Russia. A History полностью

Although the regime took special measures to provide cities with basic necessities, it also attempted to dampen demand in June 1962 by raising prices—38 per cent on meat and 25 per cent on butter. The price increases aroused intense popular discontent and even disorders. To quote a KGB report from June 1962: ‘In recent years some cities in our country have experienced mass disorders, accompanied by pogroms of administrative buildings, destruction of public property, and attacks on representatives of authority and other disorderly behaviour’. Although police tried to blame ‘hooligan’ elements (including people so diverse as former ‘Nazi collaborators, clergy, and sectarians’), the root cause of course lay much deeper.

Those causes were clearly visible in the most famous disorder of all—in Novocherskassk in June 1962. It began at a locomotive plant, where workers rebelled against rising food prices, wage cuts (30 per cent), and a backlog of unresolved grievances (housing shortages, work safety, and even food-poisoning of 200 workers). The workers quickly won the support of local townspeople; as the KGB later reported, the ‘man-in-the-street’ believed that ‘prices should have been left as they were, that the salaries of highly paid people should be reduced, [and] that aid to underdeveloped socialist countries should cease’. When the striking workers marched into the centre of Novocherkassk, they attracted a crowd of some 4,000 people and managed to repulse the assault of local police and, later, even armoured units. ‘Mass disorders’ continued the next day, as the insurgents seized the offices of the city party committee and tried to storm the KGB and militia headquarters. Moscow hastily dispatched a key Khrushchev aide, F. R. Kozlov, who denounced the ‘instigators’ as ‘hooligan elements’, defended the price rise, but promised to improve the food supply. Troops were eventually able to restore order, but not before taking scores of civilian lives.

But Khrushchev’s fatal error was to attack the ‘partocracy’—the central and local élites who comprised the only real organized political force. His attempt to democratize and ensure renewal, especially through ‘term limits’, posed a direct threat to career officials, from highest to lowest echelons. Decentralization itself was anathema to apparatchiki, especially those holding power in Moscow. His original scheme of sovnarkhozy not only reduced the power of Moscow functionaries, but also forced many to depart for provincial posts—‘I myself had to work in a sovnarkhoz’, a high-ranking functionary later complained. In 1962 Khrushchev undermined his base of support even among provincial officialdom through his scheme to divide the party into industrial and agricultural branches at the regional and oblast levels, thereby undercutting the power of local potentates. And, for all the pain, decentralization seemed only to beget corruption, falsified reports, and non-compliance. In response, Khrushchev was forced to build a new layer of intermediate bodies and central organs to co-ordinate—and control—the sovnarkhozy. The drift towards recentralization culminated in a decision of March 1963 to establish the ‘Supreme Economic Council of the USSR’—in essence, an attempt to reassert central control over the lower economic councils.

Finally, Khrushchev’s colleagues came to feel that he had begun to rule imperiously and, at the time of his removal, denounced him for taking decisions impetuously and ignoring collective opinion. Although Khrushchev gamely responded (‘But you, who are present here, never spoke to me openly and candidly about my shortcomings—you always nodded in agreement and expressed support!’), the critique was not amiss. As a high-ranking functionary, A. Shelepin, observed, Stalin—but not the cult—had expired: ‘[Khrushchev] was also a vozhd′ [Leader]. And the same psychology of the vozhd′ remained. And in the subordinates’ relationship to the vozhd′. No one had the courage to speak out against him’. The fact that Khrushchev had assumed both party leadership and the top position in the state—because it was too much work, because it centralized too much power—also elicited criticism. There was keen resentment too over his tendency to promote family members, such as his son-in-law Aleksei Adzhubei, who was made editor of Izvestiia and recipient of undeserved awards and privileges.