Nikita Khrushchev Никита Хрущёв | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 15 April 1894 Kalinovka, Kursk Governorate, Russian Empire |
| Died | 11 September 1971 (aged 77) Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
| Cause of death | Heart attack |
| Political orientation | Marxism–Leninism (Right-revisionist[1]) |
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (15 April 1894 – 11 September 1971) was a revisionist politician of Soviet Ukrainian nationality who served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and Premier of the Soviet Union from 1958 to 1964.
Khrushchev is considered to be responsible for numerous theoretical errors and policy mistakes[1] that laid the groundwork for further problems which eventually culminated in the overthrow of the Soviet Union. Notably, Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin in his infamous Secret Speech, where he blamed all of the USSR's problems on Stalin and his cult of personality.[2]
Early life and career
Khrushchev was born in a peasant family in Kalinovka. His youth was spent growing up in the Donbas region, where his father worked successively as a bricklayer, miner, and railway worker.[3] Nikita Khrushchev, who did not receive a formal education, worked as a shepherd and later a miner, until eventually landing in the field of metallurgy; Khrushchev would spend the next few years in apprenticeship and employment of a metalworking factory in present-day Donetsk (then known as Yuzovka).
As a skilled metalworker, Khrushchev was exempt from conscription into the First World War. As a result, he spent that time involved in labor organizing, combining demands for better working conditions with demands for an end to the war. During this same time, he married and had two children.[3]
Khrushchev joined the Communist Party in 1918.
Khrushchev was appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1938, making him the leader of the Ukrainian SSR. from 1938 to 1949. Party leadership criticized him for admitting too many people into the party and tolerating Ukrainian nationalism. In 1949, he moved to Moscow and became the party secretary there.[4]
Death of Stalin
Khrushchev may have been responsible for the death of Stalin, who was General Secretary from 1921 to his death in 1953. Stalin died under suspicious circumstances and Albanian leader Enver Hoxha accused Khrushchev and his allies of murdering Stalin.[5]
Rule as General Secretary
Under Khrushchev's rule, the percentage of industrial workers in the CPSU reduced to 30% and the number of white-collar officials increased to 50%.[6] He prioritized consumer goods over heavy industry and decentralized state planning.[4]
In 1954, he began the Virgin Lands program to cultivate sparsely populated fertile land, mainly in Kazakhstan and Siberia. 300,000 volunteers participated in the campaign and plowed 27 million hectares of new land in two years. The campaign was initially successful but began to decline in 1957.
In 1964, the Soviet government forced Khrushchev to retire and reverted some of his policies.[4]
Secret Speech
In 1956, Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin in his "Secret Speech" and made many false claims against him. He labeled his political opponents, including Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgy Malenkov, and Lavrentiy Beria as "Stalinists."
In June 1957, Malenkov's anti-revisionist faction won the majority in the Presidium, but Khrushchev argued that only the Central Committee could remove him from power.[6] The Central Committee then purged Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich from the Presidium.[4]
Khrushchev Thaw
Khrushchev's reduction of censorship lead to the spread of liberal ideas and allowed the publication of novels by the anti-Semite Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He greatly increased party recruitment, leading to some non-communists joining the party.[4]
Ideological deviations
State of the whole people
Khrushchev claimed that the CPSU, and the broader Soviet state, had become a "state of the whole people"[7], instead of just the working class and peasants.[4]
In Khrushchev's view, the Soviet Union had reached such an advanced stage of socialism that class antagonisms had substantially dimished within society. As such, the state need not be a tool of internal class repression; instead, the Soviet state's was more and more growing into a purely administrative apparatus, in which ever-increasing democratic representation from the people resulted in "total economic democracy".[7]
Khrushchev justified this idea by saying that the state would remain long into the intermediate stages of communism.[8] The "State of the Whole People" was supposed to embody the interests of all Soviet citizens, not just those of a particular class, as the domestic Soviet bourgeoisie had supposedly been eradicated altogether.
This theory is widely considered by Marxist-Leninists to have been erroneous and revisionist.[1] Marxist-Leninists instead uphold the idea that class struggle continues under socialism, including both internal and external bourgeois subversion and attempts at capitalist restoration.[9]
Khrushchev's declaration of a sufficiently developed stage of socialism to no longer have a domestic bourgeoisie was premature and right-deviationist in nature, as it posited that through sheer idealist "will", the Soviet people had advanced socialism to a new stage and essentially "won" the class struggle. This was one of the major points of the Sino-Soviet split.
National question
Khrushchev believed that a single Soviet nation would eventually replace the existing nationalities of the USSR. Regardless, Khrushchev also made frequent reference to "the peoples" and "the Soviet peoples"[10], which implies that he did not believe this had happened yet.
There was an increase in bourgeois nationalism in response to this declaration.[4]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 “The Programme put forward by the revisionist Khrushchev clique at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU is a programme of phony communism, a revisionist programme, against proletarian revolution and for the abolition of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the proletarian party.
The revisionist Khrushchev clique abolishes the dictatorship of the proletariat behind the camouflage of the "state of the whole people", changes the proletarian character of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union behind the camouflage of the "party of the entire people", and paves the way for the restoration of capitalism.”
Mao Zedong (1964). On Khrushchov’s Phony Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World). [MIA] - ↑ Vijay Prashad (2017). Red Star over the Third World: 'Polycentric Communism' (p. 117). [PDF] New Delhi: LeftWord Books.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Nikita Khrushchev (1970). MEMOIRS OF NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV. Vol. 1, Commissar (1918-1945).
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 Roger Keeran, Thomas Kenny (2010). Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union: 'Two Trends in Soviet Politics' (pp. 29–41). [PDF] iUniverse.com. ISBN 9781450241717
- ↑ “All this villainy emerged soon after the death, or to be more precise after the murder, of Stalin. I say after the murder of Stalin, because Mikoyan himself told me...that they, together with Khrushchev and their associates, had decided...to make an attempt on Stalin’s life”
Enver Hoxha (1981). With Stalin: Memoirs (p. 31). [MIA] - ↑ 6.0 6.1 TheFinnishBolshevik (2019-05-07). "The Khrushchev Coup (Death of Stalin & Khrushchev’s Rise to Power)" ML-Theory. Archived from the original on 2022-01-16. Retrieved 2022-05-30.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 “Thus, now class relations in our country have entered a new stage. "Proletarian democracy" is becoming "socialist democracy of the whole people".”
Nikita Khrushchev (1963). Communism -- Peace and Happiness for the Peoples (Collected Speeches of Nikita Khrushchev from January-December 1961): 'Report of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the 22nd Congress of the C.P.S.U., October 17, 1961' (p. 112). [MIA] - ↑ “The state will remain long after the victory of the first phase of communism. The process of its withering away will be a very long one; it will cover an entire historical epoch and will not end until society is completely ripe for self-administration. For some time, the features of state administration and public self-government will intermingle. In this process the domestic functions of the state will develop and change, and gradually lose their political character. It is only after a developed communist society is built in the U.S.S.R., and provided socialism wins and consolidates in the international arena, that there will no longer be any need for the state, and it will wither away.”
Nikita Khrushchev (1963). Communism -- Peace and Happiness for the Peoples (Collected Speeches of Nikita Khrushchev from January-December 1961): 'On the Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Report to the 22nd Congress of the C.P.S.U., October 18, 1961' (p. 112). [MIA] - ↑ “For a very long historical period after the proletariat takes power, class struggle continues as an objective law independent of man’s will, differing only in form from what it was before the taking of power.
After the October Revolution, Lenin pointed out a number of times that:
a) The overthrown exploiters always try in a thousand and one ways to recover the "paradise" they have been deprived of.
b) New elements of capitalism are constantly and spontaneously generated in the petty-bourgeois atmosphere.
c) Political degenerates and new bourgeois elements may emerge in the ranks of the working class and among government functionaries as a result of bourgeois influence and the pervasive, corrupting influence of the petty bourgeoisie.
d) The external conditions for the continuance of class struggle within a socialist society are encirclement by international capitalism, the imperialists’ threat of armed intervention and their subversive activities to accomplish peaceful disintegration.
Life has confirmed these conclusions of Lenin’s.
In socialist society, the overthrown bourgeoisie and other reactionary classes remain strong for quite a long time, and indeed in certain respects are quite powerful. They have a thousand and one links with the international bourgeoisie. They are not reconciled to their defeat and stubbornly continue to engage in trials of strength with the proletariat. They conduct open and hidden struggles against the proletariat in every field.”
Mao Zedong (1964). On Khrushchov’s Phony Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World). [MIA] - ↑ Nikita Khrushchev (1963). Communism -- Peace and Happiness for the Peoples (Collected Speeches of Nikita Khrushchev from January-December 1961).