Aftermath of the Berlin Crisis in Moscow (PJW)

"Aftermath of the Berlin Crisis in Moscow" is an excerpt from The Dancing Bear: The Soviet Union in the 1960s, written by historian Robert Conquest and published in 1977.

Aftermath
There was an uneasy silence in the Kremlin following Khrushchev's failure at Berlin. Khrushchev had probably known he was already on thin ice. His rivals had forgotten about his failure at Suez in 1956. Khrushchev had just managed to avoid the plot against him then. Now, his opponents were eager to move against him again.

The hardliner Stalinists were nominally led by Alexander Shelepin, at the moment head of the KGB. It was known Shelepin was a major supporter of the worldwide revolution, and so he took the loss at Berlin as a heavy blow. Soon after the crisis, Shelepin began meeting with others to plot the First Secretary's removal. With the KGB loyal to him, Shelepin was sure to cover his movements.

But Khrushchev wasn't a fool. He knew Shelepin would be working against him, so he reassigned him from KGB Chairman to head of Committee of Party and State Control and handed the KGB to Vladimir Semichastny. Khrushchev had miscalculated; he believed Semichastny, a close friend, was more loyal to him than Shelepin, but that was not the case. Semichastny and the senior leaders continued to work with Shelepin, who, as head of this new Committee, essentially had contact with leaders from all enterprises within the Union.

Shelepin was incredibly ambitious. He quickly secured the loyalty of important members of the Presidium: opposition leader Mikhail Suslov, and Chairman of the Presidium Leonid Brezhnev. With the support of the KGB and the Presidium, Shelepin began his move against the First Secretary....