Unit 14 (Part I)

SOVIET RUSSIA: REFORM, DECLINE, AND COLLAPSE (1953–1991)

Part I

Introduction

I. Scan the text and explain the words in bold.

The basic institutions of the Soviet system were conceived and built between the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and Stalin’s death in March 1953, a period of slightly more than 35 years. The country’s Communist Party leadership then spent another 38 years struggling to reform those institutions to enable the Soviet system to compete with the world’s modern capitalist societies. To that end the leaders had to make the economy more efficient and productive, stabilize the Communist political system, and deal with a growing number of serious social problems.

Three leadership teams with three very different approaches tried, and ultimately failed, to cope with these tasks. Between 1953 and 1964, Nikita Khrushchev directed an energetic, albeit often spasmodic and poorly conceived reform effort. With Khrushchev at the helm the Communist Party leadership ended Stalin’s terror while preserving and trying to improve the basic institutions of Soviet life inherited from the Stalin era. From 1964 until 1982, the Communist Party leadership headed by Leonid Brezhnev rejected many of Khrushchev’s reforms as potentially destabilizing and relied instead on the status quo, tinkering here and there in the hope that stability was the best solution to the country’s problems.

Meanwhile, under both sets of leaders the Soviet Union competed for world influence with the United States and its allies in the Cold War. It was an extremely expensive and burdensome struggle whose inherent dangers were exponentially compounded by the Soviet-American nuclear arms race it produced.

After a short transition period, beginning in 1985 the dynamic new leader Mikhail Gorbachev, having concluded that the Soviet Union’s problems were turning into a systemic crisis, returned the party to the path of reform. Gorbachev went far beyond anything Khrushchev had contemplated as he tried to overhaul the Soviet system while preserving its fundamental socialist framework. That radical effort proved to be more than the system could stand, and, rather than fixing what was broken, it unleashed forces that caused the Soviet Union to collapse.

II. Read the text again and discuss the following questions:

1. Why did the country’s Communist Party leadership struggle to reform the institutions built between the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and Stalin’s death in March 1953? What had to be done to that end?

2. What was the essence of Nikita Khrushchev’s policy? What kind of reform effort was directed by him?

3. What country did the Soviet Union compete with? How can that struggle be characterized?

4. What type of leadership was chosen by Mikhail Gorbachev? What did his policy lead to?

III. Make a short report on political, social and cultural development of one of the foreign countries during 1953–1991. Text 1 Khrushchev and the Problem of Reform

I. Read the text to get the general understanding of it:

The issue of reform emerged immediately after Stalin’s death, even as the small group who had been the late dictator’s top aides and supposedly were going to govern together as a “collective leadership” began their maneuvering in an incipient power struggle. The key players in that struggle were Georgy Malenkov, who seemed to be Stalin’s heir apparent and in the days immediately after the dictator’s death garnered the key positions of prime minister and senior party secretary; Lavrenty Beria, the secret police chief and therefore the most feared by his colleagues; Vyacheslav Molotov, who had served Stalin for long periods as both foreign minister and prime minister; and Nikita Khrushchev, a tough, efficient party boss who at different points in his career had headed its organizations in the Ukraine and Moscow.

Yet even as they schemed against each other, Stalin’s successors understood that they could not rule as Stalin had. During Stalin’s continuous waves of terror – greater or lesser – no one in the Soviet Union had been safe, not even members of the Communist Party elite. Even they were at risk of losing everything at a single stroke. Governance by terror therefore had to end. That in turn meant something had to be done to improve the lives of the Soviet people as a whole lest popular discontent lead to instability that could threaten the entire regime.

The early moves in the struggle for power took place within the context of these imperatives and therefore in effect brought about two key reforms in Soviet life. First, the new leadership promised the people an improved standard of living. Within a month, by lowering prices on a variety of foods and consumer goods, it took a small first step to deliver on that promise. Second, the leadership as a body made political changes to prevent any one of them from accumulating absolute power. This in turn assured the Soviet Union’s new leader he would not be able to rule by terror, which had left no Soviet citizen safe, not even top party leaders. Thus within days of Stalin’s death Malenkov, the prime minister, was forced to give up his position as senior party secretary, a post, soon to be called “first secretary,” that went to Khrushchev.

Perhaps more important, in June 1953 Khrushchev organized a coup in which the dreaded and hated Beria was arrested and the secret police purged. In December Beria and several of his top aides were executed. The result was that for the first time since Stalin’s rise to power, the secret police, reorganized in 1954 as the KGB (Committee of State Security), was brought under the supervision of the party’s Central Committee and thereby under the control of the party leadership as a whole, where it remained for the remainder of the Soviet Union’s existence. That crucial change did much to guarantee that the Soviet Union would never again be ruled by an all-powerful dictator. In the future the Soviet leader would be the head of the Communist Party oligarchy, its most powerful member to be sure, but still a politician dependent on the support of his colleagues to remain in power.

With Beria out of the way only two contenders remained for the top spot in the Soviet political hierarchy – Khrushchev and Malenkov. In early 1955 Malenkov resigned as prime minister, and while he remained a member of the Communist Party leadership, Khrushchev clearly now was in charge.

The party leadership meanwhile had continued with reforms and efforts to improve life for ordinary citizens, including paying collective farmers more for their crops and reducing taxes on their private plots. An amnesty announced in March 1953 (before Beria’s arrest, and actually his idea) had led to the quick release of about 1.5 million Gulag inmates (out of about 5.5 million), although most of those released were common criminals and only a smattering were political prisoners. By 1955, however, the number of released political prisoners had risen to 90,000. In 1954 Khrushchev launched a massive program to grow grain in the steppe region of central Asia, his so-called virgin lands program, a risky undertaking given the unreliable rainfall in the region but yet another sign of his determination to raise the country’s standard of living as quickly as possible. In foreign affairs, during 1953 the new Soviet leadership moved to ease tensions with the West by helping to arrange an armistice that ended the Korean War. Other measures included a summit meeting with American, French, and British leaders in mid-1955 in Geneva, the first such meeting since the end of World War II.

These were all small steps, and not all of them were supported by everyone in the top leadership. In fact the entire issue of reform was controversial. From the start the burning question was how much reform could the system stand? Everyone was glad to see Beria gone, and no one wanted a return to Stalin’s terror, but that was as far as the consensus went. The great fear was that the reform process could run out of control and threaten the power of the party leadership, or even the rule of the Communist Party itself. The specter of runaway reform loomed ominously as early as mid-1953 during an anti-Soviet outbreak in East Germany and appeared again during three major uprisings in the Gulag during 1953 and 1954. These events placed additional obstacles in the path of those who believed in further, more substantial reform.

The most vigorous proponent of reform was Khrushchev. Born into a peasant family in 1894, Khrushchev had labored as a mechanic in the coal-mining industry before joining the Communist Party in 1918. Over the next quarter century he worked, and clawed, his way up the party hierarchy. Although hampered by his limited formal education and crude manner, Khrushchev was highly intelligent. His interests ranged well beyond politics, from the techniques of modern farming to the technology of advanced machinery, and as he once told the British ambassador to the USSR, to rereading Tolstoy’s War and Peace every year.

Like Malenkov, Molotov, and his other colleagues, Khrushchev had served Stalin and carried out many of his most oppressive policies. Unlike them, however, he had not remained isolated from ordinary people, cut off from the realities of daily Soviet life by high Kremlin walls and legions of guards. As boss of the Ukraine and Moscow, Khrushchev continually visited collective farms and factories and knew firsthand how the people lived. During World War II he had served in the army as a political officer (with the rank of general) and had been the horrified witness to the consequences of Stalin’s methods when millions of Soviet citizens welcomed the Germans as liberators.

A true and passionate believer in the virtues and superiority of communism and an impatient man determined to see those virtues benefit the Soviet people, Khrushchev was committed to implementing real change. He also understood that the single greatest barrier to reform was Stalin’s reputation, which provided legitimacy to those opposed to change. After all, if Stalin was everything a generation of Soviet propaganda claimed he was, surely the institutions and policies he left behind did not require serious modification. His reputation therefore had to be cut down to size. Khrushchev also wanted to consolidate his place at the top of the Soviet hierarchy, which as of 1955 was hardly secure. By early 1956 the confluence of those objectives and the nature of the obstacles he faced led him to a policy known as de-Stalinization.