Word: khrushchevism
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...Khrushchev soon began hearing other reports about the disastrous effects of collectivization. But it was not until many years later that he realized the scale of the "starvation and repression which accompanied collectivization as it was carried out under Stalin." Long afterward, for example, he heard of a train that had pulled into Kiev filled with the bodies of Ukrainians who had starved to death. Some officials wanted to sound an alarm at the time, but none had the courage to confront Stalin. "We had already moved into the period when one man had the collective [leadership] under his thumb...
Lucky Ticket. Yet Khrushchev's own career skyrocketed, and by 1934 he was party leader of Moscow. One reason: Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva, who had been a fellow student at the Industrial Academy, was impressed by Khrushchev and told her husband about him. "Nadya," mother of Svetlana Alliluyeva, committed suicide in 1932. But her judgment of Khrushchev endured in Stalin's mind, a stroke of luck that the old Soviet leader readily acknowledges. In the years that followed, he says, "I stayed alive while most of my contemporaries, my classmates at the academy, lost...
Others did not fare so well. Stalin had little respect for Nadezhda Konstanti-novna Krupskaya and Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova, Lenin's widow and sister, recalls Khrushchev. He used to say that he did not think either of these women was making a positive contribution to the party's struggle. "After Stalin's death we found an envelope in a secret compartment, and inside the envelope was a note written in Lenin's hand. Lenin accused Stalin of having insulted Nadezhda Kon-stantinovna. Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] demanded that Stalin apologize; otherwise Lenin would no longer consider Stalin...
...things escaped the dictator's attention. Khrushchev recounts that he was once told to telephone Stalin at home. "Comrade Khrushchev," Stalin said, "rumors have reached me that you've let a very unfavorable situation develop in Moscow as regards public toilets. Apparently people can't find anywhere to relieve themselves. This won't do." Khrushchev relates that he and Nikolai Bulganin, then head of the Moscow Soviet and later to become Premier, "worked feverishly" on the problem...
...Khrushchev recalls another telephone call, informing him of the 1934 murder of Leningrad Party Chief Sergei Kirov by a Trotskyite dissident. It was that event that set the stage for one of the most terrifying eras of modern history: the Great Purges of the 1930s, or, as Khrushchev calls them, "the meat mincer." The NKVD, Stalin's secret police and precursor of today's KGB, suddenly became all-powerful, and thousands of party officials and army officers began to vanish. Khrushchev survived the grim era in willing ignorance. "I don't know where these people were sent...