March 27, 1958 - Communist Party Leader Khrushchev Removed

Following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Union came into a period of transition.  Georgy Malenkov was the dictator's heir as Premier while Stalin's position as First Secretary of the Communist Party went to Nikita Khrushchev.  Other positions were continued by their respective members of the Presidium, the highest committee in the SU.  This separation of powers was defended when Minister of Internal Affairs Lavrentiy Beriya was arrested and executed in secret.  Beriya had headed Soviet security with extensive powers and aided in the spread of Communism throughout Eastern Europe by the overthrow of governments.  Rumors stated that Beriya was working toward a military coup in Moscow itself, and an alliance of Khrushchev and Malenkov managed to defeat him.

The balance of rule was short-lived, however, as both Malenkov and Khrushchev sought to expand their powers.  Malenkov used his centralized government agencies to assert command while Khrushchev worked among the grassroots to encourage devotion from the people.  Gradually, Khrushchev chipped away at Malenkov's powers, popularly opening the Kremlin to the public and creating the Virgin Lands Campaign to create new farmland in areas such as Siberia and Kazakhstan, which led to record harvests in 1956.  Soon Khrushchev defeated Malenkov, organizing his removal and replacing him with Minister of Defense Nikolai Bulganin.

Khrushchev began to institute further reforms and, in 1956 at the 20th Party Congress, gave his "Secret Speech."  Point by point over the course of four hours, Khrushchev gave a description of Stalin's cruelty and abuse of power.  He later recalled, "congress listened to me in silence. As the saying goes, you could have heard a pin drop."  The initial speech was behind closed doors, although it was later repeated slowly to Eastern European leaders and finally published, though stamped "not for press."  Stalin remained an icon, but his reputation was destroyed along with those who had supported him during the Great Purge.  Outrage exploded on both sides, including four days of rioting in Stalin's homeland of Georgia.  Most sentiment supported Khrushchev as a new leader for a new Soviet Union.

Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who had long served under Stalin, received much of the flack from Khrushchev's speech and was demoted.  He joined with other conservatives such as Malenkov and Old Bolshevik Lazar Kaganovich, determined to knock Khrushchev out of power.  They sought a political maneuver, arguing before the Central Committee to remove Khrushchev, but eventual discussion prompted them to ensure that they could remove him before acting.  Molotov approached Premier Bulganin, who wavered and would not give total support as Khruschev controlled the public at large as well as the military under Minister of Defense Georgy Zhukov.  Zhukov and Khrushchev had served together in the Ukraine, and Zhukov had begun the calls for reform and the ousting of Stalin's abuses even before the Secret Speech.  Any action against Khrushchev would be opposed by Zhukov and, in turn, the military he controlled.

It was clear that their efforts would meet with at most partial success unless they ousted Zhukov.  Now, rather than targeting the chairman himself, they began a plot to remove Zhukov from office.  He had risen to great new heights, becoming the most decorated figure in the Soviet military.  After a meeting of the Presidium in June of 1957 when the general was granted full membership in the Presidium, Molotov mentioned to Khrushchev that Zhukov's fame as Minister of Defense was likely to make him Premier, like Bulganin.  Khrushchev became nervous about losing his engineered popularity due to the fall of Stalinism to Zhukov and began to orchestrate the general's removal, effectively making Khrushchev a conspirator in the plot against himself.  That October, while visiting Albania, Zhukov was voted into forced retirement.

Khrushchev began pushing for military reform, attempting to undo Zhukov's policy of the political agencies of the military reporting to commanding officers before the Communist Party.  The move lost him a great deal of support politically as it became evident he was consolidating power.  By the beginning of spring the next year, the Presidium voted to remove him as they had Zhukov.  Khrushchev was demoted to managing agricultural materials in the Ukraine, where he would live out the rest of his life.

With the conservatives back in control of the Soviet Union, they attempted to recast the nation away from Khrushchev's policies.  The Virgin Lands Campaign began to fail, leading to a new campaign of improving production on existing land and increasing sophistication in communal farms.  The use of tanks in Hungary in 1956 was seen as widely unpopular, and the USSR was saved from international scorn only by the timely seizure of the Suez Canal.  Molotov set to work rebuilding the Soviet image, capitalizing on Russian advantages in the Space Race to encourage communist action in other countries as Colonialism ended.  Relations with Mao's China improved, and gradually China, Mongolia, North Korea and later countries in Southwest Asia were inducted into the Warsaw Pact.

As Communism spread, the West became increasingly nervous.  In 1960, an American U2 spy plane was shot down, but long talks at the Four Powers Summit enabled the East and West to divide up the world into agreed upon spheres of influence.  The Cuban-Turkish Missile Crisis tested the agreement, which brought about suspicious but peaceful coexistence as both sides removed weapons from near the other's border.  The twentieth century continued, and the Soviet economy stagnated under conservative rule and eventually gave way to introductions of minor capitalism through East Germany and Poland.  Similar experiments went forward in China after the death of Mao.  Liberalization proved to be beneficial for the Communist nations, who thrived while the economies of the West struggled to recuperate from the recessions of the 1970s.  Massive expenditures in governments such as Britain and America proved beneficial for a time in the 1980s, but, by the 1990s, attention shifted to the Communists, who by 2010 were the world economic leaders as the West attempted to repay its massive tax capital.

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In reality, the "Anti-Party Group," as they were dubbed by Khrushchev during speeches in his defense, did not wait to gain support from the military.  Their action to remove Khrushchev was supported in the Presidium, but the meeting of the Central Committee supported him, especially Zhukov, who gave an affirming speech that the military backed Khrushchev.  The political careers of Khrushchev's opponents were ended as Khrushchev went on to become Premier; Molotov was sent as ambassador to Mongolia, Malenkov was made director of a hydroelectric plant, and Kaganovich became director of a potassium factory.  Later, Khrushchev would be overthrown by conservative elements in 1964 under Leonid Brezhnev.

November 15, 1957 – Khrushchev Offers to Share Technology

In a move that many who knew him considered shockingly uncharacteristic (and believed to have been caused by advisers warning against words antagonizing opponents as had caused massive uprising in Hungary), Russian First Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev said during an interview with an American reporter that he would be willing to share missile technology with the United States, who clearly did not have the same ICBM capabilities as the Soviets. "If she had, she would have launched her own Sputnik," Khrushchev noted, recalling the Russian success of being the first people to put an artificial satellite into orbit some six weeks before on October 4. Later in the interview, given as part of the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, he discussed East-West relations and noted that neither side wanted war, but that the Soviets would win if one began.

The interview came just days after the Soviets had hurriedly launched Sputnik 2, which brought the first living creature into orbit, a dog named Laika. She proved that living creatures could survive weightlessness and opened the door for human scientific exploration of space. It also came after the humbling Gaither Report was leaked to the press. Assembled by the Security Resources Panel of the President's Science Advisory Committee, the report showed that the United States was far behind the Soviets on missile technology. After a decade of not working toward that end, the US had as its only defense the system of bomb shelters that were hardly effective if a large-scale war erupted.

The American populace continued to reel from the shocking news of Soviet superiority. Only a decade ago, the USA had been unquestionably the most powerful nation in the world with the A-bomb born out of the Manhattan Project. At the end of the war in 1945, Operation Paperclip sent OSS agents throughout Germany picking up Nazi scientists such as Werner von Braun and capturing what technology they could. Many of these scientists came to work for the Americans (some even illegally imprisoned at places such as P.O. Box 1142), and an inter-continental ballistic missile project was begun in 1946 by Consolidated-Vultee with its MX-774. The program was shut down a couple of years later as conservative feelings overtook post-war America, and it would not be until after the shocking launch of Sputnik that the Americans would reawaken.

Embarrassed and shocked by the Russians, Project Vanguard was quickly put into place by the Eisenhower administration to lift the Explorer Program, picking up proposals from the US Navy and Army that had been shelved due to lack of interest and funding. With the disastrous launch attempt of the Vanguard TV3 on December 6, 1957, where the three-stage rocket rose four feet before losing thrust, collapsing, and exploding, American public turned back to Khrushchev's offer. Many took it as if he were an older brother offering help with homework, while others thought he was twisting the diplomatic knife with a pandering, impossible offer. The world was in the midst of the International Geophysical Year sharing science on geomagnetism, oceanography, etc, and leaders internationally began to criticize the Americans for not taking up Khrushchev's offer to take up an American satellite on a Russian rocket. Much of the hooplah was settled with the launch of Explorer 1 on January 31, 1958, and then rocketry settled to a calmer scientific route with military espionage riding closely, secretly behind.

International relations improved somewhat between the USA and USSR, later resulting in the Nuclear Limitation Treaty in 1962 avoiding a massive stockpile of weapons beyond the point of Mutually Assured Destruction. Despite Khrushchev's constant assurances that communism would bury capitalism and colonialism, the Soviet Union would eventually fall in 1992, but not until after the success of the Buran shuttle system, launched in 1988 on the anniversary of Khrushchev's speech that began a time of peaceful coexistence in orbital space above the simmering Cold War. With an international space station being pieced together by Russian rockets with American engineered segments, long term space habitation is gradually being explored. Scientists hope to eventually put a man on the moon, where probes and flyby satellites have already taken a great deal of data, but cost and lack of public incentive have kept humans home.


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In reality, Khruschev challenged America with, "Let's have a peaceful rocket contest just like a rifle-shooting match, and they'll see for themselves." The words would help begin the Space Race in which the Americans would work to catch up with and surpass the Soviets, culminating with the American Moon landing on July 20, 1969. Due to cost and recent catastrophic N1 rocket failures, Khrushchev determined that the Soviets would not make further plans to attempt a manned moon landing, and even the Russian shuttle program, which emulated the Americans from a decade before, would never launch more than an unmanned test mission.