Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894-1971)

Khrushchev was an important leader of the Soviet Union who served as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U., Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, among other posts.

On April 17, 1894, he was born to a miner’s family in Kalinovka village, Kursk province (now Kursk state). His grandfather was a serf. He studied in the countryside for a few years, and at the age of 15, he worked as an apprentice and as a locksmith in the machinery factory at Donbas, but was laid out for taking part in the strike. He then went to work in the mine and participated in the publicity activities of the Social-Democratic Labor Party. After the outbreak of the World War I in 1914, he actively participated in and led local strikes and anti-war demonstrations. On May 29, 1917, Khrushchev was elected as the Chairman of the Rutchenkovo Soviet, and in the second half of 1918 he joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). At the end of the same year, he joined the Red Army as a political commissar. Khrushchev was demobilized at the beginning of 1922, started to work as deputy manager of a coal mine. In 1925, he left this job to attend party work. In December 1926, he was promoted to the membership of the Communist Party Committee of Stalino and then to the ministry of Organizational Department of the Ukrainian Party’s Central Committee. In 1928, he was appointed as the deputy minister of the Central Committee of Ukraine. In 1929 he entered Stalin Industrial Academy in Moscow, in 1930 he was elected as party secretary of this Academy. After graduation, he became the party leader of the district. From 1932 to 1934, he started serving as the deputy secretary of Moscow City (Municipal) Committee of the Communist Party, then he assumed duties of the first secretary of the same organization. He was also appointed as the deputy secretary of the Moscow State Party Committee. He actively supported Stalin’s proposition in the Anti-Japanese movement. From 1935 to January 1938, he was the first Secretary Moscow Regional Committee of the C.P.S.U. and the first Secretary of the Municipal Committee of the C.P.S.U. (Bolshevik). He became a full member of the Politburo in 1939. From January 1938 to March 1947, he was appointed as the first Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. He served as a member of the Military Commission of the southwest front during the period of the Great Patriotic War. He was granted the rank of lieutenant general in 1943. In December 1949, he was appointed as the secretary of the Central Committee of C.P.S.U. in 1949, also assumed the duties of the first Secretary of the Moscow State Committee—in charge of agriculture and industrialization. In October 1952, he made a report on the revision of the Party constitution at the 19th Congress of the C.P.S.U., and was elected member of the Presidium and Secretary of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.. After Stalin’s death, he was elected as the First Secretary at the plenary session of the C.P.S.U. Central Committee in September 1953 and elected as the chairman of the Russian Federation Bureau of the C.P.S.U. Central Committee in the same year. In March 1958, he assumed the Chairmanship of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union.

During Khrushchev’s tenure as the supreme leader of the Soviet Communist Party, catching up and surpassing the United States was seen as an important component part of building communism in the Soviet Union. In 1959, the task of comprehensive construction of communism was put forward. At the 22nd Congress of the C.P.S.U., Khrushchev put forward that “communism will be basically built in 20 years” which meant breaking away from the realistic level of the socialist economic development of the Soviet Union, which meant transcending over the stage of social development, which caused negative effects to the theory and practice of building socialism in the Soviet Union.

Politically, Khrushchev took a series of measures to correct the mistakes of Stalin’s later years.

Firstly, he pushed for the reopening of cases from the political movement and the release of a large number of political prisoners; secondly, in February 1956, he gave the secret report “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” at the 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U., denouncing Stalin’s “purges” and deportations of ethnic minorities, the disasters caused by his agrarian policy and his incompetence in military command. It concluded with a return to the Leninist line. The report caused an uproar throughout the world, especially within the international communist movement. The report had a positive effect on breaking the cult of Stalin in the Soviet Union, and thus on vindicating historical wrongs, upholding the principle of democratic centralism in the Party, and strengthening the rule of law, as well as objectively prompting the communist parties of other countries to break their superstitious belief in the Soviet model and to explore independently the path of socialism suited to their national conditions. But the report’s wholesale rejection of Stalin caused serious ideological confusion in the Soviet socialist camp, arousing suspicion and denial of the Soviet Communist Party and the socialist road it represented, and also inducing serious splits in the Communist Parties of Western Europe and the United States. Thirdly, institutional adjustments were made, such as the abolition of trial privileges for members of the state security apparatus, the replacement of punishments for dissidents with unemployment, dismissal from university posts, expulsion from the Party, or forced hospitalization on the grounds of “social threats”; the expansion of the number of central committee meetings; and the division of provincial party committees into two parallel mechanisms, one for agriculture and one for industry. They were responsible for agriculture and industry respectively. This brought about confusion in the administration.

Economically, Khrushchev advocated reforms. In respect to agriculture, he emphasized the policies of material stimuli, increased the purchase price of agricultural products, expanded the autonomy of collective farms, in order to promote agricultural development, and improve people’s lives. He has successively promoted the reclamation of wasteland, abolished the mandatory sales of products to state by collective farm, obliged collective farms to purchase agricultural machinery, implemented corn planting plans, and promoted the increase of meat production. These measures increased the agricultural output and improved the living conditions of farmer households to a certain degree, however due to the extensive central management mode implemented in the Soviet agriculture, the low labor productivity did not change, various reform measures did not have a systematic coordination, besides the opinions of farmers and local authorities were not taken into consideration, therefore the positive results of agricultural reform were limited. As for the industry, 15,000 centrally-owned enterprises have been decentralized, i.e., transferred from the Union to respective Republics, and the management authority of the Republics over these enterprises was expanded. This reform did not fundamentally change administrative method of economic management upon the enterprises, nor did it expand the operational autonomy of the enterprise management, thus contrary to expectations these measures have fostered localism.

Regarding foreign affairs, in 1959, Khrushchev visited the United States and met with President Eisenhower at Camp David, which resulted in a general detente relations between the Soviet Union and Western countries. At the same time, his adventurist actions led to the Second Berlin crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis and several other tensions. In terms of relations with socialist countries, a Soviet government delegation headed by Khrushchev visited Yugoslavia in 1955, thereby normalized the relations between the two countries. However, in dealing with the relations between China, Poland and Hungary, Khrushchev adopted a hegemonistic great power approach to a considerable extent.

In 1961, Khrushchev publicly announced his “Three Peacefuls” and “Two Wholes” doctrines at the 22nd Congress of the C.P.S.U., thus theorized the line he had carried out since the 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U.. “Three Peacefuls” meant peaceful coexistence, peaceful competition and peaceful transition to socialism. First proposition meant that the two systems, i.e., socialist countries and Western capitalist countries could coexist peacefully; second proposition meant that Soviet Union should aim to surpass the United States in a peaceful competition; the third proposition meant that the working class of the developed capitalist countries can peacefully obtain political power through the parliamentary struggle path; the socialist countries should emphasize common interests with the USA and seek recognition from it; on the other hand Soviet Union and the C.P.S.U. should intensify socialist infiltration and expansion towards the Asian, African and Latin American countries and these countries should be promoted to take the non-capitalist development path, through peaceful transition, thus in this way these developing countries should be won to the strategic orbit of the Soviet Union. This idea ran counter to Marxist basic principles in respect to class struggle and violent revolution, ignored the reality of the Cold War confrontation between the two camps at that time, and unilaterally emphasized peaceful coexistence between the two social systems, and ignored the reality that bourgeoisie states generally sought to suppress the revolutionary proletarian movement with violent measures.

In fact, one-sided emphasis on the parliamentary struggle path meant advocating class reconciliation and class cooperation, and which also disarmed the proletariat ideologically. The “Two Wholes” doctrine proposed by Khrushchev meant that the Soviet state was “the state of the whole people” and the communist party was the party “of the whole people”. Thus, Khrushchev clearly proposed to replace the dictatorship of the proletariat with the “state” of the whole people and the proletarian party with the party “of the whole people”. The party program adopted at this Congress announced that the Soviet Union has become the state of the whole people and the C.P.S.U. (communist party), has become the party of the whole people. Under the historical conditions of class and class struggle, preaching “Two Wholes” would negate the class nature of the party, abandon Marxist party doctrine and the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and it means a shift towards democratic socialism. Therefore, the doctrines proposed by Khrushchev, such as “Three Peacefuls” and “Two Wholes” were opposed by the Communist Parties of quite several countries. The Communist Party of China did not agree with Khrushchev’s proposals and the C.P.S.U.’s above mentioned theories, which had led to Sino-Soviet split.

Khrushchev’s revisionism in the later period became the ideological and political source of Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” (Perestroika) and humanitarian Democratic Socialism line.

On October 14, 1964, when Khrushchev was on vacation in the holiday resort on shore of the Black Sea, the Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. dismissed him from his posts of the First Secretariat and from the post of Member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. due to his errors of “subjectivism and voluntarism”. The next day, he was dismissed of his post as the Chairman of the Soviet Union Council of Ministers. Khrushchev was forced to “retire” and became a “special pensioner”, who disappeared from the public scene.

Khrushchev died of illness in Moscow on September 11, 1971.