Nikolai Bulganin - Premiership

Premiership

After Stalin's death in March 1953, Bulganin moved into the first rank of the Soviet leadership, being appointed to the key post of Defense Minister. He was an ally of Nikita Khrushchev during his power struggle with Georgy Malenkov, and in February 1955 he succeeded Malenkov as Premier of the Soviet Union. He was generally seen as a supporter of Khrushchev's programme of reform and destalinization. He and Khrushchev travelled together to India, Yugoslavia and Britain, where they were known in the press as "the B and K show."

During the Suez Crisis he sent letters to the governments of the United Kingdom, France and Israel threatening rocket attacks on London, Paris and Tel Aviv if they did not withdraw their forces from Egypt. However, this was simply a bluff. Krushchev, in his memoirs, admitted the threat was designed simply to divide western opinion, especially since at the time he did not have enough ICBMs to launch the rockets, and in any case he had no intention of going to war in 1956. Furthermore in 1959 US intelligence revealed that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was much smaller than the west had believed, and therefore the Soviets would not have had enough rockets to launch in three different directions. Ironically the threatening letters actually helped the British and French at the United Nations, since they ensured that all of NATO (including the United States) was committed to defend the UK and France from a Soviet attack.

By 1957, however, Bulganin had come to share the doubts held about Khrushchev's reformist policies by the conservative group (the so-called "Anti-Party Group") led by Vyacheslav Molotov. In June, when the conservatives tried to remove Khrushchev from power at a meeting of the Politburo, Bulganin vacillated between the two camps. When the conservatives were defeated and removed from power, Bulganin survived for a while, but in March 1958, at a session of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev forced his resignation. He was appointed chairman of the Soviet State Bank, a job he had held two decades before, but in September Bulganin was removed from the Central Committee and deprived of the title of Marshal. He was dispatched to Stavropol as chairman of Regional Economic Council, a token position, and in February 1960 he was retired on a pension.