Its not often that the proceedings of a conference are read by
anyone other than the participants (and often not even by them),
but this book, originating in an international conference on the
centennial of Nikitia Khrushchev's birth, is both important and
even moving.Khrushchev is one of the most remarkable and
paradoxical figures to have arisen in the Soviet or any other
system. A convinced Communist, an admirer and close collaborator of
Stalin, he was intimately involved with some of the worst purges of
the 1930s and 1940s. In Moscow archives, his signature (as the
party secretary) appears on the list approving the execution of
thousands of party functionaries5,000 of whom were shot as part of
Moscow's quota. As a regional party boss in the 1930s, he deported
more than two million people from the western Ukraine. Im up to my
elbows in blood, he said after his retirement. I sincerely believed
in Stalin at the time and did everything. . . . That's the most
terrible thing, what burdens my soul. And yet, even at the height
of the purges, Khrushchev took considerable risks in seeking the
rehabilitation or release of some accused, even in the face of
Stalin's irritation. And while his famous secret speech condemning
Stalin was agreed to by the Presidium, it was, writes Vladimir
Naumov, an act of high civil courage that could have, if it had
gone wrong, cost him his life. Solzhenitsyn himself credited
Khrushchev with a profound spiritual impulse in his determination
to release prisoners from the Gulag. But the importance and
subtlety of these analyses lie in the nuances that the authors,
approaching Khrushchev from so many perspectives, bring to his
life. One revelation is the evidence that the public, unlike the
intellectuals, may have disapproved of the speech.A book that
underlines why Gorbachev was almost inconceivable without
Khrushchev. (Kirkus Reviews)
What was known about Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during his
career was strictly limited by the secretive Soviet government.
Little more information was available after he was ousted and
became a "non-person" in the USSR in 1964. This pathbreaking book
draws for the first time on a wealth of newly released materials --
documents from secret former Soviet archives, memoirs of
long-silent witnesses, the full memoirs of the premier himself --
to assemble the best-informed analysis of the Khrushchev years ever
completed. The contributors to this volume include Russian,
Ukrainian, American, and British scholars; a former key foreign
policy aide to Khrushchev; the executive secretary of a Russian
commission investigating Soviet-era repressions and
rehabilitations; and Khrushchev's own son Sergei.
The book presents and interprets new information on Khrushchev's
struggle for power, public attitudes toward him, his role in
agricultural reform and cultural politics, and such foreign policy
issues as East-West relations, nuclear strategy, and relations with
Germany. It also chronicles Khrushchev's years in Ukraine where he
grew up and began his political career, serving as Communist party
boss from 1938 to 1949, and his role in mass repressions of the
1930s and in destalinization in the 1950s and 1960s. Two concluding
chapters compare the regimes of Khrushchev and Gorbachev as they
struggled to reform Communism, to humanize and modernize the Soviet
system, and to answer the haunting question that persists today: Is
Russia itself reformable?
General
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