Secondly, the Sino-Soviet split. In the early 1960's, there was an obvious rift between the Soviet Union and Communist China. There was an evident personality clash between Khrushchev and the Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung. Khrushchev wanted “peaceful co-existence” with America. Tse-Tung wanted the opposite, he took the view that the world should be Communist and they should overthrow the leaders and make Communism supreme. Khrushchev was rumored – in this clash - to have called Tse-Tung “a worn out old boot”. This is typical of Khrushchev. There were also border clashes. In account of the split, Russia had a competitor for the ruling of the communist world.
Thirdly, the Industrial Reforms. When Khrushchev took over the Soviet Union, he left the soviet running of industry intact. There were masses of flaws in the running of the industry. In his power struggle, he took the side of the hard-line Stalinists, in favour of traditional heavy industries. This made him popular among colleagues. However, when he had complete control of Russia, he changed his views and took the side of “cotton-dress industrialisation”, this meant more emphasis on consumer goods. There was an overthrowing attempt but it fell through. Khrushchev was very devious but he got his own way and there was more emphasis on consumer goods in industry. His main reform was in 1958 when he introduced 105 regional economic councils “the sovnarkhozy”. Every sovnarkhoz had to manage the affairs of its region. The sovnarkhozy was just something for Khrushchev to use to hide behind the “metal-eaters”. The sovnarkhoz was discarded after Khrushchev’s downfall. There were low wages in industry, no overtime but there was no unemployment. This led to over manning in factories.
Fourthly, and again most importantly, the Virgin Lands project. When Khrushchev took over, Russia was finding it hard to feed itself, due to a large population increase. Collectivisation was proving to be inefficient and unproductive. Russia needed an agricultural reform. Khrushchev made gigantic state farms in remote uncultivated parts of Russia namely Siberia and Kazakhstan. He did not choose the Ukraine because it had an extremely unreliable climate and suffered bouts of drought. There was a low morale of collective workers because they were not making a profit, this equalled low work, and maybe the Virgin Lands project was just the boost they needed to make their lives more interesting. The Virgin Lands project was not the only solution to Russia’s agricultural problems, maybe private agriculture would have produced better outputs, but Khrushchev quickly ruled it out because it would be going against communist principles. There were three main differences between state farms and collective farms; I will outline them in a table below.
The Virgin Lands project was a brilliant opportunity for young workers. They were guaranteed a wage. It attracted over half a million potential workers. Between 1953 and 1958, there was over a 40% increase in harvests, this was great news for Russia.
However, appearances can be deceptive, as Khrushchev found out, southern Russia was notorious for being plain and non-mountainous. This gave soil erosion a good prospect to begin, and it did. Nearly half of the “virgin land” was ruined or spoilt by this process. Also, over-cultivation and insufficient fertilisation allowed the wind erosion to be more effective. This had a dramatic effect on harvest in the early 1960’s, especially the 1963 harvest. Khrushchev yet again was humiliated, even more so for being the main agricultural minister before becoming leader. The failure was a major cause of his own downfall.
Lastly, Was Khrushchev’s personality and style to blame for his downfall? Below, I will make a table of his personality positives and negatives.
As you can see, the negatives weigh out the positives, his colleagues got particularly tired of him by 1964. I will demonstrate a couple of examples of Khrushchev’s behaviour.
In 1962, Khrushchev was invited to an art exhibition by Bilyutin. He went into the gallery and inspected the paintings, while inspecting he swore unpleasantly about the work he was looking at and he said, “a donkey could do better with its tail” and “it looks like horse manure”.
In 1960, Khrushchev attended the UN general assembly in New York. When Prime Minister Macmillan of the UK was speaking, Khrushchev did not agree with him and he took his shoe off and banged it on the table in front of all the leaders. This was very degrading for Russia.
All of these reasons played a part in the downfall of Nikita Khrushchev. His colleagues forced him into retirement. He left as leader of the Communist party in late 1964.