Khrushchev in the Kremlin: Policy and Government in the Soviet Union 1953-1964 ed. by Jeremy Smith and Melanie Ilic (review)

Did Iosif Stalin's system undergo any fundamental revision after his death? If so, how far were Nikita Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders prepared to go in reaching accommodation with theWest? One could also ask: was the Soviet system reformable at all? Liberals thought it was and still think so—if only Mikhail Gorbachev had stayed in power—whereas conservatives, in Jeremy Smith's words, "maintained that, since communism was fundamentally evil, it was beyond reform" (p. 1). According to Smith, we should be thankful that the first attitude prevailed because it made negotiation possible with Soviet Union and thus "saw the superpowers through some of the biggest international crises of the Cold War." There might be some truth in this argument, but how can one ignore that the hardline interpretation of the Soviet System—as the Empire of Evil—caused so much more than "peaceful coexistence"; namely, the end of the Cold War.

Throughout the anthology Khrushchev in the Kremlin the two heroes of the revisionist school, Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev, are compared. The fact that they both failed is strong evidence that the Soviet system could indeed not be reformed. But compared to the Stalinist system, Khrushchev did make a difference. State terror ceased to be the dominant tool of governance, and that certainly made life more tolerable in the Soviet Union. One should not forget, however, that what held the Soviet system together was not so much Khrushchev's "welfare state" as the deeply rooted fear from the Stalin years. When Stalin's heir showed that he could not keep his promises and that the socialist system could not deliver, social forces went into action, and Khrushchev had no other choice than to employ Stalinist means of control. The well-documented shootings of striking workers in Novocherkassk in 1962 are the best-known example.

This volume is the second of two books on the Khrushchev era funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2005 to 2008. The research was mostly carried out by researchers who were either employed at or affiliated with the University of Birmingham's Center for Russian and East European Studies. In most of the essays newly found archival material is analyzed, and together the authors cover a variety of key policy areas: policy toward national minorities; economic decentralization; policy toward the West in technology exchange and toward Eastern Europe in political and economic reform; agriculture; railways; and construction.

Ian D. Thatcher makes a good point in arguing that the leading biographers of Khrushchev have been more eager to repeat the harsh critiques of him by the officials who ousted him than to examine what he actually intended. Thatcher has great sympathy for his protagonist, but he is going too far in suggesting that Khrushchev's practical sense was so great that had he not been removed in 1964 he would have reached the conclusion that the command economy was the root of evil.

Nikolai Mitrokhin documents how Khrushchev from 1931 onward created a clan of supporters within various circles of power. This explains much about how he was able to gain ultimate power and to survive at the top when influential comrades attempted to get rid of him in 1957. Unfortunately for Khrushchev, his clan members over the years became a burden to his reform plans, and when he eventually signaled that he wanted to get rid of them, they turned against him.

Robert Hornsby examines political dissent and finds that more people were jailed during the reign of Khrushchev than during the years under Leonid Brezhnev. Political dissent peaked after the Hungarian uprising in 1956 but was stopped by a resolute and brutal clampdown by the political leadership. If this had not been done, Hornsby claims, the unrest might have spread to other countries in Eastern Europe and to the Soviet Union itself, and what happened...