Ancient history

Nikita Khrushchev

Nikita Sergeïevitch Khrushchev, (April 17, 1894 - September 11, 1971), (in Cyrillique никита сергевич хрущв, pronounced [nʲɪˈkʲitə sʲɪˈrgʲejɪtʃʲ xruˈʃʲ:of) is a Soviet statesman of Ukrainian origin, who gradually asserted himself as the main manager of the USSR between Stalin's death (March 5, 1953) and his ousting from power on October 14, 1964.

He owes his political rise from the 1930s to personal protection of Joseph Stalin, whose circle of intimates he joined. He was First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from March 1953 to October 1964 and, from 1958, Chairman of the Council of Ministers (Government) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

Main inspiration for the policy of de-Stalinization inside and peaceful coexistence outside, he also marked the limits of this new course by going back on certain measures of liberalization of the regime, by crushing the Hungarian revolution of 1956, or by confronting the United States during the Cuban crisis in 1962. His hesitations and his failures caused him to be removed from power by the nomenklatura, worried about the questioning of his privileges. He left important memoirs that make him a key witness to the Stalinist and post-Stalinist era.

Young years

In 1908, his family moved to Yuzovka, now Donetsk in Ukraine. He received only about two years of education during his childhood. His real education did not begin until he was in his twenties, or even approaching his thirties. These popular origins and this neglected upbringing explain certain manifestations of vulgarity that will strike his contemporaries (thus in 1960, when he stamped his shoe on his desk at the UN), or his receptivity to certain prejudices widespread in the population, such as the anti-Semitism.

Khrushchev was mobilized in 1914. He later participated in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. He was a member of the Russian Communist Party and will remain marked by the Lenin era.

Stalin's friend

At the University in Moscow, he met Nadezhda Alliluieva, the wife of Joseph Stalin, who introduced him to her husband. He quickly joined the intimate circle of the all-powerful Secretary General of the CPSU.

He became a member of the central committee of the party in 1934. From 1935 to 1937, he was first secretary of the Moscow region. As such, he played an important role in the completion of the Moscow metro and in the policy of monumental constructions which reshaped the face of the Soviet capital.

Mass terror (1937-1940)

The following year (1938), he was promoted to first secretary in Ukraine. As in Moscow and the rest of the USSR, he implemented the bloody purges of the Great Purges.

Thus, while the Political Bureau had set the number of people to be sentenced to death in Moscow at 50,000, Khrushchev carried out 55,741 executions, and on July 10, 1937, asked Stalin for the "right" to shoot 2,000 former more kulaks to fill the pre-set quota.

In the spring of 1938, he was with his close friend Nikolai Yezhov the main architect of the Great Terror in Ukraine, where he arrested 35 of the 38 secretaries of the Party committees of the province and the cities. He often goes to Moscow to bring the collective lists of condemned directly to Stalin and Molotov. In kyiv, the terror led by Khrushchev and Yezhov ends in 30,000 arrests. In total, the terror he orchestrated in Ukraine claimed 106,119 victims in 1938. He also supported the holding of the Moscow trials.

At the same time, like all Stalinist leaders, Khrushchev must establish his own cult of personality in his stronghold:so the Ukrainians must sing a "song for Khrushchev" or cover their walls with his portrait.

When the USSR annexed a large part of Poland thanks to the German-Soviet pact, Khrushchev played a key role in the forced Sovietization of the regions attached to Ukraine. In one year, 1,117,000 inhabitants were deported to the Gulag, or 10% of the population. 30% of the deportees will be dead a year later. There are also 60,000 arrests and 50,000 shot[3].

The Great Patriotic War and the post-war period

During the Second World War, he was a political commissar at the front, in particular during the battle of Stalingrad where he played an important role in monitoring and galvanizing the military command. He himself had to report to Stalin, who repeatedly made him feel the possibility of disgrace, especially during the German spring offensive in Ukraine in 1942.

His son Leonid Khrushchev, engaged in military aviation, was killed in flight on March 11, 1943. His body not being found, he was accused of going over to the enemy. His widow Lioubov was then arrested and sentenced to 5 years in a labor camp followed by 5 years in exile. She would not return to Moscow until 1954. Nikita Khrushchev, who had in the meantime raised her granddaughter Julia, then refused to see her again - Julia herself would see her in 1956, but the two women would only be strangers. to another[4].

After the war, Khrushchev was a privileged witness to the clan struggles taking place around an aging Stalin, who himself regularly terrorized and humiliated those around him. Khrushchev in particular develops a strong enmity with the head of the police apparatus, Beria. Called back to Moscow, he is in charge of agricultural issues. He is regularly the victim of sarcasm and humiliation on the part of Stalin, towards whom his doubts and his repulsion increase, even if he will affirm in his Memoirs to have sincerely mourned his death, which occurred on March 5, 1953.

At the head of the USSR (1953-1964)

After Stalin's death, three of the most influential political figures in the USSR vie for power:Georgy Malenkov, Lavrenty Beria (head of the KGB), and Khrushchev.

The situation will turn in favor of Khrushchev. From the end of June 1953, he played a key role in the fall of Beria, dismissed and arrested on the orders of his colleagues, then shot. Malenkov having handed over the head of the CPSU to him on March 14 to devote himself to leading the government, Khrushchev was confirmed in September 1953 as first secretary of the Communist Party, which he remained until his ousting in 1964. In 1955, he has Malenkov sidelined, and his preeminence begins to show clearly to the outside world. In 1957, the elimination of Molotov and the fraction of the Politburo most hostile to de-Stalinization ended up leaving Khrushchev alone in the foreground.

The Khrushchev Report (February 1956) and de-Stalinization

When he came to power, Khrushchev began a critique of the Stalinist period called de-Stalinization, particularly condemning the dictatorial and repressive character of Stalin's power. The most serious attack took place during a night session of the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between February 24 and 25, 1956, during which he read a devastating report on Stalin's deviations from "legality socialist".

Although the revelation took place in the absence of the international press and foreign delegations, the report was quickly disseminated around the world, and as of March 16, the New York Times published excerpts from it. The Soviet power will not deny the authenticity of the report, even if Maurice Thorez, leader of the PCF, will only ever use the expression "report attributed to comrade Khrushchev" to refrain from implementing de-Stalinization within the Party. French.

By launching de-Stalinization himself, which he considered inevitable, the leader of the CPSU hoped to control the movement himself, and to set clear limits for it:the monopoly of the Party-State was not called into question, nor was the model of development imposed by Stalin. Indeed, Khrushchev dates Stalin's so-called degeneration from 1934, which he attributes without historical plausibility solely to the character's psychology and his personal "paranoia". This makes it possible not to question the dekulakization and the murderous famines of the early 1930s, nor the frenzied industrialization initiated by the five-year plans, and to present the Party as innocent in itself.

Similarly, Khrushchev is sorting through the victims of the Great Purge. He insists above all on the victims who were members of the Party, leaving in the shade the millions of private individuals shot or deported to the Gulag, and he does not rehabilitate any of those who were opponents of Stalin in the 1920s (Bukharin, Zinoviev , Kamenev, let alone Trotsky). Finally, de-Stalinization has a political goal:it allows Khrushchev to push aside his rivals by accusing them of remaining "Stalinists".

This report marks the start of the official policy of de-Stalinization. Very quickly, articles appear on the cult of the personality of the dictator and which qualify it as venom. Little by little, we are witnessing the rehabilitation of the victims of purges and repressions. Those of them who have been sent to prison or deported are beginning to return en masse from the Gulag.

A turning point then took place in domestic politics, causing the country to move from a permanent civil war to a civil peace. This political reversal is primarily aimed at the economic reconstruction of the country. The privileges of socialism are considered as assets that can alone ensure the development and prosperity of the country.

However, surprised by the scale of the wave of de-Stalinization in the countries of the Soviet bloc, Khrushchev worked to limit its effects, especially if it called into question the country's membership of the Soviet camp.

On October 15, 1956, he landed in person in Warsaw with the Politburo, and negotiated the continued power of Gomulka, demanded by the revolting population, in exchange for the confirmation of Poland's allegiance to the Warsaw Pact.

On the other hand, when the new Hungarian government of Imre Nagy proclaimed the neutrality of the country and its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, Khrushchev decided on military intervention. On November 4, insurgent Budapest was attacked by Red Army tanks and reduced after a long and bloody street battle. Repression fell on the leaders of the movement, kidnapped and then executed, and on thousands of insurgents. Many Hungarians have to flee the country, where Khrushchev installs a new government led by Janos Kadar. The latter will turn out to be more liberal than that of Gomulka in Poland.

Worried about these upheavals, Molotov, Kaganovitch and the most faithfully Stalinist fraction of the Politburo tried to oust Khrushchev, who found himself outvoted at a meeting of the Politburo (June 1957). Khrushchev demands to appeal to the Central Committee. The role of Marshal Zhukov, Minister of Defence, is decisive:he provides the military apparatuses which quickly transport the members of the CC to Moscow, who come out in favor of keeping Khrushchev.

His rivals ousted, the latter confirmed his power by replacing Nicolas Bulganin at the head of the Soviet government (March 1958). Previously, as early as October 1957, he disgraced his savior Zhukov, deprived of all military and political responsibility.

In 1961, at the XXII Congress of the CPSU, criticism of Stalin's crimes became public. Khrushchev orders his embalmed body removed from Lenin's mausoleum. In addition, he personally authorized the resounding publication of Solzhenitsyn's short story, A Day of Ivan Denisovitch.

On the other hand, he persecuted Boris Pasternak, whom he forced to refuse the Nobel Prize for Literature (1957). He does not question socialist realism in art, displaying his contempt for aesthetic innovations. He refuses any introduction of rock music in the USSR. In the sciences, de-Stalinization does not take place, since Khrushchev continues to cover with honors the charlatan biologist Trofim Lyssenko, who is disavowed by power only after his fall.

Trials of reform

Khrushchev loosens the pressure put by Stalinism on the peasants and workers. At the beginning of 1958, he suppressed the MTS (machine and tractor stations), the eyes and ears of power in the countryside since the dekulakization, and which had there the monopoly of modern tools. It also abolishes compulsory agricultural deliveries and payments in kind. Aimed at workers, it abolishes the draconian decrees of 1938-1940 which prevented any free change of employment and punished by sending to the Gulag any repeated delay of more than 20 minutes.

To ensure the prosperity of the country, Khrushchev undertook two major achievements:

* the accelerated development of agriculture;

* the construction of dwellings.

The Khrushchev period is marked by a rebalancing of production in favor of consumer industries, sacrificed in Stalin's time:for Khrushchev, "well buttered, Marxism-Leninism will taste better". As a result, the population experienced a real increase in its standard of living in those years.

Voluntarist, he speaks in public of exceeding the standard of living of the United States, at least on the agricultural level (July 15, 1957). At the end of the 1950s, he affirmed that Soviet society would have built socialism by 1980. 1965 the same production per capita as in the United States.

But the major reforms he launched often fell through due to a lack of organization. For example, after his visit to the United States, impressed by the American corn fields, he urged the Soviets to cultivate this plant. But this cereal can only adapt to a very small part of the territory, and this great agricultural campaign is a bitter failure. It earned him the nickname "Mister Corn" (Koukourousnik).

His ambition to clear and cultivate the "virgin lands" in Central Asia only leads to hardly more conclusive results.

Labor discontent did not completely disappear either:in June 1962, labor riots unprecedented for 30 years were bloodily repressed in Novocherkassk.

Foreign policy

Although Khrushchev initiated de-Stalinization and advocated peaceful coexistence, this period was marked by violent events or moments of tension such as the Hungarian uprising (1956), "Khrushchev's ultimatum" (1958), the construction of the of Berlin (1961) and the standoff which will oppose him to Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. He is also unable to prevent the Sino-Soviet rupture between the USSR and the People's Republic of China from Mao Zedong, consumed between 1960 and 1963.

Unlike Stalin, who had almost never left the USSR, Khrushchev traveled a lot, and multiplied international tours, which he used as an instrument of diplomacy and propaganda. He likes to play with his seemingly good-natured character and his unpredictable mood swings to alternately seduce or intimidate international opinion.

Thus, when he met President Dwight Eisenhower during a trip to the United States in 1959, he intimidated Americans by explaining to them on television that their grandchildren would live under communism. Similarly, at the beginning of 1960, he abruptly left the Big Four conference in Paris following the affair of the U-2 spy plane, shot down over the USSR with its pilot Gary Powers.
The Khrushchev spouses on a State visit to the White House, at President Eisenhower's house, 1959.
The Khrushchev spouses on a State visit to the White House, at the President's Eisenhower, 1959.

Khrushchev's voluntarism and his activism on the international level were served by the Soviet successes in the conquest of space, which accumulated under his mandate:overtaking the Americans, the Soviets sent the first satellite into orbit (Sputnik, October 4, 1957 ), the first living being in space (the dog Laïka, November 3, 1957), the first rocket on the Moon (1959), or finally the first man in space in the person of Yuri Gagarin (1961).

In 1955, Khrushchev effected Soviet-Yugoslav reconciliation, but without bringing Tito back into the Soviet fold.

Anxious to secure Allies for the USSR in the Third World in full decolonization, Khrushchev supported anti-colonialist and anti-American regimes, even when these suppressed their own communist parties at home.

In 1956, as an ally of Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, he threatened France and Great Britain to intervene militarily, or even to use the atomic bomb if they did not immediately stop their intervention in Suez. It finances the Aswan dam. In 1959, the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro provided him with an ally at the gates of the United States. In Africa, Khrushchev violently and publicly opposed UN Secretary General Dag Hammarjsköld over the civil war in the former Belgian Congo (1960-1961).

Hostile to the "Chinese road to socialism" advocated by Mao Zedong, Khrushchev also incurs the enmity of the Chinese by his policy of de-Stalinization and East-West dialogue, and by refusing to share with them nuclear secrets and help build their own atomic bomb. In 1960, he withdrew Soviet experts from China. In 1963, the final break is consummated. Under the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969), Mao's rivals were stigmatized by the Red Guards as the "Chinese Khrushchevs".

Since 1958, Khrushchev has violently questioned the quadripartite status of Berlin. In April 1961, at the summit conference in Vienna, he was deliberately very brutal in the face of the young new American president, Kennedy, surprised and disconcerted by his virulence. Thinking he had gauged the weakness of the American leader, Khrushchev then authorized Walter Ulbricht to build the Berlin Wall to stem the massive flight of East German citizens to the West. His election began on August 13, 1961, without much reaction from Westerners.

In October 1962, during the Cuban crisis, Khrushchev had the Soviet missiles withdrawn from the island in the face of John Kennedy's threats. This episode will allow his successors, including Leonid Brezhnev, to permanently denounce the Khrushchevite period as a time of "adventurism".

The fall and the retreat

Khrushchev's downfall was arguably the result of concerted action by his opponents within the Communist Party, angered by Khrushchev's fluctuating policies and moody behavior. The Communist Party accused Khrushchev of making political mistakes, such as mishandling the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and of disrupting the Soviet economy, especially in the agricultural sector.

Opponents of Khrushchev led by Leonid Brezhnev, Alexander Shelepin and KGB chief Vladimir Semichastny, acted abruptly in October 1964, while Khrushchev was on vacation in Pitsunda in Abkhazia. They called a special meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee, and when Khrushchev arrived on October 13, the Presidum voted to remove him from the Party and the Soviet government. A special meeting of the Central Committee was hastily called the next day and approved without discussion the decisions of the Presidium. On October 15, 1964, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR accepted Khrushchev's resignation as Prime Minister of the Soviet Union.

A sign of the times, Khrushchev was able to lose power without losing either life or liberty, which marked a relative success in breaking with the Stalin era.
Khrushchev's grave.
Tomb of Khrushchev.

Following his ousting, Khrushchev spent the rest of his life as a pensioner, leading a silent existence in Moscow. He remained a member of the Central Committee until 1966. For the rest of his life he was closely watched by the KGB, but managed to write his Memoirs and smuggle them to the West.

He died at his home in Moscow on September 11, 1971, and was buried in Moscow's prestigious Novodevichy Cemetery, after he was denied an official funeral and burial near the Kremlin wall.