Reviews for The Khrushchev Era 1953-1964

The average rating for The Khrushchev Era 1953-1964 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-08-09 00:00:00 Mona Tuko [ 1894 Khrushchev was born. 1917 He became a Bolshevik. 1918 Joins the Party and fights in the civil war. 1918 - 1935 Lots of promotions…. 1935 Khrushchev was made acting Party leader in the Ukraine, and his task was simple : bring the Ukraine under Stalin's heel….a newspaper reported his "merciless uprooting of the enemies of the people"….. Heady stuff, but the conclusion is inevitable: Khrushchev was wallowing in blood. During the war Khrushchev was made the Kiev Military Commander's second in command, and as such he participated in all key military decisions. After the war Krushchev was still involved with the Ukraine. The Ukraninans formed an insurgent army in Western Ukraine and this army continued armed resistance against the Soviet forces until the early 1950s. Both sides were very cruel. Khrushchev got the nickname "Butcher of the Ukraine". 1953 Stalin died. There were several people trying to take over from him. Khrushchev's main rival was Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria - one of Stalin's henchmen who was guilty of many atrocities. In the end Khrushchev and his colleagues took him to court. He was tried, found guilty and executed. Re Khrushchev's efforts to get into power, and the effect of him and subsequent leaders on communism. Stalin had done Khrushchev a favour. All the clever men had been eliminated from the top echelons of the Party and state power, with no new ones to take their place. One can coin the expression "the law of diminishing brain power". The brilliant Lenin was followed by the crafty Stalin, who killed intellectual debate at the top. Then came Khrushchev, who only had a limited grasp of Marxism. He was followed by Brezhnev, who preferred flattery to hard thinking (he was known as 'the ballerina': his head could be turned in any direction). Andropov was never well enough to make an impact. The depths were plumbed by the election of Chernenko. Perhaps one should not be too harsh on him. He could hardly speak. The arrival of Gorbachev was the exception that proved the rule, however, in the end, he destroyed the system. The limited intellectual ability had a disastrous effect on the way the country was managed. 1953 Khrushchev made first secretary of the Communist Party. 1953 Khrushchev proposed reforms, whereby economic decision-making could be decentralized. 1954/5 American efforts to widen a ring of containment around the Soviet Union by recruiting countries on its southern periphery - Pakistan, Iran and Iraq - made Moscow very nervous. 1955 The Central Commission set up a commission to investigate Stalin's crimes. This report created a sensation. There were some releases from the labour camps. Things that were defended by the report : Forced industrialization Forced collectivization Liquidating Trotskyist opposition in the 1920s Liquidating Bukharinist opposition in the 1920s The purges. Things that were condemned by the report : Acts against dedicated Party workers Acts against innocent scientists, writers and other intellectuals. Khrushchev was brave enough to admit that he bore some responsibility for Stalin's misdeeds. At a meeting after the Congress he received a note asking him why he had allowed such crimes to be committed. He asked who had written the note. There was total silence. "The person who wrote this note is frightened. Well, we were frightened to stand up to Stalin." 1956 Khruschev evolved his own 'new political thinking' in foreign affairs. Its core was peaceful co-existence. His relaxed attitude resulted from the growing strength of the Soviet Union as a nuclear power. There were bad relations between China and the Soviet Union, with Mao Zedong and Khrushchev having very little respect for one another. Mao thought that China was the country best perpetuating Lenin's communism, not the Soviet Union. Mao thought Khrushchev was too soft on "the Imperialists". He was annoyed because the USSR refused to help China develop its nuclear capacity. Nor would it support its conflict with Taiwan and the USA. 1956 The draconian Stalinist labour laws of June 1940, which criminalised the changing of jobs and absenteeism, were repealed. 1957 Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite, was launched by the Soviet Union. 1958 Khrushchev became Prime Minister. A Defence Council was established, and Khrushchev became command-in-chief of the Soviet armed forces. 1958 - 1962 Khrushchev was at the peak of his reforming powers, able to force through any piece of legislation. But much of it was ill-conceived, ill-digested and doomed to fail. There was no overall plan, no strategy of reform. Khrushchev would have a wizard idea, and he was brilliant at lateral thinking, providing several solutions to the same problem. But as time passed the number of options declined, and Khrushchev often chose the wrong one. He would dictate his inspirational thoughts, then read the transcript, make amendments, and finally hand it over for drafting as legislation. Often the drafters were not clear what the ultimate objective was, as becomes painfully clear when one re-reads the legislation. 1958 Khrushchev launched an educational reform programme, trying to make it easier for poorer children to get into university, and trying to encourage the prestige of manual jobs These reforms were unpopular, and his changes to education were reversed when he was removed from power in 1964. The wage reform of this time attempted to bring order to the chaotic wage structures. Hitherto it had been accepted that existing wages did not provide a living wage, so various subterfuges had to be resorted to. Now the minimum wage was raised and differentials between skilled and non-skilled were narrowed. Many skilled workers were worse off as a result of the reform, so various loopholes had to be found by management to pay them more, lest they quit. Also, although the reform addressed the problem of wage inequalities within an industry, it did not tackle the problem of inequalities between industries. Often workers left low-paid industries to work in higher-paid industries, even if this meant moving on from skilled jobs to unskilled jobs. Women made up almost half of the industrial labour force in the USSR, but were normally restricted to female-dominated industries - textiles, the garment industry, knitwear and food, where wages were low and the intensity of work very high. Where they were to be found in high-technology industries, they were usually confined to the lower echelons and performed monotonous jobs. On average, women earned two-thirds of men's wages. 1958 There was a Berlin crisis for about 4 years. The Soviet Union wanted to force the allies out of West Berlin, but the allies were not compliant. Instead the Berlin Wall was built. He also reformed the KGB. This was much needed. It was full of officers whose pasts were murky. The head, General Ivan Serov, was an avid collector of war loot. Instead Aleksandr Shelpin, first secretary of Komsomol (the Young Communists League), was made new chief of the KGB. 1959 Khrushchev was invited to America. The visit was a great success. America loved Khrushchev - his dynamism, openness, love of good drink, vitality and sheer joie de vivre. The trip was accompanied by enormous positive publicity in the Soviet Union too. 1960 An American aircraft over Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg) was shot down by the Russians. This was Soviet airspace. It was a reconnaissance aircraft. Khrushchev demanded that President Eisinhower condemn and cease such overflights, and punish those involved, and apologise. He refused. He had an invitation to visit the USSR withdrawn, and the two countries reverted to hurling abuse at one another. 1959 The revolution in Cuba, led by Fidel Castro, was becoming increasingly anti-American. This made rapprochement with Moscow a natural development. The USA had imposed a trade embargo which left Castro no choice by the develop relations with the socialist world. 1961 The first manned space flight - from the USSR - with Yury Gagarin. 1961 Monetary Reform. Ten old roubles were to be worth one new rouble. People were rightly concerned. State prices stayed firm, but the private market saw the change as an opportunity to make some extra money. 1961 At the Twenty-second Party Congress Khrushchev provided more gory details about the 1930s, and it was agreed to erect a monument to those who had suffered at this time. The whole cultural climate was changing as victims put pen to paper, e.g., Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This was published in the literary journal "Novy Mir", but only after the editor had forwarded a copy to Khrushchev. 1962 The Cuban Missile Crisis. A 13-day political and military standoff over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba. America and the Soviet Union came close to nuclear war. However disaster was avoided when the U.S. agreed to Khrushchev's offer to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for the US promising not to invade Cuba. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove US missiles from Turkey. (THIS PARAGRAPH TAKEN FROM THE INTERNET, NOT THE BOOK). 1963 There was a terrible drought. Unlike Stalin, who in this situation let people starve, Krushchev took the laudable step of importing millions of tons of grain from Canada, Australia and other countries. 8 March 1963 Addressing cultural workers, Khrushchev spoke of Stalin's "services" to the Party, and his "devotion" to Marxism and communism. Stalin, he explained, had been ill towards the end of his life, and had suffered with paranoia. His crimes were due to his illness. Did Khrushchev fear that demolishing Stalin's reputation would eventually risk demolishing the Party? For a while, Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's crimes made life easier for practising Christians, and Church life was more normal than any time since the revolution. Then began a vicious campaign which saw 10,000 churches and dozens of monasteries closed. Khrushchev made it clear that under communism there was no room for religion. 1964 The campaign to remove Khrushchev began. According to Semichastny, Brezhnev came up with various ways of eliminating Khrushchev, e.g., poisoning him, or an aeroplane crash, or a car accident. But in the end there was just a coup, and Khrushchev was told he was no longer leader of the country. An indictment was brought against him on fifteen counts. Many of these criticisms were justified. They included the following. * Erratic leadership * Taking hasty and ill-considered decisions * Ignoring and slighting his colleagues * Developing his own personality cult. * Being 'obsequious, incompetent and irresponsible'. * Imagining he was expert on anything that took his fancy - industrial administration had become very complex and unwieldy. Plus his policies had reduced workers' welfare. * Being insensitive in his dealings with foreign affairs. Thereby exacerbating tensions. * Damaging foreign trade relations. * His campaigns against fallow plots and peasants' private plots and his support of the charlatan Trofim Denisovich Lysenko had caused agriculture a lot of problems. * He had given too much to Third World states. 1971 The first volume of Krushchev's memoirs are published (in America). 1971 Khrushchev dies of heart failure. 1974 The second volume of his memoirs are published - again in America. ------------------------------------------------------ Good synopsis about Khrushcev. (hide spoiler)]

Review # 2 was written on 2017-08-25 00:00:00 PAT MURPHY It might not be the most in-depth history of Khrushchev's administration, but the author's British sense of humor earns this one a five-star rating.