27.1 The Soviet Union under Khrushchev

Soviet history from 1953 to 1964 is identified with the leadership of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894 - 1971). Entering the national spotlight as a good and faithful Stalinist, Khrushchev would later shock his comrades in the Communist Party by condemning Stalin and calling for the "de-Stalinization" of the USSR. Under his leadership the Soviet people would experience a relaxation of the economic severity and police state terror associated with Stalin. He would seek both to further Soviet interests and enhance the Soviet image in the world through a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West. At the same time as lessening confrontation with the West, he would make the USSR a strategic power.

Nikita Khrushchev 1963

The son of a Ukrainian coal miner, Nikita Khrushchev joined the Communist Party in 1918 and became active in the party organization in the Ukraine. As a good Stalinist he rose through the party ranks and achieved national leadership responsibilities when appointed to the governing Politburo in 1939. During the war he served with distinction as a political officer and supervised postwar reconstruction in the Ukraine. In 1949 Stalin appointed him head of the Moscow party structure and in 1950 he became commissar for agriculture. His long years of work as a party official and operative served to build a strong base of support within both the party leadership and rank and file. Khrushchev was twice married. His first wife, Galina, died during the famine in 1921. He married Nina Petrovna in 1924. Through both marriages he had five children (three daughters, two sons). His eldest son, Leonid, was killed during World War Two. The younger, Sergei, formerly a Soviet aerospace engineer, became an American citizen and was a professor of international relations at Brown University. (He died in 2020.) Strongly family oriented, Nikita and Nina Khrushchev loved and spoiled their children and grandchildren. Khrushchev was 59 years old when Stalin died.

Whereas Stalin was dour and distant, Khrushchev was very much a public personality. At the same time shrewd and calculating, he was also unpredictable and spontaneous, traits that occasionally embarrassed his comrades in the national leadership. Of peasant background, he would often lapse into crude peasant humor to make a point. He could be both charming and badgering when dealing with foreign leaders. His famous 1959 "kitchen debate" with US Vice President Nixon certainly illustrated his disregard for the niceties of protocol as did his pounding his shoe on the lectern when addressing the United Nations in 1960. His rotund features and pixie-like grin coupled with his unpredictability always made him the center of attention. Compared to the formalism of Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev did indeed seem reflective of a new direction for the Soviet Union.

Consolidation of Power, 1953 - 1958

Khrushchev assumed supremacy over the Communist Party through the brief period of collective leadership following the death of Stalin in March 1953. Stalin's immediate successor was Georgi Malenkov who was named to the positions of both Party Secretary (head of the Party) and Premier (head of the government). Malenkov's tenure of those offices was dependent upon the good will of his associates in the Presidium and on the outcome of the post-Stalin maneuvering taking place within the party's governing Central Committee. Seven days after assuming power, Malenkov resigned as Party Secretary and was replaced in that office by Khrushchev. As the new Party Secretary Khrushchev moved to strengthen his authority. Working in cooperation with Malenkov, who continued as premier, he engineered the arrest and execution of Lavrenti Beria, Stalin's feared security police chief. Seen as the most formidable threat to the new leadership, Beria was the only fatality of the transition of political power. Over the next few years Khrushchev would further consolidate his supremacy by successfully removing from office Malenkov and Molotov, and even the popular defense minister General Georgi Zhukov, who had led the armies that defeated the Germans. In 1958 he completed his rise to full power by assuming the position of Premier. Consequently, as head of both Party and state, Khrushchev was undisputed master of the USSR.

What happened to the political victims of Khrushchev's rise to supremacy over Party and state? Indicative of a new and perhaps more humane regime, all but Beria were spared imprisonment or execution, the standard Stalinist approaches to dealing with political opposition. Malenkov and Molotov and the others deposed in 1957 were demoted to lesser positions and later retired into relatively comfortable obscurity. Zhukov and Bulganin were likewise both retired.

The Secret Speech and De-Stalinization

Khrushchev's mark on the world was first felt at the Twentieth All-Union Party Congress that met in Moscow in February, 1956. There, before a closed session of hushed delegates, he delivered his famous "Secret Speech." Titled the "Crimes of the Stalin Era," the speech was a 20,000 word condemnation of Stalin and his abuse of power in betraying the principles of Marxist-Leninism. The focus of Khrushchev's attack was on the injustice of the purges and Stalin's "Cult of Personality." Stalin was portrayed as a brutal and demented despot whose arbitrary use of power sent thousands of good Communists to their deaths. He had subverted the ideals of Communist ideology in order to make himself absolute.

The speech, supposedly confidential, was never released for publication in the Soviet Union, but its contents were disseminated to Party members throughout the USSR. Its effect was to show the Party rank and file that the USSR was under new leadership and was going to move in new, supposedly more ideologically correct, directions. Word of its content and purpose did, of course, get out, and copies of its text were secreted out of the USSR and published abroad. The secrecy was justified on the grounds that the Soviet people might not comprehend the condemnation of Stalin, who for most had been portrayed for so long as a glorious and heroic leader. The men who were condemning him, after all, were the same men who had served him! Khrushchev need not have feared popular indignation. The Soviet people, either out of relief or continued fear, seemed to welcome the change signaled by the speech.

The Secret Speech inaugurated a period of cautious "de-Stalinization" through which some of the more restrictive aspects of the Stalinist state were reformed. There was a general relaxation of the police repression so evident in the Stalinist system. Thousands of political prisoners were released from the gulag prison camps. Many of the victims of Stalin's purges were posthumously "rehabilitated," their convictions being overturned as illegal and unjust manifestations of Stalin's paranoia. Censorship was relaxed, permitting a degree of intellectual and artistic expression. A new emphasis on the production of consumer goods provided some assurance that the government was interested in improving the overall quality of Soviet life. The physical presence of Stalin's Cult of Personality was gradually dismantled. His portraits and statues were removed. In 1961 his physical remains were relocated from the Lenin Mausoleum and re-interred in a modest grave inside the Kremlin walls. In the same year Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd.

For the average Soviet citizen, life did indeed seem to be changing for the better. Except in matters of treason or incorrect ideological thought, the terror of the secret police had been replaced by due process of law. Refrigerators and washing machines might be expensive and in short supply but at least they were being manufactured. There were newly expressive books, articles, and poetry to read and daring new paintings and sculpture to view as writers and artists were no longer restricted to the deadening restraints of socialist realism. An ambitious urban housing construction project promised relief to the problem of chronic overcrowding into substandard apartments. Marvelous Soviet technological achievements such as Sputnik, the first artificial satellite (1957), and manned space flight (1961) made the Soviet citizen proud of his collective accomplishment.

The de-Stalinization policy did not, however, mean abandonment of the basic framework of the Soviet system. Much of what Stalin had implemented remained in place. Liberalization did not mean the end of censorship. Freedom of expression had its limits. In 1958 the Soviet writer Boris Pasternak was not allowed to accept the Nobel Prize for literature for his work, Dr. Zhivago, a book critical of the 1917 Revolution's stifling of the individual. The state security police remained in place as did the gulag camps. The massive slow-moving and cumbersome bureaucracy continued to administer all aspects of the Soviet system. Centralized economic planning continued to regulate the production and availability of manufactured goods and foodstuffs. Above all, the Communist Party retained its control over the life of all Soviet individuals and institutions.

Khrushchev's Economic and Military Policies

Hoping to increase the efficiency and output of industrial production, Khrushchev called for a degree of decentralization of political controls over economic life. An optimistic Seven Year Plan was announced in 1958 through which the USSR would outstrip the capitalist countries in overall production by the year 1965. While there were some modest gains, neither program proved successful, and both were quietly abandoned in the early to mid-1960s.

The most ambitious of Khrushchev's agricultural undertakings was the "Virgin Lands" project in Central Asia. Agricultural experts, technicians, farmers, and their families were encouraged to relocate to Kazakhstan where extensive desert lands were to be made arable and brought under cultivation. Thousands migrated to new desert "agrotowns" to make the deserts bloom.

The Virgin Lands project, however, failed to produce desired increases in food production. In fact, in the early 1960s, poor harvests and drought led to serious shortages of needed staples – eggs, meat, butter, milk, and bread. In order to keep grocery shelves even minimally stocked, the Soviet government was forced to buy foodstuffs from abroad. The failure of Soviet agriculture proved a major embarrassment to the Party leadership and was among the reasons for Khrushchev's fall from power in 1964.

The conditions of the Cold War relationship with the United States and its allies caused Khrushchev to seek an increase in Soviet defense capabilities. While the USSR had a massive and well-equipped army, its basic arsenal was largely conventional, consisting of thousands of tanks, fighter and bomber aircraft, and other tactical battlefield weapons. In spite of its formidable strength, Khrushchev feared the Soviet military would be no match for the United States in a global war. In order to fight a war on a global scale, it was necessary to modernize and develop Soviet strategic armaments. Between 1956 and 1964 billions of rubles were spent on research and development for expanding the navy and creating new systems of long-range jet bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of striking targets thousands of miles away. Powerful nuclear weapons with massive destructive capability were developed and tested. The 1957 launching of Sputnik and subsequent achievements in manned space flight revealed to an alarmed West the Soviets' technical ability to develop strategic missile systems. The incredible 58-megaton hydrogen bomb tested in 1962 revealed the destructive power such missiles were capable of delivering. The US-Soviet arms race was well underway by 1964.

Soviet Foreign Policy, 1953 - 1964

Foreign policy during the Khrushchev years was based on "peaceful coexistence" with the West rather than the Stalinist pattern of confrontation. Confrontation had led to Cold War and the formation of the massive political-military alliance system through which the United States encircled and threatened the USSR. The thought underlying peaceful coexistence was that the ultimate triumph of Communism would be possible through economic and social competition with the forces of "capitalist imperialism." Such a policy, it was hoped, would reduce tensions between the USSR and the West and cause the breakup of the US alliance system. Also, since 1945 colonial peoples everywhere were rejecting their weakened imperial masters and seeking political, economic, and social self-determination. World-wide, the economic and social strengths of the socialist system would show themselves superior to capitalism which would collapse (as Marx predicted) under its own inner contradictions.

There were several major features of Khrushchev's peaceful coexistence policy. These included normalization of relations with the western powers; Soviet courtship of the emerging "Third World" including cooperation with anti-western "bourgeois nationalist" regimes; and Soviet support for wars of "national liberation." All intended to serve Soviet interests by reducing tensions with the West and building support throughout the non-western world. A brief overview of each follows.

Khrushchev sought to relax confrontation with the Western powers by seeking accommodation and better relations with them. Reflective of this policy were goodwill tours by the Soviet leadership and personal meetings with western leaders. In 1955 Khrushchev and Bulganin traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, for a four-power summit meeting with US President Eisenhower and the leaders of Britain and France. While the meeting produced no agreements of substance, the four leaders were able to take measure of each other on a personal as well as national interest basis. Khrushchev visited Britain in 1956 and spent two weeks in the fall of 1959 touring the United States.

On his US visit Khrushchev spoke to business groups and the press, mingled with the American man-on-the-street, toured factories, farms, even Hollywood, before meeting for two days with Eisenhower at the presidential retreat at Camp David. He was not, however, allowed to go to Disneyland in California. US officials wanted Disney to close the park for the visit in order to guarantee Khrushchev’s safety. Disney refused, saying that the Soviet leader should be able to experience the park in the company of American families. Khrushchev chided his hosts, “What do you have there? Rocket-launching pads?” (Beschloss, Mayday, 199).

Other efforts to accommodate the West included the 1955 treaty whereby Soviet forces (having occupied Vienna and eastern Austria) evacuated Austria on Austria's rehabilitation as a sovereign state. In the same year the USSR extended diplomatic recognition to the government of West Germany. Cultural and educational exchanges with the western countries were established whereby performing groups toured and select students studied in each other's universities. In 1959 the US and USSR both opened public exhibitions of their country's achievements in Moscow and New York. It was at the US Exposition in Moscow that Khrushchev challenged Vice President Nixon on the supremacy of Soviet technology in the famous "kitchen debate." The “debate” took place in a model American kitchen. Nixon pointed out all the modern conveniences and expressed the hope that someday the Soviet people might enjoy the same levels of comfort. Khrushchev, agitated, repeatedly poked Nixon in the chest and railed about the power of Soviet missiles.

The peaceful coexistence policy did not mean the end of confrontation with the West. There would be periodic crises as the interests of the Soviet Union clashed with those of the United States. As Khrushchev himself was both accommodating and bullying, so Soviet policy was often less than predictable. Relations between the two nations were severely strained by the 1960 U-2 Incident. The gravest crises centered on the status of Berlin in 1961 and Khrushchev's decision to place strategic nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. It is not the purpose of this reading to identify these crises here, but the reader should be aware that they are part of the Soviet experience during Khrushchev's regime.

The Soviets undertook a vigorous diplomatic, economic, and propaganda effort to establish a cooperative and working relationship with the emerging Third World countries of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Here the emphasis of policy was to exploit anti-colonial feelings of the new nations. Again, Khrushchev took to the road through goodwill visits to India, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Indonesia. The leaders of Third World nations were invited to Moscow. Soviet economic and technical assistance was made available to developing nations. Soviet diplomatic and advisory personnel were trained in the language and customs of the nations to which they were sent giving them a distinct advantage over their American counterparts. Cultural and student exchanges were established.

Khrushchev was pragmatic enough to put aside ideological considerations in furthering Soviet interests in the Third World. It did not matter if the regimes being courted and extended Soviet support were sympathetic to Communism. The purpose of the policy was to undermine the economic and political control of the western "imperialists." Thus, Moscow was willing to cooperate with "bourgeois nationalist" regimes who were opposed to the commercial and social influence of the US and western powers in their countries. Khrushchev sought to establish good relations between the USSR and presidents Gamal Nasser of Egypt and Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia. Both rulers had outlawed the Communist party in their countries, but their anti-imperialism made them useful "friends" for the USSR. The most dramatic illustration of this policy were a Soviet trade and arms agreement with Egypt and substantial Soviet financial and technical assistance in the building of the Aswan High Dam on the Nile.

Throughout the Third World Soviet propaganda presented the USSR as the champion of all peoples opposed to western imperialism and Communism as the means to liberation. The Soviet people were presented as once having been the victims of such imperialism until their successful revolution freed them from bourgeois tyranny. Through Marxist-Leninism revolutionary liberation was possible. Through a centralized economy based on socialism, the wealth of society would be shared by all people, not just a wealthy few tied to the business interests of the United States and other imperialists. The Soviet message had great appeal to the poverty-ridden millions in the newly independent countries of the Third World.

Perhaps the Soviet Union’s most effective demonstration of support for states resisting Western imperialism during the Khrushchev years was in Cuba. In early 1959 nationalist guerrillas led by Fidel Castro overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The Cuban people enthusiastically welcomed Castro’s promise of revolution to make Cuba master of its own destiny. Once in power Castro used harsh measures to end the corruption of the Batista regime and make his promised reforms. Thousands of upper and middle class Cubans were deprived of their property and wealth in the name of the “revolution.” All land was nationalized and redistributed to landless peasants. Foreign investments were nationalized. In the face of both domestic and foreign protest, Castro’s rule became increasingly authoritarian and abusive. Those opposed to the revolution fled the country and emigrated to the United States and other Caribbean countries.

As much of Cuba’s sugar, mining, communications, and transport industries were American-owned, Castro’s policies caused much discomfort in Washington. The Eisenhower administration responded with increasingly severe economic and diplomatic sanctions intended to keep Castro in line, but to no avail. Khrushchev saw Cuba’s conflict with the US as an excellent opportunity to reach out to Castro and establish a Soviet presence in the Western Hemisphere. Making a trade deal to purchase Cuban sugar, Khrushchev lauded Castro as a new force in Latin America and proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine dead. Castro’s speeches took on a strident anti-American tone condemning “Yankee imperialism” throughout all of Latin America. By the fall of 1960 the US had embargoed all trade with Cuba and ended its diplomatic relations with Cuba in early 1961. Castro welcomed an increase in Soviet aid and technical assistance. To encourage the spread of “Fidelismo,” Cuban revolutionaries were sent to assist leftist movements in other Latin American countries. To the US, Cuba was rapidly becoming a Soviet satellite and a destabilizing threat to the Western Hemisphere.

When Kennedy ran for the US presidency in 1960, he attacked the Republicans for being too soft on Castro and promised strong measures to rid the hemisphere of Communism. On assuming office in 1961 he approved the CIA’s plan for Cuba. The CIA had been secretly training and equipping a force of some 1400 Cuban exiles in Guatemala and Honduras for the future overthrow of Castro. In April 1961, the invasion force landed at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. The result was a disaster of overconfidence, poor strategic planning, and logistical mismanagement. Castro’s forces easily defeated the invaders. Kennedy, expecting an easy victory, backed away from further escalation of the conflict and refused to provide US military air protection for the exile force. The survivors were captured and later (December 1962) ransomed to the US for medical supplies. Kennedy accepted responsibility for both the operation and its failure. Much to Khrushchev’s joy, the Bay of Pigs Incident made Kennedy look indecisive and unprincipled. The US had tried to overthrow the government of another country - and failed. The victory made Castro a hero in Cuba. His propagandists hailed him as the first Latin American to defeat US imperialism. In December 1961, Castro declared himself to be a Marxist-Leninist and began to reorganize his government along Communist lines. Thus, Khrushchev brought the Cold War to the US doorstep.

The third feature of Soviet foreign policy was to provide financial, material, and military support for what Khrushchev called "just wars" of "national liberation." Thus it was that the USSR provided financial and material assistance to the Viet Cong (the South Vietnamese Communist guerrillas opposed to the US-supported government of South Vietnam). Following the 1956 Suez War in the Middle East, the USSR would provide military support for the Arab nations in their conflict with Israel.

In addition to peaceful coexistence with the West and the strengthening of Soviet ties in the Asian-African Third World were two other areas of foreign policy concern: Eastern Europe and China. In Eastern Europe, the Soviet hold on the satellite countries was firmly reasserted.

Crises in Eastern Europe

Following the death of Stalin the satellite countries of Communist Eastern Europe became increasingly restless under Soviet domination. Ever since 1948 the ideological independence of Yugoslavia's President Josef Tito had proved particularly vexing to the Soviets. Tito's independence threatened to undermine Soviet control of the other East European regimes. In 1955 Khrushchev traveled to Yugoslavia to meet with Tito in an attempt to heal the schism between the two Communist countries. Relations were improved as Khrushchev joined in a joint declaration with Tito condemning Stalin and Beria for the 1948 breakdown of Soviet-Yugoslav relations. Yugoslavia would continue, however, to follow its own nationalist course, mixing Marxist socialism with elements of capitalist enterprise. The prosperity of a Yugoslavia free of Soviet economic domination caused other Eastern Europe regimes to seek similar autonomy.

Poland If Tito were not bad enough, the Eastern European reaction to the de-Stalinization policy also proved troublesome. Taking what they thought was their cue from Khrushchev's efforts to undo the abuses of the Stalinist system, the Communist leadership of Poland and Hungary attempted to move in new directions. In the summer of 1956 a workers strike caused anti-Soviet rioting in the Polish city of Poznan, leading to a crisis between Poland and the USSR. In dealing with the unrest the Polish Communist party central committee, seeing an opportunity for greater autonomy, dismissed the Stalinist "hard-liners" who had held power and replaced them with a government headed by Wladislaw Gomulka, a known nationalist. The interests of Soviet national security could not tolerate a Polish government potentially unfriendly to the USSR, and the Soviet leadership reacted with alarm. In October Khrushchev traveled to Warsaw. In meeting with Gomulka he made it very clear that the USSR would, if necessary, take military action to keep Poland firmly within the sphere of fraternal socialism. Gomulka saved his country from Soviet invasion by affirming Poland's solidarity with Moscow in matters of foreign policy and mutual defense. Poland would remain firmly within the Soviet orbit.

The Hungarian Revolution The lesson of Poland was not learned by Hungary. In the fall of 1956, the Communist party of Hungary divided into opposing factions of "nationalists" and Stalinists. Hoping to pursue a policy similar to that of Yugoslavia, the Hungarian nationalist Communists called for greater national autonomy. The division of the Hungarian Communist party disrupted the operation of government and political authority collapsed. Sensing the end of the Soviet presence in their country, people took to the streets in support of the nationalists. Soviet officials and security police in Hungary were attacked and killed. The Hungarian army came over in support of the new popular movement. In late October the Hungarian Communist central committee named Imre Nagy as the new head of state. Although a Communist, Nagy proclaimed the end of the single-party political system and announced that Hungary would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact (Soviet alliance system). On October 29, the Soviet government called for the evacuation of all Soviet military forces from Hungary. To the joyous Hungarians it appeared as if they had won their independence. In the United States and the West the events in Hungary seemed to signal the breakdown of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe. The Hungarian Revolution was seemingly victorious. For the Hungarians, a terrible new lesson was about to be learned.

On November 4, 1956, the Soviets suddenly returned. In a brutally efficient invasion, Soviet tanks and troops forced their way into Budapest. In heroic but futile resistance the Hungarian army supported by armed detachments of workers and students fought the Soviet invader. Some 40,000 were killed as the Soviets suppressed the rebellion. Two hundred thousand Hungarians fled the country. Pleas from the Hungarian resistance fighters for assistance from the West went unanswered. The Hungarian Revolution was crushed. Nagy and other rebel leaders were arrested and later executed.[1] A new government of Communist hard-liners led by Janos Kadar was installed in Budapest. The lesson of Hungary was evident to the rest of Communist Eastern Europe. De-Stalinization or not, the satellites of Eastern Europe would remain within the Soviet sphere of vital interest.

The Schism with China

While Communist solidarity seemed secure in Eastern Europe, Soviet relations with Communist China soured. Having come to power in 1949 through a successful struggle of some two decades of civil war, the Chinese Communists sought close ties with the Soviet Union. The Chinese leader Mao Zedong traveled to Moscow, and the two nations announced a treaty of friendship and assistance. In the early 1950s thousands of Soviet technicians and advisors were sent to China to help the Chinese modernize and industrialize. In the late 1950s, however, relations between the two Communist giants became increasingly strained. Ideological correctness lay at the heart of the matter. The Soviets became increasingly critical of Chinese attempts to move China rapidly to Communism through the ambitious Great Leap Forward program inaugurated in 1958. The Chinese resented Khrushchev's de-Stalinization process and peaceful coexistence policy and accused the Soviets of betraying Marxist-Leninist principles. The Soviets accused the Chinese of being reckless revolutionaries; the Chinese accused the Soviets of being hypocritical revisionists.

In the summer of 1960 Khrushchev ordered all Soviet technical personnel out of China. Work on hundreds of vital projects in China suddenly came to a halt as the Soviets went home, taking not only their expertise but blueprints as well! What Western observers have called the "Sino-Soviet Split" had begun. In the years following, relations continued to worsen. The Chinese proclaimed to the world that their brand of revolutionary socialism was the only means whereby colonial peoples might throw off the yoke of Western capitalist imperialism and that Communism could never coexist with capitalism. China would compete with the USSR for the hearts and minds of the world's oppressed peoples. Although China and the Soviet Union never broke diplomatic relations, their future interaction would be one of cold formality. By the mid-1960s both countries had bolstered their military presence along their common frontiers.

Khrushchev's Fall from Power

In October 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was dismissed from his offices and compelled to retire. Very simply, his comrades in the ruling Party Presidium had lost confidence in his leadership. The massive agricultural failures of the early 1960s were blamed on the inadequacy of his reforms and ineffectiveness of such schemes as the Virgin Lands project. The disturbing ideological break with China had undermined the Soviet claim to championship of the anti-imperialist cause of the Third World's peoples. The embarrassment suffered by Khrushchev's retreat in the Cuban Missile Crisis had undermined Soviet prestige throughout the Communist world. Above all, the recklessness of Khrushchev's seemingly spontaneous policy-making gave the impression that Soviet government was out of control. His personality, with its unpredictable mood shifts, temper tantrums, and badgering, was likewise seen as an embarrassment.

The men who succeeded Khrushchev in a new collective leadership were those who engineered his removal. All had been men whose political careers had been advanced by Khrushchev. Leonid Brezhnev (age 58), who assumed the position of Party Secretary, had been a Khrushchev protégé in the Ukrainian party structure and since 1960 had served as President of the Supreme Soviet. Alexei Kosygin (60), who became Premier, was a Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Nikolai Podgorny (61) had been head of the party in the Ukraine and later would be named President (a largely ceremonial office) of the USSR. Having built a base for support within the Central Committee and the army, the Presidium summoned Khrushchev home from a Crimean vacation and informed him that his resignation was expected.

The transition to new leadership went smoothly and without vindictiveness. The issue was personal not ideological. There was no major public denunciation of Khrushchev's policies or purge of his followers. (However, his son-in-law was removed as editor of Izvestia, the government newspaper.) He was retired with a pension to a comfortable government dacha compound outside of Moscow, where, until his death in 1971, he spent his days working on his memoirs, walking in the countryside, and playing with his grandchildren.

The years of Nikita Khrushchev marked a significant switch in Soviet directions. The Stalinist legacy of state-sanctioned terror had been ended. The huge bureaucratic system of planning and production remained in place, but it seemed less threatening. Under Khrushchev the average Soviet citizen began to experience modest material benefits of socialism. Peaceful coexistence with the West and protection of Soviet national interests had replaced the ideological -and dangerous- drive to further world revolution. The USSR was at peace with itself and, relatively speaking, with the world. Soviet cosmonauts had led the world in the first tentative steps to explore outer space. Complacency and security seemed to have become the factors underlying Soviet Communism. The Brezhnev regime that followed would continue what Khrushchev had started but without the brashness.

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The image of Khrushchev is from Wikipedia.

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[1] In one of history's many ironies the Communist government of Hungary in 1989 rehabilitated Nagy as a heroic patriot and re-interred his body with full ceremonial honors.