The Penguin History of the World

In 1964 Khrushchev was removed from office. As head of both government and party since 1958 it seems likely that his personal contribution to Soviet history had been to provide a great shaking-up. That had meant qualified ‘de-Stalinization’, a huge failure over agriculture, and a change in the emphasis of the armed services (towards the strategic rocket services that became their élite arm). Khrushchev’s own initiatives in foreign policy (besides the disastrous Cuban adventure) may have been the fundamental cause of the decision to remove him. Yet though with the connivance of the army he was set aside by colleagues whom he had offended and alarmed, he was not killed, sent to prison or even to run a power station in Mongolia. Evidently the Soviet Union was civilizing its techniques of political change. The contrast with old times was striking.

Soviet society had indeed relaxed a little after Stalin’s death. The speech at the 20th Congress could never be unsaid, even if much of it was aimed at diverting criticism from those who (like Khrushchev himself) had been participants in the crimes of which Stalin was accused. (Symbolically, Stalin’s body had been removed from Lenin’s tomb, the national shrine.) In the next few years there was what some called a ‘thaw’. Marginally greater freedom of expression was allowed to writers and artists, while the regime appeared briefly to be a little more concerned about its appearance in the eyes of the world over such matters as its treatment of Jews. But this was personal and sporadic: liberalization depended on who had Khrushchev’s ear. It seems clear only that after Stalin’s death, particularly during the era of Khrushchev’s ascendancy, the party had re-emerged as a much more independent factor in Soviet life. The authoritarian nature of the Soviet government, though, seemed unchanged – which is much what might have been expected.

It may now seem odd that for a time it was the fashion to say that the United States and the Soviet Union were growing more and more alike, and that this meant that Soviet policy was becoming less menacing. This theory of ‘convergence’ gave a distorted emphasis to one indisputable truth: the Soviet Union was a developed economy. In the 1960s some on the European Left still thought socialism a plausible road to modernization because of that. But often overlooked was the fact that the Soviet economy was also inefficient and distorted.

Although Soviet industrial strength had long been evident in heavy manufacturing, the private consumer in the Soviet Union remained poor by comparison with his American counterpart, and would have been even more visibly so but for a costly system of subsidies. Soviet agriculture, which had once fed the cities of central Europe and paid for the industrialization of the tsarist era, was a continuing failure; paradoxically, the Soviet Union often had to buy American grain. The official Soviet Communist Party programme of 1961 proposed that by 1970 the USSR would outstrip the United States in industrial output. That did not happen, although President Kennedy’s proposal of the same year to put a man on the moon was realized. Yet the USSR, in comparison with undeveloped countries, was undoubtedly rich. In spite of the obvious disparity between them as consumer societies, to the poor the United States and the USSR sometimes looked much the same. Many Soviet citizens, too, were more aware of the contrast between their stricken and impoverished country in the 1940s and its condition in the 1970s, than of comparison with the United States.

Nor was the contrast between the two systems always one-sided. Soviet investment in education, for example, may have achieved literacy rates as good as, and even at times better than, the Americans’. Such comparisons, which fall easily over the line from quantitative to qualitative judgment, nevertheless do not alter the basic fact that the per capita GDP of the Soviet Union in the 1970s still lagged far behind that of the United States. If its citizens had at last been given old age pensions in 1956 (nearly half a century after the British people), they also had to put up with health services falling further and further behind those available in the West. There had been a long legacy of backwardness and disruption to eliminate; only in 1952 had real wages in the USSR even got back to their 1928 level. The theory of ‘convergence’ was always too optimistic and too simplistic.