The Shortest History of the Soviet Union by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Author:Sheila Fitzpatrick [Fitzpatrick, Sheila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General
ISBN: 9781743822227
Google: bFFEEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Schwartz
Published: 2022-03-01T20:39:12+00:00

THE KHRUSHCHEV ERA

If Khrushchev was not the originator of post-Stalin reforms, as is often claimed, he was still an energetic innovator – and sometimes, according to his detractors, a ‘harebrained schemer’ – who led the Soviet Union in its years of greatest economic success. GNP grew at a rate of almost 7 per cent a year throughout the 1950s, compared with less than 3 per cent in the United States (the Soviet GNP admittedly starting from a lower base); industrial production in 1960 was almost three times what it had been in 1950 and close to five times the 1940 level; and agricultural production was also up. More than half the Soviet population was urban by 1962; adult literacy, not much above 50 per cent in the mid-1920s, was now close to 100 per cent. New consumer goods started to reach the urban and even the rural population: by 1965, 32 per cent of households had TV sets, 17 per cent had refrigerators and 29 per cent had washing machines. Life expectancy, which had been below forty in the middle of the 1920s, was in the high sixties twenty years later – within sight of catching up with the United States, which in the 1920s had been far ahead. For the only time in Soviet history, the claim (loudly made by Khrushchev) that the Soviet Union would soon catch up with and surpass the West actually looked plausible.

As a reformer, Khrushchev’s forte was thinking big. His own formative administrative experience had been in the heyday of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan and cultural revolution of the early 1930s, and that was a spirit he tried to recapture. His ambitious Virgin Lands program was designed to bring large areas of Kazakhstan into use for growing grain, not only through large state investment but also through mobilising the enthusiasm and adventurous spirit of the young. That was how you built socialism, in Khrushchev’s view. He never forgot the ‘joy and excitement’ of a campaign that, as he wrote a little sadly in his post-retirement memoirs, ‘showed us how mighty our party could be if it only had the trust of the people’. Comrades’ courts at local level and volunteer druzhinniki (something like a Soviet version of Neighbourhood Watch) were other examples of the grassroots participation encouraged in the Khrushchev years. Party membership grew from just under seven million in 1954 to eleven million in 1964 – still preponderantly men, but with women inching up to 21 per cent of membership.

Druzhinniki could, of course, turn out to be bullies of non-conformists, and Khrushchev’s version of participatory socialism included campaigns against ‘social parasites’ – people who didn’t work but made a living on the fringes of the grey economy. True to the spirit of the cultural revolution of his youth, Khrushchev also reversed the postwar trend towards greater tolerance of religion, closing churches, harassing clergy and introducing mandatory courses in ‘Scientific atheism’ in universities. At village level, propagandists pointed out that cosmonauts had now flown into space but had seen no sign of God.

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