After decades of adulation of the man who had led the Soviet Union for a generation, Communists worldwide had to come to terms with the fact that Stalin was, to put it bluntly, a mass murderer. Some refused to believe it, and held that Khrushchev’s Secret Speech must be a forgery – perhaps an invention of the CIA. In 1961, however, Khrushchev went on to attack Stalin in open session of the Twenty-Second Congress, thus putting an end to any doubts about the authenticity of his 1956 speech. What he did not do at either of those de-Stalinizing congresses was to call into question the political system which had allowed Stalin and the secret police to get away with their atrocities.
Much of what Khrushchev said in his speeches on those two major occasions was known in essence in the West to those who had taken the trouble to inform themselves. Among the sources of information were Russian and East European émigrés, former Communists and anti-Stalinist Marxists, including Trotsky and some of his followers, as well as people who had been close to Bukharin. Others were democratic socialists, among whom the most insightful and influential was George Orwell,1 or academic authors such as Harvard’s Merle Fainsod.2 But there were many Communists and fellow travellers who regarded all such sources as tainted and untrustworthy. It was the more dispiriting for them when they heard some of the most shocking charges, with new details added, from the mouth of the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. There was an exodus of members from Western Communist Parties, and in the Soviet Union itself, questions were asked at meetings which went well beyond the bounds within which the party leadership had hoped to confine discussion. In Stalin’s native Georgia there was a large demonstration protesting against Khrushchev’s speech and in favour of their most famous son.3 The most serious repercussions of the Twentieth Congress for the Soviet leadership were, however, in Eastern Europe.
The ‘Anti-Party Group’ Crisis
The East European events of 1956–in particular, profound unrest in Poland, leading to a change of policy and of leadership, and the Hungarian revolution in the same year – are discussed in the next chapter. Not surprisingly, the problems in Eastern Europe contributed to a backlash against Khrushchev from a number of those in the Soviet leadership whom he had alienated. Those who continued to revere Stalin believed that Khrushchev had gratuitously undermined the credibility, unity and strength of the international Communist movement. They were joined by others who strongly disliked Khrushchev’s style of leadership, which had become increasingly assertive and dismissive of criticism. This culminated in what became known as the ‘Anti-Party Group’ crisis of 1957. Khrushchev found himself outnumbered and outvoted on the Presidium of the Central Committee by people who did not really form an organized group but were united by their desire to replace him.
In order to meet without Khrushchev in the first instance, those who wished to depose him as first secretary called a meeting on 18 June 1957 of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers, of which Khrushchev was not a member, so that they could confer among themselves. Bulganin then contacted Khrushchev and summoned him to join them. Khrushchev reluctantly agreed. The gathering was turned into a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee, but Khrushchev was not allowed to chair it. Malenkov, who was the first to speak, insisted that Bulganin preside.4 There was a majority among the full (or voting) members of the Presidium who, each for his own reasons, had had enough of Khrushchev and decided to remove him. Some were unreconstructed Stalinists, notably Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov; others were people who were no less implicated in Stalin’s crimes, such as Malenkov, but who in recent years had embraced a more reformist position. Bulganin, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, whom Khrushchev had regarded as a supporter or, at the very least, someone he could control, also became a member of the anti-Khrushchev coalition.5 Among the members of the Presidium of the Central Committee, the line-up was seven – four against Khrushchev. The other two full members who opposed him, though less actively, were the industrial minister Mikhail Pervukhin, and the economic planner Maksim Saburov. Especially distressing for Khrushchev was the participation in the attacks on him of the relatively anti-Stalinist Dmitry Shepilov, whose career Khrushchev had advanced. Shepilov had replaced Molotov as Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1956 and he was a candidate member of the Presidium. In the Presidium meeting, called with the aim of ousting Khrushchev, Shepilov criticized him sharply for purporting to be an expert on everything in spite of his lack of education. Khrushchev never forgave him. The four votes in support of Khrushchev continuing as party first secretary were made up of Khrushchev himself, Mikoyan, Mikhail Suslov (who was a secretary of the Central Committee as well as full Presidium member) and Alexey Kirichenko, the first secretary of the Communist Party in Ukraine and an ally of Khrushchev, known to him since 1938. Kirichenko missed the first part of the meeting because, unaware of the move against his patron, he was addressing a meeting in Kiev that day.
Even some of those round the table who did not join the attempt to remove Khrushchev from the party leadership, whether they were full members of the Politburo, like Mikoyan and Suslov, or a candidate member such as Marshal Zhukov, who was by now Minister of Defence, had their reservations about Khrushchev. For a variety of reasons, however, they preferred him to the alternatives. Not everyone had given sufficient thought to what those might be. In 1991, when he was aged eighty-six, Shepilov was interviewed by his grandson, who asked him whether, in speaking up against Khrushchev, he had realized that the removal of Khrushchev ‘could mean a return to Stalinism’. His reply was revealing:
Never. I never gave any thought to it. That is unpardonable. I deserve a lashing for it. I never asked myself: Whom will we get instead of Nikita? It was either naiveté on my part or plain stupidity…to go into all the gross violations of the principle of collective leadership, all the nonsensical schemes that were leading us to disaster, but not to ask myself who would be there to take Nikita’s place.6
The Anti-Party Group could not deal with Khrushchev in the way in which they had joined forces with him to arrest Beria. Through Serov, Khrushchev controlled the security police, and Marshal Zhukov was in charge of the army. Zhukov had many criticisms of Khrushchev but felt still more strongly about the way in which the army had been decapitated in the late 1930s – a time when several leading members of the opposition to Khrushchev shared responsibility with Stalin for the mass arrests of Red Army officers. Not being in control of the forces of coercion, the Anti-Party Group had to prevail politically. They had assumed that their majority among voting members of the Presidium would be enough.
Although clearly outvoted by the full members of the Presidium, Khrushchev had on his side a majority of those who attended these meetings with the right to speak but not to vote. These were the candidate members of the Presidium and secretaries of the Central Committee. They included younger people who had worked with Khrushchev in the past, such as Brezhnev, whose careers he had advanced. Brezhnev’s own attempt to defend Khrushchev at this marathon meeting ended somewhat ignominiously. Kaganovich, whom Khrushchev later described as the ‘knife-sharpener’ of the group, aggressively berated the younger colleagues who had the audacity to contradict the majority of the voting members. In the face of this verbal onslaught, Brezhnev fainted and had to be carried out of the room by the guards.7
As these members of the outer ring of the top leadership team lacked Presidium voting rights, it looked as if the old guard aligned against Khrushchev would prevail. Among the most senior members of the Presidium, only Mikoyan was firmly on Khrushchev’s side. But Mikoyan played an important part in convincing Mikhail Suslov to support Khrushchev, even though he privately took a dim view of Suslov, regarding him as a ‘real reactionary’.8 Suslov’s support for Khrushchev in 1957 was prudential rather than principled. ‘I convinced him’, recalled Mikoyan, ‘that in spite of everything Khrushchev would emerge as the winner.’9 Playing for time, Khrushchev succeeded in dragging the meeting on into a second and third day. In the meantime, word of the attempt to remove him from the party leadership got round to members of the Central Committee. At this point the rules which the majority of the Presidium had used against Khrushchev, insisting that only full members could vote, worked against the Anti-Party Group. In principle, the Presidium was the body which took decisions in between plenary sessions of the Central Committee, with the latter institution possessing ultimately the higher authority. That was not the way things normally happened in practice, but Khrushchev made the rule work.
His political manoeuvring since Stalin’s death also worked to his advantage. His support for heavy industry and cultivation of the military had ensured on this occasion Marshal Zhukov’s crucial support, even though Zhukov had already complained to Shepilov of Khrushchev’s disregard of collective leadership.10 Military aircraft were used to bring some Central Committee members from the more distant parts of the Soviet Union to Moscow. By 21 June, more than a third of the Central Committee members were in the capital, and on that day eighty of them signed a letter demanding that a plenum be held immediately. They refused to accept Bulganin’s assurance that such a session would be convened within two weeks, and, in the face of the Central Committee members’ insistence, Khrushchev’s opponents had to give way. The plenum opened the following day.11 This was the key turning point in the struggle, for Khrushchev had more supporters within the Central Committee than had his opponents put together. While the latter were Communist Party members of extremely long standing, there was one point at which the ‘Anti-Party’ label connected with reality. Khrushchev’s strongest support came from people in the party apparatus, many of them his protégés, and they were heavily represented within the ranks of the Central Committee. His leading opponents were, overwhelmingly, people working in the governmental, rather than party, machine at the time of the showdown. The adage of bureaucratic politics that where you stand depends on where you sit was an additional factor here. Khrushchev had alienated large swathes of the ministerial network by earlier in 1957 abolishing many of the central ministries and transferring their functions to regional economic councils, the sovnarkhozy. By doing so, he had hoped to find a cure for the sin of ‘departmentalism’, whereby Soviet economic ministries would hoard material and personnel and put their institutional interests above the common good. Unfortunately for Khrushchev, the same kind of bureaucratic behaviour re-emerged in the regions, with ‘localism’ taking the place of departmentalism.
Suslov, as a senior secretary of the Central Committee, opened the attack on a group who had, he said, been trying to take over the party. Marshal Zhukov, the formidable second speaker, upped the ante by referring to the role Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov had played in the repressions of the 1930s. Other speakers added details of their bloody past, including the fact that on one day alone–12 November 1938–Stalin and Molotov had approved the execution of 3,167 people.12 When the phrase ‘Anti-Party Group’ was introduced into the discussion, the dreaded party sin of factionalism appeared to count for no less than the mass murders of the 1930s in the eyes of Central Committee members. In the face of prolonged attacks, the fragile unity of the group was exposed, and before long the hard core of Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov had been left isolated. Even they were united by not much more than their dislike of Khrushchev and their intimate linkage to many of the crimes of Stalin.
The plenum ended in complete victory for Khrushchev. Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov were removed from the Presidium and expelled from the Central Committee. Other members of the opposition to Khrushchev were able to retain their positions for the time being, for to expel them all would have made clear to the world that Khrushchev had been in a minority within the Presidium. The candidate member, Shepilov, was, however, also removed from the Central Committee. He became known for the rest of his life by a phrase Khrushchev used which implied that he had opportunistically attached himself at the last moment to the Anti-Party Group. Referring to the group, Khrushchev (and, subsequently, his supporters) invariably added ‘and Shepilov who joined them’, giving him, it was later joked, the longest name in the Russian language.13 Shepilov remained an implacable critic of Khrushchev, although he acknowledged his positive role in freeing political prisoners, attacking Stalin and trying to repair relations with Yugoslavia.14
Khrushchev’s opponents were people of disparate views and intentions, rather than a cohesive band of brothers. Their victory, however, given that the most determined among them were Molotov and Kaganovich, would almost certainly have resulted in a rehabilitation of Stalin and increased repression. The ‘group’ would not have stayed together for long, as there was no love lost among them. Even Molotov and Kaganovich, in spite of their shared admiration for Stalin and dislike of Malenkov, could not stand each other.15 The defeat of the Anti-Party Group provided some illumination on the changing role of Soviet institutions since the death of Stalin. It was clear that a real struggle had gone on within the party Presidium. It was now evident, furthermore, that the Central Committee could, when the Presidium was seriously split, play a decisive part in the political outcome. In particular, the Anti-Party Group crisis underlined the significance of the relationship between the first secretary and the Central Committee. This was named the ‘circular flow of power’ by the American historian Robert V. Daniels.16 The phrase encapsulated the important political point that the first secretary (or general secretary, as in Stalin’s and Brezhnev’s cases) had a disproportionately large say in appointments to key posts, especially party secretaryships at the all-union, republican and regional levels, and that those people, by virtue of the offices they held, would become members of the Central Committee. There they could be expected to support the patron who had appointed them, thus completing the circle.
The ‘circular flow of power’ explanation of a first/general secretary’s security of tenure raises, however, the question of how a Communist Party leader could ever lose power, other than by dying. That, indeed, was the most common way in which the party chief in the Soviet Union demitted office. The East European cases can be left aside for the moment, for those were penetrated political systems in which leadership changes were heavily influenced by, and sometimes determined from, Moscow – not only, therefore, by the relationships within the Central Committee of each country. But in the Soviet case indigenous politics prevailed – and so usually did the general secretary. Of the six Soviet leaders who held that office, four of them died in post, and only one of the quartet, Yury Andropov, was under the age of seventy at the time. There are those who have suggested that Beria poisoned Stalin, but there is no evidence for that, and it seems safe to say that no leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union died other than a natural death. In contrast, between 1926, when Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Soviet political police, died of a heart attack, and Beria’s arrest and execution in 1953, the only political police chief to die other than an unnatural death was Semyon Ignatiev, who headed the MGB between 1951 and Stalin’s death in 1953. (Ignatiev lived until 1983.)
Of the Communist Party leaders, Khrushchev alone was successfully ousted from that post by his colleagues. The case of Gorbachev’s loss of office had some similarities, but more differences. It does not really belong to this discussion because by 1991 so much else that was fundamental had changed. Nevertheless, Khrushchev’s removal from office in 1964–and, to a lesser extent, Gorbachev’s loss of power twenty-seven years later – illustrates two points. The first is that even if a leader appoints people to prestigious positions of responsibility, if he then pursues policies which go against their interests, they are liable to turn against him. This, as we shall see, applies strongly to Khrushchev’s policies after the Anti-Party Group crisis and, especially, to his actions between 1962 and 1964. The second point is that, since the party leader also invariably became the country’s chief executive, and over time was increasingly involved in foreign policy and international diplomacy, appointments within the party apparatus were largely devolved to the de facto second secretary of the party, who was in charge of personnel. Between 1960 and 1963 that office was held by the neo-Stalinist Frol Kozlov. (There was at least an echo of this, in terms of appointments lower down the party organization, between 1985 and 1988, when the radically reformist general secretary, Gorbachev, had as his second secretary the relatively conservative Communist Yegor Ligachev.)
Marshal Zhukov, as we have seen, was among those who attacked Stalin and the Anti-Party Group at the June 1957 plenum of the Central Committee. He also, however, hinted at Khrushchev’s role during the Stalinist repression. In general, Zhukov’s increasing assertiveness had worried Khrushchev, who saw him as a potential rival, notwithstanding the invaluable support he had rendered in the arrest of Beria (which had led Khrushchev to bring Zhukov into the political leadership) and in the defeat of the Anti-Party Group. In the closed system of Soviet politics, when a member of the leadership team was about to be removed, he was usually sent on a mission far from Moscow or was already on holiday. The person concerned was thus caught unawares (most business trips or vacations did not, after all, end in dismissal) and prevented from mobilizing the support of his most influential friends in high places. In Zhukov’s case, he was dispatched on a lengthy visit to Albania and Yugoslavia on 4 October 1957. Khrushchev was then able to spend the next two weeks making sure that he would have a majority of the presidium behind him in his move to oust Zhukov from political office. In this he succeeded, for when the Presidium met to discuss the minister of defence on 17 October, one speaker after another criticized Zhukov severely.17 One of Khrushchev’s new recruits to the Presidium, the veteran Finnish Communist (but Soviet citizen) Otto Kuusinen, who had been a leading figure in the Comintern, was among those who stressed the importance of party control over the military and the unacceptability of Zhukov’s resistance to this. According to Kuusinen, the linkage between the party and the army had been weakened and the army was becoming the monopoly of one person.18
Zhukov had travelled by ship to the Balkans, but having heard about the moves against him in Moscow, he hastened back by plane. At a Presidium meeting on 26 October, he complained about that body discussing his behaviour in his absence and asked for a commission to be set up to investigate his conduct.19 Voroshilov, still in the Presidium since his own ‘Anti-Party’ activities had not yet been made public, called Zhukov a person with little interest in the party (malopartiynyy chelovek). Having been utterly outshone by Zhukov during the Second World War, he no doubt relished turning the tables politically. The accusations of Voroshilov and others were, however, overdrawn. While Zhukov did not show the usual deference, according to Soviet norms, of a candidate member of the Presidium towards full members (including the first secretary), his speech to party activists in the Ministry of Defence at the time of the Anti-Party Group crisis a few months earlier had been quite orthodox in party terms. It stressed the importance of the Communist Party, which was ‘leading the Soviet people to communism’, and pledged fidelity to the course set by the Twentieth Party Congress.20 It laid great stress on the role of Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich in the repression of the 1930s. The only note in this unpublished speech which might have raised Khrushchev’s eyebrows, if he read the transcript, was a reference to the Anti-Party Group plotters having taken advantage in their factional activities of ‘some shortcomings in the work of the Presidium and Secretariat of the Central Committee’.21 Be that as it may, the 26 October meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee ended with Zhukov accepting that he had lost the confidence of his colleagues and that he could not therefore continue as minister of defence. It was agreed that he would be succeeded by Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, a Ukrainian with strong links to Khrushchev.22 At a subsequent meeting of the Central Committee which ratified the dismissal of Zhukov, no fewer than four Soviet marshals joined in the attack on their former comrade-in-arms, whom they clearly resented. Rokossovsky complained about his rudeness, Moskalenko denounced his ‘limitless arrogance’, Malinovsky referred to his ‘self-glorification’, and Marshal Bagramyan added that ‘self-aggrandizement is in his blood’.23 As Khrushchev’s biographer William Taubman observed: ‘With friends and colleagues like these, Zhukov needed no enemies.’24
The Limits of de-Stalinization
In the short term Khrushchev was enormously strengthened by his victory over Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov and the rest of the Anti-Party Group, as well as by his removal of the potential threat which Marshal Zhukov’s strength of will and popular standing represented. Over the next two years Khrushchev brought an increasing number of people who had worked with him in the past, especially in Ukraine, into the Presidium of the Central Committee (in addition to the Secretariat, where they were already well represented). In demoting his rivals he even displayed his sense of humour. Molotov, who had been the foreign minister, representing the Soviet Union in many major international negotiations, was dispatched to Ulan Bator, where he spent the years between the June 1957 plenum of the Central Committee and 1960 as Soviet Ambassador to Mongolia. Malenkov, who had been in charge of the entire Soviet economy before being demoted to minister for electrical power stations, was sent to manage a hydro-electric power station in eastern Kazakhstan. Kaganovich was shunted off to the Urals as manager of a cement works in Sverdlovsk. While Khrushchev’s defeated rivals could feel hard done by, their fate was a dramatic improvement over that of oppositionists under Stalin. The execution of Beria turned out to be the end of the era in which the price of intra-party opposition was a bullet in the head – and, if anyone deserved such a fate, it would have been hard to find a better candidate than Beria.
Bulganin kept his post as Chairman of the Council of Ministers until 1958 (it was only in that year that his membership of the Anti-Party Group was revealed to the Soviet public and the wider world), when Khrushchev took this office in addition to his party first secretaryship. Heading the government as well as the party enhanced Khrushchev’s powers still further, but by broadening his responsibilities, it pointed up his evident culpability when things went wrong. It also led to growing ill-feeling in the highest echelons of the party about the apparent abandonment of collective leadership and Khrushchev’s desire to concentrate immense power in his own hands. In retirement, Khrushchev came close to admitting that adding on the chairmanship of the Council of Ministers to his party first secretaryship had been a mistake, conceding that it ‘represented a certain weakness on my part’. However, he was content to leave the final judgement on its wisdom to ‘the court of history’.25
Having taken on this new role, Khrushchev proceeded to work from his office in the Council of Ministers more than from his office in the party Central Committee building. Along with the extra duties he had taken on, this meant that the second secretary of the Central Committee had all the more leeway in dealing with the party organization. When, at the end of the 1950s, that office was held by Khrushchev’s ally Kirichenko, this did not represent any danger to the party leader, but the Ukrainian Kirichenko had enemies within the top leadership team, and Kozlov succeeded in turning Khrushchev against him. In 1960, Kirichenko was demoted and Kozlov, who aspired to be Khrushchev’s successor as party leader (with, for a time, Khrushchev’s apparent blessing),26 became the second secretary in charge of the party bureaucracy. Kozlov thus played an important role in supervising the selection of delegates to the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961 as well as in choosing the membership of the Central Committee formally elected on that occasion.
Khrushchev himself at times wavered in his anti-Stalinism, partly as a result of pressure from more conservative colleagues, but more because of his own worries about a loosening of party control. He remained an ideologically convinced Communist who actually, as his own daughter remarked, agreed with Stalin on many matters.27 At a diplomatic reception on the eve of 1957–thus, after the Twentieth Congress but before the struggle with his opponents came to a head the following summer – Khrushchev announced that he and his colleagues were ‘Stalinists in the consistency with which they fought for communism and Stalinists in their uncompromising fight against the class enemy, as was Stalin, who devoted his whole life to the victory of the working class and socialism’.28 The Yugoslav ambassador, who reported these and other pro-Stalin remarks made by Khrushchev at the time, saw them as ‘a passing tactical move’, aimed especially at pleasing the Chinese Communists.29 But Khrushchev, in the enforced leisure of his retirement, recognized the profound imprint that Stalin had left on him. Reflecting on his refusal of permission to Petr Kapitsa, a distinguished physicist and later Nobel Prize winner, to go abroad in the mid-1950s, Khrushchev observed that ‘possibly Stalin was still belching inside me’.30 *
Even in his memoirs, by which time his views were, on the whole, more moderate than when he was in office, Khrushchev declared:
The struggle will end only when Marxism-Leninism triumphs everywhere and when the class enemy vanishes from the face of the earth. Both history and the future are on the side of the proletariat’s ultimate victory…We Communists must hasten this process by any means at our disposal, excluding war…There’s a battle going on in the world to decide who will prevail over whom: will the working class prevail, or the bourgeoisie?…Every right-thinking person can see clearly that the basic questions of ideology can be resolved only when one doctrine defeats the other…To speak of ideological compromise would be to betray our Party’s first principles – and to betray the heritage left to us by Marx, Engels, and Lenin.31
De-Stalinization in Literature
Khrushchev pursued an inconsistent cultural policy. The Twentieth Party Congress had encouraged talented writers to believe that work which could not previously be published was now within the realms of the possible. Some of it did make its way into print. A short story by Alexander Yashin called ‘The Levers’ pointed to the dichotomy between the way people spoke in everyday discourse and the wooden language they would adopt when the situation required a switch to official clichés. The story is set in a collective farm with a group of people making clear how dilapidated the place was and how badly things had gone under the direction of the district party secretary. Then they are called to order and it transpires that they are the members of the primary party organization of the collective farm. As soon as the party meeting begins, they speak in the kind of official language they have just been mocking. The disjunction between state and society, between conformism and spontaneity, was not just a phenomenon existing among very different sets of people. It was also often to be found in the heads of the same people.32
A more famous literary work – Vladimir Dudintsev’s novel Not by Bread Alone – portrayed an inventor’s struggle against the protection accorded an inferior designer by Soviet bureaucratic authority. Such aspersions on the social order brought a storm of criticism from Soviet literary functionaries no less than from party ideologists. Both sets of conservative officials were adept at manipulating Khrushchev to join the attack on innovative work in literature and art. A notorious example was when Boris Pasternak, one of the most important twentieth-century Russian poets, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 for his novel Doctor Zhivago. It had been published abroad, although Pasternak had offered it to Novy mir and hoped it would be published in Moscow. (The novel eventually appeared in Russia – in Novy mir – in the very different political climate of 1988.) Pasternak was crudely and scathingly insulted by Soviet officials, especially by the head of the Komsomol (Young Communist League) and later KGB chief Vladimir Semichastny, with Khrushchev’s full support. He was put under great psychological pressure and was compelled to refuse to accept the award of the Nobel Prize. Pasternak’s death in 1960 was almost certainly hastened by the campaign of abuse against him. Khrushchev, when dictating his memoirs, admitted that he had not read Pasternak’s novel during his years in power, and in retrospect he regretted the harsh treatment to which the author had been subjected.33
While he was in power, Khrushchev, however, showed some sympathy for another poet, Alexander Tvardovsky, who returned to the chief editorship of Novy mir in 1958 where he struggled to defend literature against dogma.34 Young poets who attracted mass audiences to readings of their work, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrey Voznesensky, also managed to combine wide popularity with cautiously nonconformist views, and were met with a degree of official tolerance, although they too could attract the wrath of party conservatives and the cultural bureaucracy. Yevtushenko combined a spirited anti-Stalinism with what seemed – in the Khrushchev era, at least – to be a rosy view of Lenin.35 If what could be published under Khrushchev was far removed from some of the root-and-branch criticism of the Soviet system and Soviet society that was to appear in print in the second half of the 1980s, it was, nevertheless, a refreshing contrast with the cultural desert of late Stalinism. In Soviet intellectual life following the Twentieth Party Congress there was a division not only between Stalinists and anti-Stalinists but also strong echoes of a much older divide – between Westernisers and Russophiles (or Slavophiles, as they were known in the nineteenth century). The latter included both Russian nationalists who were sympathetic to Communist rule – applauding the extent to which this had made Russia, in its Soviet form, into one of the world’s two greatest powers – and nationalists with religious sympathies who were fundamentally (though not overtly in their Soviet published work) opposed to the Communist system. The most important writer in the last-named category was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, about whom more will be said later, for in 1962 he was able to break the literary silence on the Soviet labour camps, following Khrushchev’s renewed attack on Stalin at the Twenty-Second Party Congress the previous year.
Socialism Built–‘communism’ Coming Soon
That congress also saw the approval of an ideologically innovative new party programme. While non-Stalinist in spirit, the document was a remarkable combination of self-delusion, wishful thinking, and utopianism. Khrushchev himself was not much interested in abstract ideas, but having defeated his most dogmatic opponents, he was eager to be associated with movement to a new stage in the development of Soviet society. The programme endorsed by the Twenty-Second Congress on 31 October 1961 declared that the Soviet Union had become a ‘state of the whole people’ and that the Communist Party was now a ‘party of the entire people’. It was no longer a dictatorship of the proletariat. This, in a way, was good news for the intelligentsia and, indeed, the peasantry who, doctrinally (and for much of the time in practice), had been treated as less praiseworthy citizens than industrial workers. It should also have been good news for bureaucrats, although they (with the exception of those who were arbitrarily caught up in Stalin’s purges in the 1930s) had flourished perfectly well during the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. What the state was called did not directly affect people’s lives, although different terminology often reflected different political tendencies. Behind the scenes party intellectuals had agonized over the phraseology of the party programme, with the most conservative guardians of Marxism-Leninism very reluctant to accept the idea of the all-people’s state. Indeed, in that respect they were the more orthodox followers of Marx, who had held that for as long as there was a state, there had to be a ruling class.
The 1961 programme was also, however, the last authoritative document produced by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to take entirely seriously the building of a communist society – as distinct from a Communist system, which the programme, of course, called socialism, declaring that socialism had now been built in the Soviet Union. Its final words were: ‘The Party solemnly declares: the present generation of Soviet people shall live in communism.’36 The Programme stated that ‘a communist society will in the main be built in the U.S.S.R.’ by 1980, and that the construction of communism would be ‘fully completed in the subsequent period’.37 In the meantime, the role of the party would become greater rather than diminish. As the programme put it: ‘The period of full-scale communist construction is characterised by a further enhancement of the role and importance of the Communist Party as the leading and guiding force of Soviet society.’38 The authors of the programme, running no risk of understatement, further declared:
The achievement of communism in the U.S.S.R. will be the greatest victory mankind has ever won throughout its long history. Every new step made towards the bright peaks of communism inspires the working masses in all countries, renders immense moral support to the struggle for the liberation of all peoples from social and national oppression, and brings closer the triumph of Marxism-Leninism on a world-wide scale.39
If such rhetoric was to be something of an embarrassment to Khrushchev’s successors, still more embarrassing were the concrete predictions of economic achievements also made in the programme, for the latter were what Soviet citizens remembered. Thus, the programme declared that by 1970 there would be no housing shortage in the Soviet Union, that they would have surpassed the United States in production per head of population, and that by 1980 the real income per head would have increased by more than 250 per cent.40
At this same party congress which approved the new programme, Khrushchev returned to the attack on the Anti-Party Group and on Stalin in sessions which were reported. He implied that Stalin was responsible for the murder of Kirov, which the Soviet leader had then used as an excuse to launch the intra-party repression of the 1930s. Some other speakers attacked Stalinism more strongly, and younger delegates could be even more outspoken about the role of Molotov, Kaganovich and Voroshilov than Khrushchev himself, since his own hands were far from clean. Molotov and Kaganovich were expelled from the Communist Party. The congress also passed a resolution approving the removal of Stalin’s body from the mausoleum in Red Square where it had lain alongside that of Lenin. By the very next morning Lenin lay there alone.41
Achievements and Failures
The years in which Nikita Khrushchev headed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were packed with policy initiatives, many of which backfired on Khrushchev. They were also, though, a period of social change and intellectual ferment. Some of the developments were willed by Khrushchev, while other changes were more of an unintended consequence of de-Stalinization. One change – Khrushchev’s massive house-building programme – had elements of both at the same time. Khrushchev had a genuine concern for the average Soviet citizen’s living conditions and placed a high priority on improving the quality of housing. The apartment blocks were drab and not particularly well built, but they transformed the lives of millions of people for the better.42 During Khrushchev’s years at the helm, the annual rate of housing construction, from prefabricated materials, almost doubled, and tens of millions of people moved into homes of their own.43 Most of them were rented from the local authorities – the soviets – but there was also a growth of co-operative apartment blocks which were co-owned by the various occupants. Previously, whole families in the cities had lived in one room in communal apartments – in the worst cases more than one family to a room, with their territory separated by a curtain – during the years of rapid urbanization and industrialization under Stalin. Even if the new apartments consisted of only one or two rooms plus kitchen and bathroom, they greatly enhanced the quality of everyday urban life.
A Russian dissident and literary scholar, Leonid Pinsky, in a conversation I had with him in Moscow in early 1976, picked out Khrushchev’s housing programme as the most important social and political change of the post-Stalin years up to that time. Its significance, he observed, lay in the fact that millions of people acquired the possibility to shut their own front door. The unintended consequence of the policy of constructing self-contained apartments was that it provided privacy and thus liberated conversation. People who were known political dissenters had their homes bugged. One of the ‘privileges’ of being in the top leadership team was that those high officials, too, were wise to assume that their apartments and dachas contained listening devices. But most citizens were spared such intrusion. The economy would have ground to a halt if half the population had been employed listening to the conversations of the other half. The KGB had to rely on selected informers to report the existence of dangerous opinions. The task of the latter was very much easier in communal apartments. Once people had their own home, with a door they could close to the outside world, they began to talk uninhibitedly with members of their family and with trusted friends. Paradoxical though it may appear, some of the freest and broadest-ranging conversations in the world took place round the kitchen tables in the apartments of the intelligentsia in Moscow and Leningrad during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years of oppressive Communist rule in Russia.
Many of the conversations were not, of course, overtly political, but among those which were, the nature of the departure from current Soviet orthodoxy varied radically. Some intellectuals criticized the system on the basis of an idealized view of Lenin. Others did so drawing on the writings of pre-revolutionary Russian liberals or on the basis of Western liberal ideas and practices. Others were impressed by democratic socialism. A minority within the Russian intelligentsia knew something about Scandinavian social democracy, which had achieved a far higher standard of welfare for the average citizen at infinitely less social cost than Soviet Communism. There were also some in the Khrushchev years, and many more in the Brezhnev era, whose critique of the system was grounded in Russian nationalism. Between the mid-1950s (after the Twentieth Congress) and the mid-1980s, it was possible only obliquely to advance these ideas in works which had passed through the hands of the Soviet censorship. Nevertheless, the public glasnost (openness or transparency) which was embraced during Gorbachev’s perestroika could not have taken off as quickly as it did had it not been preceded by the private glasnost developing over the three previous decades.44
The educational expansion which had been one of the positive features of Soviet rule already under Stalin continued in the 1950s and 1960s. What was most distinctive about Khrushchev’s approach was an attempt to improve the chances of workers and rural youth entering higher educational institutions and to emphasize the importance of vocational training. He spoke out against the disproportionately large number of children from privileged families who were entering universities. He also noted a tendency to look down on manual work. This he regarded as a personal and ideological affront. Khrushchev’s way of trying to resolve these problems was to attempt to make it a condition of entry to higher education that a student should have completed two years of work experience. There was much resistance to this, with scientists and mathematicians being the first to point out that people in their fields tended to produce their most innovative work at an early age. To delay their university entrance was, accordingly, a mistake. In a policy area such as education, Khrushchev could set the tone but he found himself obliged to accept practical objections from within the relevant ministries and the policy community of specialists. Between April and December 1958–from the time he made some of his most radical proposals until the promulgation of the law on education – the policy innovations were watered down. The new law raised the period of compulsory education from seven years to eight and it recommended that in admissions to higher education, preference be given to students with work experience. However, it neither specified how long the period of work had to be nor made it mandatory.45
If Khrushchev showed more genuine interest in improving the everyday lives of the average Soviet citizen than did many of his colleagues in the leadership, who had long insulated themselves from the travails of lesser mortals, there was one category of people whom he treated with especial disdain – namely, religious believers. In his desire to push ahead on the road to communism, Khrushchev was convinced that all religious belief was a hopeless relic of the past which needed to be swept aside as soon as possible. Between 1959 and 1964, about three-quarters of all Christian churches in the Soviet Union were closed down in defiance of the wishes of the believers. In comparison, the years between the Second World War and 1958 were a period of relative tolerance of religion in the Soviet Union.46 A leading specialist on religion in Communist countries, Michael Bourdeaux, went so far as to describe Khrushchev as ‘one of the greatest persecutors of the church that Christian history has known’.47
Khrushchev’s policy in this area bore especially harshly on the peasantry, whose village churches in many cases were closed. In other ways, too, he made life more difficult for those who worked in the countryside. Campaigns to catch up with the United States in meat production within the space of two or three years led to the excessive slaughter of cattle at the behest of party secretaries desperate to meet their targets, with a corresponding shortage of livestock in subsequent years. Khrushchev had a special interest in agriculture, but his frequent reorganizations and new ideas did more harm than good. His policies were not helped by the fact that, like Stalin, he had confidence in the quack agronomist Trofim Lysenko. This led him to support some entirely useless agricultural techniques. Khrushchev’s agricultural policy was notable, above all, for his encouragement of the growing of maize in the Soviet Union and for his extension of agriculture to hitherto uncultivated land, especially in northern Kazakhstan and southern parts of Siberia – the ‘Virgin Lands’ campaign. Both had mixed results. Maize was grown not only in soil suited to it but also in places where it was inappropriate. Khrushchev himself was popularly deemed to have a maize-mania. The Virgin Lands project was also, at best, a temporary and mixed success. It was on such a massive scale that between 1953 and 1956 the increase in the area of land cultivated was equivalent to the total cultivated land of Canada.48 Exploitation of the Virgin Lands led to increases in the tonnage of grain produced in the country, but the short-term successes were vitiated by the political campaigning nature of the enterprise, with an emphasis on the speedy achievement of ever higher yields leading to lack of crop rotation and, in turn, to soil erosion.49 Nineteen sixty-three was a particularly bad year in the Soviet Union for both livestock and the harvest, and the leadership were forced to import grain from abroad. It was remarked in Russia at the time that Khrushchev was the first person to sow in the Virgin Lands and to reap in Canada.
Measured purely in quantitative terms, discounting the poor quality of many Soviet goods, economic growth was impressive in the 1950s. The economy grew more slowly thereafter. There was a long-term decline in the rate of growth from the 1950s to the 1980s. However, the nature of the command economy was such that massive investment of material and human capital could be devoted to certain areas of production, and in these the Soviet Union was able to achieve world standards. This was true of much of Soviet military industry, an area in which Khrushchev emphasized nuclear weapons and rocket production rather than conventional forces, thereby (in the years after he had defeated the Anti-Party Group) causing discontent in large sections of the military. Above all, the Soviet Union under Khrushchev took a lead in space research and exploration. In August 1957 the first successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile was carried out, and in October of the same year that rocket was used to launch the world’s first man-made satellite in space.50 It was a tremendous boost for the Soviet Union, and an achievement in which the average citizen as well as the Soviet leaders took pride, when a Soviet spacecraft – the sputnik – became the world’s first satellite in space. The excitement was, if anything, still greater when a Russian, Yury Gagarin, became the first man in space in 1961. A year earlier he had been encouraged to join the Communist Party and he was subsequently given the honorific role of a deputy to the Supreme Soviet. (Gagarin was killed in an aircraft accident in 1968.) The principal genius behind the Soviet Union taking an early lead in the space race was Sergey Korolev. His career trajectory illustrated the severe risks and disadvantages of life as a Soviet scientist as well as the opportunities. Korolev was already working on rockets from the beginning of the 1930s, but he was arrested later in that decade and not released until the summer of 1944. During some of that time he endured severe conditions in a labour camp at Kolyma, but for part of his sentence he was allowed, under guard, to work in a special prison (of the kind described by Solzhenitsyn in his novel The First Circle) in which scientists and engineers could do research in their area of expertise for the benefit of the Soviet state. The secrecy with which the Soviet authorities surrounded his later work was such that Korolev’s name was publicly revealed only when he died in 1966. Until then he was known as ‘the Chief Designer’.51
The success of Soviet space research, and also Khrushchev’s boastfulness about the country’s military rocketry, led the outside world to overestimate Soviet progress. Alongside Soviet economic aid to some developing countries, including Egypt and India, the conquest of space helped boost the prestige of the Soviet Union in the Third World. (That was assisted still more by the Soviet Union’s anti-colonial stance in world politics, with its admirers in Africa and Asia overlooking the nature of the relationship between the USSR and the states subordinated to it in Eastern Europe.) However, Khrushchev’s exaggeration of Soviet missile capacity turned out to be counterproductive in the ‘First World’. In particular, it led to American perceptions of a ‘missile gap’ in favour of the Soviet Union and so to massive investment in US military production. Similarly, the shock of the first sputnik and Gagarin’s flight in space produced an American response so successful that the first men to set foot on the moon – in 1969–were Americans. (The space programmes of both the Soviet Union and the United States, it is worth adding, benefited from their acquisition of talented German rocket scientists and engineers at the end of the Second World War.) Nevertheless, in the years between 1953 and 1964, the Soviet Union became a still more formidable military power than it had been hitherto, far stronger than any country apart from the United States. It was not, though, until the early 1970s that it reached a rough military parity with the USA.
In foreign policy the record of the Khrushchev years was a very mixed one. Some of the major events – among them, Soviet reaction to unrest in Eastern Europe and the Sino-Soviet split – are discussed in other chapters. Nevertheless, this was an area where Khrushchev’s impetuousness at times made the world a much more dangerous place. In 1960 he took the decision to wreck a Paris summit meeting with President Eisenhower, President de Gaulle of France and British prime minister Harold Macmillan by demanding a public apology from Eisenhower for the intelligence-gathering flights made by American aircraft over Soviet territory. The evidence for these flights was in Soviet hands, for one such U-2 flight had been downed, and the pilot, Gary Powers, who had bailed out, was in Soviet custody. This being so, Eisenhower owned up to prior knowledge of the spy flights but, in such circumstances, could scarcely apologize for them. For Khrushchev this meant that ‘Eisenhower had, so to speak, offered us his back end, and we obliged him by kicking it as hard as we could.’52 Since, however, Khrushchev had actually wanted to achieve better relations with the United States, this style of diplomacy was, to say the least, unhelpful.53
Although Khrushchev was firmly convinced that nuclear war would be a disaster for all humankind, and profoundly disagreed with Mao Zedong’s more insouciant view of the prospects, he brought the world closer to nuclear catastrophe than it had ever been by placing missiles, with nuclear warheads, in Cuba in 1962. Fidel Castro had initially been reluctant to accept the missiles, but he regarded it as a humiliation when, on the insistence of the Kennedy Administration that the missiles be withdrawn, they were removed. In the Soviet Union also, both in political and military circles, there were many who had thought the original idea foolhardy but also perceived the return of the rockets to Soviet soil as a diplomatic victory for the United States. In fact, the backstairs diplomacy during the crisis produced results which were not at all bad from a Soviet standpoint. President Kennedy gave an assurance that there would be no US attack on Cuba and, on condition that the promise was not made public, agreed to withdraw American missiles from Turkey. Yet the venture did Khrushchev much more harm than good in the circles of those who mattered at home. His impulsiveness had risked war with the one country which was militarily stronger than the Soviet Union – and whatever the concrete results of the showdown, the perception was that Khrushchev had blinked before Kennedy.54 The extreme dangers which the Cuban missile crisis had highlighted contributed to the current of opinion internationally, and in scientific circles in the Soviet Union itself, in favour of banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere. Igor Kurchatov, the leading Soviet atomic scientist, was among those who lobbied Khrushchev to agree to such a ban, which had gained the support of the Western nuclear powers. A limited nuclear test-ban treaty was duly signed in Moscow in 1963.55
Contradictions of the Khrushchev Era
When conservative party bureaucrats, notably the ideologist Leonid Ilichev, joined with the leading officials of the Artists’ Union to take Khrushchev to an exhibition of abstract art, they knew exactly what they were doing. They accurately predicted that there would be an explosion of rage from Khrushchev and that this would be conducive to stepping up the pressure on writers and artists who deviated from Soviet orthodoxy. This was late in the same month, November 1962, in which Solzhenitsyn had published his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy mir. This ground-breaking short story, which in an understated way illuminated life in the Soviet labour camps, had been published with the personal support of Khrushchev. That came after Khrushchev’s aide, Vladimir Lebedev, on the urging of Tvardovsky, who was enthusiastically in favour of publishing the work, had read the story to Khrushchev when the latter was in a receptive mood.56 Thus, in the very same month, Khrushchev’s support had been successfully enlisted on opposite sides of the battle on the artistic and literary front. (Soviet officials were fond of such military metaphors.) An already grumpy Khrushchev, who thought he had better things to do than attend an exhibition of recent and contemporary art, was duly outraged by the sculpture and abstract paintings he encountered in the Manezh hall, just a few hundred yards from the Kremlin.
The approved form of art was ‘socialist realism’. This meant representational art which was realistic only up to a point. It had to be imbued with optimism and to present an idealized view of workers and peasants. The key word was ‘socialist’, in the sense of whatever was currently meant by that term at the top of the Soviet hierarchy. (Irreverent Soviet citizens asked: ‘What is the difference between impressionist, expressionist and socialist realist art?’ The answer: ‘Impressionists paint what they see, expressionists paint what they feel, and socialist realists paint what they hear.’ To listen to the guidance of party and state officials and the guardians of orthodoxy in the state-sponsored artistic unions was the path to a comfortable existence for the artist.) The outstanding sculptor Ernst Neizvestny was one of those targeted at the Manezh exhibition for the full range of crude Khrushchevian invective. He was also bold enough to answer back and even to tell Khrushchev that the people around him were exploiting his ignorance of art. That produced another explosion. The ploy of the conservative bureaucrats worked in the way they had intended it should. A backlash got under way not only against innovative artists but also against writers such as Solzhenitsyn who were raising dangerous questions about the Soviet past.57
Subsequently, a group of writers and artists were invited to a meeting with Khrushchev in the Central Committee. Yevtushenko, with a mixture of daring and orthodoxy, raised the issue of anti-semitism. This annoyed Khrushchev, who said it was not a problem in the Soviet Union. Yevtushenko insisted that it was and that it was to be found among people who occupied official posts. Addressing it would ‘lead us to even greater success in all areas of Communist construction’.58 Neizvestny was among those called to this Central Committee meeting, and again he got a dressing-down from Khrushchev. The name ‘Neizvestny’ means ‘unknown’ in Russian, and Khrushchev told the sculptor that he was well named because he would remain unknown. Later in the 1960s, when dictating his memoirs, Khrushchev recalled this episode and said, ‘it was rude of me to say it…If I met Neizvestny now, I’d apologize for what I said during our discussion at the Central Committee.’59 Seven years after he was ousted from the Soviet leadership, Khrushchev died – in September 1971. Remarkably, the person his family asked to sculpt a memorial to him, to stand above his grave in Moscow’s Novodevichy cemetery, was none other than Neizvestny. He agreed. The very striking monument has intersecting white marble and black granite (in equal proportions) and on one of them rests a bronze head of Khrushchev. For most observers it symbolizes the good and the bad which Khrushchev did in his life, the two sides of a remarkable personality who lived through turbulent times.
The Khrushchev era was one of profound contradictions. Much that was important in these years occurred regardless of Khrushchev’s intentions, no matter how hard he tried to keep his finger on every pulse. However, the pull in two different directions also reflected contrasting sides of Khrushchev’s own personality. He was a Stalinist who did more than anyone to shake the foundations of Stalinism, a hard and ruthless politician who yet retained some human warmth, a poorly educated worker with a remarkable capacity for learning, and a true believer in the goal of a humane world communism who did not hesitate to use tanks to put down popular resistance to Communist rule in Hungary in 1956 or to support, although this time with misgivings, the shooting of striking workers in the Soviet city of Novocherkassk in 1962.60 (The strikes and demonstrations were a product of deteriorating working conditions in local factories as well as more general discontent at price rises. Even the KGB report from Novocherkassk noted that new work norms in one of the factories had earlier in the year led to a decline in the wages of some categories of workers of up to 30 per cent.)61
The Fall of Khrushchev
Between 1962 and 1964 Khrushchev was at his most imperious. In general, he liked to shake up institutions and he gave full vent to this desire in his final years in power. This style of leadership, and the upset his reorganizations caused, adversely affected the interests of a majority of Central Committee members, the very constituency which had come to his rescue in 1957. It sealed Khrushchev’s fate when his colleagues in the Presidium of the Central Committee finally moved against him. They had no difficulty in getting the Central Committee as a whole on their side. How much Khrushchev’s institutional changes of the early 1960s were disliked by the Soviet establishment was shown when within a year of his departure almost all of them were reversed. That applied also to earlier changes, such as Khrushchev’s uniting of the party leadership and the chairmanship of the Council of Ministers and his creation of the regional economic councils. The first two posts were separated in October 1964 and most of the central ministries that had made way for the sovnarkhozy were soon reinstated.
In November 1962 Khrushchev had created a new body called the Committee of Party-State Control, which had the avowed aim of checking up not only on state organs but on Communist Party officials as well. This could be perceived as yet another centralization of power in his hands, although the chairman of that body was the ambitious Alexander Shelepin, who was already a secretary of the Central Committee and had previously been Chairman of the KGB. The greatest blow to regional party first secretaries, who had earlier formed Khrushchev’s main power base, was dealt to them in the same month, when Khrushchev divided the regional party organizations into organs for industry and organs for agriculture. This meant that whereas previously the regional party first secretary was responsible for everything that went on in his area – in effect, a powerful regional governor – now he (and it was invariably a man) was in charge of either industry or agriculture, but not both. The other sector became the responsibility of a different secretary. But the Central Committee in 1964 was the same Central Committee that had been selected at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961, thus consisting of people whose powers and functions had in the meantime been curtailed. To this diminution of their authority was added uncertainty about their future. One of the changes introduced at the Twenty-Second Congress was the imposition of a compulsory percentage turnover of membership of party committees at all levels at every ‘election’. This even applied to the top party leadership. There was to be a turnover of at least a quarter of the members of the Central Committee and of its Presidium at every congress of the Communist Party. At lower levels of the party organization the percentage turnover was to be still higher. All of those changes were reversed very soon after Khrushchev was removed from power.
Naturally, his opponents chose to strike when he was on vacation. He was accompanied on this occasion by Mikoyan. Khrushchev had provided plenty of opportunities for his enemies to conspire against him. He had become an inveterate traveller, and in the course of 1963 had spent 170 days away from Moscow and in the first nine and a half months of 1964 150 days away, either in some other part of the Soviet Union or abroad.62 On the evening of 12 October 1964, when he was holidaying at Pitsunda, on the Black Sea coast of Georgia, Khrushchev received a telephone call from Leonid Brezhnev.63 The latter had succeeded Kozlov, who was incapacitated by a stroke in 1963 (dying in 1965), as second secretary of the party. Brezhnev told him he must return to Moscow at once to attend a Central Committee meeting. When Khrushchev asked him what the issues were, he was told they would be ‘agriculture and some others’.64 Khrushchev guessed what was coming. His son, Sergei, had been told by a friendly KGB officer of an impending move to oust his father, and he had passed the warning on to both Khrushchev and Mikoyan. They had given it some thought, but decided that there was little danger. Since, however, it was normally Khrushchev who decided when there was going to be a Central Committee plenum, it was not difficult for him to work out that Brezhnev’s call meant the warning had, after all, been well founded.
Khrushchev attended a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee the following day. It had been well prepared. Every member criticized him. He was accused of errors in both agricultural and foreign policy, of adventurism in the Cuban missile case, of being unpredictable, erratic, overbearing and conceited. Among the lesser charges, he was blamed for having awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union to President Nasser of Egypt. Khrushchev telephoned Mikoyan that evening – on a phone which was, of course, bugged – and said that he would not put up a fight but would go quietly. The Presidium reconvened the following day, on 14 October, and the criticism continued. Only Mikoyan suggested that Khrushchev be allowed to keep one of his two posts, that of Chairman of the Council of Ministers. But when Brezhnev called for a vote on ousting him from both his positions, even Mikoyan did not vote against or abstain. Later the same day the Central Committee met and ratified the decision. Only Suslov spoke, reading the indictment, while Khrushchev sat silently. Since Khrushchev was quite popular in parts of the outside world, the leadership who had united against him produced the formula that they had accepted his request to retire ‘in connection with his advanced age and deterioration of his health’.65 Khrushchev was in fact aged seventy, and Brezhnev and others had paid sycophantic but utterly insincere tributes to him on his seventieth birthday earlier the same year. He was also in reasonably robust health. But in 1964, unlike 1957, he knew he was beaten. The people he had trusted, but often treated extremely roughly, had turned against him. Khrushchev, though, noted how much had changed. He remarked later: ‘Perhaps the most important thing I did was just this – that they were able to get rid of me simply by voting; Stalin would have had them all arrested.’66