Word: khrushchev
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What did Kennedy expect? Khrushchev understood that style of statecraft. He had learned from the monster himself, sitting at Joseph Stalin's right hand--or in his savage vicinity--for decades as cheerleader, yes-man and ideological dogsbody: a "nice guy," as his Kremlin cronies called him, who cheerfully survived Stalin's almost recreational paranoia even when so many of the evil crew (including Yezhov and Beria) were led offstage and shot...
...Khrushchev, unlike his mentor, ultimately lined up more on the side of life than on the side of death. The fascination of William Taubman's splendid new biography, Khrushchev, the Man and His Era (Norton; 876 pages), lies in tracking the abundantly human struggle in the man between his native humanity and the temptations of power and glamour. Early on, Stalin took a shine to young Khrushchev (some thought because Khrushchev was even shorter than Stalin). Between 1929 and 1938--the most lethal years of Stalinism, starting with the enforced collectivization that left some 10 million kulaks dead, and running...
...height of the terror," writes Taubman, a professor of political science at Amherst College, "Khrushchev gave violent, bloodcurdling speeches rousing 'the masses' to join in the witch-hunt. As Moscow party boss he personally approved the arrests of many of his own colleagues and their dispatch into what he later called the meat grinder." He had other sins on his head, many from a later time; he brutally crushed the 1956 Hungarian uprising, for example...
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Taubman's exploration of Khrushchev's complicity in Stalinist horror is probing, subtle. "Like many others," Taubman writes, "Khrushchev thought he was building a new socialist society, a glorious end that justified even the harshest means." So he "practiced deception and self-deception. He never fully owned up to his complicity." Touching a chillingly familiar chord, Taubman explains, "His complicity in great crimes ... was tied to nothing less than his own sense of self-worth, to his growing feeling of dignity, to the invigorating, intoxicating conviction that Stalin, a man he came almost to worship...
...Khrushchev came of peasant stock; he possessed a peasant's shrewdness and wit--a garrulous, storytelling gift the newspapers called earthy; what they meant was that he referred to excrement a lot. With only two years of schooling, he had a fierce, uncouth animation that was shadowed by feelings of intellectual inferiority...