The Penguin History of Modern Russia

Khrushchevas under Stalin, no challenge to the Kremlin’s dominance would be tolerated.

The prestige of Khrushchev, who had been hailed around the world as the hero of the Twentieth Party Congress, tumbled; but this did not bother him as much as the criticism he suffered in the Presidium. Already in June he had been compelled to agree to an official resolution playing down the abuses of power by Stalin. The Polish strikes and the Hungarian revolt gave further stimulus to his critics. Printed copies of the closed-session report were destroyed before they could be distributed. Legal publication in the USSR did not occur until the rule of Gorbachev, and for this reason the report became known as ‘the secret speech’. Khrushchev began to avoid overt commitment to reform; such was his discomfiture that at the end of the year he denounced anti-Stalinist novels such as Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone as being anti-Soviet. Khrushchev had not attained supreme office to preside over the collapse of the post-war order in the USSR and its subject states.

But it was only a matter of time before Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich mounted an assault on him. On 18 June 1957 they struck. At a Presidium meeting lasting three days, Khrushchev was outnumbered and defeated. Rather than simply sack him, Molotov and his friends had hit on the device of abolishing the post of Party First Secretary.¹⁶ In this way they hoped to win over those leaders alarmed by the renewal of dissension in the Kremlin. For any other contender for the leadership this might have been the end of the matter, but Khrushchev staunchly insisted that the right to dismiss him lay with the Central Committee. With the assistance of Marshal Zhukov as Minister of Defence, Central Committee members were flown to Moscow to attend an emergency plenum. Some of them banged on the doors of the Presidium as it discussed Khrushchev’s fate. The Central Committee plenum commenced on 21 June and resulted in a resounding victory for Khrushchev.

Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich — along with their last-minute ally D. T. Shepilov — were dismissed from the Presidium by the Central Committee. Into the Presidium came Zhukov, Frol Kozlov and other figures who had stood by Khrushchev in the crisis. Khrushchev had won because his amalgam of policies continued to appeal to Central Committee members. Also important was the suspicion that his opponents, were they to achieve victory, might revert to terror. After the plenum, Kaganovich had rung up Khrushchev pleading for mercy. Khrushchev issued a contemptuous retort: ‘Your words yet again confirm what methods you intended to use for your vile ends… You measure other people by your own standard. But you are making a mistake.’¹⁷ Such self- righteousness would have been more plausible if Khrushchev had not had Beria shot in 1953. In his favour, however, it deserves stress that his mercy towards the ‘Anti-Party Group’ was an important break with Stalin’s practices. Khrushchev guaranteed that internal elite disputes should be conducted without manacles and rifles.

Khrushchev had fun at the losers’ expense chiefly by subjecting them to humiliating demotions. Molotov became ambassador to Mongolia, Malenkov director of a hydro-electric power station in Kazakhstan and Kaganovich director of a Sverdlovsk cement works. Khrushchev’s ascendancy led to a disgorging of victims of Stalin’s purges from the Gulag penal camps. Until 1956 only some 7000 reprocessed cases had resulted in judicial rehabilitation of prisoners. (Molotov’s wife had been among the first of them.) Within a few months, between eight and nine million people had been rehabilitated.¹⁸ It is true that this good fortune came to most of Stalin’s victims posthumously. Even so, the releases from the camps became a mass phenomenon after the Twentieth Congress, and they deepened popular knowledge about the past.

The policy of ‘socialist legality’ had been proclaimed since 1953. This did not signify that the USSR was meant to become a law-based state: Khrushchev provided a system under which the constitution and the law would be enforced solely insofar as communist party rule was preserved. The Presidium’s dominance over high state policy remained in place. If Hungary needed invading or a summit with the American president arranging or a new crop imposing on the kolkhozes, this was normally done by the Presidium. Thus the Central Committee was able to intervene in discussions on policy only at the Presidium’s request — and this happened most decisively when the Presidium was itself divided. Yet the Central Committee had had a taste of power; and Mikhail Suslov, when pleading with the Central Committee to vote for Khrushchev at the June 1957 plenum, took the liberty of noting the need for Khrushchev to end his sharp-tongued, overbearing behaviour towards colleagues.¹⁹

For a while Khrushchev seemed to take Suslov’s words to heart. He consulted often with Presidium and Central Committee members and published the proceedings of Central Committee plenums. Power at the centre was exercised more formally than before 1953. Party bodies met regularly and asserted control over the other public institutions. The party inherited by Khrushchev grew in size as a recruitment campaign gathered strength. When Stalin died, there were nearly 6.1 million members; by 1961 there were 9.7 million.²⁰ Khrushchev also started to show considerable contempt for the desk-bound bureaucracy of the communist party apparatus. He wanted action in society, and he set an example by visiting factories, mines and kolkhozes. The party had to be mobilized so that the party might mobilize society.

The change in the party’s condition, however, had its limits. The party set policies, but these policies continued to be conditioned by the existing interests of groups, organizations and institutions. Thus the Soviet Army impeded a reconsideration of military priorities. Khrushchev preferred nuclear weapons to the more traditional armed forces on grounds of cheapness as well as deterrence. Marshal Zhukov argued strongly against Khrushchev. From Khrushchev’s standpoint, Zhukov had outlived his usefulness as soon as the Anti-Party Group had been defeated. Khrushchev moved with dispatch. In October 1957 a startled Zhukov was pitched into retirement. Nevertheless the Soviet Army command remained a serious constraint on the Presidium’s freedom to govern. So, too, were the economic ministries that could in practice choose which of the various priorities set for them by the Presidium they would pursue.

While the Presidium could push its policies upon the ministers as party members, the ministers in their turn had access to the party’s decision-making; and, much as he altered the party’s apparatus, Khrushchev retained the system of economic departments in the Secretariat.²¹ As ever, the officials in such departments did little to inhibit the inclinations of ‘their’ ministries. The entanglement of party and government was strengthened in March 1958 when Khrushchev, having waited his chance to get rid of Bulganin who had supported the Anti-Party Group, took over the post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers. The head of the party now also became head of the government.

Having worsted the Anti-Party Group, Khrushchev at last felt well placed to rectify the inadequacies in consumer-goods production in Soviet factories.²² Malenkov’s priority became his own. This adjustment of policy, however, unsettled the institutional support that had facilitated his rise to power since Stalin’s death; the traditional lobbies in the army and the heavy-industrial civilian administrations were appalled by what they saw as his treachery. Conflict was avoided mainly because Khrushchev did not push his wishes too hard. In any case he adhered to his original contention that agricultural improvements remained more urgent than changes in industrial investment policy. He expressed his opinion as follows: ‘It is important to have good clothing and good footwear, but it is still more important to have a tasty dinner, breakfast and lunch.’²³ Khrushchev also vetoed suggestions that Soviet automotive plants should produce cars for purchase by the private citizen.²⁴

Thus his basic economic preferences were much more conventional than appeared from his declarations about the need to satisfy all the aspirations of Soviet consumers. The incidence of such declarations increased in the late 1950s, and his confidence in his own judgement on the entire range of official policies was extreme. Khrushchev, the Party First Secretary and the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, led from the front.

His colleagues noticed the paradox that the politician who denounced the ‘cult of the individual’ was zealous in accumulating prestige. A day would not pass without his picture appearing in the press. The practice was resumed of prefacing books with mandatory eulogies to the party’s leader. Khrushchev secured additional publicity for himself by appointing his son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei as editor of Izvestiya. He had a keen eye for self-advertisement (although the photograph of him wrapped in a bearskin rug probably confirmed the Western image of the threat posed by each Soviet leader!). Significantly, he stopped short of commissioning a full- scale biography: presumably his criticism of Stalin’s vanity-publishing ventures dissuaded him from such an attempt. But this was a rare instance of restraint. Khrushchev demanded and obtained adulation from the press, radio, cinema and television.

It was this ebullience that had powered his rise from unpropitious social origins. As a lad in the village of Kalinovka in Kursk province, Khrushchev had worked as a shepherd. In adolescence he had drifted — like many other young Russians — to the Don Basin and signed on as a miner. In the First World War he was active in the labour movement. In the Civil War he fought on the Red side, becoming a Bolshevik in 1918. His exuberant intelligence was coupled to ambition. After rising through the local party network in Ukraine, in 1929 he undertook training at the Industrial Academy in Moscow. Despite his inadequate formal education, he made further headway