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yoram gorlizki and oleg khlevniuk
ruling group that the leader had no hope of recovery. By 8.00 p.m. on 5 March,
whileStalin was technically still alive (he died at 9.50 p.m.), the ruling group had
convened a joint session of the Presidium and of the Central Committee.
56
Notwithstanding the turmoil of Stalin’s last months, the leadership would
rely on the collegial decision-making structures and mutual understandings
forged in the proceding years, to see itself through the uncertainties of the
early post-Stalin transition.
Conclusion
The entrenchment of Stalin’s dictatorship was a multi-stage process in which
oligarchic tendencies were persistently represented. By the end of the 1920s
a fully-fledged Stalinist faction had been formed, yet there were still strong
elements of collective rule. At this stage Stalin still had to accommodate the
cut and thrust of high-level bureaucratic politics and to win colleagues onto
his side. Any semblance of resistance was only crushed with the purges of
the late 1930s which left the Politburo and Central Committee, newly infused
with a young cohort of Stalin appointees, as institutionally malleable bodies
subject to the dictator’s whims. For Stalin the leadership system of the late
1930s represented the high-water mark of dictatorship, an ideal to which the
leader would strive to return in later years.
At the height of his powers, in March 1939 Stalin declared to the Eighteenth
Party Congress that ‘there is no doubt that we will not use again the method
of the mass purge’. Although we are unlikely ever to know whether Stalin
seriously intended to keep his pledge, there are indications from the post-
war years that Stalin recognised the benefits of relative equilibrium within
the political system. Despite the devastating personal consequences for those
involved, the Leningrad Affair of 1949 was the only occasion after the 1930sin
which high-ranking politicians lost their lives, and the purges of the personal
networks which accompanied it were relatively confined in scope. Equally,
when, in the early 1950s, oligarchic tendencies began to set in and to constrain
Stalin’s leadership, as they had in the early 1930s, the anti-oligarchic strategy
pursued by Stalin was far less bloody or robust than it had been when Stalin
had broken the back of the 1930s collective leadership, fifteen years before.
The latter phase of Stalin’s life has sometimes been depicted as a time of
Stalin’s mental decline and of the system’s institutional disarray.
57
In fact from
56 Khlevniuk et al., Politburo TsK VKP(b) i Sovet Ministrov SSSR 1945–1953,pp.101–4.
57 See e.g. Ulam, Stalin,pp.652, 665–70, 686.
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Stalin and his circle
the second phase of the war on, we find evidence of institutional consolidation.
As for Stalin himself, we see a rationalisation of his own commitments, as the
leader shed a variety of secondary duties and focused on a narrow range of
core activities. As Stalin grew older and his powers waned, he was forced to
relinquish even more of these. It is in the Doctors’ Plot that we find, distilled
to their essence, the two irreducible functions that Stalin could never let go of.
In this final, desperate, lunge he turned to repression and ideology in order to
counter oligarchical forces which, despite his own supreme dictatorial powers,
would never quite go away.
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10
The Khrushchev period, 1953–1964
william taubman
TheTwentieth Congressof the SovietCommunist Party convened on 14 Febru-
ary 1956 in the Great Kremlin Palace. On 25 February, the day the congress
was slated to end, Soviet delegates attended an unscheduled secret session
at which their leader, Nikita Khrushchev, talked for nearly four hours with
one intermission. His speech was a devastating attack on Joseph Stalin. Stalin
was guilty of ‘a grave abuse of power’. During his reign ‘mass arrests and
deportation of thousands and thousands of people, and execution without
trial or normal investigation, created insecurity, fear, and even desperation’.
Stalinist charges of counter-revolutionary crimes had been ‘absurd, wild and
contrary to common sense’. Innocent people had confessed to such crimes
‘because of physical methods of pressure, torture, reducing them to uncon-
sciousness, depriving them of judgement, taking away their human dignity’.
Stalin himself had been personally responsible for all this: he ‘personally called
in the interrogator, gave him instructions, and told him which methods to
use, methods that were simple – to beat, beat and once again, beat’. ‘Honest
and innocent Communists’ had been tortured and killed. Khrushchev assailed
Stalin for incompetent wartime leadership, for ‘monstrous’ deportations of
whole Caucasian peoples, for a ‘mania of greatness’, and ‘nauseatingly false’
adulation and self-adulation.
1
Khrushchev’s indictment was neither complete nor unalloyed. The Stalin he
portrayed had been a paragon until the mid- 1930s. Although oppositionists had
not deserved ‘physical annihilation’, they had been ‘ideological and political
enemies’. Khrushchev not only spared Lenin and the Soviet regime itself,
he glorified them, but his speech stunned his audience. Many in the hall
This chapter draws extensively on my book, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (New York:
Norton, 2003).
1 ‘O kul’te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh: doklad pervogo sekretaria TsK KPSS tov.
Khrushcheva N. S. XX s”ezdu Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza’, in Izvestiia
TsK KPSS 3 (1989): 131, 133, 144–5, 149, 154–5.
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The Khrushchev period, 1953–1964
were unreconstructed Stalinists. Others, who had secretly feared and hated
Stalin, could not believe his successor secretly shared their view. The speech
was met with ‘a deathly silence’, Vladimir Semichastnyi, who would later
become Khrushchev’s KGB chief, recalled. ‘We didn’t look at each other as we
came down from the balcony,’ remembered Aleksandr Yakovlev, then a minor
Central Committee functionary, and later Mikhail Gorbachev’s collaborator in
perestroika, ‘whether from shame or shock or from the simple unexpectedness
of it.’
2
Khrushchev’s speech was supposed to be kept secret. However, the ruling
Presidium approved distributing it to local party committees; local authorities
read the text to millions of party members and others around the country;
and Polish Communist leaders allowed thousands of copies to circulate, one of
which reached the US Central Intelligence Agency. The US State Department
eventually released the text to the New York Times, which published it on 4 June
1956.
‘I very much doubt Father wanted to keep it secret’, recalled Khrushchev’s
son Sergei. ‘He wanted to bring the report to the people. The secrecy of the
session was only a formal concession on his part...’
3
Yet, at numerous meetings
at which the speech was read and discussed, criticism of Stalin exploded way
beyond Khrushchev’s. Why had it taken so long to admit Stalin’s crimes? Had
not current leaders been his accomplices? Why had Khrushchev himself kept
silent for so long? Was not the Soviet system itself the real culprit? Some
meetings tried to call for rights and freedoms, and for multi-party elections to
guarantee them.
4
In April 1956, the KGB reported that portraits and busts of
Stalin had been defaced or torn down, that Communists at one party meeting
had declared him ‘an enemy of the people’, and at another had demanded
his body be removed from the Lenin–Stalin mausoleum. On the other hand,
those who defended Stalin included not only unreconstructed party officials
but ordinary citizens, some of whom hailed Stalin for ‘punishing’ the party
and police officials who had oppressed them.
5
In Stalin’s native Georgia, some
60,000 people carried flowers to his monument, and when some of them
2 Semichastnyi’s recollection in ‘Taina zakrytogo doklada’, Sovershenno sekretno 1 (1996): 4.
Yakovlev quoted in Iurii V. Aksiutin, ‘Novye dokumenty byvshego arkhiva TsK’, in XX
s”ezd: materialy konferentsii k 40 – letiu SS s”ezda KPSS (Moscow: Aprel’-85, 1996), p. 127.
3 Sergei N. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (University Park,
Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), p. 99.
4 See Iurii Aksiutin, ‘Popular Responses to Khrushchev’, in William Taubman, Sergei
Khrushchev and Abbott Gleason (eds.), Nikita Khrushchev (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000), pp. 182–92.
5 See Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1995), pp. 61–3.
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william taubman
marched on the radio station, at least twenty demonstrators were killed in the
clashes with troops.
6
Not long after his ‘secret’ speech, ‘Khrushchev sensed the blow had been
toopowerful,and...increasingly he sought to limit the boundaries of critical
analysis, lest it end up polarising society . . .’
7
His retreat climaxed in a Central
Committee resolution of 30 June which blamed Stalin at most for ‘serious
errors’.
8
However, the retreat came too late to prevent turmoil in Poland and
a revolution in Hungary, which Soviet troops crushed at a cost of some 20,000
Hungarian and 1,500 Soviet casualties.
Personality and history
The year 1956 was pivotal in the Khrushchev period. De-Stalinisation was at
the heart of his effort to reform Soviet Communism. But in the years that
followed, virtually all his reforms were marked by the kind of alternating
advance and retreat that occurred in 1956. What triggered the burst of change
that was central to the Khrushchev years? What limited it? Whydid the reforms
of the Khrushchev period go as far as they did, but no further? Answers to
these questions can be found at the intersection of personality and history, of
Khrushchev and his character, on the one hand, and, on the other, impersonal
forces such as Stalin’s legacy, the nature of the Soviet system, the influence of
the world outside the USSR, even the nature of nuclear weapons.
Three conditions justify singling out a political leader and his or her per-
sonality as decisive influences on events. Obviously, such a leader must have
the sheer political power to affect those events. Second, a leader who acts
idiosyncratically, rather than doing what others would do in his position, is
not simply reacting to the dictates of a situation, or reflecting values that he
and his colleagues share. Thirdly, actions that are particularly costly and self-
destructive are likely to be products of internal drives and compulsions rather
than of external circumstances.
9
6 V. A . K o z l o v , Massovye besporiadki v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve (1953–nachalo 1980)
(Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf, 1999), p. 160.
7 Aleksei Adzhubei, Krushenie illiuzii (Moscow: Interbuk, 1991), p. 145.
8 Resolution translated in The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism, ed.
Russian Institute of Columbia University (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956),
pp. 282, 291, 293.
9 See Sidney Hook, The Hero in History: A Study in Limitation and Possibility (New York: John
Day, 1943), pp. 151–83; Fred I. Greenstein, Personality and Politics: Problems of Evidence, Infer-
ence and Conceptualization (Chicago: Markham, 1969), pp. 33–68; Faye Crosby, ‘Evaluating
Psychohistorical Explanations’, Psychohistory Review 2 (1979): pp. 6–16.
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The Khrushchev period, 1953–1964
Khrushchev fits all three criteria. Stalin’s successor may have wielded less
power than his former master, but more than enough to allow him to initiate
reforms and then throttle them back. Perhaps his most important decisions
(to unmask Stalin in 1956, to dispatch nuclear missiles to Cuba in 1962 and
then suddenly to remove those missiles) were moves which, in all probability,
no other Soviet leader of his time would have made. In a sense, Khrushchev’s
life is a stunning success story (if one does not count the corpses over which
he clambered on his way to the top), but no sooner had he survived and
succeeded Stalin, and assumed full power himself, than he began making
devastating miscalculations, which ended in his unceremonious removal in
October 1964.
Yet, Khrushchev also acted in a historical context that shaped and limited
him. Having come to political maturity under Stalin and served for years
in the dictator’s inner circle, Khrushchev himself was a Stalinist before he
became a ‘de-Stalinist’. In addition, Stalin’s legacy – a dysfunctional economy,
a super-centralised polity and a self-isolating foreign policy – was nearly insur-
mountable. Martin Malia goes so far as to contend that the Soviet system which
Khrushchev tried to reform was essentially unreformable.
10
Kremlinologists
like Myron Rush, Carl Linden and Michel Tatu have portrayed Kremlin power
struggles that determined Khrushchev’s policies.
11
Stephen F. Cohen pointed
to the ‘larger political forces in Soviet officialdom and society’, particularly
the ‘friends and foes of change’, which influenced the pace and pattern of
de-Stalinisation.
12
Not to mention the effect of Russian inertia, explicated, for
example, by Tim McDaniel in The Agony of the Russian Idea,
13
but characterised
more crudely by Khrushchev in a 1963 conversation with Fidel Castro: ‘You’d
think I, as first secretary, could change anything in this country. Like hell I can!
No matter what changes I propose and carry out, everything stays the same.
Russia’s like a tub full of dough, you put your hand in it, down to the bottom,
and you think you’re master of the situation. When you first pull out your
hand, a little hole remains, but then, before your very eyes, the dough expands
into a spongy, puffy mass. That’s what Russia is like!’
14
10 Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York:
Free Press, 1994).
11 Michel Tatu, Power in the Kremlin: From Khrushchev to Kosygin, trans. Helen Katel
(New York: Viking, 1969); Carl Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership: 1957–1964
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966).
12 Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 93–157.
13 Tim McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1996).
14 N. C. Leonov, Likholet’e (Moscow: Terra, 1997), p. 73.
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william taubman
The outside world posed both mortal threats and irresistible opportuni-
ties to a superpower on the make like the USSR. Pursuing ‘expansion and
coexistence’
15
simultaneously was difficult for any Soviet leader. As Alexander
Yanov has argued, the United States ‘consistently [tried] to undermine a Soviet
reformist leader, thus practically shutting one of the rare Russian windows into
political modernity and inviting a ferocious arms race’.
16
But Khrushchev him-
self was also at fault: the awesome power of nuclear weapons reinforced his
conviction that war with the United States would be an unmitigated catas-
trophe, but it also tempted him to engage in nuclear bluff and blackmail that
ended up endangering Soviet security as well as his own.
Biography
Khrushchev was born on 15 April 1894 in the poor southern Russian village
of Kalinovka, and his childhood there profoundly shaped his character. His
parents dreamed of owning land and a horse but did not obtain either. His
father, who later worked in the mines of Iuzovka in the Donbass, was a failure
in the eyes of Khrushchev’s mother, a strong-willed woman who invested her
hopes in her son. That made it all the more important for Khrushchev to outdo
his father, yet the very success he craved risked evoking guilt at succeeding
where his father had not. The fact that Khrushchev had no more than two
to four years of elementary education not only equipped him ill to cope with
governing a vast transcontinental state, it also explains the insecurity he felt,
especially when jousting with the intelligentsia, and the super-sensitivity to
slight which made him vindictive towards those he thought had demeaned or
betrayed him. His parents’ religiosity helps to account for his sense of rectitude
and for the conscience that endured even after he violated his own moral code
by becoming Stalin’s accomplice in terror.
From 1908 until the late 1920s, Khrushchev lived and worked mostly in the
Donbass. Until the revolution, he laboured as a metalworker whose ambition
was to become an engineer. The revolution and civil war ‘distracted’ him into
Bolshevik politics (he joined the party in 1918), witness the fact that he twice
returned to an educational path that seemed designed to lead to an industrial
15 Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1973 (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974).
16 Alexander Yanov, ‘In the Grip of the Adversarial Paradigm: The Case of Nikita Sergeevich
Khrushchev in Retrospect’, in Robert O. Crummey (ed.), Reform in Russia and the USSR:
Past and Prospects (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 169.
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The Khrushchev period, 1953–1964
career. Strange as it may sound, Khrushchevmight have made a better manager
than a political leader whose native gifts sustained him during his rise to the
top, but failed him when he reached the summit of power. Both in 1925 and
1930, he chose careers in the Communist Party apparatus, first in Ukraine,
then in Moscow, where he quickly became Moscow party boss. Returning to
Ukraine as party leader in 1938, he remained there (except for the war years)
until Stalin summoned him back to Moscow in 1949.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Khrushchev played a central role in Stalinism.
His positive contributions included supervising construction of the Moscow
metro, energising Ukrainian agriculture and industry after the Great Purges,
and attempting to ameliorate the post-war famine which Stalin’s draconian
policies caused. On the other hand, as he himself later admitted, his arms were
‘up to the elbows in blood’ of those who perished in the purges. ‘That’, he
continued shortly before he died, ‘is the most terrible thing that lies in my
soul’.
17
Khrushchev believed in socialism and took great pride in his role in
‘building’ it. But he also felt a deep guilt about his complicity in Stalinism, guilt
that helps to explain both his anti-Stalin campaign and why he retreated from
it lest his own complicity be fully revealed.
The ‘secret speech’ was a sign of Khrushchev’s repentance. As early as 1940
he confided his sense of anger about Stalin’s terror to a childhood friend in
the Donbass: ‘Don’t blame me for all that. I’m not involved in that. When I
can, I’ll settle with that “Mudakshvili” [Khrushchev altered Stalin’s real name,
Dzhugashvili, by playing on the Russian word for ‘prick’, mudak] in full. I
don’t forgive him any of them – not Kirov, not Iakir, not Tukhachevskii, not
the simplest worker or peasant.’
18
Stalin was Khrushchev’s mentor and tormentor, the man who raised him
to the heights, but mocked him for his limitations as he did so. Khrushchev
managed to survive and succeed Stalin by playing the simple peasant slogger,
the very role which he aspired to transcend. But despite his miraculous rise,
his doubts about both his capacities and his sins remained, exacerbated by the
domestic and foreign-policy troubles that came crowding in on him, troubles
to which he responded with increasingly desperate and reckless actions which,
rather than consolidating and extending his achievements, ultimately ensured
his defeat.
17 N. S. Khrushchev (1894–1971): Materialy nauchnoi konferentsii posviashchennoi 100-letiu so
dnia rozhdeniia N. S. Khrushcheva (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1994),
p. 39.
18 Author’s interviews with Ol’ga I. Kosenko, June 1991 and Aug. 1993, Donetsk, Ukraine.
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william taubman
Succession struggle
The battle to succeed Stalin was largely about power (and the personalities
who competed for it), but it was also about policies which his would-be heirs
wielded as weapons against each other. Stalin’s legacy created his successors’
agenda. What was to be done about some 2.5 million prisoners still languishing
in labour camps, and about those who had imprisoned them? How to give the
party elite and the intelligentsia, which had been particularly terrorised, an
increased sense of security? How to allow a cultural thaw without unleashing
a flood? How to revive agriculture, which had virtually been ruined by Stalin,
while boosting the production of housing and consumer goods which the
dictator had so badly neglected? How to breach the isolation in which the USSR
found itself after Stalin managed to alienate almost the whole world – not just
the capitalist West, and influential neutrals like India, but key Communist
allies like Yugoslavia, and even China, whose leader, Mao Zedung, paid Stalin
public obeisance but nursed resentments that would soon boil over? How
to counter American nuclear superiority? How to prevent the strains of the
succession struggle itself from sapping Soviet strength in the Cold War? The
capitalists knew, Khrushchev later recalled, ‘that the leadership that Stalin left
behind was no good because it was composed of people who had too many
differences among them’.
19
Lavrentii Beria, Stalin’s former secret police chief, was hardly a closet lib-
eral. Had he prevailed, he would almost certainly have exterminated his col-
leagues, but in the first months after Stalin’s death, he played the reformer
in a vain effort to cleanse his image. He proposed a mass amnesty of non-
political prisoners, and revealed that the Doctors’ Plot, which had allegedly
prepared to assassinate the Soviet leaders, was a fabrication. He condemned
the predominance of Russians and Russian language in non-Russian republics.
Confronted with a flood of East Germans fleeing westward, itself a response
to Walter Ulbricht’s hyper-Stalinist rule, Beria apparently toyed with the idea
of abandoning East German Communism, allowing reunification of a neutral
Germany in exchange for substantial Western compensation.
20
It was not deep policy differences that turned his colleagues against Beria;
although they rejected his East German proposal, they later adopted other
reforms of the sort he had proposed. Their main fear was that he would get
them if they did not get him first. Khrushchev led a conspiracy that culminated
19 Nikita S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, trans. Strobe Talbott
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), p. 194.
20 See Taubman, Khrushchev,pp.245–8.
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in Beria’s arrest on 26 June 1953. In December, Beria was executed. With
him out of the way, Georgii Malenkov, who had succeeded Stalin as head of
the Soviet government, and Khrushchev, who had taken the late dictator’s
other job as party boss, shared the leadership. The two men complemented
each other in other ways: Khrushchev was impulsive; Malenkov was steadier.
Khrushchev craved the limelight; Malenkov might have settled for a lesser
role. The Khrushchev and Malenkov families had socialised frequently since
the 1930s. However, Kremlin political culture bred mutual suspicions, and
personal resentments sharpened them.
In August 1953, Malenkov proposed a reduction in stifling agricultural taxes,
an increase in procurement prices whichthe state paid for obligatory collective-
farm deliveries, and encouragement of individual peasant plots, which pro-
duced much of the nation’s vegetables and milk. Khrushchev had wanted
to announce the new policy, and, according to Presidium colleague Anastas
Mikoyan, he was ‘indignant’ when Malenkov stole the mantle of reformer.
Khrushchev tried to grab it back with a speech of his own to the Central Com-
mittee in September, but he ‘could neither forget nor forgive’ Malenkov for
‘getting the glory’.
21
The reforms Malenkov proposed involved land already
under cultivation, and as such they would take time to boost output. So
Khrushchev’s next proposal called for a crash programme to develop the so-
called Virgin Lands of Kazakhstan and western Siberia. Over the next few
years, as Khrushchev precipitously increased the area brought under new
cultivation, his gamble raised overall output far above that of Stalin’s last
years. But it also became a source of dissension between him and Viach-
eslav Molotov, and by the early 1960s, Virgin Lands output proved to be
disappointing.
For both Khrushchev and Malenkov, a prime obstacle to change was the
Stalinist image of the outside world. If capitalist states were irredeemably hos-
tile, and new world war was therefore inevitable, then the USSR could hardly
afford the luxury of domestic reform. Malenkov challenged these axioms when
he insisted there were ‘no contested issues in US–Soviet relations that cannot
be solved by peaceful means’, and warned that a nuclear war could destroy
not just capitalism, but ‘world civilization’. Khrushchev himself would even-
tually adopt similar stances, but seeking to attract the arch-Stalinist Molotov
into an anti-Malenkov alliance, he attacked the latter’s heresies, charging that
Malenkov’s alarm about nuclear war had ‘confused the comrades’.
22
21 Anastas Mikoian, Tak bylo: Razmyshleniia o minuvshem (Moscow: Vagrius, 1999), p. 599.
22 Malenkov cited in Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold
War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996),
275