In the decolonising world, the discourse of difference greatly expanded potential Soviet allies beyond Communist Parties. The experience of Central Asia provided living proof that a vanguard in Moscow could substitute for the absence of a proletarian vanguard abroad. US support for its allies in the Third World made Soviet support for NLMs that much more natural.
In April 1955, the non-aligned movement was born in Bandung, Indonesia. From the perspective of the new discourse of difference in the Soviet Union, non-aligned meant not aligned with imperialism, permitting closer relations with Moscow. Nehru, Sukarno and Nasser became friends in the struggle against imperialism in the newly christened zone of peace. In August 1955, Moscow approved the sale of Czech arms to Egypt. In November and December 1955, Khrushchev spent four weeks in India, Burma and Afghanistan, during which he compared these three countries to Central Asia. Reading the decolonising world through the Soviet experience in Central Asia, Khrushchev declared that the road to socialism was possible for anybody in the developing world, no matter how meagre their material resources. One need only rely on Soviet experience and help.
Molotov found preposterous the idea of socialism in places like India as he did on difference at home and in Yugoslavia. While not denying the possibility of normal relations with Delhi, he rejected the idea that leaders such as Nehru could ever escape their petit bourgeois nationalist identities, and consequent roles as imperialist lackeys.[245] On 1 June 1956 Molotov was replaced as foreign minister by Dmitrii Shepilov, who had played a key role in the Soviet opening to Egypt in 1955.82 At the June 1957 CC plenum, Molotov was accused by Mikoyan of not recognising the obvious differences between India, Egypt and Afghanistan, on the one hand, and Pakistan, the Philippines and Iraq, on the other. Instead 'Molotov says the bourgeois camp is united against us... He is a bygone conservative ... This is a left-wing infantile disease in which we cannot indulge . . .We should not be fetishists or dogmatists.' Khrushchev summed matters up: 'Comrade Molotov, if they accept you as one of our leaders, you will ruin your country, take it into isolation ... Molotov is a hopeless dried-up
old man.'83
Cold peace at home: cold war abroad, 1957-85
At a May 1957 Kremlin meeting with the intelligentsia, Khrushchev warned them that if they ever tried to create a 'Pett^'fi circle' of reformist intellectuals like they had in Budapest the year before, we 'will grind you into dust'.[246]Khrushchev's fulminations were characteristic of the rest of his rule: support for pushing the boundaries of difference with periodic eruptions of vitriol against what he deemed transgressive. Khrushchev charged Pasternak and others with a lack of patriotism after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1958. But in May i960 Khrushchev approved the publication, in Pravda no less, of an anti-Stalinist poem by Andrei Tvardovskii. Two years later, Khrushchev was railing at the Manezh exhibit of contemporary Soviet art about 'all this shit' they were producing. But almost simultaneously he was approving, along with the Politburo, which met twice over the manuscript, the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic anti-Stalinist novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.[247]
The removal of Khrushchev from power in October 1964 did not narrow the boundaries of permissible difference. Indeed, Mikhail Suslov, in reading the bill of particulars before the CC, praised 'Khrushchev's positive role in unmasking the cult of personality of Stalin', and agreed with the removal of Molotov in 1957.[248] Under Brezhnev and his two successors, the main targets of official repression were those who engaged in public dissent, especially after August 1968.[249] The Siniavskii/Daniel' trials of February 1966 were an early manifestation of official intolerance. But it grew more comprehensive and more directed against those with manifest political demands to change the Soviet political system.[250] Solzhenitsyn, for example, was finally exiled in February 1974, at Andropov's personal behest.[251] A 1979 KGB report on avant- garde artists could have been written in 1955: 'they produce individualistic works . . . based strictly on personal perceptions'.90
This struggle over difference at home was not isolated from identity relations with the outside world: China was a prominent player. The removal of Molotov in 1957 not only marked the triumph of difference over the NSM, but also the irreversible turn towards alienation from China. China's Stalinist model helped proponents of difference at home point out what restoration ofthe NSM would mean for socialism in the Soviet Union. This domestic role for Chinese identity continued until the Chinese alliance with the United States after the death of Mao in the late 1970s. By then, however, a new external Other had emerged on the revisionist side of the spectrum: Eurocommunism, or National Social Democracy, personified by Enrico Berlinguer in Italy.[252]
Soviet identity was publicly contested in the discourse of permissible difference in relationship to Chinese dogmatism, Eurocommunist revisionism and competition with the imperialist camp headed by the United States. Meanwhile, identification with Europe was a counter-discourse within the Soviet party elite and intelligentsia. Its public manifestations, whether as Eurocommunism or as Andrei Sakharov's 'Letter to the Soviet Leadership', were officially repressed as anti-Soviet, but identification with European Social Democracy as the desirable Soviet future was already emerging as the alternative beyond the boundaries of permissible difference in the 1950s. Ironically, both the invasion ofCzechoslovakia in 1968 and the accession to the Helsinki Treaty in 1975 energised identification with Europe among Soviet elites.[253] By the 1960s, a discourse on ethno-national Russian identity was emerging, especially among the 'village prose writers', led by Valentin Rasputin. While granted more official tolerance to publish its views, it was not as deeply institutionalised as its European alternative.[254]
If the early years of the Thaw were characterised by the de- institutionalisation ofStalinism, then the next thirty years witnessed the insti- tutionalisation of both the dominant discourse and its competitors. There are several related issues here: the institutionalised lack of unbiased information available to decision makers; the position of General Secretary within the decision-making process; the split between the MFA and Central Committee International Department (CCID); the development of research institutes; and the persistence of the intelligentsia as a carrier of the discourse of difference.
Khrushchev, despite making agriculture his primary domestic avocation, continued to receive inflated statistics on harvests, yields and technological innovation throughout his tenure as General Secretary.[255] Georgii Shakhnazarov, an aide to both Andropov in the i960s and i970s, and then Gorbachev in the i980s, relates how party elites, such as CCID secretary Boris Ponomarev and Defence Minister Dmitrii Ustinov, remained in a state of delusion about the economic conditions of the country, reporting their election excursions to the countryside, where all had been made ready for them, as if it were a representative sample of Soviet reality.[256] But this delusion extended to foreign and security policy as well. It was not until 1990, for example, that Soviets found out that the May i960 shootdown of Gary Powers's U-2 spy plane had required thirteen missiles, and had only inadvertently been hit.[257] Soviet ambassadors, especially in the developing world, reported to Moscow just like an obkom secretary would, exaggerating the industrial, agricultural and political accomplishments of the piece of territory they considered to be their own.[258]
248
'Plenum, TsK KPSS, Oktyabr' 1964 goda. Stenograficheskii otchet',
252
Cherniaev
p. 53.
254
English,
258
98 Ibid., p. 9. On the CCID and decision-making on Angola, see OddArne Westad, 'Moscow