The Penguin History of Modern Russia

was relaxed somewhat. Mention of these events was forbidden in the mass media; but politicians had been given a lesson that repression alone was not enough to keep regular control even over prisoners. All the more reason for changing policy before popular discontent got out of hand.

The reformers kept their advantage in the Presidium. After Stalin’s death a leavening of the cultural and social atmosphere was allowed to occur. Permission was given for the appearance of an article by Vladimir Pomerantsev calling for greater sincerity in literature. The deceits and self-deceits in literature and the mass media were widely denounced, and a sensation was caused by Ilya Erenburg’s short novel The Thaw, which described the problems of administrators and intellectuals in the Stalin period.

But the conflict intensified between Malenkov and Khrushchev over the nature of the reforms to be adopted. Already in April 1953, Malenkov had lowered retail prices for both food and industrial consumer products; and in August he presented a budget to the Supreme Soviet cutting taxes on agriculture and raising the prices paid to the collective farms for their output. By October he was arguing that the consumer-oriented sector of industry should expand faster than armaments and capital goods. But Khrushchev countered with his own projects. At the September Central Committee plenum he successfully proposed the cultivation of the virgin lands. Nor did he do himself any harm by giving the impression that no one else was quite as keen as he to end rule by police terror. The plenum rewarded him for his initiative in the Beria affair by designating him as First Secretary of the Central Committee.

His elevation came from his daring; but this would have counted for little unless his policies had been attractive to influential political constituencies. Unlike Malenkov, he did not advocate peaceful coexistence with world capitalism. Nor did he propose to alter the existing investment priorities; and, in contrast with Malenkov, he proudly described the central and local party apparatus as ‘our underpinning’.⁵ Deftly he gained more friends than Malenkov in the heavy-industrial ministries, the armed forces and the communist party. Furthermore, he had shown a large capacity for shouldering responsibility. He obviously had a talent for setting himself clear practical objectives in a situation of extraordinary flux.

The dangers were not restricted to internal Kremlin disputes. The tensions between the USSR and the USA remained acute, and the Korean War had not ended. In 1952 American scientists had attained a further stage of destructive military capacity by producing a hydrogen bomb. Their Soviet counterparts fortified their competing research programme. In the meantime Stalin had made moves to effect a settlement in Korea lest the conflict might erupt into a Third World War. His successors maintained this approach. The Korean War was brought to a close and Korea was divided between a communist North and a capitalist South. But the Cold War between the Soviet and American governments continued. In March 1954 the USA successfully tested a hydrogen bomb that could be delivered by long-range aircraft. But the USSR was catching up. Already in August 1953 Soviet scientists had tested its own hydrogen bomb and they were conducting research on long-range aircraft capable of delivering it.⁶

The Soviet regime had sharp difficulties not only with the USA but also with several countries in Eastern Europe. The industrial workers in Berlin, sensing that Stalin’s death gave them an opportunity to express their discontent with the political and economic policies of the German Democratic Republic, went on strike in midsummer 1953. There were riots, too, in Plzen in Czechoslovakia; and rumblings of discontent were reported in Poland and Hungary. The Soviet Party Presidium members made material concessions while ruthlessly suppressing overt opposition; but all of them recognized the dangers of the international situation: they were confronted by instabilities and threats which needed handling with decisiveness.

Khrushchev had this quality aplenty; but his eventual victory in the dogfight in the Kremlin was not yet guaranteed: he had to continue making his own luck. Among his manoeuvres was the establishment of a commission under P. N. Pospelov to investigate the crimes of the 1930s and 1940s. The Leningrad purge of 1948–9 came under particular scrutiny. This was not the greatest case of blood-letting in Stalin’s time, but for Khrushchev it had the advantage that Malenkov had been involved as a perpetrator of repression. Malenkov was a politician on the slide. The harvest of summer 1954 was a good one, and the success was attributed to Khrushchev even though the virgin lands contributed next to nothing to the improvement. By December, Malenkov’s authority in the Presidium had been so weakened that he was compelled to resign as Chairman of the Council of Ministers.

Although the Presidium steadily came under Khrushchev’s personal influence, he still had to show restraint. Malenkov’s post in the Council of Ministers was given in February 1955 to Nikolai Bulganin, who had allied himself with Khrushchev but was not his protege. Furthermore, the Ministry of Defence — which until then had been led by Bulganin — was handed over to Marshal Zhukov, who had never been known to kowtow to civilian politicians. But Khrushchev was in irrepressible mood. Together with Bulganin he visited Yugoslavia despite having executed Beria for having written letters to Tito. Khrushchev’s pre-eminence was on display in Belgrade: his boisterous vulgarity left no room for ambiguity for observers. Nor did he fail to stress that, as Stalin’s successor, he would frame his policies to compete with the USA. In May 1955 the Soviet government convoked a meeting of East European communist leaders and formed the Warsaw Pact in reaction to the permission given by NATO for West Germany to undertake its rearmament.

Khrushchev had to watch his back. Gradually Malenkov shifted back into an alliance with Molotov and Kaganovich: having lost the struggle to be the supreme reformer, he settled for becoming an associate of communist reactionaries. There was much uneasiness about Khrushchev. His enemies understood, above all else, that the Soviet edifice as reconstructed by Stalin was held together by tightly-interlocked structures and that any improvised architectural alterations might bring the roof down on everyone’s head.

But how to stop Khrushchev’s mischief ? In foreign policy Molotov as yet had little objection to Khrushchev, who had helped him to repudiate Malenkov’s contention that any nuclear war would bring about ‘the destruction of world civilization’. Khrushchev’s weakness in 1955 lay instead in domestic economic policy. In pursuit of his virgin lands scheme Khrushchev had replaced the Kazakhstan communist party leadership in Alma-Ata, and sent his follower Leonid Brezhnev there to secure policy on his behalf. He recruited 300,000 ‘volunteers’, especially from among students, for summer work in Kazakhstan and western Siberia. As a consequence Khrushchev’s survival in power depended on the germination of wheat seed in the ploughed-up steppe of central Asia. Fortunately for him, the 1955 grain harvest across the USSR was twenty-one per cent higher than in the previous year.⁷

What is more, Khrushchev had kept his ability to surprise. On 13 February 1956, a day before the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he proposed to the Presidium that a speech should be delivered on ‘the Cult of the Individual and its Consequences’. This constituted a call for discussion of the horrors of the Stalin period. Khrushchev argued not from moral but from pragmatic premisses: ‘If we don’t tell the truth at the Congress, we’ll be forced to tell the truth some time in the future. And then we shan’t be the speech-makers; no, then we’ll be the people under investigation.’⁸ Molotov’s counter-proposal was for the speech to be made on the theme ‘Stalin the Continuer of Lenin’s Work’. But Khrushchev had a majority, and arrangements were made for his speech to be given at a closed session of the Congress.⁹

This decision was not mentioned by Khrushchev in his general report at the start of the Congress on 14 February. It was not Khrushchev but Mikoyan who stirred things up by making some derogatory remarks about Stalin. But behind the scenes Khrushchev was preparing himself. The Pospelov commission had made a deposition to the Presidium in late January detailing many of Stalin’s abuses. Khrushchev wanted to increase trenchancy of the commission’s criticisms and to offer an account of Stalin throughout his rule. With this in mind he recruited D. T. Shepilov, fellow Central Committee Secretary and a former Pravda editor, to head a drafting group.¹⁰ Presidium members eyed the process with trepidation. As Stalin’s adjutants, they knew about the mass repressions: all of them — including Khrushchev — had blood on their hands. They could only hope that Khrushchev was right that it was better to raise the Stalin question sooner rather than later.

On 25 February he spoke, as planned, to a closed session of the Congress: only delegates from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were allowed to attend. Journalists were banned. Even distinguished foreign communists such as Togliatti were prohibited from being present. The Presidium exercised the greatest possible control of the occasion.

The speech, which lasted four hours, was a turning-point in the USSR’s politics. Its unifying topic was Stalin. Khrushchev informed the Congress about Lenin’s call in 1923 for Stalin’s removal from the General Secretaryship. The rest of the speech was given over to the abuses perpetrated by Stalin in the following three decades. The repressions of 1937–8 were itemized. Khrushchev stressed that Stalin was a blunderer as well as a killer. The failure to anticipate Hitler’s invasion in mid-1941 was given as a particularly gross example. Wanting to demonstrate