memoirs as a serious source, Thatcher finds a leader who ‘was constantly intrigued by realworld solutions to real-world problems’ and who had a clear idea of how these solutions could be implemented, primarily by promoting the role of specialists above that of party apparatchiks in policy formulation and implementation. That he was ultimately unable to achieve this may have been down to the obstacles put in his path by a party nomenklatura, which had become, according to Thatcher, ‘frightened … by the leader’s determination to bring it to account’. Khrushchev could hardly be accused of political ineptness. Having outmanoeuvred first Beria and then Malenkov for the leadership of the Soviet Union, he survived a concerted attempt to remove him in 1957, when he faced a hostile majority in the highest political body in the land, the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. As Nikolai Mitrokhin describes in detail in Chapter 3, Khrushchev’s political advantage accrued from the fact that he alone of all the leading survivors of Stalinism had succeeded in cultivating a group of powerful individuals who owed him personal loyalty and support – his ‘clan’, which he had cultivated since 1931 in Russia, and since 1938 in Ukraine. Mitrokhin calculates that by the end of the 1950s members of Khrushchev’s clan shared between them about half of the managerial posts in government departments. This achievement required a combination of political skill and personal charisma, whatever the perceptions of Khrushchev as vulgar and naive. Perhaps inevitably, Mitrokhin finds evidence that, having helped secure Khrushchev’s political position, the clan members were anxious to pursue opportunities for obtaining material advantages. Denial of this possibility, together with a general neglect of his clan base after 1957, laid the political basis for Khrushchev’s eventual fall.

The relationship between politics and policies is best illustrated by looking at the periodization of Khrushchev’s period in office as First Secretary of the CPSU. Khrushchev acted within political constraints, and traditional treatments mark out three distinct periods between 1953 and 1964. The first begins with the death of Stalin and/or arrest of Beria in 1953, which was followed by a period of political intrigue with Khrushchev and Malenkov the main protagonists. The second period begins with Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ denouncing Stalin in February 1956, followed by a period of Destalinization up until 1961, when the new Programme of the CPSU formalized the dominant role of the Party, but after which Khrushchev’s increasing impatience with that Party led to his own downfall. There is much to be said for this periodization, but by examining important policy initiatives we find that other events were of equal or greater importance in shaping the direction of the Khrushchev era. While the Secret Speech undoubtedly engendered a new atmosphere in the Soviet Union and its satellites, it was one of the consequences of that new atmosphere – the Hungarian rising of October 1956 – that had a greater impact on policy. On the one hand, the Hungarian events led to a harsher crackdown on all forms of political opposition (described by Robert Hornsby in Chapter 5), and on the other hand greatly increased the determination of the Soviet leadership to address the living standards of the population through fear of a similar revolt erupting in the USSR. The next landmark event was the defeat of the anti-Party group in May 1957, which was followed in short order by a number of Khrushchev’s most significant reform drives – in regionalization of the economy, in housing, in education, in the legal system and in other areas. This is not to say that there were no significant reforms before May 1957, but the welter of legislation that followed it both indicates the extent of Khrushchev’s reformist inclinations and suggests the limits to reform that politics had placed on the leader before then.

The 1961 Party Programme is put into a broader context by Alexander Titov in Chapter 4.⁷ Although Beria’s downfall in 1953 was linked to his preference for the ministries and security forces over the CPSU, which he dismissed as a propaganda machine, Titov shows that the role of the CPSU after 1953 was far from that of a mere accomplice in Khrushchev’s struggle for power. Rather than being an end in itself, the revitalization of the Party was subordinate to Khrushchev’s broader aims of reducing bureaucracy and decentralizing decision-making. The reform of the Party was, therefore, intimately linked with the introduction of policies like the Sovnarkhoz reform, which, Khrushchev believed, would improve Soviet economic efficiency and the life of Soviet citizens. Many of the successive reorganizations of the CPSU were aimed at giving the Party a greater role in economic life. Ultimately the effectiveness of the Party was undermined by the very measures taken to reinvigorate it – constant reorganizations led to disorientation and instability, and the final Khrushchev plan of ‘bifurcation’ of the Party, underlining its role of supervising the economy, turned its members against the leader.

What Titov shows, among other things, is that Khrushchev’s manipulating was not unguided bureaucratic tinkering. The 1961 Programme itself was not a break, but a formal underlining of Khrushchev’s continuing commitment to address what he viewed as the chief tasks of socialism – to overcome the increasingly evident and embarrassing gap with the USA in both economic productivity and citizens’ living standards, in addition to the arms race. The early successes of the Soviet space programme, the Virgin Lands Campaign, and later the housing programme, illustrated how the targeted mobilization of resources and people could produce successful outcomes. R.W. Davies and Melanie Ilic illustrate in detail in Chapter 13 how such a carefully orchestrated campaign could work in practice in the case of the construction industry. The vision on which this programme rested was, as this chapter demonstrates, one that Khrushchev already clung on to in the 1930s. The contrast in aims, style and approach with Stalin’s housing policy is of especial significance. The limited utopian aim of creating better housing conditions for Soviet citizens could be achieved, for all the problems the programme encountered. Here we see most clearly the differences with the Stalin period. In Chapter 12 John Westwood draws an equally significant contrast. The Soviet and British governments embarked on railway modernization programmes at more or less the same time. While both were state-led projects conceived and executed by extensive bureaucracies, it will come as a surprise to many that the Soviet bureaucracy seems to have been better suited to such an effort than was the B...

Table of contents

• BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary of Russian terms and abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Khrushchev as leader
• 3 The rise of political clans in the era of Nikita Khrushchev
• 4 The Central Committee apparatus under Khrushchev
• 5 The outer reaches of liberalization
• 6 Leadership and nationalism in the Soviet Republics, 1951–1959
• 7 Moscow–Kiev relations and the Sovnarkhoz reform
• 8 Failings of the Sovnarkhoz reform
• 9 Khrushchev and the challenge of technological progress
• 10 Khrushchevism after Khrushchev
• 11 The economy of illusions
• 12 The modernization of Soviet railways traction in comparative perspective
• 13 From Khrushchev (1935–1936) to Khrushchev (1956–1964)
• Select bibliography
• Index