1934–
A British historian of modern Soviet history
For Stalin, the 'creation of the idea of the perpetual enemy' was indispensable.
Martin McCauley is an Irish-born historian of Soviet and East European politics. A former senior lecturer at UCL's School of Slavonic and East European Studies, he wrote widely on Stalinism, the Khrushchev era, the Cold War, and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. He interpreted the 20th Party Congress speech both as an effort to restore a functioning Party, freeing officials from fear of repression, and as a move in Khrushchev's struggle to weaken rivals.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1953–1956Studied surveying at the University of Westminster
- 1961Studied French civilisation at the Sorbonne in Paris
- 1962–1968Studied at the University of London and earned a PhD
- 1968–1978Senior lecturer at the University of London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies
- 1975Edited and published The Russian Revolution and the Soviet State
- 1976Published Khrushchev and the Development of Soviet Agriculture
- 1995Published The Khrushchev Era: 1953–1964
- 2007Published The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union
Related historical events
The Virgin Lands Debate
McCauley's scholarly core was Soviet agricultural policy under Khrushchev. In 1969 he studied at Moscow's Timiryazev Agricultural Academy, gaining direct exposure to Soviet agrarian affairs, and built his doctoral work and his 1976 book Khrushchev and the Development of Soviet Agriculture: The Virgin Land Programme 1953–1964 on that foundation. The book remains a standard reconstruction of the Virgin Lands debate.
His account frames the debate as a contest between extensive and intensive development. Khrushchev chose to plow up idle steppe in Kazakhstan, western Siberia and the Urals to secure a rapid rise in grain output, while Malenkov argued for raising the productivity of land already under cultivation; Molotov, Kaganovich and other leaders also opposed the scheme as economically unsound. McCauley traced, document by document, how Khrushchev used the strong 1954 harvest to keep raising his targets and quell his critics, while not losing sight of the 1955 drought, the wild swings in output that followed, and the environmental price of monoculture-driven soil erosion.
In his reading the Virgin Lands was not merely an agrarian experiment but a site of power struggle: irritated that Malenkov, not he, was taking credit for agricultural reform, Khrushchev advanced his own bolder plan to undercut a rival's authority. McCauley also noted that Brezhnev, after Khrushchev's ouster, kept the programme going and sought to turn the Virgin Lands into a permanent grain-growing region, showing that its institutional residues outlived Khrushchev himself. He extended this research into The Khrushchev Era (1995) and a 1991 biography, Nikita Khrushchev, his broad interpretations of the Khrushchev years for a general audience.