Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union

2. Two Trends in Soviet Politics

Bukharin is a most highly valued and important party theoretician… but it is very doubtful if his theoretical outlook can be considered as fully Marxist. V. I. Lenin14

Khrushchev in essence was a Bukharinite.

V. M. Molotov15

Andropov obviously was not on the side of Khrushchev nor on the side of Brezhnev for that matter. V. M. Molotov16

The crisis that came upon Soviet society [in the 1980s] was due in large measure to the crisis in the Party. Two—opposing tendencies existed in the CPSU—proletarian and petty bourgeois, democratic and bureaucratic. Program of the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (1997)17

The collapse of the Soviet Union did not occur because of an internal economic crisis or popular uprising. It occurred because of the reforms initiated at the top by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and its General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. It goes without saying that problems must have existed in the Soviet Union, otherwise no need for reforms would have arisen. Gorbachev’s reforms were a response to the underlying problems. In Chapter 4, we will examine the chronic problems facing Soviet society in three areas: economics, politics, and foreign relations—all of which had become more acute because of developments in the early 1980s. Since, however, the treatment of the illness rather than the illness itself caused the death of the patient, the origin and character of the treatment, that is the origin and character of Gorbachev’s reforms, require our first attention.

We proceed from the simple assumption that the diagnosis of social problems, even more than medical problems, are rarely matters of certainty. The definition and diagnosis of social problems, as well as the policy responses to problems, involve politics, that is, conflicting values and interests, and this was no less the case in the Soviet Union than in the United States. Outsiders commonly assumed that because the Soviet Union had only one party, political thought was monolithic and political debate non-existent. This was far from true. Starting before the revolution, the Soviet Communist Party contained more than one tendency or trend. Gorbachev did not invent his policies out of whole cloth, but rather his policies reflected trends in the Party that had earlier been represented in part by Nikolai Bukharin, Nikita Khrushchev and others.

Just as Gorbachev’s ideas did not arise in a political vacuum, neither did they arise in a socio-economic vacuum. That is, Gorbachev’s political ideas reflected social and economic interests. Gorbachev’s reforms after 1986 reflected the interests of those in Soviet society with a stake in private enterprise and the “free market.” This sector consisted of entrepreneurs and corrupt Party officials whose numbers had increased during the previous thirty years.

Before proceeding, a word of clarification is necessary. Though a continuity existed in the approach of Bukharin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev, the problems they confronted, the social basis of their support, and the policies they advocated differed. For example, in the 1920s, the largest social group with an interest in private enterprise was the peasantry, which constituted a distinct class representing about 80 percent of the population. By the 1970s only 20 percent of the population worked in agriculture, and most of these were agricultural workers on state farms or collective farms. By then the social group with a stake in private enterprise had become the petty entrepreneurs in the second economy. Such elements had thrived under the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the early 1920s, shrank drastically with the collectivization of property under Joseph Stalin, re-emerged under Khrushchev’s so-called liberalization, increased greatly in size under Brezhnev’s laxness, and ballooned under Gorbachev’s reforms. In another difference, the agricultural question, which was so prominent in Bukharin’s championing of the kulaks, and in various Khrushchev policies, did not figure prominently in Gorbachev’s program. Moreover, Gorbachev’s foreign policy retreats, cultural liberalization, weakening of the Party, and market initiatives went to lengths never contemplated by his precursors.

In the politics of the Russian revolution, two poles or tendencies arose because the winners of the Russian Revolution were two classes: the working class and the petty bourgeoisie, chiefly the peasantry. In 1917 the Soviet working class was small, and in the decades after 1917, tens of millions of peasants were the human material that would make up the new, growing Soviet working class. As these two classes persisted so did two political tendencies that more or less reflected their class interests. In the 1920s, both tendencies ostensibly favored building socialism. The working class tendency, however, favored policies that strengthened the working class by rapidly building up industry and weakened the property-owning classes by collectivizing agriculture, and policies that strengthened the role of the Communist Party particularly in centralized economic planning. The petty bourgeois tendency favored building socialism slowly by maintaining or incorporating aspects of capitalism, for example maintaining private property, competitive markets, and profit incentives. Though not all political ideas fell neatly into one or the other category, nonetheless, these categories provided the poles around which the variety often pivoted. This was evident in the early debate over the New Economic Policy (NEP).

In late 1920 and early 1921, with the country freed of foreign invaders, Lenin and other leaders of the revolution turned their attention from war to peace. They needed to replace the policies of “war communism,” particularly the forceful appropriation of surplus grain that had alienated many peasants. They had to grapple with acute shortages of fuel, food, and transportation, to revive industry and food production, and insure the unity between workers and peasants. In March 1921 at the Tenth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, Lenin proposed what became known as the New Economic Policy (NEP).18 It was a “strategic retreat,”19 a chance to regroup and lay the foundations for a future march toward socialism. Under the NEP, a tax in kind replaced the appropriation of peasant grain. Peasants could engage in free trade to sell their surplus, and various other kinds of capitalist enterprises could exist. The idea was that the NEP would encourage the peasants to produce more, and the state could use taxes on peasant produce to revive the state-owned industry. Debate soon arose. The “Lefts” called the NEP a capitulation to capitalism that would doom the Soviet project. On the other end of the spectrum, Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin and others thought the NEP was too tame and advocated even more far-reaching concessions to capitalism. Lenin agreed that the NEP represented a danger. It means “unrestricted trade,” he said, “and that means turning back towards capitalism.”20 Still, he thought the Party could handle the danger by limiting the retreat and keeping it temporary. Lenin prevailed.21

By the time of Lenin’s death in 1924, the revolution had seized state power and consolidated its hold, had defeated invading imperialist armies and the domestic counterrevolution, had nationalized key industries, had distributed land to the peasants, and had revitalized industry and food production. Originally, all leading Communists thought that completing the socialist revolution in a backward, peasant country like Russia would be impossible without revolutions in the West. With the defeat of an uprising of the German workers in 1923, however, it became clear that no European revolution was on the horizon. With no European revolution to count on, what was to be done? Three solutions presented themselves: Leon Trotsky’s, Nikolai Bukharin’s, and Joseph Stalin’s.

Leon Trotsky advocated an attempt to build socialism at home while continuing to press for socialist revolution abroad. Domestically, he urged the development of industry, the collectivization and mechanization of agriculture, and the development of economic planning. Above all, however, and with increasing stridency, Trotsky stressed the need for international revolution as the only hope for Russia to escape from what he called bureaucratic degeneration and the loss of revolutionary fervor. Trotsky and the Left Opposition were decisively defeated at the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925, which adopted a course of rapid industrialization and self-sufficiency.22

Nikolai Bukharin represented a petty bourgeois or right-wing solution to socialism’s way forward. Barrington Moore pointed out that unlike Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, Bukharin never held a high administrative post with major organizational responsibilities. As editor of Pravda and an official of the Comintern, he manipulated “symbols rather than men.” Moreover, as a theoretician he moved from the “extreme left to the extreme right of the Communist political spectrum.” By the 1920s, he was firmly on the right. He believed that Russia could not skip the stage of capitalism or even pass through it quickly. As Moore said, Bukharin’s positions “strongly resembled the gradualist views of Western Social Democracy.” He softened the idea of class struggle, to the idea of a peaceful contest between competing interest groups, between state industry and private industry, between cooperative farms and private farms, in which the former would gradually show their superiority. Whereas Lenin, the originator of the New Economic Policy, had frankly viewed it as a retreat, Bukharin viewed the NEP as the road to socialism. He would have continued the New Economic Policy and allowed or even encouraged private enterprise, particularly among the kulaks. Bukharin opposed rapid industrialization, the collectivization of agriculture and any coercion of the peasants. Instead, he said the peasants should be given what they wanted, and he advanced a slogan for the peasants, “Enrich yourselves.” In a kind of pale imitation of Trotsky’s vain hope in socialist revolutions abroad, Bukharin sought to obtain support for the Soviet Union from non-Communist groups abroad, hopes that were dashed by the failure in 1926-27 to win the support of British trade unionists, German Social Democrats, and Chinese nationalists. Bukharin and the Right Opposition were rebuffed by the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1927 that adopted a policy of promoting the collectivization of agriculture.23 (Sixty years later, Gorbachev read a biography of Bukharin by historian Stephen F. Cohen. According to Gorbachev’s close advisor, Anatoly Chernyaev, it was then that Gorbachev decided to rehabilitate Bukharin, and the re-evaluation of Bukharin “opened the sluice gates to reconsidering our whole ideology.”24)

In the course of debates with Trotsky and Bukharin, Stalin developed his own solution to socialism’s way forward. It had four main components. First was the idea that socialism could be built in one country, a reiteration of Lenin’s 1915 idea that “the victory of socialism” was possible “even in one single capitalist country.”25 In the 1920s, Stalin translated this idea into a program. Stalin argued that the Soviet Union could advance toward socialism without a revolution in the West, without help from non-Communist allies abroad, and without passing through developed capitalism, providing that the country industrialized rapidly. This was the second component. Industrialization required financing. Since the self-financing of industry would be slow, and financing by foreign investment was impossible, the growth of industry would have to be financed by increasing agricultural yields. Hence rapid industrialization required the development of large-scale collective farms utilizing mechanized production. This was the third component. The coordination of industrial growth and agricultural production demanded centralized planning, the fourth component.26 British historian, E. H. Carr, called this formulation of the problem and its solution proof of “Stalin’s political genius.” With these ideas, Stalin defeated first Trotsky and then Bukharin. Moreover, as Carr noted, he saved the revolution: “More than ten years after Lenin’s revolution, Stalin made a second revolution without which Lenin’s revolution would have run out into the sand. In this sense, Stalin continued and fulfilled Leninism.”27

Underneath the policy differences between Stalin and Bukharin resided more fundamental differences. Bukharin thought that class struggle was only needed until the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Though Stalin did not (as many have asserted) maintain that the class struggle in general intensified as socialism developed, he did argue that class struggle would intensify specifically as the country moved from the NEP toward collectivization.28 Bukharin viewed the NEP concessions to the peasants, the market, and capitalism as a long-term policy; Stalin viewed them as a temporary expedient that the revolution had to jettison when able. During the grain crisis of 1927-28, Bukharin wanted to rely on the free market and to encourage peasants to grow more grain by offering them more consumer goods. Even with the threat of impending war, Bukharin opposed speeding up industrialization if it meant adversely affecting the peasants. For Stalin, impending war provided an additional reason for speeding industrialization even if it meant exacting surplus from the peasants to finance it, and he dismissed Bukharin as one of the “peasant philosophers.”29

The differences between Bukharin and Stalin permeated other issues besides political economy, notably the national question. One of the most striking features of Lenin’s and Stalin’s approach to the national question was the considerable attention they devoted to it. Lenin read dozens of books in different languages on the history and problems of various national groups, prepared hundreds of pages of notes, and wrote at least twelve major speeches, reports, or sections of books on this question.30 Lenin made novel refinements in Marxist theory with regard to the importance of national liberation struggles and the right of nations to self-determination.31 Stalin, too, devoted considerable attention to the national question, on which he wrote numerous speeches and reports.32 Moreover, after the revolution, Stalin served as Commissar of Nationalities and dealt with numerous difficult national problems, on which he and Lenin occasionally disagreed. Under Lenin, Stalin presided over the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922, and over several modifications in the Union that eventually embraced fifteen republics and numerous autonomous regions. Under three decades of Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet Union also used the wealth and know-how of the more advanced Russian republic in order to build up the industry, mechanize the agriculture, and raise the educational and cultural level of the outlying republics. These policies brought liberation and advancement to those who had been systematically oppressed in what Lenin called the czarist “prison of peoples.”33 None of this is to say that Lenin and Stalin solved all problems. Indeed, insofar as industrializing involved overrunning some of the outlying republics with Russian citizens and polluting some of their waterways, the policies of Stalin and his successors created new national grievances. Still, the attention that Lenin and Stalin gave to the national question contrasted sharply with the comparative neglect of Bukharin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev.

The different importance the two tendencies attached to the national question reflected a deeper difference. As with political economy, what distinguished the left wing tendency from the right wing pivoted around struggle. For both Lenin and Stalin, Communists had to engage with nationalism as an important independent variable in the equation of revolution. The proletarian revolution faced the greatest peril if it ignored either the importance of the national aspirations of oppressed people or the danger of big power chauvinism and narrow, petty bourgeois nationalism. Between 1914 and 1919, a major dispute occurred between Lenin and Bukharin precisely on this question. Bukharin rejected appeals to nationalism as classless and unMarxist, and he consequently failed to foresee the upswing of national liberation movements after World War I. By contrast, Lenin argued that nationalism in colonial and non-colonial areas had a revolutionary potential and that if socialist revolutionaries sincerely fought for national self-determination, the mainly peasant nationalists in oppressed nations would join forces with the proletarian revolution. Bukharin’s biographer Stephen F. Cohen said, “Bukharin’s failure to see anti-imperialist nationalism as a revolutionary force was the most glaring defect in his original treatment of imperialism.”34 The Russian revolution’s success in winning the support of oppressed nations in the czar’s empire vindicated Lenin’s approach and even changed Bukharin’s opinion.

During the NEP, Stalin faced a different problem than had Lenin before 1919. The NEP encouraged the development of petty capitalists, or what Stalin called the “middle strata” consisting of the peasantry and “petty toiling population of the towns.” These middle strata constituted nine tenths of the population of the “oppressed nationalities,” and they were particularly susceptible to nationalist appeals. The development of nationalism in these strata constituted a real threat to the consolidation of the proletarian dictatorship whose basis was “mainly and primarily of the central, the industrial regions.” Consequently, Stalin urged a struggle against “the nationalist tendencies which are developing and becoming accentuated in connection with the New Economic Policy.” Stalin’s main opposition on this point came from Bukharin, who in 1919 had made an about-face from opposing self-determination to embracing it. By 1923, Bukharin not only supported the NEP and the petty capitalists created by it but also advocated a hands-off approach toward this class’ growing nationalism. Stalin noted that Bukharin had gone from one extreme to the other, from denying the right of self-determination to supporting it one-sidely.35 What remained the same, however, was Bukharin’s failure to accord nationalism sufficient importance, his failure to appreciate either its potential support of—or its potential danger to—the revolution, and his reluctance to struggle with nationalists who opposed socialist development.

Stalin went a long way toward the creation of a fair and viable multinational state, but his policies also had a problematic side. During World War II, in his determination to thwart narrow nationalism among the backward elements on the periphery, Stalin relocated entire populations, attacked Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans,” and gave Russians domination of the Party and state.36

From the mid-1930s to Stalin’s death in 1953, the policies of forced collectivization, rapid industrialization, and centralized planning through a series of five-year plans held complete sway. Certainly, the trial and execution of Bukharin and other leaders, and the imprisonment of tens of thousands of rank and file Communists, many of whom were innocent of any wrongdoing, had much to do with the comparative reticence of opposition voices. It would be wrong, however, to assume either that Stalin eliminated all diversity of thinking or that repression alone accounted for the dominance of Stalin’s views. The widespread acceptance of Stalin’s approach to building socialism resulted mainly from its obvious success in bringing the Soviet Union within a short period out of semi-feudal backwardness into the front ranks of the industrialized nations.

Bahman Azad gives a succinct summary of the accomplishments. In the first two five-year plans, industrial production grew at an average annual rate of 11 percent. From 1928 to 1940, the industrial sector grew from 28 percent to 45 percent of the economy. Between 1928 and 1937, heavy manufacturing output’s share of total manufacturing output grew from 31 percent to 63 percent. The illiteracy rate dropped from 56 percent to 20 percent. The number of graduates from high school, specialized schools and universities jumped. Moreover, in this period, the state began providing free education, free health services, and social insurance, and after 1936 the state gave subsidies to single mothers and to mothers with many children. These accomplishments, Azad notes, were “impressive and historically unprecedented.”37

Between 1941 and 1953, the Soviet Union defeated fascist Germany and rebuilt from the devastation of the war. By 1948 overall industrial output exceeded that of 1940, and by 1952 it exceeded 1940 by two and a half times.38 The Soviet Union developed an atomic bomb and forced the West into a Cold War stalemate. Admittedly, problems existed, notably acute agricultural shortages, and even the achievements exacted a certain cost in terms of lives, living standards, socialist democracy, and collective leadership, but they had occurred nonetheless.

It is impossible to understand the divergence of Nikita Khrushchev’s policies from Stalin’s without appreciating the persistence of ideological diversity and debate in the Party. A fascinating piece of CPSU history involved the struggle between Georgi Malenkov and Andrei Zhdanov after World War II. Both men had impeccable revolutionary credentials. Before the war, Zhdanov had headed Party ideological work, and during the war he had been in charge of Leningrad’s heroic resistance to the German siege. Malenkov had an equally important wartime role. As a member of the State Defense Committee in charge of the country, Malenkov was responsible for the Party and government personnel and operation. At the end of the war, though they disagreed about postwar prospects and priorities, Zhdanov and Malenkov emerged as Stalin’s two top deputies. Zhdanov thought the promising prospects for international peace should govern Party policies. Winning the war had required giving priority to production and technical know-how, but with an enduring peace at hand, Zhdanov thought the Party should give priority to ideology. Moreover, the Party should emphasize improving living standards and increasing consumer goods. In 1946 and 1947, for example, Zhdanov and his allies launched a campaign against ideological weaknesses in literature and culture and a campaign against “private farming.” One of Zhdanov’s targets was Nikita Khrushchev, the Party leader in the Ukraine, whom Zhdanov and his supporters accused of laxness in admitting new members to the Party and of “bourgeois nationalist” errors with respect to Ukrainian histories published during his watch.

In contrast, Malenkov believed the international dangers remained real and that the Party’s priorities must remain the development basic industry and military strength. Malenkov’s belief in the priority of industrial development placed him solidly with Stalin and against Bukharin. (When Khrushchev later echoed Zhdanov’s priorities of increasing consumer goods and raising living standards, Malenkov continued to advocate a stress on industrial development.) In 1946, Stalin sided with Zhdanov, but by 1947 after the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan signaled aggressive anti-Soviet course for American foreign policy, Stalin agreed with Malenkov. In 1948, Zhdanov died, his closest allies were demoted, and two of them were tried for treason and executed.39 The policy of strengthening industry and the military remained pre-eminent. The Zhdanov-Malenkov struggle showed that serious political differences over the direction of socialism continued at the highest levels even under Stalin, and they resembled earlier polarities and tendencies.40

With Stalin’s death in 1953, the political struggles over the direction of socialism continued. At first, Khrushchev became the head of the Party, and Malenkov became head of the government. The Party’s collective leadership agreed on the need to put Stalin’s repression behind them and to improve the living standards of the people. All of the Party Presidium joined with Khrushchev in a secret plan to arrest and depose Lavrenti Beria, the head of the secret police, who aspired to the top Party position after Stalin’s death and whose name had become synonymous with excessive repression.41 The Central Committee also began releasing and rehabilitating some of those who had been jailed for political offenses, particularly recent victims, such as members of the so-called doctor’s plot, a group of doctors accused of conspiring against Stalin’s health. The Central Committee also established a commission to give an accounting of the past repression, its extent and the degree to which it was or was not justified.42

In 1956 the unity of the top leaders foundered on Khrushchev’s handling of the repression under Stalin. At midnight on the last day of the Twentieth Congress in February 1956, Khrushchev delivered a “secret speech,” a four hour condemnation of Stalin’s “cult of the individual” and the imprisonment, torture, and execution of thousands of innocent people, including loyal Party members. Even though the Central Committee voted to have this speech read to Party meetings throughout the country, some members of the CC took exception to it. Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgi Malenkov, Lazar Kaganovich, and K. E. Voroshilov thought that Khrushchev took an unbalanced approach that neither gave Stalin credit for his positive contributions nor acknowledged the legitimacy of some repression. Their misgivings were reinforced and extended to others by the uprisings in East Germany and Hungary that the speech seemingly sparked. In June, the Central Committee revealed a growing opposition to Khrushchev’s approach when it passed a resolution crediting Stalin’s accomplishments while condemning his abuse of power.43 Subsequently, Khrushchev himself presented a more evenhanded view of Stalin, even telling his opponents in the leadership, “All of us taken together aren’t worth Stalin’s shit.”44 Opposition to Khrushchev, however, soon emerged on other issues.

Highly impulsive and sometimes inconsistent, Khrushchev represented an approach to building socialism that often resembled Bukharin and Zhdanov and foreshadowed Gorbachev. This approach cut across the entire spectrum of issues from ideology to agriculture, foreign affairs, economics, culture, and the operation of the Party. Though it is important to appreciate the continuity of certain ideas in the history of the CPSU, obviously the value of any particular policy depended upon its success in defending or advancing socialism at a particular time and under particular circumstances. Most would agree, for example, that Khrushchev’s advancement of the idea of peaceful co-existence and his reduction of Soviet military ground forces represented appropriate and successful policies, whatever their lineage. Others of his ideas were more dubious. Both before Khrushchev consolidated his hold on the Party in 1957, Molotov and others opposed the main thrust of his policies, and in 1964 after forcing Khrushchev into retirement, the Party reversed many of his initiatives. Khrushchev’s ideas, however, did not disappear entirely and would flower again under Gorbachev.

The best way to understand the differences between the thrust of Khrushchev’s policies and those of his critics, like Molotov, (as well as Gorbachev’s policies and his critics like Yegor Ligachev), was to see them as polarities even though in practice the differences sometimes amounted to matters of emphasis. For example, Khrushchev believed in a quick and easy path to communism, while his critics projected a more protracted and difficult road. Khrushchev looked for an “easing of the contest” with the U.S. and its allies abroad and “political relaxation” and “consumer communism” at home.45 His critics saw a continuation of class struggle abroad and the need for vigilance and discipline at home. Khrushchev saw more in Stalin to condemn than to praise; Molotov and others more to praise than condemn. Khrushchev favored incorporating a range of capitalist or Western ideas into socialism, including market mechanisms, decentralization, some private production, the heavy reliance on fertilizer and the cultivation of corn, and increased investment in consumer goods. Molotov favored improved centralized planning and socialized ownership, and continuing the priority of industrial development. Khrushchev favored broadening the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the proletarian vanguard role of the Communist Party to put other sectors of the population on an equal footing with workers; his critics did not.

Khrushchev was born into a peasant family and from 1938 to 1949 served as Party Secretary of the Ukraine, where he became an authority on agricultural questions and under Stalin supported the subordination of agriculture to the industrialization of the country. The Party had censured Khrushchev’s leadership in the Ukraine (and on this Stalin agreed) for admitting too many people, mainly peasants, to the Party, for being lax on Party standards, and for tolerating narrow Ukrainian nationalism.46 Even after he moved to Moscow to become its Party Secretary in 1949, Khrushchev retained his ties to farming, and as chief of national agricultural policy, he was the only member of Stalin’s Politburo who visited the countryside frequently.47 After 1954, his agricultural policies would play a prominent part in the growing Party debate.

In 1953, Khrushchev initiated a set of policies that proved to be problematical both ideologically and practically. Khrushchev encouraged the country to look to the West not only as a source of new methods of production but as a standard of comparison for Soviet achievements. He also shifted resources from industry to agriculture. To encourage agricultural production, Khrushchev reverted to NEP-type measures. He reduced taxes on individual plots, eliminated taxes on individual livestock, and encouraged people in villages and towns to keep more privately owned cows, pigs, and chickens and to cultivate private gardens. Khrushchev also came up with a brainstorm for boosting agricultural production overnight. In January 1954, he proposed a nationwide campaign to cultivate millions of hectares of so-called virgin lands mainly in Siberia and Kazakhstan. That year 300,000 volunteers joined the virgin lands campaign and plowed 13 million hectares of new land. The following year’s effort added another 14 million hectares of cultivated land.48

Khrushchev also placed a new emphasis on raising living standards. After the wartime deprivations, no one opposed raising Soviet living standards. The questions were how to do it and at what cost. For his opponents, Khrushchev’s approach had two problems. First, it required a shift in investment priorities from heavy industry to light industry, consumer goods. In Khrushchev’s first year as General Secretary investment in heavy industry exceeded that in consumer goods by only 20 percent, compared to 70 percent before the war.49 This shift in priorities flew in the face of Stalin’s 1952 warning that “ceasing to give primacy to the production of the means of production” would “destroy the possibility of the continuous expansion of our national economy.”50 In the long run, shifting priorities would undermine the goal of surpassing the West that Khrushchev himself projected. Secondly, his opponents thought Khrushchev’s emphasis placed the Soviet Union in competition with the United States and Western Europe over consumer goods, a race the Soviet Union could not and probably should not win. The German Communist, Hans Holz, said later that lowering socialist goals to material competition with capitalism was giving up “ideological territory.”51 The goal of catching up and surpassing the West in five or ten years resulted in “a stimulation of needs and cravings oriented around a Western style of consumption.”52 The slogan encouraged the Soviet people to the view that the “competition between social systems was not over the goals of life, but over the levels of consumption.”53 More simply, Molotov said, “Khrushchevism is the bourgeois spirit!”54

Molotov and others in the Presidium (as the Politburo was then known) opposed Khrushchev’s policies across the board: on the handling of de-Stalinization, the de-emphasis on class struggle internationally, the encouragement of private agricultural production, the virgin lands initiative, the decentralization of industry, and the shift from heavy to light industry.55 For example, Molotov and others thought that because of the problematic climate and the lack of infrastructure in the virgin lands, widespread cultivation invited disaster and that the country could more profitably use its resources to increase production in already cultivated areas. The opposition favored some moves to improve the standard of living but not an abrupt shift in priorities. The opposition to Khrushchev grew over a couple of years and then was precipitated into action by two events in May 1957. The first was Khrushchev’s decision to decentralize industry.56 The second was a speech in which Khrushchev called for a “spectacular leap forward” in the production of milk, meat, and butter in order to surpass the West in three or four years.57 This became part of Khrushchev’s belief that the Soviet Union could, in the words of his grandson, “dash forward to communism,” an idea that late in his life, even Khrushchev regarded as an “incorrect concept.”58

During a four-day Presidium meeting, June 18-21, 1957, and a Central Committee meeting that immediately followed, a decisive confrontation between Khrushchev and the opposition occurred. As a prelude to seeking Khrushchev’s removal as General Secretary, the opposition assailed his economic policies, particularly his agricultural policies and his idea of decentralizing state planning.59 Molotov and others opposed changing investment priorities from industrial to agricultural, rushing headlong to catch the West in consumer goods, opening the virgin lands, loosening agricultural strictures, and decentralizing economic decision-making. In their view, Khrushchev’s policies were wrong in principle and would lead to economic disruption. Molotov called the virgin lands program an “adventure” and said it would take away resources from industrialization. Malenkov argued that the goal should be to surpass the West in steel, iron, coal, and oil, not consumer goods. “We Marxists,” Malenkov said, “are accustomed to begin with industrialization.” He called Khrushchev’s program a “rightist peasant deviation,” an “opportunistic” move that would make the Soviet people less interested in rapid industrialization.60

The opposition held a seven to three majority (with one neutral) in the Presidium. When word of the imminent repudiation of Khrushchev leaked out, however, Moscow members of the Central Committee (many of whom had been promoted by Khrushchev) besieged the Presidium and demanded the convening of the Central Committee. A hastily arranged meeting of the Central Committee that went on for six days ended by supporting Khrushchev and expelling Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich from the Central Committee and the Presidium.61

After routing what he called the “anti-Party” opposition, Khrushchev ruled without serious resistance for the next seven years. Of Khrushchev’s course during this time, two things stood out. First, in spite of some tacking and weaving, Khrushchev pursued a domestic course the main elements of which were cuts in military spending, attacks on Stalin, decentralization of planning, dismantling of state tractor stations, emulation of American agricultural methods, cultivation of virgin lands, promotion of consumer goods, some liberalization of intellectual and cultural restrictions, and an ideological de-emphasis of class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the vanguard party. Secondly, all of Khrushchev’s major domestic policies failed to produce the results intended. As his biographer, William Taubman said, “Too often Khrushchev made a bad situation even worse.”62

At the Twenty-second Congress in 1961, Khrushchev returned with renewed intensity to his attack on Stalin. Two aspects of Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinism foreshadowed Gorbachev. First, Khrushchev’s treatment of Stalin was exaggerated, one-sided, and incomplete. Secondly, the denunciation of Stalin served politically factional ends. Much could be said about the distortions of Khrushchev’s treatment of Stalin. For example, Khrushchev implied that Stalin emerged suddenly on the scene in 1924, when in truth Stalin had solid revolutionary credentials dating from his political work among railroad workers in Georgia in 1898. Khrushchev quoted Lenin’s so-called last testament criticizing Stalin’s rudeness but ignored Lenin’s praise of Stalin as an outstanding leader. In 1956, Khrushchev concentrated on Stalin’s alleged repression of Party leaders and claimed that half of the delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress and 70 percent of the Central Committee were killed. Stalin’s biographer, Ken Cameron, concluded that it is “difficult to believe that Khrushchev’s figures are correct.”63 (Using the recently opened Soviet archives, scholars have numbered the total of executions from 1921 to 1953 at 799,455, far below the millions estimated by Robert Conquest, Roy Medvedev and other anti-Soviet scholars.64) Also, Khrushchev ignored the evidence of sabotage that served as the ostensible reason for the repression. Khrushchev blamed Stalin for faulty military strategy and dictatorial leadership during World War II, both of which were contradicted by the leading Soviet general, Georgy Zhukov. Most importantly, Khrushchev did not invite a thorough, searching, and balanced treatment of Stalin. Instead, he wrote Stalin out of Soviet history, and discussion of his role more or less stopped.65 Consequently, Khrushchev left the history, in Yegor Ligachev’s words, with “too many blank spots.”66

Besides its deficiencies as history, Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin served partisan ends. Having fabricated a monstrously distorted image of Stalin, Khrushchev then accused those who did not join the denunciation of wanting to revive Stalin’s methods. In 1961, Khrushchev explicitly linked his attack on Stalin to the crimes of his opponents, whom he called a “group of factionalists headed by Molotov, Kaganovitch, and Malenkov.” Khrushchev claimed that they “resisted everything new and tried to revive the pernicious methods, which prevailed under the cult of the individual.”67 Though Molotov and the others objected to Khrushchev’s policies and the one-sided treatment of Stalin, they did not advocate a return to Stalin’s repression. Just as anti-Communists use “Stalinism” to attack Communists, so Khrushchev employed the idea, if not the term, to defame his opponents.

Khrushchev’s treatment of Stalin set the stage for Gorbachev. Gorbachev would capitalize on the desire to fill in the blank spots of history left by Khrushchev’s incomplete treatment. Moreover, Gorbachev would open the door to even more one-sided attacks on Stalin than had occurred under Khrushchev. Finally, like his predecessor, Gorbachev would adroitly use attacks on Stalin to impugn those who did not join the chorus and to undermine those who opposed his policies. In 1988 during the Nina Andreyeva affair (see Chapter 5), Gorbachev echoed Khrushchev by accusing his opponents of wanting to revive Stalinist methods.

Nothing was more characteristic of Khrushchev’s approach to building socialism than the belief that quick and easy solutions existed. This belief underpinned the policies that brought Soviet agriculture to near chaos in a decade. The virgin land campaign occupied the centerpiece of these initiatives. Lasting ten years, this campaign involved sending tens of thousands of tractors and combines and hundreds of thousands of volunteers to plow up acreage that eventually equaled the surface area of France, West Germany, and England combined. The first year of the campaign, grain production increased by 10 million tons, but the increase was largely due to greater yields in the non-virgin lands. The next year a drought occurred and production everywhere suffered. The following year, 1956, the campaign scored a triumph, when the virgin lands produced an exceptional yield, supplying half of all Soviet grain, even though much was lost due to insufficient equipment for harvesting, storing, and transporting the bounty. In no succeeding year did the harvest match 1956. In 1957, the harvest was 40 percent less than 1956, in 1958 8 percent less and in subsequent years still less, until 1963 and 1964, when the harvest was a total bust. In his monograph on the virgin land campaign, Gerald Meyer argued that the campaign failed because Khrushchev overestimated the favorableness of the natural conditions and underestimated the costs. A short growing season, insufficient and poorly distributed precipitation, high winds, and poor fallow practices in the virgin lands resulted in frequent droughts, vast land erosion, falling fertility, and soaring costs.68 As a policy, the virgin land campaign was a disaster.

Three other of Khrushchev’s agricultural initiatives also produced undesirable results. Two of them stemmed from Khrushchev’s belief that quick and easy increases in production would follow the emulation of practices in the West. The corn campaign rested on the idea of boosting cattle production by following the American practice of growing corn for silage. The anti-fallow campaign involved encouraging the use of chemical fertilization instead of rotating crops or allowing fields to lie fallow. Both campaigns ignored the realities of natural and other conditions in the Soviet Union and never came close to being the panacea envisioned by Khrushchev.69

The third initiative, and one of the most extreme of Khrushchev’s entire tenure, involved dismantling the state-run machine tractor stations that supplied tractors and other machinery to the collective farms. Collective farms that had relied on the tractor stations suddenly had to buy and maintain their own farm equipment. Ideologically, Khrushchev’s move represented a repudiation of Stalin’s last statement on the Soviet economy. Stalin had said that the direction of Soviet development should be toward the enhancement of the state sector (rather than the collective farms).70 Practically, the policy produced another debacle. The change occurred with such abandon that a majority of the tractor stations disappeared within three months. Even Khrushchev sympathizers believed that the policy seriously reduced agricultural productivity, inflicted long-term damage on the economy and amounted to an unadulterated failure.71

With industry as with agriculture, Khrushchev faced serious problems but resorted to problematic solutions. Under socialism, central plans largely determined the size and nature of production. Planning eliminated the boom and bust cycle of capitalist markets, but it had its own challenges. Planning became more difficult as the economy became larger and more complex. By 1953, the number of industrial enterprises reached 200,000 and the number of planning targets reached 5000, up from 300 in the early 1930s and 2500 in 1940. At this time, the British economist Maurice Dobb claimed that “over-centralization” was cramping initiative and technical innovation, wasting resources, producing bottlenecks in supplies, placing a premium on “purely quantitative fulfillment” of the plan, rewarding unproductive enterprises, and punishing conscientious ones.72 By shifting the economy toward consumer goods, Khrushchev complicated the already difficult job of planning. Alec Nove said, “Housing, agriculture, consumer goods, trade, all became matters of importance, even priority. So the task of planning became more complicated, because a system based on a few key priorities, resembling in this respect a Western war economy, could not work so effectively if goals were diluted or multiplied.”73

Khrushchev sought an easy way out of the problems of centralized planning through radical decentralization and the application of such capitalist-oriented ideas as market competition. In May 1957, Khrushchev abolished the thirty plus central planning ministries and replaced them with over a hundred local economic councils. The result was predictable. Co-ordination of production and supplies became even more difficult than it was before, and local interests superseded national goals. The Medvedevs, who purportedly sympathized with Khrushchev, said his decentralization produced “anarchy,” “duplication, parallelism and dissipation of responsibility.”74 In 1961, Khrushchev had to regroup and consolidate planning into seventeen large economic regions. Even this did not undo the damage of decentralization. The Soviet economy expanded at a slower rate in the second half of the 1950s than the first half, and expanded at a slower rate in the first five years of the 1960s than in the 1950s.75 After replacing Khrushchev in 1964, the Party re-established twenty central planning ministries and tried to combine these with greater plant autonomy.76