Word: nikita
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...Nikita Khrushchev, pudgy, hard-drinking son of Ukrainian peasantry, became dictator of Russia last week, grinning and triumphant after carrying out the most sweeping purge of top-level Kremlin Communists in almost 20 years...
...many big Kremlin names been dragged in the dirt. The charges against the first four ousted leaders had a Stalinist ring: they were accused of having "resorted to methods of intrigue and formed a collusion against the Central Committee"; i.e.,. they had opposed Boss Nikita, possibly attempted to ease him out of the key job of First Party Secretary. But Khrushchev had won out and, as is the Communist custom, was privileged to hurl the whole book of party crimes at the losers. As is also Communist custom, the ink was hardly dry on Nikita's indictment before...
...validity of the charges hardly mattered. What mattered was that in the big power picture Nikita Khrushchev was in clear ascendancy. At 63 Khrushchev was five years older than Stalin had been when he had eliminated his rivals in the power struggle. Khrushchev is full of a peasant's energy (despite kidney trouble); he is shrewd, opportunistic, audacious, pragmatic. But he also has a vastly more experienced, stronger and more watchful Communist hierarchy to deal with, and the apparatus of the secret police on which Stalin relied has to some extent been dismantled...
Last week was one of those rare times when both halves of Europe were simultaneously lit by the flare of significant events, and the weaknesses of the East and the strengths of the West could be better seen. Moscow got the big headlines: Nikita Khrushchev's grab for power, his overturning of Soviet Russia's most durable Politburocrats, his emergence in the top spot, was dramatic evidence that collective dictatorships in time become one-man dictatorships...
...prosperity of Western Europe and the poverty of Eastern Europe were all part of the same story, as no one knows better than Russia's new czar, Nikita Khrushchev, who made it a key plank of his new program that Russia must "catch up with America in the per capita production of milk, butter and meat in the next few years...