We have a thread on Stalin, the man of steel.

Stalin is considered one of the most influential men of the 20th Century. Here I'd like to ask: was Khrushchev crucial to the eventual collapse of the iron curtain or not?

In K. (hmm, I think that letter was taken by Kafka) as I was saying, in K. we have a human being who didn't have the taste for massacres that Stalin had. In K. we have a party man not a despot. Should he be seen as a failure or as basically decent human being caught in an impossible situation?

Please don't turn this into another BBV4L.

Nice

Neither. I think we have to see K as both a hero and a horribly evil man at different times. Throughout all of this, he was a bungler, although an incredibly hard working and dedicated one, causing or nearly causing catastrophes. His secret speech denouncing Stalin and his 'thaw' are two of the greatest acts of the past century, and it seems he had more to lose then to gain from at least the former. However, he should have denounced his own acts during the same speech. Stalin ran the terror by giving quotas to each region e.g. "Ukraine kill 10,000 people". K ran one of the regions and always exceeded the quota giving to him by Stalin, killing more people then Stalin thought was appropriate.

K. also isn't quite the party man you claim him to be. He was, when he was removed from power, really acting or at least trying to act more and more unilaterally.

But, the most important thing about K is that he is the only world leader, as far as I know of, to describe, in public, a piece of artwork as

"Your art resembles this: it's as if a man climbed into a toilet, slid down under the seat...looked up at what was above him, at someone sitting on the seat, looking up at that particular part of the body....that's your position, comrade...you're sitting in the toilet

Khruschev did some horrible things under Stalin's reign, but he really should be credited with ending the nightmare of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. His attempts to reduce corruption within the Communist system was also admirable, but ultimately the hard-liners won out and continued an ultimately futile and unsustainable system. Leaders like Khruschev and Gorbechev might have succeeded in creating a government more like the social democracies of northern Europe given enough time, but the years of Stalinism had created too strong a party apparatus and military-industrial complex.

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).

Vehement disagreement is what makes history so interesting, no? I take no offense to a reasoned response , particularly when I am outside my area of real study. I simply lived through the late Stalinist period and the Khruschev years. I find it hard to credit the man as anything but a brutal peasant, in pursuit of power. But, as I said, I could be wrong. Analyzing any historyical figure is complex at best.

Khrus was a brutal peasant (although he tried very hard to become and be more than this), but brutal peasantism is quite superior to Stalinism, and unless the relatively good acts that he performed and tried to perform were just the result of gross and bizarre miscalculations of personal interest, he did quite a few good brave things.

A better argument, perhaps, that K did nothing positive that other plausible alternatives to him would have done even more good. Beria, who was probably the most powerful person in the USSR for a short time in-between the reign of Stalin and K (sure, Malenkov had the higher position officially, but Malenkov was heavily influenced by Beria, to say the least) , apparently wanted to radically liberalize and soften the USSR and was doing much to in fact do so. Beria, however, was one history's great monsters personally, and he perhaps, could not have weakened the state police without crushing his own primary power base, so it's quite unclear what would have happened had Beria not been liquidated by Khruschev and company.

Regarding what Khrushchev did under Stalin and his later denunciation of the man, I was going over some of my reading while writing my final essay for my Soviet history class and thought this was awesome:

"...an apocryphal story tells of a note being passed up to Khrushchev [during his "secret speech"] asking why he had not protested against the terror at the time. Khrushchev looked out into the audience and asked who had sent up the note. No hand was raised. 'That answers your question,' Khrushchev commented coolly."

If true, what a baller.

-Quote is from Ronald Grigor Suny's The Soviet Experiment, 2nd edition if anyone's interested. Great book.

I don't know if that story is true but K generally tried to win debates with aphorisms and wit like that.

More and more I think part of K's historical importance has to be as one of the most funny figures in history. He was surreal, both on accident and on purpose. He is certainly the most powerful man in history to throw a temper tantrum about not being allowed to go to Disneyland. From http://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...tml?c=y&page=6, which talks about part of his journey in the U.S.A.

Just now, I was told that I could not go to Disneyland," he announced. "I asked, ‘Why not? What is it? Do you have rocket-launching pads there?' "

The audience laughed.

"Just listen," he said. "Just listen to what I was told: ‘We—which means the American authorities—cannot guarantee your security there.' "

He raised his hands in a vaudevillian shrug. That got another laugh.

"What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera there? Have gangsters taken hold of the place? Your policemen are so tough they can lift a bull by the horns. Surely they can restore order if there are any gangsters around. I say, ‘I would very much like to see Disneyland.' They say, ‘We cannot guarantee your security.' Then what must I do, commit suicide?"