Twentieth Party Congress (1956)
The first such assembly since Stalin’s death, the Twentieth Party Congress was a watershed in the political history of modern Russia. It sought to revitalize the party by including many new faces, not only among the 1,349 voting delegates, but also in the leadership: roughly half of the oblast and regional secretaries, even the Central Committee, were new. That turnover reflected Khrushchev’s campaign to consolidate power: one-third of the members of the Central Committee came from Khrushchev’s Moscow and Ukrainian ‘tail’ or entourage. The congress began in humdrum fashion, with little hint of the coming fireworks; Khrushchev’s report as First Secretary made only passing reference to Stalin. Critical tones, however, reverberated in the speeches of M. Suslov (about the ‘cult of the individual’) and Anastas Mikoyan (who attacked the cult and Stalin’s last opus, The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR).
But the bombshell exploded unexpectedly on 24 February when delegates were summoned to an unscheduled, late-night speech by Khrushchev behind closed doors. His speech on ‘the cult of the personality and its consequences’, a text of 26,000 words requiring four hours for delivery, offered a devastating account of Stalin’s crimes after Kirov’s murder in December 1934. It presented shocking statistics on the number of party members, congress delegates, and military leaders who perished in the 1930s amid ‘mass violations of socialist legality’. The report also blamed Stalin for catastrophic mistakes in the Second World War, for the mass deportation of entire peoples, and for other crimes after the war. By suggesting that the cult appeared after collectivization and industrialization (which were thus not called into question), Khrushchev sought to distinguish between Stalin’s crimes and Soviet achievements and to uphold the principle that ‘the true creators of the new life are the popular masses led by the Communist Party’. The main thrust of the speech was incorporated in a Central Committee resolution of 30 June 1956 ‘On Overcoming the Cult of the Individual and its Consequences’.
By then the rehabilitation process was already in high gear. The regime advised investigatory commissions that many convictions were based on un-proven accusations or ‘confessions obtained through the use of illegal methods of investigation’. Nevertheless, it exempted whole categories from rehabilitation: ‘nationalists’ in Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltics who had fought against the Soviet Union during the war as well as those ‘who were really exposed as traitors, terrorists, saboteurs, spies and wreckers’. To accelerate the process, a party commission was sent to interview political prisoners and judge whether they should be released. The undertaking was enormous, involving more than one hundred thousand ‘counterrevolutionaries’. According to a report from 15 June 1956, authorities had already released 51,439 prisoners (including 26,155 politicals) and reduced the sentences for another 19,093. Although restricted to cases initiated after 1935 (on the specious grounds that ‘mass violation of individual rights’ commenced only then), by 1961 rehabilitation gradually enveloped a large number of Stalin’s victims, including half of the politicals who had been executed.
De-Stalinization was also fraught with foreign repercussions. Khrushchev’s secret speech, leaked by a Polish communist, quickly found its way into print (with the assistance of the American CIA). It had an extraordinary impact on foreign communists—many of whose comrades-in-arms had perished in the Stalinist repressions. In April 1956 the Pravda correspondent in Bonn reported that West German communists reacted favourably to the speech, yet wanted to know why the CPSU had failed to stop Stalin and, more important, ‘where is the guarantee that the Soviet comrades will not again make mistakes and bring harm to the fraternal parties through their new mistakes?’ Khrushchev personally had to fend off similar questioning from Italian communists. The attack on Stalin also contributed to the rebellious mood in Poland, where demonstrations in Poznan ended in bloodshed and brought a change in party leadership.
The main explosion came in Hungary: in late April 1956 the Soviet ambassador, Iurii Andropov, warned Moscow that de-Stalinization had exacerbated internal tensions and provoked criticism from Stalinists in the Hungarian Politburo. By September Andropov’s dispatches became increasingly alarmist, with warnings about an anti-communist movement and disintegration of the Hungarian Communist Party. The popular movement culminated in street demonstrations on 23 October, when angry crowds smashed Stalinist statues and shouted demands for democratization and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The next day the Hungarian party elected Imre Nagy as its chief, and he promptly summoned Andropov to ask about Soviet troop movements in eastern Hungary. The denouement came soon: after Hungary declared itself a neutral state, on 4 November the Russian army invaded and suppressed the popular insurrection with raw force. A week later the KGB chief reported that Soviet forces had arrested 3,773 ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and seized 90,000 firearms.
The attack on Stalin also had reverberations inside the USSR. Rehabilitation involved such vast numbers that even Khrushchev became anxious. Thus, to protect ‘state interests’ and understate the scale of repression, the KGB falsely informed relatives that many of the executed had received sentences of hard labour and died of natural causes. More problematic was the fate of entire peoples deported to Siberia and Central Asia for alleged collaboration—such as the Karachai, Chechens, Ingushi, Kabardinians, and Balkars. Although the government began in April 1956 to allow certain groups (the main exceptions being the Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars) to return home, repatriation created new problems of its own when returnees demanded restitution of property. The result was fierce ethnic conflict, such as the four-day riot in August 1958 that involved Russians, Chechens, and Ingushi.
But the political resonance from de-Stalinization was muted in Russia. A KGB report on ‘anti-Soviet’ activities during celebrations for the October Revolution in 1956 cited only minor incidents—for example, ‘hooligans’ demolished two sculptures of Stalin in Kherson, shredded photographs of party leaders in Sevastopol, defaced a portrait of Khrushchev in Serpukhov, and disseminated anti-Soviet leaflets in Batumi. The action of a tenth-grade student in Iaroslavl (who marched past the tribune with a banner that read: ‘We demand the removal of Soviet troops from Hungary’) was as unique as it was courageous. Nevertheless, the ‘vigilant’ leaders became anxious and on 14 December 1956 approved the proposals of a special commission (chaired by L. I. Brezhnev) to combat the growth of anti-Soviet sentiments and activities. The next year the KGB crushed a student democratic movement at Moscow State University that, under the leadership of L. Krasnopevtsev, had distributed leaflets and agitated in favour of full-scale democratization. In Archangel the police uncovered a tiny group that categorically repudiated the Stalinist legacy: ‘Stalin, having destroyed his personal adversaries, established a fascist autocratic regime in the USSR, the brutality of which has no equals in history’.
All this galvanized Stalinists to oppose Khrushchev and his policies. Although Khrushchev later claimed to have broad support in the party, many party members—including several members of the Politburo—opposed de-Stalinization. Stalwarts like A. M. Peterson of Riga openly challenged the new policy: ‘Comrades in the Central Committee, do you really not feel that the party expects from you a rehabilitation of Stalin?’ Pro-Stalinist sentiments were particularly strong in Stalin’s home republic of Georgia; news of Khrushchev’s secret speech had even ignited street demonstrations in Tbilisi.
The foreign and domestic turbulence impelled Khrushchev to retreat from a public campaign against Stalin, with the rationalization that the ‘people’ were not yet ready for the new line. Although individual rehabilitations continued, the regime took steps to curtail debate and criticism of Stalin. A telling sign of the change was the famous ‘Burdzhalov’ affair in October 1956 involving a historical journal (Voprosy istorii), which had published revelations about Stalin’s role in 1917 and subsequent falsification in Soviet historiography. By reprimanding the chief editor and cashiering the assistant editor (E
. N. Burdzhalov, the principal culprit), the regime made clear that it would not tolerate anything that might delegitimize the revolution and its own claims to power.
The zig-zags in policy aroused confusion and criticism from below. Local party officials quoted one member as complaining that ‘the leaders of party and state have become muddled in criticizing the cult of personality of Stalin: at first they condemned him, but now they have started to praise him again’. In January 1957 an engineer wrote to the Central Committee to complain that ‘there are two N. S. Khrushchevs in the Central Committee of CPSU: the first N. S. Khrushchev with complete [adherence to] Leninist principles directly exposes and wages battle against the personality of Stalin; the second N. S. Khrushchev defends the actions of Stalin that he personally perpetrated against the people and party during his twenty years of personal dictatorship.’ Individual rehabilitation continued, but Khrushchev now turned his attention from de-Stalinization to political and administrative reform.
Democratization and Decentralization
The years 1957–61 marked the apogee of Khrushchev’s attempt at structural reform along two main lines. One was ‘democratization’, a campaign to dislodge an entrenched bureaucracy and to shift responsibility directly to ‘the people’. Khrushchev was the consummate populist, fond of hobnobbing with workers and peasants and flaunting his closeness to the people. He was also profoundly suspicious of ‘bureaucrats’ and ‘partocrats’ (party functionaries). And their numbers were legion; as a Central Committee resolution (21 May 1957) acidly observed, since 1940 primary party organizations had increased twofold, but their number of salaried functionaries had grown fivefold. To combat bureaucratization and ensure ‘fresh forces’, Khrushchev applied term limits not only to regional and oblastsecretaries (two-thirds of whom were replaced between 1955 and 1960), but even to those in élite organs: two-thirds of the Council of Ministers and one-half of the Central Committee changed between 1956 and 1961. The objective, as a party resolution explained in 1957, was to eradicate the cult of personality and ‘ensure the broad participation of the working masses in the management of the state’. This also meant an expansion of party membership, which increased from 6.9 million to 11.0 million members between 1954 and 1964 (60 per cent of whom were listed as workers and peasants in 1964). Khrushchev also sought to expand the people’s role in running the state—for example, by increasing the authority of organs of ‘popular control’ and reviving ‘comrade courts’ to handle minor offences and misdemeanours.
The second, related thrust of reform was decentralization—a perennial Russian panacea for solving problems and inciting initiative at the grass roots. By 1955 Khrushchev had already transferred 11,000 enterprises (along with planning and financial decisions) from central to republican control. Moscow went further in May 1956, reassigning the plants of twelve ministries to republic jurisdiction. The capstone to decentralization came in 1957 with the establishment of sovnarkhozy—105 regional economic councils given comprehensive authority over economic development. Republican authorities gained so much power that their prime ministers became ex officio members of the USSR Council of Ministers. Khrushchev also dismantled much of the old bureaucracy (including 140 ministries at the republic, union-republic, and union levels). The underlying idea was to bring decision-making closer to the enterprise to ensure better management and greater productivity.
Decentralization, together with resentment over de-Stalinization, fuelled growing opposition to Khrushchev. Although Khrushchev had strong support in the Central Committee (where republic and provincial secretaries—the main beneficiaries of reform—dominated), he faced stiff opposition in the ruling Presidium. The latter represented old party élites and entrenched officialdom in Moscow, who not only watched their empires shrivel or disappear, but sometimes had to relocate to a provincial site. When, for example, Khrushchev relocated the main offices of the Ministry of Agriculture 100 km. from Moscow (to be closer to the fields!), top officials had a daily commute of two to three hours in each direction.
One month after the sovnarkhoz reform was promulgated, Khrushchev faced a full-blown revolt in the Presidium. On 18 June his nominal co-equal, Bulganin, asked Khrushchev to convene a meeting of the Presidium, where a majority was prepared to vote his dismissal. Khrushchev, however, insisted that only the body that elected him—the Central Committee—could authorize his dismissal; with the assistance of military aircraft (supplied by his ally, Marshal Zhukov), Khrushchev flew Central Committee members from their provincial posts to Moscow. His adversaries in the Presidium finally agreed to convene a special plenum of the Central Committee. The result was a complete rout of Khrushchev’s opponents, who were denounced as ‘the Anti-Party Group’ and their leaders (Malenkov, Kaganovich, and Molotov) expelled from the Central Committee. The new Presidium included critical supporters, such as Marshal Zhukov, and high-level functionaries like L. I. Brezhnev and A. I. Kosygin who would later have Khrushchev himself removed. Although, for the sake of appearances, Bulganin was allowed temporarily to remain head of the state, in March 1958 Khrushchev assumed his post as chief of state.
Having tamed the opposition, Khrushchev next dealt with his key supporter—Marshal Zhukov. The latter had begun to voice the military’s dissatisfaction with Khrushchev’s decision to scale down the army (from 5.8 million in 1950 to 3.6 million in 1960) and to deny costly weapons systems (cutting the military’s share of the budget in 1956 from 19.9 per cent to 18.2 per cent). On 29 October 1957, just a few weeks after the spectacular launch of the world’s first artificial satellite Sputnik (4 October), a party resolution denounced Zhukov for restricting its role in the army (thereby ‘violating Leninist party principles’) and for propagating ‘a cult of Comrade G. K. Zhukov … with his personal complicity’. The last major political counterpoint to Khrushchev appeared to have been removed.
Economy, Society, and Culture
The late 1950s represented the golden age for the Khrushchev economy, which boasted extraordinarily high rates of growth in the industrial and agricultural sectors. Altogether, the annual rate of growth in the GNP increased from 5.0 per cent in 1951–5 to 5.9 per cent in 1956–60 (the Fifth Five-Year Plan). The most spectacular progress was to be found in the industrial sector: the total growth (80 per cent) even exceeded the ambitious plan target (65 per cent). In 1987 Soviet analysts revealed that this was by far the most successful industrial growth of the whole post-Stalinist era. With labour productivity rising by 62 per cent and the return on assets (‘profit’) amounting to 17 per cent, the Soviet economy made enormous strides. The launching of the satellite Sputnik seemed to demonstrate the might, if not superiority, of the Soviet system. As Soviet industrial production increased from 30 to 55 per cent of American output between 1950 and 1960, Khrushchev seemed to have good ground for his bravado about ‘overtaking and surpassing’ America.
Agriculture, the unloved stepchild of Stalinist economics, became a new focus of development. The policy yielded immediate results, as output increased 35.3 per cent (1954–8); the ‘Virgin Lands’ programme opened up an additional 41.8 million hectares of arable land, which produced high yields and a spectacular bumper crop in 1958. Altogether, the average annual output between 1949–53 and 1959–63 increased by 43.8 million tons (28.9 million tons of which came from the virgin lands). Not only gross output but productivity was higher: the yield per hectare rose from 7.7 centners (100 kg.) per hectare (1949–53) to 9.1 (1954–8). Encouraged by this success, Khrushchev cut back the investment in agriculture (its share of investment falling from 12.8 per cent in 1958 to 2.4 per cent in 1960), on the assumption that the virgin lands would sustain large harvests. He also forced kolkhozniki to grow more maize, though at the expense of other grains (oats production, for example, fell by two-thirds). And he applied decentralization to agriculture, chiefly by liquidating ‘machine tractor stations’ (January 1958) and undercutting the power of party bureaucrats.
‘Democratization’ also meant a higher standard
of living for ordinary citizens—a rather unexpected policy, given Khrushchev’s earlier criticism of Malenkov for ‘consumerism’. There was much social inequity to overcome: because of Stalinist wage differentials, the ‘decile coefficient’ (the official standard for income distribution, measured as the difference between the ninth and first deciles) was 7.2 in 1946—far higher than that in capitalist countries (the comparable figure for Great Britain in the 1960s was 3.6). Resentment against the privileged informed this anonymous letter to the Komsomol in December 1956: ‘Please explain why they babble (if one may so speak) about the well-being of the people, but there is really nothing of the sort; things are getting worse—and worse for us than in any capitalist country’. The letter derided the endless radio propaganda about progress towards communism: ‘You [party élites] of course have communism; we have starvationism, inflationism, and exploitationism of the simple working people’. A letter from eleven workers in Lithuania ridiculed state propaganda ‘that people live badly under the capitalists’ and declared that the common people live worse in the USSR, that ‘this is not socialism, but just a bordello (bardak) and hard labour’.
Khrushchev took important steps to improve popular well-being. One was a revolution in labour policy: he decriminalized absenteeism and turnover, made drastic reductions in wage differentials, and established a minimum wage. After fixing a ‘poverty line’, the regime reduced the number below this limit from 100 million in 1958 to only 30 million a decade later. As a result, the decile coefficient dropped from the Stalinist 7.2 (1946) to 4.9 (1956) and then to 3.3 (1964). Considerable improvements were made among the lowest-paid segments of society—rural labour: between 1960 and 1965, the average income of kolkhozniki rose from 70 to 80 per cent of the average-paid state employees. Although the kolkhoznik remained a second-class citizen (without pensions, sickness benefits, or even a passport), his material condition had improved significantly.
Russia A History Page 47