Re-Stalinization in the Soviet Union

Stalin's death in 1953 created significant upheaval among the Soviet leadership, as potential successors struggled to secure a leading role in national reform and development. In his wake, Stalin left a host of complex and threatening political, economic, and social problems which needed to be overcome if a Soviet state was to survive. When Khrushchev eventually emerged victorious over his rivals for political authority in the Central Party and national government, he did so largely by promising an end to the trends of arbitrary mass-terror and stifling economic inefficiency - particularly in agriculture - established under the Stalinist system. As Robert Service argues, however, Khrushchev's policies of "de-Stalinization," while providing a considerable "decrease in overt political intimidation" and loosening some oppressive restrictions and impositions of Stalin's regime, were more aesthetic than practical in reforming Soviet government (342). In fact, Khrushchev came to reinforce a style of administration ironically analogous to Stalinism by imposing rigid autocratic authoritarianism, reasserting the dominance of a centralized, one-party government, and suppressing political opposition, both by Russians and foreign nationalists.

Undeniably, Khrushchev's denouncements of Stalin as "a blunderer as well as a killer", beginning with the so-called "secret speech" at the twentieth party congress, created a general sense of relief and earned him a great deal of popular support from fellow party members and the population at large (Service 339). Many began to believe the Soviet Union had turned a corner, and that arbitrary brutality, fear-mongering, and rigid government control over all levels of society were finally becoming things of the past. While there was certainly some truth to this, the irony of Khrushchev's masterful political manipulation in turning favor against his greatest opponent, Malenkov - by implicating him in the same violent repressions in which he himself had played an integral part - went largely unnoticed (Service 339-340). The incident was largely indicative of the equivocal nature of Khrushchev's reforms, as was his denouncement of Stalin's "cult of the individual" and simultaneous condoning of the NEP, collectivization, and the First Five-Year Plan (Service 340). Khrushchev solidified his own powerbase by condemning the terror of Stalin's regime, but as Service points out, "much remained in place that would have been congenial to Stalin" under his direction, including retaining the kolkhozes and industrial priorities for capital-goods (341).

More urgently, his increasingly-publicized demonizing of Stalin lent unprecedented legitimacy and support to growing nationalist-separatist movements in countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Hungary which the USSR had acquired or intensively tightened its control over only under Stalin's rule (Service 342-344). In Poland, Khrushchev showed a willingness to compromise never shared by his predecessor when he responded to the industrial workers' revolt by releasing Polish nationalist Wladislaw Gomulka from prison and allowing him to become First Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party (Service 342). In the same year, however, he ruthlessly crushed revolts against Soviet rule in Hungary with Red Army tanks and troops, sending a message to all Warsaw Pact countries that, as Service says, "under Khrushchev as under Stalin, no challenge to the Kremlin's dominance would be tolerated" (344). Khrushchev's reputation suffered in the hail of criticism to follow, forcing him to curb his criticism of Stalin's abuses of power in fear of causing further insurrection (Service 344). But the strong stance he had taken against the frivolous use of terror - especially within the party - was a welcome reform from Stalinist tactics, one which earned him both a decisive popular victory when openly challenged by Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich, and greater admiration when he dealt with them nonviolently (Service 344-345). Khrushchev also initiated a mass-exodus of Stalin's political prisoners from forced labor in the Gulags, rehabilitating "between eight and nine million people" in only a matter of months (Service 345). Of course, careful restrictions were still imposed on speech, press, assembly, and foreign travel, and the KGB was quick to arrest individuals suspected of subverting the party's ideologies. Clearly, Khrushchev's "new" Soviet government was not averse to using oppressive Stalinist tactics, but was willing to do so only "insofar as communist party rule was preserved" (Service 345).

And Khrushchev's regime was able to deliver undeniable improvements in economic production, both agricultural and industrial, and notably increase Soviet standards of living. Khrushchev's "virgin lands" campaign saw 36 million new acres of farmland "put under the plough," and he consolidated many kolkhozes into "super-kolkhozes" (Service 350, 359). Wheat production "rose by over fifty per cent between 1950 and 1960," and output in milk and meat "had increased by sixty-nine and eighty-seven per cent respectively in the seven years after Stalin's death" (Service 350). Food consumption reached its "greatest quantity in the country's history," and after implementing his Seven-Year Plan in 1959, industrial output rose by eighty four percent, gross national income by fifty eight percent, and consumer goods by sixty percent (Service 350-351). In some respects, Khrushchev's personal style of rule was remarkably similar to Stalin's, for he "always assumed he knew best, and he disrupted the work of any institution which opposed his policies;" he impulsively ordered the cultivation of maize against his advisors' insistence it was infeasible on Russian land, imposed damaging restrictions on the size of private plots for kolkhozniki, and set arbitrary goals for apartment construction even as he undercut production for bricks required to build them (Service 351).

In other ways, he proved unable or unwilling to fully impose his will for change over commonly-accepted modes of Soviet government established under Stalin; despite his proclaimed desire to "satisfy all the aspirations of Soviet consumers," Khrushchev maintained production priorities for capital goods over consumer goods, and even vetoed measures to produce cars for private consumers (Service 347). Thus, a combination of personal stubbornness and general resistance caused many of Khrushchev's actual reforms to fall short of their goals, and when the over-confident idealism of schemes like the virgin lands campaign proved only temporary solutions, he was forced to backpedal even on some of his strongest positions, as shown by his later "rapprochement with the USA" (Service 352-354). And, although some restrictions on private life and labor were loosened with some reform of legal systems, "arbitrariness remained a basic feature of the management of society," and a police state was carefully maintained through vast networks of police informants and tireless government watch-dogging (Service 358).

All things considered, it seems clear that the political landscape of the Soviet Union post-Stalin was not conducive to major reforms. For his part in ending the cycle of brutality and mass-terror under Stalin and aiding the recovery of a post-war Soviet economy, Khrushchev can be considered a reformer, but the actual concept of "de-Stalinization" represents more of a tactical-distancing of Khrushchev from Stalin's most widely-reviled practices than a clean-break from the fundamental tenets of Stalinism. "Ludicrously over-ambitious" planning, the dominance of a highly centralized one-party, one-ideology authoritarian government, and rule by a supremely powerful single leader remained the trends of the day (360). Service argues that Khrushchev's "quarter-reforms...were probably the maximum that his close colleagues and the rest of the central elite would have tolerated at the time," but through his amassing of personal praise and denouncement and blame-shifting, Khrushchev was obviously not nearly as dissimilar from his predecessor as he liked to claim (355). Either way, Khrushchev's swift rise to popularity and party leadership suggests an underlying appeal in the fundamental purposes and spirit of Stalinism among the Soviet leadership of the time, making it difficult to imagine any other political leader emerging who could have truly de-Stalinized the Soviet Union.

Sources

Service, Robert. A History of Modern Russia: From Nicholas II to Vladimir Putin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003.