The trigger for Shelepin may have been Khrushchev’s visit to Egypt. Shelepin believed that Khrushchev was trying too hard to be liked by anti-Communist third world leaders and, as a result, was sacrificing Soviet dignity. The idea of Khrushchev and a man like Iraq’s Aref together on a ceremonial stage nauseated him.
One area where Shelepin did not disagree with Khrushchev was the Soviet policy toward Beijing. He viewed Mao as a menace. Still, he blamed Khrushchev for the falling-out with Hanoi, which he attributed not to Moscow’s mistakes in its handling of the Chinese but to Khrushchev’s single-minded drive to reach an accommodation with the Americans in Laos.
Shelepin was able to bring to the plot the assistance of his long-time protégé Vladimir Semichastny, who had replaced him as chairman of the KGB in 1961. Semichastny owed a great deal to Khrushchev, but he owed even more to Shelepin. The move to the KGB was only the most recent instance of Shelepin’s handing posts off to Semichastny as he himself rose even higher on the Kremlin’s ladder of success. Semichastny had served first as Shelepin’s deputy, then succeeded him as leader of the Soviet Communist youth organization, Komsomol. The two men symbolized a new generation of Soviet administrator, the “Komsolets,” to whom the baton of the aging Stalinist generation was to be passed in the 1960s.
Sometime in 1963 Brezhnev, Podgorny, and Shelepin began to use Khrushchev’s many absences from Moscow to begin their plotting. There is scattered evidence that the group had a hard time deciding how best to remove Khrushchev. Sometime in the spring of 1964 Brezhnev approached Shelepin and Semichastny with the request that they consider ways of assassinating Khrushchev. Perhaps his airplane could suffer an accident on one of his trips abroad. For a while planning had centered on Khrushchev’s long-delayed trip to Scandinavia. In the end the idea was dropped. The circle of conspiracy was widening enough that the key plotters had reason to believe that Khrushchev would lose a vote in the Central Committee.
Remarkably, the conspiracy continued for months before any of it leaked to Nikita Khrushchev. The Khrushchev family first caught wind of the plot just after the old man returned from Egypt. A loyalist in the bodyguard of N. I. Ignatov, a longtime Central Committee member, revealed to Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, that his boss was traveling the country lining up support for Khrushchev’s removal.11 The source, Vasily Galyukov, named the key conspirators, including Shelepin, Brezhnev and Podgorny, and stated that the planning had been going on for some time. The coup was slated for October, before the party plenum in November.
Khrushchev mishandled the warning. “When I told Father about Galyukov’s disclosures,” Sergei Khrushchev later recalled, “he both believed them and didn’t believe them.” Khrushchev was still very confident of his hold over the party and the Soviet state. He had defeated a serious attempt to unseat him in 1957, and he just doubted that a conspiracy that dangerous could be organized against him now. “Brezhnev, Shelepin, Podgorny—such different people…. Unbelievable!”12
The only person Khrushchev turned to was his old comrade Mikoyan. Since Cuba their relationship had improved. Khrushchev was grateful to Mikoyan for his superb handling of the Cubans in November 1962, when it seemed that Castro was spoiling for a fight with both the Americans and the Soviets. More important now was Mikoyan’s own renewed respect for Khrushchev. The submarine dispute of October 1962 had been forgotten. Khrushchev’s decision to end his quixotic Berlin policy in June 1963 was a signal to Mikoyan that Soviet foreign policy was finally proceeding in the proper direction. For five years Mikoyan had agitated from within to tame Khrushchev’s wilder instincts, while supporting the leader’s innate belief in the possibility of accommodation with the West. Khrushchev asked Mikoyan to meet the bodyguard Galyukov to assess the tip.
Khrushchev also let the conspirators know that he was watching them. He confronted Podgorny, who issued an immediate denial. No doubt within hours Shelepin and Brezhnev knew that either they had to move fast or give up the attempt.
Watching his father’s reaction to the tip, Sergei Khrushchev was disappointed. He found that his father behaved in “a strange, illogical and inexplicable way.” Khrushchev did not allow the rumors of a plot to alter his plans for a vacation in Pitsunda in the first week of October. The only change was that he invited Mikoyan to visit after talking to Galyukov.
The Soviet leader believed he could defeat whatever plan his enemies had prepared. It is not known for sure what, if any, advice Mikoyan offered. His later behavior strongly suggests that he advised Khrushchev to relinquish at least one of his posts as a way to preserve his line in foreign policy.
Khrushchev also brought Mikoyan along when he visited Gagra on October 12 to witness the launching of the world’s first three-man space mission. For all its economic difficulties, the Soviet Union was once again committed to besting the United States in outer space. Khrushchev was scheduled to meet with a personal representative of Charles de Gaulle’s the next day. The schedule allowed for a one-hour meeting and then a formal lunch for Gaston Palewski, a longtime ally of the French president’s. News from Moscow upset that schedule.13
While Khrushchev witnessed the launch of the Vostok 3 spacecraft, Brezhnev assembled almost the entire Presidium in Moscow to plan for his dismissal. In recent weeks the Kremlin’s chief ideologist, Mikhail Suslov, and Khrushchev’s chief economics adviser, Aleksei Kosygin, had been brought into the conspiracy. It was decided to summon Khrushchev for a meeting the very next day at the Kremlin. Brezhnev made the call to Pitsunda. He told Khrushchev that the Presidium planned to meet to discuss a “variety of questions” and he should be there.14
Khrushchev was in no rush to leave Pitsunda. “What’s the hurry? I will be there. I will arrive and [then] we can work things out.”15 It was natural for the Presidium to meet without the first secretary to settle second-tier matters. On October 8 Suslov had chaired a meeting on forming a drafting committee for the forthcoming Communist Party plenum.16 Khrushchev said he would think about coming back for the next day’s meeting. Brezhnev was always considered an excellent sycophant. Soon he would no longer need these talents. But on this day he shamelessly stroked Khrushchev to get him to return: “We can’t decide without you…. We are asking you to come.”17
Khrushchev did not bother to call Brezhnev back. He thought about the request and decided he had to return. He had word sent to Palewski on the evening of October 12 that the lunch was off—the excuse being that he had to return to Moscow early to organize a reception for the Vostok cosmonauts—and that he would only be able to meet him briefly at 9:30 A.M.18
The next morning, October 13, there was no panic in the Khrushchev camp. The leader himself left a strong impression on his French visitor during their brief meeting. He was “in excellent form and gave no sign of suffering from age or ill health,” Palewski later reported.19 Khrushchev, who seemed at peace, told Palewski that the USSR could live with the status quo in Germany. “We can wait,” he said. “We have patience.”20 There was only an oblique reference to what Khrushchev thought he might be facing later that day in Moscow. He told Palewski with approval that statesmen like de Gaulle left office only when they died.21
Brezhnev had learned from the KGB at about midnight that Khrushchev would be coming to Moscow after all. Vladimir Semichastny’s service controlled the general secretary’s plane as part of its protective responsibilities. Soon after the Khrushchev family ordered the plane to be ready, Semichastny had been on the telephone with Brezhnev to alert him that the plan was back on track. Brezhnev ordered Semichastny to be at the airport in Moscow to escort Khrushchev and Mikoyan to the Kremlin. Everyone else who mattered in this drama, ultimately twenty-five people including Khrushchev, would then gather in the meeting room of the Presidium on the second floor of the old Czarist Senate to try to sentence Khrushchev to political oblivion.21
Khrushchev noticed on the plane that something was amiss. The KGB had replaced his regular bodyguards with new men. As he left the airplane, he also noticed that
there were only two waiting to greet him, Semichastny and M. P. Georgadze, a Georgian ally of Mikoyan’s. Probably suspecting the answer, Khrushchev asked the waiting KGB chief, “Where are the rest?” Semichastny replied: “Everybody’s at the Kremlin waiting for you.” With a momentary lapse into some human feeling, he then asked, “Do you want to have lunch at home first or eat at the Kremlin?” Khrushchev had lost his appetite: “Let’s go to the Kremlin.”22
Once in Moscow, Khrushchev rode with Mikoyan to the Kremlin in the long black Zil limousine that he customarily used. It is now impossible to know what, if any, strategy they cooked up during this car ride. Did Mikoyan hide his knowledge of the seriousness of the plot from Khrushchev? Or was it only at that point that both men understood how serious all the plotting had become? Mikoyan recommended to Khrushchev that he be prepared to relinquish the post of chairman of the Council of Ministers to Kosygin as a way of preserving his control over the party. Khrushchev would have no part of it. “I am not going to fight,” he told Mikoyan. The two men then took the elevator to the second floor, where the Presidium meeting was already in session. Unseen by the two as they stepped into the elevator, Khrushchev’s guards, who had stayed on the first floor, were disarmed and told to go home. They would no longer be required to protect Nikita Khrushchev.23
Brezhnev, who was in Khrushchev’s usual spot when Khrushchev arrived, set the tone for what followed by enumerating instances where the Soviet leader had acted unilaterally.24 One after the other, Khrushchev’s other colleagues, most of whom had once been his protégés, piled on criticisms of his leadership. They emphasized that Khrushchev had failed to respect the system of collective leadership, exactly the same charge he himself had once made against Lavrenti Beria and then Georgi Malenkov.
The most articulate of Khrushchev’s opponents, Aleksandr Shelepin, attacked the fallen leader for spreading myths about Soviet achievements. “When did you get the idea that things are going well?” he asked.25 He rattled off the domestic disappointments. Economic growth had slowed over the decade. Annual growth in national income had dropped from 11 to 4 percent. Agriculture had become a “merry-go-round” with uncoordinated production, stockpiles, and shortages. Khrushchev’s efforts to reinvigorate industry through administration reorganization had “detached science from production.” Shelepin then took aim at the basic tenet of Khrushchev’s foreign policy. He believed peaceful coexistence was dangerous. “We should be on guard when it comes to imperialists. You,” he said to Khrushchev as if he had been alone in supporting this policy, “are diverging from the main line.” Shelepin listed Khrushchev’s foreign errors. He blamed Khrushchev for taking Moscow unnecessarily to the brink of war in 1956 over Suez. On the Berlin question, he said that Khrushchev’s position had “caused damage.” His assessment of the Cuban missile crisis was even harsher. Operation Anadyr had been “a risky enterprise,” and during the crisis that ensued in the Caribbean, Khrushchev had “juggl[ed] with people’s fates.” Shelepin rejected the idea that it had been necessary to risk so much to force the United States to accept Soviet positions. “The slogan—‘If the USSR and the United States reach an agreement, everything will be all right’—is wrong.” Shelepin saved his only good word for Khrushchev’s handling of the Chinese problem. That policy was “correct,” he said, though it should have been carried out “in a more flexible manner.” The critique was seconded by others who blamed Khrushchev for taking the country down the wrong path because of his “morbid competition with America.”
The discussion continued into the next day, when Khrushchev and his one defender, Anastas Mikoyan, were given a chance to speak. Mikoyan directed criticism as well as praise toward Khrushchev. “In foreign policy,” Mikoyan explained, “at first Khrushchev did not understand very much, but he quickly became proficient in it.”26 He reminded the group that he had opposed Khrushchev’s Berlin Policy. “In general,” he added, “I was right.” He also recalled how he had tried to reduce the risk of war in the Cuban missile crisis. “I argued,” he said, “that sending the submarines verged on adventurism.” Yet in the end Mikoyan refused to blame Khrushchev for all these mistakes. He wanted Khrushchev to lose some of his posts but not be dropped from the Presidium altogether. Mikoyan’s was the lone voice suggesting a future political role for Khrushchev. “I cannot make bargains with my conscience,” said Brezhnev, setting the tone for what came next. “Dismiss Comrade Khrushchev from the posts he holds and divide them.”
Khrushchev was resigned to losing everything. “You gathered together and splatter shit on me, and I can’t object to you,” he said, his earthiness intact.27 Although he understood that he was not primarily being fired because of his foreign policy, he issued a defense of what he had done abroad. He said that the risk he took in the Cuban missile crisis was “inevitable” and asked his colleagues to think rationally about the problem that he had faced. He also requested understanding for his Berlin policy, which he believed had been “very well carried out.” But these were the last gasps of defiance. “I do not ask for mercy,” he concluded; “the question is solved.” With remarkable insight, Khrushchev found the energy to remind his colleagues that though he was the victim of this event, the fact that the event occurred signaled one of his greatest achievements as first secretary of the CPSU. “Finally the party has grown,” he attested, “and is able to control anyone.” In true Bolshevik style, he then requested his own dismissal. When he left the meeting room, Khrushchev found that his bodyguard had already been dismissed and his Zil limousine been replaced by a Volga sedan. In an instant his once-immense power and all its trappings were history.28
KHRUSHCHEV’S OUSTER came as a surprise to the West when TASS reported the news on October 15, 1964. The Soviet press ascribed the change to “reasons of age and health,” but no one bought that.29 Describing the event as “a political coup,” the British ambassador explained to London that “whatever preparations were made for his removal were secret from us, from the great majority of the population and, presumably, from the victim himself.”30 In recent years rumors of Khrushchev’s retirement had become an annual event at the time of his birthday celebration. Khrushchev himself fed some of the speculation. In April 1963 he was quoted in Pravda as saying, “Everyone understands that I cannot occupy forever the post which I now occupy in Party and State.”31 A visiting Italian dignitary had asked Khrushchev in February 1964 if he had any plans to write his memoirs. “Perhaps,” Khrushchev had responded playfully but with unintended clairvoyance, “when they send me away.”
The U.S. government interpreted Khrushchev’s ouster as primarily a repudiation of his domestic leadership and not as the harbinger of new trouble in the Cold War.32 President Lyndon B. Johnson met with the inner circle of his national security team on October 16 to discuss the change.33 Secretary Rusk and Ambassador Thompson stressed that Washington should not project any anxiety about this change in leadership. It might well bring less tension in the Cold War. “After all,” Rusk argued, “it was Khrushchev who brought on the Berlin crisis and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.” Johnson agreed with his advisers’ view that the approach should be “watchful but steady.”
Later that day TASS announced the elevation of Leonid Brezhnev to first secretary of the CPSU and Aleksei Kosygin to the post of chairman of the Council of Ministers (Soviet premier). Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin then visited Johnson to convey directly an assurance from the new Kremlin chieftains that Soviet foreign policy would not change. It remained “the pursuit of peaceful coexistence and the relaxation of tensions.”34 This settled any remaining American concerns.
Soviet allies reacted in different ways. The North Vietnamese representative in Paris told a French representative that Soviet policy had long been misinformed in Southeast Asia because of Khrushchev’s “lack of interest” in the region.35 The North Vietnamese thought that the Soviets had not properly discharged their socialist responsibilities and with Khrushchev’s departure there was a chance that Moscow would
become fully committed to Hanoi’s struggle to control South Vietnam. Eastern European reaction was muted.
THE PRESIDIUM SESSIONS of October 13–14, 1964, turned out to be the opening salvo of a debate that shaped Soviet foreign policy in the post-Khrushchev years. Since the Cuban missile crisis Khrushchev had moved closer to Mikoyan’s thinking on matters of war and peace. In so doing, he had alienated some of the men that he had promoted from within the party apparatus. These men identified with only one-half of Khrushchev’s strategy. They approved of efforts to force Washington to accept Soviet interests and welcomed the development of new allies in the third world. Shelepin and Suslov, however, viewed with suspicion anything resembling a global partnership with Washington. For the next few years the Kremlin set aside Khrushchev’s complex strategy for reshaping the Cold War and concentrated on accumulating more strategic weapons. Only with the departure of Shelepin in the late 1960s and the deepening of Sino-Soviet tensions did Leonid Brezhnev revive the Khrushchev formula: cooperation on the strategic plane, competition in the developing world.
HENRY KISSINGER captured the dilemma for superpower leaders in the middle years of the Cold War. “[A]s power has grown more awesome,” he wrote as a Harvard professor before entering government, “it has also turned abstract, intangible, elusive.”36 Although Khrushchev never attended an institution of higher learning, he instinctively understood this problem. Throughout the years in which he directed Soviet foreign policy, the Soviet leader had attempted to make power less abstract, more tangible and accessible.
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