Word: khrushchevism
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...common view of the Crisis has been that President Kennedy "stood eyeball to eyeball" with Khrushchev and that "the other guy blinked." By placing a naval blockade around Cuba and by gradually increasing the military pressure, Kennedy and his advisers took the Soviets to the brink of nuclear war and forced the Kremlin to back down. The missiles were removed at no cost to the United States and a period of detente soon began between the superpowers. Or so the popular theory goes...
Instead of calmly gauging how to pressure the Soviets, Kennedy and his men were confused and very willing to make several concessions to Khrushchev. Scared by the prospect that Khrushchev would escalate any conflict, the White House was afraid that any move against the Soviets would touch off a nuclear holocaust. Eventually, a dovish Kennedy pledged never to invade Cuba and implicitly agreed to Khrushchev's demand that American nuclear missiles in Turkey be removed in exchange for a withdrawal of Soviet nuclear weapons from Cuba. The transcripts show that the United States did not "win" the Cuban Missile Crisis...
...perhaps the reverie will end, as did the false dawn of the Khrushchev years. Glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) may turn out to be less "irreversible" than Gorbachev proclaims them to be. Even so, his reforms can no longer be dismissed as a mere matter of style, of a telegenic new face in the Kremlin. Gorbachev is that, to be sure. Also a dedicated Communist. Also a ruthless political opportunist. In 1987 he became something more, a symbol of hope for a new kind of Soviet Union: more open, more concerned with the welfare of its citizens and less with...
...year of Gorbachev's graduation, the Stalinist ice had broken in the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev had taken over and was winding down the terror. Ghostly figures began drifting back into Moscow from the labor camps. But at the start of this period of ferment and change, Gorbachev removed himself and Raisa from the relative sophistication of Moscow and returned to the Stavropol area, where he was to stay for the next 23 years. According to Neznansky, the young graduate tried for a position with the Moscow Komsomol apparatus but lost out to a classmate and had little choice...
...1950s, recalls that the young official often visited the paper's offices for a chat. "He would sit down with us in a casual manner," says Maximov. "We would uncork a bottle of wine ((for all his antialcoholism campaigning, Gorbachev still enjoys an occasional drink)) and usually talk politics. Khrushchev's report on the crimes of the Stalinist era had recently appeared. The entire country was still reeling from shock." Maximov and others of Gorbachev's generation, however, remember the late 1950s as an exciting time. Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin at the 20th Communist Party Congress...