Word: nikita
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...hear them tell it last week, Mao Tse-tung was stepping serenely down from the most tedious of his five jobs, and Nikita Khrushchev was proclaiming some of the greatest victories in Soviet agricultural history...
...stand was his conviction (based on "intelligence sources") that Khrushchev is currently engaged in some kind of power struggle in Moscow, as evidenced by the dismissal of the hated police boss Ivan Serov (see below), and that an uncompromising Western stand on Berlin would strengthen the hand of Nikita's critics within the Politburo. The Kremlin has indeed been sounding an uncertain note of late, in its diplomatic huffing and puffing on Berlin. It threatens time limits, then withdraws them. It fills the air with windy ultimatums. Last week the Russians said again that unless the Western powers showed...
...Thus Nikita Khrushchev fired his secret police chief, one of the last and most bloodstained survivors of the Stalin tyranny-a shadowy, trim little man and a gumshoe general who won his highest promotions and decorations in the "Great Patriotic War" leading grisly campaigns not against the Germans but against his own Soviet people...
Bloody Past. Trained at Moscow's Frunze Military Academy to be a professional soldier, Serov was assigned on graduation to the NKVD. He first caught the Kremlin's approving eye in the '30s as chief Chekist in the Ukraine (where Nikita Khrushchev also served as Stalin's troubleshooter). shooting and deporting to certain death in Siberian slave camps hundreds of thousands of peasants who resisted collectivization. When World War II began, Serov, an equal in bloodstained iniquity to Nazi Germany's Himmler, specialized in genocide and in exterminating "anti-Soviet elements" in the new Soviet...
...last two late and loathed secret police chiefs had gone to their deaths in the month of December. Would Serov share their fate, or be allowed a peaceful retirement to think about all his old victims? Even though Serov is an old collaborator of Khrushchev's, Nikita is said to have little liking for him. Serov's removal was generally regarded as a show of liberalization by Khrushchev before next month's 21st Party Congress. Other more complex motivations may be involved, but dictators cannot be blamed, for their own safety, for not wanting to have...