"Gorbachev Factor"
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Khrushchev’s mistakes at home and abroad made his rivals (including
his protégé Leonid Brezhnev) determined to act. In October 1964 the
party-state nomenklatura rebelled against the troublesome leader.
Practically the whole of the Politburo of the Central Committee
conspired against him. Confronted by the hostile majority,
Khrushchev was forced to resign. He was permitted to remain in
Moscow, where he lived as a private citizen until his death in 1971. |
Khrushchev committed many mistakes and misjudgments during his
period in power. His competence as the leader of a world superpower
was often in question. His political style was dubbed by his
opponents “voluntarism,” that is, policy making in a willful,
foolish, and erratic manner. Khrushchev was notorious for advocating
harebrained schemes and chasing impractical ideas, such as his
insistence on massive expansion of the sown areas of maize,
including territories beyond the Arctic Circle. (A popular joke
commented on this obsession of his thus: “We shouldn’t let
Khrushchev go to the moon—he would plant maize there.”)
Other hallmarks of political “Khrushchevism” were populism and
overoptimistic, utopian objectives. His optimism stemmed from his
Leninist fundamentalism and the belief that socialism, when cleansed
of Stalinist distortions, would be able to prove its historic
superiority over capitalism. However, Khrushchev’s denunciation of
Stalin and his quest for “socialism with a human face” failed to
create conditions for genuine democracy in the party and the
country.
Khrushchev’s reforms were, in the main, limited to the adjusting of
the system established by his predecessor. The basic structures and
the apparatus forged by Stalin continued to rule, and no
institutional or political barriers were erected against a revival
of Stalinism. The CPSU remained the dominant political institution,
and the curbs on the KGB and the de-Stalinization process itself
proved to some extent reversible.
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