Krushchev's Coup

RESTORATION of CAPITALISM in the USSR

Martin Nicolaus

In June 1957, 16 months after the 20th Congress, the storm unleased by Khrushchev's anti-Stalin speech reached a dramatic climax, a final showdown between the backers and the opponents of Khrushchev's line within the leadership. 

Inside a period of two weeks, Khrushchev was thrown out of party leadership and stripped of his power, and then restored to leadership at his opponents' expense. The story of this showdown, and of the role played in it by the Soviet military hierarchy, throws an important light on the character of current Soviet society. 

Virtually the whole of this conflict was played out among a rather narrow circle of people at the highest levels of the Soviet superstructure. While Khrushchev's opponents apparently never thought to take the issues to the masses of the Soviet people -- this was certainly their fatal weakness -- Khrushchev's backers, for their part, did everything possible to keep the Soviet people in the dark. 

Even the great majority of the members of the Communist party was kept out of it from the beginning. According to the leaked transcript of the "secret speech," the delegates to the 20th Party Congress in February 1956 received Khrushchev's 20,000-word diatribe against Stalin with "tumultuous, prolonged applause ending in ovation. All rose." But, if the description is accurate, such enthusiasm was evidently stronger on the highest party levels than below, because for the first time in the party's history, it was decided to keep a major congress speech by the top-ranking party official concealed from the party membership at large. 

What the party press published for all to see after the congress was a fairly innocuous-seeming document that formed the last half-dozen paragraphs of Khrushchev's marathon speech: three theses that called for ending the "cult of personality" and for reviewing unspecified "erroneous views" connected with it. It was a very moderately phrased document, containing no hint of the poisonous invectives -- "treason" was among the milder ones -- hurled at Stalin during the closed session of the congress. Stalin's name was not even mentioned. 

Of the full Khrushchev text only 6000 copies were distributed within the Soviet Union, all to high-ranking party cadre. (Paloczi-Horvath, Khrushchev: Making of a Dictator, Boston 1960, p. 211.) The party at that time counted nearly eight million members. Thus only a tiny minority, fewer than one member out of a thousand, had the document. It was enough to set the venom dripping into the party's arteries, to generate endless, escalating rumors and horror stories, to create suspicion, confusion and chaos, to undermine unity and poison the atmosphere -- but not enough to give the great majority of cadre, who had learned to respect and to defend Joseph Stalin, a clear and visible target to shoot at. 

Among the figures who did have a copy of the full text, and whose own views in his field of specialty were very largely reflected in it, was the then minister of defense, Marshal G. K. Zhukov. Zhukov had been one of the top commanders of the Red Army during World War 2 and had directed a number of the army's most brilliant victories. Success, however, appeared to have made him vain and arrogant toward superiors and subordinates; and after the war Stalin relegated him to secondary roles. The resentment Zhukov appeared to have harbored because of this treatment brought him into alliance with Khrushchev. Promoted to codeputy defense minister in 1953, Zhukov was made full defense minister at the time of Malenkov's ouster by Khrushchev in 1955. He was the first professional military man ever to hold that post in the USSR. Khrushchev took the opportunity also to create nearly a dozen new marshals, the highest army rank. 

Although Khrushchev posed as the champion of the party's supremacy over the government and other institutions, he encouraged and rewarded for his own benefit the blatantly antiparty attitudes of Marshal Zhukov. Barely a week before the 20th Congress opened, Zhukov had published in the official army organ the following unmistakable advice to the party to stop telling the generals what to do: 

"Certain efforts have been made in the district to subject the official activity of commanders to criticism at party meetings. Such efforts are blameworthy. Our task is the comprehensive strengthening of the authority of the commanders. giving support to exacting officers and generals." (Quoted by Paloczi-Horvath, p 190.) 

On Feb. 23 while the congress was winding up its regular session, and on the eve of Khrushchev's "secret speech," Zhukov expressed similar sentiments, this time with a more clearly anti-Stalin tendency, in addressing a Moscow gathering of top officers on the 38th anniversary of the Red Army. A week later Zhukov was promoted to candidate membership on the party presidium, an extraordinary advance for a military man. 

Khrushchev was later to say of Zhukov (in the second volume of Khrushchev Remembers, p. 14) that the marshal had Bonapartist tendencies and had plans in mind for "a South American-style military takeover in our country." That is not implausible from the evidence. He put expertise over politics and clearly had personal ambitions for power. But this bothered Khrushchev only later. Meanwhile Zhukov was much too useful in Khrushchev's own designs. 

What the masses of average Soviet workers and collective farmers were thinking and doing politically during the first few months after Khrushchev's speech is difficult to know reliably. According to an account by a clandestine group of Marxist-Leninists that operated in the USSR briefly before being suppressed in the early 1970s, the rank-and-file party members "demanded that the central committee make an objective, Marxist evaluation of Stalin's contribution. So insistent was this demand of the membership that the opportunist leadership of the CPSU was forced to resort to attacks and persecutions against many party members and to disband quite a number of party organizations which were known for their militancy." (Program and Principles of the Revolutionary Soviet Communists [Bolsheviks], New York 1967, p. 4) 

As for the nonparty masses, not even these indications are available. But, judging from the series of little economic crumbs that were tossed at them during this period -- Khrushchev now freely borrowed from Malenkov's "new course" program that he had earlier denounced -- there must have been a certain measure of dissatisfaction. Paloczi-Horvath speaks of considerable unrest, of spontaneous demonstrations and strikes, though not all of this activity may have been progressive. Large numbers of people detained by the dictatorship of the proletariat years before, among them hard-core reactionaries of all kinds, had been released under a general amnesty decreed by Khrushchev, and were actively stirring. In any case, in the autumn of 1956, Paloczi-Horvath writes, the Soviet armed forces and state security services held their annual maneuvers extraordinarily near the cities and towns, as a precaution and a warning. (Paloczi-Horvath, p. 219) 

But the explosions that nearly blew Khrushchev away came not from inside the USSR but from its Eastern European allies. In the summer and fall of 1956 came the Polish workers' uprising and the attempted counter revolution in Hungary. Both events were widely laid at the door of Khrushchev's anti-Stalin line and his preaching of "peaceful coexistence." His handling of these crises brought him further criticisms. By late fall he was in deep trouble; in "imminent danger of being overthrown," according to Crankshaw (Khrushchev: A Career, p. 239). His position "was most insecure," according to Paloczi-Horvath (p. 246). He was rarely seen in public anymore that winter; and when he did make an occasional speech, it was to pose once again as a loyal disciple of Stalin and praise Stalin to the skies. (Crankshaw, p. 243) He appeared to have abandoned the keynote theme of his congress performance. 

Deeply isolated both in public opinion and in the party presidium, Khrushchev in February 1957 launched his boldest and -- but for Zhukov -- probably his last plan for counterattack. He proposed to the central committee, which he had long since larded with his own followers, a drastic economic "decentralization" package that was really much more than that. Among its measures, to be analyzed later, was the proposal to sell off the state-owned Machine and Tractor Stations to the collective farms, thus giving the collective farms the unique distinction in socialist society of owning their own means of production. In the industrial sphere, the plan envisaged the abolition, at one stroke, of the central economic planning ministries carefully constructed with years of effort under Lenin and Stalin. Their functions and powers were to be transferred to more than hundred regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy), with only loose supervision remaining at the center. 

Even Khrushchev's otherwise loyal central committee would not go for this all-out attack on socialist property and socialist planning institutions. The best Khrushchev could get, after weeks of struggle, was to have the proposal published in the press for public discussion. This took place in the spring of 1957. Khrushchev, perhaps knowing it was his last chance, went barnstorming around the country to drum up support. Crankshaw says Khrushchev, on his campaign, "offered to key men of all kinds throughout the provinces the promise of undreamed of advancement, increased scope and promotion for tens of thousands" of local and regional officials, once the "Moscow bureaucracy" was abolished. (p. 247). 

Khrushchev' s opponents on the party presidium -- Malenkov, Molotov and Molotov's ally Kaganovich still had their posts there -- meanwhile kept utterly silent on the issue of the proposal. It is probable that they expected to win without an open fight. The program was manifestly unpopular, Paloczi-Horvath writes; even the party press, controlled by Khrushchev, printed numerous criticisms of it. (p. 246). But the plan had at least one prominent supporter, who endorsed it on "national security" grounds -- what these were was never clear -- Marshal Zhukov. Crankshaw speculates that Zhukov's support was given because Zhukov believed the army would have less opposition from scattered regional economic councils than from the powerful centralized ministries. (p. 248). 

The decentralization scheme, whether intentional or not, was uniquely designed to bring about a showdown. For on the one hand it wrapped up in a single package virtually all the most "advanced" demands of the bourgeois forces in the USSR at their stage of development at the time; and on the other hand it united against Khrushchev not only the Marxist-Leninists but all those who, Marxist-Leninist or not, derived their power and not inconsiderable privileges from their connection with the central economic ministries. 

Thus it was that a presidium majority in mid-June 1957 summoned Khrushchev back from a trip to Finland for a special meeting duly convened according to the party statutes. When Khrushchev arrived, according to Crankshaw version of the event, he "found himself isolated. He was attacked with savagery . . . voted out of the first secretaryship by a strong majority of the presidium, [but] then confounded the victors by refusing to resign until this verdict had been confirmed by the central committee in full session. 'But we are seven and you are four,' exclaimed Bulganin, to which Khrushchev retorted, 'Certainly in arithmetic two and two make four. But politics are not arithmetic. They are something different.'" (pp. 249-50). 

The account by John Dornberg, a biographer of Brezhnev, gives the added detail that the presidium majority "charged Khrushchev with pursuing opportunist and Trotskyist policies." (Dornberg, Brezhnev, New York 1974, p. 152) Whatever specifically was said, Khrushchev demanded an immediate central committee meeting. A long battle raged in the presidium over procedure. Meanwhile, to return to Crankshaw's account (here Dornberg's is less detailed, though all standard accounts agree on the basic steps), as the argument raged, "the Khrushchev faction staged a spectacular operation. With the help of Marshal Zhukov and the army's transport planes, Khrushchev's supporters were rushed into Moscow from the remotest provinces, while those who were already there staged a filibuster until the majority for Khrushchev was assured. . . . 

"And then," Crankshaw continues, "according to Polish press reports, Zhukov went a stage further: he directly attacked Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov for their behavior during the great purge years and said that if they did not look out he would prove his point by publishing relevant documents of the period. . . ." 

Zhukov's intervention on Khrushchev's behalf drew Its significance not merely from the provision of timely transport for Khrushchev's supporters and from the threat to produce "documents." Zhukov, as minister of defense, spoke for the entire Soviet military establishment. His speeches carried more than ordinary weight. They implied the clear warning that the armed forces would not support a Molotov-Malenkov-Kaganovich "antiparty group" government. 

In reward for his services when it was all over -- Molotov exiled as ambassador to Mongolia, Malenkov to run a power station in Siberia, the others to similar oblivion -- Zhukov was promoted to full membership in the presidium. Three months later when Zhukov's putschism was no longer useful to Khrushchev, a trap was set for him and he was dismissed. 

After June, Molotov-Malenkov-Kaganovich's allies and supporters were one after the other fired from leading posts or expelled altogether from the party and government, while Khrushchev and his group put their followers in all positions. The struggle was over. Khrushchev's program had won. 

Though no blood was spilled between the antagonists in the final showdown of June 1957, Molotov, Malenkov and Kaganovich and their allies were put out of power, fundamentally, by military intervention. The takeover was bloodless and completely "legal" according to party rules; but it was nevertheless in essence a right-wing military coup that insured the Khrushchev victory. 

Without a doubt, his power grew out of the barrel of a gun only not the gun of the revolutionary soldiers and peasants, but the gun of a bourgeois officer corps. 

12 Consolidation

The "palace" coup of June 1957 expelled from the pilot house of the Soviet state the only leading group -- Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov -- that had some potential, then and there, for grasping the helm and steering back onto a Marxist-Leninist course. 

It is an easy matter today, with the benefit of hindsight, to sit back in one's chair and dispense advice as to what Molotov and his allies should have done to prevent their defeat. Without a doubt they should not have allowed the struggle to be cooped up mainly within the highest circles of the superstructure. They should have taken it boldly to the masses. As one Sovietologist records, during the months immediately following the 20th Congress (February 1956), "There were stormy meetings in the factories at which even members of the presidium were howled down as representatives of the new wealthy 'They.'" (Robert Conquest, Industrial Workers in the USSR, New York 1967, p. 11.) If Molotov and his allies had linked up with this storm in the factories, joined in the denunciations of the "new wealthy 'They'" and placed themselves at the head of this mass movement, the outcome might well have been different. 

It is well to keep in mind, however, when one engages in this sort of second-guessing of history, that Molotov or any other leading figure who might have tried to act in this fashion would have had to confront and to defeat not only the speeches and policy maneuvers of Khrushchev but also the military power of the Red Army commanded by Defense Minister Zhukov, not to speak of the state security police, also under Khrushchev's control. The ouster of Khrushchev's group would have required already in 1956-57 the very real risk of a civil war. Would the troops have opened fire on the workers? Which divisions would have remained loyal to Zhukov-Khrushchev, which ones would have backed Molotov? 

Obviously no one can give an answer to this sort of question. Yet precisely this sort of question would have been at the top of the agenda for any leadership attempting in 1956-57 to lead a mass movement against the Khrushchev group. Then too there was the international situation to consider: What would have been the effect of a new civil war in the USSR on the Eastern European allies? Would such a development not have encouraged further counterrevolutionary comeback attempts, as in Hungary? Was there not a real danger, given the Cold War climate, of imperialist intervention? 

In short, when one looks at the historical situation more concretely, dozens of very difficult and complex questions show up that quickly make a mockery of anyone today who tries, like an armchair quarterback, to tell Molotov and his allies "what they should have done." 

What might have happened "if" is a matter for speculation. But what did happen once Khrushchev's group consolidated their position in the highest party bodies is a matter of historical record. In this regard, the British Sovietologist Crankshaw, already quoted earlier, has turned a phrase that deserves repeating here. Khrushchev, he said, "moved backwards into the future." (Khrushchev: A Career, p. 270.) While Crankshaw meant it primarily as a description of the Khrushchevian style, it applies even more so to the concrete policies and programs that were put through by the Soviet state once his group had fastened its grip on the helm. 

Just as Khrushchev released and/or rehabilitated thousands of individuals whom the dictatorship of the proletariat had earlier suppressed as counterrevolutionaries, so he began also to resurrect, piece by piece, the counterrevolutionary political line that the Bolshevik party had, at various points in its history, combated and defeated. This was the inner logic of his attack on Stalin, and necessarily so. For there was nothing in substance new in the Khrushchevian program except the rhetoric. Its concrete elements, its content, had all been put forward before by other leaders or would-be leaders, most of whose names and ideas could be looked up by any Soviet citizen in the widely-available "History of the CPSU(B) Short Course" written under the supervision of Stalin, or in any number of other documents. (Not surprisingly, one of the first points in Khrushchev's program was the discrediting and suppression of that book and the substitution in 1961-62 of a revisionist party history.) 

To resurrect a program that had earlier been defeated, therefore, Khrushchev had to rehabilitate the person who had put it forward, and vice versa, the rehabilitation of the person served as accompaniment to the reintroduction of the policy. Thus, for example, it was no coincidence that Khrushchev's 1957 abolition of the central economic planning ministries went hand in hand with a lavish press campaign in honor of Voznesensky, the former planning director whose own much more timid steps in the same direction had been cut short by arrest and execution in 1949-50 (see part nine of this series). And it was only the feeling that there were certain limits beyond which he could not go in public that prevented Khrushchev in 1956, as he recounts in his memoirs, from openly rehabilitating Zinoviev, Bukharin, Rykov "and other leaders of the people" who had opposed the collectivization of agriculture in the early 1930s and defended the interests of the kulaks (see part four of this series). (Khrushchev Remembers, Boston 1970, p. 385.) Unmistakable also in Khrushchev's 1957 barnstorming oratory against the "Moscow bureaucracy" are the echoes of Trotsky's earlier demagogy from exile; and the silence in Khrushchev's memoirs regarding Trotsky is remarkable. 

In order to push through his program, Khrushchev had first of all to gain a complete victory within the Communist party. Even after the ouster of Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov from the leading party bodies, this group retained a number of sympathizers and allies even on the presidium and on the central committee, who formed pockets of resistance and delay to the Khrushchevian course. Throughout the rest of 1957, right through the 21st Congress in January 1959 and into the 22nd Congress in October 1961 Khrushchev and his group waged an uninterrupted campaign of polemics and vilification against Molotov's so-called "antiparty group" and all associated with it. There was a wholesale removal and replacement of leading party members during this struggle. According to publications by the Chinese and the Albanian parties, who were in a position to know the complete roster of the Soviet party's central committee (Western Sovietologists had to do some guessing as the full list was not always published), "nearly 70 percent of the members of the central committee of the CPSU who were elected at its 19th Congress in 1952 were purged in the course of the 20th and 22nd Congresses held respectively in 1956 and 1961. And nearly 50 percent of the members of the central committee who were elected at the 20th Congress were purged at the time of the 22nd Congress." On the regional and local levels there was a similar turnover. (On Khrushchev's Phony Communism, Peking 1964 p. 29; also the Party of Labor of Albania in Battle with Modern Revisionism, Tirana 1972, p. 258.) Down at the rank-and-file level, the clandestine Marxist-Leninist pamphlet quoted earlier reported that in 1957 at party meetings "all those who were known to be critical of the decisions of the 20th Congress" -- i.e., of Khrushchev's line -- "were forced to recant." No figures are available on the extent of the turnover at the base. 

The point of these quantitative changes was to produce a change in the character of the party. Cadre who knew that Khrushchev's theory of "peaceful transition to socialism" was contrary to Marxism-Leninism, for example, had to give way to other cadre who would endorse it. Khrushchev's general line of "peaceful coexistence" and "peaceful competition" with imperialism, in order to become the line of the whole party, had to assert itself by ousting those party members who had read Lenin's critique of Kautsky (in "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism") and sided with Lenin in the argument, rather than with Kautsky, whose views Khrushchev was exhuming in a new guise. In this way, through a series of wide-ranging turnovers in the membership of the party, its ideological character was transformed from a Marxist-Leninist party into a revisionist party. 

But Khrushchev went further than these ideological transformations. In 1961 he declared that since hostile classes no longer existed in the USSR (here he was building on Stalin's error), there was no longer a need for the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie. The Soviet state, accordingly, was recast as a "state of the whole people." As a corollary, the Soviet Communist party was declared a "party of the whole people," rather than the party of the proletariat. As far as the party's class composition was concerned, the meaning of the new doctrine was to remove from the party statutes any effective bars to the entry of persons with bourgeois backgrounds or current bourgeois standing. Since there were no classes, a candidate's class stand did not matter -- so went the official reasoning. As several Western writers on this party "reform" note, the effect was to open wide the party's doors to managers, engineers, administrators, high-ranking academics and others with positions far removed from the ordinary workaday life of the Soviet proletariat. Party membership, the historian John Hazard wrote, became "like the British knighthood," an honor awarded to successful administrators and engineers regardless of their ideology and leadership ability. (The Politics of Soviet Economic Reform, in Balinsky, ed., Planning and the Market in the USSR: The 1960s, New Brunswick 1967.) 

Along with the new social class composition of the party went a new definition of the party's role: what Khrushchev called the "production principle." Basing himself in part on quotations taken out of context from Lenin's writings in the early phase of the New Economic Policy (see part three of this series), Khrushchev decreed that party cadre must give the task of economic management and the promotion of production priority over political leadership or ideological debate. (See e.g., Carl A. Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership 1957-64, Baltimore 1966, pp. 149-52.) The party thus became explicitly -- even too explicitly for appearance's sake -- a party of the managers, whose own powers (see below) had meanwhile been considerably enhanced. To carry the "production principle" to its logical conclusions, Khrushchev then divided the party into industrial and agricultural branches joined only at the very top, and proposed that the salaries of local party officials be tied to the "economic success indicators" of the farms and factories under their authority. (Alec Nove, Economic Rationality and Soviet Politics, New York, 1964, p. 93) This meant, in so many words, that party members should be paid according to how much profit their enterprises make. 

Besides its obvious effect on the class composition of the party, Khrushchev's party "reform" had also another consequence, namely the disruption of the alliance between workers and peasants, the basis of Soviet state policy under Lenin and Stalin. To split the party into agricultural and industrial branches meant that party cadre at the local and regional levels could no longer make the preservation and strengthening of worker-peasant and town-country relationships a part of their business. They were either one or the other, divided and counterposed against the comrades in the opposite branch. 

All these and other measures in politics and economics were advanced under cover of a constant barrage of attacks against the "dogmatism" of Molotov and his allies, and with renewed campaigns of slander against Stalin, culminating in the 1961 removal of Stalin's body from its resting place at the mausoleum in Red Square. As the Khrushchevian program advanced in its course, there are more and more indications of unrest and resistance on the part of the Soviet working class. The Sovietologist Conquest, already quoted -- he is by no means a supporter of Stalin -- states categorically that "every relaxation" (meaning every fresh campaign against Stalin launched by the leadership) has been marked by strikes and other protests by the working class, including such cases as "major riots" like the one in Novocherkass in 1962. (Industrial Workers in the USSR, p. 11.) Such acts of resistance, about which much too little is known, were very likely one of the reasons why the leadership after each campaign against Stalin retreated somewhat, paid Stalin compliments and backed off from some of its own proposals, though without changing its basic direction. 

About the inner life of the "new" Soviet communist party, after its conversion into a party of the newly engendered bourgeois forces, it is difficult to find much information. That there was and is struggle, faction fighting and disagreements of all kinds we can deduce from history, notably the ouster of Khrushchev himself in 1964 and subsequent events. But it does not seem, at least not since the early 1960s, that any public leader or group in the party has stood in strategic, basic opposition to the line launched by Khrushchev. Such high-level disagreements as have come to the light of day, or can be plausibly inferred, have not been between revisionists and Marxist-Leninists, but rather between one and another bourgeois faction. 

What life is like at the lower levels, especially for workers and peasants who remain members of it for whatever reason, can only be imagined. A publication by the Albanian party described the inner life of the Soviet and East European revisionist parties in 1968 as a vicious caricature of Leninism: 

"In these parties, they speak loudly of democratic centralism, but that is Leninist no longer. They speak of 'Bolshevik' criticism and self-criticism, but they are Bolshevik no longer. They speak of party discipline, but it is no longer a Leninist, but a fascist discipline; of proletarian morality, but the morality is bourgeois, antiproletarian, anti-Marxist; of free expression of opinions in the party, about everything and everybody, but the expression of thoughts in the party spirit, in the proletarian spirit, in the revisionist countries leads to jail and concentration camps." (The Party of Labor of Albania in Battle . . . , p. 415.) It is at about this time, in the early 

1960s under Khrushchev -- to judge from remarks in the clandestine pamphlet cited earlier -- that the first underground Marxist-Leninist grouplets and clusters began to take shape, necessarily in extreme secrecy and isolation from each other. 

13 Expropriation 

After the Krushchev group's decisive victory in the battle for state power (1956-57), an historically unprecedented situation came about in the Soviet Union: a ruling group representing the newly engendered bourgeois forces was in command of an economic system in which socialist, proletarian production relations had the upper hand. 

The superstructure of Soviet society, in other words, was now -- at least in its decisive points -- in the hands of bourgeois forces. But the key centers of the infrastructure or base continued to function and to operate more or less as before in the established socialist way. 

As far as the elementry relations of property in Soviet society are concerned, the seizure of state power by Krushchev's forces already constituted, in and of itself, the expropriation of the Soviet proletariat and the end of the socialist period of Soviet history. The major means of production remained the property of the state, but the state itself was no longer the "property" of the working class. The bourgeois forces, in he very act of capturing state power, usurped the ownership title to the means of production. 

The Krushchev group thus reintroduced the great divorce between the working class and the means of production which the Soviet Communist party under Lenin and Stalin had fought ceaselessly to bridge over and to eliminate. The great reconciliation, unification, between the working class and its tools, achieved during the socialist period, was once again ruptured. Khrushchev's seizure of state power in the USSR was the newly engendered Soviet bourgeoisie's "primitive accumulation of capital" described by Karl Marx in "Capital": 

"The process . . . that clears the way for the capitalist system can be none other than the process which takes away from the laborer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage-laborers. The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production." (Capital, I, International ed., p. 714) 

Like the "primitive accumulation" of capitalism on the basis of feudalism, which Marx discusses, the new (or "second") development of capitalism in Russia, this time out of the socialist basis, was in essence a violent process. As is shown by the role played in the seizure by the bourgeoisified leadership of the Soviet army (see the 11th article in this series), the "methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic," as Marx correctly pointed out. Force played the main part. (Capital, ibid.) 

The USSR, in sum, ceased to be a socialist country in the full and complete sense of the term already in 1956-57, with the expropriation of the proletariat. In the same sense the Soviet Union shortly after its birth in 1917, with the formal expropriation of the land, the banks and the major industries by the proletariat as ruling class, ceased to be fully capitalist. Ownership of the means of production was taken over by the working class. 

(The fact that the expropriations in 1917 were proclaimed openly, proudly and defiantly, while their reversal 40 years later took place so covertly that no one could clearly and firmly establish that it had taken place until years later, when the consequences surfaced, does not of course affect the substance of the matter. Unlike the proletariat, the bourgeoisie historically -- see again Marx -- has shrouded the ways of its great robberies under various guises, even when it expropriated the feudalists. All the more so when it expropriates the proletariat.) 

At the same time, however, the transfer of property in the means of production from one class to another, both in 1917 and in the reverse case of the mid-1950s, did not in itself bring about any profound changes in the actual relations of production operative in the economic base of the society. As was pointed out in parts 2, 3 and 4 of this series, the economic basis of the USSR in 1917 remained predominantly capitalist, and petty-capitalist at that. The new Soviet power had to embark on a long struggle, full of twists and turns, so as to transform the economic basis and lay the foundations of socialist economy. It had to isolate, restrict, then attack and destroy, the key areas of economic life where capitalist principles prevailed, and establish socialist relations of productton in their place. 

Khrushchev's group had the reverse problem. By seizing state power, they gained legal title of ownership to the means of production. But the transformation of the actual production relations in the infrastructure, the isolation, restriction, destruction of the key strongholds of socialist relations and their replacement by capitalist relations still lay ahead. 

The main blows that Khrushchev and his followers struck in the economic field were touched on earlier (parts 8, 11 and 12) -- abolition of the central planning ministries and the sale of the Machine and Tractor Stations to the collective farms -- and some details about them can now be given to fill in the picture. 

The abolition of the central industrial ministries in Moscow, as several writers on the period have suggested, was in part a purely tactical move on Khrushchev's part, motivated by the immediate needs of his factional struggle against the so-called "antiparty group." For his chief opponents in leadership (Malenkov, Kaganovich and lesser figures; also, after his resignation as foreign minister in June 1956, Molotov) had powerful positions and close ties with the ministries. By abolishing the ministries, he deprived his opponents of key power bases. (See e.g., Pistrak, Khrushchev, Grand Tactician, New York 1959, p. 247; Crankshaw, Khrushchev -- A Career, p. 246) 

These short-term tactical motivations explain why Khrushchev himself in 1962 and 1963, and even more so his successors in 1965, were able to turn around and reestablish central industrial ministries to a certain extent. The reestablished ministries, as will be shown, had a different personnel and the kind of "planning" they were to do had nothing in common with socialism. Of this, more later. Meanwhile, Khrushchev's blow at the centralized socialist planning ministries -- their functions were taken over by 105 regional economic councils ('sovnarkhozy') -- had the immediate effect of a widespread resurgence and expansion of the sphere of commodity-money exchange relations. 

"The minister in Moscow," one bourgeois writer on the period noted correctly, "may have had his views distorted by narrow departmentalism, but at least he was able to look at things on a national scale. The chairman of the 'sovnarkhoz' at Omsk cannot see beyond the confines of the Omsk province. Whenever he has choices to make he cannot, with the best will in the world, take the national interest properly into account." (Alec Nove, Economic Rationality . . . , New York 1964, p. 59) An immediate result of the abolition of the ministries, therefore, was to create in the economic decision-making process a strong element of narrow localism: each little region for itself. 

But, while plannning could be fragmented into 100 pieces, the material production process could not. Advanced large-scale industry draws its materials from, and sends its output to, many different regions all over the country. Soviet regional planners therefore, and the directors of enterprises even more so, found themselves under the new system faced with an enormous headache in procuring essential raw materials and supplies and distributing their output outside the immediate regional planning area. Such central organs of coordination and forecasting as remained were of little help, as numerous complaints in the press attested. (Nove. p. 104) They were compelled by the setup to rely on their own "enterprise" and "ingenuity." 

Thus arose what another writer describes as "an unofficial network of interenterprise relationships" in which "blat" (personal influence) and "tolkachi" (brokers, "fixers") created the nationwide links formerly provided by central planning. An enterprise director needing materials phoned a crony in another region who had them or contacted a broker who knew where to get them; and this whole system of deals was worked "off the books," informally, under various covers, through person-to-person negotiations. "A veritable army of 'tolkachi' . . . assisted industrialists in dealing with their most difficult problem, that of securing supplies. These specialized middlemen made it their business to know where equipment and materials of all kinds could be obtained on the ubiquitous 'free market.'" (M. Miller, Rise of the Russian Consumer, London 1965, p. 33) 

This was in fact not yet a free market, hence the quotation marks. It was an illegal market, and both the managers and the specialized brokers could be heavily punished under existing Soviet law if caught making deals outside the plan. But this black market was so necessary under the system, and prosecutions so few, that it should more properly be called a "grey" market. 

It is easy to recognize in the figures of the "tolkachi" the reincarnation of the NEPmen of the 1920s. (See part 3 of the series) Likewise the managers' own interenterprise dealings outside the plan revived a relationship that was legal in the early phases of Lenin's New Economic Policy, when enterprises could buy and sell from each other on their own hook. (See e.g., Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development, New York 1966, pp. 131-148) But what was temporarily legal in early NEP, as part of the limited retreat to state capitalism at the time, was outlawed and in fact stamped out as the 1920s ended. Just the opposite under Khrushchev. There the rights and powers of the enterprise managers gradually expanded. 

A key step here was the abolition of the law on economic sabotage, which had made directors liable to criminal charges for nonfulfillment of the plan; the new regulations, writes Granick, are "much less severe than they once were." Khrushchev, this student of Soviet executives observed, went "a long way toward eliminating the trauma previously embedded in Soviet executive positions." (Red Executive, p. 43, 136) He did so not by giving greater responsibilities for coordinating production to the workers themselves, but by enhancing the powers and legalizing many of the illegal practices of the enterprise directors. Khrushchev's general report to the 22nd Congress of the CPSU in 1961 -- a document which pretends to map out the advance to communism in the USSR by 1980 -- included the "further gradual extension of managerial powers" in the party program, to leave no doubt on this score. (Documents, Vol. 11, New York 1961, p. 98) 

At about this time also, there was a rash of court cases in many areas of the USSR where workers protested that managers had dismissed them from their jobs illegally. (Conquest, Industrial Workers, p . 20) Most were reinstated at the time; the managers had acted too hastily. Later on, after Khrushchev, the managers achieved the power to fire virtually at will and their private dealings were legalized, as will be shown. 

Thus the major Khrushchev "reforms" in industrial organization reveal a definite overall pattern. Step by step they broaden the area in which commodity-money exchange relations -- the breeding ground of capitalism -- govern economic behavior. At first, this extension takes place in the shadows; gradually it is legalized; and the demand for further extension is written into the party program. 

In agriculture Khrushchev's attack on the strongholds of socialist production relations was, if anything, more direct and complete than in industry. During 1957-58, as already mentioned, the Soviet state under Khrushchev sold off to the collective farms the Machine and Tractor Stations (MTS). It was a case of the state expropriating itself for the "benefit" of the collective farms, the only avowed and open tampering with socialist property relations that Khrushchev and his successors engaged in. The move gave the collectives, as Stalin had said, the "exceptional status . . . not shared by any other enterprise in our country," of owning basic instruments of production (Economic Problems of Socialism, p. 95), but this analysis, together with Stalin's warning that it would lead to the regeneration of capitalism, was attacked and discarded by Khrushchev as so much "dogmatism" connected with the "cult of the personality." (Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, Baltimore 1966, p. 61). 

Along with the sell-off, Khrushchev abolished the plan targets (production quotas) to which the collective farms had been subjected. The farms were thus, more than any other kind of enterprise at the time, "on their own" -- with little relations other than commodity-exchange relations to link them with the towns. It was only a short time thereafter, due in part to the cost of having to maintain their own machinery, in part to the profiteering spirit that seized hold of the farms, that the controlled prices paid to the collective farms by the state had to be increased in a number of product lines. In 1962, as a direct outcome of the new setup, meat and dairy product prices to the consumer were raised 30 percent and 20 percent respectively. (Miller, op. cit. p. 235) 

The political impact of the sell-off was also considerable. The MTSs had been not only the mechanical backbone of the collective farms, but also played the role of outposts of the industrial proletariat among the peasantry. Their actions in executing state policy necessarily exercised enormous leverage on the collective farms; and among the workers at each MTS there was a party branch whose role was to participate in the collective farm leadership and guide it in a proletarian direction. With the sale of the stations, these roles collapsed and large numbers of party cells on the collective farms ceased to exist. (Nove, op. cit. p. 65) 

All of these and other Khrushchevian measures, however, did not quite yet amount to a restoration of capitalism. By the time of the 22nd Congress in 1961, the socialist fabric of production relations was stretched very thin and was full of holes, but the main strands still held. It required a fresh bourgeois offensive -- four more years of demagogy, wrecking and purges -- before they snapped.