Acts of Nikita the wonderworker. Part of 1. Khrushchev and Kazakhstan
24 January 1959 was held an extraordinary closed joint meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Board of Ministers of the USSR. On it, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, shortly before that, at the end of March 1958, who replaced Marshal N.А. Bulganin as the head of the Council of Ministers said that “the borders between many republics and regions are irrational.” “Some have huge territories and some are“ buried ”within narrow borders. We need to quickly correct these disproportions: we have already begun this work, but it is slowly moving ". Soon they began to draft a corresponding resolution of the Central Committee of the Party and the Union Council of Ministers.
But it all began not only and not so much with the transfer of the Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR at the beginning of 1954. In the middle - the second half of the 1950-s, the Lipetsk region was established, which was carved out of the territories of the Tambov, Voronezh, Oryol and Ryazan regions. Then the Kalmyk ASSR was recreated, which was immediately transferred to a number of contiguous districts of the Rostov and Stalingrad regions, the Stavropol region and the Volga port of Burunny in the Astrakhan region, which, from 1961, has the “national” name Tsagan-Amman.
A little later, a number of areas of the Smolensk, Bryansk and Kaliningrad regions were transferred with the same surprising generosity to neighboring Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania. Finally, the main fuel and energy base of the Moscow Coal Basin and, we emphasize, of the entire non-chernozem region of the Russian Federation - then still the Stalinogorsk District of the Moscow Region was transferred to the Tula Region.
But there were much larger projects. And everything had to start, in fact, from Kazakhstan - it was this republic that Khrushchev considered too large in territory. Khrushchev not once admired the grain successes of Kazakhstan, achieved in the first virgin years. The republic received high awards, and Khrushchev, in his speeches, regularly called for learning from Kazakhstani virgin landsmen.
But over time, Nikita Sergeevich began to fear many other things, and not only the already formed "anti-party group" headed by Molotov, and a little later - the colossal authority of Marshal Zhukov. The fears of the first secretary of the Central Committee grew stronger in relation to the same Kazakhstan. And the talk in this case was not at all about nationalism, the logic was completely different - they say, the virgin records too much strengthened the authority of the leadership of the Kazakhstan SSR.
Kazakhstan by that time not only became the main grain base of the USSR, and the Kazakh SSR was not only the largest territorial union republic after the RSFSR. It was in Kazakhstan that such strategically important objects as the Baikonur cosmodrome and the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site were located. And all these factors in the aggregate, according to Khrushchev, could have prompted the Kazakh authorities to try to change something in the top Soviet leadership. For example, we could talk about the "de-Ukrainianization" of the party Central Committee after Stalin’s departure.
Although in reality there was not even a hint of such attempts, Khrushchev decided to “obkranat” Kazakhstan territorially in advance. The fact that Kazakhstan is “too big in its territory”, Nikita Sergeevich managed to complain in February of 1959 in private conversation with the then head of Azerbaijan, Dashdemir Mustafayev.
However, even in the fall of 1956, Moscow decided to transfer to Uzbekistan an extensive Bostandyk district of about 420 thousand hectares. It was one of the most fertile areas in the south-east of Kazakhstan, but the government of the republic preferred only to "gently" dispute this decision. It seems that Kazakhstan decided to avoid radical personnel decisions by Khrushchev, who, as is known, did not stay with this. But in 1965, half of this territory, on the orders of the new leadership of the USSR after Khrushchev, was returned to Kazakhstan.
In September, 1960, Khrushchev invited the then Kazakh leaders to Moscow - the secretary of the republican Central Committee of the party, Dinmukhamed Kunayev, and the head of the Council of Ministers, Zhumabek Tashenev. He told them that along with the creation in the same year of the “Tselinny Krai” as part of all North Kazakhstan regions, it would be necessary to think about transferring a number of other territories to Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.
Say, such a large territory of Kazakhstan, although under the "Tselinny Krai" left almost a third of it, significantly slows down its socio-economic development. The “virgin land”, which existed from December 1960 until October 1965, inclusive, was only formally part of Kazakhstan, but in fact was subordinate to the leadership of not even the RSFSR, but the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
D. Kunaev, together with Z. Tashenev, as might have been expected, came out strongly against. But Kunaev was removed from his post only in 1962, and after Khrushchev’s resignation, he again headed the Kazakhstani Communist Party. Kunaev, thus, received a kind of calculation from Brezhnev and his colleagues for the unequivocal support of the plot against Khrushchev. Dinmukhamed Kunaev remained the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan up to the 1986 year, when almost all those who had once “shot” Khrushchev had already gone into another world.
Zhumabek Tashenev was removed from the central governing bodies of the republic earlier - already in 1961, but he was not destined to return to high positions after the resignation of Khrushchev. Historians from Kazakhstan are convinced that the Kremlin was very afraid of the politically influential tandem Kunaev-Tashenev.
In this regard, characteristic information of the national portal on stories Kazakhstan's "Altynord" from 14 July 2014 G.: "At that time Khruschev was obsessed with the obsession to cut off land in the north, south and west from Kazakhstan and distribute them to its neighbors. Five northern grain regions were to go to Russia, Mangyshlak oil fields to Turkmenistan or Azerbaijan, cotton areas - Uzbekistan.
In Uzbekistan, they were not shy in thanking Khrushchev. Third left - Communist Party ideologist Mikhail Suslov
At a meeting of the party’s collective property of the Kazakh SSR in Akmolinsk, which later became Akmola, Khrushchev said: “There is one urgent question about the land area in the republic. With Comrade Kunaev and the heads of the regions (which? - Note of the author), we have already exchanged views on this matter: they support our proposal. "
The latter was frank, very characteristic of the Khrushchev style of leadership, falsification. At the same time, Comrade Khrushchev warned: "If it comes to that, we can make a decision without your consent." But a few delegates voted for the proposed Khrushchev at this event: the overwhelming majority chose to abstain.
And in the spring of 1961 in the barracks of the military camp in the Akmola region "a large republican meeting was held, mainly on the same issues. Without giving anyone a word, Khrushchev attacked Kunaev. What did he not say in his address!" But again to no avail.
Finally, in 1962, Moscow started talking about the transfer of the Mangyshlak Peninsula (this is almost 25% of the territory of Kazakhstan) now to Azerbaijan. The idea was filed from Baku, and the rationale was that Mangyshlak had long been engaged in the oil industry. The leadership of Kazakhstan instructed Shahmardan Yesenov, the republican minister of geology, to “fight back”.
The whole region of Mangyshlak was planned to be transferred to Turkmenistan or divided between Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. In the south, almost 45% of the territory of the Chimkent region was transferred to Uzbekistan (half of the transferred territory was returned to Uzbekistan in the middle of 60's). Finally, 4 of the North Kazakhstan virgin areas in 1960 were proclaimed by the Virgin Land: it was planned to announce it under joint management - the condominium of Kazakhstan and the RSFSR
At a joint meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Council and the Council of Ministers of the USSR, the Kazakh minister was able to prove that Kazakhstan can successfully solve not only agricultural, but also industrial tasks. And made those present agree that there are qualified specialists, material resources, and extensive experience in the industrial development of mineral deposits in the republic.
Under Khrushchev, Aleksey Nikolayevich Kosygin headed the Russian Council of Ministers; under Brezhnev, he was already an ally
After a stormy discussion, Alexey Kosygin himself unexpectedly stood on the side of the Kazakh minister. Nobody decided to go against the authoritative chairman of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR, and as a result the project did not take place. Soon, Khrushchev was dismissed (October 1964), and, as is known, not the leading workers of Kazakhstan, but the closest associates of Nikita Sergeevich did it ...
It is also quite characteristic that it was precisely in those years that territorial claims against Kazakhstan began to be made in China, which were first identified in some regional Chinese media in 1963. It is good that the Chinese leadership managed to temper their appetites in time, and did not recall these claims during a period of serious aggravation of relations with the USSR after only a few years.
As for the draft of a joint resolution of the Central Committee of the Party and the Union Council of Ministers on territorial innovations within the USSR, it was prepared with reference to all the same Khrushchev "ideas." They primarily concerned the territories of Kazakhstan and a number of its neighbors. But since those plans did not succeed, the Kremlin obviously decided to hold onto the final version of that document.
We have already noted that the Kazakhstan project, along with the Crimea presented to Ukraine, was by no means the only global national-territorial project of Khrushchev. His innovations were held in Kazakhstan, it would seem, only the first run-in, on the eve of much more significant ethno-territorial redistribution. If even only a little of what was once proposed by Khrushchev was put into practice, this could directly threaten the entire Union of the USSR with a growing aggravation of interethnic relations.
It is possible that the collapse of the Union could have happened much earlier. Judging by a number of signs, Khrushchev and his "team" still could not understand this, but this did not prevent them from continuing with the implementation of their dubious projects. It seems that Brezhnev, together with his comrades, quite well understood from what "perspective" they were saving a great power.
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