Khrushchevism Without Khrushchev

...This shows that a great change has come over the balance of political power in the Soviet Union in the past few years...

...When there were signs that Khrushchev was in trouble, in the first months of 1963, it was plain that the policies under attack included modernizing ideas like the Liberman proposals, and in general the emphasis on light industry and away from steel production—ideas associated with Khrushchev but anathema to the Party traditionalists...

...The policies which, under Khrushchev, the Chinese branded as a "restoration of capitalism," have demonstratively been taken a step further...

...With the removal of the last political leader with experience, power, prestige adequate to provide a certain political stability, the crisis can now be seen as having broken through to the political level...

...Though in a general way the conservative apparat must always have welcomed the prospect of overthrowing Khrushchev, the conspiracy was nonetheless carried out under a program which largely failed to take their views into account...

...2 Khrushchevite, Aleksey Kirichenko, in 1960...

...Robert Conquest is the author of Common Sense About Russia and Power and Policy in the USSR...

...and even the "Ukrainians'" could remember how often a loyal group of Stalinists had been purged to make way for a new and even more closely dependent lot...

...The way to throw out Khrushchev, it now appears, was not to mount a political campaign against him, but to conduct a secret plot and present him and the Party with a fait accompli...

...Even so, the threat to his position really only developed when it appeared that he wished to extend this change, so disruptive of the power and organization of the Party, to the top levels—and give charge of the agricultural secretariat to his son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei...

...The Party reorganization into separate industrial and agricultural sections at the local level in November 1962 evidently aroused objection at the time and, if published accounts are correct, was one of the main charges against him in the recent crisis...

...It was clear, too, that this "conservative" campaign was led by Frol Kozlov, and that soon after the latter suffered a paralytic stroke in April 1963 Khrushchev regained the initiative—withdrawing earlier remarks about the possibility of his resigning, slowing down a tough campaign against the writers and artists, and withdrawing formulations hostile to Yugoslavia in the draft May Day slogans...

...In the first agricultural announcement of the regime, too, the peasant's private plot was given special guarantees...

...Within days of the coup in the Kremlin, the Liberman economic proposals had been accepted and scheduled for application on a large scale...

...Stalin had full control while still in his early 50s...

...For in spite of the fact that the policies put forward at present are on the whole those best fitted to cope with Russia's difficulties, or rather the best available unless and until the present system undergoes revolutionary change, it is difficult to imagine that factional strife will not soon break out again, as the regime meets its first serious problems...

...It also seems likely that a political campaign directed at the rank and file of the apparat is not open to the new rulers as it was to the "conservative" faction...

...There only Brezhnev, Nikolai Podgorny and Andrei Kirilenkö had been dependent on him for their whole careers and such a situation was, in principle, full of instability...

...Anyone wishing to solve the economic and other problems facing the country must do what he can about the outworn political integument which prevents modernization...

...The lesson of recent events is, surely, that Soviet politics consists of a struggle fought out in a limited group by methods appropriate to Byzantium or Baghdad...

...Just as over the past decade, so in the years now ahead, we must expect surprises, perhaps this time affecting the very existence of a regime which now has all the stigmata of the transitional...

...But if this course was not open, then Khrushchev, and any other man in the same position, could rule only through the old apparat...

...These are so great that on the experience of the last few years, the USSR can now be said to be in that state of general crisis long postulated of capitalism by Marxist theorists...

...On top of the policy failures, such provocation was asking for trouble...

...It is remarkable that though appointees from his old Ukrainian machine were at all the lesser levers of power—the KGB, the Party Organs Department of the Central Committee, the Administrative Organs Department, the Army Political Directorate, and so on—his old liegedom was much less impressively represented in the Presidium itself...

...So the amenities may be better preserved, and the Soviet side may feel that the tactics pursued by Khrushchev were unsuccessful, but everything points to the doctrinal dispute becoming, if anything, deeper unless further changes take place in Moscow—or Peking...

...No faction in Russia can be proChinese—Chinese support must be the kiss of death in the internal Soviet struggle for power...

...It is noticeable that the version of the Suslov report on Khrushchev which appeared in the Italian weekly L'Espresso condemns his ostentatious arming of India during the Chinese invasion, yet says nothing that could be taken either as approval of the Chinese attack or as a change of Moscow's policy of friendship with India...

...But Khrushchev's series of policy failures were compounded by tactical errors in the political struggle...

...Meanwhile, experienced but unimpressive operators are digging in for the next round...

...Thus, the new regime is committed to solve the same problems that Khrushchev faced...

...To have rooted the apparatchiks out and replaced them by his own nominees—to have recreated the Party in his own image as Stalin did—was probably beyond Khrushchev...

...Chinese policies are always involving the Communist world in foreign dangers without the consent or approval of Moscow...

...An accumulation of fiascos—in Cuba, in the Virgin Lands, in predictions of "catching up with the U.S.A...

...Not only is it an operation that can only be carried out from the top by terror, which is not feasible in the present atmosphere, but he quite simply did not have time...

...For example, according to the Suslov report as published in L'Espresso, the charges against Khrushchev included failure to produce a decent growth-rate in light industry...

...On the other hand, it seems certain that the conspirators could not have dared to strike without an assurance of Army support, or at least neutrality—particularly in view of the result of the last crisis in 1957...

...For here at last the other leaders' own positions were affected...

...had been disguised to some extent, or at least their opponents had been disorientated, by the instant launching, with fanfares of fresh promises, of a new and noisy initiative...

...And yet Khrushchev's own political prestige and power might have been expected to make his position extremely strong, provided he maneuvered with even moderate skill...

...This eccentric procedure, however, seems also to have affected Khrushchev's thinking in the fight for power...

...Brezhnev, indeed, could remember the more recent degradation of his predecessor as No...

...But if the Army supported them without the assurances on heavy industry usually thought to be a military requirement, then it must have been possible to persuade Marshal Malinovsky that a modernization and rationalization of the economy would release the necessary resources for military production which Khrushchev had almost openly said could not be met at the same time as the needs of his own plans...

...So far the evidence is of clear Russian announcements of policy, domestic and foreign, on lines basically unacceptable to Peking, and an ostentatious refusal to applaud them by Chou and his entourage...

...And, of course, it is not simply a matter of doctrine...

...The coup appears, in any case, to have gone through without concession to the economic conservatives...

...When the power issue is also taken into account— not merely the struggle for the leadership of world Communism, but also the active Chinese intervention in Soviet internal affairs— the corporate chauvinism of the CPSU forbids retreat...

...A KREMLINOLOGICAL MANEUVER Khrushchevism Without Khrushchev By Robert Conquest THE COOL correctness of Chou En-lai's reception in Moscow is such a change from the personal virulence of the previous phase of Sino-Soviet relations that we are inclined to see it as warmer than it really is, or at least to wonder if it foreshadows a further rapprochement...

...We can trace in Khrushchev's whole career an attempt—erratic and incomplete, to be sure—to drag, hustle or persuade the bulk of the long-service Party cadres into some program of policies designed to adjust Russia to the present...

...One of the most striking things about the coup was the total unconcern with outside opinion, the conventionally unconvincing formulae and silences with which Russia and the world were informed of events: the strict adherence, in short, to the traditionalisms of Soviet politics, and to the rules of Kremlinology...

...Even the most "conservative' elements in the Soviet leadership must label the Chinese Leftists adventurists, as Stalin himself would have done...

...But the most striking thing about the BrezhnevKosygin regime has been its strong commitment to modernization...

...But it is not simply that the present victors have learned from the experience of 1963...