Word: ukrainians
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...from the hall, "Why didn't you kill him?" and Khrushchev's reply: "What could we do? There was a reign of terror." No mention was made, either, of the fact that, at Stalin's order, the elephantine Khrushchev had once performed the gopak, a fast Ukrainian dance. Nor did the transcript record such homely touches as the cob-nosed Nikita in tears as he told of children being tortured, and the fact that 30 delegates had fainted and had to be lugged out of the hall...
Taking Over. In the Ukraine, Khrushchev (at 43) became absolute boss of a country three times the size of England and almost as populous. He spoke Russian with a phony Ukrainian accent, put on an embroidered Ukrainian shirt and wore a kartuz (workingman's cap). He went everywhere, bawling out party organizers, bureaucrats and collective farm managers, but he listened carefully to the agricultural experts sent in from Moscow. He exchanged quips with the farmers, drank buckets of vodka, and got a laugh out of most situations. Behind the facade of bonhomie he was ruthlessly liquidating all who stood...
...Khrushchev's principal and most expert job was reconstructing the Ukrainian Communist Party. The old leaders, including his predecessor Stanislav Kossior, were executed, and the membership recast. The new party was a tight, tough instrument of Stalinist policy...
...change of plan. Again Stalin had got Malenkov to say no, with the result that Kharkov was lost and the overextended Red army driven back across the Don. The old dictator had also treated him contemptuously, Khrushchev complained, called him Khokhol, a derogatory Russian name for a Ukrainian. "Khokhol, dance the gopak," Stalin had ordered at a Kremlin party. The gopak is a fast, vigorous Ukrainian dance, and the 52-year-old Nikita had danced it. Stalin, in his last days, said Khrushchev tearfully, "was so sickly suspicious and obsessed" that he often looked at people like Khrushchev and asked...
...phony account of the civil war and talked of "party leaders of that time who were wrongly declared to have been enemies of the people." Adding insult to injury, Mikoyan named Khrushchev's liquidated predecessor Kossior as one such and asserted, to the sound of laughter, that "Ukrainian historians will be found who will write a history of the emergence and development of the Ukrainian socialist state better than some Moscow historians." The speech, opening up the whole case against Stalin, and by indirection the complicity of his associates, was a sensation...