By Tatyana Shvetsova On May 22nd 1957 Nikita Khrushchev came out with his famous slogan “To catch up with and surpass America!” Later, in 1959, during his visit to the USA, he yet again voiced this slogan before an American audience.
The slogan ‘to catch up with and surpass America’ first and foremost referred to the economy, and to be even more specific – agriculture. There were plans for boosting per capita production of meat and dairy products, to reach the level registered in the USA at the time, only to eventually surpassing that level. Historian Leonid Katzva branded Khrushchev’s program “a risky gamble”, and explained why: “The attempt to boost production of, say, meat several-fold in the shortest possible time only resulted in mass butchering of cattle and a drastic reduction of the livestock numbers. This led to a massive influx of peasantry into the towns. In the period from 1960 to 1964 some 7 million people moved from village areas to the towns. Moreover, a majority of these were young people, lured to town life by prospects of high earnings, qualified labor, urban comforts and diversity of leisure pastimes. Early in 1960 Khrushchev made an attempt to make amends. The purchasing prices of meat and dairy products were raised. Later, in 1964, a Plenary meeting of the CPSU announced a drive for intensification of agriculture, i.e. adequate use of fertilizers, irrigation, mechanization and advanced chemical products. Capital investments in agriculture grew significantly. However, all these measures came too late.” Thus, Khrushchev never did manage to ‘catch up with and surpass’ America, or make the life of Soviet people as comfortable as that in America.
The Third Party program, adopted at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU in 1961 contained a utopist notion of ‘complete and total victory of socialism in the USSR’ and the plans of building communism by 1980. Commenting this document, Russian historian Professor Olshtynsky remarked: “The concluding phrase in the program – “the present generation of Soviet people shall be living under communism”, according to recollections of contemporaries, was personally written in by Khrushchev. A number of points contained there were not devoid of progressive public impact, such as, for example, the clause on peaceful co-existence of states with different social systems; the struggle of socialist countries for peace and averting a world war.” Also undeniably positive was the so-called “Moral code of builders of communism.” This code had so much in common with the ten Christian commandments it was as if it had been copied from them. However, so bold a loaning from Christianity didn’t, however, do anything to improve the attitude of the powers-that-be towards the Russian Orthodox Church. Outstanding thinker, metropolitan of St.Petersburg and Ladoga Ioann, a contemporary of Nikita Khrushchev, wrote in his study entitled “Russian Symphony”: “Among the prescripts of the Party Central Committee, elaborated in 1954 under Khrushchev’s guidance, two documents stand apart due to their utter anti-church orientation. The first – “On the most obvious lapses in scientific-atheist propaganda and means of improving it”. The second – “On mistakes in conducting scientific-atheistic propaganda among the population”. Both documents unequivocally proclaimed an end to the relatively peaceful co-existence of state and church, and in actual fact threw society back some twenty years, into the period of aggressive atheistic warfare. The sole obstacle on the road to a revival of mass anti-Orthodox terror was the general directive aimed at scaling down reprisal activity.
Those were dark times for the Orthodox Church. People younger than 30 were not allowed to be admitted to monasteries. People with a higher secular or paraprofessionals were prohibited from receiving education at Church seminaries or Academies. The Patriarchate was stripped of its right to extend financial support to parishes, monasteries, church schools. A number of restrictions regarding the economic-administrative aspects of church activity were intended to undermine its economic foundations. Metropolitan Ioann testifies: “A major part of the monasteries and church schools were closed. The number of Orthodox parishes dropped from 20 to 8 thousand in the ten years of Nikita Khrushchev’s stay in power. In the last few years of his leadership alone – from 1961 to 1964 – 1234 people were convicted in the USSR on religious grounds. Simultaneously with persecutions of the Church, the word ‘Russian’ was practically banished from the official propaganda vocabulary. The notion of ‘patriotism’ was admitted exclusively in conjunction with the terms ‘soviet’ and ‘socialist’. The concept of ‘proletarian internationalism’ used in soviet ideological practice for suppressing Russian national self-awareness, reacquired priority significance in the state mentality of the USSR.” In continuation of our narrative regarding the internal policy of the soviet government during Nikita Khrushchev’s leadership, let’s elaborate on one of its basic directions. This was none other than a raising of people’s living standards. 1956 witnessed the annulment of the 1940 law whereby workers were not allowed to change their place of employment of their own free will, and all tardiness and truancy were punishable with imprisonment. The average wages across the country were increased, as was the minimum wage not subject to tax. 1958 saw an end to compulsory subscribing to state bonds. Pensions were lifted, the pension age was set at 60 – for men, and 55 for women – something that is in force to this day. Workers employed at particularly hard or health-hazardous jobs were granted early retirement rights.
“In the second half of the 1950’s there began a mass scale government-financed building of standard panel blockwork housing. These houses, which were later to receive various derogatory nicknames from the population, were certainly far from comfortable. Yet, they were cheap, and as such sprouted very fast – in whole blocks. At the end of the 1950’s – first half of the 1960’s the USSR moved into first place in the world in pace of construction work and the number of housing turned out annually. People received state housing free of charge. Besides, around a half of the houses were built on attracted investments from the population. The housing problem was thus somewhat alleviated, although it was far from completely solved.” In the words of Leonid Katzva, people were increasingly incensed at the delayed redemption of state bonds of past years. A monetary reform was carried through in 1960. The new rouble was equated to 10 pre-reform ones. Simultaneously all prices were cut ten-fold, as were tax and various other payments. Nonetheless, according to the historian, “Denomination generated inflation, moreover, it was the prices of cheap goods that suddenly skyrocketed. Naturally, this couldn’t but impact the low-income bracket of the population.”
“In 1962 they significantly raised (on average by 25-30%) the prices of meat and butter – something that aroused the extreme indignation of the people in the country and sparked serious unrest. By the mid-1960’s the general displeasure over Khrushchev’s economic policy spread throughout the country, and was shared by a majority of the population.” Here is an example of this displeasure. On June 1st 1962 newest Soviet history witnessed its only mass demonstration of workers in the southern Russian town of Novocherkassk. Delegates from the workers intended to inform members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the leaders of State Security bodies, present in the town at the time, of their disastrous situation. But they were denied an opportunity to negotiate; moreover, the delegates were detained by the militia. At this point several demonstrators broke into the building of the town militia to free their comrades – only to be fired at. Then the 5-thousand-strong crowd of demonstrators was also shot at. There were many victims. The Central Russian newspaper “Izvestiya” in an article dedicated to the 40th anniversary of this tragedy, mentioned the witness accounts of a certain Pyotr Siud, sentenced and duly punished for his part in the Novocherkassk events. “Witnesses said that the officer who got the command to open fire refused to pass it on to his soldiers and shot himself right before their eyes,” Pyotr Siud recalled. “Still, the firing was opened. First the aim was for the tree tops, where the youngsters were hiding. Dead and wounded began dropping down. Then those firing targeted the crowd. I recall how a mother was carrying around her dead infant in a shop. A hairdresser was shot dead on her workplace. A girl was lying in a pool of blood… Trucks and busses were driven up and they hurriedly threw dead bodies inside. Not one was passed on to his family for burial. The hospitals were packed with wounded. Nobody knows where they all went. Fire machines were later summoned to cleanse the blood from the square… Two days later the arrests began. For almost a week a curfew was in operation.” 112 residents of Novocherkassk, who had fallen under reprisals, were released, their sentences made milder, only after Nikita Khrushchev was removed from power.
“To this day we do not know the whole truth about the Novocherkassk tragedy. Early in 1990’s the Main Military Prosecutor’s office launched an investigation for the purpose of finding out who issued the order to shoot at the crowd and did the army participate in the firing. The investigators came to the conclusion that the soldiers didn’t fire at the civilians. There were ten snipers up on the rooftops of neibouring houses, plus two machine-guns. It looked like it was all the work of the Interior troops or the KGB. The investigation didn’t manage to find out where the victims of the shooting were buried. Witnesses recall that when the first shot was fired, children who had been watching the events up in the trees started dropping like ripe pears. However, there is no available information regarding the casualties or wounded. There were no reports of missing children filed by the parents. The investigation drew the conclusion that the order to open fire for effect came from ‘representatives of top party-state bodies’ to ‘unspecified officials’. Another bloody event dating to Nikita Khrushchev’s time, that occurred perforce this one, was connected with the External policy of the USSR. This is the widely-publicized revolt in Hungary of October 1956. Historian Pyotr Deinichenko writes about it: “The revolt, which was
organized under anti-communist and democratic slogans, was undoubtedly
anti-soviet. In the years of the Second World War Hungary had fought on
the side of Hitler’s troops and far from a majority of the population perceived
Soviet Army as a liberating force. Protests began after Stalin’s placeman,
First Secretary of the Hungarian Party of Workers Matias Rakoshi returned
from the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR, where Stalin’s
policy was openly denounced. The Hungarians hoped that now they would be
allowed to move towards socialism in their own, chosen way. However, the
protesters made a mistake by forcing the Hungarian Government to announce
the country’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and to demand immediate withdrawal
of Soviet troops which had been stationed on the territory of Hungary since
the end of World With the full support of all socialist countries, Khrushchev ordered that Soviet troops enter Budapest. The revolt was suppressed with a great deal of bloodshed. 20 thousand people died on the Hungarian side. The Soviet Army also suffered casualties. Western countries condemned the USSR’s actions, yet refrained from meddling. Hardly surprising: the Soviet Union was approaching the very peak of its military-scientific potential. The Soviet Army was one of the strongest in the world. The launching ranges in Kazakhstan and Novaya Zemlya were regularly conducting atomic and hydrogen bomb tests. October 4th 1957 saw the first Soviet artificial Earth satellite successfully launched into orbit.” And on April 12th 1961 this country sent the first man into space –
Yuri Gagarin set off on his historic trailblazing space flight.
06/20/2006
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“For the
moment, you are ahead of us,” Nikita Khrushchev said in his speech. “We
still have a lot of work to do to catch up with you. We’ll do that. We’ll
do our best. We’ll catch up! We’ll surpass you. And we’ll go forward! That’s
my conviction. You may, perhaps, laugh now. But when we overtake you, we’ll
wave our hands and say: “Capitalists! Goodbye. Our train is going ahead.
Catch up if you can!”
Despite
this, he didn’t give up on yet another of his ideas – even more ambitious
and outlandish: to build communism in the USSR in record-breaking time!
This hindered
a repetition of those dire times when openly professed faith was grounds
enough for arrest and execution. However, even within the bounds of the
new pseudo-liberal approach, a fresh anti-Orthodox campaign flared up.
Khrushchev personally vowed to show ‘the last priest’ on television in
just a matter of years.
One of the
most acute social problems remained housing shortage. This is what historian
Leonid Katzva says about attempts to solve it:
Early in the
1960’s the country yet again experienced food shortages. Not only was meat
a scarce guest to the counters, but sausage, butter, and even grain and
bread became hard to obtain. Ration cards had to be introduced in many
towns. Leonid Katzva cites the following:
A member of
the fund “Novocherkassk tragedy” Mikhail Kraisvetny said in an interview
for the “Izvestiya” paper:
War
Two.
