Stalin. But they fell greatly short of the country’s needs.
19
Stabilization
(1964–1970)
The Soviet political system since 1917 had developed few fixed regulations. When Lenin died there was no assumption that a single successor should be selected. The same was true at Stalin’s death. No effort had yet been made to establish rules about the succession even though it was by then taken for granted that whoever was appointed to lead the Secretariat would rule the country. In mid-1964, as Khrushchev’s colleagues wondered what to do about him, this uncertainty persisted and they also had the problem that the Party First Secretary was not dead but alive and capable of retaliating.
Khrushchev returned from trips to Scandinavia and Czechoslovakia in summer. Sensing nothing afoot, he took a break at Pitsunda by the Black Sea in October. He was still fit for a man of seventy. His Presidium colleagues had recently congratulated him at his birthday celebrations and wished him well in political office, and the First Secretary took them at their word. Mikoyan popped over to chat with him and hinted to him not to be complacent. But Khrushchev ignored the allusion; instead he waited with bated breath for news that the latest team of Soviet cosmonauts had returned safely to earth. As was his wont, he arranged to greet them in person. Everything seemed well to him despite an alarm raised by a chauffeur who had overheard details of a plot to oust the First Secretary.1 He who had outplayed Beria refused to believe that he might one day meet his match.
The Presidium had in fact put together a peaceful plot involving older colleagues like Brezhnev and Suslov as well as the younger ones such as Shelepin and Semichastny. KGB chief Semichastny’s betrayal was crucial since it was properly his duty to inform Khrushchev of any such conspiracy. The plotters had also used former Central Committee Secretary Nikolai Ignatov, who had been sacked by Khrushchev, to take discreet soundings among Central Committee members. Nothing was left to chance.
The only thing left to decide was about the timing. After several false starts, Suslov made a phone call to Khrushchev on 12 October 1964 and requested that he fly to Moscow for an unscheduled Presidium discussion of agriculture. At last Khrushchev guessed what was in store; for he said to Mikoyan: ‘If it’s me who is the question, I won’t make a fight of it.’ Next day, when his plane landed at Vnukovo 2 Airport, Semichastny’s men isolated him and rushed him to a Presidium meeting in the Kremlin. Initially Mikoyan worked for a compromise whereby Khrushchev would lose the First Secretaryship but remain Chairman of the Council of Ministers. But the rest of the Presidium wanted Khrushchev completely retired. Eventually the old man buckled under the strain and tearfully requested: ‘Comrades, forgive me if I’m guilty of anything. We worked together. True, we didn’t accomplish everything.’ Unconditional surrender followed: ‘Obviously it will now be as you wish. What can I say? I’ve got what I deserved.’2
On 14 October, an emergency Central Committee plenum was held. It was attended by 153 out of 169 members. Brezhnev was in the chair since the Presidium had already agreed that he should become Party First Secretary. After briefly referring to Khrushchev’s ‘cult of the individual’ and ‘voluntaristic actions’, he vacated the podium so that Suslov might make a report. The Central Committee needed to hear from someone who had no close association with Khrushchev.3
Suslov asserted that what Lenin had said about Stalin’s crudity and capriciousness was also applicable to Khrushchev. The principles of collective leadership had been infringed, and Khrushchev had intrigued to set colleague against colleague. Policy had been changed without consultation. Khrushchev had arbitrarily introduced outsiders to Central Committee meetings. He had promoted members of his family and taken them on expensive foreign trips. His interventions in industry were bad, in agriculture even worse. His reorganizations had damaged the party, and he had behaved high-handedly towards the countries of the Warsaw Pact. He had replaced the Stalin cult with a Khrushchev cult. ‘So there you have it,’ declaimed Suslov. ‘Not leadership but a complete merry-go-round!’ Suslov’s tone was softened only towards the end when he read out a letter from Khrushchev recognizing the validity of the criticisms.4
Emotions in the audience were highly charged and several Central Committee members shouted out that Khrushchev should undergo punishment of some sort. But Brezhnev was already assured of victory, and ignored such demands. Khrushchev, depressed and contrite, was shunted into comfortable retirement. He was hardly mentioned in the press again in his lifetime. In the contemporary Western term, he became a ‘non-person’ overnight.
Khrushchev none the less came to regard the manner of his going with some satisfaction. No guns, no executions. Not even many sackings apart from his own. Brezhnev would head the Central Committee Secretariat and Kosygin the Council of Ministers; Podgorny, as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was to become head of state. They and their associates approved of the general line taken by the party since 1953; but they wished to introduce greater stability to policies and institutions. New themes appeared in
Certain early decisions on policy were predictable. The Central Committee plenum in October 1964 forbade any single person from holding the two supreme posts in the party and government simultaneously. In November the bipartition of local party committees was rescinded. In the winter of 1964–5 overtures were made to Mao Zedong to close the breach between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. In October 1965 the sovnarkhozes were abolished and the old central ministries were restored.
Yet there was no consensus about what substantial innovations should be made. Shelepin, who was made Presidium member after helping to organize Khrushchev’s dismissal, made a bid for the supreme leadership in February 1965 by calling for a restoration of obedience and order. He disliked the concept of the ‘all-people’s state’; he wanted to resume an ideological offensive against Yugoslavia; and he showed a fondness for the good old days in his confidential support for the rehabilitation of Stalin’s reputation.5 ‘Iron Shurik’, as he was nicknamed, got nowhere in the Presidium. He did not help himself by parading his contempt for his older colleagues and by proposing to cut back the perks enjoyed by party office-holders. Brezhnev was not yet strong enough to remove him from the Presidium; but in 1967 he directed him out of harm’s way by moving him from the Committee of Party-State Control to the USSR Central Council of Trade Unions.
The Presidium member who struggled the hardest for any positive sort of reform was Kosygin. Brezhnev had kept up an interest in agriculture since guiding the virgin lands campaign in Kazakhstan; but mainly he busied himself with internal party affairs. It was Kosygin who initiated a reconsideration of economic policy. Yevsei Liberman’s proposal of 1962 for an increase in the rights of factory managers was dusted down and presented by Kosygin to the Central Committee in September 1965.6
Kosygin did not open the door to complete managerial freedom: even Liberman had avoided that, and Kosygin as a practising politician was yet more cautious. Yet the implications of his reforms were large. If the heads of enterprises were to operate with reduced interference by Gosplan, then the authority of economic ministries and the party would decline. Kosygin’s long-standing advocacy of the consumer-goods sector of industrial investment increased his colleagues’ suspicion of him. Party officials were especially annoyed at his proposal to reduce the authority of economic-branch departments in the Central Committee Secretariat. The post-war organizational dispute between Malenkov and Zhdanov was re-emerging as Kosygin challenged the interests of the central party apparatus. If Kosygin had had his way, the premisses of economic policy would stealthily be shifted towards profit-making, managerial initiative and ministerial freedom from the party’s interference.
Brezhnev decided that his best stratagem was not to confront Kosygin but to position himself between Kosygin and Shelepin until he could bring his own appointees into the Presidium. With Brezhnev’s approval, the Central Committee gave formal permission to Kosygin to go ahead with the reforms; but all the while Brezhnev, both at the plenum and afterwards, impeded him with unhelpful modifications.
