Besides its deficiencies as history, Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin served partisan ends. Having fabricated a monstrously distorted image of Stalin, Khrushchev then accused those who did not join the denunciation of wanting to revive Stalin’s methods. In 1961, Khrushchev explicitly linked his attack on Stalin to the crimes of his opponents, whom he called a “group of factionalists headed by Molotov, Kaganovitch, and Malenkov.” Khrushchev claimed that they “resisted everything new and tried to revive the pernicious methods, which prevailed under the cult of the individual.”67 Though Molotov and the others objected to Khrushchev’s policies and the one-sided treatment of Stalin, they did not advocate a return to Stalin’s repression. Just as anti-Communists use “Stalinism” to attack Communists, so Khrushchev employed the idea, if not the term, to defame his opponents.
Khrushchev’s treatment of Stalin set the stage for Gorbachev. Gorbachev would capitalize on the desire to fill in the blank spots of history left by Khrushchev’s incomplete treatment. Moreover, Gorbachev would open the door to even more one-sided attacks on Stalin than had occurred under Khrushchev. Finally, like his predecessor, Gorbachev would adroitly use attacks on Stalin to impugn those who did not join the chorus and to undermine those who opposed his policies. In 1988 during the Nina Andreyeva affair (see Chapter 5), Gorbachev echoed Khrushchev by accusing his opponents of wanting to revive Stalinist methods.
Nothing was more characteristic of Khrushchev’s approach to building socialism than the belief that quick and easy solutions existed. This belief underpinned the policies that brought Soviet agriculture to near chaos in a decade. The virgin land campaign occupied the centerpiece of these initiatives. Lasting ten years, this campaign involved sending tens of thousands of tractors and combines and hundreds of thousands of volunteers to plow up acreage that eventually equaled the surface area of France, West Germany, and England combined. The first year of the campaign, grain production increased by 10 million tons, but the increase was largely due to greater yields in the non-virgin lands. The next year a drought occurred and production everywhere suffered. The following year, 1956, the campaign scored a triumph, when the virgin lands produced an exceptional yield, supplying half of all Soviet grain, even though much was lost due to insufficient equipment for harvesting, storing, and transporting the bounty. In no succeeding year did the harvest match 1956. In 1957, the harvest was 40 percent less than 1956, in 1958 8 percent less and in subsequent years still less, until 1963 and 1964, when the harvest was a total bust. In his monograph on the virgin land campaign, Gerald Meyer argued that the campaign failed because Khrushchev overestimated the favorableness of the natural conditions and underestimated the costs. A short growing season, insufficient and poorly distributed precipitation, high winds, and poor fallow practices in the virgin lands resulted in frequent droughts, vast land erosion, falling fertility, and soaring costs.68 As a policy, the virgin land campaign was a disaster.
Three other of Khrushchev’s agricultural initiatives also produced undesirable results. Two of them stemmed from Khrushchev’s belief that quick and easy increases in production would follow the emulation of practices in the West. The corn campaign rested on the idea of boosting cattle production by following the American practice of growing corn for silage. The anti-fallow campaign involved encouraging the use of chemical fertilization instead of rotating crops or allowing fields to lie fallow. Both campaigns ignored the realities of natural and other conditions in the Soviet Union and never came close to being the panacea envisioned by Khrushchev.69
The third initiative, and one of the most extreme of Khrushchev’s entire tenure, involved dismantling the state-run machine tractor stations that supplied tractors and other machinery to the collective farms. Collective farms that had relied on the tractor stations suddenly had to buy and maintain their own farm equipment. Ideologically, Khrushchev’s move represented a repudiation of Stalin’s last statement on the Soviet economy. Stalin had said that the direction of Soviet development should be toward the enhancement of the state sector (rather than the collective farms).70 Practically, the policy produced another debacle. The change occurred with such abandon that a majority of the tractor stations disappeared within three months. Even Khrushchev sympathizers believed that the policy seriously reduced agricultural productivity, inflicted long-term damage on the economy and amounted to an unadulterated failure.71
With industry as with agriculture, Khrushchev faced serious problems but resorted to problematic solutions. Under socialism, central plans largely determined the size and nature of production. Planning eliminated the boom and bust cycle of capitalist markets, but it had its own challenges. Planning became more difficult as the economy became larger and more complex. By 1953, the number of industrial enterprises reached 200,000 and the number of planning targets reached 5000, up from 300 in the early 1930s and 2500 in 1940. At this time, the British economist Maurice Dobb claimed that “over-centralization” was cramping initiative and technical innovation, wasting resources, producing bottlenecks in supplies, placing a premium on “purely quantitative fulfillment” of the plan, rewarding unproductive enterprises, and punishing conscientious ones.72 By shifting the economy toward consumer goods, Khrushchev complicated the already difficult job of planning. Alec Nove said, “Housing, agriculture, consumer goods, trade, all became matters of importance, even priority. So the task of planning became more complicated, because a system based on a few key priorities, resembling in this respect a Western war economy, could not work so effectively if goals were diluted or multiplied.”73
Khrushchev sought an easy way out of the problems of centralized planning through radical decentralization and the application of such capitalist-oriented ideas as market competition. In May 1957, Khrushchev abolished the thirty plus central planning ministries and replaced them with over a hundred local economic councils. The result was predictable. Co-ordination of production and supplies became even more difficult than it was before, and local interests superseded national goals. The Medvedevs, who purportedly sympathized with Khrushchev, said his decentralization produced “anarchy,” “duplication, parallelism and dissipation of responsibility.”74 In 1961, Khrushchev had to regroup and consolidate planning into seventeen large economic regions. Even this did not undo the damage of decentralization. The Soviet economy expanded at a slower rate in the second half of the 1950s than the first half, and expanded at a slower rate in the first five years of the 1960s than in the 1950s.75 After replacing Khrushchev in 1964, the Party re-established twenty central planning ministries and tried to combine these with greater plant autonomy.76