AREA 5 : KHRUSHCHEV

Why did Khrushchev emerge as the new leader?

• The post of Party Secretary gave him control of the Party machinery, which was essential. Stalin had used the same methods.

• He isolated the other leaders by supporting one side and then the other, just as Stalin had.

• He had the support of the army as he had worked with Zhukov in Stalingrad during the war.

• He promised reforms, especially improvements in the standard of living. He said, "What sort of Communism is it which cannot provide sausage?"

• He appeared to offer something new as he was a lively and outward-going. He was a completely different character to Stalin.

How did Khrushchev change the Soviet Union?

De-Stalinisation

• In February 1956 Khrushchev attacked Stalin in the ‘Secret Speech’. He said that he was a dictator and an enemy of the people.

• More freedom was given to writers and artists. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book, ‘A Day in the life on Ivan Denisovich’, which criticised the labour camps was allowed to be published.

• Khrushchev did not eliminate his rivals, as Stalin had done, they were all given unimportant jobs and in fact they all survived him by many years.

• Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd. Other places and streets were renamed.

• The size and powers of the Secret Police were reduced. The Gulags, or Labour Camps were closed and millions of political prisoners were released.

• But religion was controlled more strictly and the number of churches was reduced.

• In 1960 Stalin's body was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square.

BUT Khrushchev was only relaxing the system, he did not intend to change it. Abroad his actions were misunderstood. In Poland and HUNGARY there was unrest.

What went wrong with De-Stalinisation?

• It encouraged too much criticism and restrictions began to be imposed from 1960, the KGB was given more power. Khrushchev wanted people to criticise Stalin, but not the Soviet system.

• Boris Pasternak was not allowed to receive his Nobel Prize for literature.

• Other Soviet leaders became concerned at Khrushchev’s attacks. They felt that he had gone too far and was weakening the Soviet system.

Agriculture

• Khrushchev began the Virgin Lands scheme to solve the problems of Soviet Agriculture. He set up collective farms in Kazakhstan to grow food on the steppes.

• He forced many farms to growing maize, which he believed would provide fodder for animals.

• He made collective farms independent.

• He closed the Machine Tractor Stations and gave the machinery to the collective farms.

• He wrote off the debts of the collective farms and allowed them to borrow money.

What went wrong with agriculture?

• Khrushchev believed that he was an expert and would not listen to advice. He continually interfered.

• The New Collective farms did not work. They did not have enough capital to invest in new equipment.

• The Virgin Lands could not support wheat for more than a few years; too little money was put into fertiliser. By 1960 the Virgin Lands Scheme had failed. In 1962 bad weather washed away most of the topsoil and the Virgin Lands were ruined forever.

• There was no way of transporting crops. Kazakhstan was too remote and the railway network was inefficient.

• The climate in the Soviet Union was not suitable for growing maize, but Khrushchev refused to listen to advice

Industry

• In industry Khrushchev set up Sovnarkhozy, or regional economic councils. These controlled areas on the country and were encouraged to be independent and take decisions. For example, they could decide what goods to produce.

• Many of the controls on workers were relaxed.

• A seven-hour working day was introduced and workers were allowed to change their jobs. More consumer goods were produced.

• All government ministries except those dealing with defence were abolished. Khrushchev wanted decisions to be taken locally, not by planners in Moscow.

• Khrushchev was trying to break down the Command Economy set up by Stalin.

What went wrong with industry?

• The Sovnarkhozy did not work because managers did not believe that they had any real authority. Everyone was used to being told what to do, as they had under Stalin.

• Khrushchev tried to group the councils into regions, but this made things even worse. He only created an extra layer of bureaucracy and the muddle just got bigger and bigger.

• Production of consumer goods suffered as more and more money went into foreign aid, sport, space and the arms race. These all needed foreign currency so the Soviet Union had to sell whatever it could abroad.

• By 1962 one slogan said, ‘Turn Khrushchev into sausage meat’.

Why was Khrushchev forced to resign in October 1964?

• None of Khrushchev’s promises were actually kept. There was some improvement in living standards, but there were still shortages of food and everything else.

• His policies in the Soviet Union had failed.

• He had tried to make up for this by successes abroad, but this had not always happened. In particular Cuba was seen as a failure.

• He was often rude to other leaders and rarely listened to advice. His behaviour at the UN, when he had slapped his shoe on his desk, was thought to be unacceptable.

• Some leaders felt that he had gone too far in his attacks on Stalin. They believed that he was encouraging too much criticism.

QUESTIONS ON KHRUSHCHEV

In what ways did Khrushchev carry out his policy of de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union in the 1950’s?  (10) 

In March 1953 Stalin died. He had ruled the Soviet Union for twenty-five years. A period of collective leadership followed until 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev appeared as the new Soviet leader.  In that year Khrushchev gave his secret speech to the twentieth party conference.  In this three hour speech he roundly condemned the terror of Stalin’s regime and the cult of personality which had grown up around him. 

This speech began a policy of de-Stalinisation in which Stalin’s portraits and statues were taken down and history books were rewritten to show him in a truer light.

Inmates of the gulags were released and cities had their names changed.  Thus Stalingrad became Volgograd, the powers of the KGB were greatly reduced.  Censorship was also relaxed and Alexander Solzhenitsyn was allowed to publish in the Soviet Union, ‘One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich’ that criticised the gulags.  Novy Mir became a popular liberal newspaper making relatively daring comments on life in the Soviet Union.  A new criminal code was also introduced that laid down that nobody could be imprisoned without due process of law.                

There was also an economic side to de-Stalinisation too.  In the past the government had concentrated too much on heavy industry or the ‘metal eaters’.   Stalin’s fifth Five Year Plan was scrapped and Khrushchev embarked upon new industrial priorities such as consumer goods which for years the peoples of the Soviet Union had been starved of.  As Khrushchev aptly put it, ‘what kind of communism is it that has no sausage?’        

Khrushchev himself typified the differences between the new and the old. When he had eliminated all of his rivals for the leadership, there were no show trials and certainly no executions. Malenkov and the others were sacked, but then given unimportant jobs to do. One went to be Ambassador to Mongolia, another became manager of a power station.

Why did Khrushchev introduce a policy of de-Stalinisation? (10)

In February 1956 Khrushchev attacked Stalin in the Secret Speech. He denounced Stalin’s methods and accused him of crimes against the Soviet people. The speech came as a great shock, but had been carefully planned.

Khrushchev introduced de-Stalinisation to protect his own position by getting rid of Stalin’s old supporters in the party.  In order to secure his own position he thus needed to make a clean break with the past and he therefore removed old Stalinists in order to establish his own power base.  Sooner or later the truth about Stalin would come out and Khrushchev did not want to be held responsible

Khrushchev also believed that many of Stalin’s policies, such as the Purges and Collectivisation, had been genuinely unacceptable and that there had to be a break with the Stalinist past. Khrushchev was well aware that the Soviet economy had stagnated under Stalin. He wanted to get rid of the command economy that Stalin had created. He also wanted to reduce Stalinist central planning and replace it with more freedom of expression and local initiative while concentrating more on production of consumer goods. 

Khrushchev was also very conscious of the danger of nuclear war with President Eisenhower’s United States and was eager to rid the Soviet Union of its confrontational Stalinist legacy in order to improve relations with the west. Khrushchev adopted the policy of peaceful-coexistence, which meant accepting that the West had right to exist, while at the same time trying to prove that the Soviet system was better. This new policy could not be put into practice as long as Stalinist ideas prevailed.

In what ways did Khrushchev try to modernise Soviet agriculture and industry in the years to 1964?            (15)

Khrushchev’s aim was to achieve ‘peaceful co-existence’ with the west.  At the same time he wanted to show that the communist way of life was superior to that of western capitalism but this would be achieved by the superiority of communist achievement. But Stalin’s command economy strangled initiative because everything was planned by Moscow. If Khrushchev was to achieve his goal, the command economy had to go.

In 1957 Khrushchev closed down most of the large planning ministries in Moscow and set up 150 regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy). These would run industry in their own area.  This, it was hoped, would ensure greater commitment on the part of workers and managers.  You would have a greater say over what you now did and this would increase your pride in your work and so production levels would be increased. In short Khrushchev was trying to modernise industry by trying to encourage local and regional managers to take decisions themselves and not just expect to be told what to do.

Early on Khrushchev had also hoped to improve faith in the economy by promising greater emphasis on consumer goods rather than by concentrating too much on heavy industry or as Khrushchev called them the metal eaters.  Stalin’s Fifth Five Year Plan was scrapped and greater emphasis put on the production of food, clothing and household goods.  However Khrushchev was worried by the lack of progress in the economy and the Sixth Five Year Plan (1956 - 1960) once again emphasised reaching targets in heavy industry. The Seventh Five Year Plan which was launched in 1959 tried to boost crucial secondary industries such as chemicals, fertilisers, and plastics which would be indispensable to making a success of the Virgin Lands scheme and the new industries.      

In agriculture Khrushchev introduced the Virgin Lands scheme.  This led to the cultivation of lands in previously uncultivated parts of the Soviet Union such as Siberia and Kazakhstan.   Collective farms would also be amalgamated into gigantic farm cities which would be economically more efficient and would provide the peasants with new ‘urban amenities’ such as shops and cinemas that they would not be tempted to seek work in the cities.  Agricultural productivity would also be encouraged by the government writing off debts, encouraging loans, allowing the sale of tractors and other such high cost machinery to peasants and even allowing peasants to sell a portion of their crops for their own profit.         

Both policies were aimed at improving efficiency and modernising the economy by removing the Stalinist emphasis on central planning and encouraging both peasants and managers to do things on their own initiative and not expect to be always waiting around for orders.  Such a new more enterprising culture, it was hoped, would dramatically boost the Soviet Union's agricultural and industrial production levels.   

What were the effects of Khrushchev’s policies on Soviet agriculture and industry in the 1950’s and 1960’s?            (11)  

The Soviet Union had always had a shortage of wheat and consequently had suffered from sever famines. Khrushchev wanted to end the shortages once and for all and make the Soviet Union self-sufficient in food. Khrushchev saw himself as something of an agricultural expert and imposed his ideas despite many objections.

Khrushchev’s main method of increasing agricultural production was to open up new Virgin Lands in remote regions which had never been farmed before.  Millions of acres of uncultivated land, particularly in Siberia and Kazakhstan, were to be given over to the plough. Indeed the total amount of new land given over to cultivation was equal to all the cultivated land in Britain, France and Spain combined!   

The collective farms were also amalgamated into gigantic farm cities so that peasants could enjoy some of the amenities of urban life.  Peasants were encouraged to buy their tractors from the motor tractor stations giving them a greater sense of proprietorship in what they were doing. From 1958 onwards peasants were allowed to sell on private markets all the food they had produced on their private lots as a further attempt to improve their work ethic.  End of year bonuses were also available to the most efficient peasant rather than the traditional share out of the profits of the collective farm.  This, it was hoped, would also help to increase levels of productivity. This policy failed. After twenty-five years of being told what to do under Stalin, farmers were unable to use their initiative.

The first few years of Khrushchev’s agricultural policies were very successful.  From 1953-1958 agricultural production increased by 50%.  Even so, much produce was lost because it was impossible to transport it from the remote Virgin Lands to European Russia. More seriously, the topsoil of the Virgin Lands was soon eroded by over intensive farming and the dreadful drought of 1963 and a gigantic dust bowl was left behind.

Khrushchev also personally backed the introduction of maize. It was planted in many areas of the Soviet Union, but was unsuited to the climate. Khrushchev had been warned about this but had ignored experts because he claimed that he knew better. Such was the failure of his agricultural reforms that in 1963 and 1964 the Soviet Union was forced to import grain from the United States.  It seems as though six million hectares of land were lost completely, with grain production in 1964 20% less than in 1962.

Khrushchev main failing was that his reforms only went halfway. He wanted to remove the command economy, but was not ready to replace with a system in which farmers had real incentive to work hard and make a profit.

Why did Khrushchev’s agricultural and industrial policies have so little success?             (15)  

Khrushchev was well aware of the failings of Soviet industry and agriculture when he became leader. He also had very firm ideas about how the problems could be put right. Unfortunately for him, he was frequently not ready to listen to advice from experts, especially in agriculture, and he was also not prepared to allow the creation of a genuinely free market in the Soviet Union.

A significant reason why Khrushchev did not achieve more was that he was not a planner.  Instead he was a man who imperfectly thought out bright ideas! His Virgin Lands scheme was not well thought through.  Too often crops were planted on lands with an unsuitable soil or a harsh climate leading to disastrous crop failures. 

Another very significant problem was that not enough attention was paid to providing the necessary pesticides and fertilisers necessary if these new lands were to be successfully brought over to cultivation.    

Khrushchev’s industrial policies fared fairly well especially in terms of consumer goods.  The following statistics highlight the relative success of his policies.  In 1955 per thousand households there were 66 radios, but by 1966 there were 171. In 1955 there was only one washing machine per thousand households, but by 1966 it was 77.  Numbers of televisions rose from 4 to 82 and sewing machines from 31 to 151 per thousand households. Nevertheless, Khrushchev’s industrial reforms fell well below the level that he had promised. 

The creation of the sovnarkhozy did not work because local managers were not used to using their initiative. In the end all that Khrushchev did was to create one more layer of bureaucracy, when he was really trying to remove central control altogether                                                                               

Old guard Stalinists who resented Khrushchev’s denunciation of their old leader went out of their way to sabotage his reforms.  At the same time Khrushchev was unwilling to use force against the workers and his enemies in government. Naturally this meant that production levels failed to rise as spectacularly as Khrushchev had wished and certainly failed to outstrip the West as he had promised to do.            

Khrushchev main failing was that his reforms only went halfway. He wanted to remove the command economy, but was not ready to replace with a system in which farmers and workers had real incentives to work hard and make a profit. After twenty-five years of central planning by Moscow, local areas needed real incentives to use their initiative.

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