Protest, reform and repression in Khrushchev's Soviet Union

Abstract

Robert Hornsby. Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev's Soviet Union. New Studies in European History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. x, 313 pp. Bibliography. Index. $103.95, cloth.Rejecting the traditional dichotomy between belief' and non-belief, Robert Hornsby explores Khmshchev-era behaviours that, although the authorities labelled them anti-Soviet, often arose from citizens' devotion to socialist ideals. Setting aside forms of dissent based on nationalist or religious sentiments, Hornsby concentrates on political dissent, a narrower category elastic enough to encompass distinct worker and intelligentsia groups and their characteristic activities. Juxtaposed in each section and chapter, these two classes of protest introduce a certain tension into the analysis. On one hand, workers and other rank-and-file citizens lashed to voice discontent with material conditions or official abuses, causing an outburst. On the other hand, diminutive intelligentsia circles of idealistic socialists gathered to discuss society or, if oriented to action, to scatter leaflets in the hundreds or even thousands extolling Leninist values and preaching revolutionary struggle against the dictatorship of the bureaucracy.The year 1958 divides the book's two chronological periods. In each half, Hornsby outlines the authorities' approach to suppressing dissent distinctive to each five-year period. The years from March 1953 to June 1958 brought the basic tenets of Stalin's terror state into question, as the Soviet leadership dismantled the inefficient, apparently random tenor apparatus. The process of unravelling the established norms of acceptable discourse and behaviour peaked in the aftermath of Khrushchev's Secret Speech, which revealed lurid details about Stalin' s cult of personality and further blurred the boundaries between acceptable Soviet and anti-Soviet activities. This culminated when events in Hungary in the simulier and fall of 1956 sparked official fears of similar convulsions in the USSR. The techniques they used, winch Hornsby terms putting out fires, aimed to manage nonconformist behaviour as it became visible (p. 54). Arrests for anti-Soviet activity reached their post-Stalin peak in number and in the severity of the resulting sentences in 1956 and 1957. Although some were truly hostile, many citizens and party members earnestly spoke out in support of Soviet ideals, unknowingly transgressing the now obscured borders surrounding permitted expression.Yet these events also proved a turning point in the fight against dissent, inaugurating the second period. Tellingly, no comparable spike in arrests or prosecutions followed the public denunciations of Stalin at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961 because the boundaries of acceptable criticism had again solidified. Hornsby concludes that new policing strategies, used with increasing frequency after mid-1958, helped mark new limits of permissible criticism. …