The principal threat eliminated, the chief contenders were the two main speakers at the July plenum—Malenkov and Khrushchev. At one level, the two simply manœuvred to broaden their respective political bases—Malenkov in the state apparatus, Khrushchev in the party. But they also raised important issues, especially questions of economic development and agricultural policy. Malenkov proposed a ‘liberal’ policy giving greater emphasis to light industry, chiefly by diverting resources from agriculture; in his view, the regime had ‘solved’ the production problem and could rely on an intensification of production (i.e. mechanization, electrification, and increased use of mineral fertilizers). In response Khrushchev challenged the emphasis on consumer goods and, especially, Malenkov’s cheerful assumption that the agricultural question was ‘solved’. Khrushchev proposed to increase, not cut, investment in the agricultural sector, above all through the ‘Virgin Lands’ programme—an ambitious scheme to convert huge tracts of pastureland in southern Siberia and Kazakhstan to arable land. By shifting wheat production to the Virgin Lands, the Ukraine could grow the corn needed to provide fodder for greater meat and milk production.
Khrushchev’s programme, however, proved a hard sell in the party. Investment in agriculture (a radical break from Stalin’s utter neglect) encountered stiff opposition from conservatives in the centre, especially the ‘metal-eaters’ in heavy industry; it also elicited opposition from Central Asians, who feared wind erosion, Moscow’s intervention and control, and a mass influx of Russians. By August 1954, however, the First Secretary had prevailed: a joint party-government decree endorsed the Virgin Lands programme and raised the target for newly cultivated land from 13 million to 30 million hectares by 1956. Blessed with unusually good weather, the Virgin Lands programme initially brought huge increases in agricultural output (a 35.3 per cent increase between 1954 and 1958), causing the ebullient Khrushchev to make the foolhardy prediction that in two or three years the Soviet Union could satisfy all its food needs.
Simultaneously, Khrushchev declared war on ‘bureaucracy’. In part, he was seeking to undermine Malenkov’s power base—the state apparatus, which was indeed bloated (with 6.5 million employees by 1954). But Khrushchev, the former provincial party chief, also recognized the need to decentralize and shift power and responsibility to the republic level. As a result, by 1955 he had cut the number of Union-level ministries in half (from 55 to 25) and state employees (by 11.5 per cent). This decentralization significantly enhanced the authority of national republics; for example, enterprises under republic control rose from one-third of total industrial output (1950) to 56 per cent (1956). The shift was especially marked in Ukraine, where the republic-controlled output rose from 36 to 76 per cent.
By late 1954 Khrushchev’s programme, and its main architect, had triumphed over Malenkov. The latter, defeated on policy issues and confronted with ominous references to his ‘complicity’ in fabricating the ‘Leningrad affair’, resigned in December 1954. Two months later, he was formally replaced by N. Bulganin as premier, Khrushchev’s nominal co-equal in the leadership.
Cultural Thaw and De-Stalinization
Amid the struggle over power and policy, the regime cautiously began to dismantle the Stalinist system of repression and secrecy. Symbolically, in late 1953 it opened the Kremlin itself to visitors; during the next three years, eight million citizens would visit this inner sanctum of communist power. Openness also extended to culture, hitherto strait-jacketed by censorship and ideology. The change was heralded in V. Pomerantsev’s essay ‘On Sincerity in Literature’ (December 1953), which assailed the Stalinist canons of socialist realism that had prevailed since the 1930s. Thus began a cautious liberalization that took its name from Ilia Ehrenburg’s novel
