The main explosion came in Hungary: in late April 1956 the Soviet ambassador, Iurii Andropov, warned Moscow that de-Stalinization had exacerbated internal tensions and provoked criticism from Stalinists in the Hungarian Politburo. By September Andropov’s dispatches became increasingly alarmist, with warnings about an anti-communist movement and disintegration of the Hungarian Communist Party. The popular movement culminated in street demonstrations on 23 October, when angry crowds smashed Stalinist statues and shouted demands for democratization and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The next day the Hungarian party elected Imre Nagy as its chief, and he promptly summoned Andropov to ask about Soviet troop movements in eastern Hungary. The denouement came soon: after Hungary declared itself a neutral state, on 4 November the Russian army invaded and suppressed the popular insurrection with raw force. A week later the KGB chief reported that Soviet forces had arrested 3,773 ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and seized 90,000 firearms.
The attack on Stalin also had reverberations inside the USSR. Rehabilitation involved such vast numbers that even Khrushchev became anxious. Thus, to protect ‘state interests’ and understate the scale of repression, the KGB falsely informed relatives that many of the executed had received sentences of hard labour and died of natural causes. More problematic was the fate of entire peoples deported to Siberia and Central Asia for alleged collaboration—such as the Karachai, Chechens, Ingushi, Kabardinians, and Balkars. Although the government began in April 1956 to allow certain groups (the main exceptions being the Volga Germans and Crimean Tatars) to return home, repatriation created new problems of its own when returnees demanded restitution of property. The result was fierce ethnic conflict, such as the four-day riot in August 1958 that involved Russians, Chechens, and Ingushi.
But the political resonance from de-Stalinization was muted in Russia. A KGB report on ‘anti-Soviet’ activities during celebrations for the October Revolution in 1956 cited only minor incidents—for example, ‘hooligans’ demolished two sculptures of Stalin in Kherson, shredded photographs of party leaders in Sevastopol, defaced a portrait of Khrushchev in Serpukhov, and disseminated anti-Soviet leaflets in Batumi. The action of a tenth-grade student in Iaroslavl (who marched past the tribune with a banner that read: ‘We demand the removal of Soviet troops from Hungary’) was as unique as it was courageous. Nevertheless, the ‘vigilant’ leaders became anxious and on 14 December 1956 approved the proposals of a special commission (chaired by L. I. Brezhnev) to combat the growth of anti-Soviet sentiments and activities. The next year the KGB crushed a student democratic movement at Moscow State University that, under the leadership of L. Krasnopevtsev, had distributed leaflets and agitated in favour of full-scale democratization. In Archangel the police uncovered a tiny group that categorically repudiated the Stalinist legacy: ‘Stalin, having destroyed his personal adversaries, established a fascist autocratic regime in the USSR, the brutality of which has no equals in history’.
All this galvanized Stalinists to oppose Khrushchev and his policies. Although Khrushchev later claimed to have broad support in the party, many party members—including several members of the Politburo—opposed de-Stalinization. Stalwarts like A. M. Peterson of Riga openly challenged the new policy: ‘Comrades in the Central Committee, do you really not feel that the party expects from you a rehabilitation of Stalin?’ Pro-Stalinist sentiments were particularly strong in Stalin’s home republic of Georgia; news of Khrushchev’s secret speech had even ignited street demonstrations in Tbilisi.
The foreign and domestic turbulence impelled Khrushchev to retreat from a public campaign against Stalin, with the rationalization that the ‘people’ were not yet ready for the new line. Although individual rehabilitations continued, the regime took steps to curtail debate and criticism of Stalin. A telling sign of the change was the famous ‘Burdzhalov’ affair in October 1956 involving a historical journal (Voprosy istorii), which had published revelations about Stalin’s role in 1917 and subsequent falsification in Soviet historiography. By reprimanding the chief editor and cashiering the assistant editor (E. N. Burdzhalov, the principal culprit), the regime made clear that it would not tolerate anything that might delegitimize the revolution and its own claims to power.
The zig-zags in policy aroused confusion and criticism from below. Local party officials quoted one member as complaining that ‘the leaders of party and state have become muddled in criticizing the cult of personality of Stalin: at first they condemned him, but now they have started to praise him again’. In January 1957 an engineer wrote to the Central Committee to complain that ‘there are two N. S. Khrushchevs in the Central Committee of CPSU: the first N. S. Khrushchev with complete [adherence to] Leninist principles directly exposes and wages battle against the personality of Stalin; the second N. S. Khrushchev defends the actions of Stalin that he personally perpetrated against the people and party during his twenty years of personal dictatorship.’ Individual rehabilitation continued, but Khrushchev now turned his attention from de-Stalinization to political and administrative reform.
Democratization and Decentralization
The years 1957–61 marked the apogee of Khrushchev’s attempt at structural reform along two main lines. One was ‘democratization’, a campaign to dislodge an entrenched bureaucracy and to shift responsibility directly to ‘the people’. Khrushchev was the consummate populist, fond of hobnobbing with workers and peasants and flaunting his closeness to the people. He was also profoundly suspicious of ‘bureaucrats’ and ‘partocrats’ (party functionaries). And their numbers were legion; as a Central Committee resolution (21 May 1957) acidly observed, since 1940 primary party organizations had increased twofold, but their number of salaried functionaries had grown fivefold. To combat bureaucratization and ensure ‘fresh forces’, Khrushchev applied term limits not only to regional and oblastsecretaries (two-thirds of whom were replaced between 1955 and 1960), but even to those in élite organs: two-thirds of the Council of Ministers and one-half of the Central Committee changed between 1956 and 1961. The objective, as a party resolution explained in 1957, was to eradicate the cult of personality and ‘ensure the broad participation of the working masses in the management of the state’. This also meant an expansion of party membership, which increased from 6.9 million to 11.0 million members between 1954 and 1964 (60 per cent of whom were listed as workers and peasants in 1964). Khrushchev also sought to expand the people’s role in running the state—for example, by increasing the authority of organs of ‘popular control’ and reviving ‘comrade courts’ to handle minor offences and misdemeanours.
The second, related thrust of reform was decentralization—a perennial Russian panacea for solving problems and inciting initiative at the grass roots. By 1955 Khrushchev had already transferred 11,000 enterprises (along with planning and financial decisions) from central to republican control. Moscow went further in May 1956, reassigning the plants of twelve ministries to republic jurisdiction. The capstone to decentralization came in 1957 with the establishment of sovnarkhozy—105 regional economic councils given comprehensive authority over economic development. Republican authorities gained so much power that their prime ministers became ex officio members of the USSR Council of Ministers. Khrushchev also dismantled much of the old bureaucracy (including 140 ministries at the republic, union-republic, and union levels). The underlying idea was to bring decision-making closer to the enterprise to ensure better management and greater productivity.