Question by boredom is boring: What were Khrushchev’s criticisms of his predecessor?
Yea so I guess the question is simple if you understand what is is asking. My problem is, is that I just don’t get the question. I am just not quite sure what it is trying to ask. I am not sure if it is asking for Stalin’s criticisms, or Khrushchev’s criticisms. It is all just confusing to me… can anyone please please please help me out? I am lost. Much appreciated.
Answers and Views:
Answer by spiffer1
The question is what Khrushchev found wrong with Stalinism.
Having studied Stalin and lived through the Khrushchev days (in Canada, as a kid), my suspicion is Khrushchev was never really comfortable, even after Stalin’s death, with publicly stating anything he found wrong with how Stalin did things.
I would not be surprised if he had to ‘walk a fine (party) line’ after taking over as the most public of the leadership roles of the Soviet Union as too many of Stalin’s other hand-picked people were still holding on to some reins of power.
Khrushchev quite possibly felt he could lose his position if he ever crossed the line. If he did cross the line someone may have felt threatened by what he may have said and/or done. As I recall we, in the west, never really found out why Khrushchev was forced out of office and could only surmise it had to do with the show down over the Cuban/Turkish Missile/Armaments situation(s).
Read all the answers in the comments.
What do you think?
Spellbound says
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.
His criticisms of Stalin ran deep. He denounced the Cult of Personality that had grown up around Stalin. He denounced the purges, but only after 1936 – meaning that Trotsky remained beyond the pale, but many others were (often posthumously) rehabilitated and given back their Party cards. He criticised the arbitrary and "extra-legal" methods Stalin used, such as telling regional party cells just how many of their number were to be expelled, exiled, arrested or executed. He denounced the GULAG prison system, and began to close it – the last camp closed in 1960. He denounced the use of torture to gain "confession".
The impact it had within the Soviet Union was initially very limited, as it was not published there. It was leaked outside by Italian communists (I think). In the USSR it was spread to party chiefs who told the local party cells about it, but ordinary citizens did not hear too much about it. There was, however, widespread rioting in Georgia – probably because they did not like "their boy" being insulted.
The greatest effect was known as the thaw – the arts and literature were liberalised, political arrests slowed almost to a stop, executions of political prisoners ceased and the system of prisons known as the Gulag was shut down.
See:
Khrushchev – W. Taubman
Khrushchev Remembers – N.S. Khrushchev
Beria, My Father – S Beria
Leeroy Jenkinsy says
I think the question relates to Khrushchev's secret speech made in 1956 in which he denounced Stalin. He used Marx's denunciation of the 'cult of the individual' to base his argument that Stalin's reign had been far too much about the consolidation of extreme power and his cult status as opposed to the collective success of the Soviet Union, as communism was supposed to be about. He criticized Stalin for making the struggle against "Trotskyists" a physical state of repression as opposed to the ideological struggle it once was. He was disgusted at how Stalin, in an attempt to eradicate any opposition persecuted and executed thousands, going as far as to deem over 800 members of the Communist Party as "enemies of the state" and having them murdered. Khrushchev was also angry at how whole nationalities were simply deported under Stalins rule.
On Stalins personal agendas, he saw it as pathetic how Stalin doctored history to make himself look amazing, such as photo-shopping himself into photos beside Lenin even though Lenin knew very little of Stalin and Stalins apparent heroics during world war 2.
He also had other smaller criticisms such as the personality cult going too far (Stalingrad, Stalin Alee, multiple Stalin statues in all corners of the Soviet Bloc)