Khrushchev’s policies often sowed the seeds of later problems. Perhaps in an overreaction to previous criticisms of his laxness toward Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism, he often demonstrated a tin ear to national sensitivities as when, after a visit to central Asia, he rashly proposed consolidating all the Asian republics into one.77 On a less extreme note, he declared that the country had solved the national question and aimed to achieve a “Soviet national identity” that would replace existing national identities as the various nations of the Soviet Union drew closer together toward “complete unity.” However laudable as an ideal, the promotion of a Soviet national identity had the opposite effect of stimulating nationalist sentiments among those who valued their own national heritage. According to historian Yitzhak Brudny, Khrushchev’s approach glossed over existing national problems and contributed to a rise of narrow nationalist sentiments both among non-Russian nations on the periphery and among Russian intellectuals at the center.78
The policy that most endeared Khrushchev to intellectuals and would serve as the precursor of Gorbachev’s glasnost was the relaxation of censorship. Though the Khrushchev “thaw” was inconsistent and episodic, it did lead for a time to a greater openness toward modern art and films, poetry, and novels critical of the Soviet past. During the thaw, the publication of such previously banned novels as V. D. Dudintsev’s Not By Bread Alone and A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich occurred.79 This openness brought an inevitable underside in the spread of bourgeois economic ideas to Soviet academic circles. According to the Medvedevs, as early as 1953-54 “Western influence began to penetrate many areas of the economy.”80
On many other matters including his views on international relations, the Party, the state, and communism, Khrushchev advanced ideas that caused controversy at the time and since among Communists inside and outside of the Soviet Union. It is beyond the scope of the present work to judge whether these ideas were creative applications of Marxism-Leninism to new circumstances or erroneous revisions of basic principles. What was clear, however, was that Khrushchev’s ideas on these matters consistently leaned toward social democracy, sowed the seeds of later problems, and created a precedent for Gorbachev’s even more extreme views and policies.
On international relations, Khrushchev stressed the policy of peaceful coexistence. He argued that, with the growth of the socialist world, the balance of forces had so shifted that the main struggle consisted of “peaceful competition” between socialism and capitalism and that a “peaceful transition” from capitalism to socialism was possible. Even though these ideas became the centerpiece of the Chinese denunciation of Khrushchev as a revisionist,81 several things could be said in their defense. First, these ideas appeared at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was encircled by a vastly stronger United States that was justifying a bellicose anti-Soviet and anti-revolutionary foreign policy by claiming that an inherently expansionist Soviet Union was bent on worldwide aggression and subversion. In this context, Khrushchev’s ideas forcefully rejoined imperialism’s claims. They undercut the forces pushing for war against the Soviet Union and strengthened the international peace movement. Second, Khrushchev’s ideas on this matter did not break new ground entirely. In a series of interviews before he died, Stalin himself had emphasized the policy of peaceful coexistence and rejected the idea that war was inevitable.82 Thirdly, in practice, Khrushchev did not shrink from defending socialism abroad. He intervened against a counterrevolution in Hungary in 1956 and sent missiles to defend Cuba in 1962. Indeed, at the peak of the Cuban missile crisis, when the fate of the Cuban revolution hung in the balance, Khrushchev insisted on an American commitment not to invade the island before he withdrew Soviet missiles.83 Moreover, Khrushchev never shrank from extending generous material aid and technical assistance to those struggling to make their own way against imperialism, including China (before the break), Egypt, and India. Historian William Kirby called Soviet aid to China between 1953 and 1957, “the greatest transfer of technology in world history.” 84
As appropriate and successful as Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful co-existence was, he may have placed too great a trust in the willingness of the U.S. under President Eisenhower to give up the Cold War. The U.S. never reciprocated Khrushchev’s unilateral reduction in the size of military spending and the Soviet armed forces nor his desire to disengage from the war in Vietnam.85 Moreover, Khrushchev later acknowledged that his idea of peaceful cooperation was seriously undercut in 1960, when just before a planned four-power summit, the U.S. sent a U-2 spy plane over Soviet territory and then denied having done so, until the Soviets produced the downed pilot, Gary Powers. “Those who felt America had imperialist intentions and that military strength was the most important thing,” Khrushchev said, “had the evidence they needed.”86
Khrushchev introduced two new ideas about the Party and the state: the idea that the CPSU had changed from the vanguard of the working class to the vanguard of the “whole people,” and that the dictatorship of the proletariat had become the “state of the whole people.” At some point in the development of socialism, some such transition would surely be in order, but the question was whether the Soviet Union had reached that point. The writer Bahman Azad suggested that these ideas had long-term corrosive effects because they fed illusions about the transcendence of class struggle and about the reliability of certain social groups, such as state bureaucrats.87 Certainly, these ideas de-emphasized the separate interests of the working class. Since socialism supposedly served the interests of the working class, these ideas might have obscured an important standard for measuring socialism’s progress. Moreover, these ideas accompanied other troublesome policies such as leveling of wages, that is reducing the wage differentials. At a certain level of socialist development, wage leveling was appropriate, but as things stood, such leveling tended to sap incentive and productivity.
Khrushchev made several changes in the way the Party operated that diluted its leadership role. In 1957, following the precedent of his years in the Ukraine, he opened the doors of the Communist Party to mass recruitment leading to a vast expansion in membership. This related to his idea that class distinctions were disappearing and that the “overwhelming majority” of Soviet citizens “reason like Communists.”88 Khrushchev also introduced a requirement that a third of Party officials be replaced at each election, a kind of Soviet term limits. The General Secretary also divided the Party into agricultural and industrial sections, a kind of incipient two party system. Though ostensibly aimed at reinvigorating the Party, such moves as mass recruitment, term limits, and Party division weakened the Party in various ways and generated much opposition. After Khrushchev, the Party abandoned these pet ideas.89 Later, Gorbachev entertained similar ideas, such as splitting the CPSU into two, before deciding to weaken and disestablish it altogether.
In 1964, the Khrushchev period came to an end when the collective leadership forced him to retire. The ideas about economic liberalization and political democratization that Khrushchev came to symbolize did not, however, end with him. Rather, they continued to find expression in what historian John Gooding calls the “alternative tradition.” In the 1960s and 1970s, this alternative tradition found its champions in the editor of Novy Mir, Alexander Tvardovsky, and such economists, sociologists, physicists, historians and playwrights as V. Shubikin, Nicolai Petrakov, Alexander Birman, Roy Medvedev, Andrei Sakharov, Valentin Turchin, and Tatyana Zaslavskaya, and Mikhail Shatrov. For the most part, these intellectuals remained in the Communist Party, admired Lenin, and continued to believe in socialism, but at the same time, they advocated a socialism imbued with aspects of capitalist markets, management, and political formations. Rather than attacking the current system, they believed in achieving their ends by winning the ears of Communist leaders, an effort that they eventually realized with Gorbachev.90