These panaceas also failed. The 1963 harvest was disastrous: only 107.5 million tons compared to 134.7 in 1958; the Virgin Lands produced their smallest crop in years, although the sown area was now 10 million hectares larger than in 1955. As a result Moscow had to buy wheat from the West. 'Father didn't understand what was wrong', his son, Sergei, remembered. 'He grew nervous, became angry, quarreled, looked for culprits and didn't find them. Deep inside he began subconsciously to understand that the problem was not in the details. It was the system itself that didn't work, but he couldn't change his beliefs.'[125]
Industry and housing
Energising industrial management and rendering it more efficient, another post-Stalinist task, also encountered systemic obstacles. The centralised Soviet planning system, which excelled at 'extensive' heavy industrial development, was not suited for 'intensive' development of an increasingly complex and diversified economy. Yet Soviet leaders of the Khrushchev period were not inclined to pursue proposals for fundamental, structural reform. Although the Moscow-based ministries, which Khrushchev abolished in February 1957, had favoured the narrow needs of their own industries at the expense of local areas in which their plants were located, the sovnarkhozy which replaced them fostered localism while losing sight of all-Union interests. That soon led to a process of recentralisation in which the number of regional economic councils was reduced, a new agency called the Supreme Economic Council was created to co-ordinate them and a series of state committees was formed to duplicate the role of the departed ministries. Nor did Khrushchev's division of the party produce positive industrial results. Although Soviet GNP grew at a rate of 7.1 per cent until 1958, after that it dipped down to 5.4 per cent in 1964, not nearly enough to allow the USSR to 'catch up and overtake' the United States which, although it was growing more slowly, had a much larger economic base.
While the economy did not grow fast enough to satisfy Soviet leaders, the lives of ordinary citizens improved. Wages rose, meat consumption increased, consumer goods like televisions, refrigerators and washing machines became widely available. Stalin's legacy included a dreadful housing crisis: massive overcrowding, armies of young workers living in dormitories, multiple families crowded into communal apartments, with each family occupying one room and all sharing a single kitchen and bathroom. In the Khrushchev period, the annual rate of housing construction nearly doubled. Between 1956 and 1965, about 108 million people moved into new apartments, many of them in standardised five-storey apartment houses built out of prefabricated materials in rapid, assembly-line fashion. Millions were grateful, but Khrushchev encouraged ever higher expectations, particularly by promising, in a speech presenting a new party programme to the Central Committee in June 1961, that the communist utopia itself would be 'just about built' by 1980.[126]
Culture
Members of the scientific and artistic intelligentsia were a natural constituency for reform. Having been singled out for special suffering under Stalin, many of them enthusiastically welcomed de-Stalinisation. 'I like [Khrushchev] ever so much', gushed Andrei Sakharov in 1956. 'After all, he so differs from Stalin.'[127]However, they were also increasingly dismayed - not only by Khrushchev's continual retreats from anti-Stalinism, but by the incredibly boorish behaviour of a man whom artist Ernst Neizvestny described as 'the most uncultured man I've ever met'.[128] Anticipating just such condescension from intellectuals, Khrushchev dreaded encounters with them even as he craved their respect. They did not realise that their resistance to his calls for ideological discipline challenged not just the party line but his self-esteem. That is why clashes with recalcitrant intellectuals provoked him into swirls of angry rhetoric, simultaneously offensive and defensive, lashing out at his audience in a violent disconnected way.
What has been called the 'Thaw' began after Stalin's death but picked up momentum after the Twentieth Party Congress. After the long night of Stalinism, with its pogrom against writers and artists, critic Maya Turovskaya recalled, 'the coming of Khrushchev and the Twentieth Congress felt like a great holiday of the soul'.[129] Ilya Ehrenburg's novel The Thaw (Otepel') included biting criticism of the ruling elite. In Vladimir Dudintsev's Not By Bread Alone (Ne Khlebom edinym), an idealistic engineer is thwarted by mindless, heartless officialdom. Literaturnaia Moskva (Literary Moscow), a literary almanac ofprose, poetry, plays, criticism and social commentary published in i956, included works mocking the official image of'the new Soviet man'. Mikhail Kalatozov's film, The Cranes are Flying (Letiatzhuravli), Grigorii Chukhrai's Ballad of a Soldier (Ballada o soldate) and Sergei Bondarchuk's Destiny of a Man (Sud'ba cheloveka) took a fresh look at the sacred subject of the Russian soldier in the Second World War (see Plate 22). Concern for the individual, rather than the nation or the state, began to appear in the work of a new generation of film-makers such as Andrei Tarkovsky.
During the World Youth Festival in Moscow in 1957, thousands of young people from around the globe flooded the city, singing and dancing late into the night to the beat of African drums, Scottish bagpipes and jazz bands, cheering open-air poetry readings and carousing along gaily decorated streets. Masses of young Muscovites turned out to meet the foreign guests. The jamboree impressed the world with Moscow's new openness, but the Soviet young people who turned out were even more impressed with Western popular culture. After the Twenty-Second Congress in October 1961, at which Khrushchev launched another attack on Stalin, the Thaw gathered more momentum. Prompted by Khrushchev, the Presidium approved publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Odin den' Ivana Deniso- vicha), and on 2i October i962, Pravda published Evgenii Evtushenko's poem, 'The Heirs of Stalin' (Nasledniki Stalina), which had been circulating privately without hope of publication.
However, Khrushchev recoiled at the very process of liberalisation which he encouraged. When Boris Pasternak allowed his novel, Doctor Zhivago, to be published in the West, Khrushchev ordered his Komsomol chief to 'work over' Pasternak, telling him to compare the great poet unfavourably to a pig who 'never makes a mess where it eats and sleeps', and to invite 'this internal emigrant' to become 'a real emigrant and go to his capitalist paradise'.[130] After his overthrow in 1964, Khrushchev finally read Doctor Zhivago. 'We shouldn't have banned it', he said. 'I should have read it myself. There's nothing anti- Soviet in it.'[131]
126
Speech in Nikolai Barsukov 'Mysli vslukh: zamechaniia N. S. Khrushcheva na proekt tret'ei programmy KPSS', unpublished article, p. 75.
130
Vladimir Semichastnyi, 'Ia by spravilsia s liuboi rabotoi', interview by K. Svetitskii and S. Sokolov,
131
Sergei N. Khrushchev,