After a February 1955 Supreme Soviet session demoted Malenkov from prime minister to minister of electrification, Khrushchev's next target was Molotov. The two men collaborated against Beria and Malenkov, and although they disagreed on Virgin Lands development (Molotov favoured investing in previously cultivated areas instead), Khrushchev at first kept clear of Molotov's foreign-affairs bailiwick. In 1954, however, Khrushchev had pushed for rapprochement with Tito's Yugoslavia, partly to correct what he regarded as one of Stalin's most grievous sins, but also as a way to undermine Molotov, who had been a prime architect of the Moscow-Belgrade split in 1948. When Molotov objected to Khrushchev's trip to Belgrade in May 1955, Khrushchev responded with an assault on Molotov at aJuly 1955 Central Committee plenum. Although he was replaced as foreign minister in mid-1956, Molotov kept his seat on the Presidium. Like Malenkov, who also remained on the Presidium, Molotov would never forgive Khrushchev, would hold every error he made against him and would take the first opportunity to get even. The turmoil of 1956 gave them that chance.
Khrushchev was not the only Soviet leader who favoured addressing the Stalin issue at the Twentieth Congress. Beria's arrest, investigation and trial had widened the circle of those fully aware of Stalin's crimes. After his execution, requests poured in for reconsideration of high-level purges. By the end of 1955 thousands of political prisoners had returned home, bringing stories of what had gone on in the camps, and in the process adding many of their relatives to those who would support de-Stalinisation. Yet the Gulag system was still functioning, the most famous show trials of the 1930s had not been re-examined, and labour camps and colonies still held hundreds of thousands of inmates. Mikoyan recalled that he pressed Khrushchev to denounce Stalin, saying, 'There has to be a report on what happened, if not to the party as a whole, then to delegates to the first congress after his death. If we don't do that at the congress, and someone else does it sometime before the next congress, then everyone would have a legal right to hold us fully responsible for the crimes that occurred.'23 On 13 February, the day before the congress convened, the Presidium as a whole decided that Khrushchev would address the subject at a closed session.24 But Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov had grave reservations, and Molotov, in particular, later insisted on the
pp. 155, 166. Khrushchev's remarks in RGANI (Russian State Archive ofRecent History),
f.2, op. 1, d. 127.
23 Mikoian, Tak bylo, p. 591. 24 RGANI, f.2, op. 1, d. 181, lines 2, 4-5.
30 June Central Committee statement that in effect revised Khrushchev's secret speech.
Early in 1957, Khrushchev himself began taking back what he had said. At a New Year's Eve reception for the Soviet elite and the diplomatic corps, he declared that he and his colleagues were all 'Stalinists' in the uncompromising struggle against the class enemy. After the invasion of Hungary sparked protests among Soviet students and intellectuals, Khrushchev approved a new round of arrests.[122] Sensing that his authority was eroding, he launched a counter-offensive which ended up further undermining his position. His February move to abolish most national economic ministries and replace them with regional economic councils antagonised central planners and ministers. His May pledge that the USSR would soon overtake the United States in per capita output of meat, butter and milk, made without being cleared with the Presidium, was ill-conceived. His bullying of writers at a gala spring picnic played into the hands of Kremlin colleagues who had no use for literary liberals but used Khrushchev's boorish behaviour to discredit him.
On 18 June 1957, Khrushchev's colleagues (he later labelled them the 'anti- party group') launched their move to remove him as party leader. Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich led the assault, supported by Bulganin, Voroshilov, Mikhail Pervukhin, Maksim Saburov and Dmitrii Shepilov. The first seven of these constituted a majority of the Presidium's full members. They lost when Khrushchev and Mikoyan, backed by several Presidium candidate members and Central Committee secretaries, insisted that the Central Committee itself, in which Khrushchev supporters predominated, decide the issue.
The 'anti-party group' (which did not in fact oppose the party and was so racked by internal divisions as hardly to constitute a group) accused Khrushchev of erratic and irrational personal behaviour, but its deeper reason for attacking him was fear that he would use the Stalin issue against them. He did tar them with Stalinist crimes, both at the June 1957 Presidium meeting, which lasted until 22 June, and the Central Committee plenum, which stretched seven more days after that. After the plenum, most of the plotters lost their positions, Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and Shepilov immediately, the others more slowly so as to obscure how many of them had conspired against Khrushchev. It was only in 1961 that Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and
Shepilov were expelled from the party, but after 1957 Khrushchev faced no more top-level opposition until his own proteges in the Presidium began to conspire against him in 1964. Until then he was free virtually to dictate domestic and foreign policy and to undermine himself as the result.
Reforming agriculture
Khrushchev's first priority was agriculture. Yet, in addressing this and other areas, he quickly encountered the ideological limits of the Soviet system, social resistance and bureaucratic behaviour that magnified his own errors. At times Khrushchev sounded like a born-again free marketeer: 'Excuse me for talking to you sharply,' he once told state farm workers, 'but if a capitalist farmer used eight kilos of grain to produce one kilo of meat he'd have to go around without trousers. But around here a state farm director who behaves like that - his trousers are just fine. Why? Because he doesn't have to answer for his own mess; no one even holds it against him.'[123] Yet Khrushchev was still wedded to collectivist agriculture. In 1953 he had defended individual material incentives: 'Only people who do not understand the policy of the party . . . see any danger to the socialist system in the presence of personally owned productive livestock.'[124] But he himself saw such a danger, and so preferred to rely on party mobilisation and exhortation, and on quick fixes of technology and organisation.
Corn had long been grown in the USSR, but Khrushchev took the United States as his model. His American guru when it came to corn, Iowa farmer Roswell Garst, stressed necessary preconditions - hybrid seeds, fertilisation, irrigation, mechanisation, plus use of insecticides and herbicide - but Khrushchev pushed on without them, not just in suitable southern regions but in Siberia and the north as well. Collective farmers resisted planting corn because its cultivation was particularly labour intensive. That drove Khrushchev to press his corn campaign all the harder, while zealous bureaucrats who wanted to please him exacerbated the situation by insisting on extending corn acreage without adequately preparing peasants first.
Despite these and other mistakes (such as the virtually overnight abolition of machine tractor stations, which provided collective farms with machinery and the people to run it), agriculture at first boasted big gains. Between 1953 and 1959 farm output rose 8.5 per cent annually and 51 per cent overall. But 1960 proved to be the worst year for agriculture since Stalin's death, and despite optimistic forecasts in the summer of 1961, that autumn's harvest was no better. Khrushchev's response was to resort to more institutional tinkering. In 1962 he moved to abolish district party committees, the fabled raikomy which had overseen agriculture for decades, and to replace them with 'territorial production administrations', which added another layer of bureaucracy between the countryside and the capital. That same autumn he proposed dividing the Communist Party into two separate branches, one specialising on agriculture, the other on industry. Ever since Lenin, the party had jealously guarded its monopoly of power by centralising its own ranks. Khrushchev was convinced that local party officials shied away from rural problems, and he was determined to force them to concentrate on feeding the people.
122
Nikolai A. Barsukov, 'Analiticheskaia zapiska: Pozitsiia poslestalinskogo rukovodstva v otnoshenii politicheskikh repressii 30-x-40-x i nachala 50-x godov', unpublished article, pp. 41-6. Barsukov, 'The Reverse Side of the Thaw', paper delivered at conference on 'New Evidence on Cold War History', Moscow, Jan. 1993, pp. 19-20, 32-6.
123
Nikita S. Khrushchev,
124
Speech in Thomas F. Whitney (ed.),