Quote:
Originally Posted by OldYoda
The nightmare of Stalinism was ended by the death of Stalin in 1953 - Khruschev had little or nothing to do with it. After a 3 year behind the scenes struggle, Khruschev emerged as the single most powerful man in the U.S.S.R. He was, at best, Stalin lite.
In addition, Khruschev was one of the most infamous mass murderers of the 20th Century. He was a monster who slaughtered his own people on an unthinkable scale. If Dante was correct, Khruschev is now in the 7th Circle of Hell, right where he belongs. Believing that Nikita Khrushchev would have pointed the U.S.S.R. toward a social democracy is a misreading of the man and his record, IMO. I could be wrong.
Oh I vehemently disagree that Khruschev had nothing to do with it. Pretty much the moment of Stalin's death (indeed, even if the few years before), Khruschev was embroiled in a struggle against the more hardline members of the cabinet for the fate of subsequent Soviet society. Khruschev and his allies denounced Stalin and his policies at every turn, and it was largely due to Khruschev's work that thousands of prisoners returned from the gulags to tell stories of the suffering they had faced. Additionally, he loosened some of the restrictions on the arts and the publication of
Pravda (though it was still primarily a piece of party propaganda). Even some of Khruschev's allies discouraged him from disclosing the extent of Stalin's crimes to official party meetings, but he was convinced that removing the stain of Stalinism was the only way to "rescue" Soviet society. To call him "Stalin lite" is to miss a lot of the complexity and do him, I think, a profound disservice. If this is to be said of Khruschev, it may as well be said of every other Soviet leader; as monstrous as the Soviet system was, it had as much nuance as most any other political entity, and a rather varied cast of characters within its politics--granted, I am not a Soviet history specialist, but I was surprised at the depth of political and social contrast when I studied Russia as an undergraduate (in comparison to my earlier schooling, which presented the USSR as monolithic and its leaders single-minded).
That said, it is definitely true that Khruschev was an active member of Stalin's purges and political killings, and he defended them in writing and speeches during the Stalinist years. Whether Khruschev had a genuine change of heart or was merely towing the party line in the earlier years is a mystery, at least to me (I'm sure Khruschev scholars have a more detailed explanation). While Soviet society was anything but liberal under Khruschev, it was not marked by the arbitrary killings and imprisonment that had come to characterize Stalin's rule. Economically, Khruschev tended to favor more liberalization than many of his contemporaries, and he famously sought to emulate many "Western" innovations within the USSR, where Stalin had sought to eschew anything associated with the West. It was largely Brezhnev, not Khruschev, who oversaw the extended period of economic and political stagnation that accelerated the decline of the USSR. If anyone is to be called a "Stalin lite," it ought to be the more hardline Brezhnev (but even that is a disservice, as it's incredibly hard to match Stalin's utter ruthlessness and bloodlust).