Khrushchev in Power 1956–1964 Flashcards
The aims of Khrushchev
Challenges
Although Stalin had become a hero of the Russian people he was still associated with the Great Terror and years of unprecedented repression. Khrushchev therefore had to stamp his own personality on the Russian government and change the image of Russia created by Stalin. The latter was especially important given the nature of international relations in the post-war era. Agriculture was still considered to be in something of a mess but heavy industry had progressed, albeit to the detriment of living standards. From Khrushchev’s perspective, one of the most important problems facing politicians was the deterioration in working and living conditions. The last thing he wanted was mass social unrest.
Domestic policies
Although Stalin was acclaimed as a war hero, he had gained support through fear and high-level repression. The non-communist world took advantage of this by proclaiming Russia to be the great enemy of the ‘free’ world. Khrushchev attempted to deal with this by denouncing the rule of his predecessor (de-Stalinisation).
Nevertheless, he carried on with the centralised planning of the economy but with more focus on the enhancement of light and consumer industries. The mainstay of his agricultural policy was the Virgin Land campaign, which was aimed at increasing the amount of land under the plough. A number of important social improvement programmes were put into operation, especially in the field of housing. However, the Khrushchev era continued to witness the use of repression to maintain law and order. Political prisoners were released and the Gulag was mostly made redundant but Russian citizens were still subject to rule through autocracy.
The nature of his government
De-Stalinization led to a more open and less repressive Soviet society, reduced the excessive concentration of power in the hands of the leader, and fostered a period of cultural, intellectual, and political reform. However, the process was not without challenges. Khrushchev’s policies met resistance from hardliners and while De-Stalinization eased some aspects of life in the Soviet Union, it did not entirely eliminate authoritarianism. There were protests and strikes for even greater freedoms (Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland), though Khrushchev resisted violence at first, the MVD maintaining control. Nonetheless, it set the stage for later reforms and a gradual, albeit inconsistent, shift away from Stalin’s oppressive legacy.
Even though there was a process of De-Stalinisation, the structure of the USSR remained the same post 1936 constitution with the Supreme Soviet of the USSR with the Soviet of the Union and Soviet of Nationalities below. Khrushchev did make some changes to the running of the Communist Party:
In 1962, the Party was split into Rural and urban sections at all levels.
New rules were issued, limiting how long a party official could stand for. Membership was expanded to 11 million Russians in 1964.
There was further democratisation by weakening the traditional bureaucracy to give more responsibility to the people. This in turn resulted in decentralisation by giving more responsibility to local initiatives.
Opposition & methods / enforcement of repression in Russia
SECRET POLICE: The MGB and MVD merged into a large MVD in 1953, remaining in the hands of Beria, who was later executed in December by Khrushchev, soon after he gained control of the Party Central Committee. Thus began the reorganisation of the MVD: in March 1954, it was reorganised into two departments, the new MVD (mainly civil disorder and ordinary criminality) and KGB (internal and external security, very important due to Cold War). These were Inde redirect administration of the party and it became much easier to monitor security measures. The new structure AND Khrushchev’s genuine desire to move away from severe repression meant political arrests plummeted, use of Gulags and the torture of dissidents largely disappeared; only 11,000 counter-revolutionaries in captivity in 1960 vs 1930 - 40s.
THE ARMY: Far more focused in resolving international conflict. With detente, an easy if tensions occured, which in turn led to a reduction is the size of the army from 3.6 million to about 2.4 million. Nevertheless, flashpoints such as the shooting down of a US spy plane over Russian airspace in 1960 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 illustrated that Russia required a significant military presence.
PROPAGANDA: Under the guidance of the Council of People’s Commissars, Soviet cinema was immersed in ‘social realism’, and greater creative freedom was allowed under Khrushchev after the ‘secret speech’. In 1959, 145 films were made and the number of cinemas had increased to nearly 59,000.
Opposition & methods / enforcement of repression in the satellites
- tanks were sent into Hungary in 1956 and the dismissal of rebellious politicians like Zhukov and Bulganin.
The extent and impact of reform
Changes in urban and rural living and working conditions
RURAL HOUSING
The plan was to take the idea of ‘special’ housing further and construct self-contained agri-towns. They were if a poor standard because they were built quickly and cheaply.
Limitations on personal / political / religious freedom
RELIGION: He had had little time for religion, and believed that to speed up the full implementation of communism, religious prejudices had to be eradicated. To this end, the 22nd party Congress of 1961, introduced a new moral code, which was essentially a substitute for the Bible.
An official anti-religious campaign launched in 1958, meant that religious activity of any kind was under scrutiny, unless it was conducted in an official place. It was not until 1958, the religion was considered officially to be unscientific, and therefore to the detriment of the well-being of the people.
CENSORSHIP: Eased. Books and libraries proliferated so that by the late 1950s nearly 65,000 books were being published per year, twice the number that came out in the mid-1920s. By 1959, there were 135,000 libraries containing around 8000 million books, a tenfold increase on the numbers for 1913. Newspapers also flourished, with a total readership of nearly 60 million by the early 1960s.
Extent of economic and social changes
Khrushev’s continuation of centralised planning resulted in further economic growth and more diversification of what was produced. But, his first plan was abandoned and his second correlated with a slowdown in the rate of growth, which makes Khrushchev’s achievements less impressive than Stalin’s.
Agriculture
Khrushchev showed a great interest in agriculture and professed to be something of an expert on all aspects of farming. One area Khrushchev focused on for improvement was the organisation of agricultural production. More emphasis was placed on increasing production through state farms. This was partly at the expense of smaller collective farms, many of which were merged. Other measures included the change in the role of the Ministry of Agriculture from being involved in planning and implementing policy to that of an a body and the abolition of MTS. However, the historian Geoffrey Hosking (2002) is probably correct in stating that Khrushchev ‘never fully got to grips with the authoritarian and bureaucratic structure of agricultural administration, which offered producers few incentives to improve either output or productivity”. The question of providing more incentives was addressed through raising the prices for state procurements (amounts of food taken directly by the state from farmers), reducing the actual amounts to be procured, reducing taxes placed on peasants and increasing the provision of electricity to more isolated rural areas. Some success was achieved, although increases in the price of food angered urban dwellers. It was unfortunate that Khrushchev’s main drive to increase the incentive to raise production preceded the disaster years of 1962 and 1963; bad weather resulted in a terrible harvest. Riots broke out in the countryside but more seriously in towns. The most notable incident was at the Budyenni Locomotive Works in Novocherkassk, where the KGB ended up killing 23 protesters.
Virgin Land campaign
From the start of his rule, Khrushchev displayed a keenness to increase quickly the amounts of cereals produced. To this end, in 1954, he introduced the Virgin Land campaign. The aim of this was to increase the amount of land to be cultivated. This was not new; Stolypin had introduced the idea but dekulakisation had put a halt to the process. The results were as follows:
In 1950, 96 million acres of land were given over to the production of wheat. By 1964, this had increased to 165 million acres.
Urban dwellers started to feel that their food requirements were at last being adequately met.
However, the approach to using the ‘virgin soil’ was flawed. The land was overused with little attention paid to crop rotation. The effect was a reduction in soil fertility. Also, little was done to counter soil erosion, a result of the virgin soil regions being arid, close to the Central Asian desert and prone to wind storms. Generally, Khrushchev wanted his policies to be implemented speedily and, as a result, he cut corners. In the long term, productivity and production slowed, the first major indication of which came in 1963. The disastrous harvest of 1963 (due mainly to drought) saw grain production fall to 107 million tonnes compared with 140 million tonnes in the previous year. Many historians believe that the Virgin Land campaign was the main reason for Khrushchev’s downfall in 1964.
EDUCATION: Khrushchev reverted to secondary schools based on the Polytechnic model. All the changes included the scrapping of all school fees, the closing down of co-education of boarding schools, the creation of specialist academies, and the spread of correspondence courses. Such progressive policies, though, were balanced by a number of restrictive measures, including the rewriting of official history books to reflect the disengagement from the Stalinist past.
Economic planning and the Virgin Lands Scheme
Agriculture
Khrushchev showed a great interest in agriculture and professed to be something of an expert on all aspects of farming. One area Khrushchev focused on for improvement was the organisation of agricultural production. More emphasis was placed on increasing production through state farms. This was partly at the expense of smaller collective farms, many of which were merged. Other measures included the change in the role of the Ministry of Agriculture from being involved in planning and implementing policy to that of an a body and the abolition of MTS. However, the historian Geoffrey Hosking (2002) is probably correct in stating that Khrushchev ‘never fully got to grips with the authoritarian and bureaucratic structure of agricultural administration, which offered producers few incentives to improve either output or productivity”. The question of providing more incentives was addressed through raising the prices for state procurements (amounts of food taken directly by the state from farmers), reducing the actual amounts to be procured, reducing taxes placed on peasants and increasing the provision of electricity to more isolated rural areas. Some success was achieved, although increases in the price of food angered urban dwellers. It was unfortunate that Khrushchev’s main drive to increase the incentive to raise production preceded the disaster years of 1962 and 1963; bad weather resulted in a terrible harvest. Riots broke out in the countryside but more seriously in towns. The most notable incident was at the Budyenni Locomotive Works in Novocherkassk, where the KGB ended up killing 23 protesters.
Virgin Land campaign
From the start of his rule, Khrushchev displayed a keenness to increase quickly the amounts of cereals produced. To this end, in 1954, he introduced the Virgin Land campaign. The aim of this was to increase the amount of land to be cultivated. This was not new; Stolypin had introduced the idea but dekulakisation had put a halt to the process. The results were as follows:
In 1950, 96 million acres of land were given over to the production of wheat. By 1964, this had increased to 165 million acres.
Urban dwellers started to feel that their food requirements were at last being adequately met.
However, the approach to using the ‘virgin soil’ was flawed. The land was overused with little attention paid to crop rotation. The effect was a reduction in soil fertility. Also, little was done to counter soil erosion, a result of the virgin soil regions being arid, close to the Central Asian desert and prone to wind storms. Generally, Khrushchev wanted his policies to be implemented speedily and, as a result, he cut corners. In the long term, productivity and production slowed, the first major indication of which came in 1963. The disastrous harvest of 1963 (due mainly to drought) saw grain production fall to 107 million tonnes compared with 140 million tonnes in the previous year. Many historians believe that the Virgin Land campaign was the main reason for Khrushchev’s downfall in 1964.
The impact of the Cold War
High Financial cost borne by the bulk of the population:
The nuclear arms race and space race were very expensive. Before 1964, the Russian government managed to cope but high levels of investment in heavy industry to meet military requirements were to the detriment of consumer industries. The knock-on effect was that the living standards appeared much lower than in the West, leading to protests that were ruthlessly dealt with.
Displayed some weakness:
The USSR was not financially strong enough to participate in another war, and this was seen internationally in events like the Cuban missile crisis where Soviets willingly backed down to prevent disagreements getting out of hand.
Minimal impact on the Internal function and structure of Government BUT…
Heightened international tensions:
Partly because of the Cold War, Khrushchev attempted de-Stalinization to paint the USSR in a more positive light, especially when considering the USA’s containment policy: in this way Khrushchev’s political ideology was partly determined by the Cold War.
Khrushchev’s fall
He struggled against the backdrop of the financially, crippling Cold War to find the money to carry out his promises of economic and social reform to raise living standards. He also suffered as a result of what some rival sought as a liberal attitude and the image. He portrayed as a man of the people. In the end, it was relatively easy for his opponents to launch a campaign that secured his dismissal and was removed from power in 1964.
