Khrushchev and Stalin
Ian D. Thatcher defends the record of Josef Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and sees him as a forerunner of Gorbachev.
Nikita Khrushchev is famous for two key events: the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the superpowers came closest to nuclear war, and deStalinisation. The Cuban Affair, admittedly dramatic and frightening at the time, was a short-term crisis in international affairs. DeStalinisation, however, involved fundamental questions about the Bolshevik Revolution, its past, present and future. After Stalin’s death in 1956 it fell to Khrushchev to try to find a justification for the continuation of the Soviet experiment whilst admitting to the past crimes of the regime against its own party and people. This was an unenviable and difficult task.
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