Nikita Khrushchev rose to power after the death of Stalin. He was a leader who desperately worked for reform yet his reforms hardly ever accomplished their goals. He was a man who praised Stalin while he was alive but when Stalin died Khrushchev was the first to publicly denounce him. Khrushchev came to power in 1953 and stayed in power until 1964, when he was forced to resign.
	Stalin died without naming an heir, and none of his associates had the power to immediately claim supreme leadership. The deceased dictator’s colleagues initially tried to rule jointly through collective leadership, with Malenkov holding the top positions of prime minister and general secretary.	Lavrenti Beria took over Ministry of Interior and also became the first deputy prime minister. Molotov became foreign minister and, like Beria, a first deputy prime minister. These three formed the uneasy triumvirate. (Modern Enc.. and Kort)
	To prevent Malenkov from gaining to much power, he was stripped of his duties as First Secretary. These duties in turn were handed to Nikita Khrushchev, a longtime party boss of the Ukraine and the first secretary of the party’s Moscow organization, who was not seen as a serious candidate for supreme power. (Kort) Khrushchev had two advantages over his associates, the right to appoint his trusted followers to key positions and the right to demote those he distrusted. To succeed Khrushchev had to remove his two principal rivals. He removed Beria quickly with the help of other colleagues who feared Beria. On April 4, 1953 Beria was forced to admit that his men had fabricated the "Doctors plot" that resulted in the arrest and death of several
physicians. Beria himself was secretly arrested on June 26. He was denounced as an "enemy of the people" and was charged with a number of crimes including that of careerist and traitor. He confessed, was tried without being present or represented, found guilty and executed.	
	After the elimination of Beria, the succession struggle became more subtle. The rivalry between Malenkov and Khrushchev surfaced publicly through Malenkov’s support for increased production of consumer goods, while Khrushchev stood for the development of heavy industry. On January 1955 Khrushchev called Malenkov’s commitment to consumer goods a new form of anti-Leninist "right devi...
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...ngary and Gottwald of Czechoslovakia. In many cases, one individual held the top posts in both party and government, but the de-Stalinization campaign with its attack on the cult of the individual resulted in temporary abandonment of the dual role. Reforms during this period mainly took the form of reduced power for the state security system, ending a period if unchecked authority over all citizens. The impact of de-Stalinization and its liberalization’s remain today in the Soviet Union and in most Eastern European countries. (Markiewicz)
	Khrushchev’s career and personality both had their contradictions. He was a hard politician yet he could also be a warm humanitarian. As a youth he helped to create Stalin’s cult of personality, which he also denounced after Stalin’s death. He wanted to reform the Soviet state, but most of reforms ended in disaster. Although the nations low standard of living was raised to some extent. (Markiewicz) But Khrushchev played an important role in removing the Stalinist inheritance. The secret police terror ended and Gulag slave-labor network was dismantled. (Kort) All in all, the Russia Khrushchev left was a better place than when he found it.
Tucker, Robert C. "Stalinism as Revolution from Above". Stalinism. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1999.
death in 1953. But how is it that Stalin emerged as the new leader of
Title: Corruption of the Soviet System in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Throughout the roughly 50 years of the Cold War, United States Presidents attempted to exert their power and authority over American foreign policy with vastly different results. Presidents during the war faced an increasingly disaffected general American population. Securing their support was a cornerstone in determining the effectiveness of any President’s foreign Policy. The Cold War challenged the security of the US as a unified hegemon, forcing Presidents into making tough decisions on behalf of the American People. As the world grew ever more interconnected, defining and defending US global interests against Communism became less black and white. In my own personal view Jimmy Carter was the least effective Cold War President, while Ronald
The Cold War was a time of fear for the American people in the aftermath of the second World War, but also was a key period in which different presidents began and led various programs to fight Communism, both at home and abroad. President Eisenhower was elected in 1952, and various actions he took throughout his two term administration both assuaged and increased American fears related to Cold War problems. Eisenhower’s policies and programs of the Cold War included MAD and McCarthyism, which caused domestic fears, Brinksmanship and the creation of highways to carry military equipment through the Federal Highway of 1956 in case of foreign war, and his creation of NASA and the National Defense Education Act of 1958 for a technology race with the Soviet Union.
Son of a poverty-stricken shoemaker, raised in a backward province, Joseph Stalin had only a minimum of education. However, he had a burning faith in the destiny of social revolution and an iron determination to play a prominent role in it. His rise to power was bloody and bold, yet under his leadership, in an unexplainable twenty-nine years, Russia because a highly industrialized nation. Stalin was a despotic ruler who more than any other individual molded the features that characterized the Soviet regime and shaped the direction of Europe after World War II ended in 1945. From a young revolutionist to an absolute master of Soviet Russia, Joseph Stalin cast his shadow over the entire globe through his provocative affair in Domestic and Foreign policy.
Even though there were not many alternations in the socialist regime of the Soviet Union, there were plenty after World War II. The Big Three, U.S President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premi...
In the beginning Josef Stalin was a worshiper of his beloved Vladimir Lenin. He followed his every move and did as he said to help establish and lead the Bolshevik party. Much of the early part of his political career was lost due to his exile to Siberia for most of World War I. It wasn’t until 1928, when he assumed complete control of the country were he made most of his success. After Lenin’s death in January 1924, Stalin promoted his own cult followings along with the cult followings of the deceased leader. He took over the majority of the Socialists now, and immediately began to change agriculture and industry. He believed that the Soviet Union was one hundred years behind the West and had to catch up as quickly as possible. First though he had to seal up complete alliance to himself and his cause.
In order to conclude the extent to which the Great Terror strengthened or weakened the USSR, the question is essentially whether totalitarianism strengthened or weakened the Soviet Union? Perhaps under the circumstances of the 1930s in the approach to war a dictatorship may have benefited the country in some way through strong leadership, the unifying effect of reintroducing Russian nationalism and increased party obedience. The effects of the purges on the political structure and community of the USSR can be described (as Peter Kenez asserts) as an overall change from a party led dictatorship to the dictatorship of a single individual; Stalin. Overall power was centred on Stalin, under whom an increasingly bureaucratic hierarchy of party officials worked. During the purges Stalin's personal power can be seen to increase at the cost of the party.
Stalin had a viciously suspicious man who coined the concept of “enemy of the people.” (Khrushchev’s Secret speech, cold war documents, 87) Khrushchev in his speech bring up the effects of Stalin’s personality had on the progression of the Soviet Union like the falsification of cases in the provinces of innocent Communists, the empty information of spies everywhere, and to the doctor-plotters that Stalin has tortured confessions out of eminent Soviet Medical practitioners. (Khrushchev’s Secret speech, cold war documents, 87-89) Khrushchev’s secret speech for the 20th Party Congress did not stay secret for long, manuscripts were sent out to communist countries and even found its way into America. This speech was the fuel for anti-Soviet uprisings and resentment which led to the uprising in Poland and in Hungary in 1956. In order to lead the Soviet Union on a peaceful path that coexisted with the western world the image of Stalin needed to be squished to allow diplomatic relations with countries that were alike and not alike in the
A comparison of these two are Both leaders saw that changes were essential, they knew that without reforms, the Soviet Union would grow weaker and weaker. Khrushchev’s and Gorbachev’s reforms were wide and touched almost all important aspects of the government. One important aspect is how Khrushchev and Gorbachev saw the past and future. When Khrushchev came to power he had a big problem how to replace Stalin and how to rule the country after him. Stalin ruled through a cult of personality and many people thought that he was irreplaceable. At “the Twentieth Congress of the Khrushchev attacks Stalinism and the Cult of Personality in the secret speech, he denounced Stalin and the terror of his regime, everything Stalin did or said was incorrect,
Joseph Stalin was the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from 1929-1953. Stalin rose to power as General Secretary of the Communist Party, becoming a Soviet dictator after
Joseph Stalin became leader of the USSR after Lenin’s death in 1924. Lenin had a government of abstemious communist government. When Stalin came into government he moved to a radical communist society. He moved away from the somewhat capitalist/communist economy of Lenin time to “modernize” the USSR. He wanted to industrialize and modernize USSR. He had overworked his workers, his people were dying, and most of them in slave labor camps. In fact by doing this Stalin had hindered the USSR and put them even farther back in time.
Stalins rise as a dictator over the USSR in 1929, was a struggle for power. It was set by Lenin, in his testament, that Stalin was not to takeover control as the party leader, and to be removed from his position as General Secretary, as Stalin in Lenins eyes had lack of loyalty, tolerance, and politeness. However, different factors, such as Lenins funeral, Stalins position as General Secretary and the rise of bureaucracy, and Stalins relationship to Kamenev and Zinoviev, made it possible for Stalin to become the undisputed leader over the USSR in 1929. This essay will discuss the methods and the conditions, which helped Joseph Stalin rise to power.
Politics has always been about image. A good image leads to power, it's that simple. Sometimes it is hard to draw the line between a leader who is genuinely interested in improving the lives of his people and one that is interested in filling a few more pages of the already crowded History book. A good example of this is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in its transition time between 1953 and 1964. The tyrannical rule of Joseph Stalin in the USSR was finally over, and the nation sought a new leader; after nearly a decade, one man, Nikita Khrushchev, rose up from the ranks with new ideas for the nation, and an extreme anti-Stalin campaign. But was he truly enraged at the way Stalin ruled or was he using this image in an attempt to capture the same power as his predecessor? The link between the two leaders goes back many years, to nearly the beginning of the communist annexation of Russia. Even today, we find ourselves asking if the politicians we vote for say they will make a reform to actually help the people, or if they say it as an empty promise in a ploy to get elected or to gain power. Was Nikita Khrushchev a man for the people, or was he simply a puppet with motives unseen to the people that pulled his strings?