Russia Returns to Collective Leadership
BIDDLEFORD, JAMES
Russia Returns to Collective Leadership Soviet Party leaders have resisted the Khrushchev personality cult By James Biddleford WRITING IN Problems of Communism (March-April 1960). Seweryn...
...Alexei Kirichenko, who acted as Khrushchev's alter ego on the Central Committee Secretariat, exercising general supervision over the Party machine...
...the sole living Communists in that list, were joined by Committee secretaries Mikhail Suslov and Leonid Brezhnev...
...Hence it may be inferred that the May 4 reorganization in effect subordinated Khrushchev's power locus, the Central Committee Secretariat, to the Central Committee Presidium...
...The attack was un expected, because just a few days earlier the leadership in Kazakhstan had received Moscow's congratulations for exemplary farm direction...
...The stanza also recalled Stalin's abuse of power, and in this connection spoke invidiously of certain unnamed politicians "who in the decorous hall rose and, before he could open his mouth, exclaimed, 'Hurrah...
...This seems to have induced the Khrushchevite organ, Soviet Russia, to note in its April 17 issue: "Lenin was very much concerned over the unity of the Party and, especially, of its Central Com mittee...
...When there is a fluctuating balance of power at the center, in turn causing fluctuation or frequent change in basic policies, then the efficiency and discipline of the society are dangerously weakened...
...was adopted precisely because of the lack of such a majority...
...Coincidental with the downgrading of Kirichenko was a reassertion of "collective leadership...
...Instead, hopeful millions were treated to the spectacle of Khrushchev imposing clearly unacceptable conditions as a price for the start of negotiations...
...Seweryn Bialer, a former member of the Communist party apparatus in Poland, speaks of "a tendency toward the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader" under the Soviet system of government...
...Bialer explains that "the sine qua non of a totalitarian system is the existence of central authority to make and to enforce basic decisions affecting all spheres of life...
...Relying on Lenin's teachings, the Party has since been able to repel attacks against Leninism within its ranks...
...Lenin (a strange illustration in view of the recently exhibited documentary...
...To impart to Khrushchev the initiative for reducing the number of secretaries on the Presidium would be to assume that his authority had increased steadily in recent times, which is something clearly at odds with the aforementioned train of events...
...The authors served notice that even the great founder of the Party had been outvoted in the Committee and that body was able with out fear of contradiction to order Lenin to go on vacation...
...He thought that an appropriate measure would be to increase the number of Committee members...
...Besides all this, the Soviet Premier's intimate words with Allied opposites were carefully recorded on the pad of a ubiquitous Soviet stenographer...
...It has been supposed by some that the top policy-making bodies in the Soviet system—the Presidium and the Central Committee of the Party—similarly [i.e., like demo critic parliaments] operated on the basis of a 'working majority' during the period of so-called 'collective leadership.' In point of fact, the concept of 'collective leadership,' invoked after Stalin's death and finally dropped in the summer of 1957...
...a reduction in the number of secretaries on a Party bureau such as the Presidium tends "to prevent the secretariats supplanting the bureaus...
...The only people likely to have de rived satisfaction from Khrushchev's conduct in Paris were the Soviet Party leaders eager to avoid a show down with the militantly anti-d?tente circles in Peking and apprehensive lest internal expectations for a rise in living standards increase sharply should Khrushchev carry home a durable agreement to ban nuclear tests...
...The fierce struggle for power within the Kremlin, and the final victorious emergence of Khrushchev, was the inevitable product—the 'other side of the coin,' so to speak—of the myth of collective leadership...
...These developments suggest that what Bialer calls "a relative equilibrium of power within the Soviet leadership, preventing the formation of a working majority," was struck again in the USSR during the first half of 1960...
...Substitute the name of Khrushchev for Lenin and employ the present tense, as an elite reader might be expected to do, and this amounts to a proposal to redress an imbalance of forces in the Central Committee (from the Khrushchevite viewpoint) and give to the First Secretary a strong hand, or in Bialer's apt terminology, a "working majority...
...Pravda carried a front-page photograph which showed Kirichenko at Khrushchev's side...
...He'll be right again!'" Several days later, on May 4, a Central Committee plenary session voted to reduce the number of secretaries on its 15-man policy-making board, the Presidium, from 10 to 6. As Khrushchev himself explained at the 19th Party Congress in 1952...
...Occasionally the Stalin symbol was invoked in a manner inconsistent with Khrushchev's former treatment: Whereas Khrushchev in his "secret speech" of 1956 had ridiculed Stalin as a wartime leader, on April 29 Pravda's readers, in a stanza from a poem by Aleksandr Tvardovsky, were told of Generalissimo Stalin's "inflexibility of paternal will" and reminded that "we had faith in this will no less than in ourselves...
...Whatever the case, the inference to cut back on Khrushchev's mounting "personality cult" of the past two years was grasped quickly...
...Thus, an examination of this and attendant developments involving the Soviet's high councils may help to explain the recent resurgence of militancy in Soviet foreign policy...
...True, by June 14 Mikoyan had returned to Moscow from his month-long "vacation" and seemed to be doing "business as usual...
...The concept of collective leadership endured as long as there was a relative JAMES BIDDLEFORD is the pseudonym of a long-time American student of Soviet and Communist affairs...
...It appears likewise to constitute a threat to an anti-Khrushchev group ing, the message being that Khrushchev whipped the formidable Malen-kov-Molotov combination and could do the same with any new challengers bent on his overthrow...
...Collective leadership"—and its uncertainties—had returned to the Soviet political scene...
...Yet during the Plenum, the titles of the senior Party officers on the Republic level were written-up novelly: Like Khrushchev, they were First, not first, secretaries, as hitherto...
...The threat notwithstanding, after a difficult winter Khrushchev had a trying spring...
...Belyaev was dismissed as Miscow's viceroy in Kazakhstan soon after the December Plenum and has since been dropped from the minor post awarded to him in compensation...
...Pravda's readers must have likewise been surprised to read in Frondizi"s letter an evaluation of the U-2 incident identical in spirit with that offered by Khrushchev at the Supreme Soviet meeting early in May: "No considerations of national dignity must be allowed to take precedent over the voices of the world's peoples against the sinister possibility of a new war...
...But they have generally overlooked the fact that in the past half year or so there has been a revival of the "collective leadership" concept in Soviet domestic propaganda...
...The name of Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas I. Mikoyan was deleted from a listing of Old Bolshevik stalwarts in Azerbaidzhan that was reprinted in a journal which went to press on May 3. On May 9 Moscow Radio, reviewing the three-year-old reorganization of industrial management, failed to mention Khrushchev, its most vocal sponsor...
...Party Life, featured an essay in which an instructor at the Lenin Academy for the training of Army political workers revised a list of World War II Party generals that had been constant for several years...
...Concurrently, marked irregularities appeared in domestic propaganda...
...Khrushchev, moreover, was unable to get the Plenum to adopt the proposals for agricultural reform which his spokesmen had advocated vigorously in preceding months...
...The inconclusive nature of the December Plenum had to reflect adversely on the talents of its stage manager...
...That was not surprising, the authors explained, since Lenin "regarded collectivity the most important principle of Party leadership...
...It may be argued, as it has been, that Khrushchev was under no constraint to behave as he did at that time but was merely acting to deter the embarrassment he would suffer after an inevitable Western rebuff on the Berlin question...
...Most Western observers share these views on the nature of the leadership struggle in the USSR...
...Khrushchev spoke of "a slackening of world tension" and Frondizi noted President Eisenhower's "traditional feelings for the cause of peace...
...That a clash of major dimensions in the Party's upper echelons had in fact occurred early in May, involving the Khrushchev-Mikoyan foreign policy line, is strongly suggested by the nature of Khrushchev's performance at the unofficial summit meeting on May 16...
...Bialer thereupon exposes "the myth of collective leadership...
...Khrushchev and Marshal Kliment Voroshilov...
...But this fails to explain why Khrushchev violated a cardinal rule of Soviet diplomacy and fired just one broadside instead of many—that is, why he failed to exploit the U-2 incident fully and use the conference as still another high tribune from which to propound his catchy slogan of "total and universal disarmament...
...This indicates that Khrushchev, initiator of the precarious experiment with outlying virgin and fallow lands, was undergoing adverse criticism in the Plenum's backrooms and felt obliged to deflect it on to a sub ordinate...
...Khrushchev had sensed the temper of Party officials who must have resented his recent high handed leadership techniques and was indulging defensively in thinly veiled self-criticism...
...To him who led us into battle and was in charge we are all obligated for the victory, as he was obligated to us for it...
...His fall was no less sudden than violent: As late as October 30, 1959...
...The lavish tributes accorded to Soviet Premier Khrushchev in internal Party propaganda after the 21st Communist Party Congress early in 1959 began to slacken after the December plenary session of the Party's Central Committee...
...Lenin's modesty also was called to mind through the reproduction of his long-buried note protesting the making of a film to be entitled V.I...
...Articles in the January 1960 issues of Kom munist, the foremost Party journal, quoted Lenin to the effect that no one man could replace the Central Committee...
...Also, on June 16 Pravda featured without comment the text of letters exchanged between Khrushchev and Argentine President Arturo Frondizi dated May 13 and May 31, respectively...
...Nikolai Belyaev, charging him with failure to prepare adequately for grain harvesting in the "virgin lands...
...Kirichenko was informally relieved of his duties and assigned to work in the provinces about two weeks after the December Plenum...
...But if these developments signified Khrushchev's dominance within the Soviet hierarchy, they simultaneously underscored the glaring inconsistencies in his pronouncements and behavior during the previous month, as well as the shifting attitude to ward Mikoyan's historical importance...
...In Feb ruary, the Central Committee's organizational journal...
...At the least...
...The publicized account of the meeting's debate reveals that Khrushchev un-expectedly turned on his personal friend and chief lieutenant in Kazakhstan...
...During March and April, collective leadership items recurred in the Soviet radio, press and other publications in connection with the 90th anniversary of Lenin's birth...
...It would, moreover, have been consistent with Khrushchev's effort to be recognized as "the great conciliator" for him to have displayed reasonableness to parley in spite of American "aggression...
...equilibrium of power within the Soviet leadership, preventing the formation of a working majority...
...This is precisely what such influential "third force" statesmen as Prime Minister Nehru and Marshal Tito had anticipated, to judge from their regretful post-summit comments...
...The occurrences of that period implied that he was then in tenuous control of the political situation in Russia...
...Then an ideological functionary in the Central Committee's Bureau for Party Affairs in the Russian Republic—an organ headed by Khrushchev—noted his boss's title as "first secretary...
Vol. 43 • August 1960 • No. 33
