Russia. A History полностью

One was a string of humiliating reverses in foreign affairs. Khrushchev, for example, took the blame for the Sino-Soviet split: although relations were already strained (because of Chinese resentment over insufficient assistance and respect), the tensions escalated into an open split under Khrushchev. De-Stalinization was partly at issue, but still more divisive was Khrushchev’s ‘revisionist’ theory of peaceful coexistence and his refusal to assist the Chinese in acquiring a nuclear capability. Next came the Berlin crisis of 1961; although provoked by the East German leadership (as is now known), at that time the crisis was blamed on Khrushchev, who appeared to have fecklessly brought Soviet–American relations to the brink of war. That débâcle was soon followed by the Cuban missile crisis. After publicly denying the presence of missiles, the Soviet Union was embarrassed by clear CIA aerial photographs, prominently displayed at a stormy session of the United Nations Security Council. Confronted by an American ‘quarantine’ of Cuba, Khrushchev was forced to back down; although he obtained important concessions in secret negotiations, the public impression was one of total Soviet capitulation. Khrushchev suffered another fiasco in India, the recipient of massive economic and military aid, but an unreliable ally—a ‘neutral’ that did not hesitate to criticize the Soviet Union or its surrogate Communist Party in India. But India was hardly the only recipient; by 1964, for example, the USSR had given 821 million dollars to Egypt, 500 million to Afghanistan, and 1.5 billion to Indonesia (which became pro-Chinese in 1963). Such foreign aid brought scant political return and became increasingly unpopular at home, especially amid the food shortages and sputtering economy. Finally, party élites were embarrassed by Khrushchev’s penchant for vulgar jokes and crude behaviour—as in the infamous ‘shoe-pounding’ escapade during Harold Macmillan’s speech at the United Nations session in 1960.

A second factor in Khrushchev’s demise was his cultural policy, which gradually alienated both the intelligentsia and general population. Even earlier, as in the 1958 campaign of vilification against Boris Pasternak (whose Doctor Zhivago—illegally published abroad—had won a Nobel Prize), Khrushchev made clear that the ‘thaw’ did not mean artistic freedom. Nor was he even consistent: one month after authorizing publication of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich he publicly castigated modern art at the ‘Thirty Years of Moscow Art’ exhibition. He was also increasingly distrustful of writers; as he declared in 1962, ‘Do you know how things began in Hungary? It all began with the Union of Writers.’ In December 1962 and March 1963 Khrushchev and party ideologues convened special meetings with writers to reaffirm the limits on literary freedom. One early victim was the future Nobel prizewinning poet, Joseph Brodsky who did not belong to the official Writers’ Union and was therefore convicted of ‘parasitism’ in February 1964. The intelligentsia was not the only victim: in 1961 Khrushchev launched a vigorous anti-religious campaign, ending nearly a decade of qualified tolerance. The campaign affected all religious confessions, but was particularly devastating for the Russian Orthodox Church: over the next four years, the regime closed 59 of its 69 monasteries, 5 of its 8 seminaries, and 13,500 of its 22,000 parish churches.

A third reason for Khrushchev’s downfall was economic, as his policies and panaceas began to go awry. As Soviet economist Abel Aganbegyan demonstrated, the growth rate in the early 1960s declined by a factor of three—the result of systemic inefficiency, waste, and backwardness permeating every sector of the economy. And, despite official claims of ‘full employment’, the real unemployment rate was 8 per cent nationally and as high as 30 per cent in small towns. Aganbegian identified three main causes: (1) massive defence allocations, which diverted 30 to 40 per cent of the work-force into primary or secondary defence plants; (2) failure to modernize and automate production; and, (3) ‘extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters’, compounded by a primitive planning apparatus that lacked computers or even reliable economic data. ‘We obtain many figures’, he noted, ‘from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration’. The result was hoarding, low labour productivity, shoddy quality, forced savings, and the omnipresent defitsity (goods shortages) that fed inflation and a booming black market. Recent data confirm Aganbegian’s analysis, showing a sharp drop in the growth indicators for the gross domestic product (from 5.9 per cent in 1956–60 to 5.0 per cent in 1961–5) and investment (from 16 per cent in 1958 to 4 per cent in 1961–3).