How Khrushchev was dismissed thanks to an internal party conspiracy

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

It is customary to associate Nikita Khrushchev with the "thaw", space flights and the massive resettlement of people from communal slums to relatively comfortable five-story khrushchevs. It is believed that, unlike Stalin and Lenin, "Tsar Nikita" avoided shedding human blood. However, it was the leader of the peoples who somehow laid siege to Khrushchev, who demanded an increase in the "quota" of death sentences: "Calm down, you fool!" And Khrushchev was removed from power because he, in fact, ruined the country …

It is believed that Nikita Sergeevich was removed by force - as a result of an internal party conspiracy started by Leonid Brezhnev. A common story says that Khrushchev went on vacation to Pitsunda, and the conspirators, led by Brezhnev, took advantage of his absence from Moscow and seized power. At the same time, Khrushchev was kept almost at gunpoint by the KGB officers loyal to Brezhnev … However, this is only a legend that cinematographers like, but has nothing to do with reality. Although a little blackmail did take place.

Brezhnev with a support group presented Khrushchev with a choice: either at the October plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Presidium member Dmitry Polyansky publicly announces his report on the arts of the head of the Soviet state, or he quietly and imperceptibly retires, and then the report will not be made public. After reading the text of the report, Khrushchev preferred the latter. Why? Because if the Secretary General's report was made public, he would have to be judged. And he himself understood it well …

Continuous receptions and business trips abroad

For a long time, the full text of Dmitry Polyansky's report was available only to a narrow circle of specialists and was considered secret. Some historians even believed that there was no complete text in principle, and Polyansky operated with some scattered calculations prepared for him by the KGB.

Nevertheless, the report still existed - fifty typewritten pages. And the “office” was directly related to the report: as noted by the Russian historian and archivist Rudolf Pikhoya, the document “is full of special information that Polyansky, who was in charge of agricultural policy, could not have by the nature of his activities.

The collection of such information (…) could only be carried out with the approval of the Central Committee or at the request of the Committee of Party and State Control under the Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers. The report contains a lot of data that could only be obtained from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the KGB."

And as KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastny recalled, Polyansky's report should not have survived. It was even printed - secretly, in parts - by several old typists who had worked in counterintelligence since the 1930s …

So what was this report about?

“Last year alone, Khrushchev was traveling abroad and across the country for 170 days, and now, when 1964 is not over yet, he has been absent from work for 150 days. If we add to this that in 1963 he held 128 ceremonial receptions, lunches and breakfasts, then how much time is left for work? - Polyansky asked rhetorically. “There were only six portraits of Stalin for 1952 published in Pravda, and 147 of Khrushchev's portraits for 1964 were published in the same newspaper.”

So much for a fighter against the personality cult! However, the report also brought forward really serious accusations that were not connected either with Khrushchev's morbid vanity or with his frequent departure from Moscow.

Polyansky cited data from the Institute of Economics of the USSR Academy of Sciences: under Stalin, the average annual economic growth rate reached 10.6 percent, and over the decade of Khrushchev's rule, they fell by more than half - to five percent. The growth rates of labor productivity also fell … But Khrushchev got the most for what it is customary to praise for now: for the construction of five-story buildings.

“Khrushchev dispersed the USSR Academy of Architecture because it did not agree with his conclusions that such houses were the cheapest and most comfortable,” noted Polyansky. “It turned out that the cost of one square meter of area, if we take into account the cost of communications, in five-storey buildings is much more expensive than in 9-12-storey buildings."

The building up of the country with khrushchobs led to the fact that the building density in cities fell sharply, and transport, water supply, heating and other communications were unacceptably stretched. It is estimated that for the money spent on the construction of one five-story building (plus communications), it would be possible to build two nine-story buildings, saving on water supply with sewerage …

Another six months - and famine would begin in the USSR

It is believed that it was Khrushchev who gave the collective farmers freedom, freeing them from workdays and starting to pay them money instead of grain calculation. In fact, this turned out to be a myth: if under Stalin the collective farmer received 8, 2 centners of grain before the war and 7, 2 centners after the war, then under Khrushchev the monetary equivalent was 3, 7 centners of grain.

“If, on average, each collective farmer earns 230-250 workdays per year,” wrote Polyansky, “this means that his monthly earnings are 40 rubles. This is more than two times less than the average monthly salary of other workers. That is why people are fleeing the collective farms."

Due to the flight of collective farmers, grain supply interruptions began:

“Khrushchev even suggested introducing a rationing system - 20 years after the war! We had to allocate 860 tons of gold to buy grain from the capitalists. The average annual growth rate of agricultural production was to be eight percent. In reality, they amounted to 1.7 percent, and 1963 was completed with minus indicators."

That is, another six months of Khrushchev's stay in power - and famine would begin in the Soviet Union …

It is known that under Stalin, on April 1, prices for certain types of goods and services were reduced in the country. Under Khrushchev, the opposite process began: prices began to rise - both for food and for essential goods.

“Prices on the collective farm market have increased by 17 percent, in consumer cooperation - by 13 percent,” wrote Polyansky.

Another myth debunked in the report is that under Khrushchev, officials were allegedly laid off. It turns out that on the contrary:

“… If in the first year after the liquidation of ministries, committees and departments, the apparatus slightly decreased, then their number almost doubled, and the total number of the administrative apparatus in the country grew by more than 500 thousand people in just five years. Expenses for its maintenance have increased by almost 800 million rubles in the last year and a half alone”.

Rudeness and generosity

But the worst thing that the authors of the report accused Khrushchev of was that he split the countries of the socialist camp.

“There were essentially three groups,” wrote Polyansky. - The countries following the USSR, China and Yugoslavia and Romania. There was a very real threat of a split."

And Khrushchev was personally to blame in many ways:

"He publicly called Mao Zedong 'old galoshes', he found out about it and, of course, was furious."

Here it is, the real reason for the deterioration in Soviet-Chinese relations! With the Romanians, Khrushchev also did not work:

"… During his stay in Romania, he rudely interfered in internal affairs, shouted that they did not know anything about agriculture."

And Khrushchev called Fidel Castro "a bull, ready to throw himself on any red rag."

However, Khrushchev compensated for his rudeness with foreigners with excessive generosity.

“In Guinea, with the help of the USSR, an airfield, factories, and a power plant have been built,” the report noted.- And all this is thrown under the tail of the dog. The so-called socialist Sekou Toure kicked us out of there and did not even allow us to use the airfield that we had built for them in Conakry when flying to Cuba. In Iraq, we relied on Qasem and launched a large construction there - 200 facilities!

In the meantime, Kasem was overthrown, and outspoken enemies of the USSR came to power. The same story happened in Syria. Indonesia, having received a lot of assistance, does not want to pay on our loans. About 200 million gold rubles were donated to India, Ethiopia and other countries as gratuitous aid. The amount of Soviet loans for only 20 developing countries amounted to 3.5 billion (!) Rubles."

This is generosity! Meanwhile, the Russian Non-Black Earth Region was slowly dying, Siberia was drinking intoxicated, and the inhabitants of the middle zone began to go to Moscow for food …

by the way

It is interesting that the report also listed “personal gifts” that Khrushchev gave to those whom he sympathized with: he presented an IL-18 plane to Sek Toure, and two representative “Seagulls” to the Egyptian leader Nasser. There were also offerings to the British queen - priceless museum treasures.

But Khrushchev did not forget himself, his beloved, either: “On his instructions, swimming pools were built at his dachas in the Crimea and Pitsunda, about five million rubles were spent (at the then official rate of 60 kopecks per US dollar. - Ed.). Khrushchev's son has four cars, his son-in-law has two, his wife and daughter have one car each, but the family has four more personal cars.”

And also the modest Khrushchev kept 110 (!) Domestic servants …