BELIEVERS; SOPHIA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bushkovitch, Paul. (2001). Peter the Great. The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Lindsey. (1990). Sophia Regent of Russia 1657-1704. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Soloviev, Sergei. (1989). History of Russia. Volume 25: Rebellion and Reform. Fedor and Sophia, 1682-1689, ed. and trans. Lindsey Hughes. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.
Within the planned economy, Soviet industrial enterprises operated on an independent economic accounting system called khozraschet. In principle, enterprises were to operate according to the principle of self-finance, which meant they were to cover their production costs from sales revenue, as well as earn a planned profit. A designated portion of the planned profit was turned over to the industrial ministry to which the firm was subordinate. However, prices paid by firms for input as well as prices earned by firms from the sales of their output were centrally determined and not based upon scarcity or efficiency considerations. Consequently, calculations of costs, revenues, and profit had little pracKHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH tical significance in evaluations of the need to adjust present or future activities of the firm. For example, firms operating with persistent losses were not subject to bankruptcy or closure; firms earning profits did not willingly offer to increase production. Under khozraschet, profits and losses did not serve either a signaling role or disciplinary role, as they tend to do for firms in a market economy.
The khozraschet system enabled Soviet enterprise managers to monitor their operations and overall plan performance, and to have financial relations with the State bank, Gosbank. Funds earned by the enterprise were deposited at Gosbank; enterprises applied to Gosbank for working capital loans. Given the enterprise autonomy granted by the khozraschet system, financial relations with other external administrative units, such as the industrial ministry to which the firm was subordinate, also occurred when conditions warranted. Under the khozraschet system, enterprise managers were able to exercise some degree of flexibility and initiative in fulfilling plan targets.
The khozraschet system was applied to work brigades in the construction industry in the early 1970s and expanded to work brigades introduced in other industries in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. State farms, called sovkhozy, operated under the khozraschet system of independent financial management, as did the Foreign Trade Organizations (FTOs) operating under the supervision of the Ministry of Foreign Trade. The khozraschet system vanished with the end of central planning. See also: COMMAND ADMINISTRATIVE ECONOMY; GOS-BANK
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conyngham, William J. (1982). The Modernization of Soviet Industrial Management. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 7th ed. New York: Addison Wesley.
(1894-1971), leader of the USSR during the first decade after Stalin’s death. Nikita Khrushchev rose from obscurity into Stalin’s inner circle, unexpectedly triumphed in the battle to succeed Stalin, equally unexpectedly attacked Stalin and embarked on a program of de-Stalinization, and was suddenly ousted from power after his reforms in internal and foreign policy proved erratic and ineffective.
Khrushchev was born in the poor southern Russian village of Kalinovka, and his childhood there profoundly shaped his character and his self-image. His parents dreamed of owning land and a horse but achieved neither goal. His father, who later worked in the mines of Yuzovka in the Don-bas, was a failure in the eyes of Khrushchev’s mother, a strong-willed woman who invested her hopes in her son.
In 1908 Khrushchev’s family moved to Yu-zovka. By 1914 he had become a skilled, highly paid metalworker, had married an educated woman from a fairly prosperous family, and dreamed of becoming an engineer or industrial manager. Ironically, the Russian Revolution “distracted” him into a political career that culminated in supreme power in the Kremlin.
Between 1917 and 1929, Khrushchev’s path led him from a minor position on the periphery of the revolution to a role as an up-and-coming apparatchik in the Ukrainian Communist party. Along the way he served as a political commissar in the Red Army during the Russian civil war, assistant director for political affairs of a mine, party cell leader of a technical college in whose adult education division he briefly continued his education, party secretary of a district near Stalino (formerly Yuzovka), and head of the Ukrainian Central Committee’s organization department.
In 1929 Khrushchev enrolled in the Stalin Industrial Academy in Moscow. Over the next nine years his career rocketed upward: party leader of the academy in 1930; party boss of two of Moscow’s leading boroughs in 1931; second secretary of the Moscow city party organization itself in 1932; city party leader in 1934; party chief of Moscow Province, additionally, in 1935; candidate-member of the party Central Committee in 1934; and party leader of Ukraine in 1938. He was powerful enough not only to have superintended the rebuilding of Moscow, but to have been complicit in the Great Terror that Stalin unleashed, particularly in the Moscow purge of men who worked for Khrushchev and of whose innocence he must have been convinced.
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Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev sign the January 1964 Soviet-Cuban Trade Agreement. © BETTMANN/CORBIS
Between 1938 and 1941, Khrushchev was Stalin’s viceroy in Ukraine. During these years, he grew more independent of Stalin while at the same time serving Stalin ever more effectively. Even as he developed doubts about the purges, Khrushchev grew more dedicated to the cause of socialism and proud of his own service to it, particularly of conquering Western Ukrainian lands and uniting them with the rest of Ukraine as part of Stalin’s 1939 deal with Hitler.
Khrushchev’s role in World War II blended triumph and tragedy. A political commissar on several key fronts, he was involved in, although not primarily responsible for, great victories at Stalingrad and Kursk. But he also contributed to disastrous defeats at Kiev and Kharkov by helping to convince Stalin that the victories the dictator sought were possible when in fact they proved not to be. After the war in Ukraine, where Khrushchev remained until 1949, his record continued to be contradictory: on the one hand, directing the rebuilding of the Ukrainian economy, and attempting to pry aid out of the Kremlin when Stalinist policies led to famine in 1946; on the other hand, acting as the driving force in a brutal, bloody war against the Ukrainian independence movement in Western Ukraine.
In 1949 Stalin called Khrushchev back to Moscow as a counterweight to Georgy Malenkov and Lavrenti Beria in the Kremlin. For the next four years, Khrushchev seemed the least likely of Stalin’s men to succeed him. Yet, when Stalin died on March 5, 1953, Khrushchev moved quickly to do so. After leading a conspiracy to oust Beria in June 1953, he demoted Malenkov and then Vyacheslav Molotov in 1955.
By the beginning of 1956, Khrushchev was the first among equals in the ruling Presidium. Yet a mere year and half later, he was nearly ousted in an attempted Kremlin coup. His near-defeat resulted from a variety of factors, of which the most important were the consequences of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech attacking Stalin at the Twentieth
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Party Congress in February 1956. This speech, the content of which became widely known, sparked turmoil in the USSR, a political upheaval in Poland, and a revolution in Hungary, which Soviet troops crushed in November 1956. Khrushchev’s aims in unmasking Stalin ranged from compromising Stalinist colleagues to expiating his own sins. The result of the speech, however, was to begin the process of undermining the Soviet system while at the same time undermining himself.
Khrushchev’s opponents, primarily Malenkov, Molotov, and Lazar Kaganovich, took advantage of the disarray to try to oust him in June 1957. With their defeat, he might have been expected to intensify his anti-Stalin campaign. Instead, his policies proved contradictory, as if the tumultuous consequences of the Secret Speech had taught Khrushchev that his own authority depended on Stalin’s not being totally discredited.
