The fall of Nikita Khrushchev

Abstract

ON 14 OCTOBER 1964 Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev's 11-year period of dominance within the Soviet leadership came to an end. He was stripped of his party and state posts and sent into an obscure retirement by the very men who had been closest to him throughout his long career. Virtually overnight he became something of an 'un-person' in the Soviet Union: his name disappeared from the mass media and was scarcely mentioned even in such denunciations as followed his ouster. Nor were there even very many of these: there were no show trials, no ritual attacks at party congresses, no public confessions nor even any expulsions from the party. The circumstances surrounding his removal remained a mystery and the coup itself was euphemistically referred to as 'the October plenum'. The Khrushchev era had indeed ended not with a bang but a whimper and the long, debilitating reign of Leonid Brezhnev had begun. In terms of Soviet history 'the October plenum' is an event of tremendous importance. It represents one of the key turning points along the path which has led the Soviet Union from the upheavals of 1917 to the crisis of the present day. The 'Great October Palace Revolution' inaugurated two decades of political stagnation, the effects of which are still painfully in evidence in the USSR today. Moreover, an understanding of Khrushchev's ouster in 1964 would contribute greatly to our broader understanding of Soviet politics in the post-war period. It is therefore most fortunate that a number of interviews, memoirs and analyses of Khrushchev's fall-many of them by the very men involved-have recently appeared in the Soviet Union. Though often contradictory, when taken together they present enough information to allow a fairly confident reconstruction of what took place. The picture which emerges is in many ways sharply at odds with accounts of the coup advanced by Western observers since 1964. It also challenges certain Western images of Soviet high politics during the post-Stalin era. Much Western misunderstanding of the 1964 coup stems from the incorrect assumption that the plot to remove Khrushchev was hatched and executed with great speed, in October 1964. Michel Tatu, in what is arguably the best early reconstruction of Khrushchev's ouster, reckoned that the plot finally took shape