as a young man, with the Red Army in the Civil War that followed the
Revolution, he rose rapidly in the party, serving as regional First Secretary in
Moscow from 1936 and in Ukraine during and after the Second World War. As
he managed not only to survive theStalinpurges, but even to be trusted by
Stalin in the late 1940s to reorganize agricultural production, he must have
been a very safe and orthodoxapparatchik. His rise to overall command after
Stalin’s death was delayed by the introduction of collective leadership, as a
result of a fear of another period ofStalinism, though he had risen to hold one
of the two most important posts, First Secretary of the party, within six months
of Stalin’s death. Only in 1958, in the wake of a failed attempt to oust him, did
he collect enough power to have himself appointed Chairman of the Council
of Ministers (premier and effectively head of state), finally removing rivals such
as Nikolai Bulganin and Georgy Malenkov. His supremacy lasted for only six
years, being himself ousted in 1964.
Khrushchev had, in part, come to power as an agricultural specialist, and
tried to reorganize the party to give more freedom and influence to
agricultural interests, so the continued failure of the agricultural sector was
a personal failure. This was by no means his only reverse, however. He
attempted a complicated balancing act in which investment demands, military
as well as agricultural, were supported and an attempt to increase the
consumer production side of industry, to win public support, was also made.
These mutually conflicting demands could not be satisfied, and he gradually
lost the support of all the sectors that had helped put him in power. Never-
theless, it was almost certainly his foreign-policy failures that finally cost him
his position. The most notorious of these was his entanglement of the Soviet
Union in theCuban missile crisis, against the advice of the military, who
held him responsible for their embarrassing inability to frighten the USA
because he had failed to back them earlier in their demands for weapons
development, and had, indeed, presided over the biggest reduction of Soviet
military power by any leader untilGorbachev. At much the same time his
intransigence towardsMao Zedong’sChina brought fears of a Sino–Soviet
war. On his removal the Soviet Union reverted, briefly, to a collective
leadership, with Aleksei Kosygin and LeonidBrezhnevholding the posts
of prime minister and First Secretary, respectively. Yet again the First Secretary
triumphed, with Brezhnev rapidly becoming the sole ruler. The agricultural
system was put back into the orthodox party model, consumer investment
decreased, and a major arms programme started. Khrushchev had, however,
presided over a slight liberalization of Soviet society, and had never attempted
Stalinist tactics. However, tolerant though he may have been internally, he
had fiercely crushed any moves towards liberalization in Eastern Europe,
especially in Poland and in the draconian crushing of the 1956 Hungarian
uprising.
Khrushchev