Question by Lovelyn: in what ways were the khrushchev years benificial to russia during (1953-1964)?
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Answer by hipponius
Khrushchev’s “peaceful coexistence” policy towards the USA was an attempt to soften competition between the two superpowers and basically give Russia a break. The policy allowed Russia to divert money and resources away from projects like the space race and missile building, and instead to spend that money on improving the living standards of its population.
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naik.bijay says
Khrushchev was admired for his efficiency and for maintaining an economy which, during the 1950s and 1960s, had growth rates higher than most Western countries, contrasted with the stagnation beginning with his successors. He is renowned for his liberalisation policies, whose results began with the widespread exoneration of political sentences. With Khrushchev's amnesty program, former political prisoners and their surviving relatives could now live a normal life without the infamous "wolf ticket".
Khrushchev placed more emphasis on the production of consumer goods and housing instead of heavy industry, precipitating a rapid rise in living standards.
The arts benefited from this environment of liberalisation, where works like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich created an attitude of dissent that would escalate during the subsequent Brezhnev-Kosygin era.
His de-Stalinization had a huge impact on young Communists of the day. Khrushchev encouraged more liberal communist leaders to replace hard-line Stalinists throughout the Eastern bloc. Alexander Dubček, who became the leader of Czechoslovakia in January 1968, accelerated the process of liberalisation in his own country with his Prague Spring program. Mikhail Gorbachev, who became the Soviet Union's leader in 1985, was inspired by it and it became evident with his policies of glasnost and perestroika. Khrushchev is sometimes known as "the last great reformer" among Soviet leaders before Gorbachev.