As Khrushchev's troubles mounted, he sought new ways to motivate and inspire the Soviet people while attacking old traditions like religion, which in his view was distracting them from the task of building Communism. 'Within twenty years', he told the Central Committee in presenting the new party programme in June 1961, the USSR would 'steadily win victory after victory' in economic competition with the United States. The Soviet countryside would blossom with 'such an array of appurtenances - apartment houses equipped with all modern conveniences, enterprises providing consumer services, cultural and medical facilities - that in the end the rural population will enjoy conditions of life comparable to those found in cities'.[132] Khrushchev was a true believer, impatient for the day when his fellow citizens, who had sacrificed so much for so long, would at last enjoy the good life.
Although religion had always been anathema to the Bolsheviks, Stalin had eased religious persecution, if only to unite the populace for the war effort, and to impress his wartime Western allies. It was Khrushchev who mounted an all-out assault that reached its peak in 1961: anti-religious agitation was intensified, taxes on religious activity increased, churches and monasteries closed, with the result that the number of Orthodox parishes dropped from more than 15,000 in 1951 to less than 8,000 in 1963. Khrushchev's anti-religion campaign was a price he paid for de-Stalinisation - in the sense that it was popular with Stalinist ideologues like Central Committee secretary Mikhail Suslov - but he may also have seen it as a form of de-Stalinisation, in that it reversed Stalin's compromise with religion and returned to Lenin's more militant approach.
Khrushchev's approach to the 'nationality question' fitted the pattern of trying to remove the Stalinist stain from socialism while at the same time bringingthe USSRcloserto utopia itself. He allowed smallpeoples ofthe North Caucasus, such as Chechens, Ingush and Balkars, to return from their Stalinist exile, although he did not invite the Crimean Tatars to return to Crimea. His efforts to decentralise political power by transferring some of it to regional leaders strengthened the position of non-Russian nationalities, some of whom were to break away from Russia three decades later. If Khrushchev did not fear that outcome, that was because he could not imagine it. He counted on the various peoples of the USSR to fuse together into a single Soviet nation. He took the borders between Soviet republics so lightly that in 1954 he transferred the Russian-dominated Crimea from the Russian Federation to Ukraine to celebrate the 300th anniversary of a treaty linking Ukraine with Russia.[133]
The Soviet bloc
Having had little exposure to the outside world (and almost none to the Great Powers) during the first fifty years of his life, Khrushchev was hardly ready to direct Soviet foreign policy, but initially at least, he did not have to. With Beria and Malenkov taking the lead in designing overall strategy, and Molotov conducting diplomacy, Khrushchev did not attend to world affairs until 1954, at which point his focus was on relations with other Communist states. Between 1953 and 1956 Moscow agreed to build, or aid in the construction of, some 205 Chinese factories and plants valued at about $2 billion, with a large proportion of the cost financed with Soviet credits, all when the Russians themselves were suffering shortages. But Khrushchev's failure to consult the Chinese before unmasking Stalin, and his handling of the Polish and Hungarian crises later in 1956, alienated Mao. Khrushchev hoped to play the benevolent tutor to the Chinese leader, so it was personally devastating when Mao began condescending to him, not just denying Khrushchev the satisfaction of outdoing Stalin in Sino-Soviet relations, but returning Khrushchev to his former role of an upstart mortified by a new master.
When Mao came to Moscow to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution in the autumn of 1957, Khrushchev showered him with attention and hospitality. But Mao practically oozed dissatisfaction and condescension in return.[134] The years 1958 and 1959 brought a sharp downturn in Sino-Soviet relations which two Khrushchev trips to Beijing not only failed to reverse, but actually deepened. The trigger for the dispute was a Soviet request for long-wave radio stations, necessary for communicating with Soviet submarines, on Chinese territory, and a proposal for a joint submarine fleet, both of which, Mao feared, would deepen Chinese dependence on the USSR.
Sino-Soviet differences extended to Chinese ideological boasting about the communes they were constructing, the Sino-Indian clash in 1959 and Moscow's pursuit of detente with the United States, all overlaid with growing personal animosity between the two leaders. Alone with Soviet colleagues in a Beijing reception room that must have been bugged, Khrushchev likened Mao in 1959 to old 'galoshes', a term that is colloquial for condoms in Chinese as well as Russian. Mao saw himself as a 'bullfighter', one of his interpreters recalled, and 'Khrushchev as the bull'.38
In i960, Khrushchev suddenly decided to pull all Soviet advisers, of whom there were more than a thousand, out of China, and to tear up hundreds of contracts and scrap hundreds of co-operative projects, a radical step that not only wounded the Chinese but deprived Moscow of the chance to gather invaluable intelligence. Although the two sides adopted an uneasy truce the next year, the dispute flared up again when Zhou En-Lai walked out of the Twenty-Second Party Congress in Moscow, further intensified when Beijing characterised Khrushchev's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis as 'adventurism' followed by 'capitulationism', and deteriorated beyond repair when the two parties started exchangingpropagandabarrages, involving other Communist Parties in their conflict, and even quarrelling about potentially explosive Sino-Soviet border disputes.
Khrushchev's i955 journey to Belgrade reflected a new, post-Stalinist formula for holding together the Soviet bloc: to tolerate a modicum of diversity and domestic autonomy, to emphasise ideological and political bonds and reinforce economic and political ties, and to weave all this together with Khrushchev's own personal involvement. Yugoslav leader Josip Tito was eager for reconciliation, but on his own terms: his aim was to reform the Communist camp, not buttress it; to preserve Yugoslav independence, including ties with the West, not restrict it. Having broken with Stalin before Khrushchev did, Tito was proud and touchy. Khrushchev needed Yugoslav concessions to prove he was right to conciliate Belgrade, whereas Tito was determined to postpone the closer party-to-party ties that Khrushchev sought until Stalinism was dead and buried in the USSR. As a result, although Soviet-Yugoslav tensions never again plummeted to their post-i948 depths, they did not become as close as Khrushchev wanted either.
The year i955 also marked the post-Stalin leadership's first major venture into the Third World. For Stalin, who was famous for concentrating on countries of great geopolitical significance, and for cutting his losses in those
38 Recollections of former Soviet and Chinese officials and interpreters at 1997 Symposium on Sino-Soviet Relations and the Cold War, Beijing, 1997.
he could not hope to control, the developing world had been a sideshow. Khrushchev, in contrast, welcomed the prospect of revolutions that might bring the USSR new allies, and courted neutrals whom Stalin had disdained. In October 1955, he and Bulganin undertooka lengthy tour of India, Burma and Afghanistan. In February i960, he revisited these three while adding Indonesia to his itinerary. Egypt received a visit from him in May i964. In the meantime, he devoted considerable attention to the Congo, supporting the short-lived, left-leaning presidency of Patrice Lumumba, and of course Cuba, whose fiery new leader seemed intent on turning his island into a Soviet ally only 150 kilometres from Florida (see Plate 17). None of these ventures, however, brought anything like the dividends Khrushchev hoped for.
133
See Ronald Grigor Suny,