I. Scan the text, explain the words in bold, search the dictionary for the collocations these words may be used in. Make up your own examples with these words.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 444.

Khrushchev at the Helm

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Like Stalin's politics and the “anti-party” group, the Gulag met its end during 1956 and 1957, when most of its camps and other facilities were closed down and the great majority of their inmates released. Millions of Stalin's victims finally returned home, reemerging in the words of poet Olga Berggolts as if “from the bottom of the sea” (quoted in Cohen 1982: 91). Along with millions of joyful reunions their unexpected return from the Gulag netherworld also produced uncounted awkward and painful encounters, a situation aptly described by the poet Anna Akhmatova when she wrote, “Two Russias are eyeball to eyeball – those who were imprisoned and those who put them there” (quoted in Cohen 1982: 27).

Meanwhile, Khrushchev, one of those who had “put them there,” doggedly pursued his eclectic reform agenda. It was a daunting list that ranged across the spectrum of Soviet life and required far more resources than were available to the Soviet leadership. For example, according to the Sixth Five-Year Plan approved by the 20th Party Congress, the Soviet Union would dramatically raise production in heavy industry and at the same time increase the availability of consumer goods. Khrushchev added to his burden of promises in 1957 by announcing that within four years the Soviet Union would match the United States, the world's best-fed country, in the output of milk, meat, and butter.

Where would the government find the resources to deliver on these promises? One potential source was the country's bloated military establishment. But, even though between 1955 and 1957 the Khrushchev regime had demobilized more than 2 million troops – leaving the Soviet Union with a still formidable military numbering 3.6 million – any savings were eaten up by the soaring costs of developing and deploying technologically advanced weapons such as ballistic missiles and nuclear submarines. In more of a hurry with each passing year and burdened by demands he could not ignore from interests he called the “steel eaters,” Khrushchev was driven to resort to questionable methods that often failed and in the process wasted precious resources that should have been put to better use.

Still there were significant successes. There was a slow but steady increase in the earnings of state employees and an increase in the minimum wage. Collective farmers, who technically did not work for the state, also benefited from increased wage rates. There was also a dramatic increase in the size and availability of old-age pensions, enough to improve the lives of millions of elderly people. An effort was made, albeit only partially successful, to extend high-quality education to the children of ordinary workers and peasants, and a crash program to build new housing provided better quarters to more than 100 million Soviet citizens who had lived in cramped, dreary conditions under Stalin.

All of these efforts were flawed – Khrushchev's prefabricated housing often deteriorated very quickly, for example – but they considerably improved the lives of the people. In a country that had claimed to be the world's pioneer in the building of socialism, they helped reduce the extreme inequalities that pervaded Soviet society during the Stalin years.

The most spectacular success of the Khrushchev era was in the area of rocketry and space exploration. Khrushchev strongly supported the development of ballistic missiles, which he believed represented both the technological wave of the future and a way to reduce military expenditures, since missiles could replace expensive aircraft and the personnel needed to fly and service them. Of particular interest were intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which with a range of more than 5,000 miles could be launched from the Soviet Union and reach the United States with their atomic warheads.

It turned out there was another benefit to ICBMs: Modified versions of those huge rockets could be used for space exploration. Thus on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. The launching thrilled Khrushchev and his countrymen and shocked the United States. Then a Soviet series of space firsts culminated in April 1961 when Soviet test pilot Yury Gagarin was launched into space and became the first man to orbit the earth. Khrushchev was ecstatic. At a lavish diplomatic reception honoring the event Khrushchev spoke with immense pride – in some ways speaking as much about himself as his country – about how “once illiterate” Russian, dismissed by others as a “barbaric country,” had become the world leader in space (quoted in Taubman 2003: 492).

Gagarin's flight, it turned out, was also the pinnacle of Khrushchev's political fortunes, which by 1961 were running afoul of a growing number of problems. One ill-conceived reform was the decentralization of economic decision making and management, introduced in 1957 shortly before the showdown with the anti-party group. Khrushchev abolished more than 140 central government ministries and replaced them with 105 local planning units, a change that did nothing to improve efficiency and led instead to confusion and competition for resources among the various units, each of which cared primarily about itself rather than the Soviet Union as a whole. It did not help when the number of these units was reduced to 47 in 1962.

Nor did efforts succeed to make the collective farms operate more efficiently. Early in his tenure Khrushchev had reduced taxes on the peasantry's private plots, a policy that both improved their meager standard of living and increased the food supply for the population at large. But several years later Khrushchev turned against his own reform, in part because private farming, even on a small scale, violated his Marxist principles. When Khrushchev applied fiscal and other types of pressure to make the peasants pay more attention to their collective farm responsibilities as opposed to their private plots, the main result was reduced production from those plots and less food for the country as a whole.

The virgin lands program had mixed results. Good weather in 1957 and 1958 led to bumper harvests, which strengthened Khrushchev politically. But poor weather in 1959 reduced the grain harvest, both in the virgin lands and in the Soviet Union's traditional agricultural regions. In 1962 food shortages and price increases led to a large protest demonstration in the city of Novocherkassk that turned into a massacre when troops fired on demonstrators, who were carrying portraits of Lenin, killing 26 and wounding almost 90.

In 1963 dry weather and strong winds turned the virgin lands region of central Asia into a vast dustbowl, largely because of agricultural methods that did not take proper account of the semi-arid climate. The drought also hit central Russia, the Ukraine, and other traditional grain-producing areas. No longer able to impose Stalin-type hardships on the people, the Soviet leadership was forced to endure the humiliation of buying almost 11 million tons of grain from several capitalist nations, including – adding insult to injury – almost 2 million tons from the United States.

II. Compose a set of either 10 questions to the text or 10 True/False statements. Discuss the questions/statements in groups of 3–4 people.