February 19 marks 65 years since the epoch-making decision of the first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Nikita Khrushchev to transfer the Crimean region of the RSFSR to Ukraine. A lot has already been written about this, although not so long ago the topic was decided, if not to hide, then at least not to advertise. However, few people know that the "transfer" of Crimea was, according to the idea of the Soviet leader (originally from Ukraine), only the first step in a global revision of the structure of the entire USSR.
Nikita Sergeevich decided to promote his much larger-scale territorial projects through a truly strategic decision. More precisely, to start with the project of transferring the Soviet capital to Kiev. According to a number of data, Khrushchev discussed this idea back in the early 60s, primarily with the then head of the Communist Party of Ukraine Pyotr Shelest and the commander of the Kiev military district, Army General Pyotr Koshev. Both fully approved of Khrushchev's plans.
In support of his ideas, Nikita Sergeevich, of course, reminded of Kiev as "the mother of Russian cities." At the same time, he regularly complained about the northern location of Moscow, about its difficult climate. In addition, he believed that the largest cities did not have to be national capitals. Appealing, along with their close analogies, New York - Washington, Melbourne - Canberra, Montreal - Ottawa, Cape Town - Pretoria, Karachi - Islamabad. It is also good that it did not occur to him to try on the laurels of Peter the Great, who, at the cost of incredible efforts, changed the first throne to St. Petersburg.
All Ukrainian regional committees managed to unanimously approve the project, according to a closed poll conducted in Ukraine in 1962. Then a similar poll, also obviously closed, was planned in other union republics. However, according to available data, the leadership of Kazakhstan immediately expressed a negative assessment of this project, which almost lost almost half of its territory in the first half of the 1960s. This was followed by secret letters of a negative plan from the RSFSR, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Moldova.
The latter feared that in this case Ukraine would transform the Moldavian SSR into Ukrainian autonomy, as was already done with Pridnestrovian Moldavia in the pre-war years. A similar reason predetermined the negative position of the leadership of Soviet Belarus. In Minsk, not without reason, it was believed that with the transfer of the capital to Kiev, the replacement of the Belarusian leadership by officials sent from Ukraine cannot be ruled out. In this case, Belarus itself could well have the prospect of becoming a kind of economic "branch" of Ukraine.
In turn, in Central Asia and Azerbaijan, it was believed that if the union capital was transferred to Kiev, then these regions would immediately lose the constantly growing subsidies from Moscow. In addition, Baku feared that in this case the Union Center would pursue a "pro-Armenian" policy. At that time, oil-bearing and therefore not at all poor Azerbaijan was quite satisfied with the secondary position of neighboring Armenia, which functionaries from Yerevan constantly complained about in Moscow. Subsequently, the head of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Armenia, Karen Demirchyan, noted that "Armenia in the Soviet period, especially from the early 60s, played a secondary role in the socio-economic policy of Moscow in South Transcaucasia."
In turn, the leadership of the Baltic republics and Georgia preliminarily approved Khrushchev's "Kiev" idea. The fact is that Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, as well as Georgia, received maximum political and economic autonomy at the end of the 50s, and the local authorities received administrative and managerial autonomy from the center. This was largely due to internal political factors in those regions, since both in the Baltic states and in Georgia, the allied authorities sought to maximize the standard of living, thereby trying to neutralize the recurrences of national separatism there.
In addition, the long-standing, albeit skillfully concealed, dissatisfaction with the "dictate" of Moscow was also evident. The change from Moscow to Kiev was, in fact, regarded from the standpoint of Russophobia and rejection of everything “Soviet”. The local princes were clearly impatient to give an answer to the allegedly carried out by Moscow Russification, especially in the cadres of the lower and middle echelons of the party and economic nomenklatura, although in reality it was only about attempts to strengthen the leadership core.
Many people in Georgia positively assessed the Kiev project from a completely different, unexpected side. The expansion of Georgia's autonomy and its accelerated socio-economic development, as well as the prospect of raising Tbilisi to the level of Moscow, could somehow “compensate” for the “vulnerability of the national and political dignity of Soviet Georgians, as well as the leadership of Soviet Georgia in connection with the discrediting of Stalin and outrage against him. ashes.
Khrushchev could not ignore the consequences of the events in Tbilisi and Gori, which took place after the XX Congress of the CPSU. They showed that local "protest" pro-Stalinism "is already merging with the nationalist underground in Georgia and with the Georgian anti-Soviet emigration. The local nomenclature seriously hoped that with the transfer of the capital to Kiev, the autonomy of Georgia would expand even more. And the fact that this would lead to an intensification of centrifugal trends in the republic, to which the authorities might have to join, was not taken into account.
The authorities of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan did not express their assessments either publicly or in the letters they discovered. But according to the available data, the opinions there were in a ratio of 50 to 50. On the one hand, in Tashkent and Frunze, they were increasingly weighed down by Moscow's orders to record a record increase in sowing and cotton picking. But this was accompanied by generous state subsidies, a significant part of which "settled" in the pockets of the local nomenklatura.
One cannot but take into account the fact that Moscow then with difficulty restrained the plans of Alma-Ata and Tashkent to divide the territory of Kyrgyzstan, which appeared immediately after Stalin's death. The Kyrgyz authorities believed that this division would certainly succeed if Kiev became the union capital. Even because, if only because the adherents of redrawing the internal-union borders will surely become the "runner-up" there. And after all, in those same years, Khrushchev actively lobbied, let us recall, the cutting off of a number of regions from Kazakhstan, which would probably require territorial compensation for him. Most likely, at the expense of a part of Kyrgyzstan.
As Aleksey Adzhubey noted in his memoirs, “what would have happened if Khrushchev had fulfilled his intention to transfer the capital of the country from Moscow to Kiev? And he returned to this topic more than once. It is clear that the prospect of moving from Moscow to Kiev did not at all please the republican and economic nomenclature, which for many years had been concentrated in the renovated and comfortable capital.
It is the nomenclature that seems to have managed to pull off the epic plan on the brakes. It should be understood that he directly threatened the disintegration of the country, because the authorities of many union republics, we repeat, were not inclined to support the replacement of Moscow with Kiev in the status of an all-union capital. Khrushchev and his entourage could not be unaware of these disagreements, but they still tried to impose on the Soviet Union the change of capitals and, as a result, its disintegration …
In conclusion, a very characteristic detail, especially noteworthy today, when there is a demonstrative separation of "Mova" from the relationship with the Russian language. Colonel Musa Gaisin, Doctor of Pedagogy, recalled: “Once I became an unwitting witness to a conversation between Khrushchev and Zhukov in 1945. Nikita Sergeevich said: “It would be more correct to write my surname not through“e”, but as in the Ukrainian language - through“o”. I told Joseph Vissarionovich about this, but he forbade him to do it."
