The man who some say could have prevented both the Soviet stagnation of the 70s and the disastrous perestroika of the 80s. Had he won the battle for power.
Describing such a figure, a certain name may have popped into your head - Stalin. After all, who doesn’t enjoy a bit of conspirology about what really happened on March 5, 1953.
In fact, it is quite noteworthy that any discussion about the Soviet Union inevitably turns to the figure of Joseph Stalin.
Stalin neither founded nor ended the USSR. In fact, the Stalinist period of the Soviet Union was unique for a number of reasons: invasion and apocalyptic war, hundreds of thousands killed in purges, and famine. None of these things occurred in the four decades of Soviet rule after Stalin.
Stalin’s symbolic significance is both powerful and mysterious. The sway his name exercises long after his death must mean something.
And leaving aside the squabbling of some socialist sects, Stalin’s name never lost its divisive power within the Soviet elite. Decades after his death, rival clans in the Soviet elite would still call each other ‘Stalinists’. In a sense, the name only became more powerful.
Why?
Today’s article is not about Stalin, but the man called by many the Soviet Union’s last potential ‘new Stalin’. Alexandr Shelepin. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn for instance, who hated Shelepin, later gave such a judgment as to Shelepin’s ‘Stalinism’.
According to Shelepin’s biographer, had he won the struggle for leadership in the 1960s, he could have saved the Soviet Union:
Shelepin represented the young, educated segment of the bureaucracy that had come to government positions after the war. They believed that the economy needed renewal, reforms, and above all, technical modernization. They wanted economic reforms while maintaining a strict ideological line. This was roughly the path that China later took under Deng Xiaoping. The young party leaders supported Kosygin and Shelepin. If Shelepin had become the head of the country, the Soviet Union would have, so to speak, followed a Chinese path.
In my last article, I went into Shelepin’s attempts to repair relations with China. They had been damaged in part because of Khruschev’s 1960 denunciation of Stalin. Stalin continues to be respected by the Communist Party of China leadership to this day.
In fact, calling Shelepin a ‘Stalinist’ is somewhat incorrect. Yes, his career bloomed under Stalin. But Shelepin, then a figure in the youth communist league Komsomol, had nothing to do with Stalin’s actual policies. In 1957, Shelepin played an enthusiastic role in purging Stalin’s old allies in their bid to retake power, and in 1960, he was just as vocal in his support for Khrushev’s famous criticism of Stalin.
So why was Shelepin called a Stalinist?
Vibes, one might say. His nickname ‘Iron Shurik’ even resembled the nom de guerre Stalin, which comes from ‘stal’, the word for steel.
Indeed, it was because Shelepin possessed something that few Soviet leaders after Stalin seemed to have — principles.
You don’t have to love Stalin to believe he had principles. It is a popular position that human lives are best preserved by pragmatism, that idealism only ever gives rise to repression and dystopia.
The alternative position also exists, best expressed by the philosopher Alain Badiou in his 1975 book Theory of the Subject:
[Anti-idealist pragmatism] is the surest road towards the worst. When one abdicates universality, one obtains universal horror.
The post-soviet world, freed of principles and beliefs, is surely a good example of that.
‘Stalinism’, if anything, referred to Shelepin’s belief that the Soviet Union required a centralized strategy. A strategy, an idea, by definition cannot be universally approved. The free market has universal approval - everyone can find a product to their liking. But a strategy requires the setting of priorities. Not everyone might agree.
In contrast, Shelepin’s great adversary, Leonid Brezhnev, was much less idealistic. Instead of bold changes, Brezhnev proposed the easy life. Something everyone can agree to. The Soviet Union drifted into decentralized fiefdoms, with each local party boss doing as he wished.
And I won’t deny that as an ordinary Soviet citizen, there was no better life than that of the Brezhnev years. But at what cost?
Today, we’ll take a look at three key events in the Brezhnev-Shelepin struggle that took place in 1965.
To begin with, the first ever Victory Day parade, and the differing interpretations of Stalin and 1945 held by the competing politicians.
The other two events concern Ukraine, Brezhnev’s home turf. First, Shelepin’s attempt to criticize corruption in Odessa, much to Brezhnev’s displeasure. Second, Shelepin’s equally unwanted criticism of Ukrainian nationalist policies conducted by the head of the Ukrainian Communist Party. This also involves some fiery speeches by Shelepin on the position of Russians in Crimea.
Next, we will take a look at Brezhnev’s top secret wiretap operation on Shelepin, and what this reveals about the true role of the KGB in the Soviet halls of power - a less powerful institution than is often assumed. Finally, we will end by examining Shelepin’s proposed economic reforms and his spirited time in charge of Soviet trade unions.
Rise of the Dnepropetrovsk mafia
Nowadays, the Soviet Union is castigated as a colonial, Russian project. In reality, by 1967 the Politburo was split evenly between Ukrainians and Russians - 5 to 5.
There were 11 full members of the Politburo, with the Ukrainians being Leonid Brezhnev, Nikolai Podgorny, Andrei Kirilenko, Dmitry Polyansky, and Petro Shelest. The Russians were Alexei Kosygin, Mikhail Suslov, Gennady Voronov, Alexander Shelepin, and the Belarusian Kirill Mazurov, who had joined them. The eleventh was a Latvian, Arvid Pelshe.
Another common narrative is that Stalin and ‘Stalinism’ represents an extreme Russian chauvinism against all part of the Soviet Union outside of Moscow. Shelepin, a Russian, is also sometimes identified with the ‘Russian nationalist’ fraction of the Soviet elite.
Brezhnev, in contrast, was from the Ukrainian industrial city Dnepropetrovsk, today renamed ‘Dnipro’. Brezhnev’s rise heralded the meteoric ascent of the so-called Dnepropetrovsk clan, which I wrote about here. It gained a remarkable over-representation in the top posts of the Soviet Union. And after 1991, it only grew in power. 2014, the famous Euromaidan revolution, was in many respects a victory of the Dnepropetrovsk mafia over its competitors. As was Zelensky’s election in 2019.
But the struggle between Shelepin and Brezhnev was certainly not ‘national’. Brezhnev was a Russian-speaker with nothing in common with Ukrainian ethno-nationalists. And Shelepin was an anti-revisionist Marxist who despised any form of ‘bourgeois nationalism’.
At stake was a political question.
Shelepin had great ambitions of modernizing Soviet Union, and for this some degree of centralized control was necessary. Brezhnev, in contrast, represented the vast middle sections of the bureaucracy, who longed for little more than a comfortable existence managing their local fiefdom.
This political difference manifested itself in other ways as well. Shelepin, the Komsomol ideologue, deeply resented Brezhnev’s disregard for ideological matters. He told Gorbachev’s assistant Valery Voldin the following:
“Theoretically, Brezhnev was poorly educated. Apparently, he hadn’t read Lenin. I became convinced of this, for example, when I worked in Zavidovo. He invited me there while we were preparing the report for the 24th Party Congress. I was astonished — he didn’t know even the most basic works of Lenin. And he didn’t read literature either. Apart from Krokodil magazine, he read nothing at all. I became convinced that Brezhnev never had any ideas, suggestions, or thoughts of his own — I can’t recall a single one. The only thing he would say was, ‘Maybe we could replace this word with another.’ That was the extent of his role in preparing the report for the Congress…”
Leonid Zamyatin, a ‘hardline’ Soviet diplomat and ambassador to the UK, agreed with this assessment of the relationship between the two:
Shelepin saw him that way too. Brezhnev was at best a regional-level functionary, not the head of a vast state — primitive, incapable of stringing two or three thoughts together, with no theoretical knowledge whatsoever. All his speeches were written for him…
Alexei Adzhubei, a Soviet journalist closely allied with Shelepin, believes that this led to an underestimation of Brezhnev:
Shelepin didn’t think much of Brezhnev. In terms of strength of character, Brezhnev wasn’t even close to Shelepin — ‘Iron Shurik,’ as he was called in his inner circle… Many things promised Shelepin victory in the upcoming struggle with Brezhnev. He was preparing for it. But he didn’t take into account that brute strength can be broken not only by greater strength, but also by cunning — and in that, he was no match for Brezhnev.
Indeed, Brezhnev’s Dnepropetrovsk mafia lived up to that great stereotypes of Ukrainians as cunning schemers. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, incidentally.
In the 18th century, Ukrainians also rose to the highest cabinets of power in Moscow. The Cossack noble Razumovsky clan was renowned for its immense influence over the imperial court and the Empress Elizabeth. Other Cossack nobles also wheedled their way deep into Catherine II’s inner chambers. A topic for another article.
Anyway, back to the 1960s. Shelepin had risen to power in the intellectual climate of the Komsomol. He had received an education at the prestigious IFLIS humanities institute of Moscow. Brezhnev, in contrast, had spent his life engaged in economic management and party intrigues in Ukraine and Moldova.
And as soon as he became General Secretary in 1964, Brezhnev began putting ‘his’ people in positions of power. But unlike Shelepin, whose allies were chosen on an ideological basis, Brezhnev’s allies were simply those he had worked with, often in Dnepropetrovsk.
Vladimir Semichastny, the KGB head closely allied with Shelepin, later said this:
It reached the point of absurdity: Kosygin had five deputies — all from Dnepropetrovsk. Brezhnev’s personnel approach was quite provincial. A joke circulating in Moscow captured this new periodization of Russian history: there was the pre-Petrine period, then the Petrine, and now — the Dnepropetrovsk period (Dopetrovskaya, Petrovskaya, i Dnepropetrovskaya)
Shelepin’s men were very different. Boris Pankin, a high-ranking journalist in the in the 60s and 70s, editor-in-chief of Komsomolskaya Pravda, described the ideology puritanism of the members of the “Shelepin group” as follows:
Shelepin feared above all else ideological heresy, but he believed that the real evil feeding it was bureaucracy, corruption, and the self-indulgence of party and Soviet grandees. He called for a fight against these not for life, but to the death. The rising top of the ‘Dnipropetrovsk mafia’ was for him the embodiment of many of these evils.
The dislike was mutual. Brezhnev hated what he called Shelepin’s ‘disingenuous democratism’, by which he meant Shelepin’s practice of relaxing and eating alongside his subordinates.
And in 1967, Shelepin’s attempt to critically discuss broader economic issues was derailed by the fact that Brezhnev’s friends were to blame:
At an expanded meeting of the Politburo with the participation of local party leaders, the issue of large livestock complexes in the Russian Federation was discussed. Shelepin spoke sharply, criticized the Central Statistical Administration for presenting distorted figures, objected to the elimination of small and medium-sized livestock farms, spoke about the difficult situation in the countryside, and demanded the resignation of the Minister of Agriculture, Vladimir Vladimirovich Matskevich.
Brezhnev had known Matskevich since the post-war years, and they had developed good personal relations. Matskevich got away with a lot.
Therefore, Leonid Ilyich was angered by Shelepin’s words. The next day, Brezhnev called him:
—Can you come to my office now?
When Shelepin arrived, he lashed out at him:
—How should I understand your speech yesterday? Your speech was directed against me!
—Why do you think that?
—What, don’t you know that I am in charge of agriculture? That means everything you said yesterday was against me. Furthermore, what right did you have to propose the dismissal of Matskevich? He is my personal nomenklatura (appointee)!
— Leonid Mlechin, Zhelezny Shurik, page 458
Shelepin’s principles proved no match for Brezhnev’s connections.
1965-1945
The Stalin question reared its head quite interestingly in the 1960s. It was in May 1965 that the first Victory Day Parade was held in Moscow since 1945.
Indeed, the second Victory Day parade was held 20 years after victory. That might sound strange, because the May 9 celebrations became so central to both Soviet and, today, Russian identity.
That’s because the very idea of glorifying Victory above all else wasn’t Stalin’s idea. It was in fact Leonid Brezhnev’s quite genius political invention.
After Brezhnev and Shelepin worked together to remove Nikita Khrushev from power in 1964, Brezhnev found himself at a crossroads. Everyone assumed that he was a minor figure, soon to be replaced as general secretary by the far more intelligent and powerful figure Shelepin, who had the might of the KGB, the Committee of Party Control, and the Komsomol network behind him.
But Brezhnev had something that Shelepin didn’t have — support among the vast ranks of the lower and middle bureaucracy. And his glorification of Victory Day was crucial to that.
Victory Day was obviously a way to try and unite the Soviet Union on the basis of something both shared and glorious. However, victory, as the saying goes, has many fathers. Whose victory was victory day?
