In 1964, Khrushchev, who was on vacation on the Black Sea, was suddenly urgently recalled, but what awaited Khrushchev after getting off the plane was the "trial" of various forces, and Khrushchev was forced to "voluntarily retire" under the vote of the presidium, and it was Khrushchev's "confidant" Brezhnev who took over Khrushchev's leadership position.
What's going on here? Why did the Soviet leadership change overnight?
This has to be fromKhrushchev's path to powerSpeaking of.
In 1953, the supreme leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, died in Moscow, and the supreme power of the Soviet Union was divided into three. Malenkov became the chairman of the Council of Ministers and the country's prime minister, and took control of the political power of the Soviet Union, Beria, as the leader of the KGB, held the economic power of the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev, who served as the first secretary of the ** commissioner, had limited his power to propaganda and ideology, and was the weakest of the three.
Originally, Khrushchev had no chance of becoming the supreme leader of the Soviet Union, but his rivals were carried away by power one by one. Beria, who had seized economic power, began a series of liberalization reforms, freed more than a million political criminals, and brewed the merger of East and West Germany into a neutral Germany, and the economic resumption of the NEP. This perestroika caused opposition within the party and among the ** people, fearing that Beria's perestroika would push the USSR into the abyss.
So Beria was overthrown under the leadership of Khrushchev and Malenkov, and he was executed for treason, counter-revolution.
Khrushchev then asked the court to investigate the 1949 Leningrad case, which eventually involved Malenkov. In 1954, Khrushchev won the support of a large number of people in the party and within the party, and eventually Malenkov was removed from the post of prime minister, and Khrushchev became the country's top leader.
Khrushchev, who succeeded in ascending to power, began to flex his muscles and began to reform the Soviet Union, but it was these reforms that led to Khrushchev's eventual **.
Economically, in order to revitalize the Soviet economy, catch up with the United States as soon as possible and break the solidification of the previous Stalinist model. Khrushchev first decided to reclaim a large amount of wasteland in Kazakhstan and Siberia, and 100,000 volunteers settled in the eastern region.
Although this act brought an increase in grain production in the Soviet Union for a short time, by the 60s, due to the ecological damage caused by the problem of land reclamation, hundreds of thousands of hectares of land were seriously eroded by wind and sand, and could not be cultivated.
In addition to this, in 1959 Khrushchev forced all collective farms to purchase agricultural machinery and mechanized production, proposing to catch up with the United States in all aspects of production, most notably by expanding corn production and requiring per capita meat and milk production to catch up with the United States.
However, this did not bring about a substantial change in the Soviet Union, as a result of which the agricultural machinery purchased on the collective farms was fully utilized, and the Soviet Union was unable to complete the mechanization of agricultural production, and blindly expanded the production of corn without taking into account the influence of the natural environment. In addition, it is mandatory to produce per capita, which forces the bottom ** to buy products from all over the country to make up the number.
Khrushchev's economic reforms not only did not change the extensive management and low efficiency of agricultural production in the USSR. On the contrary, the economy of the Soviet Union fell further, and the people's lives and national interests were damaged one after another.
In terms of political reform, Khrushchev first abolished many of the laws of the Stalin period at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Union, and cracked down
However, in his attempts to reform the Stalin model, Khrushchev did not explore a new model suitable for the development of the Soviet Union, which led to economic and political turmoil in the Soviet state.
What's more critical is that the blow to *** made Khrushchev fall into the path of **autocracy.
Khrushchev, after integrating political and party powers, fell into a hall of words and unlimited expansion of power, and engaged in self-worship while opposing Stalin.
Statues of Khrushchev were hung all over the country, there were *** a lot of films about Khrushchev everywhere, and books began to worship Gruschev. It is not so much that Khrushchev is against ***, but that he wants to replace Stalin as the idol of the nation.
These reforms, although they caused popular discontent, still could not shake the key position of Khrushchev's leader.
ButThe real reason for Khrushchev **StillThe interests of the core interest groups of the Soviet Union were touched.
At that time, the Soviet Union implemented a lifelong cadre system, and the Soviet Union's high-level personnel had long lost their ambition and ambition, and in order to change this status quo, Khrushchev decided to rotate a certain proportion of cadres at all levels within the Soviet Union, breaking the shackles of the cadre tenure system.
At the same time, Khrushchev also cut the welfare benefits at all levels, such as removing all garages and economic subsidies. Such an intra-party reform seriously violated the interests of all strata of the Soviet Union, and led to a large number of ** dissatisfaction with Khrushchev.
The voices against Khrushchev are also getting louder and louder, and these people are constantly gathering to stand on the opposite side of Khrushchev, and many of them are high-level ** were pulled up by Khrushchev, and in the end it was under their planning that Khrushchev was forced **.
A coup d'état is not something that can be done by a group of oppositionists, the key is that the support of the army is needed.
The most important failure of Khrushchev was the military reform.
After Khrushchev came to power, his ability to control the armed forces was already average, but he attached too much importance to the role of strategic nuclear power, and began to drastically reduce the Soviet navy and army, disarming more than 2 million people from 1955 to 1957, 300,000 in 1958, and 1.2 million again in 1961.
This caused the Soviet army to have serious dissatisfaction with Khrushchev, and at the same time, in order to reduce spending, Khrushchev decided to develop high-tech **, and launched an unprecedented space race with the United States.
This series of actions seriously damaged the interests of the Soviet military leadership, which caused the military that had originally supported Khrushchev to also oppose Khrushchev, and Khrushchev's opposition greatly increased the success of the coup after gaining the support of the army.
The ideological reforms also deprived Khrushchev of his last support.
If the population has enough support for the leader, even if the opposition wants to carry out a coup d'état, it will be difficult for it to succeed. Khrushchev's failed economic reforms made life difficult for the Soviet public, but the excessive revision of ideology deprived Khrushchev of the last shred of support at home.
After Khrushchev came to power, he became the first Soviet leader to visit the United States, and although it was still in the Cold War at that time, Khrushchev advocated a détente with Europe and actively sought communication with the United States and Western capitalist countries.
Such an act of Khrushchev naturally aroused the discontent of domestic communism, which saw it as a compromise with capitalism. At the same time, when dealing with his comrades in the communist camp, Khrushchev's implementation of great power hegemony also made other socialist countries dare not speak out, so after the coup d'état in the Soviet Union, Eastern European countries did not support Khrushchev.
In 1964, believing that he was in power, Khrushchev flew to a recuperation center on the Black Sea for a vacation. It was also a favorite holiday destination for Soviet leaders and top leaders, not only for its beautiful surroundings, but also for its large number of luxury facilities.
On October 12, 1964, the Presidium of the USSR convened a meeting in Khrushchev's absence and unanimously adopted a decision to remove Khrushchev from office.
After the conference, all Khrushchev's powers were hollowed out. That night, Khrushchev received a letter from Brezhnev asking Khrushchev to return to Moscow as soon as possible under the pretext of attending an agricultural conference.
Although Khrushchev was very dissatisfied, he returned to Moscow by plane. The KGB took control of Khrushchev as soon as he got off the plane, and on the second day of the presidium meeting, the opposition accused Khrushchev of the mistakes he had made in the past 10 years, and Khrushchev, who had lost power, was powerless in this coup.
Finally, on October 14, 1964, Khrushchev stepped down from the position of supreme leader of the Soviet Union by signing a long-prepared statement requesting retirement due to illness.
But for Khrushchev, this was already a blessing in disguise.
You must know that Brezhnev did not intend to get Khrushchev ** by coup d'état at first, but was ready to assassinate Khrushchev. They had planned to bribe Khrushchev's personal chef and poison Khrushchev's usual food, so that Khrushchev was poisoned to death.
But Khrushchev's personal chef had followed Khrushchev from the Second World War, and Brezhnev was afraid that the chef would leak the plans.
So he put forward Plan B, that is, to manipulate Khrushchev's plane back to Moscow to create the illusion of an air crash. Although the method was good, the consequences were very serious, and Khrushchev, as the supreme leader of the Soviet Union, would inevitably trigger an investigation by the KGB organization once he died in a plane crash.
In this way, the truth was easily found out, and Brezhnev and the other partners were not exempt from punishment. In the end, they chose to launch a coup d'état directly, forcing Khrushchev**.
After Khrushchev, Brezhnev sat on the throne of the supreme leader of the USSRAfter Khrushchev's "retirement", all groups in the USSR were reluctant to cede the leadership throne, so they chose Brezhnev, who looked mediocre and easy to control.
However, after taking office, Brezhnev's hardline attitude made Soviet interest groups uncomfortable. Not only did they vigorously disarm the opposition within the party and within the country, but they also further strengthened the Stalinist model of the Soviet Union, which finally overwhelmed the United States in the Cold War in the 70s of the last century.
However, he also deprived the Soviet Union of its last chance to turn around, and the solidification of interest groups and the continued deformity of the country's economic development led to the eventual disintegration of the Soviet Union, neither Khrushchev's perestroika nor Brezhnev was able to save this communist giant.