90 years ago, in 1921, the young communist Nikita Khrushchev wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the RCP (b) with an unexpected proposal that ran counter to the general line of the party. According to Vlast correspondent Svetlana Kuznetsova, the letter explains a lot about how the unique management style of the future first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee was formed.

"The authorities are putting pressure on you"

When Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Central Committee and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, was relieved of his posts in 1964, at a meeting of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee on October 13-14, 1964, much was said about the shortcomings in his work. He does not listen to the members of the presidium and secretaries about the fact that he makes most of the decisions alone, and the rest of the country’s leaders learn about the new changes he has planned in the state structure or legislation from the speeches of “dear Nikita Sergeevich” at rallies. Or, at best, from his lengthy notes sent out when the decision, in fact, has already been made.

Members of the presidium, for example, talked about how Khrushchev, unexpectedly for everyone, in September of the same 1964, suddenly proposed changing the way of planning the country's development. Instead of five-year plans, as happened before, or a seven-year plan, which had to be switched to in order to hide from the citizens of the USSR the failure of the five-year plan of 1956-1960, Khrushchev put forward a new idea - to plan for an eight-year plan.

Khrushchev was also criticized a lot for his endless reorganizations of government structures. And also because his decisions on such issues look, to put it mildly, ill-considered. First Deputy Chairman of the Bureau of the CPSU Central Committee for the RSFSR Leonid Efremov reproached Khrushchev:

“Ideas are hastily put forward... New proposals are made one after another. In agriculture, the line is developed by you, but everything is hasty, outside of time and space.”

No less was said about how much the First Secretary of the Central Committee was spoiled by the authorities. Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR Gennady Voronov said:

“As a result of Comrade Khrushchev’s incorrect and non-partisan attitude, an intolerant situation was created, a new cult of personality arose - Khrushchev... Essentially, there is no collective leadership... For 3.5 years I did not have the opportunity to express my opinion; shouts, insults.”

And Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee and head of the Party and State Control Committee Alexander Shelepin added:

“You have concentrated power, you began to abuse it... The cult of personality has completely developed. It supported you, but faith in you fell and fell. It’s a shame.”

The main ideologist of the party, Mikhail Suslov, spoke about the same thing:

Speaking with the party for a new godless way of life, Khrushchev proposed leaving in it certain elements of religious rituals for a vast layer of rural Bolsheviks
Photo: RGAKFD/Rosinform, Kommersant

“Treat the workers insultingly. All the positive things are attributed to Khrushchev, the shortcomings are attributed to the regional committees. You encourage sycophants.”

Khrushchev’s deputy in the government, Dmitry Polyansky, did not lag behind:

“Khrushchev became a different person. During the first five-year plan he behaved well. Lately he wanted to rise above the party and became rude. Agriculture went well in the first years, then there was stagnation and disappointment.”

The result was summed up by the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers and member of the Presidium of the Central Committee, Alexei Kosygin, who said that Khrushchev loved the praise and applause of a crowd of thousands: “The authorities are putting pressure on you.”

The conclusion that Khrushchev was spoiled by too much power was included in the decision of the Presidium of the Central Committee, and then in the resolution of the plenum of the CPSU Central Committee, held on October 14, 1964:

“Recognize that as a result of the mistakes and incorrect actions of Comrade Khrushchev, which violate the Leninist principles of collective leadership, a completely abnormal situation has recently been created in the Presidium of the Central Committee, which makes it difficult for members of the Presidium of the Central Committee to fulfill their responsible duties in leading the party and the country. Comrade Khrushchev, holding posts First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and concentrating great power in his hands, in a number of cases began to go beyond the control of the CPSU Central Committee, stopped taking into account the opinions of the members of the Presidium of the Central Committee and members of the CPSU Central Committee, resolving the most important issues without proper collective discussion. intolerance and rudeness towards his comrades on the Presidium and the Central Committee, disdaining their opinions, Comrade Khrushchev made a number of major mistakes in the practical implementation of the line outlined by the decisions of the XX, XXI and XXII Congresses of the CPSU, the Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee believes that in the presence of negative personal qualities as. employee, manifested in recent times, advanced age (as in the text - “Power” ) and deteriorating health of Comrade Khrushchev began to lose confidence in the Central Committee of the CPSU and is not able to correct the serious mistakes he made.”

Khrushchev turned from prime minister into a pensioner. And the opinion that he was corrupted by enormous power became generally accepted. However, a recently discovered letter written on April 25, 1921, allows us to look at this from a different point of view.

"In exceptional cases, these rituals will be performed"

In 1921, after the end of the Civil War, among the many priorities that the Bolsheviks set for themselves, the fight against religion was not the least important. The assertion that the new government will not stop at the separation of church and state was already contained in paragraph 13 of the RCP(b) Program, adopted at the Eighth Party Congress in 1919:

“In relation to religion, the Russian Communist Party is not satisfied with the already decreed separation of church from state and school from church, i.e., measures that bourgeois democracy puts forward in its programs, but nowhere in the world has it been completed due to the diverse actual connections of capital with religious propaganda. The RCP is guided by the conviction that only the implementation of planning and consciousness in all social and economic activities of the masses will entail the complete extinction of religious prejudices. The Party strives for the complete destruction of the connection between the exploiting classes and the organization of religious propaganda, promoting the actual liberation of the working masses from religious prejudices and organizing the most. broad scientific, educational and anti-religious propaganda. At the same time, it is necessary to carefully avoid any insult to the feelings of believers, which only leads to the consolidation of religious fanaticism.”

For the sake of the victory of the new system, Khrushchev lied that in the old days, as a metal worker, he earned much less and lived much worse
Photo: RGAKFD/Rosinform, Kommersant

At the 10th Congress of the RCP(b), in the resolution “On the Main Political Education and Agitation and Propaganda Tasks of the Party,” anti-religious work was given special importance, although it was emphasized that it should be carried out without undue pressure:

“One of the essential tasks of Glavpolitprosvet is the broad formulation, guidance and assistance in the matter of anti-religious agitation and propaganda among the broad masses of working people. For this purpose, Glavpolitprosvet must, among other things, make natural history knowledge available to the widest masses by publishing magazines, books, textbooks, organizing systematic cycles of lectures and the use of all methods of modern technology (photography, cinema, etc.) to disseminate this knowledge.”

In April 1921, in preparation for the celebration of May Day, an appeal from the Central Committee appeared in central newspapers, in which the Bolsheviks were called upon to expose the lies of religion. And after that, a campaign began for the unswerving implementation by all communists of point 13 of the party program and the personal participation of every Bolshevik in the fight against any manifestations of religiosity.

Soon, the propaganda department of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) began to receive letters from communists and non-party members with responses to new anti-religious initiatives. Among the messages of praise and abuse, a letter written on April 25, 1921 from the Red Army soldier N. Khrushchev, whose biographical data coincided with the data of the future first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, could not help but attract attention. The Red Army soldier was a member of the party, previously worked as a metal worker and served in the North Caucasus. All these facts were found in different versions of Khrushchev’s biography. And his memoirs said that he was demobilized at the beginning of 1922.

The letter was notable both for the illiteracy of the author (Khrushchev entered the workers' faculty after returning to civilian life) and for the proposal it contained. Khrushchev began by describing the difficulties awaiting rural communists in the new conditions (spelling and punctuation preserved):

“To your appeal about the fight against religion. I defend that it is our duty to fight against religion, and everyone who joins our party agrees with this. But in reality, other races have to face difficulties that we have to think about; these will be our members from the peasants. Being in the red army where the books are newspapers, rallies at which he studies and he admitted that the R.K.P. party is his party, he joins it after he goes home, his family eats, his wife is fanatical, they have children and a child is born, he is against it. baptism, and the wife is for. How is life in this? If he does not agree, then the brother needs a divorce, and the children and other connections that hold him, and especially the children in the event of a divorce, she will leave them with her and try to raise them in her spirit, i.e. That is, she will cripple them, just as she herself is crippled by religious prejudices. Or another example, a bachelor farmer requires him to have an assistant, but he is a member of the party. How is life in the village? The woman is very backward without a church; she will not agree to marriage because they are strong in her. religious prejudices. What are they doing to him?"

“I defend that it is our duty to fight against religion, and everyone who joins our party agrees with this. But other races have to face difficulties.”

What followed was a proposal that ran counter to the general line of the party:

“On this basis, for party members engaged in rural individual farming (a broad organization of communes has not yet developed) it will be allowed in exceptional cases to perform these rituals. But only before that submit applications to the district party committee, and if it finds the reasons for presenting compelling then allow it. The committee we will have to choose the lesser of two evils when sorting out statements.”

The grandiose scope of the ideas of the first secretary of the Moscow Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks was restrained only by the authority of senior leaders
Photo: RGAKFD/Rosinform, Kommersant

According to Khrushchev’s idea, the exception to the rules did not apply to the proletariat and the intelligentsia:

“And for everyone else, both manual and mental workers, there shouldn’t be any assumptions, they should follow the program. These are my views.”

Bringing Khrushchev's plan to life seemed very problematic. Rural Bolsheviks, as a rule, were not wealthy and not all of them had or could find a horse to get to the district centers. After all, some villages were many tens of miles away from them. Add to this the impassable abyss of mud, and it turns out that no Bolshevik would have been able to get permission to bury a family member in a church in a reasonable time.

Another questionable point was the procedure for obtaining permission for weddings and baptisms. How the district party committee would separate those who needed it from everyone else remained unclear. It could also happen that the matter would come down to ordinary bribery, which would hardly strengthen the already weak district committees.

One more important question remained - what part of their time should the small rural party officials devote to issuing permits for each case of baptism, wedding and funeral? Even with a relatively small number of Bolsheviks in the district, the committees could calmly abandon all other matters and deal exclusively with the consideration of such issues. And if we add to this the discontent of the proletarians from large villages and towns who gathered to marry deeply religious girls, then Khrushchev’s project, while true to the original message, only led to confusion and general discontent. It turned out exactly what Leonid Efremov told Khrushchev half a century later: “The line is being developed by you, but everything hastily, outside of time and space.”

The Central Committee of the RCP(b), obviously, understood the realities of Soviet life much better than Khrushchev. Therefore, no decisions were made in connection with the letter of the initiative communist, and it, as an original example of folk political creativity, went into the archives.

At the front, the pre-war habit of attributing to oneself the merits of others grew among Lieutenant General Khrushchev (second from right in the photo) to military commander proportions
Photo: RGAKFD/Rosinform, Kommersant

“Sometimes they took sin on their souls”

If the young communist was embarrassed by this turn of events, it was only for a very short time. After all, after demobilization, he could show his unbridled initiative in a leadership job, which he was immediately offered:

“I remember the time,” Khrushchev recalled, “when I returned from the fronts of the Civil War at the beginning of 1922. As soon as I arrived, the party organization sent me as deputy manager of the mines of the French company, where I worked as a mechanic in 1912-1914. And the manager these mines were my closest friend Yegor Trofimovich Abakumov... We experienced a difficult time in the 20s. There was famine in the mines, in 1922 there were isolated cases of cannibalism, and the village was even more devastated than the industry. ".

Even then, as Khrushchev himself recalled, he began to deceive listeners in his speeches:

“We then not only laid down our bellies for the sake of a new life, but sometimes took sin on our souls and said that in the old days, they say, life was worse. It’s a sin because, although not all, but highly skilled workers in the region of Donbass where I worked, before the revolution we lived better, even much better. For example, in 1913 I was personally better off financially than in 1932, when I worked as second secretary of the Moscow Party Committee.”

With the help of grandiose corn, Khrushchev and his entourage (pictured on the right is USSR Minister of Agriculture V. Matskevich) hoped to raise agricultural production in the country to the skies
Photo: RGAKFD/Rosinform, Kommersant

Little information has been preserved about the Donbass years of Khrushchev’s life. He studied at the workers' faculty and moved up the party line. Then in 1929 he entered the Moscow Industrial Academy, but at the same time he was promoted to party work in Moscow, where he began to show his initiative in full force - still with a big eye on the top leadership. For example, when plans for the reconstruction of Moscow were discussed in 1935, while speaking during his speeches about existing versions of the project, almost after every phrase he referred either to Comrade Stalin or to the first secretary of the Moscow Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Lazar Kaganovich.

Khrushchev showed personal initiative only in small, purely private matters. For example, he began to demand from the trade that potatoes in stores and tents be sold not dirty, in the ground, but only washed. Trade workers argued to him that due to the lack of proper drying, the potatoes would immediately begin to rot. But Khrushchev firmly stood his ground: since they do this abroad, we are no worse. Trade workers followed the instructions as soon as they assessed the opening prospects: the more goods rot, the more potatoes can be written off and stolen under this pretext.

But the real miracles of initiative began after gaining relative independence, when Khrushchev headed the Moscow party organization. In the mid-1930s, he proposed cutting down all the trees on the Garden Ring, because there was a theory that in the event of a chemical attack on the city, toxic substances would settle on the trees. Fortunately, it was not possible to verify how correct the assumption was. But breathing in the center of Moscow has become much more difficult.

“In our time, in order to strengthen the protection of socialist property, it would be necessary to issue a law granting the right to general meetings to pass sentences of eviction.”

They said that in 1937 it was Khrushchev who initiated the exceeding of the repression plan. Some veterans of the Moscow NKVD recalled that the first secretary of the Moscow Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks called in the evenings, listened to a report on the work done during the day and demanded that the assigned tasks be exceeded. This is directly or indirectly confirmed by his speeches at party meetings during the period of the “Great Purge.”

Since 1938, in a new, even more independent job as the first secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, Khrushchev could have realized many of his ideas, but the war interfered. But at the front, his habit of deceiving listeners during speeches took on a new look. Khrushchev began to take credit for the merits of others. (This is exactly what Mikhail Suslov spoke about in 1964: “Everything positive is attributed to Khrushchev, the shortcomings are attributed to the regional committees.”) About the war years, the former manager of the affairs of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Mikhail Smirtyukov, told the following story (see the material “He took revenge even on the dead” in N33 “ Power" for this year), which happened to the head of the rear of the Red Army, General Khrulev:

“He once called the assistant to Stalin Poskrebyshev.“ Here, ”he says,“ a encryption from Khrushchev came. He reports that the troops of the Stalingrad Front restored the bridge across the Volga. And it seems that your units did this? "Khrulev asked Screbyshev to hold the Khrushchev telegram and wrote a report on how everything was actually. And both Paprebyshev papers reported to Stalin together. And he made a good infusion by the phone."

The leaders of the country learned about changes in their fate from the fateful speeches of Khrushchev at many thousands of rallies
Photo: RGAKFD/Rosinform, Kommersant

And Khrushchev began to realize his peculiar initiatives after the war. In 1947, he offered Stalin a plan for the liberation of the rural regions of Ukraine from people who did not want to work on collective farms (see the material to "inspire useful fear" in N16 "power" for this year).

“In 1946,” Khrushchev wrote to Stalin, “not a single workday of 86,676 collective farmers did not develop in Ukraine. In the summer, the most intense period, during harvesting in 1947, in the collective farms of the Vinnitsa region, for example, more than 45,000 workable collective farmers not We developed without good reason the minimum of workdays established by law for this period; in the Kamenetz-Podolsk and Zhytomyr regions during this period, a minimum of workdays did not develop more than 20,000 able-bodied collective farmers ... In Tsarist Russia there was a law according The removal of persons from the village of Persons in this environment threatens local well-being and security ”(Code of Laws of the Russian Empire, Volume IX, Article 683). Building in our time, to strengthen the protection of socialist property, to issue a law that grants the right to make sentences of eviction. ”

The adopted law was distributed to the whole country, and from everywhere there were reports that they are far from always evicted by those who were supposed. In general, the goal was achieved, and the rural population was driven to collective farms. But it still worked after sleeves. So for the rise of agriculture, Khrushchev, who rose at the helm of the country in 1953, had to put forward new initiatives - on the transformation of collective farms into state farms, about the widespread cultivation of corn, about a change in the structure of agriculture, and then all the national economy of the country as a whole.

All his initiatives, as well as the idea of special rights to send religious rites by rural Bolsheviks, the 1921 model, at first glance looked completely sensible. But only during their implementation there were a lot of problems and side effects, which their author did not think about.

After the liquidation of ministries and the transfer of industry management, it turned out to be violated by the interaction between the intensity of the mesh enterprises. So soon I had to organize various state committees, in fact, restoring the ministries.

The story of the division of regional party bodies into industrial and rural ones turned out to be even more sad. This was done to improve the work of agriculture and industry. And as a result, not only citizens did not know which of the two regional committees to deal with complaints, but the district committees sometimes could not understand which of the regional committees and what to report in. The transformation was planned to reduce the party apparatus, and as a result, at the regional level it doubled.

Khrushchev discovered a new era in political science, proving his boiling activities that the authorities, of course, spoils people, but a person can ruin power
Photo: RGAKFD/Rosinform, Kommersant

The list of Khrushchev transformations that brought nothing but unnecessary fuss and empty costs could continue to endlessly. In 1956, he conceived a completely correct measure-a pension reform that would allow a huge number of old people to live more or less tolerably. But during the preparation of the new pension law, they miscalculated, and I had to pay an additional 7 billion rubles, and in order to cover the budget deficit, the country's leadership was forced to refuse payments for bonds of internal loans.

The problems grew, but the technique did not change. Whatever happens, Khrushchev immediately issued a simple, but useless or unfulfilled decision. Young people do not want to go to collective farms and factories - to ban school graduates in higher educational institutions. Let them first work in production, serve in the army, ripen, and there it will be seen where to go further. It is clear that any senior parent wanted to protect the child from such a fate, and as a result, worried officials were ready to do everything so that such a law was not adopted or turned out to be inoperative. But Khrushchev did not take into account this factor.

Khrushchev redrawed not only the structure of power, but also personnel. The former ministers and officials were good or bad, it did not matter much: they were replaced by those who listened to every word of the first secretary of the Central Committee and flattered it with all his might. As a rule, this contributed to the implementation of Khrushchev’s ideas, but the control apparatus worsened not only structurally, but also of high quality.

In September 1964, when Khrushchev gathered a meeting on a change in the planning system, from the report he prepared along with the nearest associates, none of the experienced managers could understand anything. The only clear thought was that you need to plan on an eight -year -old. Meanwhile, as stated at a meeting of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee, the lack of funds for all Khrushchev proposed projects reached astronomical sizes - 78 billion rubles.

Participants in the displacement of Khrushchev were mistaken in only one. They believed that he was spoiled by a huge and overwhelming power for him. However, the authorities only removed all the barriers and gave Khrushchev the opportunity to manifest itself in the full character, habits and inclinations. Including the tendency to nominate ridiculous and inappropriate ideas.

"Ideas are being put forward hastily"