Utopia in Power

With Stalin's death came the end of the period of unlimited terroristic dictatorship in Soviet history. At the same time, however, it had been a period of growth, of the formation and ripening of the Soviet society whose principles had been laid down by Lenin in the first years of the Soviet regime. The revolution from above, led by Stalin in the 1930s, had been the logical conclusion of the October revolution and the Leninist strategy. In this sense, Stalin's historic claim to being Lenin's most faithful and consistent pupil is justifiable enough.

The Stalinist dictatorship was the realization of the dreams of all tyrants: absolute control over men's bodies and souls. The system put together in the USSR was more complete and solid than German nazism or any other variety of fascism. It attempted not only to control the souls of the people but to pour them into a new mold—that of the "new Soviet man," Homo Sovieticus. This grand design could not be accomplished by terror alone, although the use of terror as the primary tool for the creation of the new world was of enormous significance. It was also necessary to carry out successive cleansing operations in Russian society, radically transforming the structure of society by political and ideological means.

Wholesale extermination of the representatives of Russia's ruling classes and its intelligentsia followed after the October revolution and during the civil war. At the same time the peasant population was also decimated during the suppression of numerous peasant uprisings that resulted from the extortion and terroristic policies of the new regime. From the point of view of the Soviet regime, the peasant was completely unsuitable material for the creation of a new world. From 1917 to 1922 it was not a matter of thousands, nor even of tens of thousands, but of millions who perished or were forced to flee the country. The regime used the period of the New Economic Policy (1921-1928) to consolidate its power. It was precisely during this time that the dictatorial regime of Stalin, the front man of the new elite—the party bureaucracy—was in the final stages of completion. Now terror was aimed not only against the remaining bourgeois intelli­gentsia, those who had loyally cooperated with the Soviet regime and the former members of the old "bourgeois" parties; it was also directed against the Socialist Revolutionary party, and even Marxist parties (the Mensheviks and Bundists). The foundations for the slave empire of the Gulag were being laid.

The revolution from above, carried out by the Stalinist dictatorship during the 1930s, whose echoes lasted into the 1940s, marked a new period in the formation of present-day Soviet society and Soviet man. Collectivization had destroyed the most productive strata of the peasantry. It had led to the creation of an enormous army of virtually unpaid labor, and thus was in a sense a physical revolution: millions had died so that other tens of millions could become convenient material from which the dictatorship could forge the "new man." One of the essential traits of the regime was in fact its mass character. The "new man" was created not only by physically elim­inating the brightest, most dynamic, and best-educated members of society; it was also created by educating the people within a definite framework, according to a fixed ideology.

At the time of Stalin's death, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had about 7 million members. At the other end of society, in the Gulag camps, there were 8 million people. The entire system balanced between these two extremes.

The 1939 party announcement that the construction of socialism had been essentially completed in the Soviet Union corresponded to reality. By then the basic socioeconomic structure of the society was established, and it has persisted to this day. The USSR had been industrialized to a con­siderable extent, had made its appearance on the international arena, and had taken the first steps toward expansion. At the same time in 1939, the great purge came to an end, a purge that affected not only the minority, those opposed to Stalin's policies who were criticized by the party, but also the majority of party functionaries, who agreed with Stalin on everything. It eliminated the majority of those who had any links to the revolution's past and could have kept alive historical memories, or who might have shown some independent initiative—a synonym for potential danger in the eyes of the dictatorship.

The purge of the 1930s was in reality more colossal than the most recent accounts by historians, political scientists, and sociologists suggest. In terms of numbers, fewer party, state, and army officials were eliminated than collective farmers and workers, blue collar and white collar, and their families. Every region was obliged to fill a quota of "enemies of the people." The entire hidden meaning of the terror of the 1930s, one perhaps not even fully realized by the dictatorship itself, was to accomplish a repeated purge of Soviet society as it came into being. The previous purges during the civil war and collectivization certainly had had an impact on people's consciousness, but in the purge of the late 1930s the dictatorship achieved what it had sought for twenty years—mass support for terror by a population that was either seething with zeal or trembling with fear. These people were the necessary raw material for making the "new Soviet man."

The war with Nazi Germany very nearly brought the end of the dicta­torship, but the country withstood the German attack, precisely because the Stalinist regime had not had the time to complete its task of creating the "new man." In the exceptional conditions of the war, the best of human feelings and love for the motherland resurfaced. But in defending their country the Soviet people were also saving and defending the dictatorship. The war interrupted the formation of Soviet society, yet at the same time it cleared the path for its completion, since among the millions of victims were many members of the generation born in the first years of Soviet power, who had grown up before the Great Terror of the 1930s. In these people, curiously enough, dreams of world revolution—echoes from their confused childhoods—existed side by side with loyal obedience to the Stalinist dictatorship. Just as they could die on the battlefield with the word Stalin on their lips, they could survive with great dreams of liberty. Only a few of those born during the 1920s returned home whole and unharmed. But those who survived were certainly not appropriate material for the creation of the "new man." A new purge became inevitable, especially since the war had awakened the people's collective memory. It had awak­ened their genuine memory, however, which the regime had assiduously been trying to eradicate, on the one hand by eliminating the bearers of the real one, and on the other by creating an artificial collective memory using the Short Course on the History of the Soviet Communist Party, the Biography of J. V. Stalin, and numerous other falsifications produced by historians, writers, artists, actors, and poets.

During the last years of Stalin's dictatorship, often referred to as the period of mature Stalinism, its essential traits became more sharply visible, as in the case of older people, whose good and bad sides become more pronounced with age. A similar process occurs in societies. Postwar Sta­linist society had many symptoms of premature senility: ideological de­composition; government arbitrariness; complete control by the secret police over all aspects of social life; a vast system of informers among the masses; brutal incursions of the party-state into all aspects of human relations; tension among the nationalities; growing expansionist tendencies; domestic xenophobia; chauvinism; and anti-Semitism. All this against a background of rapid growth of the state's military potential and an increasingly rapid deterioration in economic conditions, especially among the rural popula­tion.

The absence of a sense of security, so indispensable to any society, became an obstacle impeding the completion of the formation of Soviet society. All social strata, without exception, suffered from a sense of in­security and its own powerlessness. The party bureaucracy was more af­fected than others, since even the power and privileges possessed by the members of this caste disappeared suddenly, unexpectedly, as could the members themselves. The bureaucracy was tired of one-man rule. It dreamed of a different kind of dictatorship, one without a dictator, but it also feared the possible consequences of Stalin's death.

Many works, largely in the West, have been dedicated to the study of the Stalin era, or Stalinism, as it is often called. Interesting points of view have been put forward on Stalinism as a social phenomenon.¹⁹⁰ Some have attempted to judge the Soviet experience from the viewpoint of the interests of man, of human society as a whole. Thus they discovered that during this period of building the "radiant future" tens of millions of people had died, some starved to death, others killed. Some estimates put the number of victims at 25 million, others at 40 million. Solzhenitsyn asserts that during the Soviet period the human losses reached 60 million. Whatever the figure, there is no question that a real demographic catastrophe oc­curred, such as Russia had never known in all its many centuries of history. It was also a great moral catastrophe for the survivors. How were they to deal with the legacy of the Stalin era? That was the historical dilemma posed in March 1953.

CHAPTER

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CONFUSION AND HOPE, 1953-1964

THE FIRST TRIUMVIRATE

After Stalin's death, Malenkov seemed to be the natural successor, having become the main political figure in the party during Stalin's last years. At the Nineteenth Party Congress in 1952, for the first time since the Four­teenth Party Congress of 1925, someone other than Stalin gave the Central Committee main report. It was Malenkov. A photograph of Malenkov with Stalin and Mao Tse-tung appeared in every newspaper on March 12, 1953, next to Mao's article, which said: "We profoundly believe that the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet government with Comrade Malenkov at its head will undoubtedly be able to continue the work of Comrade Stalin."¹ This was tantamount to an assertion of Malenkov's right to the succession.

Malenkov offhandedly brushed aside Khrushchev's proposal that they meet to discuss how and by whom affairs would be conducted in the future. "We'll all get together and then we'll talk," he retorted, departing from Stalin's dacha after the physicians had certified Stalin's death.² Khrushchev said nothing but took his own measures: he removed some important ar­chives to his own offices at the Central Committee and began to prepare for the decisive battle for power.

At the joint session of the Central Committee and the leading government bodies on March 6, 1953, Khrushchev gained his first important victory: he was released from his duties as secretary of the Moscow Committee with the recommendation that he concentrate on work at the Secretariat of the Central Committee. Neither Malenkov nor Beria, who had become allies since the time of the "Leningrad affair," saw in Khrushchev a serious rival. Both were directing their thoughts toward seizing control over the state apparatus. Both committed a serious error when they overestimated the significance of their respective posts as head of government and head of the secret police and underestimated the importance of possessing control over the party apparatus. It was the personality of the head of government— not the post of chairman of the Council of Ministers—that was important for holding power. As chairman of the Council of Ministers, Stalin remained the all-powerful dictator. Malenkov occupied this post, but he was not a dictator—he was only the prime minister.

Khrushchev did not try to contend for the premiership. Contrary to his nature, this time he was patient enough to wait. As far as he was concerned, Malenkov was no danger to him. The danger lay in an alliance between Malenkov and Beria. Khrushchev was the embodiment of the party appa­ratus and understood perfectly well the mood of the regional secretaries, who had now become the real power locally. They wanted to be free from fear and from surveillance by the chiefs of local state security agencies. They were loyal, but they desired greater independence in deciding local matters and a guarantee of personal security. For them, as for Khrushchev, the most dangerous man was Beria, whom the majority of party leaders and the military bureaucracy hated.

After Stalin's death, Khrushchev very rapidly managed to separate the power of the party and the power of the government. On March 14, 1953, Malenkov at his own request was released from his duties as secretary of the Central Committee, but he remained chairman of the Council of Min­isters. Khrushchev in effect became first secretary of the Central Com­mittee.³ This office, abolished after the Nineteenth Party Congress, was officially reinstated in September 1953.

On March 15, 1953, the fourth session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR confirmed the new government leadership. Voroshilov was elected to the nominal, yet honorary post of chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. Malenkov was named chairman of the Council of Ministers; Beria, Molotov, and Kaganovich became his first deputies, and Bulganin and Mikoyan were made deputies. The first "triumvirate"— Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov—had come to power, although Molotov was actually shunted aside to the realm of foreign policy.

The new government needed the support of the people, who were still uneasy after the departure of the Omniscient and Omnipresent. The gov­ernment promised to devote effort to the people's welfare and declared its readiness to improve relations with the United States immediately.⁴ On April 1, in accordance with tradition, it announced a new reduction in retail prices for food, clothing, gasoline, and building materials.⁵

Where to begin? This has always been and remains the most important question upon any change in leadership, and so it was for the new lead­ership. The answer was complicated and far from unequivocal: during Stalin's last years severe tensions had arisen in literally every area of the country's economic and cultural life. The international situation was also fraught with danger; any crisis could escalate into World War III.

As is evident from his first actions, Malenkov understood that it was necessary to give the people the material relief they had been denied for so long. The triumvirate's program was concisely set forth in Malenkov's first official report at the fourth session of the Supreme Soviet on March 15, 1953—one week after Stalin's body was placed in the mausoleum: 'The duty of unfailing concern for the welfare of the people, for the maximum satisfaction of their material and cultural needs, is a law for our govern­ment."⁶ This became a kind of motto for the new leadership.

A campaign began in the press to increase production of consumer goods and foodstuffs. Several months later, at the sixth session of the Supreme Soviet, Malenkov, noting the poor state of affairs in agriculture, made the following appeal: "In the next two to three years we must achieve abundance in food supplies for our population and raw materials for our light industry. "⁷ The new premier also called for a change in attitude toward the private plots of collective farmers, increased housing construction, and the de­velopment of commodity circulation and retail trade.⁸ Capital investment in light industry and in the food and fishing industries was increased substantially. The first measures of the new leadership—lowering the taxes on the peasantry—gained it wide popularity. It was Malenkov, not Khru­shchev, who was the most popular figure among the population during this period.

One of the most deplorable consequences of Stalin's dictatorship was the decline of agriculture. Stalin's successors were faced with making im­portant decisions, which would not only determine the fates of tens of millions of collective farmers but would also affect the entire economy for decades to come. Of course, none of the new leaders thought of such a radical solution as the abolition of the quasi-feudal system of agriculture. They did, however, seek ways to lessen somewhat the burden on the col­lective farmers and to increase the profitability of agricultural production.

For many years the collective fanners had barely managed to make ends meet, particularly in central and northwestern Russia. Families maintained their existence not by the ephemeral income of the collective farms, which was trumpeted by the press, but by their Lilliputian personal plots and single cow which nourished each family, as they had since time immemorial. After the war, money taxes and taxes in kind on the private fanners in­creased unbelievably. With the famine of 1946—47, these new extortions led to the demise of hundreds of thousands of peasants and the complete impoverishment of millions. Taxes were assessed not on the basis of overall value but according to each unit of produce, livestock, or poultry. In order to avoid paying these taxes, the peasants were forced to forgo variety in their farming and raise only those crops that were taxed lightly or that were absolutely indispensable to keep their families from starving to death.

One of the first measures of the "triumvirate" was to reduce the agri­cultural tax on the private plots, to replace the tax in kind with a monetary tax, and to increase the purchase price on surplus agricultural production. Debts for agricultural taxes in arrears from previous years were canceled entirely. The tax levied in accordance with the law of August 1953 was in effect lowered by an average of 50 percent for each kolkhoznik's household.⁹

An editorial in the first issue for 1953 of Kommunist, the Communist party's central theoretical magazine, announced triumphantly: "The grain problem, which previously was considered the most acute problem, has been resolved firmly and conclusively."¹⁰ But the tenth issue of the same magazine published the proceedings of the September plenum of the Central Committee, which was devoted to conditions in agriculture. By the thir­teenth issue, not a trace of the optimistic tone remained.¹¹

Khrushchev admitted that all the resounding declarations that the grain problem had been solved were untrue. The taxes on the private plots of the collective famers were lowered once more, and the owners of cows received some exemptions. It was decided that in the future small-scale farming by blue collar and white collar workers would be encouraged— the breeding of hogs, poultry, and dairy cattle. This was tantamount to an admission that the private plots in small provincial towns were not only the principal source of their owners' livelihood but also a major source of agricultural supply for a significant part of the population as a whole.¹² But in 1953 one-fourth of the 20 million peasant families had no cows.

In 1954 the tax on cows and pigs was abolished. By this time the tax on the private plot had decreased by some 60 percent as compared to 1952. The effect of these measures was staggering: the countryside and the cities located close to rural areas ceased to experience acute food shortages, although the situation remained grave enough. But above all, the peasants once again began to believe in the government and in the possibility of an improvement in their bleak existence.

It is easy to imagine what the results of a total restructuring of agriculture might have been if granting relative freedom in the use of the private plot, which represented only 2 percent of all cultivated land in the Soviet Union, changed conditions so quickly.¹³

On April 4, 1953, a report was published, without any commentary, by the Ministry of Internal Affairs: the "doctors' plot" had been concocted as a provocation by the former leadership of the former Ministry of State Security, and the accused were innocent of any crimes.¹⁴ This was an astonishing announcement, for Ignatiev, the former chief of state security, had been made a secretary of the Central Committee immediately after Stalin's death. He could not have been elected to the Secretariat of the Central Committee without Khrushchev's consent. But Ignatiev bore direct responsibility for the preparation of the doctors' trial. Did Khrushchev have anything to do with this affair? The question is all the more justified, because Ignatiev was never called to account for his actions, and after he was relieved of his duties as secretary of the Central Committee he was named first party secretary of Bashkiria. Be that as it may, the MVD's April 4 announcement had enormous political significance as a declaration of a break with the previous practice of lawlessness and terror. Many families of those arrested as "enemies of the people" saw the potential for obtaining a review of the accusations and convictions of their relatives. The procuracy of the USSR and party agencies were deluged with hundreds of thousands of individual petitions to review the cases of people who had been convicted.

Later, after Beria's arrest, it was contended in party circles that Beria had not submitted this communiqu6 to the Secretariat of the Central Com­mittee for approval; otherwise, it would have been published under the name of the entire government—not just the Ministry of Internal Affairs— and it would have been formulated differently. Indeed, that was probably the case. The MVD communique created a new, immense, and rather undesirable problem for the new leadership: the rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people who disappeared during the Stalin terror. There was probably not one major party or government figure who was not involved, either directly or indirectly, in the massive crimes of the Soviet regime or, at a minimum, who had not derived some profit for himself during the terror of the 1930s and 1940s. Now the number of Beria's enemies in the leadership had increased substantially, since many were in danger of being exposed. In the meantime, Beria gave the order to free the families of members of the leadership who had been arrested and sent to the camps during the last years of Stalin's life. Beria personally officiated when Molotov was reunited with his wife, P. S. Zhemchuzhina, who had been sent to a camp just before Stalin's death.¹⁵ At the same time, he gave the order to free the former minister of state security, Abakumov, who had landed in prison as a result of the "doctors' plot." N. D. Yakovlev, a marshal of the artillery, and his son, as well as aviation Marshal Novikov, who was arrested after having been denounced by Vasily Stalin, were also released from prison.¹⁶

For a short while, Beria's name became fairly popular among the intel­ligentsia and the urban population in connection with the April 4 com­munique. Beria and the "triumvirate" made a clever move in combining the Ministry of Internal Affairs with the Ministry of State Security to create a reconstituted Ministry of Internal Affairs. The frightening words state security disappeared in a short time, creating the illusion of change and causing a storm of applause among leftist intellectuals in the West.

But these hopes were premature, as evidenced by the decree of the Supreme Soviet on the amnesty of March 27, 1953.¹⁷ This decree, incor­rectly called the Voroshilov amnesty (Voroshilov signed it as chairman of the Supreme Soviet Presidium, but it had been drawn up with Beria's active participation), released from prison all those who had received sentences up to five years, sometimes up to eight years, as well as certain categories of invalids, minors, and women. The amnesty did not affect political pris­oners.

In the summer of 1953 masses of criminals who had been freed from the camps by the March decree filled the cities. Even in Moscow it became dangerous to go out at night because one could easily be robbed or killed. Ministry of Internal Affairs troops were brought into Moscow and mounted patrols appeared. Later, after his removal, Beria was accused, among other crimes, of intending to use criminals released from prison to seize power.

Beria became popular in the non-Russian republics. His name sym­bolized a turning point in nationalities policy, toward granting more rights to the union republics. The central committee plenums of each of the republics condemned the Great Russian policy. At the Ukrainian Central Committee "grave distortions" in nationalities policy were discussed. Mel- nikov, chief of the Ukrainian Communist party, was reproached in particular for the fact that workers from other provinces of the Ukraine had been sent to work in supervisory capacities in the western Ukraine and because, to all intents and purposes, education in the Russian language had been introduced at all institutions of higher learning in the western Ukraine. A similar discussion took place at the plenum of the Lithuanian Central Committee: the inadequate promotion of Lithuanian nationals to supervisory positions was criticized.¹⁸ During this time open protests against Russifi- cation could be heard without exception at every non-Russian national party's central committee plenum.

Beria proposed a project to the Presidium of the Central Committee concerning the ethnic composition of the top leadership in the Ukraine. His idea was to name Ukrainian cadres to local leadership positions and not to move them to Moscow. The Presidium relieved Melnikov of his duties as first secretary of the Ukraine and named the Ukrainian Kirichenko in his place. There is no doubt that these changes were made with Khru­shchev's consent, since Kirichenko was his protege. The writer Korneichuk became a member of the Central Committee Presidium of the Ukraine Communist party. Similar changes were made in the Baltic countries and in Byelorussia. As Khrushchev attested in his memoirs, the Presidium of the Central Committee decided that the post of first secretary in each republic should be given to a local leader, not a Russian sent from Moscow.¹⁹ Khrushchev admitted that Beria's plan to reduce the preponderance of Russians in the top leadership of the republics coincided with the Central Committee's opinion. Khrushchev's accusation against Beria, that he was seeking to aggravate tensions between Russians and non-Russians in the union republics as well as between the central leadership in Moscow and the leaderships of the republics,²⁰ does not stand up to criticism. If Beria really were aspiring to seize power, such a method would have been com­pletely out of keeping with its objective. Whether Beria had a program on the nationalities question and whether he really wanted to reinforce the national character of each republic and, if so, to what end, remain open questions. But immediately after Beria's arrest, plenums and meetings were once again convened in the non-Russian republics, where he was con­demned for his attempts to turn the nationalities of the Soviet Union against one another "under the false pretext of struggling against violations of the party's nationalities policy."²¹ However, that was all in the usual order of things.

Beria, who was guilty of a multitude of crimes against humanity, was the driving force in the first "triumvirate," as can be concluded from the charges leveled against him in the letter by the Central Committee, ad­dressed to members of the party organizations and to them alone, which followed Beria's arrest. It turns out that it was Beria who defended the idea of international detente, the reunification and neutralization of Germany, reconciliation with Yugoslavia, the granting of further rights to the repub­lics, an end to russification in the cultural arena, and the advancement of members of non-Russian nationalities to local leadership posts. The Central Committee letter also pointed to the extraordinary activity of Beria, who had inundated the Presidium of the Central Committee with all sorts of projects.

Molotov, the third member of the triumvirate, was made minister of foreign affairs, as we have said. An expert in cold war tactics, he now had to normalize relations between the Soviet Union and the Western nations, particularly the United States: these relations had become severely strained over the Korean war and the German question. The new government's program was revealed as early as Malenkov's speech of March 15, 1953. Besides the usual assurances of the USSR's peaceful intentions, the speech contained an indirect appeal to the United States, inviting it to reevaluate U.S.—Soviet relations.²²

The U.S. government reacted without equivocation, although without haste. In a speech on April 16, 1953, which contrary to the usual practice was published in its entirety in the Soviet Union ten days later, President Eisenhower affirmed: "We welcome every honest act of peace. We care nothing for mere rhetoric."²³ More concretely, he proposed the following: to make peace with honor in Korea; to conclude an agreement on Austria; and to create a broad European association which would include a reunified Germany. He also pressed for the complete independence of the Eastern European states, arms limitation, and the international control of atomic energy.²⁴ Pravda s commentary on April 25, 1953 ("On the speech of President Eisenhower"), was very mild in tone. The Times of London praised Pravdas article: "The article as a whole represents the calmest, clearest, and most rational statement of Soviet policy that has appeared for many a long month."²⁶ The reaction of the British government, too, was positive. Prime Minister Churchill declared, "We have been encouraged by a series of amicable gestures on the part of the new Soviet government," and pro­posed to convene a summit conference.²⁷

The results of this shift in Soviet foreign policy were not slow in coming. On July 27, 1953, the armistice was signed in Korea and the war was over.

The echoes of Stalin's death, Beria's arrest, and the press campaign in defense of legality reached the ears of millions of prisoners languishing in Soviet concentration camps. They began to go on strike and revolt every­where: in the Komi republic (Vorkuta), the Urals, Siberia, Central Asia, and Kazakhstan. The most important was the uprising at Kengir in the spring and summer of 1954,²⁸ in which 9,000 male prisoners and 4,000 female prisoners took part.

An attempt by the Kengir camp administration to provoke the common criminals against the politicals unexpectedly set off a general strike and an uprising by both categories of prisoners. The revolt continued for forty- two days. The prisoners presented demands of a political and social nature, including a call for review of all sentences and a general amnesty, imple­mentation of an eight-hour workday, conversion of "special regime" camps into regular ones, removal of prison numbers from clothing, and improve­ment of living conditions. They also demanded a meeting with a represen­tative of the Central Committee. Their slogan was: "Long live the Soviet constitution." Several years later, a human rights movement adopted the same slogan.

On Moscow orders, 3,000 soldiers with tanks were sent against the Kengir prisoners. The unequal battle, which began at dawn on June 26, 1954, lasted for more than four hours. The prisoners put up a desperate resistance, hurling Molotov cocktails at the tanks. Their strength won out, however. The prisoners were defeated by the overwhelmingly superior force of the state. The most active rebels were arrested, convicted, and sent to Kolyma.

During this revolt, a solidarity strike was declared on June 10 at the Dzhezkazgan camp. After June 26 the punitive detachment with its tanks turned to Dzhezkazgan. The 20,000 prisoners there were not prepared to do battle; they surrendered.

However, the forty-two days of revolt at Kengir were not in vain. There were changes in the lives of the prisoners: now they began to work at 8 am, instead of 6, and they worked until 5 pm. The bars on the windows of the barracks, torn off during the revolt, were not replaced. Numbers were removed from prisoners' clothing. Some imprisoned invalids and juveniles were released, and others had their sentences reduced.

Two years before the revolution in Hungary, Soviet prisoners revolted in the camps. At the time their heroic feat went unnoticed by the rest of the world, but theirs was a historic deed, for they partially defeated the ter­rorism, the exploitation of prisoners, and the arbitrariness that had been rampant in the camps for years. The Resistance movement of prisoners in the Soviet camps also helped make possible the dramatic developments at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU.

Stalin's death and the first steps toward liberalization undertaken by the new Soviet leadership found an immediate echo in the Soviet Union's satellites in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Disturbances began every­where, and the struggle between the old Stalinist leadership and the anti- Stalinists intensified sharply. Only Albania, Romania, and Bulgaria remained more or less calm. In Albania, Enver Hoxha, a staunch Stalinist, had already dealt with all likely and unlikely opposition beforehand. In Romania and Bulgaria, too, the Stalinists held the reins of government firmly in hand. It was only later, after the Twentieth Party Congress, that the anti-Stalinist forces were activated in those countries.

The first serious disturbance in the socialist bloc occurred in Czecho­slovakia in early June 1953. Its immediate cause was the monetary reform of May 30, 1953, which seriously affected the workers' already low standard of living. On June 1 disturbances broke out at Plzen; at the same time a general strike was called in the coal mines of Moravska Ostrava. In Plzen 5,000 demonstrators burst into the town hall and ripped down the portraits of Stalin and Gottwald. Troops summoned to the scene refused to fire on the demonstrators. Demands were made for free elections, and the names Masaryk, Bene§, and Eisenhower drew strong applause. No one, however, called for the overthrow of the government. The movement was spontaneous and had no leaders. There was not even any bloodshed: after the troops refused to open fire, special police forces were called in, but they met with no resistance.²⁹ The unrest in Czechoslovakia was an indication of the discontent brewing against the policies of the Communist party that had seized power in February 1948.

Agitation against the government's economic policy was also the cause of an uprising in East Germany in June 1953. The industrialization and forced collectivization carried out by the East German government led to a massive flight of the population from East to West Germany. The gov­ernment's response was to increase obligatory deliveries of produce from the peasant households and to force payment of taxes in arrears. In April 1953 distribution of ration cards for foodstuffs to "alien class elements" or to inhabitants of East Berlin employed in the Western sector of the city were terminated. At the same time pressure was put on the workers to increase labor productivity. At the end of May 1953 the Council of Ministers of the GDR issued a decree increasing production norms by 10 percent.³⁰ Population flow to the West increased. During the first five months of 1953 190,000 people left East Germany for West Germany, as opposed to 182,000 during all of 1952.³¹

At exactly the same time, Moscow received word that the situation in Hungary was deteriorating. The new Soviet leaders insistently advised their satellites to change economic policies immediately, to cease pressuring the workers, peasants, and middle strata of society, and to renounce their costly and unjustifiable programs of industrialization. During the Stalin era the satellites had tried to copy "big brother" in every possible way, utterly ignoring the economic realities of their countries.

Under pressure from Moscow, the Central Committee of the East German Communist party adopted a resolution condemning their former economic policy, admitting serious errors, and revoking all the unpopular measures of the previous months. On the list of errors committed and measures for their rectification, however, no mention was made of the increased pro­duction quotas. The resolution was followed by the announcement that these quotas would go into effect precisely on June 30, 1953. On June 16 the workers of East Berlin responded with an immediate work stoppage and mass demonstrations. Thousands of workers converged on the main government building in East Berlin, demanding that the new quotas be withdrawn and prices lowered. They presented political demands as well: the dismissal of Walter Ulbricht, leader of the party, and the reunification of Germany, followed by free elections. The next day, a general strike began in East Germany, and disturbances broke out in a number of other cities, including Leipzig, Dresden, and Magdeburg.³² Workers in these cities attacked police stations and prisons, freeing political prisoners. As many as 100,000 people took part in these actions.

In order to suppress the incipient general insurrection in the GDR, the Soviet authorities brought in tanks. The Soviet troops were aided by the GDR police.³³ According to some sources, nearly 500 people were killed.³⁴ The Soviet government portrayed this bloody suppression of a workers' uprising in the GDR as the liquidation of an attempted fascist rebellion. Even more than thirty years later, the Soviet people still do not know what happened in East Germany in June 1953.

The new Soviet leadership observed events developing in Hungary with great uneasiness. The leader of the Hungarian Communist party, Matyas Rakosi, was conceivably the most devoted to the Soviet Union of all the leaders of the socialist countries. He sought to imitate Soviet policies in every respect. As a result, by the early 1950s Hungary was in a disastrous situation economically and politically.

Rakosi and the other Hungarian leaders were summoned to Moscow in the spring of 1953. The Soviet leaders demanded from Rakosi an end to the unwarranted, adventuristic course of superindustrialization and forced collectivization. Moscow insisted on a reorganization of the leadership, the resignation of Rakosi as prime minister, along with the ministers of heavy industry and defense, and the condemnation of past errors.³⁵ Imre Nagy, an old Comintern member, was named to take Rakosi's place as the head of government; Nagy was considered a moderate and in fact had opposed Rakosi's policies. The Hungarian Politburo accepted the resolution forced upon it but kept its contents secret, getting away with publishing a nebulous communique. But Nagy, who had been placed at the head of the government, embarked on a policy similar to the NEP.³⁶

Rakosi remained at the head of the party, and soon a bitter struggle developed in the Hungarian leadership. Nagy was accused of rightist de­viation and removed from his post as prime minister in April 1955.³⁷ But at the same time the rehabilitation of the victims of the Rakosi regime had begun, paralleling developments in the Soviet Union. In Hungary, unlike in the Soviet Union, many were restored to their positions in the Communist party. Hungary became the scene of a broad movement for liberalization, which won the support of the entire intelligentsia, from students to writers. Social organizations and circles of various kinds made their appearance, as did magazines and anthologies by writers and artists of a liberal bent. Works that developed a point of view critical of the situation in socialist Hungary were published.³⁸ A spiritual revolution had begun in Hungary.

On July 10, 1953, Soviet newspapers announced Beria's arrest. The groundwork for Beria's removal had been laid by Khrushchev, in a deal with the other members of the Presidium of the Central Committee. The arrest was carried out by the military group, headed by Marshal Zhukov and assisted by Ivan Serov. Beria's fall brought the end of the first trium­virate. The prestige and influence of Khrushchev, the organizer of the plot against Beria, increased significantly. Malenkov, without Beria's support, came to depend all the more on Khrushchev, who very quickly assumed control of the party apparatus. Khrushchev was not yet able to dictate his own decisions, but even Malenkov could no longer act without Khrushchev's consent; each still needed the other's support. Khrushchev controlled not only the party apparatus; the army, which he had used to eliminate Beria, was also behind him. Zhukov, Konev, Moskalenko, who had directly ex­ecuted the logistics of Beria's arrest, as well as Marshal Bulganin, who was utterly devoted to Khrushchev, were assigned to the most important political and strategic area—the Moscow Military District.³⁹

The official trial of Beria and his accomplices was held in December 1953. (Beria was already dead, although the people did not know this.) Among other things, he was accused of organizing "a group of anti-Soviet conspirators whose aim was to seize power and to restore the rule of the bourgeoisie."⁴⁰ It is doubtful, however, that Beria would have sought to restore power to the bourgeoisie rather than for his own dictatorship.

At the same time Beria was declared to have been an agent of British intelligence since 1918. He was tried and sentenced to death along with several other high-ranking members of state security, including some former ministers and their aides. In 1954 Ryumin, the man personally responsible for the "doctors' plot," was tried and shot.⁴¹ The same fate later befell the former minister of state security, Abakumov, who was found guilty, among a multitude of crimes, of fabricating the Leningrad affair.⁴²

After Beria's removal, the state security establishment was reorganized.

A majority, though not all, of the high-ranking leaders were removed or replaced. They received first-rate pensions. The Ministry of State Security (MGB) was replaced by State Security Committee (KGB), attached to the USSR Council of Ministers. Its diminished significance in the structure of state power was thus emphasized. In the provinces local KGB chiefs were henceforth subordinate to the first secretaries of the party, who became the veritable masters of their regions. The special sections of the MGB in various institutions, including the one in the Central Committee, were dismantled. The all-powerful "special boards"—the secret tribunals that handed out severe sentences without appeal in trials mainly involving "counterrevolutionary" activities, anti-Soviet agitation, and so on—were also abolished. One of Beria's former deputies, General Serov, who played a key role in the elimination of his boss, was named head of the KGB. Serov was notorious for his "services" in the deportation of the Baits and the inhabitants of the western Ukraine and western Byelorussia in 1939 and 1940. It was under his guidance, too, that the peoples of the Northern Caucusus and the Crimean Tatars had been deported in 1943—44. He also headed the main state security office in the Soviet zone of Germany. And so on. But his personal devotion to Khrushchev, tested during their years as colleagues in the Ukraine, and his lack of political ambition played their roles. These qualities were well suited to the reason for reorganization of the state security agencies: to reduce them to the level of mere instruments. The Central Committee once again assumed full responsibility for the terror apparatus—diminished and limited, yet retained as an indispensable com­ponent of the Soviet social system.

As before, the primary reserve of cadres for the KGB was the Komsomol. Many state security employees had previously been Komsomol members of various ranks. After Serov, Shelepin, the former first secretary of the Komsomol's Central Committee, was named head of the KGB. Later, when Shelepin became a member of the Politburo, he was replaced as chairman of the KGB by a Komsomol Central Committee secretary, Semichastny. The preservation of the state security organs confirmed that the basis of the system created by Lenin and perfected by Stalin remained unchanged. But in 1953 all this had not yet become clear.

One week after the rehabilitation of the doctors, the CPSU Central Com­mittee passed a resolution "On the Violation of Laws by the Organs of State Security." The significance of this resolution extended beyond the particular matter of the "doctors' plot": it was the first formal party resolution con­demning the state security agencies, which had previously been above both the party and the state.

After the publication of the announcement on the rehabilitation of the doctors, and particularly after the elimination of Beria, a completely spon­taneous movement arose in all levels of society against arbitrariness, whether that of the KGB, the police, heads of enterprises, or directors of apartment buildings. This movement took a form that is typical under Soviet condi­tions. The Central newspapers received thousands of letters with complaints about the arbitrariness of local leaders. The families of the "enemies of the people," either killed or languishing in concentration camps and pris­ons, had been aroused. For many years they had been the pariahs of society; the party and state had taken every opportunity to remind them that it was official magnanimity alone that permitted them to live and find work and allowed their children to go to school.

As a rule, these letters began with words of thanks to the party, which had unmasked the "despicable traitor" Beria. Then they demanded or requested that the trials of their fathers, mothers, or other relatives be reviewed. The agencies of the procuracy, as well as the party leaders themselves, were confused. They realized that they were in the midst of a wave of popular indignation that could sweep them away. First in one camp, then in another—Kolyma, Kazakhstan, and other islands of the Gulag— strikes and riots flared up and ended in bloody repression. Outside the camps, people openly discussed the crimes that had been committed. Local leaders suddenly became polite and accessible to the population. Citizens made use of the demagogy in the newspapers, where the arbitrariness and violations of the law were condemned, and began earnestly to demand that their civil rights be observed. At the end of 1953 and the beginning of 1954 this movement, which no one had organized, began to widen and grow, exerting considerable psychological pressure on the new leaders.

Is it true or not that the new leadership had no idea of the number of people who had been subjected to repression and were sent to the camps and prisons? This has been a rather controversial question. The govern­mental economic plans always indicated which ministries were responsible for particular construction projects as well as what funds and human re­sources each ministry had at its disposal; in many cases, the Ministry of Internal Affairs was named. Therefore it would have been quite easy to guess the size of this secret empire which at any one time had a slave population of 8—9 million people.⁴³ It is highly unlikely that the top leaders were unaware of this.

After the MVD's communique of April 4, 1953, the demand for legality became universal. It concerned not only political prisoners but all areas of social life, for everywhere arbitrariness had taken the place of the law, and the law only expressed this arbitrariness. All the top Soviet and party bodies—not only the courts, the procuracy, the judicial agencies, and the

Ministry of Internal Affairs—were inundated with demands, requests, and complaints. And those very officials who were guilty of the abuses did their best to respond to these complaints.

However, when the question arose of rehabilitating those guilty of "coun­terrevolutionary crimes," nothing could be done without a general resolution on a government-wide scale. In 1953 some 4,000 people were released.⁴⁴ According to the most cautious estimates, there were 8—9 million prisoners in the camps.⁴⁵ Although from 1953 through 1955 prison conditions were eased, the problem remained unsolved. The release of prisoners continued, but during 1954 and 1955 only 12,000 people were released and rehabil­itated.⁴⁶ In 1955 amnesty was declared for those who had collaborated with the Germans in 1941—1944.⁴⁷ German prisoners were liberated the same year, in connection with West German chancellor Adenauer's visit to the Soviet Union. In 1956 the Japanese prisoners of war were freed.

After the Twentieth Party Congress, rehabilitation took on a massive character. Special rehabilitation commissions were created endowed with the power to liberate prisoners on the spot, in the camps themselves. The overwhelming majority of surviving prisoners were freed in 1956, the year of the congress; many were rehabilitated posthumously, but this process continued for many long years. The problem was particularly difficult with regard to those who had participated in opposition groups. No opposition leaders were rehabilitated, although, gradually many of the victims of the trials of 1936—1938 were posthumously cleared of the charges against them. Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and some others remained "guilty," although their innocence of the crimes they were accused of, such as plotting to assassinate Lenin in 1918 (Bukharin), espionage and organizing terrorist activities (Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin), and sabotage (all of them, plus Rykov), was absolutely clear and was confirmed by the rehabilitation of their "accomplices."

The rehabilitation was necessary not only to those directly affected and their families. It also had enormous significance for the population as a whole. The moral conscience of society was awakened. Candidates for elections to party committees and trade unions were recommended on the basis of their moral values.

The survivors, raised from the dead, rehabilitated and returned to their lives and families, played a major role in exposing the lawless nature of the Soviet state and the immorality of its social system. But was this true only of the Soviet system? The events in Eastern Europe demonstrated that the problem was significantly larger: it was a matter of the socialist system in general and the legitimacy of its existence. In the fall of 1954 facts concerning the tortures used by Polish state security received wide pub­licity. At the same time, Wladislaw Gomulka, one of the most prominent Polish Communists, was released from prison. In January 1955 the state security agencies in Poland were abolished, and those guilty of torture were brought to trial.⁴⁸

We have already mentioned that the Leningrad affair was fabricated by Malenkov and Beria. Khrushchev reported in his memoirs that even Stalin hesitated before making a final decision, but in the end he decided to leave the matter in their hands.⁴⁹ It is typical, however, that in the enumeration of Beria's crimes, the Leningrad affair was passed over in silence. It was only much later, in December 1954, that Beria was charged for this crime. By then however, the question of Malenkov's departure from the post of chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers had already been decided.

During this time Khrushchev climbed steadily higher. At the Central Committee plenum in September 1953, where he gave the main report on the agricultural situation, Khrushchev was formally appointed first secretary of the Central Committee, which confirmed his leading position in the party. He immediately replaced Mikhailov, Malenkov's protege, with Kapitonov as the head of the Moscow Committee of the party. Khrushchev was also the main reporter at all the Central Committee plenums of 1953 and 1954. His proposal for opening up the "virgin lands" (previously unfilled areas in Siberia and Kazakhstan) met with a rather cool reception from the other members of the Central Committee Presidium. Malenkov was inclined to the more intensive exploitation of land already under cultivation.

In July 1954 came the trial of Ryumin, the former deputy minister of state security, who was not, apparently, the initiator of the "doctors' plot" but who had been in charge of the investigation. His trial was an obvious warning to Malenkov to speed up his resignation. Still in store was the trial of Abakumov, the former minister of state security, who had been the principal figure responsible for the investigation into the Leningrad affair. Malenkov's situation became hopeless. Khrushchev proved to be a very skillful intriguer in this instance. But for the first time in many years a high-ranking member of the state was faced with the possibility of leaving his post not only voluntarily, but with honor as well.

At the Central Committee session of January 1955, Malenkov was crit­icized for giving priority to light, not heavy industry and for his errors in directing agriculture in the early 1950s. In February 1955 Malenkov sub­mitted his formal resignation from his post as prime minister. In it, making a public "self-criticism," he admitted his mistakes and explained that he had not been trained adequately for a role as a government leader.⁵⁰ Bul­ganin, an old friend of Khrushchev's, became the new chairman of the

Council of Ministers. He was not well known as a political figure but, as was asserted at the time, was an able administrator. Malenkov became one of Bulganin's deputies and retained his position as a member of the Central Committee Presidium. During 1955 government personnel underwent var­ious replacements and transfers, bearing testimony to the increase in Khrushchev's influence. Several former ministers were sent as ambassadors to different countries, which thereafter became a common practice. Hence­forth career diplomats lost their monopoly on ambassadorial posts. The role of the minister of foreign affairs—Molotov, at the time—became less im­portant.

After Malenkov's departure, Molotov was not only the sole remaining member of the first triumvirate, he was also the main link with the past, the Stalin era, and the cold war. Gradually Khrushchev began his attack on Molotov. Molotov was vulnerable to many serious charges, beginning with his part in the terror and the nonaggression pact and friendship treaties with Nazi Germany in 1939, and ending with the break with Yugoslavia. He was not included in the delegation headed by Khrushchev that departed for Belgrade for a reconciliation with Tito in May 1955. He no longer participated in the conferences of the Warsaw Pact countries. At the July plenum in 1955, Molotov was the only member of the Presidium to maintain his former position with regard to Yugoslavia. Molotov was considered the party's principal theoretician after Stalin. Many dissertations had been written at the USSR Academy of Science on his "theoretical," "philosoph­ical," and other views. He was once elected an honorary member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. (Khrushchev's education consisted of parochial school,* followed by years at the Industrial Academy.) The party leadership used against Molotov his statement of February 1955, that the USSR had just completed the foundations of a socialist society—Molotov had appar­ently forgotten the party's 1939 announcement that socialism was already constructed.

Thus, gradually disposing of the direct heirs of the Stalin era, Khrushchev approached the Twentieth Party Congress, scheduled for February 1956. His struggle against these rivals unavoidably compelled him to proceed rather hastily with the unmasking of the crimes of the Stalin period and with the rehabilitation of the victims of the Stalinist terror. Having used the Leningrad affair against Malenkov, Khrushchev found himself pressured by demands for further rehabilitations from the families of prominent po-

*The Russian initials for this church school are Ts Psh. Some people have mistakenly thought that these letters stand for Central Party School(!).

litical and military officials who had suffered in the 1930s and 1940s. Khrushchev now had to consider the fates of the former members of the Politburo and Central Committee. This in turn forced him to make some explanation of the role of Stalin and his closest comrades—Molotov, Vo­roshilov, and Kaganovich—in the annihilation of party cadres. This was a dangerous path for Khrushchev himself: he had been the secretary of the Moscow Committee during the years of the terror, then the leader of the Ukrainian party and the man in charge of the purges in the western parts of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltic states in 1939—40, and the suppression of insurgents in the western Ukraine after World War II. The fact that Khrushchev chose to expose the crimes of the Stalin era—despite the risks such a course would pose to his own fate—showed Khrushchev to be a cut above the other Soviet leaders, both as a man and as a political figure. It cannot be ruled out, however, that Khrushchev embarked on this path without being fully conscious of the political consequences of his action and counting on his ability to maintain control over future events.

A special commission was created at the Central Committee under Pos- pelov, the party's principal theoretician, who had prepared the famous Short Course, the falsified history of the Soviet Communist party and, later, the Biography of J. V. Stalin, based on it. It was hard to expect a profound and impartial analysis of the past from this commission; however, even the creation of such a committee was an enormous step forward for the still intact Stalinist regime.

"For three years," Khrushchev wrote, "we were unable to break with the past, unable to muster the courage and the determination to lift the curtain and see what had been hidden from us about the arrests, the trials, the arbitrary rule, the executions, and everything else that had happened during Stalin's reign."⁵¹

THE TWENTIETH CONGRESS OF THE CPSU

Once in forced retirement, Khrushchev turned to the past and wrote in his memoirs: "Criminal acts had been committed by Stalin, acts which would be punishable in any state in the world except in fascist states like Hitler's and Mussolini's."⁵² It was the first time that a Soviet political leader had drawn a parallel between the Soviet socialist state and fascist states. This is one more indication of Khrushchev's exceptional personality.

The establishment of a commission of inquiry, even under Pospelov's chairmanship, was greeted without any enthusiasm by the Stalinist old guard: Molotov, Voroshilov, and Kaganovich. Mikoyan did not object to the commission, but neither did he actively support Khrushchev.⁵³

The report for the Central Committee given by Khrushchev on February 14, 1956, at the Twentieth Party Congress, was rather reserved. On the one hand, Khrushchev made several critical remarks about Stalin, Molotov, and Malenkov without actually naming them.⁵⁴ On the other hand, he noted Stalin's services in crushing the "enemies of the people."⁵⁵ Mikoyan's attack on the "cult of personality" made in his speech on February 16 was much sharper. He specifically referred to Kosior and Antonov-Ovseenko as people who had been wrongly declared enemies of the people.⁵⁶

It was during the congress itself that Khrushchev secured a decision from the Central Committee Presidium to announce at a closed session the results of the investigation conducted by Pospelov's commission. This de­cision was passed after a stormy session of the Presidium in which Vo­roshilov shouted that Khrushchev did not understand what he was doing. These sentiments were supported by Molotov and Kaganovich. Voroshilov and Kaganovich did not conceal the fact that they feared being held per­sonally responsible.⁵⁷ Khrushchev responded frankly that the members of the Presidium were responsible to varying degrees, depending on each one's participation. He declared his own readiness to accept his share of the responsibility.⁵⁸ In this way, Khrushchev undermined one of the foun­dations of the Communist manner of government: the system of mutual protection and coverup that thrives not only among the party leadership but in every institution, everywhere. In fact, until very shortly before that time all members of the Politburo had jointly ratified death sentences, by signing one after the other.

After long debate it was decided that Khrushchev would present a second report at a closed session—on Stalin's crimes. Of course, the report had been prepared in advance. Without a doubt Khrushchev was confident that the majority of the Presidium would support him; they had no alternative.

Khrushchev decided to limit himself to the crimes committed against party members who had supported Stalin and the general line of the party, avoiding the question of the victims of the "show trials," the left and right oppositionists, and so forth. Meanwhile, on the eve of his secret speech, Khrushchev had already heard from the lips of Prosecutor General Rudenko that, "from the standpoint of judicial norms, there was no evidence what­soever for condemning, or even trying those men." The entire cases against them "had been based on personal confessions beaten out of them under physical and psychological torture."⁵⁹

Nevertheless, it was decided not to refer to the leaders of the oppositions so as not to embarrass the representatives of the fraternal parties present at the congress who had previously defended the Moscow trials of the 1930s. Later, Khrushchev admitted that this decision had been a mistake. He did not mention the principal victims of the regime: the millions of ordinary Soviet citizens.

Despite these limitations, the secret speech was a bombshell.⁶⁰ Khru­shchev revealed the mechanism of terror and denounced the system of arbitrariness that had dominated the country for thirty years. To the degree possible, he tried to limit his exposure of Stalin's crimes solely to those against the party elite and its best-known representatives, but the docu­ments he read aloud were sufficient to indicate the brutal and massive nature of the terror. Such was the case with the letter by Eikhe, an alternate member of the Politburo, whose spine was broken by his interrogator; the letter by Rudzutak, chairman of the Central Control Commission, also tortured cruelly; the note from Red Army Commander Iona Yakir, addressed to Stalin; the letter from a former member of the Cheka collegium, Mikhail Kedrov (who was himself guilty of a number of crimes of the Cheka), as well as the numbers of Seventeenth Congress delegates who had been annihilated. Finally, Khrushchev gave the delegates of the congress to understand that the Kirov assassination had been carried out on Stalin's orders, and he promised that a full investigation would be conducted.

An important part of Khrushchev's report took up the question of Stalin's responsibility for the Soviet Union's lack of preparedness for the attack by Hitler's Germany. Khrushchev did not dare go so far as to condemn the Soviet—German pact of August 23, 1939, and the partition of Poland, but this question hung in the air. Another important issue discussed in the report was the lawless mass deportation of non-Russian peoples during the war with Germany. Here again Khrushchev stopped short of the full truth.⁶¹ Finally, Khrushchev spoke of Stalin's other errors and crimes: the break with Yugoslavia, the Mingrelian affair, the Doctors' plot, and the suicide of Ordzhonikidze.

In fact, Khrushchev showed that the entire history of the party when Stalin was at its head had consisted of criminal acts, lawlessness, mass murder, and incompetent leadership. He touched briefly on the systematic falsification of history written by Stalin himself or at his direction. However, he spoke approvingly of Stalin's struggle against the oppositions. This was understandable: after all, something had to be preserved from the inventory of services of Stalin and the party he had led, even though every step they had taken had been bloody.

By his denunciation of the "cult of personality" (an expression borrowed from a well-known letter of Marx's), Khrushchev committed a great historic act: he made it possible for many to understand that the Soviet system was the most inhuman system that had ever existed.

Although Khrushchev's report was theoretically secret, its contents be­came known widely throughout the country shortly after the conclusion of the closed session of the congress. Accompanied by speeches from delegates who had been at the congress, the report was read out in full to every party organization in the country and followed by stormy discussions.⁶² The sub­ject of the heated and impassioned debates was not only Stalin and his crimes but also the Soviet system, the entire social order and the way of life of its citizens. The overwhelming majority of the participants in these meetings approved of what had been expressed at the Twentieth Congress. Assemblies of office workers, industrial workers, and collective farmers were also held to hear a diluted version of Khrushchev's speech. The mystical aura that surrounded Stalin and the refined system of psychological and physical terror began to dissipate. A miracle happened before every­one's eyes. Things began to change because someone had dared to speak out. This was something new and very dangerous for the authorities.

Khrushchev's speech came at the very moment when much in the country was in a state of change: life in the rural areas was improving; legality began little by little to replace the years-old practice of lawlessness; and the people were beginning to recover their self-respect and to demand respect from the authorities. But the sprouts from the seeds sown by the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU were still fragile and weak and needed constant support or they risked being destroyed by forces which, despite their retreat in confusion, still possessed adequate strength. These forces had been tempered by the system of mutual support and coverup and years of experience under the terrorist dictatorship.

The movement for democracy experienced a sudden surge. It was still weak, disorganized, often amorphous, but it was growing. And there was great hope in this.

Very rapidly—evidently, on the orders of Khrushchev himself—the se­cret speech reached the outside world and spread. As in the Soviet Union, foreign reactions varied. Confusion reigned particularly in the most con­servative, Stalinist Communist parties, such as those in the United States, Great Britain, and France. Reactions were varied in the Eastern European countries which during the war had been under fascist rule or occupation and later became Soviet satellites. At the time the ruling elite of these countries were Stalinists who, under the control of Soviet advisers, had conducted the same policy of terror as in the Soviet Union. In 1948—1952 several waves of purges had swept through Eastern Europe (as in the USSR in the 1930s), accompanied by public political trials of former Communist leaders who had confessed to accusations extracted under torture.⁶³ The leaders of Communist parties, particularly in China and Albania, were alarmed and insulted that Khrushchev did not forewarn them of the secret speech, putting them in a difficult position within their parties. In the Eastern European Communist parties, the ferment that had begun soon after Stalin's death intensified. Long suppressed anti-Soviet (or anti-Russian) feelings came out into the open, and dealing with them was no easy matter. Demands for changes in leadership began to be voiced.

In the Soviet Union itself, the Stalinists recovered rather quickly after the first blow and began an offensive against the Khrushchev line, insisting that the decisions of the Twentieth Congress condemning the cult of per­sonality be reconsidered. For the Stalinist old guard, it was essential on the one hand to blunt the impact of revelations made at the congress and to minimize the extent of the accusations and, on the other, to protect themselves from any possible charges of complicity in Stalin's crimes. The united efforts of the Soviet and foreign Stalinists had their effect. The CPSU Central Committee session of June 30, 1956, adopted a resolution, "On Overcoming the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences." In this reso­lution, Stalin was called "an extraordinary theoretician and organizer" and given credit for his struggle against the oppositions and for assuring "the victory of socialism" in the Soviet Union, as well as for developing the Communist and national liberation movements around the world. He was accused only of abusing his power, which, as stated in the resolution, was the result of his personal defects. The resolution emphasized that although the cult of personality had slowed the progress of Soviet society, it had not been able to alter that society's fundamental nature. The policy of the CPSU was just, since it expressed the interests of the people.⁶⁴ The resolution of June 30, 1956, was in fact substituted for the decisions of the Twentieth Congress and became the principal ideological basis for post-Stalin con- formism.

The new Soviet government inherited a rather difficult situation in the realm of national relations. During the war entire populations of Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Karachievtsi, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, and others—1.5 million people—had been forcibly removed from locations they had inhabited and deported to Siberia, the Urals, Central Asia, and Kazakhstan. This was accompanied by the confiscation and outright pil­laging of their property by NKVD troops. The exiles were subjected to a special regime, that is, they were restricted in their movements and the kinds of jobs they could take, not to mention education. They were subject to special controls and were regulated by special passes. The local NKVD commandant was lord and master of the unfortunates, upon whom they depended for everything, even permission to marry. Any complaint ad­dressed to higher bodies was considered a counterrevolutionary act. An appeal to Stalin resulted at best in "brainwashing" talks with the authorities, at worst—a prison term. Escape attempts were punishable by twenty-five years of hard labor.⁶⁵

After Stalin's death, there arose among these deported peoples, greatly decimated by starvation and an inability to adapt to the new conditions of life, a strong movement to return to their homelands and to obtain com­pensation from the state for the injustice they had suffered. The Chechens and Ingush began to return on their own to the Caucasus, but often with bloody tragedies. In 1954—1955 the USSR Council of Ministers issued a series of measures to ease restrictions in the special settlements. Certain categories of people were totally removed from the special registry.⁶⁶

These palliative measures, however, could not solve the problems, which had become more and more complex with time. The deported populations demanded their return to their homelands and the restoration of all their rights, including autonomy. The authorities feared the consequences if these people withdrew from the economies of the republics and regions to which they had been sent; they also feared severe ethnic conflicts and economic difficulties in the areas from which the people had originally been deported. These were the costs of the politics of arbitrariness and violence conducted by the Soviet regime. It followed that this price had to be paid and the deported populations immediately returned to their homelands. In his secret report at the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev expressed his indig­nation at the wartime mass deportations of the Karachai, Balkars, and Kalmyks, but did not even mention the other deported populations: the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tatars. The pre- and postwar deportations of Baits, Poles, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and others likewise went un- mentioned. Still, the mere fact that such deportations were condemned in principle from the speaker's platform of a party congress cannot be over­estimated.

Nevertheless, the removal of the special restrictions on the deportees, which followed Khrushchev's condemnation, did not resolve the main prob­lem: the peoples' desire to return to their homelands.

At that point, the victimized populations decided to take their fate into their own hands. Together the Chechens and Ingush comprised 500,000 people united by a desperate determination to return to their native lands. Thousands of Chechen and Ingush families gathered on the main railroad lines leading into Russia. They were refused tickets, admonished, and threatened. But despite all this, during 1956 25,000-30,000 Chechens and Ingush returned, unauthorized, to their homeland. And the authorities wavered. The Chechens and Ingush were included in the resolution of November 24, 1956, that restored national autonomy to certain popula­tions.⁶⁷ The resolution also applied to the Kalmyks, Karachai, and Balkars. Their autonomy was reestablished in January 1957. The Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and others were left out. But they have continued their struggle to the present day (1985).

Why did Khrushchev pass over the Crimean Tatars in silence? The answer is simple: in 1954, on Khrushchev's initiative, a present had been made to the Ukrainian SSR on the occasion of the three hundredth anniversary of the reunification of Russia and the Ukraine. The present was the Crimea, which was transferred from the RSFSR and joined to the Ukrainian SSR. In his struggle for power, Khrushchev needed the support of the Ukrainian party leaders, who were categorically opposed to the return of the Crimean Tatars. They began a massive resettlement of coastal Crimea with Ukrai­nians. Even today, there is ample room to accommodate the Crimean Tatars in the Crimea without dislocating anyone.

Unfortunately for the Crimean Tatars, they were not as well organized or united in 1956 as the Chechens and Ingush. Undoubtedly, had they begun to return en masse to the Crimea, they would have won their demands. In November 1956, in connection with the events in Hungary and other countries of Eastern Europe, the Soviet government greatly feared com­plications in its own country and probably would have been forced to grant concessions to the Crimean Tatars. But this did not happen, and the Crimean Tatars missed their historical opportunity.

The populations of the Crimea and Caucusus were decimated in the course of their deportation. There are conflicting statistics in this regard. Documents of the Crimean Tatar movement indicate that in the first year and a half of deportation, 46.2 percent of the deported population—some 200,000 people—died.⁶⁸ However, it is known that on the eve of World War II the Crimean Tatars constituted one-fourth of the total population of the Crimea, which was 1,127,000 people.⁶⁹ On May 17 and 18, 1944, 194,000 Crimean Tatars were deported from the Crimea.⁷⁰ According to rough figures, close to 18 percent of these died within the first year and a half of deportation. This enormous number testifies to the policy of genocide carried out by the Soviet government.

This genocide was further confirmed by the figures on the losses in population of other deported peoples between the two countrywide census takings of 1939 and 1959. The Chechens lost 22 percent of their population, the Ingush 9 percent, the Kalmyks close to 15 percent, the Karachai 30 percent, and the Balkars 26.5 percent.⁷¹ Data on the losses suffered by other deported peoples remain unavailable; it can be assumed, however, that the figures were not minute.

In the first years after the return of the deported populations to the Caucusus, race relations were rather strained, particularly between the Russians and the Chechen-Ingush. In August 1958 a race riot broke out in the city of Grozny which lasted three days. The pretext was a murder of jealousy committed by an Ingush against a Russian. The victim's funeral turned into a pogrom against the Chechen-Ingush people. This was one of the most serious racial clashes in the Soviet Union since World War II. The disturbances occurred amid slogans calling for the expulsion of the Chechens and Ingush and the formation of a purely Russian local govern­ment. The Russian public, including Communists, wore red ribbons so as not to be taken for Chechens. The Chechens of Grozny displayed exceptional restraint and did not respond to these provocations. The local authorities, of course, disappeared immediately. On the third day, looting began. Troops were called in. Moscow sent M. A. Yasnov, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, and N. K. Ignatov, a CPSU Central Committee secretary, to the scene of the disturbance. General Pliev, com­mander of the Northern Caucusus military district, arrived to direct the suppression of the riot. In typical fashion, none of the individuals who participated in the pogrom was called to account. One year later, A. J. Yakovlev, regional secretary of the party, was transferred to work in the CPSU Central Committee apparatus as an inspector.⁷²

The disturbances of 1958 gave impetus to other, less severe national conflicts in the Chechen-Ingush region, which continued to flare up into the early 1970s. One of the causes of conflict and disturbance was the problem of the Prigorodny region, an ancestral area of inhabitation by the Ingush people which after their deportation had been annexed to Northern Ossetia. Hostility from at least part of the local Russian population was also encountered by the Kalmyks after their return to their native region.⁷³

THE BLOODY AUTUMN OF 1956

The official admission of the crimes of the Stalin regime made at the Twentieth Party Congress evoked a strong reaction not only in Polish po­litical and intellectual circles but also and primarily among Polish workers, whose economic situation left much to be desired. On June 28, 1956, the workers in the Poznan automobile factory CISPO rebelled. They were soon joined by workers from other factories. The movement began with a peaceful demonstration, but clashes developed.⁷⁴ The workers attacked the local police headquarters, seized their weapons, and distributed them among themselves. The demands of the rebels were: "Bread" and "Soviet Troops out of Poland." The soldiers in the regular units that had been summoned to disperse the workers not only refused to fire on the workers but joined them. The government declared a state of emergency, called in Ministry of Internal Affairs tank units, and suppressed the uprising. According to official Polish sources, 38 were killed and 270 wounded.

The Central Committee of the Polish United Workers party (PUWP) became the scene of a bitter struggle. The party leadership had been compelled, as was the case everywhere, to rehabilitate party and govern­ment members victimized by the purges. One of them, Komarz, was named commander of the internal security troops. Gomulka proposed a program to ease the burdens on the peasantry and to normalize relations with the Soviet Union which was supported by many peasants, workers, intellectuals, and a significant portion of the PUWP. However, a section of the Politburo called the Natolin group opposed the reforms and began to prepare for a coup, timed for the Central Committee plenum in October, which was to elect a new Politburo.

It was in this very complex and confused situation that a Soviet govern­ment delegation consisting of Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Molotov, and Kaga- novich suddenly arrived to participate in the session of the PUWP Central Committee. The delegation also included Marshal Konev, commander of the Warsaw Pact troops, whose presence signaled that the Soviet leadership was prepared to use force if necessary. In fact the use of force was advised by Polish defense minister Marshal Rokossovsky, who had been sent to Poland and made a member of the PUWP's Politburo on Stalin's order after the war (he was of Polish origin). Rokossovsky met separately with the Soviet delegation. According to Khrushchev's account: "He told us that anti-Soviet, nationalistic, and reactionary forces were growing in strength, and that if it were necessary to arrest [their] growth by force of arms, he was at our disposal."⁷⁵

The idea of putting down the rebellion in Poland with Polish arms was tempting, but after more careful consideration the Soviet leaders concluded that they probably could not rely on the Polish army. The other alternative, using Soviet troops against the traditionally anti-Russian Poles, even at a moment of acute political crisis, was in fact rather somber. Nevertheless, the Soviet leaders were prepared to use force.⁷⁶ Konev was ordered to begin moving troops toward Warsaw. Gomulka, who had been elected the new first secretary of the PUWP Central Committee, demanded that Khrushchev immediately stop the movement of Soviet troops advancing toward Warsaw and order them back to their bases.⁷⁷ At this point a shameful scene developed: Khrushchev began to lie, claiming that Gomulka had received false information about the Soviet troops' movements. Gomulka repeated his demands and warned of possible serious consequences if the Soviet troops continued to move. Khrushchev ordered the Soviet tanks to halt and wait, without returning to their bases. The Warsaw city party committee gave the order to distribute arms to the workers, who were ready to resist the Soviet troops should they enter Warsaw. But it was only after assurances from Gomulka that not only would he not conduct an anti-Soviet policy but, on the contrary, would cultivate friendship with the Soviet Union that Khrushchev and his entourage returned to Moscow and the Soviet troops to their bases.⁷⁸

The disturbances in Poland did not develop into a general uprising for many reasons. One of the most significant was that in Stalin's time the repression of the moderate elements in Poland had not taken the form of executions and massive bloody purges of the party and state apparatus. On October 21, 1956, when Gomulka came to power, the majority of the party apparatus supported him. The most pro-Soviet elements—Zenon Novak and Marshal Rokossovsky—were removed from the Politburo. The latter soon left Poland for the Soviet Union.

Events turned out differently in Hungary, where emotions ran much higher than in Poland. Events in Hungary had been heating toward the boiling point for three and a half years. Returning to Budapest from Moscow after the Twentieth Party Congress, Rakosi said to his friends: "In a few months, Khrushchev will be the traitor and everything will be back to normal."⁷⁹

Meanwhile, the internal political struggle in Hungary became increas­ingly intense. Rakosi was forced to promise an investigation into the trials of Rajk and other Communist leaders whose executions had been Rakosi's doing. At all levels of power, including the organs of state security, the most hated institution in Hungary, Rakosi's dismissal was being demanded. He was openly called a murderer. In mid-July 1956 Mikoyan arrived in Budapest to obtain Rakosi's resignation.⁸⁰ Rakosi was forced to submit and left for the Soviet Union, where he finally ended his days, cursed and forgotten by his own people and despised by the Soviet leaders as well. Rakosi's removal was followed by the arrest of former leaders of state security who had been responsible for the trials and executions. The public reburial on October 6, 1956, of the victims of the regime (Laszlo Rajk and others) turned into a powerful demonstration in which 200,000 residents of Budapest participated.⁸¹

Under these circumstances, the Soviet leadership once again decided to call Nagy to power. At the same time, a new ambassador was sent to Hungary: Yuri Andropov, the future head of the KGB and of the Soviet Communist party and state.

The people's hatred was directed against some members of the state security police who symbolized the most despicable aspects of the Rakosi regime. They were caught and killed. There were not, however, persecutions or murders of Communists in general, contrary to the claims of Soviet propaganda. Events in Hungary assumed the character of a genuine popular revolution, and this is precisely what terrified the Soviet leaders. Not only intellectuals but factory workers as well were drawn into the movement: the largest factories of Budapest became the backbone of the revolt. A significant portion of Hungary's youth also participated in the movement, leaving a discernible imprint on its character. The political direction came from the tail-end of the movement, the grass roots, not from its head, as in Poland.

The crucial question was the presence of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe, in effect occupying them.

Although increasingly anxious, Khrushchev withdrew calmly to Moscow, for Gomulka had managed to convince him that Poland was still in the socialist camp and that it did not even object to the Soviet troops stationed on bases in its territory. The new Soviet leadership preferred to avoid bloodshed but was prepared for it should the issue at stake become the loss of the Soviet Union's satellites, even if their status were one of declared neutrality and nonalliance. Such a precedent could lead to the disintegration of the entire socialist system. Yugoslavia's great fortune was that it did not have a common border with the Soviet Union but it did have an impressive army, which had proven its worth in World War II. And the Soviet leaders had been raised on respect for strength. Hungary was not Poland, and Imre Nagy was not Gomulka. The three-year ferment made itself felt. On October 22 demonstrations began in Budapest, demanding a new government led by Nagy. On October 23 Nagy became prime minister and issued an appeal to the people to lay down their arms. However, Soviet tanks were in Bu­dapest and had evoked great tension in the population.

An enormous demonstration took place, mostly of students and young workers. They were joined by army deserters and ordinary passersby. The demonstrators set out for the statue of General Bern, hero of the revolution of 1848. A crowd of 200,000 gathered in front of the Parliament building. The statue of Stalin was toppled. Armed detachments formed, calling them­selves freedom fighters; they numbered about 20,000.⁸² Among them were

former political prisoners liberated by the population. They occupied var­ious sections of the capital, established a central command with Pal Maleter as its chief, and proclaimed themselves the National Guard.

Workers councils—the seeds of the new regime—were forming in en­terprises in the Hungarian capital. They presented their own social and political demands, one of which aroused the fury of the Soviet leadership: the removal of Soviet troops from Budapest and from all Hungarian territory. The second event that frightened the Soviet government was the reestab- lishment of the Hungarian Social Democratic party, followed by the for­mation of a multiparty government.

Although Nagy had been made prime minister, the new, predominantly Stalinist party leadership, with Gero at its head, attempted to isolate him and in this way aggravated the situation all the more.

On October 24, Mikoyan and Suslov arrived in Budapest. They rec­ommended that first secretary Gero be immediately replaced by Janos Kadar, who had recently been freed from prison. Meanwhile, an armed clash with Soviet troops took place at the Parliament building on October 25. Nagy announced his intention to insist on the withdrawal of Soviet troops and ordered a cease-fire.⁸³ But clashes continued. The insurgent population demanded the removal of Soviet troops and the formation of a new government of national unity in which other parties would be repre­sented.

On October 26, after Kadar had been named first secretary of the Central Committee and Gero had resigned, Mikoyan and Suslov returned to Moscow. They went to the airport aboard a tank after lengthy and detailed discussions with the new leadership. One wonders if they really believed that recon­ciliation was possible in Hungary on the same basis that had been attained in Poland five days earlier: the preservation of Hungary as an ally and member of the Warsaw Pact; the redefinition of Soviet—Hungarian com­mercial agreements in Hungary's favor; the liberalization of the regime, taking into account the specific characteristics of Hungarian life; and the withdrawal of Soviet troops as soon as the situation stabilized.⁸⁴ In all probability, they had their doubts.

On October 28, while fighting continued in Budapest, the Hungarian government ordered a cease-fire and the return of armed detachments to their quarters to await instructions. In his radio address, Imre Nagy an­nounced that the Hungarian and Soviet governments had come to an agree­ment concerning the immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops from Budapest and the inclusion of armed detachments of Hungarian workers and youth in the regular Hungarian army.⁸⁵ The announcement of the withdrawal of

Soviet troops was greeted with great delight and regarded as the end of Soviet occupation.

On October 30 the government abolished the system of obligatory delivery of agricultural products. The provinces supported the capital. The workers decided to stop working until the end of the fighting in Budapest and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. A delegation from the workers council of the industrial region of Miklos presented a demand to Imre Nagy that Soviet troops be removed from Hungary by the end of the year.⁸⁶

The report from Mikoyan and Suslov to the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee regarding the situation in Hungary appeared to indicate, as evidenced by an editorial in Pravda on October 28, that the Soviets had accepted the program for democratization, provided that the program pre­served Communist party rule and that Hungary remain in the Warsaw Pact alliance.⁸⁷ In reality, this article was merely camouflage, as was the order for Soviet troops to leave Budapest. The Soviet government sought to gain time in order to prepare a reprisal not only in the name of the members of the Warsaw Pact but in that of Yugoslavia and China as well. The Soviet interventionist forces in Hungary were to represent the entire socialist camp, so that the responsibility would be shared by all.

Soviet troops were removed from Budapest but concentrated nearby, at the airfield outside the city.⁸⁸ The Soviet ambassador, Andropov, contin­uously informed the Kremlin of the developing situation.

Khrushchev states in his memoirs that on October 30, while Mikoyan and Suslov were in Budapest, the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee unanimously adopted a resolution for an armed suppression of the Hun­garian revolution—stated, of course, in the customary Stalinist terminology. It would be inexcusable, the resolution stated, for the Soviet Union to remain neutral and "not to help the working class of Hungary in its struggle against the counterrevolution."⁸⁹ On the same day, a declaration was adopted on the equality of all Communist parties: in reality, this was just more camouflage. Khrushchev states plainly that the Soviet leaders feared the effect of the Hungarian events on other Eastern European countries.⁹⁰

At the request of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee, a Chinese delegation led by Liu Shao-chi arrived in Moscow for an advisory conference. At first, according to Khrushchev, Liu declared that the Soviet troops should withdraw from Hungary and allow the Hungarian working class to "put down the counterrevolution by itself." After reluctantly con­senting, however, Khrushchev, who was unsatisfied with the Chinese re­sponse, repeatedly proposed that the question of intervention be discussed further. After consulting by phone with Mao, Liu confirmed the Chinese position. Since this completely contradicted the decision of the Presidium to intervene, which had in effect already been accepted by the CPSU Central Committee, Khrushchev reported the Chinese response and insisted on the immediate commencement of military operations. Marshal Konev, who had been summoned to the Presidium session, declared that his troops needed three days to put down the "counterrevolution" in Hungary. He was ordered to get his troops prepared for action.⁹¹ This order was given behind the back of Liu, who was leaving that day for Peking, fully convinced that there would be no Soviet intervention. It was decided to inform Liu at the moment of his departure from Vnukovo airport. In order to make a bigger impression on Liu, the Presidium showed up at Vnukovo in full strength. After more hypocritical discussions about "the well-being of the Hungarian working class," Liu finally gave in: Chinese support was assured.⁹²

Subsequently, Khrushchev, Malenkov, and Molotov set out in succession for Warsaw and Budapest, where they readily received consent for inter­vention. The last stage of their journey was Yugoslavia. They had already obtained consent to suppress the revolution in Hungary from the other socialist countries. The Soviet delegates anticipated serious resistance from Tito, but Khrushchev reports, "We were pleasantly surprised. ... Tito said we were absolutely right and that we should send our soldiers into action as quickly as possible. ... We had been ready for resistance, but instead we received his wholehearted support. I would even say he went further than we did in urging a speedy and decisive resolution of the problem."⁹³ Thus the fate of the Hungarian revolution was sealed. On November 1 Soviet troops began a massive invasion of Hungary. In response to the protests of Imre Nagy, Andropov declared that the Soviet divisions were only replacing troops already stationed in Hungary. Three thousand Soviet tanks crossed the Hungarian border from the Transcarpathian Ukraine and Romania. Summoned once again by Nagy, the Soviet ambassador was warned that Hungary, as a sign of protest against the violation of the Warsaw Pact (the entry of troops requires the consent of the government concerned), was withdrawing from the alliance. That same night, the Hungarian government announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, declared itself neutral, and appealed to the United Nations to oppose the Soviet invasion.

None of this worried the Soviets. The Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt had distracted world attention from the events in Hungary. The U.S. government had condemned the actions of England, France and Israel. The division in the Western camp was thus obvious. There was nothing to indicate that the Western powers would come to the aid of Hungary. The international situation was extremely favorable for Soviet intervention. So­viet propaganda lumped together the war in the Middle East and the events in Hungary, presenting them as one and the same imperialist plot against the "camp of peace and democracy." This explanation, together with the allegations that Communists were being killed in Hungary and that a coun­terrevolutionary rebellion aimed at restoring capitalism was underway there, had its effect on the Soviet population. They greeted the suppression of the revolution in Hungary either with indifference or with relief that the unpleasantness, thank God, was over.

By the evening of November 1 Soviet troops had occupied all Hungarian airports. The next day Andropov, camouflaging the military preparations, proposed that the Hungarian government name two delegations, one polit­ical and one military, to discuss the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hun­gary as well as the political problems relating to the Warsaw Pact.⁹⁴ The negotiations were to begin the next day. The Hungarian government, not wanting complications, accepted. Meanwhile, Soviet troops continued to be deployed.

At the same time, the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee began to prepare a new Hungarian government that would replace Nagy's "coun­terrevolutionary" regime. Janos Kadar, first secretary of the Hungarian Communist party, agreed to be the future prime minister. A Soviet military plane delivered him to Uzhgorod, where the new government was created on November 3. Not until two years later was it known that the Kadar government had been formed on the territory of the USSR. Officially its formation was announced at dawn on November 4, as Soviet tanks burst into the Hungarian capital.⁹⁵

The previous evening a coalition government headed by Imre Nagy had been formed in Budapest. It included representatives of the Communist party, the small landholders party, the Social Democrats, and the Petofi party. An independent, General Pal Maleter, had become a defense min­ister. All the parties agreed that Hungary should join no military alliances whatsoever and would remain a neutral country.

Meanwhile in Budapest on November 1, official negotiations between the Soviet and Hungarian delegations began. The operation to mislead Nagy's government had been prepared in detail. The Soviet delegation headed by General Malinin pretended to haggle over the date for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. (The Hungarians proposed December 15, 1956, while the Soviets insisted on January 15, 1957.) A continuation of the negotiations was set for 10 PM. Meanwhile, the Soviets announced to the United Nations Security Council, which was to convene at 9 am, that negotiations on troop withdrawal were already in progress between Hungary and the Soviet Union. The Security Council session was postponed. As soon as it reconvened, the Soviet Union vetoed a resolution on Soviet intervention in Hungary. (Later on, after numerous resolutions were adopted in the General Assembly calling on the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops immediately from Hungary, the General Assembly strongly condemned the Soviet Union for suppressing the rights of the Hungarians with military force. On December 12 fifty-five nations voted for this resolution, including many countries of Asia and Africa.⁹⁶)

By the evening of November 3 eleven Soviet divisions were already on Hungarian soil. The Hungarian military delegation led by Maleter, which arrived at Soviet headquarters in the evening to continue the negotiations, was treacherously arrested by General Serov, head of the KGB. It was only when Nagy was unable to make telephone contact with his military dele­gation that he realized that the Soviet government had deceived him, but he still refused to give the order to open fire.⁹⁷

On November 4 at 5 am Soviet artillery began to bombard the Hungarian capital. Half an hour later, Nagy informed the population over the radio.

It was an unequal battle. The Soviet armed forces were superior to those of the Hungarian revolution in every respect—manpower, weaponry, and military tactics. Nevertheless, the Hungarians fought heroically. For three days, Soviet troops hammered at the capital. Armed resistance in the provinces lasted until November 14. No one came to Hungary's aid. The Hungarian revolution was crushed by the treads of Soviet tanks and the indifference of the Western nations.

After suppressing the revolution, the Soviet military administration, aided by the state security agencies, launched a repression of Hungarian citizens: massive arrests and deportations to the Soviet Union began.

Imre Nagy and his closest collaborators found refuge in the Yugoslavian embassy. Tito, who had given his consent to the destruction of the Hungarian revolution, did not want to be tainted by association with the murder of legitimate Hungarian leaders. After two weeks of protracted negotiations, the new prime minister, Kadar, gave a written guarantee that Nagy and his comrades would not be persecuted for their actions and declared that they could leave the Yugoslavian embassy and return home with their families. But the bus that was transporting Nagy in the company of two Yugoslav diplomats was intercepted by Soviet officers, who arrested Nagy and then transported him to Romania. The Soviet government paid no attention to Yugoslav protests. Victors trouble themselves about neither the vanquished, nor the fellow travelers, and Tito was a fellow traveler. Later Imre Nagy, who refused to recant, was convicted in a secret session and shot. The news was announced on June 16, 1958.⁹⁸ The same fate befell General Pal Maleter.

In his memoirs written fifteen years after the events in Hungary, Khru­shchev expressed not the slightest regret. Evidently, it never occurred to him that both he and the Soviet government had behaved despicably and treacherously. Such a notion simply did not exist for a consistent Leninist.

ATTEMPTS AT IMPROVING THE SOVIET SYSTEM

At first, the new leadership attempted to reorganize the economy on a more stable and realistic basis, to modernize it and introduce more flexible management. The September 1953 plenum of the CPSU Central Committee opened with the question of agriculture.

The economic inefficiency of the kolkhoz system was quite obvious, but to speak of it, even in a whisper, was equivalent to admitting that the very idea of building socialism in the Soviet Union was absurd. Instead, the new leadership chose to try easing the pressure on the rural population: the collective farmers and the inhabitants of the agrarian and semi-agrarian towns and settlements. In 195^-54, quotas were reduced for compulsory deliveries of animal products to the state by collective farmers and by blue collar and white collar workers who were allowed to raise livestock. Per­manent mechanics were assigned to the MTSs (machine and tractor sta­tions), and the practice of planting crops on orders "from above" was ended: now the districts (though not the collective farmers themselves) decided what to plant.

Simultaneously, the policy of strengthening and consolidating the col­lective farms into larger units went on at a fairly steady pace. From 1950 to 1955 the number of collective farms decreased from 123,700 to 87,500; by the end of the "Khrushchev era," in 1964, the number had fallen further to 37,600. The collective farms were gradually being transformed into state farms, and the peasant collective farmers into wage workers. This was evident from the growing number of state farms, which increased from 4,857 in 1953 to 10,078 in 1964, that is, more than doubled." All the newly created farms in the "virgin lands" were sovkhozes.

Other measures were adopted. The practice of estimating the size of the grain harvest and appraising it in terms of total output was abolished, along with the obligatory use of the grass rotation system.¹⁰⁰

In 1954^55 agricultural investments totaled 34.4 billion rubles, 38 per­cent more than for the entire Fourth Five-Year Plan.¹⁰¹ Agricultural "spe­cialists," comfortably ensconced in various offices, were sent out into the fields. Agricultural equipment, tractors, combines, and motor vehicles were also sent to the countryside in significant numbers.

In 1954^55 virgin and fallow lands began to be opened up in Kazakhstan,

Siberia, and the Urals.¹⁰² The first to open up the virgin lands were the prisoners of concentration camps, followed by thousands of young people sent by the Komsomol.

By the middle of 1956, 33 million hectares had been cleared and planted.¹⁰³ But poor management reigned everywhere, and undercut the effectiveness of this new beginning. Grain silos were not built in time; the grain rotted in the rain or was blown away by the wind. Every year during the harvest machinery and mechanics had to be sent from other parts of the country, where the harvesting had already been completed, to the virgin lands in Kazakhstan. Naturally, all of this was frightfully expensive, and the results did not warrant the expenditure and effect. As always, there were not enough accommodations for people.

A great deal depended on climatic conditions as well as the organization of production. These new regions could have served as a "reserve bread basket" only if there were a stable grain supply in general. Under a rational economic system, the varied climates in different parts of the country would have made it possible to avoid major fluctuations in the grain supply, even in years of poor harvest. However, every failure, such as the experiments with maize, with the virgin lands, and with the MTSs, compelled the leadership to return to its old ways.

The enthusiasm for the virgin lands led to the mobilization of all the country's resources and technology. For a while the traditional grain- producing regions found themselves in the position of outcasts, while the country fell into dependence on the harvests from the virgin lands. Those harvests depended in turn on the caprices of the weather and were hurt badly by soil erosion, which rendered millions of hectares of plowed land useless. Erosion and bad weather greatly reduced the virgin lands harvest several times in the 1950s and 1960s. The area was hit by particularly bad sandstorms in 1963 and again in 1965.

Nonetheless, ultimately the opening up of the virgin lands was not a vain endeavor as the table below shows;¹⁰⁴ even now they serve as one of the country's sources of grain.

Cereal Production in the Virgin and Fallow Lands, 1954-1964

(millions of tons)

Total Fallow and

Total USSR Production

Year

1955

85.5 103.7 125.0

Virgin Land Production

37.2 37.5 63.2

Total Kazakhstan Production

4.7 23.8

Total USSR

Production

Year

Total Fallow and Virgin Land Production

Total Kazakhstan Production

63.5

58.5

50.6

37.9 66.4

1958

1960

1962

1964

102.6

119.5 125.5

140.2 107.5 152.1

10.5 21.9 14.3 12.9 10.3 10.1

There were two major defects in the virgin lands project in Kazakhstan, however. First, the crop yield there was lower than elsewhere; second, the production cost of grain there from 1954 to 1964 was 20 percent higher than in the Soviet Union as a whole.¹⁰⁵

Beginning in 1955 the collective farms were supposed to plan agricultural work jointly with the MTSs.¹⁰⁶ This positive initiative was never carried out. The collective farms, state farms, and MTSs were dominated by a monstrous party-state apparatus in the form of the regional party committees and district soviet executive committees, which themselves were dominated by higher bureaucratic bodies. This apparatus interfered endlessly, dic­tating decisions and demanding reports, changes, and corrections. It pun­ished and encouraged, reported and released directives, intruded in the affairs of the collective farms, and significantly reduced the positive effect of the new system. Khrushchev himself provided the example. He de­manded that maize, the "queen of crops," be planted everywhere,¹⁰⁷ thus disrupting the new system for agricultural planning and management before it had even been fully established. "Maize and only maize is capable of solving the problem of increasing the production of meat, milk, and other dairy products," Khrushchev declared.¹⁰⁸ Once again, the orders had begun to come "from above." In 1955 the bad harvest was not compensated for either by the virgin lands or by maize. Khrushchev's position as first sec­retary of the CPSU Central Committee was badly shaken. His opponents in the Presidium, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Malenkov, considered the opening up of the lands to be a risky adventure and the widespread planting of maize a caprice, and they openly criticized Khrushchev at sessions of the Central Committee Presidium. His savior was a good harvest in the virgin lands in 1956, which provided almost exactly half the country's total harvest: 63.2 million out of 125 million tons.¹⁰⁹

In May 1957, encouraged by this success, Khrushchev insisted on catch­ing up with the United States in the production of meat, butter, and milk within three to five years. In other words, by 1960—1962, the production of meat was to be increased 3.2 times.¹¹⁰

The fact that Khrushchev's proposal was divorced from reality was evi­dent, particularly in the area of meat production. In 1956 the United States produced 16 million tons, the USSR 7.5 million.¹¹¹ But it wasn't simply a matter of this wide lead; the prerequisites for Khrushchev's great leap forward did not exist in the Soviet Union. Cattle raising depends above all on the production of grain for feed, and that was clearly insufficient.¹¹² Khrushchev's new plan required significant investments, but they were not available. Finally, was it really necessary to surpass the United States in levels of production and consumption? Slogans of this sort had stimulated a certain enthusiasm in the 1930s ("catch up with and surpass America"), for hardly anyone understood what the American economy was, how it worked, or its tremendous productive capacity. Those who did understand either were eliminated or kept their mouths shut. The slogan was designed to galvanize the enthusiasm of the masses. Khrushchev himself proposed the new goal in complete earnestness, but his idea of America did not correspond to reality.

Khrushchev's impatience to obtain immediate results led him to an ad- venturistic policy that caused a veritable chain reaction: local leaders wishing to get into the good graces of the first secretary, to earn rewards or advancement, created an outward appearance of success in precisely those areas where Khrushchev wanted them. This system, however, had come into being under Stalin. The policy of rapid industrialization had given rise to Stakhanovism, which, in the end, degenerated into pure showmanship (pokazukha) and rivalry among the directors of various en­terprises to have the best organization on record. The same was true in agriculture. Each region had its own model collective farm or state farm, equipped with the best machinery and specialists, that served as the show­case for the region.

A sharp rise in livestock production could not be assured for a variety of economic, technical, and technological reasons. During the first year of "competition" with the American meat and dairy industry, 1958, the pro­duction of meat was increased by only 301,000 tons; two years later, in 1960, by another 1,007,000 tons.¹¹³

Once again, as in the Stalin era, bluffing, lying, and deception came into their own. The initiator this time was the party committee of the Ryazan Region, which in 1959 pledged to increase its production of meat four to five times. The risky nature of this unrealistic pledge was beyond all doubt. Nonetheless, Khrushchev personally supported the pledge of the Ryazan

Region and its first party secretary A. M. Larionov, producing a chain reaction in the other regions, where the pledges began to climb higher and higher. It was impossible to provide the amount of meat that had been promised, despite the fact that blue and white collar workers and collective farmers were forced to sell their personal cattle. Often they were paid, not with money, but with promissory notes. The region's businesses and even schools were forced to pay a kind of tax in meat. Special "procurement" agents were sent to buy meat in other regions. All the livestock in the region were slaughtered. But at the Central Committee plenum in December 1959, Larionov was able to report that the production of meat in his region had multiplied four times and that the state had bought 100,000 tons of meat from him;¹¹⁴ consequently, he assumed a new obligation to sell the state 180,000—200,000 tons of meat in 1960. An enthusiastic Khrushchev, who badly needed a success like this one, made Larionov a Hero of Socialist Labor. Finally, however, rumors of the total ruin of agriculture in Ryazan reached Moscow. But only at the end of 1960 did a special commission of the CPSU Central Committee conclude its investigation with the distressing report that the Ryazan miracle was a sham.¹¹⁵ Larionov was "advised" to withdraw from the scene, and he shot himself.

Thus ended Soviet—American competition in the realm of meat and dairy production. In 1964 meat production in the Soviet Union reached only 8.3 million tons.¹¹⁶

Khrushchev's maize program did not even stand a chance. Introduced in regions of the country where climatic conditions were unfavorable, it ended, as was to be expected, in fiasco.

Other irrational decisions affected agriculture, for example, the elimi­nation of millions of hectares of fallow land, which ultimately hurt grain production substantially. Instead of the anticipated steady progress, agri­culture essentially marked time. After a significant increase in the harvest in 1958 (1,110 kilograms per hectare in 1959 as opposed to 790 kilograms in 1950), productivity dropped to 1,090 in 1960, 1961, and 1962, then to 830 in 1963. Only in 1964 did it begin to increase, reaching 1,140 kilograms.¹¹⁷

Khrushchev soon began a search for scapegoats. He changed agricultural ministers one after the other, limited their responsibilities, moved agro­biological research institutes into the countryside, and so on. But an in­disputable reality remained. Agriculture refused to budge on orders from above.

Khrushchev's intention to change the situation fundamentally led to the liquidation of the MTSs in February of 1958. Their equipment was sold to the enlarged, amalgamated collective farms.¹¹⁸ In less than a year this

operation too was terminated. Many of the collective farms were in a difficult financial state, for the machines they were forced to buy had been sold to them at the current wholesale prices, which considerably exceeded what the MTSs originally paid for them.¹¹⁹ In addition, many of the MTS workers did not wish to enter the collective farms, preferring instead to seek work at government enterprises. Agriculture lost half its mechanics. Manufac­turers of agricultural machinery, deprived of the steady internal market of the MTSs, found themselves with excess production and were forced to cut back. The use of machinery by the collective farms deteriorated sharply as a result of the lack of qualified maintenance.¹²⁰ In 1961 the debts of the collective farms to the banks for agricultural machinery reached more than 2 billion rubles.

In the years that followed, the state attempted to improve the grave situation of the collective farms with agricultural machinery and equipment, motor vehicles, spare parts, and gasoline and to ensure timely maintenance of the machinery by creating a special organization, the Selkhoztekhnika, and service stations. These efforts did not bring about any substantive change in the situation.

At first, after the improvements of 1953, and particularly after the ag­ricultural reforms of 1954—55, the situation of the collective farmers, work­ers, and employees who had their own private plots improved significantly. In 1964 approximately 7 million hectares were in private use, compared with 482.7 million hectares of collective farm land and 571.1 million hectares of state farm and government land.¹²¹ But the productivity of the private plots was quite high. Permission to own a cow and a certain number of domestic animals and poultry was not only materially beneficial to individual owners, kolkhozniks, and those living in small cities and towns; it also improved food supplies in the large industrial centers. From 1959 to 1965 (all figures being given as of January 1 each year), privately owned cattle constituted an average of 42—55 percent of the total number in the USSR; privately owned hogs, 27—31 percent; and privately owned sheep, 20—22 percent.¹²² From this it is clear what an important role individual farming played in the production of meat in the Soviet Union.

The country's agricultural population had scarcely begun to get on its feet when their privileges were abruptly revoked. In 1959 city dwellers lost the right to own cows; they were forced to sell them to collective and state farms. The sale and stocking up of fodder for private plots was restricted. A campaign was launched against "parasites" in the collective farms and "speculators" at the kolkhoz's markets. There was an attempt to convince the population that all the misunderstandings and difficulties with food sprang from the negligence of collective farmers and the machinations of

speculators at the markets. Here again the economic methods of the Stalin era were revived.

Khrushchev and the other "collective leaders" were often drawn to the methods of the past. The Soviet leaders refused to admit—either openly or to themselves—that all the failures of the economy were tied to the nature of the Soviet regime and were the inevitable concomitants of the Soviet social system; further, they were organic components of the system. The Soviet leaders preferred to find victims to blame for the failures and to retract many of the useful reforms introduced in the first years after Stalin's death. Of the 22 million privately owned cows in the Soviet Union in 1958, no more than 10 million remained at the end of 1962.¹²³ As for the collective farms which had acquired the cows, they were unable to provide them with fodder.

In 1963, a bad harvest year, it became clear that the government had not managed to accumulate the reserves of grain required in the event of natural calamity. There were bread shortages in many parts of the country. Once again, as in the 1930s and in 1947, long lines formed and bread sales were rationed. The southern parts of the country suffered especially, areas such as the Northern Caucasus and southern Ukraine.

The government began massive purchases of grain from abroad at the expense of the available gold reserve. More than 13 million tons of grain were bought. Later Khrushchev was reproached for this; whereas in Stalin's time the people would simply have been left to swell up and die of hunger, in Khrushchev's it was decided to exchange gold for bread. This illustrates the tremendous qualitative difference between these two periods in Soviet history.

Khrushchev's last desperate attempt to find a way out of the agricultural impasse was connected with the drought and the bad harvest of 1963. His hopes for the extensive development of agriculture through the use of the new lands, particularly in Kazakhstan and Siberia, had not been justified.

The entire agricultural system had to be transformed. Even for a country as large as the Soviet Union, agriculture had to be intensive. The example of the United States, where 3.5 percent of the population produces enough not only to feed the country but to export huge quantities of food, is convincing enough. Khrushchev wanted to duplicate the American expe­rience, but he did so mechanically, without taking into account the differ­ences in economic, political, and social systems of the two countries.

The land needed fertilizing, rest, and renewal. These elementary prin­ciples that every Russian peasant knew from birth were rather difficult to put into practice in a state where decisions were based on the demands of the moment, on political expediency, and without regard to the conse­quences. At the end of his ten years of rule Khrushchev understood the necessity for large investments and fertilization of the land. As hastily as he made his other decisions, Khrushchev in 1963 proposed a new, abso­lutely unrealistic program to apply the use of chemicals to farming. "Chem­icalization" it was called.¹²⁴ The program envisaged increasing the production of mineral fertilizers to 80 million tons of mineral fertilizer by 1970, and to 150—170 million tons by 1980. The fantastic nature of this plan is evident from the following figures: in 1963, the USSR produced less than 20 million tons of chemical fertilizer; in 1970, 53.4 million tons; in 1977, 96.8 million tons.¹²⁵

The results of the "shake-up" of agriculture in the post-Stalin years were extremely discouraging. In the course of the seven-year plan (1959-1965), gross output was supposed to increase 70 percent: in fact it increased only 10 percent. In the period of 1960—1964, the average harvest yield grew by an average of only 0.8 percent. The rate of growth of the cattle herd declined 50 percent in comparison to the preceding five years. The yield of milk averaged only 370 kilograms a year per cow. The collective farms were heavily in debt. Such was the picture painted by Brezhnev, the new head of the party, in March 1965.¹²⁶

This was merely one more confirmation that the Soviet economy rests on an unsound basis, that no semi-reforms, reorganizations, decrees, or resolutions will correct it. As long as the economy depends on political decisions that change on one pretext or another, there is no hope for the country to escape its economic impasse.

This is also demonstrated by the innumerable fruitless attempts to im­prove the structure of the state apparatus by endowing the ministers, main directorates, and enterprise managers with new rights or, on the contrary, limiting these rights, or by dividing the planning organs and creating new ones, and the like. There were a great many such "reforms" in the Khru­shchev era, but they achieved no real improvements in the economy. The quicksands of Soviet bureaucracy engulfed everything.

In February 1956 the Twentieth Party Congress approved the Sixth Five- Year Plan. By December of the same year, it was clear that the plan would not work. A temporary transitional plan for one or two years was hastily formulated, followed by a new plan—this time a seven-year plan—for the period 1959—1965. This leapfrogging of plans was due in part to the in­tensified power struggle that led in 1957 to the complete removal of Ma­lenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich, along with two key figures in economic planning, Pervukhin and Saburov. At that point it was very easy to blame all errors in planning on the "opposition" and to require a longer period (seven years instead of five) to correct the mistakes they had purportedly made.

Khrushchev wanted the firm support of the local authorities. His personal experience in the Ukraine prompted him to give initiative to local officials and directors to solve local and regional problems. As a result, the ministry of the petroleum industry in Azerbaijan, the ministry of nonferrous metals in Kazakhstan, and a number of other such specialized ministries were formed in the Ukraine.¹²⁷

Toward the end of 1956 the clashes between Khrushchev and the majority of the Central Committee Presidium became sharper. Although the pretext was disagreement over the economic management of the country, the real basis of the clashes were the recent events in Hungary, where the workers councils seemed to be the embryo of a new power. For the Stalinist old guard, the policy of decentralization and relative autonomy seemed to be a reverberation of events in Hungary.

The CPSU Central Committee session of December 1956 criticized the weak control exercised by the central ministries over the ministries of the republics and individual enterprises. Although the plenum recognized the need to broaden the rights of republics in industry, it decided at the same time that the work of the central ministries in regions where particular branches of the national economy were located should be strengthened.¹²⁸ Khrushchev, however, soon took his revenge: at the Central Committee plenum of February 1957 a resolution was adopted in favor of an industrial leadership based on the territorial principle and organized by region.¹²⁹

In May 1957 a law was passed to create regional economic councils (.sovnarkhozy■), which were required to manage the economy of their re­spective regions and to develop local resources and industries as had been done by the sovnarkhozy of the 1920s.¹³⁰ A total of 105 sovnarkhozy were created, of which 70 were in the RSFSR, 9 in Kazakhstan, 11 in the Ukraine, and 4 in Uzbekistan. Each of the remaining republics was or­ganized as a single sovnarkhoz directed by the chairman of the given re­public's council of ministers. Now Gosplan had to answer only for general planning and plan coordination of the plans, and for allocation of principal resources among the republics. The State Economic Commission was abol­ished, but the central ministries that managed the armament industries retained all their powers.

The organization of the sovnarkhozy encountered blatant disapproval from the bureaucrats in the capital, who were accustomed not only to power but also to the advantages of living in Moscow. Many were forced to leave comfortable positions they had held for a long time and move to the prov­inces. At first the local bureaucrats supported the creation of the sovnar- khozy although they surmised that they could make do without the "bosses" sent from Moscow. Khrushchev's prestige was strongly shaken at the center, but thereby improved in the provinces. This temporary shift in the balance of forces was a decisive factor in the consolidation of his power.

The differences of opinion that divided the top men in power touched on a number of important problems. Khrushchev's adversaries argued that the leadership should maintain total control over and coordination of the work of the ministries. They were also at variance with him on the solution to the constant difficulties involving food and on a number of foreign policy issues.

The creation of the sovnarkhozy, which affected the interests of the powerful Moscow bureaucracy, stimulated the formation of a wide opposition to Khrushchev in the party leadership. This opposition arose immediately after Malenkov's resignation from his post as chairman of the Council of Ministers and especially after the Twentieth Party Congress. The events of the summer and fall of 1956 in Eastern Europe fortified the ranks of the opposition, which began to charge Khrushchev with adventurism. The signal for the offensive against Khrushchev was his speech at a meeting in Len­ingrad in May 1957, in which he advanced his fantastic plan to overtake and surpass America in the production of meat, milk, and wool.

At the Central Committee plenum of June 1957 Khrushchev clashed with an organized opposition. The overwhelming majority of the Presidium was opposed to his policy. Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, Pervukhin, and Saburov opposed him openly. They were joined by Shepilov, a secretary of the Central Committee. Bulganin and Voroshilov also voted with the op­position for Khrushchev's removal from the post of first secretary. The opposition won seven to four.

Khrushchev, however, decided to do battle. With the help of Kapitonov, a devoted supporter in the party apparatus who was later made a secretary of the Central Committee, Defense Minister Marshal Zhukov, and KGB head Ivan Serov, members of the CPSU Central Committee were hastily flown into Moscow from the provinces by military aircraft. They demanded that a Central Committee session be convened. A week of discussion (June 22—29, 1957) brought victory to Khrushchev. His principal adversaries— Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich, as well as Shepilov—were stripped of their posts for constituting an "antiparty opposition."¹³¹

As usually happens in history, the victor made haste to rid himself of his most powerful ally, who in this case was Marshal Zhukov. As a reward for his part in crushing the "antiparty opposition," Zhukov was made a full member of the Presidium, but his popularity with the population, who believed he had saved Russia from the Germans, made Khrushchev ex­tremely uneasy. He could not forget that during the skirmishes at the plenum of the CPSU Central Committee, in response to Malenkov's angry retort: "Perhaps you intend to move your tanks against us?" Zhukov answered with assurance: "The tanks will move only at my order." These were ex­tremely thoughtless words from the defender of Moscow and the conqueror of Berlin. If he had been more sophisticated politically he would have said: 'The tanks will move only on the order of the Central Committee." Thus, Zhukov himself provided the pretext for the later accusation of "Bonapart- ism." However, if he had not uttered those ill-fated words, another pretext would have been found. Many of the marshals envied Zhukov's glory, and Khrushchev made use of this envy. One cartoon published in a Western European newspaper hastened the denouement. It showed Khrushchev marching ahead, followed at a short distance by a very confident-looking Zhukov. Under it was the caption: 'Turn around, Nikita, look who's behind you.

Nikita did turn around. He knew that Zhukov had not the slightest wish to become dictator, but he could not tolerate the marshal's popularity, which was eclipsing his own. As long as Zhukov and Khrushchev were harnessed together, the possibility of reminding the people of Khrushchev's service during the war was closed. It was no accident that several years later the first volume of The History of the Great Patriotic War Against Hitlerite Germany, 1941—45, presented Zhukov in a negative light, as the chief of the General Staff who had failed to take timely measures to forestall Ger­many's "surprise" attack. In all the succeeding volumes, Zhukov's military talents were never once given their due.

In October 1957, while Zhukov was on a trip abroad, Khrushchev con­vened the Presidium of the Central Committee to discuss the Bonapartist danger Zhukov represented. In response to the doubts of those who proposed to wait for his return to Moscow, Khrushchev answered cynically: "Seven do not wait for one." Zhukov was not only removed from the Central Committee; he also lost his post as minister of defense and was retired.¹³²

The results of Khrushchev's struggle for the position of Leader soon became apparent. In March 1958 Bulganin was relieved of his duties as chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. He was replaced by Khrushchev himself, who concentrated in his own hands—just as Stalin had, and for a short time Malenkov as well—the two key posts in the state: party leader and prime minister.

For the first time in the history of the Soviet Union the removal of leaders from top party posts was not followed by their arrest. This was something new in Soviet life and a sign of the stabilization of the uppermost bureau­cracy and its resolve not to permit a revival of the practices of the Stalin era, while at the same time retaining the succession of power.

In the final analysis, the traditional gravitational pull of the center was swift to be felt. The regional sovnarkhozy were preoccupied mainly with local industries instead of directing the overall development of the region. Very rapidly—already in 1959—a process similar to the amalgamation of the collective and state farms was set in motion: the "weaker" sovnarkhozy began to be merged with the more powerful ones. The previous economic hierarchy was quickly restored, but in a form even more misshapen than before.

During the period 1953—1964, power supply sources in the Soviet Union were developed considerably. Big new hydroelectric plants were erected at Kuibyshev (1958), Stalingrad (1960), and Bratsk (1961-1964). New sources of energy rapidly began to be utilized, including Markovo oil in Siberia (1962) and oil and natural gas in the Tyumen Region (1963). New industries were created such as those for natural gas and diamonds. Electric power production grew from 150.6 billion kilowatts in 1954¹³³ to 507.7 billion in 1965.¹³⁴ In the same period the extraction of oil increased from 52.7 million tons¹³⁵ to 347.3 million;¹³⁶ the smelting of steel from 41.4 million tons¹³⁷ to 91 million;¹³⁸ and coal production from 347.1 million tons¹³⁹ to 577.7 million.¹⁴⁰

One of the most serious problems of the 1950s and 1960s was how to restructure industrial production in accordance with the demands of the new technical revolution. In one of his speeches, the prominent scientist Academician Petr Kapitsa compared Soviet industry to an ichthyosaur, a prehistoric beast with a long enormous body and a tiny head; that is, a huge industrial apparatus in which science played an extremely insignif­icant role.

In Stalin's time the scientific and technical achievements of the capitalist world had been furiously refuted and trivialized and declared to be ideo­logical diversions and idealism. Now the Soviet leadership suddenly rec­ognized such achievements as cybernetics. In keeping with these changed attitudes and policies, enormous sums were allocated to science. New research institutions were created. Basic scientific research, which had become almost nonexistent, was revived and expanded. The needs of the state, always tied to the strengthening of its military capacity, required more highly refined technology, more sophisticated weapons.

Since the Soviet state remained and remains the sole employer, the sole unchecked master of revenue and expenditure, the most promising scientific branches were given huge subsidies. That is what made possible, for ex­ample, the breakthroughs of Soviet science and technology in missile pro­duction, which in turn led to dramatic Soviet achievements in space, the launching of Sputnik, the first earth satellite in 1957, and Yuri Gagarin's space flight on April 18, 1961.

But the lopsided development of Soviet industry led to a chronic shortage of consumer goods and extremely poor quality for many goods and services. Despite all the efforts and reforms, agriculture was unable to cope with its one and only problem: how to feed the population.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the increased role of science, the introduction of more modern technology into industry, and the scientific-technical rev­olution in a number of areas raised the problem of training highly qualified personnel for industry. The difficulty was that the Soviet system had grad­ually produced a disdainful attitude toward labor. The children of workers did not want to go to the factories; their parents wanted them to become engineers or professors.

The school system prepared students to enter institutions of higher learn­ing, but those institutions could not accept all applicants. Moreover, under the admissions system in effect, applicants to institutions of higher learning received priority very often in accordance with their parents' positions. Admissions committees received direct orders on which candidates to ac­cept and which to refuse. Those who were excluded preferred any work as long as it was not in a factory. Institutions of higher learning, night schools, and so on, were created to permit education without draining labor forces from production. Nevertheless, many students went to factories only be­cause they were forced to work in order to survive. An attempt was made to solve such problems through educational reform. In December 1958 the ten-year school and general compulsory seven-year education were replaced by a compulsory eight-year program, after which students were required to work in factories or in agriculture for three years. At the same time, three additional (nine to eleven) optional years with professional training were also introduced. For admission to institutions of higher learning, preference was given to those who had already worked and had a good political and professional record.¹⁴¹

This reform aroused discontent at almost every level of the population: in the upper reaches of society the privileged parents had already planned a successful climb up the ladder of power or science for their children; at the lower levels, particularly in the cities, parents wanted their children to have access to higher education. Finally, for rural youth who dreamed of leaving the village to study in the city, the new law raised an insur­mountable obstacle. Of course, as an alternative one could join in the building of communism in Siberia or Central Asia or go to the virgin lands.

The entire country was mobilized in a systematic campaign for combining "school with life," "science with life," and so on. The Komsomol mobilized thousands of young people for the virgin lands and for construction projects at Bratsk, at Krasnoyarsk, on the Volga, and elsewhere.

Like all Soviet mass campaigns, the campaign for "closer ties with real life" was taken to an absurdity. Scholars and physicians were forced to do uncompensated and unproductive work to the detriment of their professional activity. In Moscow, for example, research fellows at the institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences were sent to wash floors and staircases and collect garbage at new housing projects. Refusal to do such work was considered an antisocial act.

Another measure which tore thousands of people from their work and disrupted the transportation and commerce systems was the greeting of guests of honor arriving in Moscow. By order of the district party committees, thousands of people were assembled along the main streets leading from the airports to the center of the capital in order to create the impression of enthusiasm for such guests as Nasser and Tito. In other instances, such as the arrival of the American President Nixon, access to the main roads on which he traveled was closed and the streets remained empty.

In the years 1955—1961 a number of laws were passed that improved the legal position of the urban populations, primarily of industrial workers. On April 25, 1956, the antiworker law of 1940, which bound the worker to his job and imposed harsh penalties for absenteeism and tardiness, was repealed. The Soviet worker once again became "free," in the sense that the right to change jobs was restored.¹⁴² A decree of September 8 the same year established a minimum wage.¹⁴³

Changes in the pension laws affected the lives of millions. In July 1956, a new system was introduced providing for significantly larger monthly pensions. They were based on age and seniority on the job and ranged from 300 to 1,200 rubles. The qualifying age for a full pension was set at sixty for men with twenty-five years' seniority and fifty-five for women with twenty years.¹⁴⁴ This was much lower than the qualifying age for pensions in the West. In July 1964 a pension system was introduced for collective farmers, who were given the right to retire at sixty-five in the case of men and sixty for women,¹⁴⁵ but only on the condition that they continue to live on the collective farm. This law, however, avoided the vital question of automatic retirement on pension at a certain age. The absence of such a rule allowed high government officials to hold onto their positions, regard­less of their age, sometimes even for life. Furthermore, in connection with the interests of high officials, the system of special pensions for especially important services to the state was not only preserved but broadened. These special pensions were accompanied by other privileges, in particular a 50 percent reduction in rent, free use of public transportation, free annual stays at vacation homes and sanatoriums, and other quite substantial ad­vantages. Special pension systems were retained for scientific researchers, the military, and agents of state security.

Laws were also passed that shortened the work week by two hours¹⁴⁶ and extended maternity leave to 112 days (the latter having been shortened to 70 days in 1940).¹⁴⁷

The construction of urban housing complexes, which began in the last years of Stalin's life, was expanded greatly.¹⁴⁸ An objective was set "to end the country's housing shortage within ten to twelve years."¹⁴⁹ The govern­ment began to encourage the construction of cooperative apartments under conditions that were extremely favorable to the population: the initial pay­ment, at the start of construction, was 15—30 percent of the price of the apartment, with a fifteen-year installment system at 0.5 percent annual interest. At the same time, the construction of apartment complexes by city authorities, enterprises, and ministries increased significantly. The scope of the construction that took place from 1953 to 1964 is evident from the following data: in 1950, there were 513 million square meters of housing space in the entire country; in 1955, 640 million; in 1960, 958 million; and in 1964, 1,182 million.¹⁵⁰ Although improved housing conditions af­fected the lot of many thousands of families, the housing problem had still not been completely solved even as of the mid-1980s.

The government used this acute problem as yet another way to pressure the population. An apartment could be obtained more quickly if one's political record was impeccable. Any criticism of the authorities cost some­one waiting in line for an apartment very dearly. In the best of cases, the wait simply became longer; in the worst, the offender was deprived of the right to receive any housing space at all; a pretext was always easy to find.

In 1958 the leadership instituted a twenty-year moratorium on payments to the owners of government bonds. Such payments had become a heavy burden on the state. At the same time, the issuing of bonds was discon­tinued, with the exception of "domestic bonds," which could be bought and sold freely. This measure aroused mixed feelings in the population. Millions of Soviet citizens had accumulated these bonds for years, and the payments added significantly to their incomes. On the other hand, the end of obligatory subscriptions to government bond issues through withholding from wages and salaries meant a saving of two to three weeks' wages each year. In 1975 the right of citizens to cash in their government bonds was restored.

The rate of inflation led to a new monetary reform in 1961. Formally, it consisted of exchanging old bills for new at the rate of ten to one, with a corresponding adjustment of prices and wages.¹⁵¹ Little by little, the buying power of the new money diminished as inflationary tendencies continued.

In 1957 direct taxes on those in low-paid categories were reduced.¹⁵² Even earlier, in 1954, the 6 percent tax on bachelors (imposed during the war) had been dropped.¹⁵³ This reduction in taxes occurred against a back­ground of growth in industrial production and increased government rev­enues, thanks to the "turnover tax" (essentially a sales tax on consumer goods) and to higher prices on food and basic consumer durables. Price increases were systematic, paralleling the rise in gross wages and the cost of public utilities. The latter made up an insignificant part of the budget of the urban family, whose principal expenses were food and clothing. Food alone usually took up more than half of the monthly wage. Family income also increased with the elimination of the tuition charges for secondary schools and higher education, which had been introduced in 1940.

Allowances to families with many children also increased, along with compensation for the temporarily disabled.¹⁵⁴ The minimum wage rose from thirty new rubles a month to sixty. However, the wage differential between the lowest and highest paid personnel remained enormous. Teachers, doc­tors, and medical personnel—providers of the most essential social ser­vices—remained among the lowest paid.

There is no doubt that Khrushchev sincerely wanted the people to have better lives, but his idea of what was good and what was bad did not generally go beyond the accepted framework of Communist ideology, al­though his thinking contained certain egalitarian features. For example, the party program of 1961 promised to introduce a number of free goods and services by 1980.

Khrushchev made an effort to combat the omnipresent embezzling and bribetaking; in this campaign he used both legal and illegal methods. At his insistence, an article was introduced into the legislature instituting the death penalty for such crimes as the embezzlement of funds and currency speculation. This article was immediately applied to a crime committed before the law went into effect (the Rokotov affair). This was a gross violation of one of the most elementary legal principles: that laws should not be applied retroactively.

In 1957 a campaign was launched against "parasites," a category that included speculators, alcoholics, and hooligans, who by their actions dis­turbed public order and peace. It became clear very soon that the primary targets of this campaign were people in more or less unregulated professions, such as writers and poets. Many of them were not members of the official artists' and writers' unions and therefore had "no social status." They rapidly became victims of moral terror at the hands of their neighbors, who were spurred on by the authorities. The "parasites" were arrested, convicted, and sent to live in remote regions of the Soviet Union, where, it was thought, they could not possibly "leech" on anyone. A notorious instance was the use of the "parasite" law against the poet Joseph Brodsky in Leningrad in

1964.¹⁵⁵

The campaign against "parasitism" became another form of political repression. Similarly, the campaign against speculators and bribetakers became a form of anti-Semitism. The overwhelming majority of those con­demned to death on these charges were of Jewish origin. Khrushchev, who was no stranger to anti-Semitism, spoke more than once in his speeches about "good" and "bad" Jews, but never about "good" and "bad" citizens. For example, he cited Army General Kreiser as being one of the "good" Jews.

The so-called druzhiny, or "people's guards," whose creation was au­thorized by a decree of the Supreme Soviet in 1959, took an active part in the struggle against parasitism. They were given the right to supervise public order and were released for this purpose from their factories or office jobs by the "collectives" themselves. In many cities the druzhiny degen­erated quickly into bands that terrorized and blackmailed the population. Local authorities often used the druzhiny for violence against undesirables. Later they were used against exhibitions of paintings by unauthorized art­ists, for intimidating dissidents, and for a variety of other tasks.

Trials by "comrades' courts" were used in a similar way to invade brazenly the personal lives of Soviet citizens.

This is how Khrushchev's regime, which renounced mass terror and arrests in principle, established social control over its subjects' lives. One could say that Khrushchev tried to establish the full sovereignty of the people in Soviet society—by endowing hundreds of thousands of people with a little bit of power over their peers. The massive growth of the party and the Komsomol served the same end. The era of the "new Soviet man" was close at hand.

COEXISTENCE AND EXPANSION

From Malenkov's first steps in foreign policy, it was evident that the new Soviet leadership was seeking to extinguish the "hotbeds of war" in Korea and elsewhere and to ease relations with the capitalist countries.

The outcome of World War II had been extremely favorable for the Soviet Union and would have been more so but for Stalin's megalomania. His military adventurism and policy of force so distinctly displayed in the Korean war and during the Berlin crisis had in fact failed. It had been Mao, who, by committing his troops in Korea, had saved the situation for the rest of the Communist world.

Between 1953 and 1955 the Soviet Union sought to make peace in many areas. After the end of the Korean war in 1953, the USSR also helped to end the war in Indochina.¹⁵⁶ In 1955 a peace treaty was finally signed with Austria, something the Soviet Union had prevented for ten years by arti­ficially linking such a treaty to concessions by the Western powers on other questions. Later, the CPSU Central Committee laid the blame for this delay and for the worsening of Soviet—Yugoslav relations on Molotov personally.¹⁵⁷

In 1955 Khrushchev also appeared in Belgrade heading a Soviet dele­gation and conveyed official apologies to Tito for the Soviet Union's policy toward Yugoslavia after the war. Khrushchev laid responsibility for the policy on Beria, but the Yugoslav leaders viewed this explanation with irony. The Soviet delegation was received coolly. The Yugoslavs were ex­pecting an honest apology, especially for the assertion that Yugoslavia was a capitalist, not a socialist country. For this reason, the following phrase was inserted in a resolution of the Twentieth Party Congress: "Important achievements in the construction of socialism have also been made in Yugoslavia."¹⁵⁸

The Soviet delegates were not psychologically prepared for this encoun­ter, Khrushchev admitted later. "We still hadn't freed ourselves from our slavish dependence on Stalin."¹⁵⁹ Tito was ready to improve relations be­tween the two states, but he declined the Soviet proposal for restoring close relations between the two Communist parties, assuming correctly that the CPSU had by no means abandoned its claim to the leading role among the world Communist parties. For this reason, the Yugoslav Communist party later refused to endorse the resolutions of two international conferences of Communist and workers parties, held in Moscow in 1957 and 1960.

The new Soviet leadership judged the situation that had developed re­alistically. The experience of the first three years of its active international policy demonstrated that in the existing situation this policy ("peaceful coexistence") was the most advantageous. At the Twentieth Party Congress this thesis was elaborated in some detail. The congress recognized the existence of two different social systems in the contemporary world (cap­italist and socialist), which were economic and cultural rivals. Sooner or later the victory of the socialist system was inevitable, but this victory would be attained through the development of internal contradictions in the capitalist camp and a class struggle, not by "exporting revolution." The possibility of a nonviolent transition to socialism existed in a number of capitalist countries. That was why, under modern circumstances, wars were not inevitable and could be averted. The danger of a new war had not been totally excluded, however: as long as imperialism existed, the breeding ground for war would exist.¹⁶⁰

This, in short, was the international policy formulated at the Twentieth Party Congress. As we have noted, this program was based on a belief in the inevitable victory of the Soviet Union (the socialist camp) over the entire world. In presenting this program, the CPSU by no means renounced this other part of its policy. First of all, it intended to develop and intensify the ideological struggle against the capitalist nations. This activity could be either enlarged or narrowed, depending on the demands of the moment. Secondly, the thesis of the impossibility of maintaining a status quo and the inevitability of changes in the world was preserved intact. Finally, the Soviet doctrine continued to affirm that the Soviet Union had not only the right but the obligation to aid national liberation movements around the world. The means and forms of this aid were in no way outlined or de­fined. These three theses in fact provided the basis for constant expansion by the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries.

Soviet foreign policy in the post-Stalin era was based, as Adam Ulam has described it, on expansion and peaceful coexistence;¹⁶¹ more precisely, it should be formulated as coexistence through expansion. The principles underlying this policy were crude and primitive, but in that lay its strength. The most virulent Western critics characterized it as follows: "What is ours is ours; the rest is negotiable." But they are mistaken; "What's ours is ours; what's yours will be ours" would better correspond to their real view. Soviet leaders were right in contending that their foreign policy, as opposed to the policies of Western leaders, was consistent. The practice of Soviet foreign policy was and is a combination of the principles of coexistence and expansion: it uses the first to camouflage the second.

After Malenkov left his post as prime minister, Soviet foreign policy became noticeably more active, with Khrushchev the driving force behind it. In 1955 a summit meeting with President Eisenhower took place in Geneva. It in no way influenced the situation in Europe, however, where the primary question was still Germany. After the formation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955, the German problem was more clearly defined. Neither the Western powers nor the Soviet Union seriously contemplated a reunification of Germany, despite declarations to the contrary. All the drafts, meetings, and discussions on the German question were more a tribute to established custom and public opinion than real measures taken to solve the problem. There was no solution. The reality was that there were two Germany's: one of them belonged to the Western alliance, the other to the Soviet bloc.

Soviet troops were stationed in the GDR. Everything indicated that the overwhelming majority of the East Germany population gravitated toward the West. The flow of emigration from east to west was quite substantial and threatened to undermine the economic and social structure of the GDR in the very near future. More radical measures were adopted. During a summit meeting with President Kennedy in Vienna in June 1961, Khru­shchev tried in vain to persuade him to recognize the GDR. The USSR then tried once again to close access to West Berlin to the Western powers. The 1961 Berlin crisis lasted several months, but the attempt to isolate West Berlin failed. The government of the GDR solved the problem in an original way: in agreement with the Soviet government, the Berlin Wall was built in August 1961 separating the eastern part of Berlin from the western part.¹⁶² Structures like these existed before only in concentration camps, except for the Great Wall of China, whose function had been quite different. Maintaining the Berlin Wall became the principal preoccupation of the East German armed forces. In time, the approaches to the wall were equipped with special electronic gear that automatically opened fire on anyone who attempted to cross to the other side. On June 12, 1964, the USSR and the GDR concluded a treaty of friendship, mutual aid, and cooperation. The Soviet Union formally assumed the task of defending East German territory in case of necessity.¹⁶³

In the 1950s Soviet foreign policy gradually assumed a more and more aggressive character. Wherever the local situation was changing or unstable, the Soviets were very active. If in 1947—48 the Soviet Union supported Israel as a force to weaken Great Britain in the Middle East, then in the mid-1950s Soviet policy was reoriented in favor of closer relations with the Arab world. The causes of this change were the Egyptian revolution of 1952 and the growing conviction that Israel was no more than a satellite of the United States. Relations between the Soviet Union and Israel were severed shortly before Stalin's death, as part of his anti-Semitic policy, and were restored only afterward, in July 1953. From then on Israel was con­sidered part of the enemy camp.

In July 1955 Shepilov, editor-in-chief of Pravda and a future secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, was sent to Egypt. From that moment, Soviet expansion in the Middle East increased. Egyptian president Nasser needed arms, which he soon began to receive from a Soviet satellite— Czechoslovakia. Later, the Soviet Union began supplying Egypt directly with tanks and aircraft, MIG fighters, for example, as well as artillery systems.

The conflict over the Suez Canal, in 1956, and the war against Egypt by England, France, and Israel, contributed greatly to the strengthening

of Soviet—Egyptian ties. In June 1956 Shepilov replaced Molotov as minister of foreign affairs.¹⁶⁴ In early November "spontaneous" mass demonstrations broke out in Moscow and in other Soviet cities with the slogan: "Hands off Egypt!" Registration of volunteers for participation in the war on the side of Egypt began. At this very moment, Soviet tanks were crushing the Hungarian revolution, but no one in the Soviet Union protested or dem­onstrated for "Hands off Hungary!" The uproar over the war in the Middle East muffled the moans of Hungarians perishing under the tanks.

Under Khrushchev, Soviet foreign policy was able very quickly to fill the vacuum created by a weakening in the positions of the great Western powers by exploiting the traditional hostility of the populations in the former colonies toward their former rulers. Such was the case, for example, in the Syrian crisis in the summer of 1957. In 1958 there was a new crisis in the Middle East, involving Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. The Soviet Union used this crisis to improve its own position in Syria and Iraq. In the 1960s the Soviet Union gained a solid foothold in Egypt by taking part in the construction of the Aswan Dam and sending in large numbers of military advisers and arms. In 1962 the Soviet Union backed the revolution in Yemen, and two years later a Soviet—Yemeni friendship treaty was signed. The Soviet Union supplied military, economic, and technical aid to all these states. In Africa, Asia, and the Indian Ocean, the Soviet Union steadily provided support to countries opposing the Western powers. But by and large, as soon as the Soviet leaders believed they were firmly established in a country, they began to impose their own conception of international policy and to interfere crudely in internal and foreign policy. That is why there is not a single "ally" with which the USSR has not had conflicts, beginning with Egypt and ending with Indonesia.

Particularly complex, however, were the Soviet Union's relations with its "brother," China.

THE TWO BIG BROTHERS

During the first several years after the founding of the People's Republic of China, Sino—Soviet relations blossomed, becoming especially close dur­ing the Korean war, when the Soviet Union supplied arms to Chinese divisions in Korea.

From 1950 to 1962 the Soviet Union granted China long-term credits of 1.82 billion rubles.¹⁶⁵ China used them to pay for arms bought from the Soviet Union and to aid North Korea.¹⁶⁶ The Soviet Union gave China 790 million rubles in merchandise and gifts.¹⁶⁷ Dividing this amount by twelve

years, however, makes it obvious that Soviet aid was not very great. In 1962 China received only 13 percent of the total aid granted by the Soviet Union to socialist countries and only 8 percent of the total of all credits granted to other countries as economic aid.¹⁶⁸ The "Chinese share" was completely disproportionate to the size of its population. According to official Soviet sources, the Soviet Union aided in the construction of 256 enterprises of various types in China. This aid took the form of technical documentation, railroad construction, and the provision of experts. How­ever, it was by no means free of charge. In twelve years, close to 11,000 Soviet advisers and experts traveled to China, receiving an amount equiv­alent to some 30,000 annual salaries.¹⁶⁹ China paid for all the services provided: freight, construction of railroads, and the training of Chinese students in the Soviet Union.¹⁷⁰ For its part, by the end of 1962 China had supplied the Soviet Union with 2.1 billion rubles in merchandise, food, and raw materials.¹⁷¹

Sino—Soviet relations worsened at the very moment that China was at­tempting to carry out a very ambitious economic program (the "Great Leap Forward"). In 1962 the Soviet Union unexpectedly recalled 1,390 experts, broke 343 contracts that would have employed Soviet experts in China, and ceased work on 257 projects of scientific and technical cooperation, placing the Chinese economic program in serious straits.¹⁷²

The sources of the Sino—Soviet conflict have their roots deep in the past. They are probably related to the territorial annexations and unfair economic agreements imposed on China by tsarist Russia. They can also be traced to Soviet policy in the 1920s and 1930s toward the Kuomintang and the Communist-controlled "Soviet regions" in China. Stalin did not believe a victory by the Chinese Communist party (CCP) was possible; his policy therefore was to collaborate with Chiang Kai-shek. After 1949 the Soviet Union implemented the same policy vis-&-vis China as it had in regard to the socialist countries of Eastern Europe: the subordination of their interests to the interests of their "elder brother," the USSR. On the economic plane, the Soviet Union established joint Sino—Soviet companies on Chinese ter­ritory, striving to exploit Chinese resources under the direction and in the interests of the Soviet Union. For example, in the border province of Sinkiang, a joint company was formed to extract minerals. The company in fact enjoyed extraterritorial rights. Between 1949 and 1953 Stalin sug­gested to Mao more than once that directly controlled Soviet enterprises be established on Chinese territory, thereby offending and humiliating the Chinese leader.¹⁷³ The historical experience of thousands of years had taught the Chinese leaders to regard with suspicion any suggestion by foreign governments to use Chinese territory for any reason. The Twentieth Party

Congress formally condemned the practice of "joint companies," and they were liquidated. Like Stalin, however, his heirs were not psychologically prepared to understand the Chinese way of thinking. Consequently, Chinese leaders were offended by Zhukov, then Soviet minister of defense and a member of the CPSU Central Committee Presidium, when he promised that the Soviet Union would immediately come to the aid of any socialist country attacked by "imperialists." They announced that China would not ask the Soviet Union for such aid.¹⁷⁴

Khrushchev's proposal to Mao in 1959 that the Soviet Union be allowed to build a submarine base for refueling and repair and a radio station in China in return for similar facilities at Murmansk was rejected with indig­nation. Mao reminded him meaningfully that the Chinese had always as­similated their conquerors.¹⁷⁵

The condemnation of the cult of Stalin in the Soviet Union provoked first concealed and then open dissatisfaction in China. The Chinese had their own "cult"—Mao's. The cult of personality is, in any event, an indispen­sable feature of any totalitarian regime—whether in the socialist Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, or Enver Hoxha's Albania. By this time, Mao's speeches and articles had been declared the Asian form of Marxism-Leninism.¹⁷⁶ While Stalin was alive, Mao remained in the shad­ows; after Stalin's death, he became the "great theoretician" of the period. In the words of a Russian proverb, "A holy place never stays empty." What disturbed the Maoists was not so much the deglorification of Stalin as its consequences for China and the international Communist movement, which the CCP desired to lead as much as the CPSU. The practical (and not purely verbal) position of the Chinese leadership was clearly shown in 1956 and 1957, when the CCP supported the bloody suppression of the Hungarian revolution by Soviet troops and in 1958, when it was the only Communist party in the world openly to applaud the execution of Imre Nagy.¹⁷⁷

Sino—Soviet relations were complicated by the existence of a common ideology. For many years the vocabulary of these relations, and of relations in the international Communist movement generally, consisted of mutual accusations such as: deviation from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy; revision­ism; dogmatism; leftist phrasemongering; right-opportunism; adventurism; aspirations to hegemony ("hegemonism"); subversive activities; Trotskyism; servility toward American imperialism; nationalism; capitulation to the bourgeoisie; peasant ideology. Each camp claimed hegemony within the world Communist movement. Relations between China and the Soviet Union, or more precisely, between the CPSU and CCP, were so full of rigidity, hostility, and suspicion that in comparison their relations with the capitalist countries seemed idyllic.

Mao attacked the CPSU's line that war was no longer a fated inevitability. He not only prophesied a worldwide atomic war but hailed it as an oppor­tunity "to do away with imperialism." For example, in a 1958 conversation with Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko, he argued that in the next war China might lose 300 million people, but when the stocks of nuclear weapons had been exhausted, China would use conventional arms to liquidate the remnants of capitalism and establish socialism throughout the world.¹⁷⁸ In another conversation, Mao called the atomic bomb a "paper tiger" and said that even if one-third of mankind (i.e., 900 million people) or even one- half (1.35 billion) perished in the next war, the other half would survive, imperialism would be swept away, and socialism would reign everywhere. After fifty or a hundred years, the population would more than double.¹⁷⁹ A book published in China in 1960 included the following: "On the ruins of imperialism, the victorious people will extremely quickly build a civi­lization on a level a thousand times higher than in the capitalist era; they will build their own genuinely beautiful future."¹⁸⁰

Mao's position on war had an effect exactly opposite to what he had intended. The overwhelming majority of Communist parties supported the Soviet thesis that war was not a fated inevitability. Although in many of its public announcements and statements the CPSU had acknowledged each country's right to determine its own path to socialism, Soviet leaders in fact conducted both an open and a covert struggle against any attempts to establish an unapproved or independent policy on the part of other Com­munist parties or socialist countries. At the same time, the Soviet Union did not intend to be philanthropic. The "little brothers" had to pay for what they got in one form or another. In early 1961 China turned to the Soviet Union with a request for grain following a bad harvest. The Soviet Union loaned China 500,000 tons of sugar it had received from Cuba. The Chinese had no choice but to buy 6 million tons of wheat from the world capitalist market.¹⁸¹ Of course the Soviet Union did not have enough grain reserves to feed its own population: two years later, the USSR was forced to buy 13 million tons of grain from the West. In 1958—1960, profiting from the Vietnam insurgency, China increased its support to revolutionary move­ments on the Asian continent, trying to make them subordinate and to use them to spread China's influence. Chinese and Soviet interests began to clash. Their struggle for hegemony spread to Africa and the Indian Ocean.

Sino—Soviet relations had by 1960 deteriorated to such an extent that in Bucharest, at a conference of Communist parties, a very sharp exchange took place openly between Khrushchev and the Chinese representative.

The ideological disputes between the CPSU and the CCP in fact con­cealed the conflicting interests of the Soviet Union and China. By the late 1950s and early 1960s China lagged far behind the Soviet Union econom­ically and technologically. In general, China was simply not part of the modern world. The Soviet Union and the United States were superpowers. China wanted to bridge this gap as quickly as possible. This gave rise to Mao's "Great Leap Forward" policy domestically and to an aggressive policy abroad, the desire to have the atomic bomb at any cost and then the hydrogen bomb, which in our time is considered the calling card of a great power.

Mao had once hoped to obtain atomic weapons from the Soviet Union. It cannot be ruled out that at one time or another he received some sort of half-promise from the post-Stalin Soviet leadership. In any case, the Soviet Union helped China build a 5,000-kilowatt atomic reactor in 1957—1959. Later, Chinese engineers perfected it and increased its power to 10,000 kilowatts.¹⁸² Chinese scientists worked at the Atomic Energy Institute in Dubna (near Moscow) until June 1965.¹⁸³

China's atomic ambitions were in opposition to the interests of both the Soviets and the Americans, who wanted to limit admission to the "atomic club." Their reasons were weighty enough: the more nuclear powers there were in the world, the greater the danger of nuclear war and the more difficult it would be to maintain peace and secure arms limitation agree­ments. The USSR also favored such limitation because the arms race placed a heavy burden on its economy. For China, signing any treaty on nonpro- liferation of nuclear weapons meant dooming it to remain a second-class power, in spite of the fact that for the first time in centuries it had appeared on the international scene as a unified and consolidated state.

The Soviet Union had no desire for a neighbor like China, with a pop­ulation of 700 million at the end of the 1950s—and growing quickly—to become a strong military power.

A particularly unfavorable aspect of Sino—Soviet relations, once a pow­erful centralized Chinese state had been created, was the existence of a 5,000-mile common border. Any deterioration in relations necessarily led to tension along this border, with all the predictable consequences.

China took advantage of the border problem in its conflict with the Soviet Union. It accused the Soviet Union of an imperialist policy, particularly because the Soviet Union still adhered to the unjust treaties imposed by tsarist Russia on China during a period when China was fragmented and weak. China suggested that while the status quo could be maintained temporarily, negotiations to change the border should begin.¹⁸⁴ In the po­lemics over the border both sides used fairly casuistical arguments. The Soviet Union admitted that the treaties were unfair,¹⁸⁵ but at the same time pointed out that the Chinese emperors had annexed the territories of their weaker neighbors. Therefore, it would be preferable to preserve the his­torically formed borders and not create new sources of misunderstanding and conflict. But this reasonable point of view was accompanied by the demagogic arguments that in China, as in the Soviet Union, the working class was in power, that "their common goal was to build communism," and that under communism international borders did not have their former importance.¹⁸⁶ This meant in effect that the Soviet Union wanted to postpone any discussion of the border until the advent of communism. Of course, this did not satisfy the Chinese. After all, the Soviet leaders could not give an exact date for the joyous coming of mankind's future. In the mid-1960s bloody conflicts erupted on the Sino—Soviet border, which revived rumors in the Soviet Union of an imminent war with China. It is possible that there were discussions in top Soviet circles of a preventive war.¹⁸⁷ Khrushchev recalled in his memoirs:

Later the Chinese press took Mao's lead and started to claim that Vladivostok was on Chinese territory. They wrote that the Russians had stolen it from China. It's true at one point in history the Chinese ruled in that part of Siberia before our tsars expanded into the area. We consented to negotiate with the Chinese about our borders. They sent us their version of how the map should read. We took one look at it, and it was so outrageous that we threw it away in disgust.¹⁸⁸

But it was not only the border problem and nuclear arms that disturbed the Soviet leadership. In the late 1950s and early 1960s China was in that stage of development when, encouraged and directed first by the leaders, then spontaneously, the masses began the "cultural revolution," that is, a pogrom conducted against the intelligentsia and all moderate elements, declaring war on the bureaucracy and spreading egalitarian ideology. It did not limit itself to ideology, however. At the same time, peasant communes began to be created on a particularly egalitarian basis. Chinese literature about the struggle against the bureaucracy and for social and economic equality appeared in the Soviet border regions and even in Siberia. Khru­shchev grew alarmed and announced to the CPSU Presidium: "This must stop immediately. The slogans of the Chinese reforms are very alluring. You're mistaken if you don't think the seeds of these ideas will find fertile soil in our country."¹⁸⁹ Khrushchev was not mistaken. There was ferment throughout the immense territory of the Soviet Union.

Despite threatening noises and the occasional crises that erupted in relations with the Western powers, Khrushchev's foreign policy as a whole was oriented toward enlarging contact and cooperation with the Western powers, particularly the United States. For Khrushchev, obsessed with the idea of comparing the Soviet Union to the United States in every area, from meat and corn production to state-of-the-art technology, the policy of co­existence with the West was not merely an empty phrase. Suffering from a kind of Marxist-Stalinist inferiority complex, he tried constantly to be the propagandist of socialism, wanting to prove the superiority of the Soviet Union over the capitalist world and, worse still, to predict on any suitable occasion the inevitable end of capitalism. In 1959, at Eisenhower's invi­tation, Khrushchev toured the United States with great fanfare and not without a certain success.¹⁹⁰ He provoked a storm of indignation, however, when he declared at a diplomatic reception shortly before his departure: "We will bury you."¹⁹¹

During his trip through the United States Khrushchev arranged with President Eisenhower to convene a summit conference for the following year (1960) on the German problem and other matters. He hoped to win the West's recognition of the GDR. China met this news with apprehension and displeasure. Mao was afraid that Khrushchev would go behind his back to Eisenhower on the question of "two Chinas."¹⁹² Mao viewed the prospect of a Soviet—American agreement on nuclear weapons with great alarm. Indeed, as we have seen, the Soviet Union had no desire to share its nuclear secrets with China.

China feared that a Soviet—American accord on atomic weapons would make the superpowers the supreme arbiters of the world. Shortly before the Khrushchev—Eisenhower meeting in Paris, the Chinese declared that they would not feel bound by any disarmament treaty in which China had not taken part.¹⁹³ The usefulness of any agreement with Eisenhower sud­denly became problematic. A pretext had to be found to pull out. Shortly before the meeting in Paris, an American U-2 spy plane was knocked down by a Soviet missile. The official Soviet declaration announced that the plane had been downed but did not mention that the pilot had been taken prisoner. Only after the publication of the rather muddled U.S. explanation did Khrushchev reveal that the pilot, Captain Gary Powers, was in Soviet hands. Khrushchev held Eisenhower responsible for the reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory, probably hoping this would make Eisenhower more amenable to Soviet demands on the German question. Arriving in Paris, Khrushchev played the game of indignation, declaring that he would not return to the negotiating table unless Eisenhower apologized. Eisenhower refused and the summit meeting was off. Khrushchev virtually capitulated to the Chinese leaders, but at the same time he was forced to abandon discussion of the German problem.

The last years of Khrushchev's rule did not bring a single improvement in Soviet—American relations. Khrushchev had an astonishing ability to lose quickly the advantages he gained on the international scene. Instead of calm, contemplated diplomacy, he preferred "storm and stress" tactics, hoping to frighten and confuse his partners or adversaries. His failures, instead of prompting him to change his tactics, however, drove him to further extremes.

Objectively, the main aim of Khrushchev's foreign policy was to establish a balance of power with the United States and to eliminate the "hot spots" in their relations (West Berlin, Cuba, the arms race) on conditions favorable to the USSR. He sought to achieve this by completely eliminating the rights and influence of the Western powers in these places. At the same time, Khrushchev, like other Soviet leaders, was prepared to use any favorable occasion to constrain "capitalism" within its own sphere. His impatience in conducting international affairs was evident in the autumn of 1960 during the Congo crisis, when he arrived in New York to take part in a session of the UN General Assembly. Khrushchev used his presence to raise questions about the effectiveness of the United Nations and to undermine its prestige. It should be noted that none of his proposals was supported by the rep­resentatives of the African or Asian countries, on whom he had been counting. He received no support in his condemnation of UN Secretary- General Dag Hammarskjold, nor for his proposal to institute a "troika" to replace the secretary-general's office, nor in his openly anti-American pro­posal to transfer UN headquarters to Europe. Khrushchev gave vent to his affected indignation by taking off his shoe and beating it on his desk during British Prime Minister Macmillan's speech, much to the amusement of the delegates and journalists.¹⁹⁴

In June 1961 Khrushchev met with John F. Kennedy, the new American president in Vienna, at the latter's suggestion. Khrushchev attempted to probe Kennedy for weak spots. He demanded the removal of the Western powers from West Berlin and repeated his proposal for a troika in the UN. Naturally, nothing came of this meeting. The Soviet Union then began to increase the tension over Berlin, which resulted not in the capitulation of the United States and other Western powers, as Khrushchev had hoped, but in the defeat of the Soviet Union and the construction of the Berlin Wall. The USSR soon tested a thermonuclear bomb in the atmosphere.

After discovering that the United States could not be intimidated and that its European allies remained calm on the whole, Khrushchev decided to change his tactics. This decision was also due to the sharp deterioration in Sino—Soviet relations, which became publicly visible during the Twenty- Second Party Congress. Although he never said so, the fear that China would acquire thermonuclear weapons dominated Khrushchev's policy. That is why he strove for agreement with the United States on limiting the proliferation of nuclear arms. Professor Adam Ulam suggests that this striving was what lay behind the Cuban missile crisis that developed in the fall of 1962.¹⁹⁵

MISSILES IN CUBA

In January 1959 Cuban dictator Batista's government was overthrown and replaced by a revolutionary government led by Fidel Castro, who had directed the anti-Batista insurrection. Relations between Cuba and the United States soon became extremely strained. The United States had been leasing a military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and the Cuban gov­ernment tried a number of times to blockade the base in order to force the Americans to abandon it.

Groups of Cuban emigres formed on U.S. territory in Florida and con­ducted raids into Cuban territory, supported by the CIA. In 1960 the tension between the two countries resulted in a nearly total ban on the import of Cuban sugar into the United States. The Cuban economy depended on these sales. On January 2, 1961, the United States severed diplomatic and consular relations with Cuba.¹⁹⁶

On April 17, 1961, Cuban emigr6s undertook a major landing operation at the Bay of Pigs. A general mobilization was announced in Cuba. In the course of seventy-two hours of continuous battle the landing was crushed. Many prisoners—Cubans who had earlier fled the country—and a consid­erable number of weapons of American manufacture were captured.¹⁹⁷

The tension between the United States and Cuba led to the rapid de­velopment of Soviet—Cuban relations. At first much was unclear and things went far from smoothly between the Soviets and Cubans because of the vagueness of Fidel Castro's ideological position and his strained relations with the leaders of the Cuban Communist party. Gradually the conflict was resolved. The Cuban Communist party leader was eliminated politically, and Castro became first secretary of the national leadership of a new organization, the United Revolutionary Organizations, the ORI.¹⁹⁸ An ide­ological rapprochement between Castro and the CPSU had occurred, and the Soviet leadership took energetic measures to reinforce Soviet influence in Cuba and to use Cuban territory to establish a bridgehead in the Western hemisphere. For the Soviet leadership, such a prospect was too attractive to refuse. The U.S. government, by its clumsy effort to blockade Cuba politically and economically and by its military aid to the anti-Castro Cu­bans, contributed greatly to the success of Soviet policy.

During 1961 and 1962 the Soviet Union took a series of measures meant to pave the way for military agreements with Cuba. The Lenin Peace prize was awarded to Castro, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin toured Cuba in July 1961, government delegations were exchanged, and a number of economic agreements were signed.

From the moment of Castro's election as first secretary of the ORI on March 22, 1962, a new stage began in Soviet—Cuban relations. In July- August 1962, there were talks in Moscow about the delivery of Soviet arms to Cuba and, on August 27, a corresponding agreement was signed.¹⁹⁹

Beginning in late July 1962, Soviet arms deliveries to Cuba increased considerably. Out of thirty-seven Soviet merchant ships arriving in Cuba in August 1962, twenty were carrying arms. From the end of July to the middle of October, more than one hundred Soviet ships bearing arms arrived in Cuba. The unloading took place at night in strict secrecy. Nevertheless, American intelligence managed to establish that among the weapons deliv­ered were 42 medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs); 12 intermediate- type ballistic missiles; 42 IL-28 fighter bombers; 144 surface-to-air missile (SAM) anti-aircraft installations, each equipped with 4 SAM missiles; 42 MIG-21 fighters; other types of missiles; and patrol boats armed with mis­siles. In addition, 22,000 Soviet servicemen were sent.²⁰⁰ In September the Soviet Union assured the U.S. government several times that it had no intention of creating a threat to the United States in Cuba and that under no circumstances would offensive surface-to-surface missiles be sent to Cuba.²⁰¹

On October 15 an American U-2 plane in a regular flight over Cuba obtained photographs that fully disproved the Soviet assurances. In the words of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, those assurances "had all been lies, one gigantic fabric of lies."²⁰² The photographs clearly showed Soviet surface-to-surface missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. These missiles were installed in the region of San Cristobal, fifty miles southwest of Havana.²⁰³ Their range was 1,000 miles—in other words, they could reach interior regions of the United States. This discovery was a complete surprise to the U.S. government.²⁰⁴ Further study of the photo­graphs and calculations performed by American experts showed that the intercontinental ballistic missiles deployed in Cuba were equivalent in destructive capacity to nearly one-half that of all 1С В Ms existing in the USSR at that time.²⁰⁵ It was discovered that the missiles were aimed at certain American cities and that, within minutes after launching, 80 mil­lion Americans would have died.²⁰⁶ This point was confirmed later by Khrushchev.²⁰⁷

Opinions on what to do were sharply divided. Members of the Joint

Chiefs of Staff insisted on immediate military action. Others preferred to limit action to a naval blockade of Cuba as a warning measure. Kennedy was undecided, for he was afraid that events in Cuba would immediately find an echo in the Berlin situation and provoke a world crisis.²⁰⁸

In planning the installation of missiles in Cuba, the Soviet government proceeded on the assumption that a direct nuclear threat to U.S. territory would dissuade the Americans from further attempts to overthrow the Castro regime. The Soviet government, as Khrushchev wrote later, wanted not only to "protect Cuba's existence as a socialist country" but also to provide an "example to the other countries of Latin America."²⁰⁹ He linked the prestige of the Soviet Union to these goals. If Cuba fell, the other countries of Latin America would reject the Soviet Union. That is why the Soviet leadership (Khrushchev emphasized several times that all the decisions concerning Cuba were made collectively) was looking for a confrontation with the United States. They decided to do this by installing missiles in Cuba that were directed at the United States. Khrushchev assumed that once the U.S. government discovered them it would think twice before striking at the missile installations: "If a quarter or even a tenth of our missiles survived—even if only one or two big ones were left—we could still hit New York and there wouldn't be much of New York left."²¹⁰ In his memoirs he asserts repeatedly: "We hadn't had time to deliver all our shipments to Cuba, but we had installed enough missiles already to destroy New York, Chicago, and the other huge industrial cities, not to mention a little village like Washington. I don't think America had ever faced such a real threat of destruction" (emphasis added—A. N.).²¹¹ It has never been definitely established whether the warheads had been installed in the Soviet missiles or not.

We can believe Khrushchev's statement that the Soviet government only wanted to shift the balance of power in the world by threatening the United States directly. But adventurism was a dominant element, for the entire plan was founded on two dubious hypotheses: first, installations of Soviet missiles in Cuba could be kept secret; and second, the United States would be frightened by the prospect of war and would make concessions. These two calculations proved false. On the contrary, the Soviet Union suddenly found itself facing the threat of its own destruction.

Before the Cuban crisis and during the thirteen days it lasted, the Soviet government tried to deceive the U.S. government as to its real intentions. Thus on October 18, 1962, Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko, on Khru­shchev's instructions, assured President Kennedy that the only aid the Soviet Union was supplying to Cuba was for agriculture and land devel­opment, plus a small number of defensive weapons. Gromyko stressed that the Soviet Union would never supply Cuba with offensive weapons.²¹² Gro­myko did not know, however, that the president already had irrefutable proof of the presence of Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba. The conversation with Gromyko once again confirmed that the Soviet government was con­sciously misleading the United States. On October 22 Kennedy addressed the American people on television and, after outlining the situation and calling Gromyko's assurances a lie, warned the Soviets that the United States would not tolerate conscious deception.²¹³

The president declared a naval blockade of Cuba as a preliminary mea­sure and ordered inspection of all ships heading for Cuba. Kennedy also warned that any missile fired from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere would be considered an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States and would provoke immediate retaliation. After enumerating a series of other military and diplomatic measures, Kennedy called on Khrushchev to cease the provocations that threatened international peace, to give up the quest for world hegemony, and to seek a peaceful resolution of the crisis. He also warned the Soviet government against the danger of any new attempts to cut off access to West Berlin.²¹⁴

Kennedy's order concerning the monitoring of arms deliveries to Cuba took effect on October 24.²¹⁵ Soviet arms shipments, meanwhile, continued on their way to Cuba, as did the installation of missiles in Cuba itself.²¹⁶ Kennedy acted cautiously and skillfully. The first inspection was made on a non-Soviet ship in order to demonstrate to the Soviet leaders that the examinations would be carried out, but at the same time providing another opportunity for the Soviet leaders to contemplate the consequences of an open confrontation. The United States simultaneously turned to the United Nations.²¹⁷

The president's brother, Robert Kennedy, met several times with the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, in order to explain to him that the Soviet Union's actions were bringing the world to the brink of war. It is probable that Dobrynin had not been fully informed of the Soviet govern­ment's plans, and it cannot be ruled out that he, too, had been misled.

On October 26 Khrushchev sent Kennedy a long letter in which he insisted on assurances from the United States that it would not attack Cuba. He did not, however, offer to dismantle the surface-to-surface missile in­stallations. That same day, an American television journalist, John Scali, was invited to an unofficial discussion by A. Fomin at the Soviet embassy in Washington. Fomin stated that the missiles would be removed if the United States would pledge not to attack Cuba.

The next day, however, October 27, a second letter bearing Khrushchev's signature arrived from Moscow. It was distinctly different from the first, which had been received on October 26. It announced rather harshly that the Soviet Union would remove its missiles from Cuba if the United States would remove its missiles from Turkey. The Soviet Union would pledge not to attack Turkey and not to intervene in its internal affairs, and the United States would give a similar pledge regarding Cuba.²¹⁸

Meanwhile, the situation was aggravated when an American U-2 recon­naissance plane was shot down over Cuba by a Soviet missile and the pilot killed. The American military demanded an immediate retaliatory strike. Never since World War II had the world been so close to the brink of war.

Kennedy decided to ignore Khrushchev's second, more aggressive letter and sent an answer to the first one on October 27, which was conciliatory in tone, expressing the U.S. desire for a permanent resolution of the Cuban problem. The United States was prepared to guarantee that it was not its intention to attack Cuba. For its part, the Soviet Union would immediately have to cease all attempts to construct launching installations for offensive missiles in Cuba.²¹⁹

Robert Kennedy then gave the necessary elucidation to Dobrynin: the president did not want an armed conflict and would do everything possible to avoid military conflict with Cuba and the Soviet Union. But the Soviets were forcing him to it. 'The Soviet Union," Robert Kennedy continued,

had secretly established missile bases in Cuba while at the same time proclaiming privately and publicly that this would never be done. We had to have a commitment by tomorrow that those bases would be removed. I was not giving them an ultimatum but a statement of fact. He should under­stand that if they did not remove those bases, we would remove them. President Kennedy had great respect for the Ambassador s country and the courage of its people. Perhaps his country might feel it necessary to take retaliatory action; but before that was over, there would be not only dead Americans but dead Russians as well.²²⁰

The next day, October 28, Moscow agreed to dismantle the missile installations and remove them and to permit the United States to verify this.²²¹

A peaceful solution was found to the Cuban crisis, but it could have ended in catastrophe. This, for example, is how the Soviet authors of A History of Soviet Foreign Policy described it: "a crisis which in its severity has had no equal in the postwar period, which directly confronted humanity with the threat of worldwide nuclear catastrophe."²²² According to these authors, the responsibility for the crisis rested with the U.S. government. The truth is that the United States was responsible—but for preventing a war. We must give some credit to Khrushchev, however. Having brought the world to the brink of disaster, he had enough sense in the end to take the helping hand Kennedy offered him.

The removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba caused a cooling in Soviet— Cuban relations for some time, since Castro had hoped to use the missiles as a "big stick" against the United States and as backing for the revolu­tionary movement in Latin America.

One year after the Cuban crisis, on August 5, 1963, after long and difficult negotiations in Moscow, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain signed a treaty banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, under water, and in space. The test ban treaty went into effect on October 10. Later it was signed by more than one hundred nations.²²³ China, how­ever, refused to sign, condemning the treaty in a series of communiqu6s from July to September 1963 as a bargain between imperialists.²²⁴

THE WELLSPRINGS OF SPIRITUAL REBIRTH

We have already mentioned that the war forced Stalin to appeal to Russian patriotism to save his regime. The call for patriotism, heroism, and sacrifice evoked a sense of individual responsibility, which had nearly died—not one's responsibility to the party, the government, or the people, but to one's own conscience.

This in turn resulted in the awakening of the collective historical memory, which the regime had mutilated and suppressed. Just as Stalin's Short Course of the History of the CPSU was intended to replace the real history of the country and its peoples, official Soviet patriotism was to become the only approved version of patriotism.

The sense of civic responsibility for the fate of one's own country had made the victories of Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin possible. The war gave rise to a fresh interest in the past, which led in turn to a partial revival of the collective historical memory among the people.