Question by mark b: why did Nikita Khrushchev seek reform when he took office in1953?
Answers and Views:
Answer by NoPlate
Stalin was an opportunist. He seized and held power for its own sake. Under his rule a fat-cat bureaucracy grew up where people could get rich off the system and never find themselves accountable. Khrushchev wasn’t like that. His biggest failing was that he *was* a communist. A real one, not someone out to milk the system. He thought he saw a way to bring the revolution to a successful end – to usher in a true Marxist society where an organized government wasn’t necessary. Of course, that meant putting many bureaucrats out of work and out of power. …which ultimately saw *him* out of work and out of power!
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Spellbound says
The reason 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.
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