Russia A History

by Gregory L. Freeze

  Khrushchev also increased social services, housing, and educational opportunities. Expenditure on social services increased by only 3 per cent in 1950–5, but rose by 8 per cent in 1956–65. As a result, the housing stock doubled between 1955 and 1964; although built mostly as the notorious ‘Khrushchev barracks’ (with low ceilings, tiny rooms, and shoddy construction), it was a serious response to the housing shortage and rapid urbanization. Notwithstanding the ideological antipathy towards ‘private ownership’, in 1955 the regime launched a programme to construct privately owned flats from personal savings (with a down-payment of 15–30 per cent and a mortgage with 0.5 per cent interest rate). The Khrushchev regime also ‘democratized’ the educational system: dismayed that 80 per cent of all university students were coming from the intelligentsia, in 1958 Khrushchev abolished school and university tuition fees and dramatically restructured secondary schooling to force all children into the labour force for two years to learn a trade.

  Although decentralization abetted the special interests of individual nationalities, Khrushchev detested ‘petty-bourgeois nationalism’. That attitude clearly informed school language policy where Moscow took steps to promote Russian language instruction. This policy elicited considerable opposition from minority nationalities; a Belorussian complained in 1956 that his ‘language has now been expelled from all state and Soviet institutions and institutions of higher learning in the republic’. The main objective was not simply closer ties (sblizhenie), but the assimilation (sliianie) of small nations into Soviet Russian culture.

  Twenty-Second Party Congress (October 1961)

  The ‘extraordinary’ Twenty-First Party Congress of 1959 dealt with primarily economic questions (including a scheme to restructure the five-year plan into a seven-year plan), but otherwise did not mark a significant event. That could hardly be said of the Twenty-Second Party Congress, attended by some 4,400 voting delegates. Above all, it signalled a new and open offensive against Stalinism. Khrushchev himself implicated Stalin in Kirov’s murder and suggested that several leading cadres (Kaganovich, Molotov, and Voroshilov) personally abetted Stalin in perpetrating the crimes. The Congress also raised the question of Stalin’s mummified corpse, which since 1953 had rested alongside Lenin in the Mausoleum. This time the party was blessed with instructions from the next world, kindly transmitted by a deputy from Leningrad, D. A. Lazurkina: ‘Yesterday I asked Ilich [Lenin] for advice and it was as if he stood before me alive and said, “I do not like being beside Stalin, who inflicted so much harm on the party”.’ The congress resolved to remove Stalin because of his ‘serious violations of Leninist precepts, his abuse of power, his mass repressions of honest Soviet people, and his other actions during the cult of personality’. The former dictator was reburied in an unmarked grave along the Kremlin wall.

  The congress also adopted a new party programme, the first since 1919. It included brash predictions that the Soviet Union would surpass the United States by 1970 and complete the construction of communism by 1980. It also included new rules to ensure ‘democratization’ in the party and preclude the formation of a vested bureaucratic class. It also called for ‘the active participation of all citizens in the administration of the state, in the management of economic and cultural development, in the improvement of the government apparatus, and in supervision over its activity’. To ensure popular participation, the new party rules set term limits on officials at all levels—from a maximum of sixteen years for Central Committee members to four years for local officials. The goal was to ensure constant renewal of party leadership and the infusion of fresh forces—even at the top, where a quarter of the Central Committee and Presidium were to be replaced every four years. However, the rules had an escape clause for ‘especially important’ functionaries (such as Khrushchev himself, presumably). Finally, the programme sought to replace full-time functionaries with volunteers and part-time staff, thereby reducing the number of paid functionaries and ensuring more involvement by the rank and file. The new programme, understandably, was the kind that would not do much to raise Khrushchev’s popularity among the ‘partocrats’.

  From Crisis to Conspiracy

  Despite Khrushchev’s apparent triumph at the party congress in 1961, within three years the very men who led the ‘prolonged, thunderous ovations’ were feverishly conspiring to drive him from power. The populist was becoming unpopular, not only in the party, but among the broad mass of the population. Several factors help to account for his fall from power.

  One was a string of humiliating reverses in foreign affairs. Khrushchev, for example, took the blame for the Sino-Soviet split: although relations were already strained (because of Chinese resentment over insufficient assistance and respect), the tensions escalated into an open split under Khrushchev. De-Stalinization was partly at issue, but still more divisive was Khrushchev’s ‘revisionist’ theory of peaceful coexistence and his refusal to assist the Chinese in acquiring a nuclear capability. Next came the Berlin crisis of 1961; although provoked by the East German leadership (as is now known), at that time the crisis was blamed on Khrushchev, who appeared to have fecklessly brought Soviet–American relations to the brink of war. That débâcle was soon followed by the Cuban missile crisis. After publicly denying the presence of missiles, the Soviet Union was embarrassed by clear CIA aerial photographs, prominently displayed at a stormy session of the United Nations Security Council. Confronted by an American ‘quarantine’ of Cuba, Khrushchev was forced to back down; although he obtained important concessions in secret negotiations, the public impression was one of total Soviet capitulation. Khrushchev suffered another fiasco in India, the recipient of massive economic and military aid, but an unreliable ally—a ‘neutral’ that did not hesitate to criticize the Soviet Union or its surrogate Communist Party in India. But India was hardly the only recipient; by 1964, for example, the USSR had given 821 million dollars to Egypt, 500 million to Afghanistan, and 1.5 billion to Indonesia (which became pro-Chinese in 1963). Such foreign aid brought scant political return and became increasingly unpopular at home, especially amid the food shortages and sputtering economy. Finally, party élites were embarrassed by Khrushchev’s penchant for vulgar jokes and crude behaviour—as in the infamous ‘shoe-pounding’ escapade during Harold Macmillan’s speech at the United Nations session in 1960.

  A second factor in Khrushchev’s demise was his cultural policy, which gradually alienated both the intelligentsia and general population. Even earlier, as in the 1958 campaign of vilification against Boris Pasternak (whose Doctor Zhivago—illegally published abroad—had won a Nobel Prize), Khrushchev made clear that the ‘thaw’ did not mean artistic freedom. Nor was he even consistent: one month after authorizing publication of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich he publicly castigated modern art at the ‘Thirty Years of Moscow Art’ exhibition. He was also increasingly distrustful of writers; as he declared in 1962, ‘Do you know how things began in Hungary? It all began with the Union of Writers.’ In December 1962 and March 1963 Khrushchev and party ideologues convened special meetings with writers to reaffirm the limits on literary freedom. One early victim was the future Nobel prizewinning poet, Joseph Brodsky who did not belong to the official Writers’ Union and was therefore convicted of ‘parasitism’ in February 1964. The intelligentsia was not the only victim: in 1961 Khrushchev launched a vigorous anti-religious campaign, ending nearly a decade of qualified tolerance. The campaign affected all religious confessions, but was particularly devastating for the Russian Orthodox Church: over the next four years, the regime closed 59 of its 69 monasteries, 5 of its 8 seminaries, and 13,500 of its 22,000 parish churches.

  A third reason for Khrushchev’s downfall was economic, as his policies and panaceas began to go awry. As Soviet economist Abel Aganbegyan demonstrated, the growth rate in the early 1960s declined by a factor of three—the result of systemic inefficiency, waste, and backwardness permeating every sector of the economy. And, despite offici
al claims of ‘full employment’, the real unemployment rate was 8 per cent nationally and as high as 30 per cent in small towns. Aganbegian identified three main causes: (1) massive defence allocations, which diverted 30 to 40 per cent of the work-force into primary or secondary defence plants; (2) failure to modernize and automate production; and, (3) ‘extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters’, compounded by a primitive planning apparatus that lacked computers or even reliable economic data. ‘We obtain many figures’, he noted, ‘from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration’. The result was hoarding, low labour productivity, shoddy quality, forced savings, and the omnipresent defitsity (goods shortages) that fed inflation and a booming black market. Recent data confirm Aganbegian’s analysis, showing a sharp drop in the growth indicators for the gross domestic product (from 5.9 per cent in 1956–60 to 5.0 per cent in 1961–5) and investment (from 16 per cent in 1958 to 4 per cent in 1961–3).

  But economic problems were most apparent in agriculture: although average grain output rose from 98.8 million tons in 1953–6 to 132.1 in 1961–4, that yield fell short of expectations and demand. According to one calculation, the grain output needed to satisfy demand in 1955 was 160 tonnes; that was about 20 per cent more than average output in 1961–4. Moreover, output fell behind increases in personal income: although per capita agricultural production increased slightly during 1959–65, disposable money income rose dramatically (48 per cent in 1958–64). The increased demand was also due to population growth (33 per cent) and urbanization (250 per cent), leaving more and more people dependent on the agricultural sector. In short, Khrushchev had severely underestimated demand and overestimated output.

  The miscalculation had several causes. One was just bad luck: the drought of 1963 caused an abysmal harvest of 107 million tonnes—larger than a Stalin harvest, but only 61 per cent of plan targets. The low harvest forced the Soviet Union, which had recently boasted of overtaking America, to take the ignominious step of purchasing twelve million tonnes of grain abroad. But it was not only bad luck and bad weather: Khrushchev himself contributed to the failure in agriculture. He was blindly devoted to maize; apart from climatic and technological problems, its cultivation met with adamant peasant resistance, duly reported by the KGB: ‘We don’t need to sow corn; it will just cause a lot of trouble and bring little use’. But the First Secretary, sullied as the kukuruznik (‘maize-man’), was determined, especially after his visit to the United States in 1959, to grow maize. By 1962 he had forced peasants to plant 37 million hectares of maize, of which only 7 million ripened in time for harvest. Nor did his panacea—the Virgin Lands programme—work the expected miracle. As a result of drought, erosion, and weed infestation, the output from the virgin lands fell far short of plan expectations. After the first bumper harvests, output steadily declined in the late 1950s, partly for want of grass covers and fertilizers to renew the soil. Worse still was the irreversible damage caused by feckless cultivation of areas unsuited for grain production: in 1960–5 wind erosion ruined twelve million hectares of land (four million in Kazakhstan alone)—roughly half of the virgin lands.

  Moreover, Khrushchev’s ‘decentralizing’ strategy weakened administrative control, inviting evasion, resistance, and malfeasance. The most famous case involved the party secretary of Riazan, A. N. Larionov, who ‘over-fulfilled’ the meat quota in 1959 threefold, but by illicit means—by slaughtering dairy as well as beef cattle and by purchasing meat from neighbouring provinces. His miraculous achievements were loudly celebrated in Pravda, but the next year the newly minted ‘Hero of Socialist labour’ committed suicide to avoid the awful day of reckoning. His case was hardly exceptional. An official investigation revealed that party secretaries in Tiumen oblast ‘engaged in all kinds of machinations to deceive the government, included reports on unproduced and unsold production to the state, thereby creating an apparent prosperity in agriculture in the oblast and inflicted great harm to the state, kolkhoz, and sovkhoz’. The problem was bad policy, not just bad people. After years of massive allocations to agriculture, Khrushchev suddenly reduced the flow of investment. Difficulties for this sector were further compounded by the decision in 1958 to abolish machine tractor stations, forcing collective farms to purchase this equipment and divert scarce resources into capital goods. Moreover, Khrushchev ambitiously pursued his earlier fetish for merging collective farms into ever larger units, their total number falling by nearly a third in 1953–8 (from 91,200 to 67,700); such mergers, however, failed to bring ‘economies of size’ and eroded effective administration. It also reinforced the kolkhoznik’s devotion to his individual plot, which yielded over half their income in 1960 (with even higher proportions in some areas—for example, 75 per cent in Lithuania). When Khrushchev urged collective farmers to abandon their monomaniacal cultivation of private plots, one peasant in Kursk eloquently summarized popular sentiment in an encounter with the First Secretary: ‘Nikita, what’s got into you, have you gone off your rocker?’

  Although the regime took special measures to provide cities with basic necessities, it also attempted to dampen demand in June 1962 by raising prices—38 per cent on meat and 25 per cent on butter. The price increases aroused intense popular discontent and even disorders. To quote a KGB report from June 1962: ‘In recent years some cities in our country have experienced mass disorders, accompanied by pogroms of administrative buildings, destruction of public property, and attacks on representatives of authority and other disorderly behaviour’. Although police tried to blame ‘hooligan’ elements (including people so diverse as former ‘Nazi collaborators, clergy, and sectarians’), the root cause of course lay much deeper.

  Those causes were clearly visible in the most famous disorder of all—in Novocherskassk in June 1962. It began at a locomotive plant, where workers rebelled against rising food prices, wage cuts (30 per cent), and a backlog of unresolved grievances (housing shortages, work safety, and even food-poisoning of 200 workers). The workers quickly won the support of local townspeople; as the KGB later reported, the ‘man-in-the-street’ believed that ‘prices should have been left as they were, that the salaries of highly paid people should be reduced, [and] that aid to underdeveloped socialist countries should cease’. When the striking workers marched into the centre of Novocherkassk, they attracted a crowd of some 4,000 people and managed to repulse the assault of local police and, later, even armoured units. ‘Mass disorders’ continued the next day, as the insurgents seized the offices of the city party committee and tried to storm the KGB and militia headquarters. Moscow hastily dispatched a key Khrushchev aide, F. R. Kozlov, who denounced the ‘instigators’ as ‘hooligan elements’, defended the price rise, but promised to improve the food supply. Troops were eventually able to restore order, but not before taking scores of civilian lives.

  But Khrushchev’s fatal error was to attack the ‘partocracy’—the central and local élites who comprised the only real organized political force. His attempt to democratize and ensure renewal, especially through ‘term limits’, posed a direct threat to career officials, from highest to lowest echelons. Decentralization itself was anathema to apparatchiki, especially those holding power in Moscow. His original scheme of sovnarkhozy not only reduced the power of Moscow functionaries, but also forced many to depart for provincial posts—‘I myself had to work in a sovnarkhoz’, a high-ranking functionary later complained. In 1962 Khrushchev undermined his base of support even among provincial officialdom through his scheme to divide the party into industrial and agricultural branches at the regional and oblast levels, thereby undercutting the power of local potentates. And, for all the pain, decentralization seemed only to beget corruption, falsified reports, and non-compliance. In response, Khrushchev was forced to build a new layer of intermediate bodies and central organs to co-ordinate—and control—the sovnarkhozy. The drift towards recentralization culminated in a decision of March 1963 to establish the ‘Supreme Economic Cou
ncil of the USSR’—in essence, an attempt to reassert central control over the lower economic councils.

  Finally, Khrushchev’s colleagues came to feel that he had begun to rule imperiously and, at the time of his removal, denounced him for taking decisions impetuously and ignoring collective opinion. Although Khrushchev gamely responded (‘But you, who are present here, never spoke to me openly and candidly about my shortcomings—you always nodded in agreement and expressed support!’), the critique was not amiss. As a high-ranking functionary, A. Shelepin, observed, Stalin—but not the cult—had expired: ‘[Khrushchev] was also a vozhd′ [Leader]. And the same psychology of the vozhd′ remained. And in the subordinates’ relationship to the vozhd′. No one had the courage to speak out against him’. The fact that Khrushchev had assumed both party leadership and the top position in the state—because it was too much work, because it centralized too much power—also elicited criticism. There was keen resentment too over his tendency to promote family members, such as his son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei, who was made editor of Izvestiia and recipient of undeserved awards and privileges.

  The plot to depose Khrushchev evidently commenced as early as February 1964, led primarily by Nikolai Podgornyi and Brezhnev. Khrushchev did receive some prior warnings, but did not take them seriously. The opportunity came in October, as Khrushchev was vacationing at his Crimean dacha: the conspirators summoned him back to Moscow for an extraordinary session of the Central Committee and subjected him to devastating criticism. In his defence Khrushchev emphasized that he had ‘worked all the time’, but professed to greet his removal, through democratic means, as a ‘victory of the party’ over Stalinist illegalities. The public announcement of his ‘retirement’ castigated the former First Secretary for ‘crudeness’, ‘bombastic phrases and braggadocio’, and ‘overhasty conclusions and hare-brained schemes divorced from reality’. Granted a ‘personal pension’, Khrushchev lived in obscurity until his death on 11 September 1971.