“You Don’t Know Khrushchev Well” The Ouster of the Soviet Leader as a Challenge to Recent Scholarship on Authoritarian Politics

Abstract

The ouster of Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964 was a key moment in the history of elite politics in one of the most important authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century. Yet political scientists and historians have long seemed uninterested in Khrushchev's downfall, regarding it as the largely “inevitable” result of his supposedly unpopular policies. Archival sources that have recently come to light cast serious doubt on this assessment and demonstrate new ways of measuring contingency. By showing the countermeasures Khrushchev could have taken, the importance of timing, and the sense among the plotters that their move was highly risky, this article demonstrates that Khrushchev's defeat was far from preordained. The lesson of October 1964 is not that policy differences or failures lead inexorably to political defeat, but that elite politics in Marxist-Leninist regimes is inherently ambiguous, personal, and, most importantly, highly contingent.