The Penguin History of Modern Russia

The media of public communication continued to blare out messages of support for the communist party. News programmes stuck closely to the party line of the day. Alternatives to Soviet Marxism-Leninism were banned: Khrushchev, while getting rid of some of Stalin’s rigidities, introduced rigidities of his own. Doctrinal orthodoxy remained an unquestionable objective, and the authorities did not give up the habit of lecturing society about everything from nuclear-bomb test negotiations to methods of child-care. Day-to-day dispensation of justice was improved and a proliferation of legal reforms took place.⁶ But arbitrariness remained a basic feature of the management of society. The dense network of informers was maintained in every corner of society: the USSR was still a police state. Those Soviet citizens who travelled abroad exemplify the point. They had to write reports on foreigners they met on their holidays; they were also constrained to leave behind a close member of their family as a surety that they would return to the USSR. The state continued to hold its society in suspicion.

Consequently people did not feel grateful to Khrushchev for long. Material and social conditions had got better, but life in general remained hard — and the political, economic and cultural order was still extremely authoritarian. Khrushchev in his frequent, lengthy speeches showed that he underestimated the depth of popular grievances.

In the countryside he failed to grasp that the amalgamation of the kolkhozes into super-kolkhozes produced enormous social distress.⁷ His campaign to build quasi-urban settlements for compulsory inhabitation by all farmworkers nearly finished off a peasantry bludgeoned to its knees by Stalin. No kulaks survived to be dekulakized, and the KGB did not pile trouble-makers into cattle-trucks bound for Siberia and Kazakhstan. But deportations of a kind occurred as villages were bulldozed and large settlements were established to form the centres of the enlarged farms. The avowed intention was that schools, shops and recreational facilities should simultaneously be attached to each super-kolkhoz; and probably Khrushchev genuinely believed that the amalgamations would bring benefit to the rural population. But, as usual, the regime was better at destruction than creation. The new rural facilities always fell short of Khrushchev’s promises in number and quality.

If peasants had no love for him, he received little greater affection from urban inhabitants. All towns across the USSR were dreary, ill-appointed places to live. Even Khrushchev’s record in building apartments was ridiculed. The new flats were referred to as khrushcheby, a pun on his surname and the Russian word for slums. Furthermore, the increase in industrial output was achieved at huge cost to the environment. In Kazakhstan his neglect of the effects of nuclear testing led to the deaths of thousands of people. A repertoire of private satirical commentary circulated. Millions of Gulag inmates returned from the camps with bitter jokes about the Soviet order, but most people did not need to have had this penal experience to mock the authorities. The Presidium and the KGB took preventive action against trouble. On days of official celebration, such as May Day or the October Revolution anniversary, the security police regularly cleared the streets of likely trouble-makers. Individuals waving critical placards or clutching petitions of complaint were swiftly arrested.

The authorities could maintain their one-party, one-ideology state; but they were unable to secure acquiescence in their more mundane demands on a daily basis — and the extent of non-collaboration was worrisomely broad in a society wherein no social, economic or cultural activity was officially considered innocent of political implications.

Non-compliance rather than direct resistance was the norm and many social malaises survived from the 1920s. Turnover of workers at the country’s factories peaked at one fifth of the labour-force per annum, and official invocations to stay at an enterprise for one’s working life were despised.⁸ Financial deals struck to dissuade persons from leaving were the convention. This was illegal, but the economy would have come to a halt if such deals had been eradicated. Enterprises, district councils and local party organizations gave the appearance solely of subservience to the central political authorities. Misinformation remained a pervasive feature of the Soviet order: the trend remained to supply inaccurate data to higher bodies in order to obtain low production targets in the following year. Cliental groups and local nests of officials conspired to impede the Kremlin’s decrees. The frequent sackings of party, governmental and police officials served only to bind their successors together in a campaign to save their new jobs.

These phenomena were well known to Khrushchev, who fitfully tried to eliminate them. But at best, a sullen acceptance of his policies was replacing the initial enthusiasm he had evoked. The difficulty was that the Soviet order did not and could not welcome autonomous initiative in political, social and economic life: spontaneity of thought and behaviour would threaten the entire structure of the state. How, then, could he inspire people again?

In facing up to this problem, he saw that he had to propound his own positive vision of communism. The closed-session speech of 1956 was a denunciation of Stalin, not a delineation of new and inspiring ideas. Before the Twenty-Second Party Congress in Moscow in October 1961 he began to address the task by rewriting the Party Programme, which had been the communist political credo under Stalin (and indeed under Lenin, since it had been accepted in 1919). A team of theorists, editors and journalists had been assembled under B. N. Ponomarev to produce a draft. Khrushchev edited its contents.⁹ He insisted that it should avoid incomprehensible abstraction: ordinary people had to be able to understand its wording and its goals. More dubiously, he overrode his advisers’ objection to the inclusion in the Programme of precise quantitative predictions and ideological schedules that were ludicrously over-ambitious.¹⁰

The proceedings of the Twenty-Second Congress were ructious. A verbal barrage was aimed at Stalin’s record, and this time there was no sparing of those among the deceased dictator’s associates who had belonged to the so-called Anti-Party Group: Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich were reviled for their complicity in mass murder. An Old Bolshevik, D. A. Lazurkina, took the platform to recount a dream she had had the previous night in which Lenin had appeared to her saying how unpleasant it was for him to lie next to Stalin’s corpse.¹¹ This stage-managed sentimentality led to a decision to remove Stalin from the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum and to bury him under a simple plinth and bust outside the Kremlin Wall.

The Party Programme accepted by the Congress described the USSR as an ‘all-people’s state’ which no longer needed to use dictatorial methods.¹² Data were adduced on Soviet achievements in production, consumption and welfare. Massive future attainments were heralded: by the end of the 1960s, according to the Programme’s prediction, the per capita output of the USA would be overtaken; by 1980 the ‘material-technical basis’ of a communist society would have been laid down. Full communism would be in prospect. Khrushchev asserted that the USSR had already reached a point where the ‘all-out construction’ of such a society could begin.¹³ Thus there would be complete freedom for individuals to develop their talents to the full along with the complete satisfaction of every person’s needs. The Soviet Union would enter an age of unparalleled human happiness.

Khrushchev’s ideas were jumbled. Under communism as projected by Lenin’s The State and Revolution, the state would wither away and society would become entirely self-administering; and Lenin implied political organizations would cease to exist once the dictatorship of the proletariat came to an end. Khrushchev by contrast expected that the party would increase in influence as the communist epoch came nearer; he never revealed how and why the party would ever give up being the vanguard of communism. Furthermore, it was difficult to see the logic in his argument that dictatorship had ended if freedom of belief, publication, assembly and organization had yet to be realized.

He was less exercised by theory and logic than by the desire to issue an effective summons to action. He called upon all Soviet citizens to participate in public life. The lower organizational units of the party, the Komsomol and the trade unions were to meet more regularly, and new voluntary associations were to be formed. (Interestingly, there was no reference to the KGB.) The most notable innovation were the so-called druzhinniki, which were groups of citizens acting as a vigilante force for law and order on urban streets. Needless to add, Khrushchev’s summons was delivered on the strict condition that the authority of himself, the Presidium and the entire Soviet order was respected. Mass participation, he assumed, had to be heavily circumscribed. It was consequently hardly surprising that most citizens felt that the main result of his policy was to encourage the busybodies in each town and city to become still more intrusive than ever.

But Khrushchev’s optimism was unabated, and the Programme eulogized the achievements of the ‘Soviet people’. The opening section proclaimed the October Revolution as the first breach in the wall of imperialism and stressed that the vast majority of workers, peasants and soldiers had supported the Bolsheviks through the years of the Civil War and the NEP. The Five-Year Plans were depicted as the crucible of unrivalled industrial, cultural and even agricultural progress; and the resilience of the Soviet order was said to have been proven by the USSR’s destruction of Nazism in the Second World War.