The Anti-Party Group, so called by Nikita Khrushchev, whom it tried to oust from power in June 1957, was neither opposed to the Communist Party nor really a group. Rather, it consisted of three of Khrushchev’s main rivals in the party leadership, Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Lazar Kaganovich, themselves hardly united except in their wish to oust Khrushchev, plus a diverse set of allies who supported them at the last minute: titular head of state Klimenty Voroshilov; chairman of the Council of Ministers Nikolai Bulganin; central economic administrators Mikhail Pervukhin and Maxim Saburov; and Dmitry Shepilov, Khrushchev’s prot?g? whom had he had recently promoted to foreign minister.
When Josef Stalin died in March 1953, Malenkov seemed the heir apparent, but Molotov also appeared to be a contender for supreme power. Khrushchev joined with both of them to bring down secret police chief Lavrenty Beria, who was arrested in June 1953 and executed in December. Khrushchev turned next against Malenkov, who was demoted from prime minister to minister of electrification in February 1955, and then against Molotov, who was soon dropped as foreign minister. However, both Malenkov and Molotov were allowed to remain full members of the Party Presidium, leaving them in position to seek revenge against Khrushchev.
ANTONOV UPRISING
The logic of power in the Kremlin, in which there was no formalized procedure for determining leadership succession, largely accounted for this struggle. So did certain policy differences: Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov were particularly dismayed by Khrushchev’s “secret speech” attacking Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, as well as by the de-Stalinization process he began in domestic and foreign policy. Malenkov had seemed more open to reform during his stint as prime minister, but although his and Khrushchev’s skills could have complemented each other, personal animosity drove them apart. Despite choosing Bulganin to replace Malenkov as prime minister, Khrushchev disdained Bulganin. Per-vukhin and Saburov felt threatened by Khrushchev’s proposed reorganization of economic administration, which jeopardized their jobs. Shepilov probably betrayed his patron because he thought Khrushchev was bound to lose.
Including seven full members of the Presidium, the plotters constituted a majority. When they moved against Khrushchev on June 18, 1957, they counted on the Presidium’s practice of appointing its own leader, leaving the Party Central Committee to rubber-stamp the result. Instead, however, Khrushchev insisted that Central Committee itself, in which his supporters dominated, decide the issue. While Khrushchev and his enemies quarreled, the KGB (Committee on State Security) and the military ferried Central Committee members to Moscow for a plenum that took place from June 22 to 28.
Khrushchev’s opponents had no chance once the plenum began. Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich were subjected to a barrage of charges about their complicity in Stalin’s terror, including details about Stalinist crimes that were not fully publicized until the late 1980s. Following the plenum, Molotov was exiled to Outer Mongolia as Soviet ambassador, Malenkov to northern Kazakhstan to direct a hydroelectric station, Kaganovich to a potash works in Perm Province, and Shepilov to head the Kyrgyz Institute of Economics. So as not to reveal how many had opposed him, Khrushchev delayed his punishment of the rest of the Anti-Party Group: Bulganin remained prime minister until 1958; Voroshilov was not deposed as head of state until 1960. After the Twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, in which Khrushchev intensified his all-out attack on Stalin and Stalinism, Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich were expelled from the Communist Party. See also: KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; MALENKOV, GEORGY MAXIMILYANOVICH; MOLOTOV VYACHESLAV MIKHAILOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Linden, Carl A. (1966). Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Micunovic, Veljko. (1980). Moscow Diary, tr. David Floyd. New York: Doubleday. Resis, Albert, ed. (1993). Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics: Conversations with Felix Chuev. Chicago: I. R. Dee. Taubman, William. (2003). Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: Norton.
The Antonov Uprising (1920-1921) was a large, well-organized peasant revolt in the Tambov province of Central Russia. Part of the Green Movement, the uprising threatened Communist power in 1921 and was a major reason for the abandonment of War Communism.
Alexander Antonov (1889-1922) was a Socialist Revolutionary (SR) whom the February Revolution rescued from a long prison sentence for robbing railroad station ticket offices. He returned to Tambov province in 1917 to become a district police official under the Provisional Government. He left this post in April 1918 and went underground, organizing an armed guerrilla group to resist the new Communist government.
Increasingly severe food-procurement and conscription policies, along with a drought, pushed Tambov peasants into a spontaneous rebellion against the Communist government in August 1920. Seizing the opportunity, Antonov put himself at the head of the rebellion. He organized a territorially-based army divided into regiments, which he recruited from the many local World War I and civil war veterans. Local socialists created a strong network of local committees (STK-soiuz trudovogo krestian’stva, Union of the Working Peasantry) that created an alternative, noncommunist government in the province. While they fought the Communist government, they did have wider plans. Their program (which survives in various versions) called for an end to civil war, the convening of a freely
APPANAGE ERA
elected Constituent Assembly, land to the peasants, and workers’ control of industry.
Initial attempts to suppress this rebellion were failures. The few troops in the province were unreliable, and often went over to the insurgents. By spring 1921 the insurgents controlled much of the countryside, had halted grain procurement, and threatened rail communications through the province. The central government responded with reforms and repression. Forced grain procurement and conscription were curtailed, removing the greatest irritants to the peasantry. The end of the Polish-Russian war enabled the Communist government to move fifty thousand troops to the province, including crack cavalry brigades, automobile detachments, airplanes, and artillery. By the end of July 1921 the insurgency was crushed. Its regiments were run to ground and annihilated by the larger, better-armed Red Army forces. The Cheka rooted out the STKs and shot or exiled thousands of insurgents. Antonov himself remained at large for another year, but died in a Cheka ambush on June 24, 1922. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; GREEN MOVEMENT; SOCIALIST REVOLUTIONARIES; WAR COMMUNISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DuGarm, A. Delano. (1997). “Peasant Wars in Tambov Province.” In The Bolsheviks in Russian Society, ed. Vladimir Brovkin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Radkey, Oliver. (1976). The Unknown Civil War in Soviet Russia. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.
Most historians since the nineteenth century- Russian, Soviet, and Western-have used the phrase “appanage era” to designate the period between the collapse of Kievan Russia and the emergence of a centralized Russian state. It is dated from the Mongol conquest of Kievan Russia between 1237 and 1240 to either the accession of Ivan III (1462) or Basil III (1505), or to the beginning of the reign of Ivan IV (1533). It was characterized by the emergence of a multiplicity of independent principalities (udeli or appanages). Princes treated appanage holdings as private property, conveying them to their heirs by wills that divided the lands between all their sons. This practice meant that holdings were increasingly fragmented in each generation. As the principalities were weakened, internal conflict escalated and external attacks came not only from the Mongols, but also from Lithuanians, Germans, Poles, and Swedes. This tumultuous situation ended only as Moscow fashioned an autocracy capable of “gathering the Russian lands.”
In the later twentieth century, a new interpretation of the age emerged. New, broadly based archeological evidence refuted the traditional view that Kiev itself was in economic decline from the mid-twelfth century, and suggested instead a general economic expansion. The new interpretation proposes that the eleven or twelve appanages that developed between 1150 and 1240 represented a rational division of labor and delegation of authority within the Rurikid dynasty, and that they were designed to respond to economic and political expansion. It maintains that the principalities should be understood as components of a dynastic realm, not as private property.
