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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
The mode of succession has long been recognized as one of the principal factors in determining the stability of a given political system and a key datum in the analysis of power relations within such a system. Essentially, the problem can be stated as involving (a) the technique of choosing a successor to a political leader, and (b) the successor's legitimization in the legal, traditional, or charismatic sense. This paper will deal primarily with the technique of succession in the Soviet system, touching only marginally on the question of legitimization. While drawing analogies from the post-Lenin succession crisis, the paper will attempt to identify the factors that shaped the nature and the course of the post-Stalin power struggle and the technique that ensured Khrushchev's victory over his rivals. Needless to say, limitations of evidence have introduced a considerable speculative element into the discussion, and some of the generalizations are therefore, at best, only tentative hypotheses that will have to be tested against such empirical evidence as may become available in the future.
Although modern constitutionalism has largely resolved the problem of succession by legally defining the technique of succession and making the technique the criterion of legitimacy, the very nature of the totalitarian dictatorship that emerged in Russia after 1917 precludes a constitutional solution to the problem. “… dictatorship,” Lenin wrote in 1920, “means neither more nor less than unlimited power resting directly on force, not limited by anything, not restrained by any laws or any absolute rules.”
This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in Kingston, June 9, 1960.
1 For a general discussion of the problem, see Watkins, F. M., “Political Succession,” Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1934), XIV, 441–3.Google Scholar
2 In his “K istorii voprosa o diktature” in Sochtneniia (3rd ed.), XXV, 441.Google Scholar For the sense in which “totalitarian” is used in this paper, see Brzezinski, Z., “Totalitarianism and Rationality,” American Political Science Review, L, no. 3, 09, 1956, 754.Google Scholar
3 An extensive discussion of the Leninist doctrine of the party appears in Selznick, Philip, The Organizational Weapon (New York, 1952).Google Scholar
4 In his Nashi politicheskiie zadachi (Geneva, 1904), 54.Google Scholar
5 See, e.g.: Konstantinov, F., “O marksistskom ponimanii roli lichnosti v istorii,” Bolshevik, nos. 10–11, 06 1, 1938, 47–61 Google Scholar; and Vodolazskii, A. F., Kollektivnost' rukovodstva bolshevistskoi partii v pervye gody NEP'a (1921–1923) (Moscow, 1960).Google Scholar
6 E.g., the editorials “Kommunisticheskaia partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza—napravliaiushchaia i rukovodiashchaia sila sovetskogo obshchestva,” Kommunist, 05, 1953, 12–24 Google Scholar, and “Polnost'iu vosstanovit' i razvit' leninskiie normy partiinoi zhizni,” Ibid., March, 1956, 3–12.
7 See “Kommunisticheskaia partiia—vdokhnovit'el i organizator stroit'elstva kommunizma v SSSR,” Ibid., Feb., 1956, 12, and “Do kontsa preodolet' posledstviia kul'ta lichnosti,” Ibid., July, 1956, 3–13.
8 See the translation of Lenin's “will” in Wolfe, Bertram D., Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost (New York, 1957), 262–3.Google Scholar
9 Although Lenin's “testament” was read (as a secret party document) to separate delegations attending the 1924 Congress (Ibid., 260), its full text was not published in the U.S.S.R. until June, 1956 (in Kommunist).
10 Ironically, with the help of his future victims, Zinoviev and Kamenev (see Reshetar, John S. Jr., A Concise History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York, 1960), 188–98Google Scholar).
11 Cited in full in Kommunisticheskaia Partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza v rezolutsiiakh i resheniiakh s'ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK (Moscow, 1953), I, 529.Google Scholar
12 See below, p. 584 and n. 55.
13 After Zhdanov died in 1948, Malenkov was clearly accorded precedence over such durable lieutenants of Stalin as Molotov, Beria, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan; from 1949 on, the latter were gradually removed from the important government posts they had occupied for many years. Malenkov's strategic position as Stalin s deputy in the Secretariat and the Cabinet was further enhanced at the Nineteenth Party Congress in 1952; not only was he chosen to deliver the report of the Central Committee (the function that Stalin had performed at every congress since 1925), but the old Politburo was replaced by a much larger and, inevitably, ineffectual body—the Presidium of the thiry-six members and candidates. More ominous portents of the forthcoming transition of power were the purges of the “Zhdanovites” and Beria's supporters, followed in January, 1953, by the announcement of the notorious “doctors' plot” which, while implicitly aimed at Beria, presaged a sweeping purge in the highest echelons of the party. According to Khrushchev, “Stalin evidently had plans to finish off the old members of the Political Bureau. He often stated that Political Bureau members should be replaced by new ones. His proposal, after the Nineteenth Congress, concerning the selection of 25 persons to the Central Committee Presidium, was aimed at the removal of the old Political Bureau members. … We can assume that this was also a design for the future annihilation of the old Political Bureau members. …” (Khrushchev's “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress, February, 1956, cited in Wolfe, , Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost, 244 Google Scholar) Later, in his 1957 speech, Khrushchev elaborated: “Occupying a high post in the Party and the State, Comrade Malenkov not only failed to restrain I. V. Stalin, but very cleverly made use of Stalin's weaknesses and habits during the last years of his life. In many instances he pushed him into such acts which deserve to be severely condemned.” (“Za t'esnuiu sviaz' literatury i iskusstva s zhizniu naroda,” Kommunist, no. 12, 08, 1957, 20 Google Scholar)
14 The existence of such a troika was nowhere confirmed in official Soviet sources, but the special prominence accorded these three men (in contrast to the rest of the Presidium) at Stalin's funeral, in the Soviet press, etc., led most Western students to assume that the long Bolshevik tradition of triumvirates in the party leadership was being followed.
15 In an attempt to “legalize” the succession, an unprecedented joint meeting of the Central Committee of the party, the Council of Ministers, and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet was summoned at the Kremlin immediately after Stalin's death; yet in changing the structure of the central organs of the party and government and replacing Shvernik with Voroshilov as the nominal head of the state, the meeting clearly usurped the prerogatives of the Supreme Soviet and the party Congress. The rationale behind these measures was stated in the resolution of this joint meeting, announced in Pravda on March 6, 1953: “… to ensure an uninterrupted and correct leadership over all life in the country, which in turn calls for the greatest unity of leadership, the prevention of any kind of disorder and panic. …”
16 Ibid. Voroshilov (Chairman of the Supreme Soviet Presidium); Bulganin (First Deputy Premier; Defence Ministry); Kaganovich (First Deputy Premier; no specific portfolio); Mikoyan (External and Domestic Trade). Saburov and Pervukhin were given consolidated industrial ministries.
17 Rostow, W. W., The Dynamics of Soviet Society (New York, 1953), 178.Google Scholar
18 See Reshetar, Jr., Concise History, 189–203.Google Scholar
19 Wolfe, Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost; Rush, , The Rise of Khrushchev (Washington, 1958)Google Scholar; Leonhardt, , Kreml ohne Stalin (Koeln, 1959).Google Scholar See also Crankshaw, E., Khrushchev's Russia (Penguin Rooks, 1959)Google Scholar, and Embree, G. D., The Soviet Union between the 19th and 20th Party Congresses, 1952–1956 (The Hague, 1959).Google Scholar Such authors as M. Fainsod, J. Towster, R. Bauer, B. Nikolaievsky, R. Lowenthal, W. Medlin, and others have contributed a large number of articles on this subject.
20 See above, n. 15. Significantly, many of those who were demoted in the reshuffle of March 6 later appeared among Khrushchev's partisans.
21 In its first few issues immediately after Stalin's death Pravda displayed Malenkov's photographs and contained frequent quotations from his speeches; its celebrated photomontage on March 10 showing Malenkov in the company of Stalin and Mao abruptly ended the “cult of Malenkov's personality.”
22 According to Giuseppe Boffa, an Italian Communist journalist who served as a Moscow correspondent for L'Unità from 1953 to 1958, Khrushchev “revealed” at the Plenum of January, 1955, that “at Stalin's death Malenkov and Beria had jointly shuffled the main organs of control, even before the Presidium was called together. The Central Committee was in fact faced with a fait accompli. Considering the gravity of the moment, no one raised any objections; but so singular a procedure could not easily be forgotten.” ( La Grande Svolta (Rome, 1959), 29 Google Scholar) Boffa's report has not yet been corroborated by official Soviet statements, but Khrushchev had alluded more than once to the close relations between Malenkov and Beria (see, e.g., his speech “Za tesnuiu sviaz' …,” Kommunist, no. 12, 1957, 20 Google Scholar).
23 The reshuffle was not announced in Pravda until March 21, 1953.
24 According to a well-informed Polish defector, party organizations in the secret police during the last years of the Stalin era were not subordinated to the Central Committee, but to the Ministry of State Security ( Bialer, S., “But Some Are More Equal than Others,” Problems of Communism, 03–04, 1960, 48 Google Scholar).
25 See Rush, , Rise of Khrushchev, 9–10, 14–15.Google Scholar Following the defeat of the “anti-party group” in June, 1957, it was charged in Kommunist (“Sila partii v edinstve ee riadov, v kollektivnosti ee rukovodstva,” July, 1957, 5) that Malenkov and Co attempted “to rationalize the inevitability of the primacy of the state organs over the party organs, [thus] perverting Leninist teaching on the party's role after the victory of the Revolution.”
26 Between April and June, 1953, Beria not only tried to win personal popularity for such measures as amnesty and the repudiation of the “doctors' plot,” but put his followers back in control of the party organizations in Georgia and Azerbaijan, and placed his own men in charge of the republican ministries of internal affairs; his boldest move (one which was certain to consolidate his opponents in Moscow) was to expose “Russification” in the Ukraine and Lithuania, and to replace Russians with native Communists in the leading party organs in these republics. See F. F., , “The Fall of Beria and the Nationalities Question in the USSR,” World Today, 11, 1953, 481–97Google Scholar, and Nikolaievsky, B., “Znacheniie d'ela Beria,” Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, 01 1954, 3–7.Google Scholar
27 For the uncorroborated “inside version” see Deriabin, Peter and Gibney, Frank, The Secret World (New York, 1959), 169–70.Google Scholar According to Deriabin, the coup planned for June 27 was betrayed to Beria's opponents by his deputy, Kruglov. The employment of army units at the time of Beria's arrest has been confirmed by several sources (see, e.g., Embree, , Soviet Union, 60 Google Scholar). On the official charges against Beria and “his gang” see Pravda, Dec. 17 and 23, 1953.
28 See the editorial “Rukovodstvo Kommunisticheskoi partii—reshaiushchee usloviie kreposti i nezyblemosti sovetskogo stroia,” Kommunist, 07, 1953, 3–10.Google Scholar
29 Beria's successors in the M.V.D. (subsequently split into M.V.D. and K.G.B.), Kruglov, Dudorov, Serov, and Shelepin, had all been associated with Khrushchev in the past and were regarded as his supporters at this time.
30 See Pravda, Sept. 13,1953.
31 See Malenkov's speech to the Supreme Soviet on August 8, 1953 (Pravda, Aug. 9, 1953) calling for development of light industry and the food industries “at the same rate as heavy industry”; Khrushchev's report at the Plenum of the Central Committee in September, 1953 (Ibid., Sept. 15, 1953) stressing heavy industry as the “only material basis of socialism” and calling for a rapid development of agriculture as a prior condition to increased production of consumer goods; and a signed article by Shepilov (“Generalnaia liniia partii i vulgarizatory marksizma,” Ibid., Jan. 24, 1955) condemning the former policy though not naming Malenkov.
32 See Lowenthal, R., “Crisis in Moscow,” Problems of Communism, 05–06, 1955, 1–8.Google Scholar It seems that Molotov and Kaganovich supported Khrushchev against Malenkov, as did Bulganin and the military circles.
33 As early as November, 1953, he undertook to puree Malenkov's supporters from the important Leningrad organization headed by the latter's nominee, V. M. Andrianov, and in December purged his one-time critic, G. A. Arutinov, from the leadership of the Armenian party organization. Similar changes in leadership followed in most of the Union republics. According to Brzezinski, Z., Permanent Purge (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 164 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, approximately half the obkom secretaries were removed or reassigned during 1954. The vacancies were filled largely with Khrushchev's former associates and lieutenants from the Ukraine and Moscow. In January or February, 1955, Shatalin, Malenkov's man in the Secretariat, was removed to another party post in the Far East; he later disappeared from public life.
34 Apparently, in addition to his “error” on the question of heavy vs. light industry, Malenkov (as Stalin's deputy in the Secretariat) was also charged with responsibility for failures in agriculture and (jointly with the “Beria gang”) with masterminding the “Leningrad Affair” (the purge of the Zhdanovites) in 1949. See Bialer, S., “I Chose Truth,” News From Behind the Iron Curtain, 10 1956, 6–7 Google Scholar, and Boffa, , La Grande Svolta, 28–30.Google Scholar
35 For Malenkov's “confession” which accompanied his “resignation” from the post of Premier, see Pravda, Feb. 10, 1955.
36 “Comrade Molotov's mistaken policy regarding Yugoslavia was unanimously condemned by the plenary session of the Party Central Committee in July, 1955” (Voprosy Istorii KPSS, Jan., 1957, 6).
37 Molotov was largely relieved of the conduct of Soviet foreign policy from that time on, but his resignation was made public only in 1956, to coincide with Marshal Tito's visit to the U.S.S.R. Prior to that, he had been compelled to write a humiliating letter to the party's ideological journal, confessing his “theoretically fallacious and politically harmful” views on the “question of construction of socialist society in the USSR”; see Kommunist, no. 14, 09, 1955, 127–8.Google Scholar
38 Pravda, July 13, 1955.
39 In addition, Khrushchev, from the autumn of 1953, used the pretext of strengthening party leadership in agriculture to increase the number of secretaries at the raikom and obkom levels from three to four, or even five. This device, which violated the provisions of the party's statute, enabled him to extend his influence over the bureaux of which secretaries are ex officio members. See Rush, , Rise of Khrushchev, 5.Google Scholar
40 See above, n. 33. At the Twentieth Party Congress, some 111 (or 44 per cent) of the 255 full and alternate members of the new Central Committee—now increased from 125 to 133 full members, and from 111 to 122 alternate members—were elected for the first time (see Embree, , Soviet Union, 331–2Google Scholar). Of the old Control Commission (thirty-seven members) twelve were removed and thirty-eight new members added. See Avtorkhanov, A., Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party (Munich, 1959), pp. 356–7.Google Scholar
41 Reproduced in full in Wolfe, , Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost, 88–252.Google Scholar The speech has not yet been published in the U.S.S.R. but the authenticity of the version made public by the U.S. State Department in 1956 was implicitly confirmed by the Soviet side.
42 Rush, for example (Rise of Khrushchev, 60), suggests as one of the primary reasons for the speech Mikoyan's earlier speech at the Congress which “hinted at Khrushchev's involvement in the purge of Kosior in order to remind the Congress of Khrushchev's potentialities for becoming a new Stalin.” We are inclined to interpret Mikoyan's speech rather as Khrushchev's “trial balloon,” preparing the atmosphere for the latter's full-scale attack on Stalin. Cf. Wolfe, , Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost, 63–6.Google Scholar
43 Wolfe, , Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost, 102, 244.Google Scholar
44 In particular, Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and, obviously, Beria.
45 Wolfe, , Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost, 240.Google Scholar Later, the Central Committee's resolution of June 30, 1956, spoke of the “Leninist core of leaders within the Central Committee” as a counterweight to Stalin (Pravda, July 2, 1956).
46 Inadvertently, Khrushchev suggested another, and much more valid, reason for Stalin's “deterioration”—the liquidation of the opposition and all factional activities in the party: “Before the Seventeenth Party Congress (1934), Stalin still paid some attention to the opinions of the collective leadership. However, after the complete political liquidation of trie Trotskyites, Zinovievites, and Bukharinites … he paid progressively less attention to the opinions expressed by members of the Central Committee or even by members of the Politburo. Stalin thought that he could now decide everything by himself and that all he needed was stage extras.” Cited in Avtorkhanov, , Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party, 274.Google Scholar
47 This was, perhaps, the most difficult thing to argue, and the reaction to Khrushchev's speech in the satellites, and especially among the foreign Communists, reflected the impossibility of separating the system from the man who was both its product and its maker. The Central Committee's resolution of June 30, 1956, attempted to clarify exactly this point.
48 See Avtorkhanov, , Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party, 349–52.Google Scholar It seems that Khrushchev's proposal for administrative-managerial decentralization was voted down at the Plenum of the Central Committee in December, 1956. (Significantly, it was Bulganin rather than Khrushchev who presented the report, “On the Improvement of Economic Leadership,” to that Plenum.) See Pravda, Dec. 25, 1956.
49 Apparently, failing to get the Presidium to implement the decision of the February Plenum to draft the law on decentralization, Khrushchev took the initiative himself and published on March 30, 1957, the so-called Khrushchev Theses for “popular discussion.” See Avtorkhanov, , Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party, 352.Google Scholar
50 Under the new law, which was to come into effect on July 1, 1957, most of the economic ministries in Moscow were to be abolished; over-all planning, co-ordination, and control remained with the newly strengthened Gosplan, the Ministries of Finance and Soviet Control, and, of course, the Council of Ministers; operative direction and control over industry and construction were transferred to the Union republics, the newly formed economic regions (sovnarkhozy), and the local Soviets. For the text of the law, see Izvestia, May 11, 1957.
51 For the victor's version of the “group's” motives and policy attitudes, see “Postanovleniie Plenumu TsK KPSS: Ob antipartiinoi grupe Malenkova G. M., Kaganovicha L. M., Molotova V. M.,” Partiinaia zhizn', no. 13, 07, 1957, 3–7 Google Scholar, and the proceedings of the Twenty-First Party Congress, Pravda, Jan. 29–Feb. 6, 1959.
52 Saburov and Pervukhin, as disclosed at the 1959 Party Congress. See Pravda, Jan. 30–Feb. 5, 1959.
53 To conceal from the public the fact that the majority in the Presidium had turned against Khrushchev, only Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Shepilov were at first identified as members of the “anti-party group”; Bulganin's name was added as late as the fall of 1958, and Saburov and Pervukhin were first publicly attacked only at the Twenty-First Congress in January–February, 1959.
54 The “inside” story of this fateful Plenum was supplied by the Warsaw Trybuna ludu and the Rome L'Unità (G. Boffa); their account is summarized in Avtorkhanov, , Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party, 353–5.Google Scholar
55 On the eve of the public announcement of the “anti-party group's” defeat and expulsion, Pravda (July 3, 1957) carried an ominous editorial article (“Leninskoe edinstvo Partii–istochnik ee nepobedimoi sily”) which provided a “definition” of “anti-party views”: “To determine the edge separating the party from the anti-party [views] there is a firm and faithful criterion: it is the [party] statute, programmatic rules, decisions of the party, its whole, more than half-century old, experience. …” Moreover, the article continued, “in our socialist country there is not and cannot be a social basis for the emergence within the party of tendencies and factions hostile to Leninism. … Lenin accorded special importance to the leading core of the party, its Central Committee. He … in every way protected it from the influence of purely personal and accidental circumstances [and] skilfully prevented the possibility of violation of its unity. These Leninist traditions [are] an inviolable law, binding our party [and] all Communists.”
56 Of the enlarged Presidium of fifteen members and nine alternates elected at the 1956 Congress, only six remained (Khrushchev, Bulganin—expelled in 1958, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Suslov, and Kirichenko); the former alternate members, Zhukov, Brezhnev, Shvernik, and Furtseva were made full members; Aristov, Belaiev, Ignatov, and Kuusinen were appointed to the Presidium while keeping their posts in the Secretariat; and Kozlov was also among the new appointees. The alternate members included, in addition to the old alternate members Kosygin, Mukhitdinov, and the demoted Pervukhin, such “newcomers” from the Central Committee as Pospelov (also a member of the Secretariat) Korotchenko, Kalnberzins, Kirilenko, Mazurov, and Mzhavanadze (Pravda, July 4, 1957).
57 In fact, since 1957, the expression “collective leadership” has come to be applied more and more to the “Central Committee headed by N. S. Khrushchev.”
58 By May, 1959, nine out of fourteen full members and one of the nine alternate members of the Presidium were secretaries of the Central Committee. A significant reshuffle of the top personnel of the party at the Plenum in May, I960, reduced the number of Central Committee secretaries to five; thus, in the present fifteen-man Presidium there are five such secretaries, two officials of the Central Committee's Bureau for the Russian Republic, and one republican party secretary; the seven alternate members of the Presidium include three republican secretaries and one obkom secretary. See Pravda, May 5, 1960.
59 He was removed from the Ministry of Defence, the Presidium, and the Central Committee by the Plenum of the Central Committee which met on October 29, 1957; Pravda announced his removal from the Cabinet on October 27, but did not publish the communiqué about the Plenum and his removal from the party leadership until November 3. Zhukov was accused of “Bonapartism”: “… he took the line aiming at the separation of our armed forces from the Communist party, at the weakening of the party organizations and actual liquidation of political organs in the Soviet army. … [He displayed] a tendency to view the Soviet armed forces as his patrimony … [strove] to escape from the control of the Central Committee, … [fostered] the cult of his [own] personality” (“Kommunisticheskaia partiia-rukovodiashchaia sila sovetskogo obshchestva,” Kommunist, no. 16, 11, 1957, 10–11 Google Scholar). See also Partiinaia zhizn', no. 21, Nov., 1957, 48–57.
60 Pravda, March 28, 1958.
61 The speakers echoed, almost word by word, Stalin's boast of 1934, which ran: “The present Congress takes place under the flag of the complete victory of Leninism, under the flag of the liquidation of the remnants of the anti-Leninist groups. … It must be admitted that the Party today is united as it has never been before.” Cited in Fainsod, M., How Russia Is Ruled (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), 47–8.Google Scholar
62 Rush (Rise of Khrushchev, 42–4) shows that the first official mention of this new designation was in January, 1956, simultaneously at the Ukrainian and Kazakh party congresses. Since the removal of the “anti-party group” from the Presidium, the use of the phrase “Central Committee [sometimes also “Presidium”] headed (vo glave s) by Comrade Khrushchev” has become standard procedure in the U.S.S.R.
63 Indeed, the proceedings of the Congress show that Khrushchev was “personally” credited for achievements in such areas as agriculture, the anti-alcohol campaign, the armed forces, nuclear research, chemical industry, construction, cultivation of cotton, educational reform, electric power, literature, cultural development of the nationalities, “socialist legality,” science, and astronautics. See Pravda, Jan. 29–Feb. 6, 1959.
64 Ibid.
65 Kapitonov's speech; see Ibid., Jan. 30, 1959.
66 The concept of a “charismatic leader” is derived from Max Weber's sociology of leadership (see his “Die drei reinen Typen der legitimen Herrschaft” in Preussische Jahrbuecher, CLXXXVII, 1–12 Google Scholar). In contrast to the other two “pure types” of leader—“bureaucratic-legal” and “traditional”—a “charismatic” leader (Weber includes in this category “prophets, warheroes, and great demagogues” as well as leaders of certain revolutionary mass movements) is invested by his disciples and followers with certain extraordinary, unique, superhuman, “magical” characteristics which set him apart from and above other men and command unqualified loyalty and obedience. The category of a “pseudo-charismatic” leader was developed by Jeremiah Wolpert in his essay “Toward a Sociology of Authority” in Gouldner, A. W., ed., Studies in Leadership (New York, 1950), 679–701.Google Scholar Tracing the process of the “routinization of charisma” in modern “Caesarism,” Wolpert observes (pp. 680–1): “On the face of it, this seems to guarantee the continuation of charisma, but in reality it produces [a] most blatant counterfeit, for modern hero worship takes place within an objective context of total rationalization. … The pseudo-charisma belies its earlier characteristics by the way in which it can be fabricated through the manipulation of techniques of mass persuasion. … When the core of authority suffers erosion, when its ethical justification dissolves, manipulative techniques become all the more necessary and the stability of social relationships suffers accordingly. …” See also Bauer, R., “The Pseudo-Charismatic Leader in Soviet Society,” Problems of Communism, nos. 3–4, 1953.Google Scholar
67 See above, n. 21; in his speech at Stalin's funeral, Beria addressed Malenkov as a “talented disciple of Lenin and a faithful companion-in-arms of Stalin”; similar phrases appeared in the Soviet press in the first week after Stalin's death.
68 On Khrushchev's manipulation of the Stalin “myth” see Rush, , Rise of Khrushchev, 6–20.Google Scholar On December 21, 1954, the East German Taegliche Rundschau published a photomontage showing Khrushchev and Bulganin in the company of Stalin, Zhdanov, and Voroshilov at a session of the Supreme Soviet in 1938. Malenkov was removed from the original photograph and Khrushchev and Bulganin substituted (see Embree, , Soviet Union, 164 Google Scholar). Khrushchev's defence of the traditional emphasis on heavy industry was, apparently, closely related to the initial attempts to identify himself with Stalin.
69 See, e.g. editorial “Monolitnoe edinstvo i splochennost' partii i naroda” in Kommunist, no. 4, 03, 1953, 23–32 Google Scholar, which states: “The C. C. [Central Committee] is rightly regarded as the incarnation of the wisdom of the Party, its gigantic experience. …” See also Towster, J., “The Soviet Union After Stalin,” American Slavic and East European Review, XIII, no. 4, 12, 1954, 471–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
70 This observation may be substantiated by such evident traits of Khrushchev's personality as his pragmatism (praktitsism) and extrovert behaviour, his apparent lack of mystique, as well as his career as an apparatchik who rose to power through a succession of secretarial offices. His emphasis on expertness and specialization of the party officials and his disparagement of theory in favour of “practical results” also point in this direction. On his political career, see Medlin, William K., “Khrushchev,” Russian Review, XVII, no. 4, 1958, and XVIII, nos. 1–3, 1959.Google Scholar
71 To quote one of the sharpest observers of the Soviet scene, “the concept of collective leadership endured as long as there was a relative equilibrium of power within the Soviet leadership, preventing the formation of a working majority. The process of elimination before such a ‘working’ majority could be formed, left—in the end—a ‘majority of one,’” that is, Khrushchev. Bialer, , “But Some Are More Equal than Others,” 47.Google Scholar
72 See above, n. 39, n. 40; also, Rush, , Rise of Khrushchev, 2.Google Scholar
73 For a discussion of this crucial instrument of party control, see: Scott, D. J. R., Russian Political Institutions (London, 1958), 181–2Google Scholar; Armstrong, John A., The Soviet Bureaucratic Elite (New York, 1959), 76–7Google Scholar; and Fainsod, M., Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 64–6, 86–8.Google Scholar
74 Thus, immediately after the Plenum of June, 1957, the whole party agit-prop apparatus was mobilized to “explain” the decisions of the Plenum and to discredit members of the “anti-party group” who, on the other hand, were denied any means of stating their case or justifying their actions. According to Partiinaia zhizn' (no. 13, July, 1957, 15), within less than three weeks over 3 million party members took part in special meetings condemning the “factionalists,” over 660,000 members delivering speeches against the “anti-party group.”
75 The taking over by his apparatchiki of the secret police files and the personal secretariat of Stalin supplied Khrushchev with enough ammunition to compromise (and to intimidate) any of Stalin's former lieutenants. Witness, for example, his use of the “now discovered” party documents in his “secret speech” or of the “Leningrad affair” evidence against Malenkov.
76 Let us mention only such programmes as the opening of virgin lands, managerial and administrative decentralization, dissolution of the machine-tractor stations, educational reform, reorganization of the judiciary and the police and (in the field of foreign policy) reconciliation with Yugoslavia, the “peaceful coexistence” campaign combined with an all-out economic offensive, and the proposal for total disarmament.
77 See Armstrong, , Soviet Bureaucratic Elite, 146.Google Scholar
78 On the ramifications of this problem see Bell, Daniel, “Ten Theories in Search of Reality” in Dallin, A., ed., Soviet Conduct in World Affairs (New York, 1960), 25–6.Google Scholar
79 On Khrushchev's Ukrainian machine and some of his former lieutenants in the Ukrainian Communist party, whom he promoted and used during his struggle for power, see Armstrong, , Soviet Bureaucratic Elite, 146–51.Google Scholar
80 Ironically, Khrushchev himself had for a long time been Kaganovich's protégé; it was through the latter that he first rose to prominence in the Moscow apparatus during the 1929–37 period.
81 For some official hints of such differences in the Presidium during 1953–7 see: “Postanovleniie Plenumu TsK KPSS …,” Partiinaia zhizn, no. 13, 07, 1957, 3–7 Google Scholar; Domrachev, M. et al., “Partiia i narod,” Kommunist, no. 10, 07, 1957, 23–36 Google Scholar; and Rumiantsev, A., “Tvorcheskii marksizm-leninizm i politika partii,” Kommunist, no. 11, 08, 1957, 12–23.Google Scholar According to Rumiantsev, the “anti-party group” charged Khrushchev with “rightist opportunism” and praktitsizm in connection with his programme in agriculture.
82 His measures to reinvigorate the trade unions and to increase their influence on factory management, as well as to narrow the differences in pay and salaries, his attacks on “bureaucracy” and the “petty-bourgeois” tendencies of the Soviet intelligentzia, and his interest in educational reform with its emphasis on manual work and technical training—all can be related to his “proletarian” orientation.
83 E.g., in connection with industrial-managerial decentralization, dissolution of the machine-tractor stations, educational reform, etc.
84 New York, 1942, viii-ix.
85 See Salisbury, H. E., “After Khrushchev, Who?” Saturday Evening Post, 05 5, 1960, 19–21, 84–6.Google Scholar
86 Neumann, , Permanent Revolution, 95.Google Scholar