In foreign policy Stalin’s heirs faced another knot of difficult questions—from the Korean War and Maoist pretensions to the infernal ‘German Question’ and Tito’s challenge in Yugoslavia. Resolutions of these problems also had major domestic implications, above all for the military budget, which consumed an inordinate share of national income. Even the ‘official’ military budget of 1952 (a pale reflection of reality) revealed a 45 per cent increase since 1950. Clearly, a regime seeking to modernize its economy could ill afford to divert so many resources—capital, labour—to so unproductive a sector.
Historical scholarship on the post-Stalinist period is still in its infancy. Until recently most literature belonged to the genre of ‘Kremlinology’—a mélange of inferences and wild guesses based on party propaganda, diplomatic gossip, distorted statistics, and symbolic gestures. Recently, however, Russian authorities have declassified materials from the super-secret ‘Kremlin Archive’ (renamed ‘Presidential Archive’) and from the operational files of the Central Committee. This chapter draws heavily upon these materials. It aims to present a fresh portrait of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras—named after two men who symbolize two different approaches to salvaging Stalin’s legacy: reform and retrenchment. By the early 1980s, however, it was obvious that neither had worked.
Perils of Reform
The first decade after Stalin’s death was marked by change so profound that perceptive observers began to question the static ‘totalitarian’ model that still shaped Cold War policy towards the Soviet Union. That decade was an era of frenetic reformism not only in the political system but also in society, economy, culture, and nationality policy. It was also a time of excesses and errors, which Khrushchev’s critics attributed to his boorishness, his penchant for ‘harebrained schemes’, and his reckless search for panaceas. The ill-repute of the Khrushchev era was so intense that, in the days of perestroika, even reformers were loath to invoke his name or reconsider his strategies. In that sense, perhaps the worst legacy of Khrushchevism was not that reform failed, but that it deterred new attempts until it was too late.
The Struggle for Succession
On the evening of 5 March, two hours before Stalin’s death, his heirs met in the Kremlin to assign spheres of power. The most prominent appointments included Georgii Malenkov (Stalin’s heir apparent) as chairman of the Council of Ministers, Lavrentii Beria as head of the Ministry of Interior (reorganized to include the Ministry of State Security), and Viacheslav Molotov as Foreign Minister. After a bizarre incident involving Pravda (which published a self-serving photomontage of Malenkov, ostensibly without his knowledge), on 14 March Malenkov resigned as ranking secretary in the Central Committee and assumed leadership of the state apparatus. Power in the Central Committee now devolved on Khrushchev, who eventually (September 1953) assumed the title of ‘First Secretary’.
Initially at least, Khrushchev seemed an unlikely pretender for power: he did not even speak at Stalin’s funeral, an honour reserved for the big three—Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov. None the less, Khrushchev was the consummate party functionary, bore the imprimatur of a top-ranking Stalin aide, and had close ties throughout the party apparatus. He also had extraordinary sangfroid and the capacity to speak effectively; his role at the Central Committee plenums, in particular, shows a self-confident ‘apparatchik’s apparatchik’. But he also knew how to relate to the common folk; an incorrigible populist, he loved to visit factories and kolkhozy to see conditions for himself. Khrushchev had a genuine concern for popular welfare. As Ukrainian party secretary, in 1947 he had even had the temerity to resist Stalin’s unreasonable demands for grain deliveries that ignored crop failure and famine—an act of defiance that earned a furious Stalinist epithet of ‘populist’ and temporary replacement by L. M. Kaganovich. By the end of the year, however, Khrushchev was reinstated as Ukrainian First Secretary and subsequently, in December 1949, summoned to Moscow as a secretary of the Central Committee and First Secretary of the Moscow party committee.
Beria, with the vast forces of the Interior Ministry and secret police at his command, was the most formidable contender. Recent archival disclosures have shown that, whether from conviction or cunning, Beria suddenly struck the pose of ‘liberal’ reformer. Within days of Stalin’s death, he not only spoke of the need to protect civil rights but even arranged an amnesty on 27 March that released many prisoners (too many common criminals, in Khrushchev’s view), including some people associated with the élite (for example, Molotov’s wife, Mikoyan’s son, and Khrushchev’s own daughter-in-law). Beria also shifted the GULAG from his own domain and later proposed that it be liquidated ‘in view of its economic inefficiency and lack of prospects’. He also exposed some major fabrications in late Stalinism, most notably the ‘doctors’ plot’ (4 April) and also proposed to release 58,000 former ‘counter-revolutionaries’ from permanent exile. The security chief even challenged the policy of Russian predominance in non-Russian republics; heeding Beria’s recommendation, on 12 June 1953 the party leadership agreed to condemn various ‘distortions’, to replace officials who did not speak the local language, and to require the use of the local language in republican communications. Beria also took an interest in foreign affairs, proposing to allow a unified (but neutral) Germany and to seek a rapprochement with Yugoslavia.
United by fear if not principle, Beria’s adversaries called a meeting of the Presidium on 26 June 1953 and, in his presence, voted unanimously for his immediate dismissal and arrest. Shortly afterwards they convened a plenum of the Central Committee to discuss the ‘criminal anti-party and anti-state activities of Beria’. An opening address by Malenkov gave a vivid description of how Beria ‘put the Ministry of Interior above the party and government’, with the result that the ministry ‘acquired too great an influence and was no longer under the control of the party’. Malenkov also castigated Beria’s newfound liberalism (in particular, his mass amnesty of criminals and proposals for a radical change in policy towards Germany and Yugoslavia) and denounced his maladroit attempts to gather information on ‘shortcomings in the work of party organs’ and even to maintain surveillance on members of the Presidium. The second main address was delivered by Khrushchev, who reiterated the attack on Beria’s belated liberalism and bluntly accused the police of fabricating ‘many falsified cases’. Six months later Beria and five of his close associates were tried, pronounced guilty, and shot.
The principal threat eliminated, the chief contenders were the two main speakers at the July plenum—Malenkov and Khrushchev. At one level, the two simply manœuvred to broaden their respective political bases—Malenkov in the state apparatus, Khrushchev in the party. But they also raised important issues, especially questions of economic development and agricultural policy. Malenkov proposed a ‘liberal’ policy giving greater emphasis to light industry, chiefly by diverting resources from agriculture; in his view, the regime had ‘solved’ the production problem and could rely on an intensification of production (i.e. mechanization, electrification, and increased use of mineral fertilizers). In response Khrushchev challenged the emphasis on consumer goods and, especially, Malenkov’s cheerful assumption that the agricultural question was ‘solved’. Khrushchev proposed to increase, not cut, investment in the agricultural sector, above all through the ‘Virgin Lands’ programme—an ambitious scheme to convert huge tracts of pastureland in southern Siberia and Kazakhstan to arable land. By shifting wheat production to the Virgin Lands, the Ukraine could grow the corn needed to provide fodder for greater meat and milk production.
Khrushchev’s programme, however, proved a hard sell in the party. Investment in agriculture (a radical break from Stalin’s utter neglect) encountered stiff opposition from conservatives in the centre, especially the ‘metal-eaters’ in heavy industry; it also elicited opposition from Central Asians, who feared wind erosion, Moscow’s intervention and control, and a mass influx of Russians. By August 1954, however, the First Secretary had prevailed: a joint party-gove
rnment decree endorsed the Virgin Lands programme and raised the target for newly cultivated land from 13 million to 30 million hectares by 1956. Blessed with unusually good weather, the Virgin Lands programme initially brought huge increases in agricultural output (a 35.3 per cent increase between 1954 and 1958), causing the ebullient Khrushchev to make the foolhardy prediction that in two or three years the Soviet Union could satisfy all its food needs.
Simultaneously, Khrushchev declared war on ‘bureaucracy’. In part, he was seeking to undermine Malenkov’s power base—the state apparatus, which was indeed bloated (with 6.5 million employees by 1954). But Khrushchev, the former provincial party chief, also recognized the need to decentralize and shift power and responsibility to the republic level. As a result, by 1955 he had cut the number of Union-level ministries in half (from 55 to 25) and state employees (by 11.5 per cent). This decentralization significantly enhanced the authority of national republics; for example, enterprises under republic control rose from one-third of total industrial output (1950) to 56 per cent (1956). The shift was especially marked in Ukraine, where the republic-controlled output rose from 36 to 76 per cent.
By late 1954 Khrushchev’s programme, and its main architect, had triumphed over Malenkov. The latter, defeated on policy issues and confronted with ominous references to his ‘complicity’ in fabricating the ‘Leningrad affair’, resigned in December 1954. Two months later, he was formally replaced by N. Bulganin as premier, Khrushchev’s nominal co-equal in the leadership.
Cultural Thaw and De-Stalinization
Amid the struggle over power and policy, the regime cautiously began to dismantle the Stalinist system of repression and secrecy. Symbolically, in late 1953 it opened the Kremlin itself to visitors; during the next three years, eight million citizens would visit this inner sanctum of communist power. Openness also extended to culture, hitherto strait-jacketed by censorship and ideology. The change was heralded in V. Pomerantsev’s essay ‘On Sincerity in Literature’ (December 1953), which assailed the Stalinist canons of socialist realism that had prevailed since the 1930s. Thus began a cautious liberalization that took its name from Ilia Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw (1954), and that extended to many spheres of cultural and intellectual life. It even applied to religion—long a favourite target of persecution; a party edict of 10 November 1954, responding to complaints about illegal church closings, admonished party zealots to avoid ‘offensive attacks against clergy and believers participating in religious observances’.
The most important change, however, was crypto-de-Stalinization—a cautious repudiation of the ‘cult of personality’ that commenced immediately after Stalin’s death. The initiative came from above, not below. Not that all in the leadership supported such measures; Stalin’s henchmen, such as Voroshilov and Kaganovich, themselves deeply implicated, remained inveterate foes of de-Stalinization. Apart from some early veiled critiques (for example, Malenkov’s comment about ‘massive disorders’ under the ‘cult of personality’), the principal sign of Stalin’s ‘disgrace’ was sheer silence about the leader. For example, the regime declined to ‘immemorialize’ Stalin by renaming the Komsomol in his honour, dropped plans to transform Stalin’s ‘near dacha’ into a museum, and let 1953 pass without mention of the ‘Stalin prizes’ or the customary celebration of his birthday. Servile quotations from Stalin quietly disappeared; authors who persisted were roundly criticized for ignoring Marx and Lenin. The silence did not go unnoticed; in July a party secretary in Moscow wrote to Khrushchev to enquire ‘Why have editorials in Pravda recently ceased to include quotations and extracts from the speeches and works of I. V. Stalin?’
Why did Stalin’s closest associates decide to demote the Leader to a non-person? Apart from a desire to distance themselves from Stalin’s (and their own) crimes, de-Stalinizers had several motives. Zealous ‘de-Stalinizers’ (including Khrushchev) were zealous communists: they denounced the cult for its voluntarism and for crediting Stalin, not the party or people, for the great achievements of industrialization and victory over fascism. That is why, for example, authorities decided to interdict a poem by A. Markov that failed to show the people as the ‘creative force in history’ and assigned ‘the main place in the poem’ to Stalin, who is ‘shown in the spirit of the cult of personality’. In a memorandum of 27 April 1953 the philosopher G. A. Aleksandrov denounced the cult and opposed reprinting the Stalin biography—partly because of its ‘many factual inaccuracies and editorial mistakes’, but mainly because of its ‘populist-subjectivist view on the role of the individual and especially of leaders in history’ and because of its failure ‘to elucidate sufficiently the role of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the struggle of the Soviet people for socialism and communism’. Khrushchev similarly complained that Stalin had been ‘a demigod’, who ‘was credited with all accomplishments, as if all blessings came from him’.
Zealous de-Stalinizers, moreover, had personally experienced Stalin’s fearsome tyranny. Close family members of Stalin’s top associates were counted among his victims—kinsmen, even immediate family members, of members in the Politburo. Postwar campaigns like the ‘Leningrad affair’ swept away top figures in the party, leaving many others feeling profoundly vulnerable. The philosopher Aleksandrov himself had been a victim of the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign: after A. A. Zhdanov denounced his history of Western philosophy (for exaggerating West European influence on Marxism) in June 1947, Aleksandrov was replaced as ideological watchdog by M. A. Suslov. In Stalin’s final years top aides grew fearful that the dictator had new designs on them; according to Khrushchev, only the dictator’s death prevented him from carrying out plans to arrest Molotov and Mikoyan.
Khrushchev himself had reason to fear the ageing tyrant. The most dramatic incident involved Khrushchev’s proposal to increase agricultural output by merging kolkhozy into larger ‘agrocities’. He advertised this idea in a Pravda article on 4 March 1951, but without first obtaining Stalin’s endorsement—probably because Stalin no longer read many documents. After Stalin subjected the article to devastating criticism, a terror-stricken Khrushchev hastily sent Stalin a letter of abject self-abasement and pleaded for the opportunity to denounce himself: ‘Profoundly distraught by the mistake I committed, I have been thinking how this could best be corrected. I decided to ask you to let me correct this mistake myself. I am prepared to publish in the press and to criticize my own article, published on 4 March, examining its false theses in detail’.
Khrushchev and his supporters also addressed the question of the cult’s victims and initiated a cautious rehabilitation, beginning first with élite figures. A typical early case involved I. M. Gronskii, a former editor of Izvestiia; sentenced to fifteen years in prison for ‘wrecking’, in June 1953 he petitioned the Central Committee to review his case. An investigation confirmed that his ‘confession’ was obtained through coercion and that he was innocent. In May 1954 the party established special commissions to review the cases; during the first year, these cautious commissions rehabilitated 4,620 individuals, leaving the mass of politicals—and ordinary criminals—in the maws of GULAG.
Apart from appeals for rehabilitation, the regime had other reasons for concern about GULAG. Above all, this prison empire became increasingly volatile, with frequent and violent disorders. The most famous, at ‘Gorlag’ (Norilsk) in 1953, required a military assault that left more than a thousand prisoners dead. Insurrections also exploded at Steplag (1954), Kolyma (1955), and Ozerlag (1956). More important, the ‘corrective labour’ system was anything but corrective: rates of recidivism were shockingly high. According to one study (April 1956), 25 per cent of current prisoners were former inmates. But such results were inevitable for a system manned by people with abysmally low professional standards: three-quarters of the camp administrators did not even have a secondary education. The size and complexity of GULAG also militated against better results. The population of camps and prisons (2,472,247 on 1 January 1953) declined after the
Beria amnesty, but then increased sharply. On 1 January 1956 the prisons held 1.6 million inmates (with another 150,000 in transit or under investigation); GULAG’s 46 corrective labour camps and 524 labour colonies held another 940,880 people (including 113,739 guilty of ‘counter-revolutionary activity’). In short, initial measures had barely altered the Stalinist prison-camp system; it was the Twentieth Party Congress that would open the floodgates for rehabilitation and reform.
Russia A History Page 46