Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

C

2

Relations with China

In August 1945 the Soviet Union concluded a treaty of friendship and alliance with the Republic of China’s Kuomintang (KMT) government, granting it economic concessions and defense facilities, as previously agreed upon by the wartime Allies. Although the Soviets promised to respect KMT sovereignty in Manchuria, they stripped the region of nearly all of its industrial machinery, resisted efforts by the Chinese government to reestablish its authority, and gave arms taken from captured Japanese soldiers to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the KMT’s adversary in a civil war. When Soviet troops withdrew, all Manchuria fell to the CCP. The subsequent victory of the Chinese Communists over the KMT in 1949 altered the balance of power in Asia to the momentary advantage of the Soviet Union.

D

Struggle for Leadership

Stalin, although increasingly erratic and paranoid as he grew old, remained in control until his death in March 1953. A collective leadership took power after his death. It was headed briefly by Georgy Malenkov, who was chosen CPSU first secretary and premier of the government. Other key figures included Molotov (reinstated as foreign minister), Beria (minister of internal affairs), Nikita Khrushchev (party secretary), Kaganovich and Nikolay Bulganin (first deputy premiers), and Kliment Voroshilov (ceremonial head of state).

The ruling group soon fell out among themselves. Malenkov lasted as chief organizer of the party for only one week and was eclipsed there by Khrushchev, whose title was elevated to CPSU first secretary in September 1953. The ambitious Beria was arrested in June and denounced for “criminal and antiparty activities”; in December 1953 the Kremlin announced he had been tried for treason, found guilty, and shot. Malenkov was demoted in February 1955 and replaced as head of government by Bulganin, a confederate of Khrushchev.

E

Khrushchev Era

The struggle for power finally resulted in the triumph of Khrushchev. Using many of the patronage techniques pioneered by Stalin in the 1920s, he packed the CPSU apparatus with officials friendly to him. The 20th Party Congress in February 1956 promoted many of his sympathizers to leading positions. In June 1957, in a climactic assembly of the party’s Central Committee, he ousted Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, and others. In 1958 he forced Bulganin to resign and stepped into the premiership, continuing as party first secretary. By 1960 Khrushchev was in complete ascendancy, receiving many accolades to his leadership at party gatherings.

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E

1

Domestic Policies

The removal of Beria in 1953 gave the other CPSU leaders the opportunity to clip the wings of the political police. Inmates of the Gulag camps began to be freed in 1954 and tribunals started to process the posthumous “rehabilitation” of the reputations of many of those murdered under Stalin.

In a startling move at the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev delivered an address to a closed meeting of the delegates asserting that Stalin had replaced the legitimate Soviet leadership with a “personality cult” to his own glory, with catastrophic consequences for the party and the country. Among other things, Khrushchev charged that Stalin was guilty of “mass arrests and deportations” and of “the execution without trial and without normal investigation” of Communists and others. In addition, he said, Stalin had been morbidly suspicious of his Politburo colleagues, had not anticipated the German invasion and mishandled the war effort, and had jeopardized “peaceful relations with other nations.”

The “secret speech,” whose contents if not its exact wording soon leaked out into the press, stunned many Communists in the USSR and throughout the world. Khrushchev proceeded to implement a policy of de-Stalinization in which portraits of the late dictator were removed from public places, institutions and localities bearing his name were renamed, and textbooks were rewritten to deflate his reputation. At the conclusion of the 21st Party Congress in 1961, Stalin’s body was removed from the mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow where it had rested beside that of Lenin.

Khrushchev did not follow up these moves with systematic changes in the regime, however. No legal protections for free expression and political activity were enacted, and Khrushchev took offense when intellectuals overstepped the permitted bounds. He intensified political education and increased pressure on religious believers. While allowing some criticism of the shortcomings of central planning by Yevsey Liberman and other economists, he had no coherent strategy for overhauling the economy. His major economic initiatives were to bring marginal lands in Kazakhstan and Siberia under agricultural cultivation and to relocate some industrial planning functions at the regional level. The first had some initial successes, but harvests deteriorated in the early 1960s; the regional reform of industry was ill-considered and had no positive impact.

E

2

Khrushchev’s Fall

One effect of de-Stalinization was to reduce the level of fear within the Soviet leadership. With time, Khrushchev became overconfident and neglected to pay prudent attention to the performance of his appointees and to relations among them. Some of them lost faith in his impulsive leadership style; others were disillusioned by specific policy failures, such as poor harvests, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and his division of the CPSU apparatus into parallel industrial and agricultural hierarchies. In October 1964 the party leadership, having conspired for some time behind his back, stripped him of both his party secretaryship and the premiership. The plot was led by three members of Khrushchev’s inner circle: Leonid Brezhnev, a veteran party administrator and as of July 1964 the second-ranking CPSU secretary; Nikolay Podgorny, a fellow CPSU secretary; and Aleksandr Shelepin, the head of the KGB. The announcement of the change of leadership indicted Khrushchev for “voluntarism” and “harebrained schemes.”

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