Word: khrushchevism
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...years just before-and after the death of Joseph Stalin. It was a time of Byzantine intrigues, some engineered by the old dictator, others conceived and carried out behind his back. It was a time of brutal purges and bitter battles within the Kremlin hierarchy that led to Nikita Khrushchev's startling "destalinization" speech at the 20th Party Congress in 1956. This week the former Soviet Premier, who emerged from those years as the Kremlin's new boss, provides the only first-person account of those fateful struggles ever recorded. His reminiscences, excerpted from the forthcoming book, Khrushchev...
...Khrushchev wastes no sympathy on Lavrenty Beria, the rival he deposed and destroyed. He pictures Stalin's secret-police chief as a cruel and cynical man whose favorite remark was "Listen, let me have him for one night, and I'll have him confessing he's the King of England." In later years, says Khrushchev, even Stalin grew to fear his fellow Georgian and the power he wielded as absolute master of the vast Cheka, or secret-police, organization. The sweeping postwar purge of the Leningrad party, Khrushchev believes, was part of a scheme masterminded by Beria...
Doctors' Plot. Stalin's growing derangement resulted in the "cruel and contemptible" affair called the Doctors' Plot. Khrushchev traces its beginning to a letter charging that Andrei Zhdanov, the Leningrad party boss, had been murdered by his physicians. Western experts have explained the plot as a calculated effort by Stalin to destroy Beria, whose security men would presumably have to be part of the scheme. In any case, Stalin ordered many doctors, particularly those who were treating Kremlin officials, arrested and mercilessly interrogated. Two were tortured to death, and the number would surely have risen had Stalin...
...convict the authors of anti-Soviet propaganda. British Journalist Louis Herren speculated that any KGB involvement might reflect a split between the organization's hard-liners and a more moderate faction that is anxious to counter the neo-Stalinist tendencies of the present leadership with Khrushchev's anti-Stalinist views...
According to sources quoted in both the Post and the Times, Khrushchev was unaware that any version of his reminiscences had reached the West when LIFE announced publication. Several days later, the informants said, he received a telephone call from Arvid Pelshe, a Politburo member and chairman of the Party Control Commission, which runs checks on party members. "We have business with you," he said. Though ailing, Khrushchev was picked up at his dacha and driven to the Kremlin, where he was confronted with the news of publication and an already prepared statement of denial. Khrushchev, according to the reports...