Khrushchev

12 Key excerpts on "Khrushchev"

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  The Soviet Union

  • Peter Waldron(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In the final analysis, Khrushchev's heritage stood as both a valuable and dangerous tool for the most recent generation of Soviet reformers. In the struggle for power, proponents of perestroika had to distance themselves from the failures of the Khrushchev years to prevent their political rivals from gaining an additional weapon against the reform process. At the same time, advocates of change needed to elevate the bold reformist vision of the Khrushchev era in order to resuscitate the national government. As the Soviet leader when the Gorbachev generation came of age during the years of the Twentieth and Twenty-second Party Congresses, Khrushchev served as a vital catalyst in the political maturation of a new epoch. It is this historical legacy of anti-Stalinist reform that established Khrushchev's significance for the latest wave of Soviet scholars and demonstrated yet again that the contest over historical memory is also a contest over current political power and policy.

  The author thanks Drs. Donald Raleigh and Lloyd Kramer for their prompt readings of the initial stages of this paper. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies at Savannah, Georgia, on 22 March 1991,

  1 Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Oktiabr' i perestroika: Revoliutsiia prodolzhaetsia (Moscow: Folitizdat, 1987), 27-28. Other speeches, such as Aleksandr Iakoviev's of 17 April 1987, were also vital in broadening the scope of historical analysis in the Soviet Union. See Donald J. Raleigh, "Introduction," in Soviet Historians and Perestroika: The First Phase, ed. Donald J. Raleigh (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1989), xv.

  2 Some Western scholars even argued that Soviet historical revisionism played a key role in Gorbachev's political strategy. For example, see Thomas Sherlock, "Politics and History under Gorbachev," Problems of Communism 37 (May-August 1988): 16-42.

  3 The debate took place in a variety of forums ranging from scholarly articles in academic or literary journals such as Voprosy istorii, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, Oktiabr', and Novyi mir to book-length memoirs that detailed several aspects of the Khrushchev era.

  4 Needless to say, this was largely a debate among intellectuals. Blue-collar opinion of Khrushchev, particularly in industrial cities such as Magnitogorsk, where Stalin retains popularity, is another matter. See Stephen Kotkin, Steeltown, USSR: Glasnosl', Destalinization, and Perestroika in the Provinces (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 42-50.

  5 Of course, Gorbachev relented soon after the coup attempt of August 1991. See Serge Schmemann, "Gorbachev Quits as Party Head; Ends Communism's 74-Year Reign: Cabinet Disbanded: In Deal With Yeltsin, Committee is Created to Govern Nation," New York Times,

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  Motherland

  Russia in the Twentieth Century

  • David R. Marples(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  His style of leadership was markedly different from that of his predecessor. He was constantly on the move, touring the country and making speeches. He also made appearances at party congresses in Poland and Czechoslovakia. His friends were promoted to eminent positions. They included the first woman to be prominent in the political leadership (and eventually in the Presidium), Ekaterina Furtseva, who was put in charge of the Moscow party organization; Ivan Serov, who took over the KGB; and Frol Kozlov, who was placed in control of the Leningrad party apparatus. Premier Bulganin was also loyal to his new master. Khrushchev did not hesitate to expand his areas of influence, particularly in foreign policy. From the first, he frustrated the grim Molotov by delving into foreign affairs. In December 1954, Khrushchev and Bulganin went to China on a trip that was a publicity triumph, but one from which Molotov was, inexplicably, excluded. More and more frequently party decrees would be passed on Khrushchev's signature alone, which led to many members of the Presidium being unaware of some events of major importance. Khrushchev's impulsive character would also lead to several dangerous moments for the country.

  Younger than the Stalin generation by some 15 years, Khrushchev seems to have revelled in his newfound power. Perhaps more than any Soviet leader, Khrushchev was an ideological Communist. He tried to combine the Stalinist concept of the Motherland, and more specifically Great Russia, with party authority and party infallibility, creating in citizens an image of the triumphs of the Soviet state specifically. In doing so he deliberately competed with the main adversary, the United States, at every opportunity. Whereas Stalin worked quietly and deviously to undermine the capitalist giant, Khrushchev expressed the world conflict openly, being both disparaging and dismissive about the rival power. He was frequently intoxicated in public, a liberty that Stalin would never have allowed himself, thus appearing almost comical. There are probably more Soviet jokes about Khrushchev than any of the other leaders. He is remembered for anti-American phrases such as "We will bury you!" and for his boasts and bluster when it was plain that the USSR was not in the superior position that it claimed to be. Because of this attitude, Khrushchev's brief time in power assumed much more importance than was warranted by this stocky figure. It was a time of extremes, of experiments, of early successes but very fundamental failures. Khrushchev was the first Soviet leader to take over a global power, and he very much wanted to rule in his own stead, without the personality cults, but with most other facets of the leadership, including personal decision-making, intact.

  Khrushchev's Virgin Lands Program

  Under Khrushchev, a reform movement was initiated in agriculture almost immediately. At the September 1953 Plenum of the Central Committee, various authorities in the USSR discussed the question of increasing grain production. By January 1954, the CC CPSU had issued a memorandum entitled "Ways to resolve the grain problem," which was circulated among local party organizations. The goal was to cultivate the so-called Virgin Lands, remote regions of the country that could be devoted to grain production, and which would add around 13 million hectares to the sown area by 1955. Khrushchev devised the plan and he was very much associated with its success and failure. The locations for the program were Kazakhstan, the Volga region, Siberia, the Urals, and the North Caucasus. By 1954, the party was asking for volunteers - primarily through the Komsomol - to travel to the Virgin Lands to take part in the new program. Many of Khrushchev's colleagues had reservations about the plan, which contained typical elements of any Khrushchev scheme - great enthusiasm, the desire for an immediate return on investment, a radical transformation of Soviet agricultural practices, and a general lack of foresight about the likely results. Essentially it took the form of a youth movement to the countryside. In theory priority was to be given to those volunteers with agricultural or technical skills. They travelled on special trains, while equipment and building materials were quickly transported to the east of the country.

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  Power Restructuring In China And Russia

  • Mark Lupher(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Second, in the late 1950s power dynamics in the Soviet Union experienced another fundamental shift. As familiar phenomena of bureaucratic encrustation and official power and resource appropriation were manifested in new and more assertive form, Khrushchev assumed an increasingly adversarial stance vis-à-vis the Soviet political elite, and he attempted a restructuring of power at the expense of party and state officialdom. Many of the economic, institutional, and political reforms that Khrushchev sought to enact in the late 1950s and early 1960s presaged comparable and more extensive post-Stalin power-restructuring processes under Mao and Gorbachev. Yet Khrushchevian power restructuring was rooted in Stalinist antecedents. In this chapter, I ponder these linkages, consider patterns of continuity and change, and delineate the sociopolitical contours of the era. In the end, Khrushchev was overthrown by the political elite he sought to reform, a counterrevolution that set the stage for the unprecedented ascendancy of Soviet officialdom in the Brezhnev era.

  Conceptualizing Khrushchev and Khrushchevism

  When Khrushchev was suddenly ousted in October 1964, Western analysts were caught flat-footed. As Merle Fainsod, the dean of U.S. sovietology, had written only a year or two earlier, “Khrushchev, like Stalin before him, tolerates no derogation of his own authority, permits no opposition to raise its head within the Party, and insists that the Party function as a unit in executing his will.”1 Yet the abrupt demise of the supreme leader at the hands of his subordinates irrevocably undercut the totalitarian image of uncontested and depoliticized state domination of political life and social forces and underscored the need for new ways of conceptualizing power relations and political process in the Soviet Union.2 By 1966, Carl A. Linden could write that “the Khrushchev era came to be characterized by a loss of the kind of firm discipline within the leading group that Stalin imposed…. Contention between the various elements of the upper echelons pervaded the environment in which Khrushchev worked.”3 While emphasizing the conflict and instability of the era, however, subsequent conceptualization of Khrushchev and Khrushchevism was varied and contradictory.

  Three images are recurrent in firsthand and scholarly accounts of the period: Khrushchev as a ruler, Khrushchev as a reformer, and Khrushchev as a transitional figure.4

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  Russia's Middle East Policy

  • Alexey Vasiliev(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The rise and fall of Nikita S. Khrushchev

  When in March 1953 the heirs of Josef Stalin took up the reins of government of a huge country and assumed the dominant position in the even greater “socialist camp” in which a third of the human race was living, they were faced with a number of political priorities. Priority was given first and foremost to the struggle for power, or for the individual’s own place in the upper echelons of power. In this struggle Nikita Khrushchev demonstrated outstanding statecraft and won a number of significant victories, yet it ended with his fall. The second priority was the situation inside the country, while the state of affairs within the “socialist camp” was the third. The fourth priority was given to relations with the United States and the West as a whole, chiefly in the context of the cold war and military rivalry. The Third World, however, was not included among the political priorities.

  All the Soviet leaders had inherited and personally shared, with more or less sincerity, the basic ideological and political views of Stalin. Khrushchev, a self-made man and something of a rough diamond, became a prominent political leader with a wealth of practical experience outside the Kremlin, although he was a tragic rather than a comic figure. His view of the world was in fact much less blinkered than that of most of his fellows, and political instinct prompted him and his entourage to reject the more odious of the practices that had been used by his predecessors to rule the country. He closed down concentration camps, and sought new forms of coexistence and encounter with the West. The Third World gradually began to capture his attention.

  For the sectarian Bolshevist slogan “He who is not with us is against us”, Khrushchev substituted the new slogan “He is with us who is not against us”. He established friendly relations with Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian prime minister, and with Sukarno, President of Indonesia, when he visited these countries at the end of 1955. He also went to Afghanistan with Nikolai Bulganin, the then Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, and became convinced that the situation in all these countries was by no means identical with the model that had been proposed by Stalin. He realized that the policy of the Afro-Asian states, who had adopted the five principles of peaceful coexistence or “panchashailat” at the Bandung Conference in April 1955, actually did not contradict Soviet policy but rather widened the gap between these states and the West. Khrushchev and his close associates had earlier on begun to look attentively at the large anti-Western (“anti-imperialist”) potential of many Arab countries, and easily observed their readiness to cooperate with the USSR.

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  Politics and Justice in Russia: Major Trials of the Post-Stalin Era

  Major Trials of the Post-Stalin Era

  • Yuri Feofanov, Donald D. Barry(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part I  

  The Khrushchev Period

  During the Gorbachev era a kind of “rehabilitation” of Nikita Khrushchev took place. For years it had been forbidden to mention the former leader’s name in the press, but in the spirit of glasnost and through the efforts of his son and others,1 the period of Khrushchev as a nonperson came to an end. To many in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, Khrushchev was seen as a precursor of Gorbachev, a reformer whose accomplishments set the stage for the radical changes that took place after 1985.2

  Khrushchev’s main contribution as a reformer was to shake up the old system. The fallout from de-Stalinization, in which Khrushchev played such a key role, particularly through his “secret speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, was enormous. Its ripple effects reached every aspect of Soviet life. The “thaws” of the Khrushchev period, even though short-lived, helped to rein in the terror associated with Stalinism, and legal reforms eliminated some of the worst abuses in that field. Restraints on artistic and political expression were loosened, even if only temporarily, and a generation of young intellectuals (including Gorbachev himself), who saw the possibility of real and permanent change in the Soviet Union, was spawned. A number of the people who came to political maturity during this time, the “children of the Twentieth Congress,” participated in shaping the Gorbachev era reforms two decades later.

  Since our interest here is principally in law, a review of Khrushchev era developments in this area is in order. In terms of curbing terror, the Special Board of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a tribunal that operated outside the regular rules of criminal procedure and that had been used to send thousands if not millions to camps or to their deaths, was abolished in 1953. Great numbers of those sent to labor camps under Stalin were released. And at least on paper, a number of other changes were made to narrow the jurisdiction of the security police and the military courts and to protect citizens against some of the worst abuses of the earlier era. Moreover, the tortuous, off-again, on-again process of rehabilitating and restoring the rights of victims of political repression, which continues to this day, was begun in the mid-1950s.

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  The Soviet Union 1917-1991

  • Martin Mccauley(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Khrushchev Era

  ‘THIS GENERATION WILL LIVE UNDER COMMUNISM’

     

  INTERNAL POLITICS

  Like Stalin in the early 1920s, Khrushchev was not seen as the eventual leader in 1953 and 1954. However, like Stalin he climbed to power on the back of the party and proved himself a master of political infighting. In the early years his political opponents underestimated him and again in 1957 but he in turn, as if he had learnt nothing from his victories, was to underestimate the force of opposition in 1964. A dedicated Stalinist in the 1930s, and this meant spilling blood, he ascended to the CC in 1934 but the war changed him. He mellowed and a genuine concern about the human cost of the modernisation of the Soviet Union developed in him. Khrushchev had his ups and downs in the Ukraine and Moscow during Stalin's last years but he was not under a cloud, unlike Beria, Molotov, Mikoyan and others when Stalin died.

  There were two realms in which Khrushchev was convinced that he was first class: party work and agriculture. Although Prime Minister of the Ukraine and after 1958 Prime Minister of the USSR he was not really an administrator. His forte was the spoken word and his ability to communicate with others. Since he eschewed mass terror as a motivator he exhorted, cajoled and tried to persuade orally. He was dynamic and innovative and wished to make others the same. He was fortunate in that neither of his two main competitors for supreme office was in the party secretariat after 14 March 1953. Again neither was an agricultural specialist nor keen to become involved in the rural sector, an Irish bog for aspiring politicians, in 1953.

  Such was the nervousness of the party and of Malenkov, the USSR Prime Minister, about the ambitions of Beria, head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and of the security police, that a tactical union led to the arrest of Beria in June 1953. Now the way was clear for a straight contest between Malenkov, head of the government, and Khrushchev, head of the party, as of September 1953.

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  Autopsy For An Empire

  The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime

  • Dmitri Volkogonov(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Free Press

    (Publisher)

  The decade of Khrushchev’s rule demonstrated his potential as an innovator, a demolition artist, experimenter, opportunist and inventor. It was as if he had suddenly woken up. Initiatives followed one after the other, and at the source of each of them stood the stocky figure of the First Secretary, gesticulating energetically, a veritable fount of ideas and activity. Alexander Alexandrov-Agentov, a functionary who spent much of his life in close proximity to the post-war leaders, described Khrushchev as ‘authoritative, hot-tempered, unbridled, crude, and self-confident and prone to flattery in relations with his closest colleagues. At the same time he was impetuous, intolerant, carried away, possessed by a spirit of innovation, but with no serious concept.’ 49 For such a man, there were many opportunities to apply himself in the country that was beginning to thaw. His first task was in agriculture. The harvests of 1949 to 1953 had been catastrophically low, something like eight hundred kilogrammes per hectare, when even in 1914 the yield had been seven hundred. The figures, which were a state secret, show that the total yield of grain declined from 36.4 million tonnes in 1940 to 31.1 million in 1953, while over the same period the state reserves increased from 4.1 million tonnes to 17.8. 50 In order to survive, the people stole grain, and in June 1946 the Central Committee and Finance Ministry issued the strictest prohibition against this. Interior Minister Kruglov reported to Stalin regularly on the progress of this order

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  The Shortest History of the Soviet Union

  • Sheila Fitzpatrick(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Black Inc.

    (Publisher)

  The Western view of Khrushchev as a lower-class comic turn was to a fair degree shared in the Soviet Union. This was particularly true of the intelligentsia, but a broader Soviet public also preferred more gravitas in a leader. Leadership contests in a Soviet context were not decided by popular vote, however, and Khrushchev’s annihilation of Beria had shown what a wily political operator lay beneath that Ukrainian peasant shirt. In 1957, when a majority of Khrushchev’s Politburo colleagues tried to rein him in, he turned the tables on them and emerged the victor, adding insult to injury by labelling his opponents – including Kaganovich and Molotov, for whom the party was their whole life – the ‘Anti-Party Group’. Their defeat was engineered at an extraordinary meeting of the party’s Central Committee, the organ that formally elected the Politburo. As in Stalin’s time, many of the Central Committee’s members were regional party secretaries, and, like Stalin, Khrushchev oversaw party appointments in his capacity as head of the secretariat in Moscow. In case anything went wrong, Khrushchev had Marshal Zhukov onside, but as all went well, no army intervention was needed.

  Khrushchev was proud of having presided over the first Soviet leadership change that was not followed by major reprisals against the defeated. It was indeed a happy precedent, as Khrushchev no doubt had cause to reflect when his time came seven years later. All the old guard except Mikoyan were voted off the Politburo and sent to lesser jobs far from Moscow – Kaganovich to head a potash plant in the Urals, Malenkov to direct a hydro-electric station in Kazakhstan and Molotov to be Soviet Ambassador to Outer Mongolia. (Annoyingly, both Malenkov and Molotov, displaying exemplary party discipline and work ethic, did so well at their new jobs that they had to be moved to lesser positions.)

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  Lenin's Legacy

  • Robert Wesson(Author)
  • 1978(Publication Date)
  • Hoover Institution Press

    (Publisher)

  thereby endangered not only the sacred value of the Soviet system, party supremacy, but his own position as well. To be sure, he was not consistent in this course; several times he turned around to praise Stalin, tighten controls on the arts, and so on. Yet on the whole, Khrushchev did much more than any other person to lead the Soviet Union away from Stalinism.

  *Although according to Khrushchev, Stalin said that Malenkov knew nothing about agriculture. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, p. 236.

  There have been as many attempts to clarify this policy as there are treatments of the period, but none is entirely convincing. One of the two basic contradictory interpretations is that Khrushchev was a liberal at heart who was checked by the dogmatists in the party and had to attack from political necessity.29 The opposite view is that Khrushchev had basically a dictatorial temperament, as his previous career indicated, and that his concessions to liberalism were simply a political tactic that was necessitated by the mood of the country.30 After all, Stalin was a moderate in 1925. It may well be said that Khrushchev was a bully, but also a revolutionary idealist, perceptive but ignorant, a humanitarian gangster.

  Once he had his hands on the helm, Khrushchev steered in the same general direction as Malenkov—toward liberalization, the loosening and humanizing of the regime—a program the party accepted more cheerfully when it was carried out under party auspices. There was a new emphasis on collective leadership as the Leninist way. Khrushchev and Bulganin seemed to form a well-functioning tandem, with one leader primarily responsible for agriculture and the other for industry, although Khrushchev was plainly in the driver's seat—the press occasionally referred to him realistically but without legal basis as the "head" of the Presidium. It was a token of the more cheerful era that the annual Lenin celebration was shifted from the anniversary of his death, January 21, to his birthday, April 22. Lenin's Testament, with its damaging remarks on Stalin, was published in Kommunist

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  Soviet Foreign Policy after Stalin

  • David J. Dallin(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  PART FIVE Khrushchev in Command Passage contains an image

  Chapter 1 The Year of Troubles

  1. Heavy Going

  November, 1956, marked the beginning of a year of trouble for Soviet foreign policy. The twelve-month period between the 1956 and 1957 anniversaries of the Soviet revolution began with a dangerous decline in Soviet prestige, which continued until developments permitted Nikita Khrushchev to grasp the reins more tightly and resume his drive.

  The first stage was a period of weakness that was only slightly concealed behind words and gestures. The power of a dynamic government depends not only on its weapons, the size of its army and navy, and its programs and goals, but also on the solidarity, single-mindedness, and self-confidence of its highest leaders. It was precisely the latter that Moscow lacked at that time.

  The developments in Hungary had a disturbing effect also on Soviet internal affairs. There were political protests among students in Moscow; in an effort to discover the source of these protests, Khrushchev spent several days at Moscow University. In Leningrad students organized a street demonstration. Hungarian students in Moscow spoke defiantly at Komsomol meetings.1 Trying to maintain his non-terroristic course, Khrushchev refrained from taking measures which a few years earlier would have put a rapid and tragic end to the mutiny; the fact, however, that the most sensitive segment of the nation—the Soviet youth, among them the sons and daughters of the elite—was protesting and making demands was a disturbing development.

  1 See, among other sources, Hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee of the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-sixth Congress, First Session. Testimony of Alexander Yurievich Kasnakheyev (in our text given as Kaznacheev) (hereafter referred to as Kaznacheev Testimony),

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  A History of Postwar Russia

  • Roger Pethybridge(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER VI

  THE Khrushchev ERA: FOREIGN POLICY

  How did the brave new Khrushchev regime face up to the rest of the world beyond the Soviet borders?

  By the time of the Twentieth Congress the Soviet leaders had departed more widely from Stalinist procedures in foreign policy than in domestic affairs. Persuasion rather than coercion was their unwritten slogan from the very start, with Molotov as the only significant dissenter. The new line, tentative and uncertain though it was between 1953 and 1956, and subject to violent fluctuations in Eastern Europe, nevertheless paid immediate and huge dividends in the less-developed countries. Only in Europe were Soviet aims not generally achieved. The German problem remained unresolved, while in Central Europe it seemed that Stalin’s hold on his empire could not be gently loosened without opening wide the floodgates of separatism.

  The Twentieth Congress was a watershed in foreign as well as in domestic affairs. Its function was to survey the previous three years’ achievements in foreign policy, to draw conclusions from them, and to lay down steadier lines for the future. This had a stabilizing effect on Soviet foreign policy, but unfortunately this wholesome influence, at least in Eastern Europe, was negated by the repercussions following Khrushchev’s secret speech on Stalin. Khrushchev intended his words for home consumption, but they were heard in anger by world Communism and acted upon violently. The subsequent upheaval in Eastern Europe took until the end of 1957 to subdue, leaving behind it a completely changed relationship between the Soviet Union and the European Communist camp. It took the Hungarian revolution of 1956 to shake off the weight of the Stalinist past.

  Soviet relations with the Middle East and Asia continued to develop along much smoother lines, though the atmosphere of euphoria characterizing the years between 1953 and 1956 slowly dimmed. The Soviet Union came to realize that the new countries were not willing to go beyond a flirtation with Communism, while the recipients of Soviet favours learned that aid was not without its obligations.

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  Tiny Revolutions in Russia

  Twentieth Century Soviet and Russian History in Anecdotes and Jokes

  • Bruce Adams(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  189. A young man was sent to the camps before the war. Twenty years later his mother received a telegram from him and met him at the railroad station. As soon as he stepped from the overcrowded train, she rushed into his arms.

  “How did you recognize me after all this time, mama?” “By your coat, darling.”

  Khrushchev further separated himself from his political rivals by escalating the de- Stalinization campaign in 1956. At a closed session at the end of the XX Party Congress he delivered his later famous “secret” speech in which he revealed and denounced some of what he called Stalin’s “excesses.”

  190. Immediately before his denunciation of Stalin’s excesses at the XX Party Congress Khrushchev left the stage for a few minutes. Someone asked him after the speech where he had been. “I stopped in at the mausoleum for a minute to take Stalin’s pulse… just in case.” 191. After Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s excesses at the XX Party Congress, someone called out from the hall: “And where were you when all this was happening?” Khrushchev shouted, “Who said that?” No one answered. He asked again, but no one answered. “That is where I was,” he explained.

  I sometimes use that one in class to illustrate collective guilt and collective fear, and to help explain the very possibility of the Terror. If it didn’t hit you hard at first read, give it another try.

  192. Khrushchev returned from a visit to the USA in a very bad mood. He explained to Mikoian: “Kennedy told me they have invented a machine that can bring a man back from the dead. I didn’t want to admit how backward we are, so I told him we had invented a compound that could make a man run faster than a car.”

  “No problem,” said Mikoian. “If they bring Stalin back from the dead, you’ll run faster than any car.”

  Anastas Mikoian was one the great survivors among the communist leaders. He was one of the few Old Bolsheviks who held important posts in the 1930s to survive Stalin’s purges. He continued to hold important Party posts under Khrushchev and Brezhnev almost until his death in 1978. Here is an anecdote about him that comes from the Brezhnev years.

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