The political, economic, and social condition of the Soviet Union by 1964

Social and Cultural Change

• Once his leadership had been secured Khrushchev prioritised 'the good of the people'
• Invited direct comparison between American society and life in the USSR
• Home aids such as washing machines and TVs became more common
• Meat consumption rose 55% between 1958-65
• Allowed and encouraged consumerism to increase quality of life
• Differences between social classes had been reduced
• Wage differences were smaller
• Differences between towns and countryside, industry and agriculture were being reduced
• Young people still flowed from the countryside though

The New Party Programme of 1961

• Khrushchev was a true believer in communism: making the life of ordinary workers better
• Purpose of the New Party Programme: to revive the 1920s Bolshevik spirit that 'there is no fortress a Bolshevik cannot storm'
• Delivered at the 22nd Party Congress
• Has been described as 'a remarkable combination of self-delusion, wishful thinking and utopianism'
• The Communist Party was now a party of the whole people: was no longer the dictatorship of the proletariat
• Was to be more accountable to the membership with limits on terms served and rotation of office
• A communist society will be almost complete by 1980
• By 1970 there will be no housing shortage and the Soviet Union will have overtaken the US in per capita production

Programme of the Communist Party

• By 1980 real income per head will have increased by more than 250 percent
• Members of the party were not so happy about these proposals
• The people of Russia however saw this as a huge strength
• The improvement of their lives finally seemed to be prioritised

Social Change

Life improved:

• Minimum wage rose sharply in 1956
• Major expansion of the pension scheme
• 1964: comprehensive cover extended to collective farmers
• Seven-hour-day introduced
• Holiday pay introduced
• Fierce labour laws against absenteeism and changing jobs without permission repealed
• Khrushchev's housing programme: annual rate of housing construction almost doubled
• Between 1956 and 1965 approx. 108m people moved into new apartments
• May have been poor quality but the change was still drastic
• Families previously living in one room were liberated
• Numbers of doctors and hospital beds rose
• Max publicity given to improvements in educational provision
• Numbers in higher ed almost trebled
• 1958: secondary school leaving age raised from 14 to 15
• Fees for senior classes of secondary and tertiary ed abolished
• Khrushchev keen to make ed available to children of workers and peasants

Life did not improve:

• Housing was of poor quality: cheap, prefabricated and five storey high flats
• Much resistance against an attempt to make entry to higher educ. Conditional on completion of 2yrs work experience
• Anti-religious propaganda
• Taxes on religious activity increased
• Churches and monasteries closed
• Between 1959-64: about ¾ of all Christian churches and monasteries were closed down
• Mosques and synagogues under attack too

Cultural Change

Life improved:

• Partial thaw in cultural life
• Writers who had been banned were rehabilitated e.g. Anna Akhmatova
• Tested limits of state censorship
• Prose or poems critical of Stalin were acceptable
• Khrushchev saw poets and novelists as having the ability to further his own ends
• Favoured works that discomforted diehards like Molotov
• K had a strongly positive attitude towards the publication of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich"
• Actively promoted it within the party – it highlighted criticisms of Stalin's leadership and revealed info about what it was like in the gulags

Life did not improve:

• Works that denounced the party or belittled present Soviet ways of life were off limits
• Pasternak's manuscript of Dr Zhivago was rejected: it went against the revolution and portrayed the Soviet state in a very negative light according to the Novy Mir
• Was published in Italy and Pasternak won the Literature Nobel Peace Prize in 1958
• Illegal copies circulated the USSR helped by the CIA
• Pasternak was expelled from the Writer's Union and forced to renounce the Nobel Prize
• Thousands turned out for his funeral in 1960
• Khrushchev took a violent dislike to modern art
• Grossman suffered a similar fate to Pasternak
• His novel was regarded as more damaging
• KGB came to his apartment and confiscated any material relating to and including the manuscript
• Grossman appealed to Khrushchev himself to no avail
• Life and Fate was not published in the USSR until 1988 How and with what success did Khrushchev try to reform the Soviet Economy?

The Economy under Khrushchev

• Compared to Stalin, Khrushchev was much more hands on with the economy
• Following the defeat of Malenkov, Khrushchev aimed to boost production of consumer goods and increase food yields

Problems he found:

• Low productivity
• Low livestock levels
• Low farmer incomes and low government procurement prices
• High taxes on private plots discouraged investment and production
• Because of his Ukrainian background he felt he was a man of the people
• Wanted to be more involved
• Regarded himself as the agricultural expert – did not mean he knows anything about farming
• First honest assessment of the agricultural sector since collectivisation

Solutions:

• State procurement prices were increased
• Taxes were cut
• Investment in private and collective farms and equipment was raised
• The Virgin Lands campaign

The Virgin Lands Campaign

• Khrushchev loved contact with peasants and workers
• Huge operation designed to plough up a vast tract of virgin and fallow land in Kazakhstan, the Urals and Siberia for grain cultivation.
• More than 300,000 Komsomol volunteers were mobilised to settle and cultivate the areas
• By 1959: 35.9 million acres had been cultivated
• large groups of students, soldiers and truck and combine-drivers were employed on the project, transported on a seasonal basis

Successes of the campaign:

• Like a military campaign with emphasis on speed, much like the Five-Year Plans
• There was a lot of publicity surrounding the event.
• Harvest in 1956 was announced as a great victory, it was the largest harvest in Soviet history
• Over 125 million tons of grain produced came from the new regions

Drawbacks of the campaign:

• Conditions were primitive and the harsh climate was not ideal for grain cultivation which severely reduced the ability for grain growth.
• There was much publicity surrounding the campaign however Khrushchev failed to listed to expert advice which cost him later down the line. He focused on the media attention and publicity as opposed to listening to those who were experts in the field.
• After the great harvest of 1956, results never reached that high again.
• By early 1960s reliance on single-crop cultivation had taken its toll on the fertility of the soil
• 1960: this happened to 13,000 square miles of land
• By 1963 the grain harvest was disastrous
• Virgin Lands produced their smallest crop for years

The Maize Obsession

Khrushchev believed that he had solved both the grain problem and the fodder problem.

With the Virgin Lands campaign underway, maize could be grown in traditional grain-producing areas.

This maize would:

• Provide cattle-feed
• Revive meat and dairy farming
• Be grown everywhere Khrushchev claimed that "corn can produce high yields in all areas of our country" and "corn is unequalled by any other crop" and whilst it is valuable in Ukraine it barely ripens elsewhere.

The results:

• 85 million acres of maize was planted
• Only about one-sixth was harvested ripe
• Khrushchev claimed in 1957 that the USSR would catch up with the USA in per capita meat output by 1960 which required a threefold increase however only one provincial part boss met this aim.
• However this boss achieved this through slaughter of dairy cattle and false accounting of all sorts and the boss later shot himself
• The maize obsession could not be maintained and failed drastically due to the lack of maize actually harvested.

Ultimately:

• One-sixth of the vaunted promise was delivered the following year
• This was a huge waste of man hours – it was a bigger failure than the VL campaign Other Agricultural Changes

Machine tractor stations were abolished in 1958:

• These were state owned enterprises for the ownership and maintenance of agricultural machinery that were used in kolkhozy.
• They now the Kolkhozy had to buy the machinery which was too big of a cost in one go.
• There was nowhere to store the machinery that the kolkhozy had to buy.
• Mechanics from the former MTS tended to go to the towns where living standards were higher so there was not enough expertise to maintain or repair machinery
• Machinery was left to rust away
• Khrushchev restricted size of private plots which puts pressure on peasants to sell their cows to the kolkhoz
• Khrushchev interfered too much with different forced campaigns often with little regard and reorganised continually.

---

📌 Industry

---

The Space programme

• The Soviet Union under Khrushchev took the lead in space research and exploration
• August 1957 saw the first successful test of an inter-continental ballistic missile
• Two months later that rocket was used to launch the first satellite, Sputnik, into space
• In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space
• This was a huge boost to Soviet prestige, coupled with Khrushchev's boasting about its military rocketry
• This led the outside world to overestimate Soviet progress, there was no "missile gap" with the United States in favour of the Soviet Union.

The Seven-Year Plan

• Khrushchev introduced a Seven-Year Plan covering the years 1959-65 to aid the rapid expansion of the chemical industry to provide more mineral fertilisers for agriculture
• There was large investment in oil and natural gas and the focus of investment was in the areas of east of the Urals.
• By 1961 Khrushchev announced some upwards amendments, he was in a hurry and was now buoyed up by Soviet Space exploits.

Progress:

• Overall industrial progress was impressive
• There was a major increase in consumer goods

Drawbacks:

• Soaring expenses of the space and missile programme and increased military expenditure placed heavy strain on scarce skills and specialist equipment.
• Growth rates suffered
• In 1963/1964 growth rates fell to the lowest in peacetime since planning began

Khrushchev's Reorganisations

• Hisar reorganisations had clear political motives
• It was hoped they would avoid waste and bring decision-making nearer the point of production.
• Stalinist command economy concentrated great power in the central gov ministries, this was where main Presidium had power bases
• Khrushchev's devolution of powers to the republics strengthened Party (rather than ministry) control and increased his power and influence.
• Between 1954 & 55: about 11,000 enterprises transferred from central to republican control
• 1956: factories run by twelve central governmental ministries were placed under jurisdiction of republican governments
• May 1957: 105 regional economic councils were established to take the place of the central economic ministries
• This was one of the factors that stirred up Khrushchev's Presidium opponents into challenging him
• Overcame his opponents
• Regional economic councils abolished soon after Khrushchev was ousted

Evidence of positive change:

• Increased housing construction
• Increase in consumer goods
• Increased numbers in higher education
• Decreased reliance on Terror and Repression
• Freed thousands of innocents from the gulags
• Increased successes in Space technology

Evidence of limited change:

• Housing was of poor quality
• Censorship and propaganda was still at large
• Repression of religion
• Undercover operations like the killings in the Novocherkassk Workers Revolt
• Agricultural failures
• Cuban Missile Crisis
• Limited successes in industry

"After the war, Stalin consolidated his rigid system. Under Khrushchev there was real change." Assess the validity of this view.

Stalin:

• Late 1930s – context

Evidence of consolidation

• Political:
• Economic:
• Cultural/Social:
• High Stalinism

Khrushchev:

• Fundamentally changed political system as a whole

📌 What were Khrushchev's motives?

• Restoration of faith in the Party and save it from self-implosion
• Liberate the Party from fear of repression, making it more efficient and therefore successful
• Avoid more radical debate within the Party
• Get ahead of his leadership rivals
• They were all implicated in the Stalinist terror, suggesting they would continue such practices

📌 How did life improve under Khrushchev?

Khrushchev prioritised 'the good of the people' and aimed to improve the lives of ordinary workers. Home aids like washing machines and TVs became more common, and meat consumption rose 55% between 1958-65. Khrushchev allowed and encouraged consumerism in order to increase the quality of life. Wage differences were smaller and the gaps between social classes had been reduced. Housing construction programmes (despite being cheap and not of high quality) had a huge impact on families that used to share just one room, and the educational sector of society improved too – numbers in higher education almost trebled. Under Khrushchev, life mostly improved, despite a few negative outcomes (like the bad harvests of the Virgin Lands and the Maize Obsession).

📌 Was Khrushchev more or less tolerant of religion than Stalin?

Khrushchev had a less violent view of religion but was still atheist – anti-religious propaganda was rife and taxes on religious activity increased. Churches and monasteries were closed, and mosques and synagogues were also under attack.

Historiography

• Robert Hornby has highlighted that in this era dissent was mostly from workers, not the intelligentsia
• The Soviet Procuracy mostly focused on workers in underground groups at this time
• Was a gov bureau concerned with pursuing dissenters accused of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda

Novocherkassk

• Solidly working-class Ukrainian town
• 1st June 1962, they rebelled
• Reduction in wages and increase in prices coincided
• Butter +25%, meat +30%
• A passing train had a placard hung on it saying 'cut up Khrushchev for sausages'
• The Party HQ were occupied
• Troops were brought in
• 28 killed, 80 injured
• There was a News Blackout

Novocherkassk

• The Square where the shootings took place was asphalted over that night
• Bodies buried overnight in unmarked graves
• This was only reported 30 years later
• The nature of this protest was typical of the Khrushchev era

Overall protests

• Estimated that 500,000 people protested during the yeas 1953-64
• According to Ludmilla Alexeyeva these years were an 'incubation period where people began to learn about the problems of Soviet life.'

Nature of Dissent under:

Stalin

• Largely spontaneous and volatile
• Often centred on angry peasants and workers

Khrushchev

• Involved both workers and peasants and a few members of the intelligentsia
• Did not act together, however

Brezhnev

• More legalistic and sober criticism
• Mainly from a small proportion of intelligentsia in the big cities

Dealing with dissent

• Workers' demands were relieved through a cap on prices and increased consumer goods
• Despite increasing cost of production
• Caused huge economic problems
• Intelligentsia and political dissent was rooted out through a deep network of informants
• After the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, more people were jailed in 1957-58 than at any other time since Stalin's death
• The idea that Khrushchev was somewhat more liberal is a clear exaggeration
• The USSR was still a very authoritarian state

Cultural Dissent

• By the 1960s cultural dissenters were one of the most powerful anti-communist force
• Literature and arts became the voice of the people
• Samizdat: self-publishing
• People were fully aware of the implications of their publications
• Became an underground, widespread network
• A collective endeavour
• Became a way of spreading political and factual info
• Poetry readings in Mayakovsky Square in Moscow expanded to include controversial issues
• The KGB intervened and broke them up
• The young Vladimir Bukovsky was taken to a police station and beaten up
• He was warned he would be killed the next time he went to Mayakovsky Square
• Became a leading dissident
• Best known for exposing the use of psychiatric hospitals against dissidents
• He himself had been confined to one between 1963 and 1965

Khrushchev's downfall

• Was seen as unpredictable and explosive
• Insulted colleagues
• They neither forgot nor forgave him
• Arrogance was one of the main charges against him
• Often pursued an idea without proper consultation once committed to it

Cuban Missile Crisis

• Khrushchev was determined to show the USSR was capable of defending its own interests vigorously
• The American Nuclear Missiles in Turkey on the USSR's border were resented for years
• Communist revolution in Cuba 90 miles from the coast of the US gave a similar opportunity to the USSR
• Began placing Soviet Missiles on Cuban bases
• American spy planes detected the scheme before completion
• President Kennedy placed a naval blockade around Cuba
• The world stood on the brink of a nuclear war
• Khrushchev never intended to launch this, so he drew back
• Missiles were removed
• A compromise was made
• The US had promised to both dismantle its Turkish nuclear facilities and never invade Cuba
• Part of this compromise was that it had to remain secret
• This was so the USSR seemed humbled in the eyes of the world
• Khrushchev had consulted the Presidium throughout the crisis
• The missiles had been his idea and ultimately he alone was blamed

Agricultural failures

• 1963: the dry summer, problems of the VL campaign and the maize obsession meant grain harvest was only 107 million tonnes
• Was judged against Khrushchev's boasting and planned target of 170-180 million tonnes
• Khrushchev would take no risks after Novocherkassk
• Precious gold and currency reserves were used to buy grain from the West
• Was a humiliation for Khrushchev in what he regarded his field of expertise
• Oct 1964: Khrushchev summoned to a meeting of the Presidium
• Was accused of gross mistakes in agricultural organisation

The effect of reorganisations

• Restlessness and impatience of Khrushchev clear in his attempts to interfere with the State and Party
• Liked to shake up institutions
• Had no wish to use Stalin's methods
• Left persuasion and reshuffling of personnel as only means available
• Between 1956-61: replaced more than two-thirds of the members of the Council of Ministers, the Presidium and the local Party secretaries, and half of the Central Committee

"In a sweeping transformation between 1956 and 1961, more than two-thirds of the Council of Ministers, the Presidium, and local Party secretaries, along with half of the Central Committee, were replaced."

• 1961: limited the number of times leading officials could be elected into office to three
• Was to be a turnover of at least half the members of Party committees at lower levels, a third at higher levels and a quarter of the members of the Central Committee and the Presidium at each Party Congress
• 1962: divided the Party between parallel hierarchies responsible for agriculture and industry
• Last two moves particularly resented bitterly by officials affected
• Regarded by opponents as part of his 'hare-brained schemes'
• Division of the Party especially unpopular with provincial Party Secretaries who'd previously run the Party throughout the province
• Now being asked to choose between industry and agriculture
• Drastically reduced their power
• Party Secretaries had great influence in Central Committee
• Their members already resented limits imposed on their time in office
• They had formed Khrushchev's power base
• Lead to them resigning or being voted out of office
• Khrushchev came to face the consequences in Oct 1964
• All changes reversed soon after Khrushchev was removed from power

The Presidium	• Resented his arrogance, his style, his policies • Some felt his anti-Stalinism went too far
Provincial Party Secretaries and Central Committee	• Bitter resentment of reorganisations
Military	• Resented cuts in military spending and policy of relying on nuclear weapons (was refuted by Cuban Missile Crisis)
Professionals/Managers	• Resented enhanced role of Party and its interference
Intelligentsia	• Disappointed with the retreat from the thaw after 1962
Diplomatic Service	• Appalled by some of his behaviour and use of his son-in-law on diplomatic missions
Workers	• Alienated by the rise in food prices in 1962
Peasants	• Resented disruptive and repeated interventions and failure of policies

📌 What was the impact of Khrushchev's time in power?

• Removed the intensity of Stalin's terror and repression
• Brought about the start of stability in Russia's leadership
• General improvement in living standards for majority of people
• Cold War propaganda encouraged patriotism and comradery and conformity
• Secret Speech encouraged the move away from Stalinist Terror
• Only military and space technology were kept to the highest standards internationally despite aims to improve industry and agriculture
• Changes to villages were limited, young people still flowed from them into the cities
• Increase in those with higher education qualifications caused potential threat to the system (but didn't)
• Some policies alienated people and angered them, reduced their loyalty to him
• Still elements of censorship: criticism of Stalin allowed, and criticism of the present USSR was not)
• Elements of dissent from the workers
• Alienated members of the Central Committee and the Presidium
• Terror had been removed from the system (arguably most important outcome of Khrushchev's rule)