Word: khrushchevism
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...next clue to Nikita's fate came three days later, when home-bound Moscow workers queued up before newspaper kiosks and were greeted with hastily scribbled signs: "There will be no Izvestia tonight." Something was definitely in the works. Shortly after midnight, Tass tersely announced it. Nikita Khrushchev had been "released" from all his duties "at his own request" for reasons of "age and deteriorating health." His successors were named and congratulated: Leonid Brezhnev, 57, Secretary of the Central Committee, and Aleksei Kosygin, 60, who had served as First Deputy Premier...
Brezhnev, a florid, clever politician who so far, however, has mostly performed ceremonial functions, inherited the more powerful of Khrushchev's jobs and the one that has been traditionally the key to Soviet power: the secretaryship of the Communist Party. Kosygin, a trained economist and business-minded technician who has had little political experience but may just be the smarter and deeper of the two, inherited the premiership. Both had been known as Khrushchev's prot...
Thus, some time between the moment his French visitor saw Khrushchev's exit from his Black Sea home and the time Tass announced the news of his removal, Communism's most raucous, most human, most infuriating, and in many ways most fascinating dictator had been deposed and replaced by two of his underlings...
...MESS ON THE FARM. Despite his proud proclamations of expertise in agriculture (he devoted more speeches to crop yield, fertilizer and seed bulls than any 20 national leaders), Khrushchev's farm programs were disastrous. He fell for one oversimplified solution after another, kept reshuffling the administrative setup for agriculture, and dreamed of better fertilizer-all to little avail. His "virgin lands" scheme showed promise this year, thanks to a hopeful harvest, but it was too late. > "GOULASH" COMMUNISM. Most of his people cheered when he announced that Communism must first give people a decent life and then think about...
...FAILURES AGAINST THE WEST. His adventure in Cuba two years ago ended in humiliation when the U.S. forced him to retreat. Where Stalin, armed with nothing tougher than tanks, had grabbed great swatches of territory and threatened other countries (Spain, Korea and Greece), Khrushchev, despite his ICBMs and thermonuclear terror, could gain nothing more than a small Caribbean island-and not even defend it. From the point of view of his critics, it was turning into a no-win policy, aggravated by ideological softness on capitalism. Military men also charged that he was relying on the nuclear deterrent too much...