Anti-Party Group
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Anti-Party Group
The Anti-Party Group, so called by Nikita Khrushchev, whom it tried to oust from power in June 1957, was neither opposed to the Communist Party nor really a group. Rather, it consisted of three of Khrushchev's main rivals in the party leadership, Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Lazar Kaganovich, themselves hardly united except in their wish to oust Khrushchev, plus a diverse set of allies who supported them at the last minute: titular head of state Klimenty Voroshilov; chairman of the Council of Ministers Nikolai Bulganin; central economic administrators Mikhail Pervukhin and Maxim Saburov; and Dmitry Shepilov, Khrushchev's protégé whom had he had recently promoted to foreign minister.
When Josef Stalin died in March 1953, Malenkov seemed the heir apparent, but Molotov also appeared to be a contender for supreme power. Khrushchev joined with both of them to bring down secret police chief Lavrenty Beria, who was arrested in June 1953 and executed in December. Khrushchev turned next against Malenkov, who was demoted from prime minister to minister of electrification in February 1955, and then against Molotov, who was soon dropped as foreign minister. However, both Malenkov and Molotov were allowed to remain full members of the Party Presidium, leaving them in position to seek revenge against Khrushchev.
The logic of power in the Kremlin, in which there was no formalized procedure for determining leadership succession, largely accounted for this struggle. So did certain policy differences: Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov were particularly dismayed by Khrushchev's "secret speech" attacking Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, as well as by the de-Stalinization process he began in domestic and foreign policy. Malenkov had seemed more open to reform during his stint as prime minister, but although his and Khrushchev's skills could have complemented each other, personal animosity drove them apart. Despite choosing Bulganin to replace Malenkov as prime minister, Khrushchev disdained Bulganin. Pervukhin and Saburov felt threatened by Khrushchev's proposed reorganization of economic administration, which jeopardized their jobs. Shepilov probably betrayed his patron because he thought Khrushchev was bound to lose.
Including seven full members of the Presidium, the plotters constituted a majority. When they moved against Khrushchev on June 18, 1957, they counted on the Presidium's practice of appointing its own leader, leaving the Party Central Committee to rubber-stamp the result. Instead, however, Khrushchev insisted that Central Committee itself, in which his supporters dominated, decide the issue. While Khrushchev and his enemies quarreled, the KGB (Committee on State Security) and the military ferried Central Committee members to Moscow for a plenum that took place from June 22 to 28.
Khrushchev's opponents had no chance once the plenum began. Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich were subjected to a barrage of charges about their complicity in Stalin's terror, including details about Stalinist crimes that were not fully publicized until the late 1980s. Following the plenum, Molotov was exiled to Outer Mongolia as Soviet ambassador, Malenkov to northern Kazakhstan to direct a hydroelectric station, Kaganovich to a potash works in Perm Province, and Shepilov to head the Kyrgyz Institute of Economics. So as not to reveal how many had opposed him, Khrushchev delayed his punishment of the rest of the Anti-Party Group: Bulganin remained prime minister until 1958; Voroshilov was not deposed as head of state until 1960. After the Twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, in which Khrushchev intensified his all-out attack on Stalin and Stalinism, Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich were expelled from the Communist Party.
Bibliography
Linden, Carl A. (1966). Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Micunovic, Veljko. (1980). Moscow Diary, tr. David Floyd. New York: Doubleday.
Resis, Albert, ed. (1993). Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics: Conversations with Felix Chuev. Chicago: I. R. Dee.
Taubman, William. (2003). Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: Norton.
—WILLIAM TAUBMAN
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Anti-Party Group
The Anti-Party Group (Russian: Антипартийная группа, tr. Antipartiynaya gruppa) was a group within the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that unsuccessfully attempted to depose Nikita Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Party in May 1957. The group, named by that epithet by Khrushchev, was led by former Premiers Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov. The group rejected both Khrushchev's liberalisation of Soviet society and his denunciation of Joseph Stalin.
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Motives
The members of the group regarded Khruschev's attacks on Stalin, most famously in the Secret Speech delivered at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 as wrong and hypocritical, given Khrushchev's complicity in the Great Purge and similar events as one of Stalin's favourites. They believed that Khrushchev's policy of peaceful coexistence would leave the Soviet Union open to attack. Additionally, they were protecting their self-interest. Malenkov and Molotov had been removed from their positions as Premier and Foreign Minister the year before. Others feared for their careers and possibly their lives in the continuing de-Stalinisation of Soviet life.
Attempted take-over
The leaders of the group - Malenkov, Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich - were joined at the last minute by Foreign Minister Dmitri Shepilov, whom Kaganovich had convinced that the group had a majority. In fact, in the Presidium the group's proposal to replace Khrushchev as First Secretary with Premier Nikolai Bulganin won with 7 to 4 votes, but Khrushchev argued that only the plenum of the Central Committee could remove him from office. At an extraordinary session of the Central Committee held in late June, Khrushchev argued that his opponents were an "anti-party group". He was backed by Defense Minister Georgy Zhukov, who gave a forceful speech, and was reaffirmed in his position as First Secretary even using the military to bring in supporters of Khrushchev to convince people to support him.[1]
Aftermath
During the stormy meeting of the Central Committee, Zhukov had come close to threatening Khrushchev's opponents with force but the triumphant Khrushchev resisted.
Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich and Shepilov - the only four names made public - were vilified in the press and deposed from their positions in party and government. They were given relatively unimportant positions:
- Molotov was sent as ambassador to Mongolia
- Malenkov became director of a hydroelectric plant in Kazakhstan
- Kaganovich became director of a small potassium factory in the Urals
- Shepilov became head of the Economics Institute of the local Academy of Sciences of Kyrgyzstan
In 1961, in the wake of further de-Stalinisation, they were expelled from the Communist Party altogether and all lived mostly quiet lives from then on. Shepilov was allowed to rejoin the party by Khrushchev's successor Leonid Brezhnev in 1976 but remained on the sidelines.
Khrushchev became increasingly distrusting and in the same year also deposed and expelled Defense Minister Zhukov, who had assisted him against the anti-party group but with whom he increasingly had political differences, alleging an attempted coup. In 1958, Premier Bulganin, the intended beneficiary of the anti-party group's move, was forced to retire and Khrushchev became Premier as well.
Khrushchev's treatment of his opponents marked a departure from earlier practice in Soviet politics (as last seen in 1953 during the purge of Lavrenti Beria) - a development that was followed during later power struggles, such as Khrushchev's own deposition by Brezhnev in 1964 and the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991[citation needed].
See also
References
- ^ "The Anti-Party Group". Soviethistory.org. 1957-05-10. http://www.soviethistory.org/index.php?page=subject&SubjectID=1956antiparty&Year=1956. Retrieved 2011-11-04.
External links
- Khrushchev Expels the 'Anti-Party Group' Central Committee decree on the Anti-Party Group, June 29, 1957
- Russian: Шепилов Д.Т. Непримкнувший. Воспоминания Издательство «ВАГРИУС», 2001. ISBN 5-264-00505-2
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Gale Encyclopedia of Russian History
Encyclopedia of Russian History. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bulganin
(Russian politician)
Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan
(Russian history)
Kliment Efremovich Voroshilov
(Russian history)
Georgii Maximilianovich Malenkov
(Russian politician)
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov
(Russian politician)
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