Question by Person: what were the philosophies and accomplishments of Nikita Khrushchev?
Nikita Khrushchev was the dictator of the USSR from 1953-64
do any of you know what his philosophies were and can u explain them
what were his accomplishments
and what influenced his political beliefs and who he was and what he did as the leader?
thank you in advance
Answers and Views:
Answer by Squeaky Wheeler
He revealed many of Stalin’s crimes.
And he signed the nuclear test ban treaty w/ J.F.K.
Read all the answers in the comments.
Give your own answer to this question!
Spellbound says
When Stalin died in 1953 there was no clear successor to him.
The country was initially run by a triumvirate of Malenkov, Beria, and Molotov but machinations among the Politburo led to Khrushchev being elected First Secretary of the Party in September of 1953.
By 1956 Khrushchev's position was still very weak and he needed to find a way of isolating and removing his political rivals – he couldn't use Stalin's tactics of having them arrested by the NKVD as Beria had been in charge of that and loyalties ran deep. What he decided to do was to present himself as a down to Earth, folksy, peasant. By doing this he sought to isolate Malenkov, a sophisticated man, but seen as a drab bureaucrat – he achieved this by beginning to reform the country, economically, politically as well as culturally.
His reforms proved popular, at first, and they seemed to give communism a new direction.
He still needed to reform the party, and to ensure that the Stalinists could not come back to power. This was the reason for both the 1956 "Secret Speech" where he denounced Stalin and the terror of his regime, and for Molotov's removal from office in 1956 – he was removed from the Presidium (the enlarged and renamed Politburo) in 1957.
In agriculture he began the Virgin Lands campaign – ploughing up vast areas of virgin steppe.
In science, his regime saw the launch of the first artificial satellite – Sputnik, the first man and the first woman in space.
In the arts Dr Zhivago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich were published.
Khrushchev was probably, after Lenin, the most dedicated communist who ruled the Soviet Union, he firmly believed that communism was the best form of economic and political system. He thought that, because he had risen from ill educated peasant's son to the supreme head of the USSR, that it was an egalitarian country – especially as its great rival, the USA, was practising segregation at the time.
See:
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era – William Taubman
Khrushchev Remembers – Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev
Interestingly Beria – Stalin's monster – proposed a whole series of reforms in 1953 that were even more far reaching than Gorbachev's. Had he managed to push through these reforms the USSR would have allowed a large degree of private enterprise and there would have been a political liberalisation, perhaps it would now resemble China.
See:
Beria, My Father – Sergo Beria