The Failure Of Khrushchevism

Abstract

The decade in the course of which N. S. Khrushchev stood at the head of the Soviet Communist Party and of the U.S.S.R. was an interregnum and a provisorium. One cannot speak of a "Khrushchev era" as one speaks of the Stalin era, not merely because Khrushchev was in office only one-third of the time Stalin had been, and exercised not even one-third of the power. Khrushchevism has not represented any great positive idea (or even policy) of its own. It did not even stand for a new canon or myth which might meaningfully express, as Socialism in One Country did, the "false consciousness" of a real historic situation. Khrushchevism was devoid of any creative aspiration; whenever Khrushchev himself voiced any of the familiar and elementary purposes of socialism, he invariably produced a vulgar parody (a "goulash communism"). In many respects he continued along lines long set by Stalin, but pretended that he was putting forward his own, breathtaking, innovations. "Peaceful coexistence" is a case in point. So is the slogan of a "peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism." So are the "national roads to socialism." These are all refurbished Stalinist concepts dating back to the Popular Fronts of the middle 'thirties and the National Coalitions of the middle 'forties. And Khrushchev was an epigone of Stalin above all in his emphasis on the "monolithic character" of the Soviet party and state. His determination to tolerate no opposition, no open criticism, no free debate, inevitably led to the "cult" of his own "personality," that is to attempts at establishing his own autocratic rule.