The principal threat eliminated, the chief contenders were the two main speakers at the July plenum—Malenkov and Khrushchev. At one level, the two simply manœuvred to broaden their respective political bases—Malenkov in the state apparatus, Khrushchev in the party. But they also raised important issues, especially questions of economic development and agricultural policy. Malenkov proposed a ‘liberal’ policy giving greater emphasis to light industry, chiefly by diverting resources from agriculture; in his view, the regime had ‘solved’ the production problem and could rely on an intensification of production (i.e. mechanization, electrification, and increased use of mineral fertilizers). In response Khrushchev challenged the emphasis on consumer goods and, especially, Malenkov’s cheerful assumption that the agricultural question was ‘solved’. Khrushchev proposed to increase, not cut, investment in the agricultural sector, above all through the ‘Virgin Lands’ programme—an ambitious scheme to convert huge tracts of pastureland in southern Siberia and Kazakhstan to arable land. By shifting wheat production to the Virgin Lands, the Ukraine could grow the corn needed to provide fodder for greater meat and milk production.
Khrushchev’s programme, however, proved a hard sell in the party. Investment in agriculture (a radical break from Stalin’s utter neglect) encountered stiff opposition from conservatives in the centre, especially the ‘metal-eaters’ in heavy industry; it also elicited opposition from Central Asians, who feared wind erosion, Moscow’s intervention and control, and a mass influx of Russians. By August 1954, however, the First Secretary had prevailed: a joint party-government decree endorsed the Virgin Lands programme and raised the target for newly cultivated land from 13 million to 30 million hectares by 1956. Blessed with unusually good weather, the Virgin Lands programme initially brought huge increases in agricultural output (a 35.3 per cent increase between 1954 and 1958), causing the ebullient Khrushchev to make the foolhardy prediction that in two or three years the Soviet Union could satisfy all its food needs.
Simultaneously, Khrushchev declared war on ‘bureaucracy’. In part, he was seeking to undermine Malenkov’s power base—the state apparatus, which was indeed bloated (with 6.5 million employees by 1954). But Khrushchev, the former provincial party chief, also recognized the need to decentralize and shift power and responsibility to the republic level. As a result, by 1955 he had cut the number of Union-level ministries in half (from 55 to 25) and state employees (by 11.5 per cent). This decentralization significantly enhanced the authority of national republics; for example, enterprises under republic control rose from one-third of total industrial output (1950) to 56 per cent (1956). The shift was especially marked in Ukraine, where the republic-controlled output rose from 36 to 76 per cent.
By late 1954 Khrushchev’s programme, and its main architect, had triumphed over Malenkov. The latter, defeated on policy issues and confronted with ominous references to his ‘complicity’ in fabricating the ‘Leningrad affair’, resigned in December 1954. Two months later, he was formally replaced by N. Bulganin as premier, Khrushchev’s nominal co-equal in the leadership.
Cultural Thaw and De-Stalinization
Amid the struggle over power and policy, the regime cautiously began to dismantle the Stalinist system of repression and secrecy. Symbolically, in late 1953 it opened the Kremlin itself to visitors; during the next three years, eight million citizens would visit this inner sanctum of communist power. Openness also extended to culture, hitherto strait-jacketed by censorship and ideology. The change was heralded in V. Pomerantsev’s essay ‘On Sincerity in Literature’ (December 1953), which assailed the Stalinist canons of socialist realism that had prevailed since the 1930s. Thus began a cautious liberalization that took its name from Ilia Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw (1954), and that extended to many spheres of cultural and intellectual life. It even applied to religion—long a favourite target of persecution; a party edict of 10 November 1954, responding to complaints about illegal church closings, admonished party zealots to avoid ‘offensive attacks against clergy and believers participating in religious observances’.
The most important change, however, was crypto-de-Stalinization—a cautious repudiation of the ‘cult of personality’ that commenced immediately after Stalin’s death. The initiative came from above, not below. Not that all in the leadership supported such measures; Stalin’s henchmen, such as Voroshilov and Kaganovich, themselves deeply implicated, remained inveterate foes of de-Stalinization. Apart from some early veiled critiques (for example, Malenkov’s comment about ‘massive disorders’ under the ‘cult of personality’), the principal sign of Stalin’s ‘disgrace’ was sheer silence about the leader. For example, the regime declined to ‘immemorialize’ Stalin by renaming the Komsomol in his honour, dropped plans to transform Stalin’s ‘near dacha’ into a museum, and let 1953 pass without mention of the ‘Stalin prizes’ or the customary celebration of his birthday. Servile quotations from Stalin quietly disappeared; authors who persisted were roundly criticized for ignoring Marx and Lenin. The silence did not go unnoticed; in July a party secretary in Moscow wrote to Khrushchev to enquire ‘Why have editorials in Pravda recently ceased to include quotations and extracts from the speeches and works of I. V. Stalin?’
Why did Stalin’s closest associates decide to demote the Leader to a non-person? Apart from a desire to distance themselves from Stalin’s (and their own) crimes, de-Stalinizers had several motives. Zealous ‘de-Stalinizers’ (including Khrushchev) were zealous communists: they denounced the cult for its voluntarism and for crediting Stalin, not the party or people, for the great achievements of industrialization and victory over fascism. That is why, for example, authorities decided to interdict a poem by A. Markov that failed to show the people as the ‘creative force in history’ and assigned ‘the main place in the poem’ to Stalin, who is ‘shown in the spirit of the cult of personality’. In a memorandum of 27 April 1953 the philosopher G. A. Aleksandrov denounced the cult and opposed reprinting the Stalin biography—partly because of its ‘many factual inaccuracies and editorial mistakes’, but mainly because of its ‘populist-subjectivist view on the role of the individual and especially of leaders in history’ and because of its failure ‘to elucidate sufficiently the role of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the struggle of the Soviet people for socialism and communism’. Khrushchev similarly complained that Stalin had been ‘a demigod’, who ‘was credited with all accomplishments, as if all blessings came from him’.