Khrushchevism

"When we analyze the practice of Stalin in regard to the direction of the party and the country, when we pause to consider everything which Stalin perpetrated, we must be convinced that Lenin's fears were justified. The negative characteristics of Stalin, which, in Lenin's time, were only incipient, transformed themselves during the last years into a grave abuse of power by Stalin, which caused untold harm."

Nikita Khrushchev

Khrushchevism is an authoritarian left ideology, which is a moderate version of Marxism–Leninism created by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev with a primary focus on De-Stalinisation and subsequent relative liberalization of cultural policies and small parts of the economy, while preserving an authoritarian, one party, socialist state, and the planned economy. He also prioritized the needs of the people over the state, emphasizing investments in agriculture and consumer goods over the military and heavy industry. Khrushchev dismantled Gulags, freed millions of political prisoners, and enacted a cultural thaw with more cultural exchange with Western nations, as well as liberalizations of arts, abortions, and marriage.

Beliefs

Khruschevism believes many of the same concepts as Marxism-Leninism, but rejects Stalin and his cult of personality, willing to pardon or rehabilitate some who were persecuted during his rule. Despite his softer attitudes elsewhere, he is strictly state atheist, undoing WW2-era relaxed stance on religion. He also rejects any attempt to challenge the one-party system, as the 1956 suppression of Nagy's reforms shows.

History

Legacy

Many of Khrushchev's innovations were reversed after his fall. As was the division in the Party structure between industrial and agricultural sectors, the requirement that one-third of officials be replaced at each election was overturned. His vocational education program for high school students was dropped, and his plan to send existing agricultural institutions to the land ended. However, new agricultural or vocational institutions thereafter were located outside major cities. When new housing was built, much of it was in high rises rather than Khrushchev's low-rise structures.

Historian Robert Service summarizes Khrushchev's contradictory personality traits:

[he was] at once a Stalinist and an anti-Stalinist, a communist believer and a cynic, a self-publicizing poltroon and a crusty philanthropist, a trouble-maker and a peacemaker, a stimulating colleague and a domineering boor, a statesman and a politicker who was out of his intellectual depth.

Some of Khrushchev's agricultural projects were easily overturned. Corn became so unpopular in 1965 that its planting fell to the lowest level in the postwar period.[291] Lysenko was stripped of his policy-making positions. However, the MTS stations remained closed, and the basic agricultural problems, which Khrushchev had tried to address, remained. While the Soviet standard of living increased greatly in the ten years after Khrushchev's fall, much of the increase was due to industrial progress; agriculture continued to lag far behind, resulting in regular agricultural crises, especially in 1972 and 1975. Brezhnev and his successors continued Khrushchev's precedent of buying grain from the West rather than suffer shortfalls and starvation. Neither Brezhnev nor his colleagues were personally popular, and the new government relied on authoritarian power. The government's conservative tendencies would lead to the crushing of the "Prague Spring" of 1968.

Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet "On the transfer of the Crimean Oblast." In 1954, the Soviet leadership, including Khrushchev, transferred Crimea from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR. Though Khrushchev's strategy failed to achieve the major goals he sought, Aleksandr Fursenko, who wrote a book analyzing Khrushchev's foreign and military policies, argued that the strategy did coerce the West in a limited manner. The agreement that the US would not invade Cuba has been adhered to. The refusal of the western world to acknowledge East Germany was gradually eroded, and, in 1975, the US and other NATO members signed the Helsinki Agreement with the USSR and Warsaw Pact nations.

The Russian public's view of Khrushchev remains mixed.[ According to a major Russian pollster, the only eras of the 20th century that Russians in the 21st century evaluate positively are those under Nicholas II and Khrushchev. A poll in 1998 of young Russians found that they felt Nicholas II had done more good than harm, and all other 20th-century Russian leaders more harm than good—except Khrushchev, about whom they were evenly divided. Khrushchev biographer William Tompson related the former premier's reforms to those which occurred later:

Throughout the Brezhnev years and the lengthy interregnum that followed, the generation which had come of age during the "first Russian spring" of the 1950s awaited its turn in power. As Brezhnev and his colleagues died or were pensioned off, they were replaced by men and women for whom the Secret Speech and the first wave of de-Stalinization had been a formative experience, and these "Children of Twentieth Congress" took up the reins of power under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev and his colleagues. The Khrushchev era provided this second generation of reformers with both an inspiration and a cautionary tale.

Was Khrushchev Revisionist?

Anti-revisionists have often accused Khrushchev of revisionism due to his denounce of Stalin's totalitarian rule and rehabilitation of many political dissidents under Stalin era, the peaceful coexistence theory, as well as the renounce of DOTP and several changes to the economy aimed at decentralizing the Soviet economy. However, unlike Deng and Gorbachev's reforms, Khrushchev didn't introduce market mechanisms in the economy and maintained the Soviet-style planned economy, even nationalizing the cooperatives that were previously legal under Stalin (However he did somewhat decentralize the economy). Additionally, Khrushchev also restarted another wave of crackdown on religion in the USSR. Despite Khrushchev's increasing of political pluralism within the CPSU, he maintained the one-party state structure intact, and so are most elements of the ML system, making his reforms relatively minor compared to the ones in Hungary, Poland, and China.

Brezhnevists , however, have a different assessment on Khrushchev. Rather than accusing Khrushchev of revisionism like the anti-revisionists, Brezhnevists blames his argicultural failures and de-Stalinization campaign as "voluntarism" and "opportunism", but generally still recognize him as a real communist. Additionally, contrary to popular myths, Khrushchev thaw was not only ended by Brezhnev, but also by Khrushchev himself, who grew increasingly conservative due to the criticisms within the CPSU and backlash against his reforms. Khrushchev ended the cultural thaw in 1962 and tigthened party control over independent media, arts, and culture due to fears of the CPSU losing the grip over the civil society. This was a policy that the Brezhnevists continued as they strengthened the authoritarian rule over the public after the overthrow of Khrushchev.

How to Draw

Flag of Khrushchevism

1. Draw a ball
2. Draw a blue hammer and sickle
3. (Optional) Draw a cob of corn
4. Add the eyes and you're done!

Color Name		HEX	RGB
	Blue	#0085E5	rgb(0, 133, 229)
	White	#FFFFFF	rgb(255, 255, 255)

Relationships

Friends

• Castroism - Thanks for storing my missiles.
• Ho Chi Minh Thought - The South will fall!
• Juche - You prefer me over Mao right? Please say so. Still too extreme, and too similar to Stalin
• State Atheism - Stalin betrayed the revolution by hanging out with that opium dealer, continue the crackdown on the church!
• Arab Socialism - I gave Nasser the Star of Hero of the USSR for opposing British and French imperialists and Zionist pigs!!
• Marxism–Leninism - Marx founded of communism and Comrade Lenin was a great revolutionary!
• Newsreel "Wick" - Hell yeah, bring satire on, show who is bad guys!
• Leninism - Reject Stalin! Return to Lenin!

Frenemies

• United Nations - He also likes corn, but he has capitalist biases.
• Guevarism - Look, I really like what you've done but stop calling me a revisionist bureaucrat please.
• Titoism - We were off to a good start but you had to support Nagy. I’d have to thank you for telling me to get rid of some Stalin’s puppets. But why did you intentionally make Yugoslavian representatives absent from the 1958 Communist Congress?
• Fully Automated Gay Space Communism - Sexual deviants, but we both like space. But you seems to like space too much.
• People’s Democracy - I said I want you but I never implemented you in the USSR. But I installed many regimes in Europe that followed your ideas.
• Zhukovism - Thanks for siding with me instead of the Anti-Party Group, but I am afraid our little alliance has to end here.
• Conservative Socialism - While I did ban deviants you remind me of him.
• Market Socialism - Still mad at me that I've banned worker cooperatives in USSR. (But I did like Goulash Communism.)

Enemies

• Stalinism - Haha Stalin cult goes bye bye! Ignore that I helped set the cult up in the first place and participated in his purges only to denounce him just for political gains.
• Maoism - You are him but even worse, so Sino-Soviet split time for you. Because you betrayed me after I sent you far more aid than the above guy.
• Hoxhaism - You too? For fucks sake. For these so-called " anti-revisionists", I didn't restore capitalism in the USSR, Brezhnev did.
• Brezhnevism - Treacherous traitor! Why did you have to overthrow me and aspire to be like him him?? Your kleptocracy was the reason why the USSR’s economy stagnated for decades! You paved way for the demise of our glorious country, not me!
• Dengism - He was my mortal enemy from the late 1950s onward and is now the proof of why the Maoist system would eventually degenerate into a capitalist bourgeois dictatorship.
• Capitalism - "About the capitalist states, it doesn't depend on you whether or not we exist."
• Neoconservatism - "If you don't like us, don't accept our invitations, and don't invite us to come to see you. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you! " (in outlive sense, not disposing of recently killed sense).
• Rockefeller Republicanism - You too!
• LGBT and Homoconservatism - Filthy sexual deviants.
• Nagyism - *Tank noises*
• Orthodox Theocracy - You are the opium of the Soviet people.
• Malenkovism - Tried to coup me but failed you idiotic Stalinite.
• Right-Wing Populism & Paleoconservatism - Corn syrup is a stupid idea, indeed. So stop giving people ideas!
• Beriaism - You are accused of using your position as Minister of the Interior to plot against the Soviet Union with the goal of forwarding the interests of foreign powers. You are also accused of 347 counts of rape, of sexual deviancy and bourgeois immorality and acts of perversion with children as young as seven years old. Petra Nikova, aged 13. Nadia Ranova, aged 14. Magya Holovic, aged seven. Would you like to read the list yourself? You are accused of treason and anti-Soviet behavior. The court finds you guilty and sentences you to be shot. *BLAM*
• Cult of Personality - The cult of personality and its consequences have been a disaster for the working class.

Further Information

Wikipedia

• Khrushchevism
• Nikita Khrushchev
• De-Stalinization
• Khrushchev Thaw
• Sino-Soviet Split
• Manege Affair
• Khrushchyovka
• Virgin Lands campaign
• Secret Speech

Literature

• Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman
• Speech to 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U. by Nikita Khrushchev

Gallery

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  Original image
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  Credit: TheLegend2T, Source
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  Credit: TheLegend2T, Source