A wonderful bit of history: Khrushchev's "secret" speech anniversary.

[NNadir]

FIFTY years ago today, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave a "secret speech" at the 20th Communist Party Congress that changed both his country and the world. By denouncing Stalin, whose God-like status had helped to legitimize Communism in the Soviet Bloc, Khrushchev began a process of unraveling it that culminated in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This great deed deserves to be celebrated on its anniversary.

But it is also a good time to ponder this question: What are we to think of a leader whose great deeds do not bring about the consequences intended? It is a question worth consideration by all leaders — particularly Khrushchev's current heir, Vladimir Putin, who has tried to bring his nation into the 21st century by wielding the autocratic hand of a 19th-century czar.

After all, Khrushchev sought to save Communism, not to destroy it. By cleansing it of the Stalinist stain, he wanted to re-legitimize it in the eyes of people not just in the Soviet sphere but around the globe...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/25/opinion/25taubman.html

When I was a boy, and I thought he was trying to kill me, I was taught to hate Khrushchev.

Now that I am a man, of course, the matter is not so simple. Khrushchev is an interesting historically ambiguous figure.

I thought this interesting comment worth a link here.

[unblock]

1. wait, i thought REAGAN caused the collapse of the soviet union

with his "tear down this wall" comment.

no?

:sarcasm:

[NNadir]

2. No.

[neweurope]

3. You were taught he'd kill YOU?!

I detest the USA more and more every day... Of course that propaganda was brought to us in Germany, too. But the general feeling always was more like "there might be a war between the USSR and USA in which we will have to take the side of the USA".

We were not taught to take cover under school benches in case of nuclear attack, either. And believe me, in Germany we were a lot, very much closer to the possible theater of war. Hell, the "Free World" was supposed to be protected at the Fulda Gap which is 60 miles from my home.


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Remember Fallujah

Bush to The Hague!

[acmejack]

4. Absolutely!

I grew up on an Air Force Base in Asia in the late fifties early sixties. All our news was through the Armed Forces Radio & Television Service and the newspaper was The Stars and Stripes. My worldview was somewhat, shall we say, contained, through that period of my life.

[neweurope]

5. Which IMO goes to show that the evil didn't enter the world

with the Bushistas... I have been saying the USA have always been like this; with the Bushistas it is only more in the open.
For me and my friends the USA ever since I was able to think about politics, let's say since I was 15, was the bad guy.
Our parents thought differently, they were taught when they were children that "the Russian" was their enemy. Still that didn't make the USA their friend.

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Remember Fallujah

Bush to The Hague!

[acmejack]

6. But more or less the same people have profited for centuries from war

and empire building. The majority of the people doing the actual suffering and dying on all that keen on the whole concept, in my admittedly limited experience.

[neweurope]

9. They are keen enough in my experience. They write "death to

the French" on the train wagons who carry their soldiers to war; they plant flags on their front lawns and gladly cheer their soldiers on. They "support the troops"...

It's true that they always have to pay the price. But they never see this until after the shouting - and some not even then. I'm sure if you ask any single person on this world who is not a weapons manufacturer they will say they want peace. Take any given group and dangle some - real or not! - offender before them while playing marching tunes and waiving a flag, and they'll get bloodthirsty.

I'm very glad for having found DU. People like the DUers can help break that hellish cycle.
:pals:


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Remember Fallujah

Bush to The Hague!

[NNadir]

7. Yes. We were taught he was going to kill us. In fact, it was a close

affair.

The Cuban Missile Crisis really did happen.

I was ten years old at the time. I recall being at the bus stop with my elementary school friends and all of us thinking we would die in the afternoon. I have forgotten many things from my childhood but not that.

I don't think it was all propaganda either. Americans of that age may not have been nice people, and certainly our modern government is one of the worst in the world, but the Soviets weren't particularly nice either. I think some people in Eastern Germany, particularly those who were there between 1945-1948, know that.

Here is another quotation from the article with which I began this thread:

As early as 1940, when Khrushchev was Stalin's viceroy in Ukraine, he told a childhood friend who lamented Stalin's purges: "Don't blame me for that. I'm not involved in that." He went on, using a vulgar pun on Stalin's name, to say that he would someday "settle" with the dictator "in full."

Of course, Khrushchev was involved in "that." But that is the point. Apart from anything else, the secret speech was an act of repentance. When asked in retirement what he most regretted, he answered: "Most of all the blood. My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul."

In his case, it wasn't the road to hell that was paved with good intentions, but the road from the Stalinist hell in which he had faithfully served, and which he had the courage to try to transcend.

Now, of course, the missile crisis aside, we mostly remember Khruschev as a kindly old retiree, and a buffoon banging his shoe on the dias at the UN.

But he also was the author of the threat "We will bury you," and he was, as he himself was apparently aware, a man stained by a Stalinist history.

[neweurope]

8. I never thought him to be a nice guy :)

And I remember well how alarmed all relatives were at the Cuban missile crisis. I'm just saying that the USSR weren't advertised to us as eating little children.

on edit: It seems to me the USA must always demonize the enemy. Maybe that is seen as necessary when having so many ethnicities in one's own country, to get them to rallye.

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Remember Fallujah

Bush to The Hague!