Soviet State and Society Under Nikita Khrushchev

Melanie Ilic, Jeremy Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781134023622
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

This book examines the social and cultural impact of the 'thaw' in Cold War relations, decision-making and policy formation in the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev. It highlights the fact that many of the reform initiatives generally associated with Khrushchev personally, and with his period of office more generally, often had their roots in the Stalin period both in their content and in the ways in which they were implemented. Individual case studies explore key aspects of Khrushchev's period of office, including the introduction of the 1961 Communist Party Programme and popular responses to it, housing policy, the opening up of the Soviet Union to the West during the 1957 youth festival, public consultation campaigns and policy implementation in education and family law, the boost given to voluntary organisations such as women's councils and the trade unions, the reshaping of the internal Soviet security apparatus, the emergence of political dissent and the nature of civil-military relations as reflected in the events of the workers' uprising in Novocherkassk in 1962. The findings offer an important new perspective on the Khrushchev era.

1 The 1961 Party Programme and the fate of Khrushchev’s reforms

Alexander Titov

The adoption of the third Party Programme at the XXII Party Congress in 1961 was one of the main ideological events of the Khrushchev era. Its importance is underlined by the fact that it remained the main ideological document up to the end of the Soviet period.¹ The purpose of the Programme was to reunify society in the wake of de-Stalinization and to revive the Soviet project. Internationally the Programme was supposed to increase the prestige of the Communist Party (CPSU) and the Soviet state. However, its failure to deliver on its promises discredited the Soviet system in the long term. This chapter looks at the history of the Party programmes, the process of drafting the third Programme and its main themes, and examines the public reception of the Programme. Finally, an assessment is provided of its significance in the history of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union.

Background

The first Party Programme was adopted in August 1903 at the II Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP). It was the expression of Lenin’s ideas about the strategy for a party of professional revolutionaries. The second Party Programme was adopted in 1919 at the VIII Congress of the Communist Party (at this time known as VKP(b)) and reflected the idealistic hopes of the time about imminent communist society. The second Programme was extensively used in Bolshevik propaganda during the early 1920s, particularly through its well-known exposition by Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii in The ABC of Communism.² By the late 1920s the second Programme was quietly dropped from public discourse as the reality of Party policy under Stalin’s leadership asserted itself. There were plans to draft a new Programme in the 1930s but priority was given instead to the new constitution that was adopted in 1936.³

At the XVIII Party Congress in 1939 it was officially decided to revise the 1919 Party Programme. A twenty-four-member commission was set up that consisted of the top leadership, including Stalin himself, Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, Beria, Zhdanov and Khrushchev.⁴ However, the work of the commission was interrupted by the Second World War. On 15 July 1947 the Politburo formed a new programme commission under Zhdanov’s chairmanship. A draft version was prepared in December 1947.⁵ The main components of what later became associated with Khrushchev’s reforms were already present in that draft. For example, there was emphasis on improving living standards, such as the distribution of individual apartments, automobiles and free provision of food. It was envisaged that the political functions of the state would be reduced and the role of public organizations increased as the dictatorship of the proletariat would be gradually transformed into the dictatorship of the Soviet people.

However, these proposals were presented within the traditional Stalinist framework which included a further increase in the power of the proletarian state and the strengthening of the security organs for the fight against class enemies.⁶ Furthermore, the tightening of the ideological pressure in the post-1945 period, as evidenced by the infamous decrees against the journals Zvezda and Leningrad and the struggle against Western influence, meant that the more lenient proposals of the draft were by then unacceptable. As the consequent history showed, these proposals would be implemented in tandem with the denunciation of the personality cult and rejection of the harsher aspects of the Stalinist system.

At the XIX Party Congress in 1952 a new Programme commission was formed.⁷ Because of Stalin’s death and the ensuing power struggle, no work was done on the programme before the XX Congress of 1956 when it was decided to start work on a new Party Programme once again. However, without a clear consensus among the Presidium members on the new official ideology, no active work was carried out.

With the removal from the Presidium of Khrushchev’s opponents in the summer of 1957, it became possible to begin active work on the draft of the Programme and a new commission began its work in 1958. Khrushchev declared that it was a blessing in disguise that a new Programme was not adopted under Stalin, implying that the Party Programme adopted under his own leadership represented a clean break from Stalin’s time, and this had become possible only after the XX and XXI Party Congresses.⁸ In this way, the third Party Programme became a statement of Khrushchev’s aspiration at the peak of his power and popularity in 1958–61.

There was a 43-year gap between the publications of the second and the third Party Programmes. The third Programme presented the new leadership with an opportunity to claim an ideological continuity with Lenin’s legacy and a bypassing of Stalin’s deviations, a leitmotif of Khrushchev’s ideology. The new Programme represented a revivalist vision of the Soviet communist project, free from negative aspects of the Stalin’s era. In this way, the adoption of the new Party Programme was to become a high point of Khrushchev’s ideological and political revolution.

Work on the Programme

The commission responsible for preparing a draft of the new Programme consisted of Khrushchev, who was appointed its chairman, Kuusinen, Mikoyan, Suslov, Pospelov, Ponomarev, Mitin and Yudin. There was continuity in its membership as five had also been members of the 1947 commission.⁹ In practice, the responsibility for drafting the Programme was entrusted to Kuusinen and Ponomarev, who were relieved of other duties for the duration of their work on the Programme.¹⁰ Kuusinen was soon sidelined in the work of the commission and Ponomarev assumed direct control over the commission’s work. This represented a victory for the middle line in terms of ideology, as Kuusinen was considered an ideologist keen on revising Stalin’s legacy.¹¹

The work on the Programme speeded up in 1959 after the XXI Extraordinary Party Congress where the development of the Soviet economy was outlined for the next seven years. Significant for the Programme was Khrushchev’s declaration that the Soviet Union had achieved the construction of socialism and was now advancing to building the basis of communism. Thus two main components of the future Programme, the imminent construction of communist society and the detailed plans for economic development for the next decade, were firmly established at the centre of the new official ideology. The draft commission now worked on the basis of these premises with the aim of presenting a ready draft at the XXII Party Congress in the autumn of 1961. Khrushchev was able to claim parity with his predecessors, the organizer of the socialist revolution, Lenin, and the builder of socialism in one country, Stalin, and leave his unique ideological mark as Soviet leader by developing a distinct ideological framework for his policies around the concept of imminent communist construction.

Senior specialists in their respective fields were recruited to work on the Programme’s draft. Altogether around 100 academics and specialists were engaged for three years in ‘work groups’ each assigned with particular topics of the Programme. For example, the group for the preparation of the theoretical materials for the Programme included A.A.Arzumanyan, director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, P.M.Fedoseev, director of the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Shlikhter, from the Institute of World Economy, and several other top specialists from relevant fields.¹²

Khrushchev himself edited the Programme’s text in the run-up to its final discussion at the June Plenum of the Central Committee. On 20 and 21 April 1961, and again on 18 July, he dictated forty-six pages of comments and corrections.¹³ Most of them were of an editorial nature, although some gave more spice to the text despite his claims that, ‘It would be wrong to include in the Programme something which we will not be able to do. Such commitments and promises would only discredit the Programme’.¹⁴ Nevertheless, Khrushchev personally insisted on inserting into the Programme a dubious passage which asserted that the Soviet Union was capable of surpassing the USA in per capita production by 1970, while at the same time the qualities of life of the Soviet people would be even higher owing to the egalitarian nature of Soviet society.¹⁵ His insistence on material provisions as central to communism explicitly linked its success to economic performance, which would soon backfire.¹⁶

International policy

The first part of the Programme was an exposition of a global vision of the struggle between communist and capitalist systems, with the not-too-distant victory of communism and a special emphasis on the importance of the Soviet experience for the development of the socialist world system. However, this new aspect of international relations also presupposed a new mode of ‘peaceful co-existence’ between the socialist and capitalist systems. In this scheme, the socialist system would triumph over capitalism by means of superior economic and social development. This policy was proclaimed to be a ‘specific form of class struggle’.¹⁷ This marked a break with the official policies of Khrushchev’s predecessors, who maintained, in the words of Stalin, that ‘to remove the inevitability of wars, capitalism must be destroyed’.¹⁸

Molotov, the only faithful Stalinist who dared to express his views about the third Party Programme, branded it ‘anti-revolutionary’, ‘pacifist’ and ‘revisionist’ because it betrayed true Bolshevik principles of class struggle by making concessions to capitalists.¹⁹ Unlike Khrushchev, ‘Lenin and the Bolsheviks saw the purpose of their foreign policy not in worrying about coexistence with imperialism but in hastening its demise’.²⁰ In Molotov’s view, only international socialist revolution could bring an end to wars and imperialism itself. Khrushchev’s views on international relations put forward in the Programme were, therefore, clearly unrevolutionary novelties contrary to Lenin’s views on foreign policy.

Khrushchev had his revenge on his old foe at the Congress which expelled Molotov, until then Soviet representative at the Atomic Commission in Vienna, from the Party along with the other members of the ‘anti-Party group’ except Voroshilov. All of this was accompanied by fierce anti-Stalinist rhetoric at the Congress which took many by surprise and was a distraction from the Congress’s real purpose of discussing the new Programme. Frol Kozlov, the Central Committee (CC) secretary responsible for the draft of the new Party rules, privately complained that the Congress suffered from a distortion; instead of focusing on the main event of the Congress, suddenly there was a ‘re-run’ of the XX Congress.²¹ Overall, in the international section the new Programme set a more pragmatic tone in international relations while at the same time maintaining the superiority of the Soviet system.

Economic and social policy

The second part of the Programme presented plans for the devel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary of Russian terms and abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The 1961 Party Programme and the fate of Khrushchev’s reforms
• 2 Khrushchev’s promise to eliminate the urban housing shortage: rights, rationality and the communist future
• 3 The 1957 Moscow Youth Festival: propagating a new, peaceful image of the Soviet Union
• 4 The scientist, the pedagogue and the Party official: interest groups, public opinion and decision-making in the 1958 education reform
• 5 Lone mothers and fatherless children: public discourse on marriage and family law
• 6 What did women want? Khrushchev and the revival of the zhensovety
• 7. Dismantling Stalin’s fortress: Soviet trade unions in the Khrushchev era
• 8. The changing face of repression under Khrushchev JULIE ELKNER
• 9. Voicing discontent: political dissent from the Secret Speech to Khrushchev’s ouster
• 10. The Soviet military at Novocherkassk: the apex of military professionalism in the Khrushchev era?
• Select bibliography