The New Leadership
An early if transitory sign of the coming changes was the “collective leadership” that replaced Stalin’s one-man rule. Composed of top party and government functionaries, this rule-by-committee was only a short-lived, transitional phase that allowed a new strongman to establish himself.
Initially, it seemed that Lavrentii Beria, the feared chief of the secret police, might triumph. Hoping to broaden his base of support, Beria signaled the non-Russian nationalities, the Georgians and Ukrainians in particular, that he was willing to grant them major concessions. But Beria overreached himself and paid for his failure with his life (it was, however, the last time that an unsuccessful political rival was executed). For a short while, Georgii Malenkov, a spokesman of the government and technocratic bureaucracy and an advocate of economic reforms, moved into the forefront. But the final winner was Nikita Khrushchev, a man whose career was closely linked with Ukraine.Khrushchev, a Russian, was born in a small village on the Russian-Ukrainian border. A jovial but ruthless party “apparatchik” (functionary), he rose to power thanks to his quick wit, abject subservience to Stalin, and the openings created in the party hierarchy by the purges. As we have seen, in 1938 he was sent to Ukraine to complete the Great Purge and to begin rebuilding the Ukrainian party. A year later he oversaw the incorporation of newly occupied Western Ukraine into the Soviet Union. During the war he helped to organize and lead the Communist partisans in Ukraine. And in the postwar years, Khrushchev supervised the economic reconstruction, the second incorporation of Western Ukraine, and the struggle against the Ukrainian nationalists. Although merciless in fulfilling Stalin’s instructions, Khrushchev gained some personal popularity by paying attention to “local color,” often appearing in Ukrainian embroidered shirts and demonstrating his affection for Ukrainian songs.
After his transfer to Moscow in 1949, Khrushchev retained his close, mutually beneficial relationship with the Ukrainian party. Consequently, it was the first republican party organization that backed him in the struggle for power and it remained his secure base of support. Khrushchev returned the favor. Only months after Stalin’s death, the unpopular Leonid Melnikov, first secretary of the Ukrainian party and a Russian chauvinist, was removed from his post on charges of Russifying higher education in Western Ukraine and discriminating against its local cadres. His replacement was Oleksii Kyrychenko, the first ethnic Ukrainian to hold the post (since then only Ukrainians have held the first secretaryship). Other Ukrainians also received high offices: Demian Korotchenko became head of the republic’s government and Nyky-for Kalchenko chaired the council of ministers. The reign of the “three Ks” was reinforced by other appointments that were pleasing to Ukrainians. The maligned playwright Oleksander Korneichuk and Semen Stefanyk, the son of the famous West Ukrainian novelist, received high government positions. In Western Ukraine, Bohdan Dudykevych, an old prewar Communist leader, was placed at the head of the regional party organization.
These personnel changes were accompanied by an upsurge in the numerical strength of the party in Ukraine: in 1952 it had about 770,000 full and candidate members, but by 1959 its membership was close to 1.3 million – of whom 60% were Ukrainians. In sharp contrast to the days of Stalin, when Ukrainians were discriminated against, it was evident from these promotions and their numerical growth that the Ukrainian Communists were being openly wooed by the new leadership in the Kremlin.
Not only did Ukrainian Communists expand their influence in their own republic, but a number of them rapidly rose to prominence on the all-union level. In the military, Rodion Malinovsky, Andrii Grechko, and Kyrylo Moskalenko attained the exalted rank of marshal of the USSR and the first two also were ministers of defense of the USSR. Volodymyr Semichastny rose to head the all-union secret police; and four Ukrainians – Oleksii Kyrychenko, Mykola Podhorny, Dmytro Poliansky, and Petro Shelest – became members of the eleven-member Politburo, the highest ruling body in the USSR. The main reason for their rise was their close ties with Khrushchev, not the fact that they were Ukrainians. As careerists who sought to rise to the top of the Soviet system, these men generally paid little heed to ethnic loyalties. Nonetheless, their presence at the pinnacles of power attested to the growing importance of Ukrainians and their republic.
Map 27 Administrative division of Soviet Ukraine ca 1960