Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
The Khrushchev period, 1953–1964
30 June Central Committee statement that in effectrevised Khrushchev’ssecret
speech.
Early in 1957, Khrushchev himself began taking back what he had said. At
a New Year’s Eve reception for the Soviet elite and the diplomatic corps, he
declared that he and his colleagues were all ‘Stalinists’ in the uncompromis-
ing struggle against the class enemy. After the invasion of Hungary sparked
protests among Soviet students and intellectuals, Khrushchev approved a new
round of arrests.
25
Sensing that his authority was eroding, he launched a
counter-offensive whichendedup furtherundermining his position. His Febru-
ary move to abolish most national economic ministries and replace them with
regional economic councils antagonised central planners and ministers. His
May pledge that the USSR would soon overtake the United States in per capita
output of meat, butter and milk, made without being cleared with the Presid-
ium, was ill-conceived. His bullying of writers at a gala spring picnic played
into the hands of Kremlin colleagues who had no use for literary liberals but
used Khrushchev’s boorish behaviour to discredit him.
On 18 June 1957, Khrushchev’s colleagues (he later labelled them the ‘anti-
party group’) launched their move to remove him as party leader. Molotov,
Malenkov and Kaganovich led the assault, supported by Bulganin, Voroshilov,
Mikhail Pervukhin, Maksim Saburov and Dmitrii Shepilov. The first seven of
these constituted a majority of the Presidium’s full members. They lost when
Khrushchev and Mikoyan, backed by several Presidium candidate members
and Central Committee secretaries, insisted that the Central Committee itself,
in which Khrushchev supporters predominated, decide the issue.
The ‘anti-party group’ (which did not in fact oppose the party and was
so racked by internal divisions as hardly to constitute a group) accused
Khrushchev of erratic and irrational personal behaviour, but its deeper reason
for attacking him was fear that he would use the Stalin issue against them.
He did tar them with Stalinist crimes, both at the June 1957 Presidium meet-
ing, which lasted until 22 June, and the Central Committee plenum, which
stretched seven more days after that. After the plenum, most of the plotters lost
their positions, Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and Shepilov immediately, the
others more slowly so as to obscure how many of them had conspired against
Khrushchev. It was only in 1961 that Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and
25 Nikolai A. Barsukov, ‘Analiticheskaia zapiska: Pozitsiia poslestalinskogo rukovodstva v
otnoshenii politicheskikh repressii 30-x–40-x i nachala 50-x godov’, unpublished article,
pp. 41–6. Barsukov, ‘The Reverse Side of the Thaw’, paper delivered at conference on
‘New Evidence on Cold War History’, Moscow, Jan. 1993,pp.19–20, 32–6.
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