Finally, Khrushchev’s colleagues came to feel that he had begun to rule imperiously and, at the time of his removal, denounced him for taking decisions impetuously and ignoring collective opinion. Although Khrushchev gamely responded (‘But you, who are present here, never spoke to me openly and candidly about my shortcomings—you always nodded in agreement and expressed support!’), the critique was not amiss. As a high-ranking functionary, A. Shelepin, observed, Stalin—but not the cult—had expired: ‘[Khrushchev] was also a vozhd′ [Leader]. And the same psychology of the vozhd′ remained. And in the subordinates’ relationship to the vozhd′. No one had the courage to speak out against him’. The fact that Khrushchev had assumed both party leadership and the top position in the state—because it was too much work, because it centralized too much power—also elicited criticism. There was keen resentment too over his tendency to promote family members, such as his son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei, who was made editor of Izvestiia and recipient of undeserved awards and privileges.
The plot to depose Khrushchev evidently commenced as early as February 1964, led primarily by Nikolai Podgornyi and Brezhnev. Khrushchev did receive some prior warnings, but did not take them seriously. The opportunity came in October, as Khrushchev was vacationing at his Crimean dacha: the conspirators summoned him back to Moscow for an extraordinary session of the Central Committee and subjected him to devastating criticism. In his defence Khrushchev emphasized that he had ‘worked all the time’, but professed to greet his removal, through democratic means, as a ‘victory of the party’ over Stalinist illegalities. The public announcement of his ‘retirement’ castigated the former First Secretary for ‘crudeness’, ‘bombastic phrases and braggadocio’, and ‘overhasty conclusions and hare-brained schemes divorced from reality’. Granted a ‘personal pension’, Khrushchev lived in obscurity until his death on 11 September 1971.
Perils of Restoration
With Khrushchev’s removal, the ‘old guard’—most of whom had served under Stalin—sought to restore stability and order to the political system. Although initially evincing interest in economic reform, this ‘new old régime’ became increasingly restorationist, even with respect to the persona of Stalin, and averse to extensive change in policies or personnel. Subsequently castigated as the ‘era of stagnation’, the two decades after Khrushchev’s removal were a marvel of contradictions—economic decline amid apparent prosperity, détente and confrontation, harsh repression and a burgeoning human rights movement. By the early 1980s, however, restoration had plainly failed, stagnation devolving into the systemic crisis that would trigger the frenetic reformism of perestroika and final demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.
From Reform to Restoration
The regime made the dismantling of Khrushchev’s unpopular reforms its first priority. It abolished the 1961 rules on ‘term limits’ (in favour of ‘stability’ in party leadership) and reasserted the principle of centralization—and, by extension, the power and prerogatives of the Moscow partocracy The new regime quickly abolished Khrushchev’s sovnarkhozy and re-established ‘all-union’ ministries in Moscow, with a corresponding reduction of authority at the republic and oblast levels. It also scrapped Khrushchev’s educational reform, which had proven immensely unpopular. Restoration was the principal theme of the Twenty-Third Party Congress in March 1966, which reinstated old terms like ‘Politburo’ (for ‘Presidium’) and ‘General Secretary’ (for ‘First Secretary’).
Initially, at least, the regime professed an interest in economic reform. Responding to earlier proposals (most notably, a famous article in 1962 by Evsei Liberman entitled ‘The Plan, Profit and Bonus’) and current assessments of the Soviet economy, the government—under the leadership of Aleksei Kosygin—sought to change the economy itself, not simply the way it was administered. Although favourably disposed towards recentralization, the reforms attempted to overcome the crude quantitative criteria of gross output that purported to show plan fulfilment but actually produced mountains of low-quality output. The reform proposed to measure (and reward) real economic success by placing more emphasis on sales and profits; it also assessed a small charge on capital to ensure efficiency and to limit production costs. In September 1965 the regime adopted plans to rationalize planning and introduce computers, to enhance the power of plant managers, to merge plants into larger production units (ob ′edinenie), and—most important—to replace gross outputs with gross sales. The new strategy also included tighter controls, a stress on automation, and the purchase of advanced technology from the West (for example, the 1966 contract with Fiat to build a plant in Stavropol oblast called Togliatti).
The reforms yielded short-term gains (especially in labour productivity), but soon foundered on several major obstacles. First, despite the incentives for productivity (e.g. penalties for excessive production costs), it was the State Price Committee, not the market, that set prices and therefore determined costs, value, and ‘profitability’. Second, managers lacked the authority to discharge unproductive or redundant workers—a legacy of caution after events in Novocherkassk. Third, despite lip-service to technological innovation, ‘success’ meant fulfilling quarterly and annual production plans; that low time horizon effectively militated against long-range strategies and drove managers to focus on short-term results. Recentralization meant tighter control by the Moscow partocracy a major impediment to innovation and change. And despite the fanfare about ‘automation’ and ‘cybernetics’, the Soviet Union missed the computer revolution: the number of computers per capita in the United States was seventeen times higher and at least a full generation ahead. By the late 1960s the Soviet leadership abandoned the pretence of economic reform and settled into an unruffled commitment to the status quo.
As reform at home stalled, the regime intervened to suppress change elsewhere in the Soviet bloc—above all, the famous ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968. After the Czech Action Programme’ of April 1968 proclaimed the right of each nation to follow its ‘own separate road to socialism’, the country was engulfed by autonomous movements demanding not only economic efficiency, but fundamental changes in the social and political order. On 10 August the Communist Party itself drafted new party statutes to require secret balloting, set term limits, and permit intra-party factions. Although the party chief Alexander Dubček promised to stay in the Warsaw Pact (seeking to avoid Hungary’s provocative mistake in 1956), Soviet leaders found the experiment of ‘socialism with a human face’ too threatening and led a Warsaw Bloc invasion on 21 August to restore hardliners to power.