Word: khrushchevism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Soviet Union came closer to nuclear war than at any time before or since. The 13 days of that near-apocalypse are vividly recalled this week by one of the two men who could have given the actual orders to push the button: former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev's recollections, focusing on his years in power, are excerpted in LIFE and 19 foreign publications, and will appear shortly in the Little, Brown book Khrushchev Remembers...
Alarming News. Khrushchev says that in the spring of 1962, at a meeting in the Kremlin, he spoke about how Cuba's Fidel Castro had resisted the Bay of Pigs landing only a year earlier. "I said that it would be foolish to expect the inevitable second invasion to be as badly planned and executed as the first. I warned that Fidel would crushed and said we were the only ones who could prevent such a disaster from occurring." Khrushchev found another justification: "The Americans had surrounded our own country with military bases and threatened us with nuclear weapons...
...Khrushchev began rushing intermediate-range nuclear missiles, launching equipment and Ilyushin-28 bombers to Cuba. President Kennedy's dramatic response was to order a naval blockade of Cuba and to warn that the U.S. would take "whatever means may be necessary" to remove the missiles. Khrushchev grew alarmed. Seeking "to take the heat off the situation," he suggested to other members of his government: "Comrades, let's go to the Bolshoi Theater this evening. Our own people as well as foreign eyes will notice, and perhaps it will calm them down." After he and Kennedy had begun exchanging...
Dignified Way Out. The break in the crisis, says Khrushchev, came with a secret visit by Robert Kennedy to Soviet Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin. Khrushchev says that Kennedy told Dobrynin: "We are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power." That quote is clearly suspect, suggesting that Khrushchev himself magnanimously found what he describes as "a dignified way out" of the crisis; most Western accounts give that credit to the Kennedys. In any case, Khrushchev continues...
Other gleanings from Khrushchev's memory...