Word: khrushchevism
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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...
...Malenkov was still in a state of panic," Khrushchev continues. "As I recall, he didn't even put my motion to a vote. He pressed a secret button which gave the signal to the generals who were waiting in the next room. Zhukov was the first to appear. Then Moskalenko and the others came in. Malenkov said in a faint voice to Comrade Zhukov, 'As Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R., I request that you take Beria into custody.' 'Hands up!' Zhukov commanded Beria." The police boss seemed to be reaching...
...Dulles. After three years, Khrushchev had not yet gained complete supremacy over Malenkov. In a bold gamble, he delivered a sensational 20,000-word speech before the Party Congress denouncing Stalin and his methods in mordant detail. Other members of the Presidium were opposed to Khrushchev's move. Fearfully they asked him, "What will we be able to say about our own roles under Stalin?" Khrushchev went ahead anyway. When he rose to speak, he recalls, "it was so quiet in the huge hall you could hear a fly buzzing. You must try to imagine how shocked people were...
...speech was never publicly confirmed, but it was later circulated to party committees throughout the Soviet Union and deliberately leaked to the Western press. Says Khrushchev, wryly referring to the man who directed the CIA at the time: "I remember when journalists would ask me, 'What can you tell us about this speech?' I used to say they'd have to direct their questions to Mr. [Allen] Dulles...