Word: khrushchevism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech to the 20th Soviet Party Congress opened a debate among Marxists over how faithful Communists were to live with the truth that an estimated 20 million murders had been committed in their name by the Stalinist bureaucracy between 1934 and 1953. Khrushchev denounced Stalin as an evil genius who was able to seize control of the party by some terrible historical accident. Medvedev's view is less simplistic. He argues that in every social upheaval there is a fanatical fringe whose idealistic elements can easily be infiltrated by opportunists and criminals. Stalin...
...Khrushchev took the line that Stalin's perversion of the Soviet system started with the purges of the '30s. Medvedev is probably the first and certainly the most distinguished Soviet historian to agree with Western critics that Stalin had already begun to corrupt the party during Lenin's lifetime. In one of his few but significant criticisms of the U.S.S.R.'s founding father, Medvedev suggests that Lenin's "natural enthusiasm for people" kept him from recognizing Stalin's villainous character until it was too late...
...State, along the lines of similar bodies in Bulgaria, East Germany and Rumania, that would give him the top state job as well as the ranking party post. Other speculations held that Brezhnev would shove Kosygin aside and take over both government and party leadership just as Nikita Khrushchev...
...power. According to some accounts, Brezhnev could count on only five votes. At least seven Politburo members are implacably opposed to granting greater governmental authority to Brezhnev to go along with his party leadership; to do so would be to scrap the collective leadership system that was instituted after Khrushchev's ouster as a safeguard against one-man dictatorship...
When Kennedy blew the lid off the Cuban affair, Khrushchev had to scramble out backwards. The German question was never resolved. For once, America had been firm: but whereas in the past, firmness would have produced material rewards, in 1962 the U.S. pushed the world to the brink of the apocalypse and came out with little to show for it. If Ulam is right, and the Russians were after a treaty, we might all be better off had the ploy worked. The only beneficiary was Kennedy's prestige, and an assassin's bullet the following year made that gain negligible...