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COLD WAR INTERNATIONAL HISTORY PROJECT BULLETIN 10 5 The Drama of the Plenums : A Call to Arms Khrushchev. You want to turn everything back in order then to take up the axe yourself. Molotov. No, this is not so, com. Khrushchev. I hope that that is not what you want, and moreover, that is not what I want. CC CPSU Plenum, Kremlin, 24 June 1957 by David Wolff n the third week of June 1957, a series of meetings of multiple, serving sometimes as echo (Mikoian: That is the Presidium of the Central Committee of the why Nikita Sergeevich [Khrushchev] blew up. I also I Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU) almost blew up. Voices: Blew up.), sometimes as a prompt found N.S. Khrushchev, the First Secretary, in the minor- (Pospelov: The July 1955 plenum recorded this. Voice: On ity. With a Kremlin coup in the offing, Khrushchev Yugoslavia.), and sometimes for emphasis (Khrushchev: managed to convoke a CC plenary session, whose outcome How much gold did we spend then, com. Malenkov, 200- was not at all certain prior to the meeting’s opening. But 250 tons? Voice. If not more.). Heckling was also part of by the third day, when the epigraph above was spoken, it the job, as was laughing at the right jokes and myriad other was clear that the Army and security organs, together with planned impromptus.4 the CC, would support Khrushchev. Thus, Molotov had no The three essays that begin this section each cover axe at hand and Khrushchev’s concern was purely rhetori- different ground. Vladislav Zubok’s piece most closely cal, a reminder of the true correlation of forces on the captures the core problematic of this Bulletin issue. As plenum floor.1 This kind of showmanship is illustrative of each of Khrushchev’s competitors is expelled from the the theatrical qualities of the plenum transcripts, excerpts inner circles of power, Zubok chronicles the key foreign from which are presented here for the first time in English policy decisions linked to the demotion. Beriia, Malenkov, translation. Additional materials can be found on the Molotov, and Zhukov followed each other down in CWIHP website. dizzying succession. Gael Moullec reminds us that foreign For the most part, the CC CPSU Presidium/Politburo policy and leadership struggle were just a small part of the members staged and took leading roles in the drama.2 issues touched on by the plenums. The social and cultural Under Stalin, and later under Brezhnev, autocratic rule history of the Cold War can also draw from this invaluable produced unanimously-approved speeches and decisions to source. Mark Kramer’s article will be essential reading on be rubber-stamped by the plenum. But during the this topic and for all those planning work in fond 2 at the Khrushchev years, especially between 1953 and 1957, former Central Committee archives in Moscow (now “collective leadership” produced multiple Presidium known as the Center for the Storage of Contemporary scripts to compete on the plenum floor, with the winning Documentation, or TsKhSD) for many years to come. narrative to be determined by the audience. With this in The plenum excerpts themselves help tie together the mind, the selection of cadres for the plenum (to paraphrase various sections of this Bulletin. (Excerpts from the July Stalin) would decide all.3 Of course, the structure of 1953 plenum, at which Beriia was denounced, have CPSU work and promotion was such that all Presidium already appeared in English and are summarized in members had chaired innumerable meetings of the aktiv CWIHP Bulletin 1, and are therefore omitted here.) In and knew all the organizational tricks. But Khrushchev January 1955, the role of Malenkov and Beriia during the was best of all, both at garnering loyalty and placing the 1953 German events took center stage, complementing trustworthy onto the CC. This is not to say, as Mark Christian Ostermann’s essay and accompanying docu- Kramer points out in his essay, that the plenum decisions ments. By July 1955 Molotov and Khrushchev clashed were made in the course of the session. Nonetheless, the over the normalization of relations with Yugoslavia. These plenum discussions provide us with a window into the discussions supplement the Yugoslavia section. Presidium-level discussions that did lead to the key Khrushchev’s “second secret speech” at the Sixth Plenum decisions, just prior to the plenums themselves. of the Polish United Workers’ Party in March 1956 adds Aside from the sharp dialogue generated by clashing context to Stalin’s conversations with Yugoslav leaders. In scripts, another theatrical plenum element is the role of the the part of the Bulletin devoted to Deng Xiaoping and “voices” rising up from the plenum floor to interrupt the Sino-Soviet relations, we often see Deng eager for speaker. Although one can not tell from the transcripts, information about plenum results. Chinese matters, as one suspects that these are generated by loyalists hand- well as wide-ranging foreign policy disagreements, appear picked for their eloquence to play a role somewhere in the June 1957 transcripts.5 Mark Kramer’s essay also between claque and Greek chorus. Their functions are makes clear how extensively the plenum sessions treated 6 COLD WAR INTERNATIONAL HISTORY PROJECT BULLETIN 10 China in the late 1950s and early 1960s. from power in late 1964, the older name, Politburo, was Although the “second secret speech” comes from the reintroduced. 3 Polish archives and the June 1957 plenum materials have This is known in the political science literature by a term been published in Russian and Chinese, the remaining coined by Robert Daniels, the “circular flow of power.” 4 An example where the hecklers clearly found their way excerpts, including extensive citations in the Kramer, through the thick skin to a soft spot follows: Moullec and Zubok essays, come directly from TsKhSD’s 6 Molotov: (quoting Pravda, citing Khrushchev) “If, for in- fond 2. In the spring of 1996, with the preliminary polls stance—N.S. Khrushchev adds as a joke—our [foreign] minister for Russia’s presidential election suggesting that the Gromyko and your secretary [of state] Dulles met, in a hundred Communists might take back power and reclaim their years they wouldn’t agree on anything, and, perhaps, only our archives, CWIHP’s former director James G. Hershberg grandsons would wait long enough to get any results from these launched a special initiative to study and copy these negotiations.” Voice: Read on. Molotov: Read on yourself. documents while available.7 Although the alarm proved Voice. It is being said as a joke there. Molotov: One does not premature, the happy result is that CWIHP was able to play with the authority of the MID of the USSR in front of bourgeois governments. (All examples are drawn from June 1957 gather a substantial collection of plenum records, now on plenum extracts published here or on the CWIHP website.) deposit and available for general use in the reading room 5 This helps to explain why the transcripts of the June 1957 of the National Security Archive at The George Washing- plenum sessions, first printed in Istoricheskii arkhiv 3-6 (1993) ton University as part of READ, the Russian and East and 1-2 (1994) have already appeared in a two-volume set in European Archival Database. We hope that the brief Chinese. See Sugong gongchandang zuihou yige “fandang” excerpts and expert commentary assembled here will whet jituan (The CPSU Final “Antiparty” Group) (Beijing, 1997). The appetites for more systematic exploration, both in Wash- introduction by one of Mao’s Russian translators (who is also ington and Moscow, of this important Cold War source. often present at Deng’s meetings with the Soviets), Yan Mingfu, has since been reprinted twice in the popular press. See Wenhui dushu zhoubao 4 October 1997 and Zuojia wenzhai 24 October 1 The following morning, on June 25, Khrushchev staged a 1997. similar reminder with a reference to Molotov’s wanting “to return 6 TsKhSD (Tsentr khraneniia sovremennoi dokumentatsii) = to some of Stalin’s bad methods.” Other comments by Center for Storage of Contemporary Documentation. This is the Khrushchev on Stalin’s methods can be found in the Warsaw former CC CPSU working archive. “Second Secret Speech” introduced in this Bulletin by Leo 7 CWIHP associates participating in this initiative included Ray Gluchowski. Garthoff, Hope Harrison, James G. Hershberg, Mark Kramer and 2 Starting from the 19th Party Congress in October 1952, the Vladislav Zubok. Politburo was renamed the Presidium. With Khrushchev’s fall More Evidence on Korean War Origins from the July 1955 CPSU Plenum [Ed.Note: During the past five years the CWIHP Bulletin has hosted important new findings on the origins of the Korean War. This excerpt from the plenums, though present in the verbatim record, was later expunged from the internal-circulation print version, since it so clearly contradicts the Soviet Union’s official pronouncements. Further East-bloc documentation on the Korean War can be found in Bulletin 3, pp.1, 14-18; Bulletin 4, p. 21; Bulletin 5, pp. 1-9; Bulletin 6-7, pp. 30-125; and Bulletin 8-9, pp. 237-242.] Khrushchev. Viacheslav Mikhailovich [Molotov], this smells a bit hostile to us [nemnozhko ot vrazhdebnogo nam v etom otnoshenii popakhivaet]. Viacheslav Mikhailovich, if you, as minister of foreign affairs, analyzed a whole series of our steps, [you would see that] we mobilized people against us. We started the Korean War. And what does this mean? Everyone knows this. [Anastas] Mikoian. Aside from our people, in our country. Khrushchev. Here, Viacheslav Mikhailovich, this must be borne in mind; everything must be understood, everything analyzed, [and] only then can one come to the correct conclusion.
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