Word: khrushchevism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Lottery Ticket. Until the very moment of his fall, Nikita Khrushchev was noted for similarly compelling powers of persuasion-and political survival. The son of a peasant farmer in the Ukraine, he worked as a shepherd, steam fitter and coal miner. In 1918 he joined the Red Army, quickly becoming a political commissar. As a delegate to the 14th Party Congress in 1925, he skipped breakfast every morning so he could get a front seat near Stalin...
...after studying a few years at Moscow's industrial academy and rising steadily in the party hierarchy, Khrushchev became party leader of Moscow. He survived the party purges of the 1930s, he believed, because Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva, was impressed by him and recommended him to her husband. "I've often asked myself, how was I spared?" Khrushchev later said. "I think part of the answer is that Nadya's reports helped determine Stalin's attitude toward me. I call it my lucky lottery ticket. Right up to the last...
During World War II, Khrushchev served as the Politburo's military representative in the Ukraine. He remained there until 1949, when he was brought back from the Ukraine to become head of the Moscow party organization and later overlord of agriculture. Three months after Stalin's death, Khrushchev-with the aid of eleven generals and marshals-arranged the arrest of Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's hated secret-police chief; Beria was executed six months later. Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Communist Party in September 1953, but that powerful post was not enough. Sixteen months later, he ousted...
History will probably best remember Nikita Khrushchev for his 1956 speech before the 20th Party Congress in which he denounced the crimes of Joseph Stalin. His motives for delivering the speech were decidedly mixed. He was by no means a crusader for personal liberties, but he was sufficiently disenchanted with the old dictator's legacy of fear and repression to repudiate Stalin in 20,000 graphic words. The speech was a personal triumph and helped Khrushchev consolidate his power. But it also loosed forces that inexorably led to the fragmentation of the Communist world...
...Poznan riots in Poland and the Hungarian uprising. It set the stage for Czechoslovakia's experiment in "Communism with a human face"-which was also ended by Soviet intervention. By trying to loosen the bureaucratic and ideological straitjacket that Stalinism had wrapped around the entire Communist world, Khrushchev helped to widen the Sino-Soviet split. The Chinese were-and remain-rigid dogmatists who are unlikely to forgive him even in death for his "revisionist" heresy. When French Maoist Regis Bergeron heard that Khrushchev had died, for example, he exulted: "Good! Another revisionist less. Unfortunately, Khrushchevism does not die with...