The Polish and Hungarian crises, following on
Khrushchev’s violent denunciation of Stalin and
advocacy of reform, undermined the Soviet
leader’s position within the Kremlin. He had
never been strong enough to oust the Stalinists in
the Praesidium (Politburo), among them Molotov
and Malenkov, who now attacked him on the easiest
of targets – the economy, which under centralist
control never lived up to expectations. The
struggle took the form of disputing which were
the right reforms to follow: reforms which sought
to make the government ministries more efficient,
a policy backed by Malenkov and Molotov, or
reforms based on reconstituted party control over
the economy regionally organised, as advocated
by Khrushchev. The conflict came to a head in
June 1957 when the Praesidium, by a majority of
seven to four, voted against Khrushchev. That
should have been the end. But Khrushchev turned
the tables by appealing to the larger party body,
the Central Committee, which he claimed alone
could deprive him of the post of first secretary.
With Marshal Zhukov’s help, military aircraft flew
the party representatives to Moscow from the outlying
provinces. Khrushchev won the support he
needed and dubbed his opponents on the
Praesidium the ‘anti-party’ group. All these opponents
now lost real power for good, but there was
to be no return to Stalinist vengeance. They were
sent far away; it was with a touch of humour that
Khrushchev decided to send the dour Molotov as
ambassador to Mongolia and Malenkov to manage
a power station in Kazakhstan; only Bulganin
was allowed to remain at the centre, acting as titular
premier until 1958.
From 1957 until his sudden deposition by the
Praesidium in 1964, Khrushchev dominated
the Soviet Union in its domestic and foreign relations,
though not as Stalin had done. Opponents
no longer had to fear death, but a displeased
Khrushchev could end their careers and demote
them or banish them. His enduring contribution
was to dismantle the Stalinist terror regime
and to discredit it. Indeed, discrediting it became
a potent weapon with which to defeat his rivals,
who had played subordinate roles in it.
Khrushchev restored the party, with its hierarchy
appointed by him, to primacy in the economic and
political administration of the country. This meant
that no far-reaching economic reforms would be
possible: the Soviet Union remained a command
economy. But it had become a more tolerant
country; its leader was the son of a miner, robustly
human, resilient, tough, with a sense of humour,
unpolished in speech and manner, but someone
with whom it was thought in the West it was possible
to do business. Khrushchev announced that
he believed in peaceful competition and that the
Soviet Union would win; boastfully he added, ‘We
will bury you’, a remark which was taken too literally
in the West. Khrushchev genuinely wanted to
better the lot of the ordinary people in his own
day, not to sacrifice them to some future goal. He
comes across as a man who wanted to be liked, but
also as one who wished to be acknowledged as
leader without the danger of Stalin’s cult of the
personality re-emerging.
Despite Khrushchev’s goals, which seemed to
be not unlike those of the West, the apparent
convergence of West and East was an illusion.
Khrushchev had lived all his life within a state system
that was ruled from above. He wished to correct
its most gross errors, but believed that
centralised planning was essential to communism.
The Soviet Union would continue to be ruled
from above; reforms would be introduced only as
the necessity for them was perceived in the
Kremlin. At the same time the people would be
brought into more active participation. Khrushchev
tried to reduce the dead weight of bureaucracy
but was caught in the paradox that this could
not be done unless decision-making was decentralised.
The most maddening aspect of Khrushchev’s
period of power was its unpredictability, a
reflection of Khrushchev’s mercurial temperament;
he delighted in springing surprises.
Typically, writers and intellectuals could never
be sure where they were. Thus, in 1958 Boris
Pasternak was persecuted and forbidden to collect
the Nobel Prize, but Solzhenitsyn’s novel about a
day in Stalin’s labour camp was allowed to be published
because it was in line with Khrushchev’s
own denunciation. Censorship remained erratic,
though more freedom was allowed to writers. But
Khrushchev was far less tolerant of organised religion,
and many churches and synagogues were
closed.
Unrestrained by powerful rivals, Khrushchev’s
policies were frequently changed, which contributed
to their lack of success. His various reorganisations
of industrial and agricultural controls
created confusion and waste. In the area most
vital to Soviet living standards, agriculture, the
improvements of the early years were not sustained
after 1958. Bad weather and unsound
farming methods reduced the contribution from
the virgin lands. In industry, Khrushchev’s decentralising
reforms, removing one level of planning
to the regions, also caused severe disruption. The
growth rate of Soviet industry slowed down and
failed to fulfil his unrealistic plans.
Khrushchev understood the enormous changes
the Soviet Union was undergoing as it developed
from a mainly rural to an urbanised country with a
population that was better educated and a large
section of professional people demanding higher
standards of living: more consumer goods, better
housing, better health provision, more varied and
more plentiful food and more opportunities for
higher education. He launched special campaigns
concentrating on one or other sector of supply,
organised and reorganised the running of the
economy and made promises and set ambitious
targets that could not be fulfilled. In the decade
from 1955 to 1965 growth was impressive but
could not match expanding expectations. The failure
of agriculture to make anything like the
progress planned is illustrated by the figures in the
table below.
Khrushchev was not only ambitiously attempting
to raise production, and nuclear-missile capacity,
but simultaneously working to rejuvenate and
make the party more effective. Neither he nor his
successors could solve the basic problem of how
to organise an increasingly sophisticated economy
without relegating the party to a subordinate role
in the state, a subordination which they feared
would undermine the leadership and government
of the USSR. Yet a centralised authoritarian party
structure seeking to take the major decisions
without reference to self-regulatory market forces
is simply not equipped to manage the vast and
complex industry of a modern state. In agriculture
various communist efforts to stimulate production
also proved wasteful of resources.
Khrushchev’s erratic course was especially evident
in his handling of the Soviet Union’s external
relations. He correctly foresaw the importance
of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles as the
vital deterrent and measure of military power.
‘Going nuclear’, moreover, allowed a reduction in
the size of the Red Army at a time of labour shortage
due to the smaller wartime birth rate. The
launching into space of Sputnik in October 1957
was a rare propaganda triumph – the Soviet Union
appeared briefly to be technologically ahead of the
US. The reverse was true, and the Soviet Union
paid dearly for this propaganda first. It helped to
discredit Eisenhower’s more restrained armaments
policies and prompted John F. Kennedy to close
the ‘missile gap’ that never was. The nuclear-arms
race was significantly accelerated just as the Soviet
Union was closing the real missile gap with the US
in the 1960s.
In the Middle East, Khrushchev took advantage
of Western hostility to Egypt to establish bases in
Egypt and in Syria and to assist in building the
Aswan High Dam. But the benefits Russia gained
were limited and its Arab allies proved uncertain
friends more concerned to take advantage of Soviet
aid than to offer much in return. But Soviet commitments,
though costly, were likewise limited.
Khrushchev threatened Britain and France during
the Suez War in November 1956, but they were
idle threats. The US did not withdraw its fundamental
support of Israel, and the Soviet Union
would not risk a direct military confrontation with
the Americans by involving Russian ‘volunteers’
and pilots in actual fighting in the Middle East.
The Arab states did not want to introduce Sovietstyle
communism, or to be dominated by the
Soviet Union as its East European allies were.
Indeed, the identity of interests was a tenuous
one. The shift from Stalin’s European-centred
policy to the post-Stalin global policies cost the
USSR a great deal and yielded few dividends.
The Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, Egypt, Cuba,
Ghana, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Angola and
India all received Soviet aid at various times and
were courted by the Soviet Union. But the
Russians suffered setbacks in all these relationships,
most spectacularly in China.
China had expected to be treated as an equal
after Stalin’s death, but although it had developed
an independent world policy it still relied on
Soviet aid. Divergences between the Chinese and
Soviet viewpoints increased as the 1950s drew to
a close. According to Mao, Khrushchev’s emphasis
on Soviet material advances sapped the true
revolutionary spirit that should be impelling the
communist camp forward in the world. The
Russian leader’s pursuit of detente with the US
after 1958 led the Chinese to conclude that the
world was once again endangered by the national
chauvinism of the two superpowers. This became
even more evident to the Chinese when the
Russians refused to help them to become a
nuclear power. During Khrushchev’s last two
years of leadership the Sino-Soviet break became
unbridgeable.
Ironically, the Soviet–US detente did not last
long, given the way Khrushchev handled it. The
Paris summit in May 1960, intended to seek solutions
to Berlin and the German question, was
called off before it began, Khrushchev deciding
against negotiating with Eisenhower in the
terminal period of his presidency, and the U-2
incident provided the means to humiliate the
American president. A meeting with President
Kennedy in Vienna in June 1961 brought the
Russians no nearer to their desired solution of the
German problem. Meanwhile, Berlin remained
the open door through which the citizens of East
Germany poured to express their preference for
the West. The construction of the Berlin Wall in
August 1961 to block that exit became an open
admission of the bankruptcy of Soviet policies and
those of the East German regime. Neither conciliatory
statements nor threats, which succeeded
on each other, had much effect on the West
except to accelerate the arms race. Khrushchev’s
most daring attempt to redress America’s geographical
advantage in its confrontation with the
Soviet Union came to grief in the seas surrounding
the island of Cuba. America’s allies on the
borders of the Soviet eastern empire provided
bases from which missiles could hit Soviet cities;
the Soviet Union at this time could threaten only
America’s European allies and had no reliable
missiles with which to attack the US.
Rebuffed by the US in 1960, Castro had
turned to Russia for aid, and agreements to provide
credit to Cuba and to purchase its sugar crop
were concluded in 1960. The failure of the CIA’s
Bay of Pigs landing of Cuban exiles to overthrow
Castro in April 1961 convinced the Cuban leader
that the US was determined to subjugate his
country and drove him deeper into Russia’s arms.
Khrushchev promised to defend the island and
accused the US of banditry. In the following year,
1962, Khrushchev decided to install nuclear missiles
in Cuba and to build a Soviet base there. This
daring Soviet move, which would bring the US
within range of many more Soviet missiles, was
carried out secretly. The Cuban missile crisis
that followed appeared to bring the Soviet Union
and the US to the brink of nuclear war. But
Khrushchev was obliged to withdraw. For the
Soviet Union this perceived failure marked a great
setback, less in its relations with the West, which
soon improved again, than with its standing in the
socialist camp. The Chinese took due note: the
Soviet Union too had proved a paper tiger.
Finally, any hope the Kremlin might have had of
overawing the West in future negotiations over
Berlin or Germany lay in ruins. But the world
beyond the two superpowers could breathe again,
relieved that sanity had prevailed and that ideological
fanaticism had not this time as in 1939
plunged the world into unimaginable devastation.
Khrushchev’s dynamism and experimentation
alarmed the party bureaucracy. His lack of
success, especially in agriculture, did nothing to
compensate for the constant upsets he inflicted
on the power establishment. He probably paid
less and less attention to other members of the
Praesidium, and in due course they decided to
get rid of him, having had enough of his erratic
policies or ‘hare-brained schemes’, to use their
phrase. In October 1964, while he was holidaying
on the Black Sea, his removal from the leadership
was announced in Moscow. He was
allowed to retire quietly and died in obscurity in
1971 – at least that had been the intention of the
new Soviet leaders. They underlined their contempt
by not honouring his remains with a state
funeral or a burial place close to Lenin. But
Khrushchev refused to become a nonentity and
had one more surprise in store before his unceremonious
end. He had recorded his memoirs on
tape and shortly before his death saw their first
publication in the West. Like his other breaches
with the past, this was a first in Soviet history. In
the decades between Stalin and Gorbachev,
Khrushchev did more to change the Soviet Union
than any other leader, albeit without finding
remedies for the shortcomings of communist rule
of the economy. Nor could communism be reconciled
with basic freedoms. History will nevertheless
accord him a more important place than
the Soviet leadership was willing to acknowledge.
From a later vantage point, Khrushchev’s years
of power are viewed in a different light inside and
outside the Soviet Union. The Russian people
could look back on Khrushchev with gratitude for
introducing the first breath of fresh air and freedom,
although it was stifled again during the long
interlude of the Brezhnev decades. Banished from
Red Square, Khrushchev lies buried in the
Novodevichy Convent grounds with other famous
Russians, Chekhov, Scriabin and Gogol. The
grave is not neglected, but is covered with flowers
in memory of the man who first opened the gates
of the vast prison complex of Stalin’s Gulag.
World History
