These events had taken place in secret, and only a very few were aware that something was up. For a week the CC, some two hundred strong, lambasted Molotov and his allies, accusing them of mistaken policies, splitting the party, trying to seize power, ignoring the Central Committee, and bringing up the behavior of Molotov and Kaganovich in the great terror. The party elite did not want a return to the fear and despotism of the Stalin era. One of the most outspoken was Brezhnev, a provincial party leader from the Ukraine who had only recently entered the ranks of the party’s central elite. Finally Khrushchev and his supporters denounced the three main plotters as an “anti-party group” and expelled them from the Presidium, replacing them with Brezhnev and Furtseva. In Stalin’s time the plotters could have expected only death: instead they received minor appointments, Molotov going as ambassador to Mongolia. He and his allies had grossly underestimated the new party elite that had come into power since the 1930s – people with a great deal of experience in wartime and economic management and who were appalled at the prospect of a return to the Stalin era. These younger people were Khrushchev’s base in the party, and they would remain in power until the 1980s.
Molotov had criticized Khrushchev for trying to create a new “cult of personality” and run everything himself, but the Central Committee had taken that charge as mere demagoguery. They were to be proved to a large extent wrong in the coming years. Only a few months later Khrushchev arranged the demotion of Marshal Zhukov, accusing him of ignoring party control of the armed forces and despotic behavior. These charges had some truth to them, but his removal from the Ministry of Defense and the Presidium meant that Khrushchev now had no rivals at the top. He was not a dictator like Stalin, but he alone was at the pinnacle of power in the USSR.
Khrushchev used his power to conduct a foreign policy that increasingly involved bluffing his way through crises, alternating cautious diplomacy with wild risks, the most famous being the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. He also faced the increasing disintegration of the Soviet bloc, as Albania and Rumania gradually turned into independent Stalinist states, and most important, China moved inexorably away from the USSR toward the Cultural Revolution. Mao and his allies in the Communist movement saw Khrushchev as the embodiment of “revisionism,” of a turn away from the true revolutionary path. Khrushchev’s colleagues in the Kremlin most certainly did not share Mao’s views, though they did think that Khrushchev had frequently exacerbated the conflict by his clumsy personal style. All of these events undermined his standing with the party elite, but equally problematic were the economic policies he pursued.
The problem here was not Khrushchev’s goals. The party elite clearly agreed that the country needed a radical improvement in agriculture. In the late 1950s the urban population still lived largely on black bread, sausage when it was available, and whatever could be afforded from the peasant market. Consumer goods were far more available than earlier but hard to actually obtain. Hence Khrushchev’s desire to put more resources into agriculture, consumer goods, and even housing, was extremely popular not just with the people but with the party leaders. They realized that they could not maintain stability if living standards did not improve radically.
The biggest problem was agriculture. One of his first acts was to abolish the machine–tractor stations set up in the 1930s and transfer their machinery to the kolhozes, a move that meant much greater autonomy for the farms. More was to come. On his 1959 trip to the United States he caused a considerable stir by his visits to American farms in Iowa and his meetings with American farmers. From this experience he seems to have been confirmed in his belief in large-scale, higher-technology farming, for American agriculture was already turning from family farms toward agribusiness. He realized that the USSR was way behind in the production and use of chemical fertilizer. The Stalinist industrialization model had consciously favored metallurgy and coal over chemicals and oil, as they were more suited to the then level of economic development as well as more important for defense production. This decision meant that increases in agricultural production, which did occur after the mid-1930s, came from mechanization, hybridization of plants, and more systematic crop rotation, rather than from the use of fertilizer or pesticides. None of these methods did more than keep pace with rapidly increasing urbanization, and to make matters worse Stalin and his agricultural bosses had accepted various crank schemes in agronomy like the notorious “grass-field” system. This was the notion, accepted by the authorities from the late 1930s, that food grains should be rotated with grasses rather than clover or other plants that aid nitrogen fixation. The system became a major bugbear for Khrushchev, who demanded that Soviet agriculture follow the rotation patterns accepted in American and other agricultural systems, and in 1963 he got his way.
Unfortunately Khrushchev’s programs combined solid planning with dubious schemes like the virgin lands project. Khrushchev, who considered himself something of an agricultural expert because of his years in the Ukraine, was aware that there was a great deal of uncultivated land in Western Siberia and Kazakhstan. To him the solution was obvious: the Soviet Union’s low yield in grain could be solved by sending thousands of settlers to these areas to put the steppe under the plow. The result was a 1930s-style mobilization, with the Komsomol in the lead, sending young people out to live in tents while they sowed grain and built houses. The overall size of the Soviet harvest did increase rapidly as a result, but the program also took resources from modernizing the collective farms and it turned out that much of the land was indeed fertile but too arid for continuous cultivation. Environmental degradation was the inevitable result, with falling output. The Kazakh leadership had warned Khrushchev that there was not much suitable new land, but he simply replaced these naysayers with his cronies from Kiev and Moscow.
Besides the virgin lands, his other agricultural obsession was corn. Khrushchev knew even before he went to America that corn was a major component of animal feed throughout the world, and he decided that the Soviet Union should produce corn. Most agronomists thought that it was not a suitable crop outside of some small areas in the far south of the country, but Khrushchev would not agree, even trying to force the authorities in the Baltic republics to grow corn in place of the more traditional crops. Much time and money was expended trying to find a hybrid that would grow well under various conditions, but the project just turned into another centrally sponsored campaign with no major results. Khrushchev, however, would not give up.
Khrushchev’s record in industry was mixed. The 1950s were a period of very high growth rates, even after the end of post-war reconstruction. Soviet achievements in technology, such as the building of a nuclear industry and rockets that could go into space were visible symbols of a modern state. Most of the nuclear development was still secret, but the Sputnik launch in 1957 was a worldwide event. Even more spectacular was Iurii Gagarin’s flight into space in 1961, followed by a whole series of space flights. Until the American moon landing in 1969, the Soviets seemed to be way ahead in the space race. Along with these very real achievements there were persistent problems. The new decentralized management system was no better than the old one, and in many areas it simply added a new layer of bureaucracy. More promising was the decision, which Khrushchev enthusiastically supported if he did not originate, of turning massive resources toward the chemical industry and the production of oil and natural gas. The two were related, as much of the raw material for the chemical industry would be petroleum byproducts. The Soviet Union would have plastic. For Khrushchev, the chemical industry was also to be a panacea for agriculture, as he did realize that corn and the virgin lands were not enough.