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Assignment
Did the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964
indicate that the Soviet Union had fundamentally changed its political system
since the death of Stalin in 1953?
Background
After Stalin's death
in March 1953, his successors realized that they could not continue to use
his methods. Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, (5/17 April 1894 - 11 September
1971), a self-made man who had entered the Politburo in 1939, soon emerged
as the leading figure. Over the next five years Khrushchev out maneuvered
his political rivals and became the most powerful political figure in
Russia.
Born in 1894, Khrushchev--unlike Lenin and most
of the other Soviet leaders--was the son of a miner and the grandfather of
a serf. After a village education, he began work as a pipe fitter at
the age of fifteen in Donetsk. Because of his factory employment, he
was not conscripted into the tsarist army during World War I. In 1918
he became a member of the Bolshevik party and served in the Red Army during
the Civil War. In the 1920s he began a rapid rise in the party ranks
as a full time party worker, and by 1933 he had become the second secretary
of the Moscow Regional Committee.
During the early 1930s Khrushchev consolidated
his hold on the Moscow party and emerged on the national scene. In
1934, at the Seventeenth Party Congress, he became a full member of the Central
Committee of the Party. He was a firm supporter of Stalin in those
years and participated in the purges of party leadership. By 1939,
he had become a full member of the
Politburo.
During the war Khrushchev was attached to the
Soviet Army with the rank of lieutenant general. He was the political
adviser to Marshal Andrei Yeromenko during the defense of Stalingrad (Volgograd).
In 1949 Stalin called him back to Moscow, where he took over his old
job as head of the Moscow city party and concurrently was appointed a secretary
of the Central Committee. Khrushchev became more and more involved
in agriculture and proposed a new scheme for the creation of agrogorods ("farming
towns").
Within six months of Stalin's death in 1953
and the execution of the deputy prime minister and KGB chief, Lavrentii Beria,
Khrushchev engaged in a power struggle with Georgii Malenkov, Stalin's heir
apparent, and gained the decisive margin by his control of the party machinery.
:In September 1953 he replaced Malenkov as first secretary and in 1955
removed Malenkov from the premiership in favor of his hand-picked nominee,
Marshal Nikolai Bulganin.
On the night of 24-25 February 1956, during
the 20th Party Congress in Moscow, Khrushchev delivered his memorable
Secret Speech about the excesses of Stalin's
one-man rule, attacking the late Soviet ruler's "intolerance, his brutality,
his abuse of power" and blaming it on the "cult of personality" that Stalin
had forged. The sight of the First Secretary of the Communist Party
exposing the wrongful executions of the purges of the 1930s and the excesses
of Soviet repression had far-reaching effects. The resulting "thaw"
in the Soviet Union led to the release of thousands of political prisoners
and the "rehabilitation" of many thousands more who had
perished.
The destalinization movement also had repercussions
in the communist countries of Eastern Europe. Poland revolted against its government in October 1956, and
Hungary followed shortly afterward. Faced
with open revolution, Khrushchev flew to Warsaw on 19 October and ultimately
acquiesced in the Polish leader Wladyslaw Gomulka's solution, which allowed
the Poles a great deal of freedom. But Khrushchev's decided to crush
the Hungarian Revolution by force, largely because of the Hungarian Premier
Imre Nagy's decision to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact.
In June 1957 Khrushchev almost lost his position,
and, although a vote in the Presidium actually went against him, he managed
to reverse this by appealing to the full membership of the party Central
Committee. In retaliation, he secured the permanent disgrace of Malenkov,
Vyacheslav Molotov, and others, who were labeled members of the anti-party
group. In March 1958 he assumed the premiership of the Soviet
Union.
Khrushchev's record in power was a decidedly
mixed one. On one hand he could repeatedly assert the doctrine of peaceful
coexistence and could visit with President Dwight Eisenhower in 1959 in a
"spirit of Camp David," yet he could also be combative as in the
U-2 Incident or the construction of the
Berlin Wall. His attempt, in 1962, to
place Soviet medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba,
led to a tense confrontation in October of that year, yet he also helped
to negotiate the 1963 Test Ban Treaty. Khrushchev also had to deal
with Sino-Soviet split, which partly resulted
from Chinese insistence on all-out "war against the imperialists," no matter
what the case.
During Khrushchev's time in office, he had
to
deal with many disparate pressures. Intellectuals urged greater
freedom
of expression, while the bureaucracy felt that reform would get out of
hand. Khrushchev himself, on one hand, refused to allow
Boris Pasternak to accept the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1958, while, on the other hand, he personally permitted
the
1962 publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, with its denunciation of Stalinist
repression. Khrushchev's desire to reduce conventional armaments in
favor of nuclear missiles was bitterly resisted by the Soviet military. His repeated efforts to improve agriculture and decentralize the party
structure antagonized many of those who once supported him. He opened
up more than seventy million acres of virgin land in Siberia and Central
Asia and sent thousands of laborers to till them; but his plan was unsuccessful,
and the Soviet Union eventually again had to import wheat from Canada and
the United States.
On 14 October 1964, in the
"Little October Revolution," the Central Committee
accepted Khrushchev's orchestrated request to retire from his position as
the Party's first secretary and chairman of the Council of Ministers of the
Soviet Union because of "advanced age and poor health." For almost
seven years thereafter, Khrushchev lived quietly in Moscow and at his country
dacha as a special pensioner of the Soviet government. He was mentioned
in the Soviet press occasionally and appeared in public only to vote in Soviet
elections. The one change in this ordered obscurity came in 1970 with
the publication of his memoirs (Khrushchev Remembers) in the United
States and Europe, although not in the Soviet Union. Almost 48 hours
elapsed after his death before it was announced to the Soviet public. He
was denied a state funeral and internment in the Kremlin Wall, although he
was allowed a quiet burial at Novodevichy Convent Cemetery in Moscow.
In sum, Khrushchev was a thoroughgoing political
pragmatist who had learned his Marxism on the job, but he never hesitated
to adapt his beliefs to the political urgencies of the moment. His
experience with international realities confirmed him in his doctrine of
peaceful coexistence with the non-Communist world--in itself a drastic break
with established Soviet Communist teaching. Whatever one might say
about his personal eccentricities, his boisterous nature, his vulgarity and
his bewildering policy shifts, he was a man of his people. His son
Sergei pronounced a short eulogy at the cemetery: "There were those
who loved him, there were those who hated him, but there were few who would
pass him by without looking in his direction."
Timeline
-
17 April 1894, Born in Kalinovka,
Kursk Province.
-
1912-18, Worked as a metal fitter
in the generator plants of the Ruchenkov and Pastukhov
mines.
-
1918, Joined the
Bolsheviks.
-
1919, Joined the Red Army and
served as a soldier and party worker in the Ninth Rifle Division, attached
to Budyennii's First Mounted Army.
-
1922, Began work in the Iuzovka
Party organization.
-
1924, Married Nina
Petrovna.
-
1925-34, Rose through party ranks
and elected to the Central Committee at the Seventeenth Party Congress in
1934.
-
1939, Made full member of
Politburo.
-
1941-43, Served as a political
commissar on various fronts during the war with the rank of lieutenant
general.
-
1947, Accused of insufficient
vigilance in stamping out nationalism in Ukraine. Relieved of position as
First Secretary of Ukraine, although he retained his post of Chairman of
the Ukrainian Soviet and his position on Politburo (Restored to full power
in the Ukraine the following year).
-
1949, Made head of Moscow oblast
and city committees and made Secretary of the Central Committee. Given
control of agriculture and began to propose his "agrogorod"
scheme.
-
22 March 1953, Became First Secretary
of the party after Stalin's death.
-
28 June 1953, Lavrentii Beriia,
head of KGB, arrested. (He was executed in December.)
-
1954, Virgin Lands
campaign.
-
1955, Khrushchev consolidated
power when Malenkov (because of participation in the "Leningrad Case") resigned
as Chairman of the Council of Ministers.
-
1956, Secret Speech to 20th Party
Congress that denounced the "cult of personality."
-
1957, Experiments began with the
Machine Tractor Stations (MTS) and the decentralization of light industry
with special regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy) set up.
-
1957, In June Malenkov, Molotov
and Lazar Kaganovich orchestrated a Presidium vote to dismiss Khrushchev
by a vote of 8-4 (Suslov, Furtseva and Mikoyan supported Khrushchev), but
the Central Committee overturned the vote. Malenkov sent as director of a
power station in a remote corner of Central Asia; Kaganovich made director
of a cement factory in Sverdlovsk; and Molotov became ambassador to
Mongolia.
-
1957, First sputnik
launched.
-
1958, Assumed the role of chairman
(Premier) of the Soviet of Ministers as well as party leader, forcing Bulganin
to resign.
-
1960, U-2 spy plane piloted by
F.Gary Powers shot down.
-
September 1960, Addressed the
U.N. General Assembly in New York.
-
1961, Met Kennedy in
Vienna.
-
April 1961, Iurii Gagarin became
the first man in space.
-
1961, Stalin's body removed from
Lenin's Mausoleum.
-
1962, Khrushchev ordered the
publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day In the Live of Ivan
Denisovich.
-
June 1962, Ordered the shooting
of striking workers in Novocherkassk. Hundreds died with more executed and
jailed.
-
October 1962, Cuban missile
crisis.
-
1963, US-USSR hotline
established.
-
August 1963, Nuclear test-ban
treaty signed.
-
October 1964, Deposed by Leonid
Brezhnev, et al, in the Little October Revolution.
-
11 September 1971,
Died.
WWW sites
There are some on the
web (see my HIS 242 course and remarks on the "Thaw" in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev; I also have further biographical information there along with a more extensive list of web links). His 1956 Secret Speech
denouncing the crimes of the Stalin era is available on the web, as is the
article from Time Magazine naming Khrushchev the
man
of the year for 1957. When Vice President
Richard Nixon visited the Moscow Fair with Khrushchev
on 24 July 1959, they engaged in a famous
kitchen
debate about the pros and cons of communism and
democracy.
Other useful sites include:
Recommended Books
There are a some good biographies of Khrushchev.
The best include Carl Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership,
1957-64 (1966), Edward Crankshaw, Khrushchev: A Career (1966)
and Mark Frankland, Khrushchev (1966). Khrushchev Remembers
(1970) is the controversial memoir, generally accepted as genuine, with
invaluable notes by Edward Crankshaw. Also interesting is Wolfgang
Leonhard, Nikita Sergeievitch Khrushchev: ascencion et chute d'un
homme d'état sovietique (1965). On Khrushchev and
destalinization, see Roy and Zhores Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years
in Power (1977) and Bertram Wolfe, Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost
(1957).
Related Events
Secret Speech
Suez Canal Crisis 1956
Sino-Soviet Split
U-2 Incident
Berlin Wall 1961
Cuban Missile Crisis 1962
Richard Nixon
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