Word: khrushchevism
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...Westerners talked over the day's negotiations in the U.S. embassy "tank," a small room safe (hopefully) from ubiquitous hidden Soviet listening devices. During one informal evening that he spent chatting with U.S. correspondents at the Sovietskaya Hotel, Harriman suddenly looked up at the ceiling and said, "Mr. Khrushchev, if you hear what I am saying...
Most observers, Averell Harriman included, believe that Khrushchev signed the test ban treaty-and is seeking a detente with the West in other matters -primarily because of the split with Peking, which Harriman considers as important as the split between Constantinople and Rome. It forces the Kremlin to campaign for outside support among other Communist parties; in order not to wage a two-front cold war, Khrushchev is seeking some sort of understanding with the West. Other motives may be equally compelling. The Soviet budget is badly strained by military spending that is proportionately twice as high...
...against the Reds. Much of Western Europe's postwar order is based on anti-Communism as an article of faith: the conviction that the Communists are a treacherous, armed and somehow non-European enemy. That conviction began to falter with the changeover from Stalin, the "oriental despot," to Khrushchev, the table-thumping but jolly politician-and with the accompanying softening of Communist tyranny in Russia and the satellites. The test ban and what may follow will continue this process of persuading European voters that Communists-Moscow, if not Peking variety-can be lived with. Even Charles de Gaulle seems...
What Harriman really wanted to find out during that trip was the extent to which Khrushchev's Russia was really different from Stalin's Russia. More than ever, that remains the question today. With Harriman, the U.S. had witnessed the great Communist switch of the Popular Front period, when Russia was severely threatened by the Nazis, ordered Communist parties everywhere to make common cause with the hither to despised Social Democrats, and even with the bourgeois. Maxim Litvinov, voluble ambassador to the U.S. and the League of Nations, spoke as eloquently as Khrushchev does today about "the peaceful...
Comparing Khrushchev and Stalin, Harriman recalls that while Stalin often told him that Communism would triumph because of capitalism's failures, "15 years later in the same office, with the same pictures on the wall, Khrushchev says the Reds will win because of their own successes. The faith is not fluid, but the expression of it is." Moscow's present "peaceful" line cannot be considered irreversible. What is irreversible, Harriman thinks, is "the freedom from Stalin's kind of terror and the Russians' effort to build a better life for themselves...