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The Khrushchev Succession Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Myron Rush
Myron Rush
Affiliation:
The RAND Corporation
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Extract

In any personal dictatorship or tyranny, one thing is certain: some day there will be a succession crisis. That dread day casts a long shadow before, influencing the period of dictatorial rule by anticipation. There is inherent in dictatorship a succession cycle: first, a period of stable dictatorial rule; then, a succession crisis; finally, a resolution of the crisis or a dissolution of the political system. Some dictatorial regimes experience a series of personal dictatorships; the Soviet regime, for example, has twice gone through the cycle, and now has its third dictator. This historical experience affects the general character of the entire succession cycle. Serious inquiry into the succession to Khrushchev requires us to consider the general character of the succession cycle in the Soviet system as well as the particular factors that are likely to influence the course and outcome of the Khrushchev succession crisis.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , January 1962 , pp. 259 - 282
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1962

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References

1 General treatment of the succession problem is uncommon in treatises on the Soviet political system, although the problem is an inherent feature of that system. However, two books published in the months following Stalin's death examined the matter ably and at length on the basis of evidence then available: The Dynamics of Soviet Society, by W. W. Rostow, Mentor, 1954; and Terror and Progress USSR, by Moore, Barrington Jr, Cambridge, Mass., 1954. The problem of succession in any totalitarian regime is considered by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski in Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, Cambridge, Mass., 1956.Google Scholar Accounts of the two succession crises the Soviet regime has known are numerous. The most detailed study of the Lenin succession crisis is in Carr's, E. H. multi-volume A History of Soviet Russia, London, 1950.Google Scholar A comprehensive account of the Stalin succession crisis, however, has yet to be written.

2 As will be discussed below, orderly transfer of the dictator's power to a collective is a possible, but very doubtful, solution.

3 An important additional counterweight was Stalin's reinforced personal control of the political police.

4 The “doctors' affair,” the arrest of a group of “murderer-doctors” accused of “plotting against the health” of leading Soviet military personnel in January 1953, portended a radical change in the leadership that, if it was not designed to implement Stalin's succession arrangements, could only upset them. Contemporary evidence indicates that Malenkov's political position was actually weakened by the affair. Moreover, following Stalin's death, Malenkov was associated with the execution of the security official, Riumin, who had been charged with investigating the so-called plot. On the other hand, in his secret speech to the Twentieth Congress Khrushchev defended Riumin's chief, S. Ignatiev, who was Minister of State Security when the affair was publicized. Khrushchev's most powerful deputy at the present time, Frol Kozlov, was the only important party leader to write an article expounding the political meaning of the alleged doctors' plot (Kommunist, February 1953). There is evidence bearing on the political significance of the “doctors' affair” in the author's book: The Rise of Khrushchev, Washington, D.C., 1958, pp. 17Google Scholar, 55, 56, 77.

5 A. terrible instance of this is Stali's blood purge of the Leningrad faction, 1948–1950.

6 The party's apparatus must be distinguished from its membership as a whole. The apparat is made up of the party's permanent staff, the paid officials who work in secretariats on all party echelons. Their number has been very roughly estimated as around a quarter-million, no more than 3 or 4 per cent of the total party membership. (Shapiro, Leonard, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, New York, 1960, pp. 524–25Google Scholar572–73.) Not all members of higher party bodies—the various party committees and their executive organs, the party bureaus—are apparatchiks. Many are economic administrators in the state bureaucracy, military officers, or political police officials.

7 This can be inferred from the factual findings of Rigby, T. H. in “The Selection of Leading Personnel in the Soviet State and Communist Party,” a doctoral thesis submitted at the University of London in 1954Google Scholar; see table on p. 184. Of 36 republican party secretaries whose previous careers were known to Rigby, 20 had not held government posts. This was also true in the following cases: 38 of 82 territorial and regional party secretaries; 29 of 43 city party secretaries; 86 of 138 district party secretaries (p. 184). By the same token, as Rigby emphasizes, these figures also show that interchange of personnel between the two bureaucracies was practiced extensively. Significantly, it was easier to rise in the party apparatus without having served in the administrative bureaucracy (more than half the party leaders studied by Rigby had no experience in government) than to rise in the bureaucracy without having served in the apparat (only one-third). From this it appears that under Stalin the party apparatus was a surer road to success than the bureaucracy.

8 The Lenin succession struggle also involved the Comintern, the trade unions, student organizations, and local political machines.

9 “Members of the anti-party group departed from the Leninist understanding of the leading role of the party in the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat. … Some of them …, seeking to substantiate the [alleged] necessity of the primacy of state organs over party, distorted the Leninist doctrine on the role of the party after the victory of the proletarian revolution.” (Kommunist, No. 10, 1957, p. 5.)

10 A bureau is the executive body of party committees, corresponding to the Presidium of the Central Committee.

11 The outcome, of course, provides no simple measure of the relative strength of the party and state bureaucracies. In the highly fluid situation after Stalin died, other things had their effect: chance, the strategies and personal qualities of the contenders, and the role of the political police are only three among them.

12 Khrushchev's object in delivering the speech at a secret session of the Twentieth Congress was of course not simply to denigrate his opponents. It was also to dispel suspicion that he was an incipient Stalin, to reassure the party that he would not use terror against it, as Stalin had done, and to destroy Stalin's stifling authority so that he could freely develop his own policies and programs for the USSR. But his hasty pursuit of these objectives undoubtedly injured Soviet interests, particularly in East Europe. (See the author's The Rise of Khrushchev, pp. 1, 40–66, 71.)

13 More important than personal wealth in the Soviet system is control over the national wealth; the economic bureaucracy now has less of such control than it possessed when Stalin died.

14 This development is described in an interview by David Burg, who experienced it while a student at Moscow University:

BURG: “From 1951 to 1954, practically all of us showed to the world a completely straight Communist face. You confined any critical views of the regime to your closest friends and even then unpleasant things sometimes happened. The danger of arrest and deportation was immediate. I was, frankly, very surprised to learn in 1955 and 1956, after the ‘Thaw’ began, that there were a great number of other small circles of friends, thinking in much the same way, who had been cut off from each other.”

INTERVIEWER: “How did you become aware of the ‘Thaw’? Did it follow close after Stalin's death?”

BURG: “Not immediately—there was a short period of groping confusion. Then in the winter of '55 all of a sudden people started to talk about things they would never have mentioned previously. … And gradually there was more talk about politics, especially after the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 when Khrushchev made his famous denunciation of Stalin.” (“The Voice of a Dissenter,” Harper's Magazine, May 1961, p. 127.)

15 There have been occasional localized disturbances, however, such as the strikes and rioting in Kazakhstan in 1959.

16 This is not to assert that a reduction in the role of the political police is the product of a secular trend that must continue. On the contrary, under certain circumstances, police repression might be intensified. It is not true, as Hider proved, that police terror is incompatible with scientific-industrial progress; nor is even a libertarian society immune to its imposition. Moreover, Stalin's blood purge is not only a warning to those who would let themselves be tyrannized; it is also a model for a future tyrant, something Stalin lacked until Hitler showed him the way by his blood purge of the Nazi leadership in 1934.

17 For example, the central apparatus might be further strengthened and the discretionary powers of provincial party bosses somewhat curtailed.

18 Of course, it could serve as a temporary device for rule during a struggle for the succession, but then it would not be the means to an orderly transfer of power.

19 After his fall, some former members of the Ukrainian Party machine who had risen with Kirichenko were demoted with him.

20 Kozlov was not elected to Stalin's forty-man Presidium in 1952, and he was demoted to provincial third secretary in the weeks following Stalin's death; his remarkable rise since then seems due to Khrushchev.

21 According to the Central Committee (Resolution of June 30, 1956), “any action against” Stalin was ruled out during his lifetime because of his personality cult, which guaranteed him public support Khrushchev, too, has used the cult of his person to deter political opposition.

22 The credibility of Khrushchev's remark on the subject to Averill Harriman is uncertain, yet there may have been some hidden weakness in Malenkov's political personality that at once made him a suitable choice as Stalin's heir and weakened his capacity to wage the struggle to succeed Stalin. At the same time, it does not appear that Stalin recognized Khrushchev's full potentialities as a dictator. In the years before he died, Stalin gave Khrushchev control of some key levers of the party machine as a means of assuring that Malenkov did not challenge his own authority while he lived. But after placing Khrushchev in this powerful position, Stalin denied him an important voice in deciding policy. Evidently he saw in Khrushchev a shrewd manipulator of the levers of power and a loyal supporter of his own authority, but not a possible candidate for the succession if Malenkov proved deficient in qualities of leadership or personal loyalty. If Stalin underestimated the man who finally succeeded him, it was apparently not in doubting his capacity to seize dictatorial power, but in failing to recognize in Khrushchev the qualities needed to formulate and execute strategies that would advance the cause of Bolshevism.

23 Kozlov has had an incipient base of this kind in the Leningrad organization, which he headed until 1957, and whose members have been favored for important positions in the central government in recent years.

24 In the party Secretariat elected after the Twenty-Second Congress, Kozlov's name follows Khrushchev's, with the other Secretaries listed alphabetically. This implies that Kozlov is Khrushchev's deputy for party affairs, although he has not received an appropriate title.