Word: khrushchevism
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...matter how self-serving and dubious, such predictions indicate a new confidence that has come with the U.S.S.R.'s recent attainment of superpower status. That accomplishment has been largely the work of Leonid Brezhnev and his comrades. When the present collective leadership took over from Khrushchev in 1964, the Soviet armed forces lagged behind the U.S. in every important category of strategic weaponry. Now they have caught up across the board and pulled ahead in some areas...
Brezhnev and his comrades, moreover, have accomplished the buildup without resorting to mass terror or wholesale purges. They have presided over 16 years of political stability?"the first such period since the revolution," says British Historian Leonard Schapiro. Nikita Khrushchev, while a much more sympathetic figure in many ways, ordered reforms one day, crackdowns the next, and engaged, as his comrades-turned-usurpers charged, in "harebrained schemes." His was a manic-depressive leadership. Before him were 25 years of Stalin's government by massacre. The toll: at least 20 million dead in camps, prisons and famines. Before that, the civil...
...keep meat in the grocery stores or underwear in the department stores. Nor have they loosened the reins of repression during the past 16 years. At the same time, however, material conditions are easier, and life has settled into a consistent, predictable norm that avoids the extremes of Khrushchev's erratic liberalization and Stalin's relentless terror. For many Soviets, that is reassuring, especially against the backdrop of their country's new prestige and power abroad...
...Communist youth organization, be recommended by three people who have each been members for three years, and pass other screening procedures, including serving a year on probation. Of the 193 million citizens who were 18 and older in 1979, only 16 million, or 9%, were party members. (In Khrushchev's day the figure was 6%.) Except for a few scientific administrators, virtually every responsible official in the Soviet government is a party member. Although it is impossible to separate party from government, one point is clear: the party makes policy...
...General Secretary of the Communist Party, the most powerful position in the nation. The authority of the office that Brezhnev now holds is not defined by the constitution, nor is its term. Stalin, who never held the presidency, was a dictator from 1929 until he died in 1953; Khrushchev was largely able to run things his way until he made a number of blunders (harming Soviet agriculture, widening the split with China) and the Central Committee threw him out. Brezhnev has relied on a coterie of allies and exercised his power much more discreetly...