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[[File:Nikita_Khrushchev_in_WW2.jpg|thumbnail|250px|left|Nikita Khrushchev during World War II]]
Nikita Khrushchev assumed leadership of the Soviet Union during the period following after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Khrushchev served as a General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as a Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964.
====Khruschev Rejection of Stalin====
Khrushchev became famous and most best recognized for his rejection of the “personality cult” that Stalin had fostered during his own thirty-year rule. Khrushchev also attempted the revival of the Communist campaign to suppress all remnant religious institutions in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, Khrushchev supported the invasion and crackdown on Hungary in 1956, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the deployment of Soviet weapons in Cuba in 1962.
In this regard, Khrushchev is something of an enigma. His foreign policy, position on religion and Marxist-Leninist doctrine were hardline, but he was a reformer because he allowed criticism of Stalin and even permitted some anti-Stalinist literature to be published and disseminated in USSR’s society. He allowed criticism of Stalin, despite suppressing criticism of the Soviet Republic. Khrushchev also hoped to raise Soviet citizens’ standard of living so they could benefit from the transference of the ownership of “the means of production” to the State.
====De-Stalinization and domestic policies====
[[File:Nikita_Khrushchev_in_1959.jpg|thumbnail|left|250px|Khrushchev in 1959]]
By the end of 1955, due to the policy, pursued by Khrushchev, thousands of political criminals had returned home and shared their experience in the Soviet labor camps. With several million political prisoners newly released, Khrushchev eased and freed the domestic political atmosphere. Continuing investigation into the abuses further revealed Stalin’s crimes to his successors. Khrushchev believed that once he successfully removed the stain of Stalinism, the Party would inspire even greater loyalty among the people. Beginning in October 1955, Khrushchev insisted on revealing Stalin’s crimes before the delegates to the upcoming 20th Party Congress. Some of his colleagues opposed the disclosure and managed to persuade him to make his remarks in a closed session. <ref>Nikita Khrushchev: Consolidation of power & his Secret Speech - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev#Consolidation_of_power.3B_Secret_Speech</ref>
====First unsuccessful attempt to remove Khrushchev and his further policies====
In June 1957, Khrushchev was almost overthrown from his position, and, although a vote in the Presidium went against him. Still, he managed to reverse this by replacing Bulganin as prime minister and establishing himself as the clear leader of both the Soviet state and Communist party. With the help of Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Khrushchev managed to prevent what he referred to as an Anti-Party Group that attempted to oust him from the party leadership , and he became Premier of the Soviet Union in March 1958.
Confirmed in power and in his new role, Khrushchev promoted and set a new policy of “Reform Communism” throughout the Soviet Union. In an attempt to humanize the Soviet system – but without sacrificing its ideology – he placed greater emphasis on producing consumer goods, in contrast to the Stalinist emphasis on heavy industry. Khrushchev began seeing the US and the West much more as a rival instead of an evil entity. He aimed at showing off the superiority of Soviet over American and Western products. This position further alienated Mao Zedong. As the Chinese Cultural Revolution proceeded, there was no worse insult than to be scorned for being a "Chinese Khrushchev," the equivalent of an ideological turncoat. Unsurprisingly, during the following years, all this also led to further alienation with the People’s Republic of China and what would soon become their own "Cold War" triggered by the Sino-Soviet Split in 1960.
====Liberalization, political, military and agricultural reforms====During Khrushchev’s time in office, for the first time, the Party leadership permitted Soviet tourists to go overseas, and Khrushchev often seemed amenable to widening exchanges with both socialist and capitalist countries. Furthermore, by 1954 Khrushchev effectively managed to reform the Stalinist security apparatus by subordinating it to the top party leadership. He divided Stalin’s Ministry of Internal Affairs into criminal police and security services – KGB (now Federal Security Service – FSB), which in turn reported directly to the U.S.S.R’s Council of Ministers. The head of KGB was also Khrushchev’s nominee. However, the Soviet military bitterly resisted Khrushchev’s desire to reduce conventional armaments in favor of nuclear missiles. His attempted decentralization of the party structure begun antagonizing many of those who had previously supported his own rise to power. According to various authors, political terror as an everyday method of government was replaced under Khrushchev by his administrative means of repression.
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In 1958, Khrushchev for the first time opened a public Central Committee meeting to hundreds of Soviet officials. This, however, actually expansion of the Central Committee allowed Khrushchev even greater control, since any dissenters . Anyone who dissented from him would have to make their case in front of a large, disapproving crowd. By this time, after all, the Communist Party had solidified into the so-called nomenclature – 10 million-strong elite of bureaucrats, managers , and technicians intending on guarding their power and prerogatives at all cost. <ref>Nikita Khrushchev: Domestic policies - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev#Domestic_policies</ref>
The central crisis of Khrushchev’s administration, however, was agriculture. He optimistically based many plans on the crops in 1956 and 1958, which fueled his repeated promises to overtake the United States in both agricultural and industrial production. He opened up more than 70 million acres of virgin land in Siberia and send thousands of laborers, but this plan was unsuccessful, and the Soviet Union soon had to import wheat from Canada and the US once again. Khrushchev was convinced and believed that he could solve the Soviet Union’s agricultural crises through the planting of corn on the same scale as the United States, though failing to realize that the differences in climate and soil made this strongly inadvisable.
====Khrushchev foreign and defense policies: on the brink of nuclear war====[[File:Nikita_Khrusjtsjov.jpg|thumbnail|250px|left|Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961]]<div class="portal" style='float:right; width:35%'>====Related Articles===={{#dpl:category=Russian History|ordermethod=firstedit|order=descending|count=8}}</div>When Khrushchev took control, the outside world still knew little of him, and he was initially not highly recognized. Short, heavyset, and wearing ill-fit suits, he was commonly seen as very energetic but not intellectual, and was dismissed by many as a buffoon who would not last long. Although his attacks on world capitalism were virulent and primitive, his outgoing personality and peasant humor were in sharp contrast to the image introduced by all earlier Soviet public figures. He also had very poor abysmal diplomatic skills, giving him the reputation of being a rude, uncivilized peasant in the West and an irresponsible clown in his own country. His methods of administration, although efficient, were also acknowledged as erratic since they threatened to abolish a large number of Stalinist-era agencies.
In foreign affairs, Khrushchev widely asserted his doctrine of peaceful co-existence with the non-communist world, which he had first proclaimed in his public speech at the 20th Party Congress. In 1959, Khrushchev conferred with President Eisenhower, which brought Soviet-American relations to new highs. Notwithstanding these hopeful developments, Khrushchev as a diplomat remained irascible and blunt. Back to Moscow reception, he directed his famous “We will bury you!” comment at the capitalist West. A long-planned summit conference with Eisenhower in Paris in May 1960 broke up with Khrushchev’s announcement that a U.S. plane (a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft) had been shot down over the Soviet Union with its pilot captured. Khrushchev repeatedly disrupted the proceedings in the United Nations General Assembly in September-October 1960 by pounding his fists on the desk and shouting in Russian. At one of the United Nations conferences, he even reacted to a comparison between Soviet control of Eastern Europe and Western imperialism in one of the most surreal moments in Cold War history, by waving his shoe and banging it on his desk.
Nevertheless, Chinese communists unfavorably and harshly criticized the Soviet Union for mishandling this settlement. The Sino-Soviet split, which began in 1959, reached the stage of public accusations in 1960. China’s ideological insist on all-out “war against the imperialists,” and Mao Zedong’s annoyance with Khrushchev’s co-existence policies was exacerbated by Soviet refusal to assist the Chinese nuclear weapon buildup and to rectify the Russo-Chinese border. The Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty reached between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1963, although generally welcomed throughout the world, intensified even further Chinese denunciations of Soviet “revisionism”.<ref>Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev: Premier of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics & Leadership of the Soviet Union: http://www.britannica.com/biography/Nikita-Sergeyevich-Khrushchev</ref> ====Khrushchev’s forced removal from office====
[[File:RIAN_archive_159271_Nikita_Khrushchev,_Valentina_Tereshkova,_Pavel_Popovich_and_Yury_Gagarin_at_Lenin_Mausoleum.jpg|thumbnail|left|350px|Khrushchev, Valentina Tereshkova, Pavel Popovichm and Yury Gagarin in 1963]]
Khrushchev’s rivals in the Communist party deposed him largely due to his erratic and cantankerous behavior, regarded by the party as a tremendous embarrassment on the international stage. The failures in agriculture, the quarrel with China, and the humiliating resolution of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, added to the growing resentment of Khrushchev’s own arbitrary administrative methods, were the major factors in his downfall. On October 14, 1964, after a palace coup orchestrated by his “loyal” protégé and deputy, Leonid Brezhnev, the Central Committee forced Khrushchev to retire from his position as the party’s first secretary and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union because of his “advanced age and poor health”. The Communist Party subsequently accused Khrushchev of making political mistakes, such as mishandling the Cuban Missile Crisis and disorganizing the Soviet economy, especially in the agricultural sector. However, Khrushchev considered his own forced retirement a major breakthrough and successful achievement. He was did not to opposeafter he left office, there were no executions after his coup, and his retirement was “negotiated” as between equals.<ref>Khrushchev’s last days in power - http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/23/world/son-tells-of-khrushchev-s-last-days-in-power.html?pagewanted=all</ref> Following his ousting, Khrushchev spent seven years under house arrest. He died at his home in Moscow on September 11, 1971.
==Related DailyHistory.org Articles==*[[How did Vladimir Lenin Rise To Power?]]*[[Angels of the Underground: Interview with Theresa Kaminski]]*[[Causes of World War II Top Ten Booklist]]*[[The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact- Stalin’s greatest mistake?]]</div classReferences="portal"> {{Mediawiki:WWII}}==References==
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Updated January 19, 2019