Decentralization, together with resentment over de-Stalinization, fuelled growing opposition to Khrushchev. Although Khrushchev had strong support in the Central Committee (where republic and provincial secretaries—the main beneficiaries of reform—dominated), he faced stiff opposition in the ruling Presidium. The latter represented old party élites and entrenched officialdom in Moscow, who not only watched their empires shrivel or disappear, but sometimes had to relocate to a provincial site. When, for example, Khrushchev relocated the main offices of the Ministry of Agriculture 100 km. from Moscow (to be closer to the fields!), top officials had a daily commute of two to three hours in each direction.
One month after the sovnarkhoz reform was promulgated, Khrushchev faced a full-blown revolt in the Presidium. On 18 June his nominal co-equal, Bulganin, asked Khrushchev to convene a meeting of the Presidium, where a majority was prepared to vote his dismissal. Khrushchev, however, insisted that only the body that elected him—the Central Committee—could authorize his dismissal; with the assistance of military aircraft (supplied by his ally, Marshal Zhukov), Khrushchev flew Central Committee members from their provincial posts to Moscow. His adversaries in the Presidium finally agreed to convene a special plenum of the Central Committee. The result was a complete rout of Khrushchev’s opponents, who were denounced as ‘the Anti-Party Group’ and their leaders (Malenkov, Kaganovich, and Molotov) expelled from the Central Committee. The new Presidium included critical supporters, such as Marshal Zhukov, and high-level functionaries like L. I. Brezhnev and A. I. Kosygin who would later have Khrushchev himself removed. Although, for the sake of appearances, Bulganin was allowed temporarily to remain head of the state, in March 1958 Khrushchev assumed his post as chief of state.
Having tamed the opposition, Khrushchev next dealt with his key supporter—Marshal Zhukov. The latter had begun to voice the military’s dissatisfaction with Khrushchev’s decision to scale down the army (from 5.8 million in 1950 to 3.6 million in 1960) and to deny costly weapons systems (cutting the military’s share of the budget in 1956 from 19.9 per cent to 18.2 per cent). On 29 October 1957, just a few weeks after the spectacular launch of the world’s first artificial satellite Sputnik (4 October), a party resolution denounced Zhukov for restricting its role in the army (thereby ‘violating Leninist party principles’) and for propagating ‘a cult of Comrade G. K. Zhukov … with his personal complicity’. The last major political counterpoint to Khrushchev appeared to have been removed.
Economy, Society, and Culture
The late 1950s represented the golden age for the Khrushchev economy, which boasted extraordinarily high rates of growth in the industrial and agricultural sectors. Altogether, the annual rate of growth in the GNP increased from 5.0 per cent in 1951–5 to 5.9 per cent in 1956–60 (the Fifth Five-Year Plan). The most spectacular progress was to be found in the industrial sector: the total growth (80 per cent) even exceeded the ambitious plan target (65 per cent). In 1987 Soviet analysts revealed that this was by far the most successful industrial growth of the whole post-Stalinist era. With labour productivity rising by 62 per cent and the return on assets (‘profit’) amounting to 17 per cent, the Soviet economy made enormous strides. The launching of the satellite Sputnik seemed to demonstrate the might, if not superiority, of the Soviet system. As Soviet industrial production increased from 30 to 55 per cent of American output between 1950 and 1960, Khrushchev seemed to have good ground for his bravado about ‘overtaking and surpassing’ America.
Agriculture, the unloved stepchild of Stalinist economics, became a new focus of development. The policy yielded immediate results, as output increased 35.3 per cent (1954–8); the ‘Virgin Lands’ programme opened up an additional 41.8 million hectares of arable land, which produced high yields and a spectacular bumper crop in 1958. Altogether, the average annual output between 1949–53 and 1959–63 increased by 43.8 million tons (28.9 million tons of which came from the virgin lands). Not only gross output but productivity was higher: the yield per hectare rose from 7.7 centners (100 kg.) per hectare (1949–53) to 9.1 (1954–8). Encouraged by this success, Khrushchev cut back the investment in agriculture (its share of investment falling from 12.8 per cent in 1958 to 2.4 per cent in 1960), on the assumption that the virgin lands would sustain large harvests. He also forced kolkhozniki to grow more maize, though at the expense of other grains (oats production, for example, fell by two-thirds). And he applied decentralization to agriculture, chiefly by liquidating ‘machine tractor stations’ (January 1958) and undercutting the power of party bureaucrats.
‘Democratization’ also meant a higher standard of living for ordinary citizens—a rather unexpected policy, given Khrushchev’s earlier criticism of Malenkov for ‘consumerism’. There was much social inequity to overcome: because of Stalinist wage differentials, the ‘decile coefficient’ (the official standard for income distribution, measured as the difference between the ninth and first deciles) was 7.2 in 1946—far higher than that in capitalist countries (the comparable figure for Great Britain in the 1960s was 3.6). Resentment against the privileged informed this anonymous letter to the Komsomol in December 1956: ‘Please explain why they babble (if one may so speak) about the well-being of the people, but there is really nothing of the sort; things are getting worse—and worse for us than in any capitalist country’. The letter derided the endless radio propaganda about progress towards communism: ‘You [party élites] of course have communism; we have starvationism, inflationism, and exploitationism of the simple working people’. A letter from eleven workers in Lithuania ridiculed state propaganda ‘that people live badly under the capitalists’ and declared that the common people live worse in the USSR, that ‘this is not socialism, but just a bordello (bardak) and hard labour’.
Khrushchev took important steps to improve popular well-being. One was a revolution in labour policy: he decriminalized absenteeism and turnover, made drastic reductions in wage differentials, and established a minimum wage. After fixing a ‘poverty line’, the regime reduced the number below this limit from 100 million in 1958 to only 30 million a decade later. As a result, the decile coefficient dropped from the Stalinist 7.2 (1946) to 4.9 (1956) and then to 3.3 (1964). Considerable improvements were made among the lowest-paid segments of society—rural labour: between 1960 and 1965, the average income of kolkhozniki rose from 70 to 80 per cent of the average-paid state employees. Although the kolkhoznik remained a second-class citizen (without pensions, sickness benefits, or even a passport), his material condition had improved significantly.
Khrushchev also increased social services, housing, and educational opportunities. Expenditure on social services increased by only 3 per cent in 1950–5, but rose by 8 per cent in 1956–65. As a result, the housing stock doubled between 1955 and 1964; although built mostly as the notorious ‘Khrushchev barracks’ (with low ceilings, tiny rooms, and shoddy construction), it was a serious response to the housing shortage and rapid urbanization. Notwithstanding the ideological antipathy towards ‘private ownership’, in 1955 the regime launched a programme to construct privately owned flats from personal savings (with a down-payment of 15–30 per cent and a mortgage with 0.5 per cent interest rate). The Khrushchev regime also ‘democratized’ the educational system: dismayed that 80 per cent of all university students were coming from the intelligentsia, in 1958 Khrushchev abolished school and university tuition fees and dramatically restructured secondary schooling to force all children into the labour force for two years to learn a trade.