Question by leena: What are the key points of Khrushchev’s process of “desalinization?”?
Thank you and if you do answer this then please provide your answer with the site you used..(: But if it’s something you learned aboit back then, than I don’t mind I’ll accept any right answer
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Answers and Views:
Answer by Spellbound
The reason for his de-Stalinisation policy is that 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.
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 (he and Malenkov had worked together to remove Beria, having him arrested in June 1953). 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 as well as politically. 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.
It was radical because it removed two of the major underpinnings of the Soviet state – the use of terror as a political tool, and the cult of personality surrounding Stalin; effectively claiming that from the purges onwards, with the exception of WWII, everything Stalin did or said was incorrect, and a perversion of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
See:
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era – William Taubman
Khrushchev Remembers – Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev
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