But there was ‘someone’, in fact several of them, all fighting to succeed the Leader. That successor, however, would inherit not only the panoply of power but also the other legacy of Stalinist rule: a host of critical problems. These problems unleashed a torrent of letters to newspapers, government organs, and especially the Central Committee.
The problems were daunting in their complexity and gravity. One was power itself: Stalin himself had so personalized power, leaving the lines of institutional authority so amorphous and confused, that many key organs (even the Central Committee) had atrophied and virtually disappeared. To re-establish regular governance, it was essential to rebuild the institutions of party and state administration. Related to this was another grisly legacy—the victims and survivors of the purge and terror. Apart from posthumous rehabilitation, the most urgent question concerned the two million politicals and common criminals currently in the GULAG and still larger numbers in exile and banishment. Stalin’s heirs also had to resolve critical economic questions—above all, whether to continue Stalin’s one-sided industrialization (which emphasized heavy industry) or to develop agriculture and light industry. The Stalinist model, as one acerbic letter to the Central Committee noted, had produced not communism but ‘deficitism’. N. S. Khrushchev admitted that ‘there is little milk or meat’ and asked: ‘What kind of communism is this if there are no sweets or butter?’ That ‘deficitism’ exacerbated social tensions, for it did not apply to everyone. Stalinist social policy had vigorously combatted ‘levelling’ (
In foreign policy Stalin’s heirs faced another knot of difficult questions—from the Korean War and Maoist pretensions to the infernal ‘German Question’ and Tito’s challenge in Yugoslavia. Resolutions of these problems also had major domestic implications, above all for the military budget, which consumed an inordinate share of national income. Even the ‘official’ military budget of 1952 (a pale reflection of reality) revealed a 45 per cent increase since 1950. Clearly, a regime seeking to modernize its economy could ill afford to divert so many resources—capital, labour—to so unproductive a sector.
Historical scholarship on the post-Stalinist period is still in its infancy. Until recently most literature belonged to the genre of ‘Kremlinology’—a mélange of inferences and wild guesses based on party propaganda, diplomatic gossip, distorted statistics, and symbolic gestures. Recently, however, Russian authorities have declassified materials from the super-secret ‘Kremlin Archive’ (renamed ‘Presidential Archive’) and from the operational files of the Central Committee. This chapter draws heavily upon these materials. It aims to present a fresh portrait of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras—named after two men who symbolize two different approaches to salvaging Stalin’s legacy: reform and retrenchment. By the early 1980s, however, it was obvious that neither had worked.
Perils of Reform
The first decade after Stalin’s death was marked by change so profound that perceptive observers began to question the static ‘totalitarian’ model that still shaped Cold War policy towards the Soviet Union. That decade was an era of frenetic reformism not only in the political system but also in society, economy, culture, and nationality policy. It was also a time of excesses and errors, which Khrushchev’s critics attributed to his boorishness, his penchant for ‘harebrained schemes’, and his reckless search for panaceas. The ill-repute of the Khrushchev era was so intense that, in the days of perestroika, even reformers were loath to invoke his name or reconsider his strategies. In that sense, perhaps the worst legacy of Khrushchevism was not that reform failed, but that it deterred new attempts until it was too late.
The Struggle for Succession
