Historiography of Khrushchev and 'The Thaw'

Was Khrushchev "adventurist" and "harebrained"?

1964-Glasnost, Gradual Revisionism,   Most recently

Khrushchev was deposed from power in 1964.  In a meeting of the Presidium – the supreme body of the Soviet Union – Leonid Brezhnev (who would take over from Khrushchev) complained that he had become a one-man band, that he had fostered a personality cult, that he had failed to fulfil his promises, and of his “adventurist” and “harebrained” schemes. 

It was the last two accusations which stuck, and they are still mentioned by historians today. 

1964-Glasnost

Remarkably few historians wrote about Khrushchev or the ‘thaw’ in this period. 

In the Soviet Union – which was consciously undergoing ‘dekhrushchevisation’ – Khrushchev was not mentioned at all.  In official publications about Soviet policy, the emphasis was on the ‘subversive activities’ of the West. 

In the West, by contrast, Khrushchev was remembered as the man who dismantled Stalin’s Terror, who abandoned Stalin’s myth that there was a ‘western encirclement’ of Russia, and who realised that there WAS an alternative to conflict and war between communism and capitalism. 

But, at the same time, there grew up the image of a poorly-educated peasant buffoon, prone to reckless brinkmanship and instability.  The Russian historians Roy and Zhores Medvedev (1976), while praising his reforms, accused him of being inconsistent, ideologically simplistic, arbitrary & erratic. 

The general feeling was that Khrushchev's foreign policy was driven by fear of the NATO presence in West Germany and/or bullied by the opposition and powerful ‘hawks’ in the Soviet Union. 

Gradual Revisionism

In 1986, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev adopted the policy of glasnost (openness), which marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War.  This allowed Soviet scholars to begin studying Khruschev, and the publication of all of Khrushchev’s memoirs.  After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Soviet state papers also became available to historians

Historians of international relations began to link Soviet policy during the Khrushchev years to a perceived shift of the "correlation of forces" in favour of the USSR – i.e. that Khrushchev was emboldened by changes in the nuclear balance in favour of Moscow, and that the Berlin Crisis "was a Soviet exercise in atomic diplomacy."

In 2010, two writers tried a reassess Soviet policy during the ‘Thaw’ years. 

    •  Natalia Egorova (Russian Academy of Sciences) highlighted the importance of Khrushchev in disarmament, and in playing down the notion of inevitability of war between the socialist and the capitalist camps. 

    •  Vladimir Pechatnov (Moscow State Institute of International Relations) described the Khrushchev years as pioneering and reckless, peaceful and bellicose, grandiose and ridiculous all at the same time … yet a genuine attempt to diminish the East-West gap. 

    •  And in 2011, Katalin Miklossy found that the repression of Hungary – which had so horrified British communists – was out of character with Soviet policy in the rest of Europe. 

Khrushchev came to be seen as the originator of the policies which found their fulfilment in Gorbachev’s glasnost.  Khrushchev’s son wrote a number of  memoirs representing his father as a thwarted reformer.  Other historians wrote that Khrushchev was a genuine reformer, committed to social improvement and a more egalitarian state – Ferenc Feher (1984) explained Khrushchevism as “a definite stage [in Soviet history], marking a conscious effort to break with the past, with a range of specific criteria for how a socialist community of states ought to function” (i.e. that he knew what he was doing). 

Not every historian was suddenly prepared to defend Khrushchev’s personal reputation, as we see in William Taubman' 2003 judgement of the Berlin Crisis of 1961:

“Apart from not knowing where exactly he was going or how he was going to get there, Khrushchev misjudged the obstacles on his way”

but there as been a gradual rehabilitation:

    •  Fyodor Burlatskii (1991) acknowledged that Khrushchev had faults – his political misjudgement of some matters, his liking of grandiose schemes, of which too many were implemented too fast.  Yet he also recognised the extent of the opposition he faced, and gave him credit for his enthusiasm and sense of justice. 

    •  William J. Tompson (1991) suggested that frustration with the incompetent Soviet bureaucracy may explain some of the impulsiveness of Khrushchev’s decisions. 

    •  “He was an erratic, impulsive, inspirational and innovative leader who addressed the fundamental problems of the country” wrote Martin McCauley in 1995, concluding that Khrushchev was "a brilliant failure''. 

    •  In 2000, William Taubman began his book: “Alone among Soviet rulers, Khrushchev left the Soviet Union better off than when he became its leader”. 

    •  Ian Thatcher (2011) concluded that Khrushchev was very skilled politically – and that he was “constantly intrigued by real-world solutions to real-world problems” & had a clear idea of how they could be implemented. 

And whilst it was generally recognised that Khrushchev’s reforms had failed, historians started to acknowledge the barriers and opposition that he faced – notably from a foot-dragging bureaucracy, and the vested interests of the Nomenklatura (senior officials) … to the point where, in 1962, Khrushchev had warned the Presidium that the country was stagnating and that “there are failings in our structures”. 

Most recently

In 2022, American historian Joseph Torigian addressed head-on three different negative suggestions about Khrushchev – i.e. the claims that he was a weak and foolish leader, constrained by the Soviet system, and removed for incompetence, asserting:

“Khrushchev was … an exceptionally powerful leader.  He did not bargain or negotiate with potential competitors.  Second, Khrushchev's vulnerabilities were, to a significant extent, the result of bad luck.  Third, and most important, Khrushchev was not ultimately removed for either of those reasons but for a much narrower one.  His deputies had tolerated broken promises and setbacks for years.  Only the fear that Khrushchev intended to end their political lives forced them to take the highly risky step of moving first.”