Moscow and the Non-Russian Republics in the Soviet Union

Nomenklatura, Intelligentsia and Centre-Periphery Relations

Li Bennich-Björkman, Saulius Grybkauskas, Li Bennich-Björkman, Saulius Grybkauskas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032155470
• eBook ISBN: 9781000516210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi regionali

This book examines what came to determine the local power and character of the Communist party-state at the level of the national non-Russian republics. It discusses how, although the Soviet Union looked centralised and monolithic to outsiders, local party-states formed their own fiefdoms and had very considerable influence over many policies areas within their republics. It argues that local party-states were shaped by two decisive relationships - to the central Communist party in Moscow and to local constituencies, especially to the local intelligentsia and the creative professions who constituted the local party-states' biggest potential adversaries. It shows how local party-states negotiated stability and their own survival, and contends that the effects of "Sovietisation" continue to be felt in the independent states which succeeded the republics, particularly in the field of the relationship with Moscow, which remains of immense importance to these countries.

1 Purging in the Khrushchev era

‘Red cardinals’ and nationalism in the Soviet Republics

Michael Loader

DOI: 10.4324/9781003244608-1

In contrast to the following eight chapters in this volume, the perspective is shifted to the central level instead of focusing on an individual Soviet republic. This chapter will examine a remarkable wave of political purges, which targeted some ten Soviet republics over a 30-month period in the Khrushchev era.

In the wake of the 20^th Party Congress in 1956 and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization and economic de-centralization initiatives in 1957, the Soviet republics took advantage of these circumstances to claw more decision-making authority from the Centre. By 1958, the increasingly autonomous behaviour of many of the leaderships of the republics’ Communist parties convinced conservative hardliners in the Kremlin of the need for decisive action to combat what they perceived as rampant nationalism within republican leaderships.

This chapter argues that several leading Soviet politicians masterminded these administrative reorganizations using a key department within the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) Central Committee Apparatus. The Party Organs Department for the Union Republics (hereafter the Department) was the conduit for the communication and transmission of Moscow’s instructions with responsibility for supervising republican Communist parties. The Department fell under the control of conservative hardliners in the late 1950s, moving away from Khrushchev’s orbit. The Department, an understudied component of the CPSU’s administration, played a crucial role as the Centre’s executor of these purges through the guise of its official functions. Between December 1958 and May 1961, an alliance of Kremlin hardliners and their handpicked regional elites in the republics became the architects of a wave of purges across the Soviet republics, conducted by the Department. In its contribution to our understanding of the workings of the Department, this chapter demonstrates the extraordinarily influential power of the Apparatus and complements the literature on the little-studied processes of Soviet purging (chistka) in the Khrushchev era. The tactics employed reveal how political purges were implemented after the removal of the Anti-Party Group in 1957.

This chapter links a series of purges in the Soviet republics, which has not been explored before to this extent. Although historians have been aware that some of these purges occurred, few identified any coordinated effort and even fewer linked more than a couple, while others focused on one or two, often misinterpreting their origins as local skirmishes or rash action by Khrushchev. Russian historians Elena Zubkova (2004, p. 8) and Aleksandr Vdovin (2009) come the closest, each listing seven republics in which each Party held a plenum condemning top leaders for violations of nationality policy. These leaders were subsequently purged. What previously appeared as individual purges, now emerges as a pattern and through new archival material suggests coordinated central action. Among other resources, the arguments advanced in this chapter are substantiated by research garnered following the recent declassification by the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History of previously unavailable documents from the CPSU’s highest executive levels (the Presidium/Politburo and the Secretariat).

Although Khrushchev is often implicated in the ‘decapitations’ of these republican Communist parties, this chapter reveals, contrary to the literature, that his hands were actually largely clean while the consequences of these purges weakened Khrushchev’s political strength as his loyal allies were dislodged from the powerful Central Committee (CC). In several cases, Khrushchev was manipulated into ‘friendly fire’ attacks. Therefore, despite clearing out the Stalinist remnants within the Presidium in 1957, Khrushchev was again soon surrounded by hostile actors, primarily because his reorganization of the central bureaucracy, the haphazard, constant redistribution of cadres, and concerns that his mildly liberalizing Thaw policies might be going too far began to push away his own supporters. Khrushchev could not free himself from malcontents because his own protégés morphed into them.

This research sheds light on who was causing this disruption in the Soviet borderlands. Intervention in the republics translated effectively into an indirect rejection of Khrushchev’s reforms by these Kremlin elements who viewed them as destabilizing. I have identified three members of the top echelons of Moscow’s Party elite who sought to reimpose ‘order’ on the Soviet periphery and later profited (possibly intentionally) from a diminished Khrushchev. The key players were Presidium member and Kremlin ideologue Mikhail Suslov, Committee for State Security (KGB) Chairman Aleksandr Shelepin, and his acolyte Department for Union Republics Chairman Vladimir Semichastnyi.

The Party Organs Department and the ‘Red Cardinals’

Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s cult of personality, the subsequent initiation of de-Stalinization measures in society and culture and economic decentralization through Regional Economic Councils (Sovnarkhozy), which collectively came to be known as ‘the Thaw’ for their partial relaxation and repeal of the most extreme elements of Stalinism, had consequences that were not welcomed by Muscovite hardliners. One such consequence was the impetus provided to nationalist movements by de-Stalinization. The more straightjacketed republics looked to the riots in Poland and the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 for inspiration. Moscow received reports of these growing expressions of discontent and nationalist activity.¹

Another effect of the Thaw was to embolden some republican leaderships to push for more decision-making powers. Enjoying more authority than at any time since the 1920s korenizatsiia (indigenization) period, these leaderships gradually became populated with younger, nationally-minded, post-Stalin reformist cadres who sought to broaden their popular appeal by styling themselves as defenders of the titular language and culture (Smith, 2017, pp. 985–986, 990, 1001). In Azerbaijan and Latvia, for example, this took the form of making knowledge of their respective languages compulsory in law (Hasanli, 2015, pp. 110, 112; Goff, 2014, pp. 142–143; Loader, 2017, pp. 1082–1099).² That the titular republics’ leaderships changed their composition and flexed their muscles on the issues of national language and culture and Russification so swiftly after Stalin’s death (and that it caused the response that is the subject of this chapter) demonstrates the seismic effect of the Thaw and how ‘bottled up’ resentments that had pressurized under Stalin were explosively released.

This was in essence ‘national communism’, a phrase attributed to a few Soviet republics (Latvia, and Lithuania (Grybkauskas, 2013, pp. 346, 366; Kemp, 1999)), satellite regimes in Eastern Europe (Władysław Gomułka’s Poland and Imre Nagy’s Hungary), and Josip Broz Tito’s renegade, independent Communist Yugoslavia. Khrushchev-aligned republican leaders were at pains to show how their national communist policies dovetailed with CPSU policy as products of the Thaw, merely tweaked the Soviet system, did not challenge the Soviet order’s fundamentals, and saw them repeatedly reaffirm their allegiance to Moscow (Loader, 2015, pp. 15–19).

Nevertheless, collectively these developments troubled several leading Kremlin politicians and while they may have read more into the republics reasserting certain national characteristics after years of suppression under Stalin as flagrant displays of nationalism, and reports reaching Moscow exaggerated the impact of national communism in the periphery, much of this was the tangible manifestation of de-Stalinization. Aleksandr Shelepin, Vladimir Semichastnyi, and Mikhail Suslov (who all subsequently played pivotal roles in Khrushchev’s overthrow in 1964) appear to be the hardliners who pulled the strings within the Soviet leadership to act to crush the perceived nationalism that was flourishing in the Communist Party headquarters of capitals in the Soviet periphery. While the friendly and close relationship between Semichastnyi and Shelepin is well documented, I do not argue that they were actively cooperating with Suslov, rather that they were ideologically on the same team in this operation and that their actions, presence, and ‘fingerprints’ can be found on all these purges to varying degrees. These were no Kremlin bedfellows although they were probably not as estranged at this point as they became later in the 1960s when a backstage power struggle took place between the Semichastnyi-Shelepin axis and Suslov (Medvedev, 1989, p. 6).³

These men were the ‘Red Cardinals’ as I term them, because, like the original Éminence grise, Cardinal Richelieu’s gatekeeper François Leclerc du Tremblay, they were independent and powerfully positioned (although Soviet-red rather than grey and not a unified, coordinated group, but informally aligned in this endeavour), operating unbeknownst to Khrushchev as a shadowy coterie who opposed the USSR’s political trajectory in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Red Cardinals were less concerned with resurrecting Stalinism so much as halting de-Stalinization, opposed the Thaw, held hostile opinions of anti-Russian nationalists, and were perhaps Russian nationalists themselves (Schmidt-Häuer, 1986, p. 78; Mitrokhin, 2003, p. 98). These Red Cardinals, especially Suslov and Shelepin, exercised virtually unrivalled influence on the Party-State Apparatus, as representatives of its interests (Medvedev, 1989, p. 6) – it has been said of Suslov that this was the only class he was ‘ever interested in speaking for’ and that he was ‘less a person, more a personification of the apparat’ (Urban, 1990, p. 652). These Red Cardinals were principally responsible for the sweeping leadership changes in the republics, including the ‘scalping’ of many Khrushchev-supporting First Secretaries.

To intervene in the republics against their target leaderships with the aim of reversing the de-Stalinization of nationality policy and restoring Moscow’s brand of orthodoxy in the periphery, the Red Cardinals required a pretext and an administrative arm to execute these changes. This was to be found in their specific constituency, the Apparatus. Within the Apparatus, the Party Organs Department acted as the transmission belt for the decisions of the Party’s highest executive bodies (the Presidium and Secretariat), responsible for monitoring their implementation and republic and regional level Party organizations’ activities. In 1954, the Department was split into the Department of Party Organs for the Russian Federation and the latter with which we are concerned, the Department of Party Organs for the Soviet Republics.

The Department’s tasks of information gathering, monitoring, and reporting on republican Communist parties’ activities, inspections, recommendations, and drafting decrees on disciplinary action in coordination with the Party Control Committee (KPK) and measures to correct issues, all presented an ideal administrative wing to use as the instrument to conduct the purges. Aside from its value as the organ responsible for approving republican cadre changes, the Department became the Red Cardinals’ sword because they controlled it, and because of its character as a bastion of Russian nationalism and antipathy towards non-Russian nationalists in the periphery (Mitrokhin, 2003, pp. 83–88). In March 1957, following the departure of Khrushchev-supporter Evgenii Gromov as th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Purging in the Khrushchev era: ‘Red cardinals’ and nationalism in the Soviet Republics
• 2. The formation and development of the Soviet Latvian Nomenklatura: Path dependency, cleavages, and imposed unanimity
• 3. Patterns of succession: Top party elite recruitment in Soviet Moldavia and centre-periphery relations, 1940–1991
• 4. The transformist: The evolution and adaptability of Sharaf Rashidov’s regime in Soviet Uzbekistan
• 5. The Belarusian Soviet nomenklatura: A political history, 1947–1994
• 6. The Soviet nomenklatura and cultural opposition during the Brezhnev period in Lithuania
• 7. Ukraine: Falling in and out of Moscow’s grace
• 8. Between centre and periphery: The Gamsakhurdia and Kostava affair
• 9. Pragmatic political practice: The Estonian Communist Party, the intelligentsia, and Moscow
• Index