The Penguin History of Modern Russia

after taking up the cudgels against Bukharin in the struggle over the First Five-Year Plan. Kaganovich, who already knew him in Ukraine, helped to bring him to the attention of Stalin himself.

By 1935 Khrushchev was leading the Moscow City Party Committee and three years later he became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine. In the Great Terror he was an unflinching purger, but he was also a dynamic administrator. In 1941 he became the main political commissar on the Southern front. His career was not without its setbacks. Stalin’s moods were hard to anticipate and Khrushchev had sometimes carried metal-working instruments in his jacket in case he were suddenly to be cast down from office and were to need to seek factory employment.²⁵ Yet Khrushchev survived, and was honoured with the joint appointment as leader of the party and the government of Ukraine in February 1944. In December 1949, when he was recalled to Moscow as Central Committee Secretary, it had obviously been Stalin’s intention to use him as a political counterweight to Malenkov.

He relished the grandeur of supreme authority from the mid-1950s, and was delighted when his grandson enquired: ‘Grandad, who are you? The tsar?’²⁶ He also liked his vodka and was given to earthy anecdotes and crude outbursts. A more careful First Secretary would not have said to Western politicians: ‘We will bury you!’ Nor would any alternative Soviet leader in 1960 have banged a shoe on his desk at the United Nations to interrupt a speech by the delegate from the Philippines. In power, he had a wonderful time. He adored gadgets, and welcomed scientists to his dacha. Never having been an avid reader, he got distinguished authors to read their works aloud to him. He fancied himself as a thinker with a practical bent. Going to the USA in September, he admired the fertile plains of maize and on his return he instructed all kolkhozes and sovkhozes to grow it. Khrushchev was ever the enthusiast.

But his impulsiveness irked his colleagues. The maize campaign was a case in point. Leading Soviet agronomists told him that it was a crop unsuited to many regions of the USSR. But he rejected their advice. Khrushchev, like Stalin before him, always assumed he knew best, and he disrupted the work of any institution which opposed his policies. Even the Party Central Committee’s activities were impaired. Since Khrushchev was not always able to secure its approval, he introduced outsiders to its proceedings so that they might help to put pressure on its members. In the process he undermined the very patterns of consultation and procedural regularity that he had once helped to establish.

Thus, having used the party apparatus as a means of taking supreme power, he attempted to reduce its capacity to constrain him; and he convinced himself that the party’s problems stemmed from the kind of officials he had inherited from Stalin. In 1961 he brought in a rule confining them to three periods of tenure of office:²⁷ job insecurity for his erstwhile supporters increased. At the same time he was a sucker for flattery. A. M. Larionov, the first party secretary in Ryazan province, inserted himself into Khrushchev’s affections by claiming an unprecedented expansion in local meat production. Larionov had achieved this only by killing off an inordinate number of livestock and by buying the remainder from outside his area. Found out, Larionov committed suicide in 1960. But Khrushchev blundered on regardless. A vast turnover of personnel occurred in the late 1950s.

In economics, too, Khrushchev made his imprint. In 1953 his personal objective had been the exploitation of the virgin lands, and he had implied that no large diversion of finances would be needed to turn agriculture out of its Stalinist rut. It was quite a campaign. Within three years of Stalin’s death an additional 36 million hectares were put under the plough. This was as large as the cultivated area of Canada and represented a staggering extension of Soviet cereal agriculture. Khrushchev also returned to one of his pet schemes by carrying out the amalgamation of kolkhozes into bigger units. The number of such farms consequently dropped from 125,000 to 36,000.²⁸ Khrushchev wanted the biggest possible units of agricultural production. He also strove to turn kolkhozes into sovkhozes, thereby increasing the number of peasants employed directly as state employees; and he severely reduced the area under cultivation in private plots.

For Khrushchev, in his own way, was a communist believer who wished to demonstrate the superiority of communism. While he tried to increase central state intervention in some ways, he also tried to liberate rural initiative. The machine-tractor stations were abolished in 1958. Kolkhozes were to be allowed to run their affairs without excessive local interference. The annual harvest figures, which were the key test of Khrushchev’s agricultural policy, were generally encouraging. Wheat output rose by over fifty per cent between 1950 and 1960. Milk and meat production had increased by sixty-nine and eighty-seven per cent respectively in the seven years after Stalin’s death.²⁹

Food was consumed in the greatest quantity in the country’s history; but such an improvement was not the end of the matter for Khrushchev. He wanted adjustments in the economy that would afford an even fuller satisfaction of the needs of ordinary consumers. He felt that the ministries in Moscow prevented any solution. They were detached from everyday questions of production and remained careless of local needs. In 1957 he secured the Presidium’s sanction to break up the central ministries and to allocate their functions to 105 regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy). Khrushchev’s idea was that this new administrative tier would introduce more dynamic planning and management. In 1958, too, he secured a reconsideration of priorities for industrial investment. Capital goods were still projected to expand production at a faster rate than consumer goods: Khrushchev did not touch this sacred cow. But he adjusted priorities so as to boost those sectors — especially oil, gas and chemicals — that had been neglected by Stalin.

Soviet economic achievements under Khrushchev were undeniable. An ambitious Seven-Year Plan came into effect in 1959. Gross national income had grown by fifty-eight per cent by 1965 and industrial output by eighty-four per cent. Even consumer goods went up by sixty per cent. There were spectacular successes for the USSR, especially in 1957 when the first sputnik was sent up to circle the earth; in 1960 Yuri Gagarin followed this with the first manned orbit of the globe. Gagarin had a film star’s good looks, but Khrushchev was his equal as a showman, habitually holding public receptions for cosmonauts when they returned from subsequent missions.

In agriculture, his over-confidence remained incorrigible. He interfered persistently with crop-rotation patterns. Even more damaging were his further restrictions on the size of the private plots which could be allocated to kolkhozniki. Since two fifths of Soviet vegetables were grown on them it took little expertise to foresee that shop shelves would soon become empty unless his policy was reversed. The same picture was discernible in industry. For instance, he disrupted co-ordination in Moscow and other cities by arbitrarily raising targets for the construction of apartment blocks; and, when he simultaneously downgraded the priority for bricks, he brought chaos to his already outlandish schemes.³⁰ Khrushchev was brought up in the Stalinist tradition of command and did not alter his habits after denouncing Stalin. Never the most self-questioning of men, he assumed he knew best; his bossiness had been hardened into an essential feature of his mode of rule.

There were disappointments for Khrushchev even by the standards of his own Seven-Year Plan as introduced in 1959. The virgin lands were so over-ploughed that parts of Kazakhstan were turned into a dust-bowl, and Khrushchev’s authority was diminished by poor harvests across the USSR: agricultural output in 1963 was only ninety-two per cent of the total achieved in 1958. Consumer products were not coming out of the factories in the quantity and with the quality he desired. The investment in capital goods continued to be skewed heavily towards military needs, still more heavily than the Plan required. Khrushchev’s attempt to associate himself with youth, science and progress was belied by the survival of economic priorities and practices from the 1930s.

So long as the official aim was to achieve military parity with the USA, it was difficult to alter economic policy to any great extent. Yet Khrushchev, after his early refusal to support Malenkov’s plea for more relaxed relations with the American government, began to reconsider the situation. By the late 1950s Khrushchev, too, was advocating ‘peaceful coexistence’. Professional historians dutifully ransacked the archives for evidence that Lenin had strongly believed that global socialism and global capitalism could peacefully coexist. In fact Lenin had mentioned such an idea only glancingly.³¹ In any case Khrushchev did not unequivocally repudiate the traditional Leninist thesis on the inevitability of world wars until global capitalism had been brought to an end.³² But certainly he preferred to put his practical stress on the need for peace. Repeatedly he argued that competition between the communist East and the capitalist West should be restricted to politics and ideology.

The Soviet-American relationship was at the crux of deliberations in the Presidium. The USSR and the USA were left as the only superpowers. As the old empires crumbled, the Presidium sought to befriend the emergent African and Asian states. The opportunity overlooked by Stalin was grasped by Khrushchev. Together with Bulganin, he had toured India, Burma and Afghanistan in 1955. Nine years later he went to Egypt and offered President Nasser a subsidy sufficient to build the Aswan Dam. In 1959 the guerrilla movement led by Fidel Castro seized