Khrushchev was born into a peasant family and from 1938 to 1949 served as Party Secretary of the Ukraine, where he became an authority on agricultural questions and under Stalin supported the subordination of agriculture to the industrialization of the country. The Party had censured Khrushchev’s leadership in the Ukraine (and on this Stalin agreed) for admitting too many people, mainly peasants, to the Party, for being lax on Party standards, and for tolerating narrow Ukrainian nationalism.46 Even after he moved to Moscow to become its Party Secretary in 1949, Khrushchev retained his ties to farming, and as chief of national agricultural policy, he was the only member of Stalin’s Politburo who visited the countryside frequently.47 After 1954, his agricultural policies would play a prominent part in the growing Party debate.
In 1953, Khrushchev initiated a set of policies that proved to be problematical both ideologically and practically. Khrushchev encouraged the country to look to the West not only as a source of new methods of production but as a standard of comparison for Soviet achievements. He also shifted resources from industry to agriculture. To encourage agricultural production, Khrushchev reverted to NEP-type measures. He reduced taxes on individual plots, eliminated taxes on individual livestock, and encouraged people in villages and towns to keep more privately owned cows, pigs, and chickens and to cultivate private gardens. Khrushchev also came up with a brainstorm for boosting agricultural production overnight. In January 1954, he proposed a nationwide campaign to cultivate millions of hectares of so-called virgin lands mainly in Siberia and Kazakhstan. That year 300,000 volunteers joined the virgin lands campaign and plowed 13 million hectares of new land. The following year’s effort added another 14 million hectares of cultivated land.48
Khrushchev also placed a new emphasis on raising living standards. After the wartime deprivations, no one opposed raising Soviet living standards. The questions were how to do it and at what cost. For his opponents, Khrushchev’s approach had two problems. First, it required a shift in investment priorities from heavy industry to light industry, consumer goods. In Khrushchev’s first year as General Secretary investment in heavy industry exceeded that in consumer goods by only 20 percent, compared to 70 percent before the war.49 This shift in priorities flew in the face of Stalin’s 1952 warning that “ceasing to give primacy to the production of the means of production” would “destroy the possibility of the continuous expansion of our national economy.”50 In the long run, shifting priorities would undermine the goal of surpassing the West that Khrushchev himself projected. Secondly, his opponents thought Khrushchev’s emphasis placed the Soviet Union in competition with the United States and Western Europe over consumer goods, a race the Soviet Union could not and probably should not win. The German Communist, Hans Holz, said later that lowering socialist goals to material competition with capitalism was giving up “ideological territory.”51 The goal of catching up and surpassing the West in five or ten years resulted in “a stimulation of needs and cravings oriented around a Western style of consumption.”52 The slogan encouraged the Soviet people to the view that the “competition between social systems was not over the goals of life, but over the levels of consumption.”53 More simply, Molotov said, “Khrushchevism is the bourgeois spirit!”54
Molotov and others in the Presidium (as the Politburo was then known) opposed Khrushchev’s policies across the board: on the handling of de-Stalinization, the de-emphasis on class struggle internationally, the encouragement of private agricultural production, the virgin lands initiative, the decentralization of industry, and the shift from heavy to light industry.55 For example, Molotov and others thought that because of the problematic climate and the lack of infrastructure in the virgin lands, widespread cultivation invited disaster and that the country could more profitably use its resources to increase production in already cultivated areas. The opposition favored some moves to improve the standard of living but not an abrupt shift in priorities. The opposition to Khrushchev grew over a couple of years and then was precipitated into action by two events in May 1957. The first was Khrushchev’s decision to decentralize industry.56 The second was a speech in which Khrushchev called for a “spectacular leap forward” in the production of milk, meat, and butter in order to surpass the West in three or four years.57 This became part of Khrushchev’s belief that the Soviet Union could, in the words of his grandson, “dash forward to communism,” an idea that late in his life, even Khrushchev regarded as an “incorrect concept.”58
During a four-day Presidium meeting, June 18-21, 1957, and a Central Committee meeting that immediately followed, a decisive confrontation between Khrushchev and the opposition occurred. As a prelude to seeking Khrushchev’s removal as General Secretary, the opposition assailed his economic policies, particularly his agricultural policies and his idea of decentralizing state planning.59 Molotov and others opposed changing investment priorities from industrial to agricultural, rushing headlong to catch the West in consumer goods, opening the virgin lands, loosening agricultural strictures, and decentralizing economic decision-making. In their view, Khrushchev’s policies were wrong in principle and would lead to economic disruption. Molotov called the virgin lands program an “adventure” and said it would take away resources from industrialization. Malenkov argued that the goal should be to surpass the West in steel, iron, coal, and oil, not consumer goods. “We Marxists,” Malenkov said, “are accustomed to begin with industrialization.” He called Khrushchev’s program a “rightist peasant deviation,” an “opportunistic” move that would make the Soviet people less interested in rapid industrialization.60
The opposition held a seven to three majority (with one neutral) in the Presidium. When word of the imminent repudiation of Khrushchev leaked out, however, Moscow members of the Central Committee (many of whom had been promoted by Khrushchev) besieged the Presidium and demanded the convening of the Central Committee. A hastily arranged meeting of the Central Committee that went on for six days ended by supporting Khrushchev and expelling Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich from the Central Committee and the Presidium.61
After routing what he called the “anti-Party” opposition, Khrushchev ruled without serious resistance for the next seven years. Of Khrushchev’s course during this time, two things stood out. First, in spite of some tacking and weaving, Khrushchev pursued a domestic course the main elements of which were cuts in military spending, attacks on Stalin, decentralization of planning, dismantling of state tractor stations, emulation of American agricultural methods, cultivation of virgin lands, promotion of consumer goods, some liberalization of intellectual and cultural restrictions, and an ideological de-emphasis of class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the vanguard party. Secondly, all of Khrushchev’s major domestic policies failed to produce the results intended. As his biographer, William Taubman said, “Too often Khrushchev made a bad situation even worse.”62
At the Twenty-second Congress in 1961, Khrushchev returned with renewed intensity to his attack on Stalin. Two aspects of Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinism foreshadowed Gorbachev. First, Khrushchev’s treatment of Stalin was exaggerated, one-sided, and incomplete. Secondly, the denunciation of Stalin served politically factional ends. Much could be said about the distortions of Khrushchev’s treatment of Stalin. For example, Khrushchev implied that Stalin emerged suddenly on the scene in 1924, when in truth Stalin had solid revolutionary credentials dating from his political work among railroad workers in Georgia in 1898. Khrushchev quoted Lenin’s so-called last testament criticizing Stalin’s rudeness but ignored Lenin’s praise of Stalin as an outstanding leader. In 1956, Khrushchev concentrated on Stalin’s alleged repression of Party leaders and claimed that half of the delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress and 70 percent of the Central Committee were killed. Stalin’s biographer, Ken Cameron, concluded that it is “difficult to believe that Khrushchev’s figures are correct.”63 (Using the recently opened Soviet archives, scholars have numbered the total of executions from 1921 to 1953 at 799,455, far below the millions estimated by Robert Conquest, Roy Medvedev and other anti-Soviet scholars.64) Also, Khrushchev ignored the evidence of sabotage that served as the ostensible reason for the repression. Khrushchev blamed Stalin for faulty military strategy and dictatorial leadership during World War II, both of which were contradicted by the leading Soviet general, Georgy Zhukov. Most importantly, Khrushchev did not invite a thorough, searching, and balanced treatment of Stalin. Instead, he wrote Stalin out of Soviet history, and discussion of his role more or less stopped.65 Consequently, Khrushchev left the history, in Yegor Ligachev’s words, with “too many blank spots.”66