Word: khrushchev
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...There Khrushchev found ten members of the Presidium awaiting him. Immediately Suslov got up and launched a sharp, biting attack against him. He accused Khrushchev of trying to start a new "cult of personality." He cited Khrushchev's inability to control himself, his lengthy, "boring" speeches, his "naive provincial behavior," and his "provocative attitude" toward the Red Chinese. He described Nikita's shoe banging at the United Nations in 1960 as "harmful to the reputation of the Soviet Union throughout the world." And he raised the matter of nepotism. Khrushchev had proposed that his son-in-law, Izvestia...
Suslov's knifework lasted some four hours, but the unkindest cut of all was yet to come. Khrushchev's youngest protégé on the Presidium, Dmitry Polyansky, rose to denounce Nikita's agricultural fiascoes with sharply pointed statistics...
Long Authority. Khrushchev was furious, defended himself with a fulminating three-to-four-hour speech laden with curses and invective. Caught unprepared, he could not counter coolly, and may have hoped to carry the night on the strength of his lungs and his long authority. It did not work. Suslov listened quietly until Nikita ran down, then rose to his feet. "You see, Comrades," he said slowly. "It is impossible to talk to him." Khrushchev's face reddened to the point that some witnesses thought he would hit Suslov. But he contained himself while the Presidium voted...
...they had been assembled and waiting for nearly eight hours, the Central Committee members were in no mood to hear more Khrushchevian haranguing. He was interrupted again and again with catcalls from the floor. When one minister accused him of a closed-door policy (he had tried to see Khrushchev for two years and failed), Nikita snapped: "My ministers are a bunch of blockheads." The Central Committee rejected him, but by a close margin. It was nearly dawn. Exhausted, Nikita Khrushchev offered his resignation in a soft, subdued voice and walked out of the hall...
Room with a View. The conflict had been long in the making, at least according to the Kremlin leaks appearing last week. Khrushchev had been voted down by the Presidium last February over his polemical blast at Peking (also composed by Suslov), had to delay a month before making it public while peace feelers went out to Mao and were rejected. He had further irritated the Central Committee by taking a three-week tour of the farm lands on the lower Volga and in Kazakhstan and not reporting back to them; by erupting in anger at Indonesian President Sukarno when...