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60 years ago Brezhnev staged a coup and sent Khrushchev into retirement instead of executing him
In mid-February 1956, the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union took place in Moscow. Joseph Stalin had died three years earlier, and the party congress was the first after the death of the Soviet leader. At the famous 20th Congress, First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Nikita Khrushchev read the epochal report "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences."
"I <...> exposed and denounced Stalin for committing genocide against the party builders and leaders of our Soviet state... The evil that Stalin caused caused great harm to our country, and such evil must be branded," Khrushchev himself wrote.
At the same time, the report was in no way an explicit condemnation of Soviet terrorism and the repressions of previous eras. Khrushchev scolded Stalin for usurping power through repressions against communists and "violating Lenin's norms of collective leadership." And the rest of Khrushchev's repressions were considered entirely justified.
Khrushchev proposed three main directions of reform: strengthening the Soviet economy, transforming the cultural sphere after Stalin's "freezes," and transforming party ideology after decades of the personality cult.
In the economic sphere, Khrushchev had to develop new branches of industry, oil production, nuclear energy, non-ferrous metal mining and the chemical industry.
In addition, there was an acute housing problem, and it was necessary to begin mass housing construction. In addition, Soviet society, overly mobilized during the period of industrialization, terrorism, the Great Patriotic War and the difficult post-war years, required demobilization.
To implement these ideas in practice, in early 1959, the 21st Congress of the CPSU adopted a new seven-year plan for the development of the national economy under the leadership of Khrushchev. New industries were created, such as the plastics industry. Construction of the "Khrushchevka" house began - mass-produced standard housing with individual apartments. New models of airliners were developed, cars ceased to be a luxury item, they simply became scarce, but affordable for the average Soviet citizen. Large-scale oil exports began abroad, supplying the Soviet economy with petrodollars.
At the same time, many of the Khrushchev-era reforms have been criticized. For example, the development of the famous virgin lands has been criticized for its ill-conceived and poorly developed infrastructure (which makes the land very difficult to develop and risks turning into a desert).
Although the development of virgin lands led to a rapid increase in crop yields (85.5 million tons of grain in 1954 and 125 million tons in 1960), these reforms had many negative consequences.
"I suggested investing this money in non-black earth territories and gradually cultivating virgin lands. They squandered their resources. A little here, a little there, but there is nowhere to store the grain, it rots, there is no road, it cannot be taken out.
But Khrushchev finds an idea and, like Sabra, rushes without reins!”
Under Khrushchev, for the first time in history, grain began to be purchased abroad. In addition, food prices rose. Inconsistent and incorrect pricing policy led to riots in Novocherkassk in 1962, during which dozens of workers were shot.
Khrushchev's corn campaign also caused discontent. With the Soviet Union lagging behind the United States and European countries in agriculture, as well as continuing low grain harvests and rural decline even after Stalin's collectivization, Khrushchev sought to radically modernize agriculture in the victorious socialist state.
According to economist Gavriil Popov and Khrushchev's grandson Nikita Adzhubei, the first secretary viewed corn as a "miracle cure" that could solve the problems of Soviet agriculture once and for all.
"The corn situation is accurately expressed in the proverb: "If a fool prays to God, his forehead will be broken." For zealous owners, corn "carried out" the farm, but for swindlers it served only as a tick in the report. Even very high-ranking officials, i.e. secretaries of local committees, allowed increments, outright deception and fraud in agriculture. Local officials (party and soviet) found "virgin land" in their possessions and irresponsibly, if not criminally, cultivated pastures, pastures and protected areas."
Half-heartedness characterized Khrushchev's reforms in the political sphere. During Stalin's time, those convicted and executed received large-scale rehabilitation. However, relatives were often misinformed about the death. For example, I changed the year of death. Many of those convicted in the show trials of the 1930s were not rehabilitated. For example, the Bolshevik leaders Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin.
Those who were rehabilitated were paid only a minimum pension and no compensation was paid. - For example, the Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans, Meskhetian Turks.
For the first time since the 1920s, collective farmers began to receive passports. But "Residence permit, one of the shameful legacies of the Stalinist system," remained: Soviet citizens could not get a job in the city without registration.
Even during the Thaw, censorship continued to operate. The Party interfered in the arts, controlling writers and artists, theater and cinema.
There was a "leveling out" of wages. As a result, everyone received the same wage, regardless of their actual efforts. An unpopular decision was to reduce the lands of the collective farmers.
Due to the ongoing reform of the management system, the rate of production growth has been decreasing every year. Popov and Adzhubey noted that workers and specialists are losing interest in investing in their work.
The military was unhappy with Khrushchev's idea to reduce the size of the army. Trying again to solve complex problems with the help of "miracle weapons", the Soviet leader invested heavily in the latest rocket weapons - missiles - and fired tens of thousands of career officers.
Khrushchev made mistakes on the international stage, too. He allowed partial democratization in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe in order to remove the Stalinists from their leadership. But the more liberal forces that came to power in East Germany and Hungary allowed the hatred of the Communists that had built up in society to spill out. out. In these countries, Moscow used tanks to suppress "Stalin-style" uprisings. And Khrushchev's criticism of Stalinism was received negatively in China, which had turned from an ally into a mortal enemy.
"It was with the acquisition of complete power that the era known as voluntarism began. Khrushchev stubbornly and systematically held on to his pitchfork, ignoring complaints about his leadership methods. Moreover, Khrushchev was criticized by everyone, from ordinary citizens to the highest echelons of the party apparatus," claims historian Dmitry Zhuravlev.
Historian Alexander Cheremin explained in a conversation with Gazeta.Ru that Khrushchev's entourage at that time understood perfectly well that they could be eliminated in the same way as they eliminated Stalin's comrades, Malenkov and Beria.
"All the party comrades he moved in with, including Leonid Brezhnev, Shelest and Podgorny, understood that he could resettle them at any moment or simply send them away from Moscow. The party leadership itself was unhappy with his tyranny and personnel policy. People had no idea what would happen tomorrow," the expert emphasized.
Cheremin added that Khrushchev’s disagreements in the area of party building also had a negative impact.
The historian noted that “the division into rural and urban party organizations meant that the local population did not know how and whom to govern, how to organize the vertical of power.”
Khrushchev's emotionality also played a bad role, says Alexander Cheremin. This was especially noticeable at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, i.e. during the standoff with the US over missiles in Cuba, and also when the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee hit his shoe hard during Khrushchev's public speech at the UN General Assembly. I lost. the podium.
"In almost all circles - collective farmers, workers, intelligentsia, military and political circles - it was clear that he was out of place and did not correspond to the position he once occupied, so in 1964 a conspiracy was hatched. They decided to get rid of him, and no one fought for Khrushchev. Except that at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Anastas Mikoyan spoke out against the resignation of Nikita Sergeyevich," the historian added.
Khrushchev was neither a storyteller nor an idealist, says Alexander Cheremin. He understood what was wrong with the Soviet Union. He was too impulsive and inconsistent in his policies.
In 1964, Khrushchev continued to travel abroad. And Brezhnev's influence in the Soviet Union grew. Together with other conspirators, he won the sympathy of military and regional secretaries who were dissatisfied with Khrushchev.
Khrushchev learned about the plot being prepared. But Nikita Sergeyevich was too self-confident.
"These people are against me too! This is some kind of nonsense!" He laughed.
Although the danger could not have been more real, Brezhnev even wanted to kill Khrushchev, said the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Petro Khlest.
"Semichastny stated that Brezhnev proposed to physically eliminate Khrushchev by arranging a plane crash, a car crash, poisoning or arrest. Podgorny confirmed all this and stated that all "options" for removing Semichastny and Khrushchev were rejected...
At the Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU on October 14, 1964, Shelest was the first to criticize Khrushchev’s spontaneous actions and mistakes.
The first secretary of the Central Committee was criticized for creating an "abnormal situation" in which other members could not work, citing "Leninist collective guiding principles." In fact, Khrushchev was thrown out of his post at a plenary session, using the same thesis with which he exposed Stalin's personality cult.
Khrushchev was not killed, but sent into an honorable retirement. He died in 1971 and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery rather than within the Kremlin walls, the only Soviet leader to do so. The black-and-white marble tombstone was made by Ernst Neizvestny.
"I will die... People will weigh my deeds. Bad deeds on one side, good ones on the other... And the good ones are more important," Nikita Khrushchev himself claimed.