KHRUSHCHEV POLITICAL AUTHORITY Flashcards
21 .Political authority and government: Khrushchev’s rise to power;
Even as Stalin was dying, the newly created and enlarged Presidium that had replaced the Politburo at the nineteenth Party Congress in 1952 was in session and debating the succession.
It was announced in March 1953 that Malenkov would
combine the roles of Secretary of the Party’s Central Committee and Chairman of the Council of Ministers, but within a few days his rivals had forced him to step down as Party Secretary and concentrate instead on his governmental role.
This was a significant development, as his post was taken by Khrushchev.
21 .Political authority and government: Khrushchev’s rise to power;
A collective leadership was subsequently created with Molotov, the Foreign Minister, and Beria, formerly Malenkov’s ally and head of the MVD, all exerting considerable influence.
Khrushchev immediately began
appointing his own protégés to important Party posts and although underestimated by the others as a serious contender for power, built himself a strong support network in the Party’s administrative machinery.
21 .Political authority and government: Khrushchev’s rise to power;
In February 1955 Malenkov found himself isolated and was therefore forced to step down as Chairman of the Council of Ministers.
He took the new and relatively unimportant role of Minister for Power Stations.
He was succeeded by
Bulganin, one of a number that Khrushchev had been promoting in the state ministries over the preceding years.
21 .Political authority and government: Khrushchev’s rise to power;
In the following weeks, Beria emerged as the leader who was most anxious to depart from Stalinist policies:
He advocated the release of all but the most dangerous political prisoners, took a moderate line in foreign policy, denounced the Mingrelian purge and sought to scale back on some of Stalin’s more costly construction projects. The popularity of his pronouncements as well as the power of his office caused alarm at the top.
Malenkov and other Presidium members including Khrushchev conspired against him and
arranged Beria’s arrest at the hands of the military in June 1953.
An anti-Beria campaign was conducted in the press, and he was accused of criminal anti-Party and anti-State activities was secretly tried and executed on 24 December 1953. His supporters were also purged.
21 .Political authority and government: Khrushchev’s rise to power;
Policy differences caused further splits. The leadership was divided on foreign policy, industrial and agricultural policy, and the role of the Party, Malenkov, who placed government above Party, attempted, with Molotov’s backing, to use his influence to launch a ‘new course’ wanted to change collective farm policy, reduce peasant taxes and put more investment into consumer goods.
Against this, Khrushchev, who
placed Party before government, offered his own set of policy proposals:
He offered a less radical proposal for the parallel development of heavy and light industry and sold himself as an agricultural expert, launching his Virgin Lands Scheme early in 1954.
The early successes of this scheme helped to rally the Party behind him.
21 .Political authority and government: Khrushchev’s rise to power;
Khrushchev and Bulganin acted as joint leaders until 1958, although there was an attempt to unseat Khrushchev in 1957 when they were on a visit to Finland.
A majority in the Presidium voted for Khrushchev’s dismissal but Khrushchev insisted the matter be put to the Central Committee.
Before this convened, Khrushchev ensured
those favourable to himself were brought to Moscow to vote in his favour.
He also benefited from the support of Marshal Zhukov, who had been brought back into power as deputy Minister for Defence and thus brought Red Army support. Zhukov spoke out against Malenkov, Molotov, and their supporter Kaganovich.
21 .Political authority and government: Khrushchev’s rise to power;
The plotters, who became known as the anti-Party group, were duly outvoted by the Central Committee, and accused of conservatism and involvement in the purges of the 1930s.
They were expelled from the Central Committee and
sent to jobs far from Moscow, while Zhukov and other supporters were rewarded with seats in the Presidium.
21 .Political authority and government: Khrushchev’s rise to power;
However, Khrushchev was not content to be reliant on others. In October 1957 Zhukov was dismissed and a propaganda campaign against him accused him of hindering Party work in the army and creating his own personality cult.
In March 1958,
Bulganin was accused of encouraging the anti-Party group and forced to step down and Khrushchev took over as General Secretary of the Party.
Thus, the two top jobs - in Party and in government - were combined once more.
21 .Political authority and government: Khrushchev’s rise to power;
POLICIES AND IDEOLOGY, AND DE-STALINISATION
In June 1955, the government announced a meeting of the first Party congress since Stalin’s death. It would be the twentieth and would meet on 25 February 1956.
Before it took place, Khrushchev had already begun to reverse Stalinist policies:
Those accused in the Doctors’ Plot were released, Beria, the police and the gulag system had all been attacked, and a cultural ‘thaw’ was underway.
21 .Political authority and government: Khrushchev’s rise to power;
Most of the Presidium welcomed the dismantling of the Stalinist Terror apparatus, but many had been involved in the purges and did not welcome a re-opening of the past.
They were uneasy at the thought of delegates debating Stalin’s rule and thus Khrushchev, who was determined to speak out, was persuaded to do so only in a closed session.
This was to be held in secret
and none of the 1400 delegates was allowed to ask questions. In preparing his speech, Khrushchev used material that had been assembled by a special commission of the Central Committee into abuses under Stalin.
21 .Political authority and government: Khrushchev’s rise to power;
- In his speech, Khrushchev delivered a blistering attack on Stalin, accusing him of responsibility for the purges, terror, torture, mass arrests, executions and the gulags, causing tremendous harm to the cause of socialist progress. He quoted from Lenin’s testament to illustrate Lenin’s view of Stalin and accused Stalin of betraying Leninist principles (also implying that Malenkov and Molotov were his accomplices).
- He blamed Stalin for the murder of Kirov, called for the rehabilitation of Trotsky and questioned Stalin’s war leadership.
The speech was met by resounding applause. Although it was supposedly
held in secret and was never published in the USSR, copies were soon sent to foreign parties and its content soon filtered down through the Party ranks in the USSR. Some younger communists demanded that those responsible for Stalinist ‘crimes’ should be brought to justice, but Khrushchev quietly avoided comment on such suggestions.
21 .Political authority and government: Khrushchev’s rise to power;
Although the ‘Secret Speech’ condemned matters such as autocratic leadership, the undermining of the Party, the brutal suppression of Party members and the mishandling of the war, which affected the Soviet ruling elites, it paid limited attention to the purging of ordinary soviet citizens and accepted economic controls, strong leadership, a single Party, and the elimination of factions as perfectly legitimate.
In short, the speech tried to
justify a good deal of continuity, while distancing the leadership from Stalinist mistakes.
* There was no wish to incriminate those, like Khrushchev himself, who had benefited from the Stalinist system.
21 .Political authority and government: Khrushchev’s rise to power;
POLITICAL AND PARTY CHANGE
Stalin’s death brought changes in the balance of power within the Soviet Union:
Under Stalin, both Party and state governmental institutions had become mere rubber-stamping organisations, dependent on one man.
As a result of the leadership struggle, they assumed a
renewed importance as centres for debate and decision-making.
Initially, a third institution - the police - competed with them for influence. However, with Beria’s arrest and execution in 1953, the police found themselves again, as in 1934, under the authority of the Party and government.
21 .Political authority and government: Khrushchev’s rise to power;
The coercive machinery of the Stalinist era was dismantled, and the Secret Police apparatus reduced in size.
Political amnesties and a partial revival of an independent judicial system marked a move away from police influence in state matters.
The Party gained most from Beria’s fall:
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- Since Khrushchev was First Secretary, he was able to use his influence in the Party in his struggle for power.
- When he sought the support of the Central Committee in 1957 to defend his position in the face of a challenge in the Presidium, he was returning to the traditional hierarchy of power, as advocated by Lenin, whereby the smaller institutions were directly responsible to their parent bodies.
21 .Political authority and government: Khrushchev’s rise to power;
Khrushchev thus helped to restore the position of the Party back to something like that which it had enjoyed in the 1920s.
However, there were two other goals sought by Khrushchev from 1957, which sometimes contradicted the Party’s ascendancy:
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- democratisation - this would involve weakening the traditional bureaucracy to give more responsibility to the people.
- decentralisation - this would give more initiative to the localities.
