Endgame
After the collapse of his Cuban adventure, Khrushchev tried to address foreign and domestic problems whose solutions had so far eluded him, but without the positive momentum which a Cuban triumph would have provided. He did manage to negotiate a treaty with the Americans and the British banning nuclear testing in the air, underwater and in outer space, the most important arms control agreement since the start of the Cold War, as well as one establishing a 'hot line' for communicating during crises. But the assassination of President Kennedy in November i963 put an end to hopes for another summit which would establish a new Soviet-American relationship, as the Vienna meeting had not.
The division of the Communist Party into agricultural and industrial branches, about which a Soviet journalist heard 'not one good word', but 'only bewilderment and outright rejection' behind the scenes at the November i962 Central Committee plenum which unanimously adopted the plan, failed to energise agriculture, and neither did a plan for quadrupling Soviet chemical fertiliser production in four years.[143] When drought struck in 1963, the Soviet people found themselves standing in bread queues only two years after having been promised milk and honey without limit in the new party programme. Moscow eventually agreed to purchases of 6.8 million tons of grain from Canada, almost 2 million from the United States, 1.8 million from Australia, even 400,000 from lowly Romania.
As late as November i962, liberal writers and artists were still pushing the Thaw forward. The publication that month of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich seemed a harbinger of more gains to come. Rather than sparking a sustained burst of glasnost', however, November marked a retreat as cultural conservatives, who had been waiting for an opportunity to move against their intelligentsia foes, cleverly exploited Khrushchev's sour post-Cuba mood. By moving a small exhibit of avant-garde art from an artist's studio to the huge Manezh exhibition hall, and then inviting Khrushchev to view it, they provoked him into an obscenity-laced tirade against the offending artists. He tried to revert to his more open-minded, benevolent self by inviting some four hundred intellectuals to a lavish reception on 17 December, but instead he erupted again in a vituperative attack on unorthodox art. Yet a third surreal session with artists, writers and others followed in March 1963 at the Kremlin. As in December, Khrushchev's aides had prepared a balanced, moderate text, but once again, one of them recalled, Khrushchev 'did not use a word of it'.[144]Instead he lambasted writers like Andrei Voznesenskii and Vasilii Aksionov so wildly as to raise doubts as to whether Khrushchev himself was in his right mind.
Khrushchev's reformist impulses were not entirely finished. In his last years in office, proposals for radical economic reform developed by Khar'kov economist Evsei Liberman started appearing in Pravda. During a visit to Yugoslavia in the late summer of 1963 Khrushchev displayed interest in Yugoslav 'self-management' based on 'workers' councils'. But he was no longer capable of implementing radical new ideas even if he had adopted them. By this time he was also ignoring his Presidium colleagues, having withdrawn instead into an inner circle of aides and advisers. Nor was he listening to high-ranking military men. They had previously been alienated by three rounds of deep cuts in Soviet armed forces which Khrushchev had ordered between 1955 and 1957, in 1958 and again in i960 (approximately 2 million, 300,000 and another 1.2 million respectively), and by his decision to rely on nuclear missiles rather than conventional forces. Their leader hardly hid his assumption that he knew military affairs better than they did, and they could not conceal their resentment.[145]
Overthrow
The Soviet Union possessed no established procedure for transferring power. After Lenin and Stalin died, the battle to succeed them had shaken the political system. The trouble with a fixed term for the leader, and a regularised process for replacing him, was that they would limit the leader himself. Even hand- picking a successor was problematic since an ambitious heir apparent could threaten his sponsor. The way to reduce that danger was to have two rival heirs share power, but that might ensure a destructive contest later on.
In 1962, Frol Kozlov, the former Leningrad party boss who had become Khrushchev's de facto deputy, led the field of future contenders. But Kozlov began to alienate his boss in early 1963 (less because he led a conservative faction as some Western Kremlinologists surmised at the time, and more as a result of what seemed like personal arrogance to Khrushchev), and later that year he suffered a major stroke that removed him from the running. In 1964 Khrushchev in effect elevated Leonid Brezhnev to deputy party leader, but at the same time he made Ukrainian party boss Nikolai Podgornyi a rival heir apparent. Beginning in the spring of that year, the two men put aside their mutual suspicions and combined in a conspiracy against Khrushchev. In March, they began approaching fellow Presidium members about removing Khrushchev. In June Brezhnev went so far as briefly to consider having Khrushchev arrested as he returned from a foreign trip. Instead, he and his fellow plotters spent the summer and early autumn secretly securing the support of Central Committee members so as to avoid the fate of Khrushchev's rivals in 1957.
On the evening of 12 October, Brezhnev telephoned Khrushchev, who was vacationing in Pitsunda on the Black Sea coast, and asked him to return to the Kremlin for a meeting of the Presidium. After initially objecting, Khrushchev agreed to fly back the next day. When he arrived, his Presidium colleagues took turns indicting him for destructive policies both foreign and domestic, ranging from agriculture to Berlin and Cuba. Most of all they emphasised his personal shortcomings: his impulsiveness and explosiveness, his unilateral, arbitrary leadership, his megalomania. After a brief and halting attempt to defend himself, Khrushchev offered no resistance. No one defended him, not even his closest associate on the Presidium Anastas Mikoyan, who was willing to have Khrushchev stay on as prime minister while stepping down as party
leader.[146]
The next day the Presidium granted Khrushchev's 'request' to retire 'in connection with his advanced age and deterioration of his health'. Khrushchev lived under what amounted to house arrest for the next seven years. He died on 11 September 1971.
Legacy
As a man and a leader, Khrushchev was as two-sided as the Ernst Neizvestny monument, consisting of intersecting slabs of white marble and black granite, which stands at his grave site: Stalinist-turned-de-Staliniser, complicit in great evil yet also the author of much good. The legacy of the Khrushchev period as a whole is more unambiguously positive. Mikhail Gorbachev and his reformist colleagues came to political maturity at the time and remembered its greater openness with optimism and nostalgia. Gorbachev's generation, he once said, considered itself 'children of the Twentieth Congress', and regarded the task of renewing what Khrushchev had begun as 'our obligation'.[147] And in this they had the support of a much wider circle of shestidesiatniki (men and women of the 1960s) who had long dreamed of recapturing the hope and idealism of their youth. As Lyudmilla Alexseyeva, who later became a leading dissident, recalled, Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalin 'put an end to our lonely questioning of the Soviet system. Young men and women began to lose their fear of sharing views, knowledge, beliefs, questions. Every night we gathered in cramped apartments to recite poetry, read "unofficial" prose, and swap stories that, taken together, yielded a realistic picture of what was going on in our country. That was the time of our awakening.'[148]
148
Lyudmilla Alexseyeva and Paul Goldberg,