These events had taken place in secret, and only a very few were aware that something was up. For a week the CC, some two hundred strong, lambasted Molotov and his allies, accusing them of mistaken policies, splitting the party, trying to seize power, ignoring the Central Committee, and bringing up the behavior of Molotov and Kaganovich in the great terror. The party elite did not want a return to the fear and despotism of the Stalin era. One of the most outspoken was Brezhnev, a provincial party leader from the Ukraine who had only recently entered the ranks of the party’s central elite. Finally Khrushchev and his supporters denounced the three main plotters as an “anti-party group” and expelled them from the Presidium, replacing them with Brezhnev and Furtseva. In Stalin’s time the plotters could have expected only death: instead they received minor appointments, Molotov going as ambassador to Mongolia. He and his allies had grossly underestimated the new party elite that had come into power since the 1930s – people with a great deal of experience in wartime and economic management and who were appalled at the prospect of a return to the Stalin era. These younger people were Khrushchev’s base in the party, and they would remain in power until the 1980s.
Molotov had criticized Khrushchev for trying to create a new “cult of personality” and run everything himself, but the Central Committee had taken that charge as mere demagoguery. They were to be proved to a large extent wrong in the coming years. Only a few months later Khrushchev arranged the demotion of Marshal Zhukov, accusing him of ignoring party control of the armed forces and despotic behavior. These charges had some truth to them, but his removal from the Ministry of Defense and the Presidium meant that Khrushchev now had no rivals at the top. He was not a dictator like Stalin, but he alone was at the pinnacle of power in the USSR.
Khrushchev used his power to conduct a foreign policy that increasingly involved bluffing his way through crises, alternating cautious diplomacy with wild risks, the most famous being the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. He also faced the increasing disintegration of the Soviet bloc, as Albania and Rumania gradually turned into independent Stalinist states, and most important, China moved inexorably away from the USSR toward the Cultural Revolution. Mao and his allies in the Communist movement saw Khrushchev as the embodiment of “revisionism,” of a turn away from the true revolutionary path. Khrushchev’s colleagues in the Kremlin most certainly did not share Mao’s views, though they did think that Khrushchev had frequently exacerbated the conflict by his clumsy personal style. All of these events undermined his standing with the party elite, but equally problematic were the economic policies he pursued.
The problem here was not Khrushchev’s goals. The party elite clearly agreed that the country needed a radical improvement in agriculture. In the late 1950s the urban population still lived largely on black bread, sausage when it was available, and whatever could be afforded from the peasant market. Consumer goods were far more available than earlier but hard to actually obtain. Hence Khrushchev’s desire to put more resources into agriculture, consumer goods, and even housing, was extremely popular not just with the people but with the party leaders. They realized that they could not maintain stability if living standards did not improve radically.
The biggest problem was agriculture. One of his first acts was to abolish the machine–tractor stations set up in the 1930s and transfer their machinery to the kolhozes, a move that meant much greater autonomy for the farms. More was to come. On his 1959 trip to the United States he caused a considerable stir by his visits to American farms in Iowa and his meetings with American farmers. From this experience he seems to have been confirmed in his belief in large-scale, higher-technology farming, for American agriculture was already turning from family farms toward agribusiness. He realized that the USSR was way behind in the production and use of chemical fertilizer. The Stalinist industrialization model had consciously favored metallurgy and coal over chemicals and oil, as they were more suited to the then level of economic development as well as more important for defense production. This decision meant that increases in agricultural production, which did occur after the mid-1930s, came from mechanization, hybridization of plants, and more systematic crop rotation, rather than from the use of fertilizer or pesticides. None of these methods did more than keep pace with rapidly increasing urbanization, and to make matters worse Stalin and his agricultural bosses had accepted various crank schemes in agronomy like the notorious “grass-field” system. This was the notion, accepted by the authorities from the late 1930s, that food grains should be rotated with grasses rather than clover or other plants that aid nitrogen fixation. The system became a major bugbear for Khrushchev, who demanded that Soviet agriculture follow the rotation patterns accepted in American and other agricultural systems, and in 1963 he got his way.
Unfortunately Khrushchev’s programs combined solid planning with dubious schemes like the virgin lands project. Khrushchev, who considered himself something of an agricultural expert because of his years in the Ukraine, was aware that there was a great deal of uncultivated land in Western Siberia and Kazakhstan. To him the solution was obvious: the Soviet Union’s low yield in grain could be solved by sending thousands of settlers to these areas to put the steppe under the plow. The result was a 1930s-style mobilization, with the Komsomol in the lead, sending young people out to live in tents while they sowed grain and built houses. The overall size of the Soviet harvest did increase rapidly as a result, but the program also took resources from modernizing the collective farms and it turned out that much of the land was indeed fertile but too arid for continuous cultivation. Environmental degradation was the inevitable result, with falling output. The Kazakh leadership had warned Khrushchev that there was not much suitable new land, but he simply replaced these naysayers with his cronies from Kiev and Moscow.
Besides the virgin lands, his other agricultural obsession was corn. Khrushchev knew even before he went to America that corn was a major component of animal feed throughout the world, and he decided that the Soviet Union should produce corn. Most agronomists thought that it was not a suitable crop outside of some small areas in the far south of the country, but Khrushchev would not agree, even trying to force the authorities in the Baltic republics to grow corn in place of the more traditional crops. Much time and money was expended trying to find a hybrid that would grow well under various conditions, but the project just turned into another centrally sponsored campaign with no major results. Khrushchev, however, would not give up.
Khrushchev’s record in industry was mixed. The 1950s were a period of very high growth rates, even after the end of post-war reconstruction. Soviet achievements in technology, such as the building of a nuclear industry and rockets that could go into space were visible symbols of a modern state. Most of the nuclear development was still secret, but the Sputnik launch in 1957 was a worldwide event. Even more spectacular was Iurii Gagarin’s flight into space in 1961, followed by a whole series of space flights. Until the American moon landing in 1969, the Soviets seemed to be way ahead in the space race. Along with these very real achievements there were persistent problems. The new decentralized management system was no better than the old one, and in many areas it simply added a new layer of bureaucracy. More promising was the decision, which Khrushchev enthusiastically supported if he did not originate, of turning massive resources toward the chemical industry and the production of oil and natural gas. The two were related, as much of the raw material for the chemical industry would be petroleum byproducts. The Soviet Union would have plastic. For Khrushchev, the chemical industry was also to be a panacea for agriculture, as he did realize that corn and the virgin lands were not enough.
Unfortunately none of these plans addressed immediate problems. The decisions made in 1959–1960 did lay the basis for subsequent massive developments that shifted the energy base from coal to oil and gas by the 1970s and created a huge chemical industry, but there was little to show for it in the short run. Perhaps his most successful program for the average pe
rson was the first attempts at mass housing, the five story (with no elevator) small apartment houses that mushroomed around Moscow and other large cities. These were no longer communal apartments and although they were small they had the usual modern conveniences.
Khrushchev kept tinkering with agriculture and proclaiming grand goals. In 1961 he held another party congress in which he announced that the Soviet Union was going to “build communism,” Marx’s second stage beyond socialism in which the state would wither away among a universal abundance of all possible goods and services. For a population that was still struggling with deficit goods, long lines at stores, and high prices at the peasant market, this program tasted of megalomania. In the next year the authorities even faced a riot in the southern town of Novocherkassk – a riot entirely with economic causes that was harshly repressed.
Coming on top of the Cuban missile crisis, the economic problems were increasingly disturbing. To top it off, Khrushchev did seem to be constructing a “cult of personality.” Movies appeared chronicling his trips abroad in loving detail with titles like Our Nikita Sergeevich. With his son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei controlling Izvestiia, one of the two main newspapers, his doings were spread all over the country. He appeared at various meetings with writers and artists, lecturing them about politics and art, the most famous being his performance at an exhibit of mildly modernist art in 1962, where he told the artists that their work looked like a donkey’s tail had painted it. The party leadership did not necessarily disagree, but disliked his practice of dealing with these issues off the cuff and without consultation. It was too much like Stalin’s incursions into economics and linguistics. Khrushchev also antagonized large numbers of people by a new campaign against religion. After Stalin’s recognition of the Orthodox Church and most other religions at the end of the war, the churches gradually began to acquire a modest position in Soviet society. Khrushchev decided to change that, and embarked on another massive wave of persecution. Fortunately it lacked the murderous results of the 1930s, but it did result in the closing of many churches, arrests, and the virtual proscription of religion from Soviet life. The party elite was certainly not in favor of religion, but like Stalin, they no longer thought it was a major issue and preferred simply to control it. Khrushchev’s campaign was unnecessary and was the result of his personal quirks imposed on the country.
Ironically the straw that broke the camel’s back for Brezhnev and the other party leaders came from the intersection of agriculture and science, for a long time one of the chief sore points of the Soviet system. Khrushchev, for all his anti-Stalinism, remained a convinced supporter of Trofim Lysenko and his officially sponsored 1949 condemnation of modern genetics. Lysenko had his own fiefdom in the network of agricultural research institutes, but the Academy of Sciences kept most of his cronies out. Early in 1964 Khrushchev tried to get a number of these cronies elected to the Academy of Sciences, but the physicists, led by Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm, mobilized so much opposition that the prospects were voted down. Khrushchev was furious, though his own scientist daughter tried to persuade him that Lysenko’s work was simply wrong. At a full meeting of the Central Committee in July, after a long rambling speech about agriculture, Khrushchev suddenly announced that part of the problem was with the scientists, with Sakharov’s and the Academy’s meddling in politics, as he saw it, to reject the Lysenkoites. Then he announced that they should just abolish the Academy as a relic of the nineteenth century.
Brezhnev and his colleagues decided that the time had come. The Academy issue was only one of many, but it was just too much. As they were struggling to modernize Soviet society, here was their leader trying to wreck the principal source of innovation, their only hope of catching up to the West. In October 1964, the Central Committee met again, presenting a whole list of charges against Khruschev, including the Academy affair. He did recognize his “rudeness” about Sakharov and the Academy and his obsession with corn, but he continued to defend this behavior in the Cuban missile crisis (“the risk was inevitable”) and in the various Berlin crises. The Committee voted him out, placing Brezhnev in the position of head of the party and Aleksei Kosygin, an economic manager, in the position of Prime Minister.
The new regime largely continued Khrushchev’s policies without his erratic style. The regional Economic Councils were quickly abolished, and the more exotic agricultural campaigns ceased. There was no return to Stalinist methods of rule. Stalin remained unmentionable in most contexts, though some of the World War II generals did describe aspects of his wartime leadership in memoirs, mostly rather negatively. In history textbooks and public statements the achievements of the Stalin era were attributed to “the party and people,” and accounts of his crimes remained as they stood in 1964. Further revelations ceased. The new policy produced some disquiet in the intelligentsia, but for most of the population Stalin was no longer an issue. If anything, popular estimation of the former “great leader of peoples” was more positive than the official line. In two important respects the Brezhnev era actually brought further liberalization. The campaign against religion came to an end, establishing a modus vivendi with the Soviet Union’s various religions that lasted until the 1980s: religion was discouraged, but not prohibited, and the artistic heritage of Orthodoxy in icon-painting and architecture became the object of extensive study for the first time. In science the new regime totally abandoned Lysenko and restored genetics to Soviet biology. The last remnant of Stalinist science disappeared.
The first decade or so of the Brezhnev era was a period of enormous economic growth. Plans laid under Khrushchev came to fruition, as vast new fields of natural gas went into production. In only twenty years gas production increased tenfold, with about half coming from Siberia and a quarter from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Whole new cities sprang up, like Navoi in Uzbekistan, named in typical Soviet fashion for a medieval Central Asian poet. New oil fields opened up, mainly in Western Siberia, and production nearly doubled by the 1980s. The Soviet Union launched a huge program in nuclear power, starting with the Beloiarsk station in the Urals. Beloiarsk followed a largely experimental reactor built near Moscow in the 1950s. It employed a slow-neutron reactor, a design not later used in the Soviet Union, and it produced its first electricity in 1964. Eventually the Soviet Union built nearly fifty nuclear power plants with pressurized water or graphite moderated designs, the latter being the version that failed at Chernobyl. By the 1980s nuclear reactors produced around a quarter of the country’s electricity.
The huge growth in the energy sector signaled a shift from coal to petroleum-based energy sources and nuclear power. It also changed the distribution of energy among the republics, for coal had been mined mainly in the Ukraine until World War II, then increasingly in the Russian republic and Kazakhstan, although the Ukraine still produced almost half of Soviet coal. Oil, by contrast was ninety percent the product of the Russian republic and gas was nearly eighty percent. To some extent nuclear power reset the balance, for the policy was to build nuclear power stations where other resources were absent or in decline. Thus the Chernobyl graphite moderated reactor began to produce electricity in 1977, and the Ukraine came to depend on nuclear power for half its electricity, in contrast to only twenty percent for the USSR as a whole. The southern Ukrainian city of Zaporozhe received the largest nuclear power facility in Europe, whose reactors came on line starting in 1985, fortunately with the safer pressurized light water reactors. The other effect of the massive increase in the energy base was that the Soviet Union began to export oil and gas to Eastern Europe and the world in general. Trade with the West as well as Asia began to increase rapidly in the 1950s, but oil and gas exports were in a whole different league. In Eastern Europe, the new exports sped up the transition inaugurated under Khrushchev from one in which Soviet satellites subsidized the USSR with low resource prices to the reverse. In the 1960s Soviet gas and oil went to “fraternal” socialist countries at considerably below market price. The export of oil to the
West compensated for these subsidies by bringing in large amounts of hard currency that allowed the Soviets to make much needed purchases of technology and grain abroad.
As elsewhere, the nuclear industry was also tied into military production, which allowed the Soviet Union to reach rough parity with the United States in the late 1960s, for the first time. The foundation of this parity was the development of nuclear submarines and of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), which now could actually strike the United States from the USSR in the event of war. Long-range bombers were no longer necessary. The result was an increasingly expensive arms race that absorbed huge amounts of capital and trained personnel, which the USSR could not afford as easily as its American rival. The arms race was only part of the social and ecological cost of the final decades of Soviet industrialization. Rivers and forests were polluted with nuclear waste, leading to serious health problems in the affected areas. The oil and gas fields disturbed the fragile sub-arctic ecology, and hydropower meant the flooding of large areas, removing the inhabitants and causing all sorts of changes in the environment, many of them totally unanticipated. This was not merely the story of arrogant party officials pushing scientists and engineers to construct shoddy plants in pristine nature: the scientists were convinced that their designs were perfectly safe and the ecological effects were minor. Indeed it was the physicists who most consistently pushed for more nuclear power plants, convincing party officials who worried about the massive costs.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 48