Word: khrushchevism
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Deng Xiaoping's predecessor Mao Zedong split with Gorbachev's predecessor Nikita Khrushchev partly on the grounds that Khrushchev was a "revisionist." Gorbachev has gone a long way toward healing the rift, but not by returning to orthodoxy. He has carried revisionism to a level unimagined by either Mao or Khrushchev, and as a result his picture and slogans are on the posters of Chinese demonstrators...
Even if Gorbachev is reined in, or toppled, the seeds he has sown in the Soviet mind and the changes he has already wrought will leave an indelible mark. The reforms of Khrushchev and Kosygin were squelched, but the ideas they planted blossomed a quarter-century later in a new generation of leadership. As Gorbachev told Henry Kissinger when he visited Moscow earlier this year, "At any rate, things will never be the same again in the Soviet Union." Notes Kissinger: "This would be a modest result for so Herculean a task." Yes, but once again the contradiction is also...
LIFE AND DESTINY by Vasili Grossman (Knizhnaya Palata, 1988). An epic novel about the Battle of Stalingrad that some call the 20th century's War and Peace. Completed in the 1960s, the book was suppressed during Khrushchev's regime for daring to agonize over the conflict between personal freedom and Communism...
Rewriting history has long been a tradition among Soviet leaders. Stalin revised a history of the Communist Party to puff up his role in the Bolshevik Revolution. Nikita Khrushchev began the deflation of Stalin; Leonid Brezhnev converted Khrushchev into a nonperson; Gorbachev in turn has depreciated Brezhnev, causing his name to be removed from factories, cities and streets. As the joke goes, the Soviet Union is the only country in the world with an unpredictable past...
Brezhnev has suffered an even more dramatic fall from grace. His strongest negative rating, 80%, comes from Communist Party members who bitterly blame him for abusing his post and causing the party's prestige to decline. On the other hand, Nikita Khrushchev, a reformer of sorts who was thrown out of office and saw his reputation tarnished before he died, is enjoying a modest boost in popularity. More than 29% view him favorably, compared with only 5% for Brezhnev...