Domestic policy

As Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union, Lavrentiy Beria (notwithstanding his record as part of Stalin's terror state) initiated a period of relative liberalisation, including the release of some political prisoners. Almost as soon as Stalin was buried, Beria ordered Vyacheslav Molotov's wife freed from imprisonment and personally delivered her to the Soviet foreign minister. He also directed the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) to reexamine the Doctors' Plot and other "false" cases. Beria next proposed stripping the MVD of some of its economic assets and transferring control of them to other ministries, followed by the proposal to stop using forced labour on construction projects. He then announced that 1.1 million non-political prisoners were to be freed from captivity, that the Ministry of Justice should assume control of labour camps from the MVD, and that the Doctors' Plot was false. Finally, he ordered a halt to physical and psychological abuse of prisoners. Beria also declared a halt to forced Russification of the Soviet republics; Beria himself was a Georgian.

The leadership also began allowing some criticism of Stalin, saying that his one-man dictatorship went against the principles laid down by Vladimir Lenin. The war hysteria that characterized his last years was toned down, and government bureaucrats and factory managers were ordered to wear civilian clothing instead of military-style outfits. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were given serious prospects of national autonomy, possibly similarly to other Soviet satellite states in Europe.^[3][4][5]

Foreign policy

Beria also turned his attention to foreign policy. A secret letter found among his papers after his death, suggested restoring relations with Titoist Yugoslavia. He also criticized Soviet handling of Eastern Europe and the numerous "mini-Stalins" such as Hungary's Mátyás Rákosi. East Germany particularly was in a tenuous situation in 1953 as the attempt by its leader Walter Ulbricht to impose all-out Stalinism had cause a mass exodus of people to the West. Beria suggested that East Germany should just be forgotten about entirely and there was "no purpose" for its existence. He revived the proposal Stalin had made to the Allies in 1946 for the creation of a united, neutral Germany.

Opposition to Beria

Beria displayed a considerable degree of contempt for the rest of the Politburo, letting it be known that they were "complicit" in Stalin's crimes. However, it was not deep-rooted ideological disagreements that turned them against Beria. Khrushchev in particular was appalled at the idea of abandoning East Germany and allowing the restoration of capitalism there, but that alone was not enough to plot Beria's downfall and he even supported the new, more enlightened policy towards non-Russian nationalities. The Politburo soon began stonewalling Beria's reforms and trying to prevent them from passing. One proposal, to reduce sentences handed down by the MVD to 10 years max, was later claimed by Khrushchev to be a ruse. "He wants to be able to sentence people to ten years in the camps, and then when they're freed, sentence them to another ten years. This is his way of grinding them down." Molotov was the strongest opponent of abandoning East Germany, and found in Khrushchev an unexpected ally.

By late June, it was decided that Beria could not simply be ignored or stonewalled, he had to be taken out. They had him arrested on 26 June with the support of the armed forces.^[6] At the end of the year, he was shot following a show trial where he was accused of spying for the West, committing sabotage, and plotting to restore capitalism. The secret police were disarmed and reorganized into the KGB, ensuring that they were completely under the control of the party and would never again be able to wage mass terror.

Conflict within the collective leadership

During the period of collective leadership, Khrushchev gradually rose to power while Malenkov's power waned. Malenkov was criticised for his economic reform proposals and desire to reduce the CPSU's direct involvement in the day-to-day running of the state. Molotov called his warning that nuclear war would end all of civilisation to be "nonsense" since according to Karl Marx, the collapse of capitalism was a historical inevitability. Khrushchev accused Malenkov of supporting Beria's plan to abandon East Germany, and of being a "capitulationist, social democrat, and a Menshevist".

Khrushchev was also headed for a showdown with Molotov, after having initially respected and left him alone in the immediate aftermath of Stalin's death. Molotov began criticizing some of Khrushchev's ideas and the latter accused him in turn of being an out-of-touch ideologue who never left his dacha or the Kremlin to visit farms or factories. Molotov attacked Khrushchev's suggestions for agricultural reform and also his plans to construct cheap, prefab apartments to alleviate Moscow's severe housing shortages. Khrushchev also endorsed restoring ties with Yugoslavia, the split with Belgrade having been heavily engineered by Molotov, who continued to denounce Tito as a fascist. A 1955 visit by Khrushchev to Yugoslavia patched up relations with that country, but Molotov refused to back down. The near-total isolation of the Soviet Union from the outside world was also blamed by Khrushchev on Molotov's handling of foreign policy and the former admitted in a speech to the Central Committee the obvious Soviet complicity in starting the Korean War.

Among Soviet intellectuals

Many Soviet intellectuals groused that Khrushchev and the rest of the Central Committee had willingly aided and abetted Stalin's crimes and that the late tyrant could not possibly have done everything himself. Furthermore, they asked why it had taken three years to condemn him and noted that Khrushchev mostly criticised what had happened to fellow Party members while completely overlooking far greater atrocities such as the Holodomor and mass deportations from the Baltic States during and after World War II, none of which were allowed to be mentioned in the Soviet press until the end of the 1980s. During the Secret Speech, Khrushchev had tried in an awkward manner to explain why he and his colleagues had not raised their voices against Stalin by saying that they all feared their own destruction if they did not comply with his demands.

Pro-Stalin demonstrations

In Stalin's native Georgia, massive crowds of pro-Stalin demonstrators rioted in the streets of Tbilisi and even demanded that Georgia secede from the USSR. Army troops had to be called in to restore order, with 20 deaths, 60 injuries, and scores of arrests.

Response from Soviet youth

In April 1956, there were reports that Stalin busts and portraits around the country had been vandalized or pulled down and some student groups rioted and demanded that Stalin be posthumously expelled from the party and his body taken down from its spot next to Lenin. Party and student meetings called for proper rule of law in the country and even free elections. A 25 year old Mikhail Gorbachev, then a member of the Komsomol in Stavropol reported that reaction to the Secret Speech was explosive and there were strong reactions between people, particularly, young, educated people, who supported it and hated Stalin, others who denounced it and still held the late tyrant in awe, and others who thought it was irrelevant compared to grassroots issues such as food and housing availability. The Presidium responded by issuing a resolution condemning "anti-party" and "anti-Soviet" slanderers and the April 7 Pravda reprinted an editorial from China's People's Daily calling on party members to study Stalin's teachings and honour his memory. A Central Committee meeting on 30 June issued a resolution criticising Stalin merely for "serious errors" and "practicing a cult of personality" but holding the Soviet system itself blameless.

International reception

Some of the communist world, in particular China, North Korea, and Albania, stridently rejected de-Stalinisation. An editorial in the People's Daily argued that "Stalin made some mistakes, but on the whole he was a good, honest Marxist and his positives outweighed the negatives." Mao Zedong had many quarrels with Stalin, but thought that condemning him undermined the entire legitimacy of world socialism; "Stalin needed to be criticised, not killed" he said.

Rehabilitation during this period

By late 1955, thousands of political prisoners had been freed, but Soviet prisons and labour camps still held around 800,000 inmates and no attempt was made to investigate the Moscow Trials or rehabilitate their victims. Eventually several hundred thousand of Stalin's victims were rehabilitated, but the party officials purged in the Moscow Trials remained off the table. Khrushchev ordered an investigation into the trials of Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other army officers. The committee found that the charges leveled against them were baseless and their posthumous rehabilitation was announced in early 1957, but another investigation into the trials of Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Nikolai Bukharin declared that all three had engaged in "anti-Soviet activity" and would not be rehabilitated. After Khrushchev defeated the "anti-party group" in 1957, he promised to re-open the cases, but ultimately never did so, in part because of the embarrassing fact that he himself had celebrated the elimination of the Old Bolsheviks during the purges.

Changing toponymy

As part of de-Stalinisation, Khrushchev set about renaming the numerous towns, cities, factories, natural features, and kholkozes around the country named in honor of Stalin and his aides, most notably Stalingrad, site of the great WWII battle, was renamed to Volgograd in 1961.

Defeat of the Anti-Party Group

In 1957, Khrushchev had defeated a concerted Stalinist attempt to recapture power, decisively defeating the so-called "Anti-Party Group"; this event illustrated the new nature of Soviet politics. The most decisive attack on the Stalinists was delivered by defense minister Georgy Zhukov, who and the implied threat to the plotters was clear; however, none of the "anti-party group" were killed or even arrested, and Khrushchev disposed of them quite cleverly: Georgy Malenkov was sent to manage a power station in Kazakhstan, and Vyacheslav Molotov, one of the most die-hard Stalinists, was made ambassador to Mongolia.

Eventually however, Molotov was reassigned to be the Soviet representative of the International Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna after the Kremlin decided to put some safe distance between him and China since Molotov was becoming increasingly cozy with the anti-Khrushchev Chinese Communist Party leadership. Molotov continued to attack Khrushchev every opportunity he got, and in 1960, on the occasion of Lenin's 90th birthday, wrote a piece describing his personal memories of the Soviet founding father and thus implying that he was closer to the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. In 1961, just prior to the 22nd CPSU Congress, Molotov wrote a vociferous denunciation of Khrushchev's party platform and was rewarded for this action with expulsion from the party.

Khrushchev's attack on the "anti-party group" drew negative reactions from China; the People's Daily remarked "How can [Molotov], one of the founding fathers of the CPSU, be a member of an anti-party group?"

Like Molotov, Foreign Minister Dmitri Shepilov also met the chopping block when he was sent to manage the Kirghizia Institute of Economics. Later, when he was appointed as a delegate to the Communist Party of Kirghizia conference, Khrushchev deputy Leonid Brezhnev intervened and ordered Shepilov dropped from the conference. He and his wife were evicted from their Moscow apartment and then reassigned to a smaller one that lay exposed to the fumes from a nearby food processing plant, and he was dropped from membership in the Soviet Academy of Sciences before being expelled from the party. Kliment Voroshilov held the ceremonial title of head of state despite his advancing age and declining health; he retired in 1960. Nikolai Bulganin ended up managing the Stavropol Economic Council. Also banished was Lazar Kaganovich, sent to manage a potash works in the Urals before being expelled from the party along with Molotov in 1962.

Despite his strong support for Khrushchev during the removal of Beria and the anti-party group, Zhukov was too popular and beloved of a figure for Khrushchev's comfort, so he was removed as well. In addition, while leading the attack against Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich, he also insinuated that Khrushchev himself had been complicit in the 1930s purges, which in fact he had. While Zhukov was on a visit to Albania in October 1957, Khrushchev plotted his downfall. When Zhukov returned to Moscow, he was promptly accused of trying to remove the Soviet military from party control, creating a cult of personality around himself, and of plotting to seize power in a coup. Several Soviet generals went on to accuse Zhukov of "egomania", "shameless self-aggrandizement", and of tyrannical behaviour during WWII. Zhukov was expelled from his post as defense minister and forced into retirement from the military on the grounds of his "advanced age" (he was 62). Marshal Rodin Malinovsky took Zhukov's place as defense minister.

Election to Premiership

Khrushchev was elected Premier on 27 March 1958, consolidating his power—the tradition followed by all his predecessors and successors. This was the final stage in the transition from the earlier period of post-Stalin collective leadership. He was now the ultimate source of authority in the Soviet Union, but would never possess the absolute power Stalin had.

Impact on the Eastern Bloc

Such loosening of controls also caused an enormous impact on other socialist countries in Central Europe, many of which were resentful of Soviet influence in their affairs. Riots broke out in Poland in the summer of 1956, which led to reprisals from national forces there. A political convulsion soon followed, leading to the rise of Władysław Gomułka to power in October. This almost triggered a Soviet invasion when Polish Communists elected him without consulting the Kremlin in advance, but in the end, Khrushchev backed down due to Gomułka's widespread popularity in the country. Poland would still remain a member of the Warsaw Pact (established a year earlier), and in return, the Soviet Union seldom intervened in its neighbors' domestic and external affairs. Khrushchev also began reaching out to newly independent countries in Asia and Africa, which was in sharp contrast to Stalin's Europe-centered foreign policy. And in September 1959, he became the first Soviet leader to visit the US.

In November 1956, the Hungarian Revolution was brutally suppressed by Soviet troops. About 2,500–3,000 Hungarian insurgents and 700 Soviet troops were killed, thousands more were wounded, and nearly a quarter million left the country as refugees. The Hungarian uprising was a blow to Western communists; many who had formerly supported the Soviet Union began to criticize it in the wake of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising.

American farming techniques and maize

Khrushchev continued to believe in the theories of the biologist Trofim Lysenko, a carryover from the Stalin era, however, the Soviet leader looked to his country's greatest rival for inspiration. As far back as the 1940s, he had promoted the use of American farming techniques and even obtained seeds from the US, in particular from a cagey Iowa farmer named Roswell Garst, who believed positive trade and business relations with Moscow would ease superpower tensions. This led to Khrushchev's soon to be notorious fascination with growing maize,^[10] although most of the Soviet Union outside of Ukraine lacked a suitable climate and much of the infrastructure used by American farmers, including adequate mechanized equipment, knowledge of advanced farming techniques, and proper use of fertilizer and pesticides, was in short supply. Although Khrushchev's corn obsession was exaggerated by popular myth, he did nonetheless advocate any number of unrealistic ideas such as planting corn in Siberia.

Virgin Lands Campaign

During the Virgin Lands Campaign in the mid-1950s, many tracts of land were opened to farming in Kazakhstan and neighbouring areas of Russia. These new farmlands turned out to be susceptible to droughts, but in some years they produced excellent harvests. Later agricultural reforms by Khrushchev, however, proved counterproductive. His plans for growing corn and increasing meat and dairy production failed, and his reorganisation of collective farms into larger units produced confusion in the countryside.

East Germany

East Germany continued to be a sticky situation. Khrushchev had initially hoped to obtain recognition for the GDR from the Western powers, but ended up making things worse. A mass exodus of GDR citizens to West Germany, mostly young, fit adults, continued unabated, which left the GDR's labour force drained of manpower. GDR leader Walter Ulbricht requested the use of Soviet guest workers to make up for labour shortages, a proposal that alarmed Khrushchev as it drew reminders of the use of Soviet slave labourers by Nazi Germany during WWII. On top of this, West German citizens were traveling to the East to buy low cost goods subsidized by Moscow, further increasing the amount of debt money the GDR owed to the USSR.

The problem of signing a peace treaty with West Germany loomed large and posed nearly insurmountable issues. Signing a peace treaty would likely result in an economic embargo of the GDR by West Germany which would require a twofold increase in Soviet assistance, something Moscow could ill afford.

Khrushchev visits the US

In September 1959, Khrushchev became the first Russian head of state to visit the United States. This groundbreaking trip was made on the new Tu-114 long range airliner despite still being an experimental aircraft, since the Soviet Union did not have any other plane capable of nonstop trans-Atlantic travel. The 13 day trip included meetings with American businessmen and labour leaders, Hollywood actors, and Roswell Garst's farm in Iowa. Khrushchev became openly dismayed when he was told he could not visit Disneyland because it was too difficult to guarantee his security there.

1960 US presidential election

Khrushchev anxiously awaited the results of the 1960 United States presidential election, preferring Kennedy to Richard Nixon, whom he took as a hardline anti-communist cold warrior, and openly celebrated the former's victory on November 8. In truth however, Khrushchev's opinion of Kennedy was mixed. He knew that the new president was from a wealthy background and Harvard-educated. On the other, Kennedy was the youngest elected US president at 43 and gave off the impression of inexperience and "a boy wearing his father's pants" that Khrushchev assumed he could pounce on and dominate. If however Kennedy was that weak, there stood the possibility that he could merely be a puppet of "reactionary" forces and the US military-industrial complex. Almost immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, Khrushchev attempted to barrage the president-elect with proposals and the hope of improved US-Soviet relations, specifically turning the clock back to the accommodating diplomatic atmosphere of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's time. However, Khrushchev was informed that he was acting too quickly and it would not be possible to have a formal summit with Kennedy until he took office in January, and even then, arranging such a meeting would still take time.

Kennedy-era

Khrushchev was pleased by Kennedy's inaugural address on 20 January 1961 and immediately offered to release American pilots shot down over the Soviet Union as an olive branch. Kennedy in his turn ordered a halt to US Postal Service censorship of Soviet publications, lifted a ban on the importation of Soviet crab meat, and ordered military officials to tone down anti-Soviet rhetoric in speeches.

In a report on January 6 concerning a world conference of 81 communist parties in Moscow the previous fall, Khrushchev stated that the triumph of socialism over capitalism was inevitable, but at the same time, a major conflict between the great powers on the scale of the two world wars was now unthinkable in the age of nuclear weapons. He also stated that local wars must be avoided, for they could erupt into major ones as had been the case with World War I. The only acceptable conflicts as Khrushchev saw it were anti-colonial wars of national liberation along the lines of Algeria's war of independence against France.

Although Eisenhower would have likely dismissed this speech as so much Soviet bluster, the inexperienced Kennedy became nervous and took it as a call to arms by Moscow. In his first State of the Union address on 30 January, he cautioned that "No one should think that either the Soviet Union or China has given up their desire for world domination, ambitions they forcefully restated only a short time ago. On the contrary, our aim is to show that aggression and subversion on their part is not an acceptable means to achieve these aims." These remarks were followed two days later by the first test launch of a Minuteman ICBM.

Khrushchev's initial hopes for Kennedy gradually dimmed during the next few months. When Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated, Khrushchev blamed it on Western colonialist forces. Khrushchev's boasts about Soviet missile forces provided John F. Kennedy with a key issue to use against Richard Nixon in the 1960 U.S. presidential election—the so-called 'missile gap'. But all Khrushchev's (probably sincere) attempts to build a strong personal relationship with the new president failed, as his typical combination of bluster, miscalculation and mishap resulted in the Cuban Missile Crises. After the Berlin and Cuba crises, tensions tapered off between the two superpowers.

Khrushchev openly wept at the news of Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 and feared that new US president Lyndon Johnson would pursue a more aggressive anti-Soviet stance. Johnson turned out to be more in favor of détente than Khrushchev had assumed, but would end up letting superpower relations take a backseat to his Great Society programs and the Vietnam War.