Word: nikita
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...late '50s and early '60s, after Nikita Khrushchev had rolled back Stalinism, it seemed that the time had come. The young poet Evgeny Evtushenko had just emerged as the public voice of the uneasy new freedom. His poem Babi Yar, a passionate denunciation of Soviet antiSemitism, read aloud to thousands of Russians, was becoming a symbol of popular outrage at past and present repression...
...Nikita Khrushchev had been an accurate prophet, the Soviet Union would now be starting the year in which its citizens would overtake Americans in material prosperity. Actually, Soviet shoppers still encounter frustration searching for products that U.S. citizens find in abundance. Moscow residents these days find few eggs and little flour in the stores. They may have to try two or three shops to locate as necessary an item as a light bulb. Russia's economic leaders admit that they have fallen far short of reaching not only Khrushchev's Utopian targets for 1970, but even the more...
Even before he was ousted for conspiring against Nikita Khrushchev in 1957, former Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov was not known for his dinner-table loquacity. Now nearing 80, Stalin's oldest colleague warmed up enough at a recent party to utter some pronouncements that had the ring of his late master's voice...
Four years later Stalin died, and in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev accused him of "intolerance, brutality and abuse of power." In 1962, Khrushchev ordered the publication of a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that described the Soviet Union under Stalin's rule as one vast slave-labor camp. Stalin's statues, as numerous as trees in the Siberian taiga, were hewed down, and the city of Stalingrad became Volgograd...
...reveals himself best by his pungent use of language. Rather like Nikita Khrushchev, he likes to draw on folk tales and proverbs to contrive devastating metaphors against his opponents. He is also fond of quoting from classical Chinese literature. In a 1959 meeting, he cited a Han Dynasty poet to belabor his colleagues for their laziness and love of luxury: "When one travels in a carriage or sedan chair, the body begins to decay. Women with pearly teeth and false eyebrows are the axes that cut down the body's vitality. Delicious meats and fatty foods...