Khrushchev and Brezhnev

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

Khrushchev and Brezhnev

- - - Why did Khrushchev become leader after Stalin?
    - What was the significance of the secret speech?
    - How successful was Khrushchev's domestic policies?
    - To what extent did he carry out his policy of 'peaceful co-existence' with the West?
    - Why was Khrushchev removed from office?
    - What were the key domestic policies of Brezhnev?
    - Why did Brezhnev invade Czechoslovakia?
    - How successful were Khrushchev and Brezhnev in keeping control of the satellite states?
    - What was the overall impact of Brezhnev on the USSR?

FROM THE DRIVE:

Miriam Dobson, “Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin” (Cornell UP, 2009) - New Books in HistoryExaminations of the Soviet gulag are a cottage industry in Russian studies. Since 1991, a torrent of books have been published examining the gulag’s construction, management, memory, and legacy. Few scholars, however, have investigated how Soviet citizens reacted to the return of over four million prisoners from labor camps and colonies between 1953 and 1958. How were they received? How did they reintegrate themselves into Soviet society? How did the specter of the “gulag returnee” impact policy on crime and social regulation? To answer these questions we have to turn to Miriam Dobson‘s Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin (Cornell UP, 2009). In Dobson’s book we don’t find the heroic gulag returnee (“Khrushchev’s zeks,” as Stephen Cohen affectionately calls them) who was unjustly persecuted under Stalin for his political views. Rather, Dobson gives us a tragic figure who finds himself indelibly scarred by his years in exile. Soviet citizens seemed to have cared little as to whether the returnee was a political or an ordinary criminal, innocent or guilty. People viewed all the returnees as suspicious outsiders, marked as such by their gulag slang, prison tattoos, and coarse appearance. They were, in a word, a problem, one that eventually caused a series of moral panics. For Dobson, Stalin’s death, Khrushchev’s denunciation of him, and the release of his victims did not (alas) evoke a collective sigh of relief within the body politic.Rather these acts inaugurated an era of confusion and anxiety articulated in society’s attempts to make sense of the gulag returnee’s place in the post-Stalin order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Khrushchev Thaw - Witness History: Archive 2014In the late 1950s the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced his predecessor, Stalin. Russians were able to buy tape recorders and listen to rock music. Witness hears from one man who benefitted from the period by becoming a musician himself. [Photo: Zinovy Zinik in 1975. Credit: Slava Tsukerman]

The Death of Leonid Brezhnev - Witness History: Archive 2011The Soviet leader died in November 1982 after years of ill health. He had ruled the USSR for 18 years and presided over a period of economic and political stagnation. Image: Associated Press

Khrushchev's Secret Speech - Witness History: Archive 2011Before 1956, Josef Stalin had always been portrayed as a hero of the Soviet Union. Then, in a secret speech to a Communist Party conference, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced him as a brutal and paranoid tryant. Witness hears from Russians who remember the speech and the shock it caused.

The Fall of Nikita Khrushchev - Witness History: Archive 2014On 14 October 1964 Moscow announced that the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was standing down. His retirement was unprecedented and although it was the result of a Kremlin coup, Khrushchev was allowed to live out the rest of his days in Moscow. His great-grandaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, tells us about her memories of the Cold War leader. (Photo: Nikita Khrushchev with his his grandaughter, Julia, and great-grandaughter, Nina Khrushcheva (left), at Khrushchev's retirement dacha in 1971. Credit: Khrushchev family archive)

Christopher Ward, “Brezhnev’s Folly: The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism” (Pittsburgh UP, 2009) - New Books in HistoryAt the Seventeenth Komsomol Congress in 1974, Leonid Brezhnev announced the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway, or BAM. This “Path to the Future” would prove to be the Soviet Union’s last flirt with socialist gigantism. The cost, poor planning, waste, and environmental damage associated with the construction BAM’s 2,687 miles of track served as an allegory for the Soviet system as a whole. To say that the BAM, which was to serve as an alternative to the strategically vulnerable and aging Trans-Siberian Railway, was a colossal failure is a colossal understatement. It’s troubles linger even today. But BAM’s story is not merely tragic. As Christopher Ward‘s book Brezhnev’s Folly: The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism demonstrates, the tale of BAM is also a window into the complexities of the Brezhnev era. Historians commonly view this period as one of “zastoi,” or stagnation. The BAM project, however, suggests a rather different interpretation. As Ward shows, we find a lot of things in the BAM initiative that are not captured by the “zastoi” interpretation, for example: a nascent Soviet environmental movement at loggerheads with the ecological destructiveness of Soviet Prometheanism; a flood of young volunteers driven by enthusiasm, opportunity, and a desire for freedom in the more libertine Soviet Far East; and, finally, a lot of crime, corruption, and sex (together with futile attempts to regulate and punish all of them). Ward’s study of BAM suggests that the Soviet Union under Brezhnev wasn’t so much stagnating as it was running about without any real idea of where it was going. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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