Khrushchev began seeing the US and the West much more as a rival instead of an evil entity. He aimed at showing off the superiority of the Soviets over American and Western products. This position further alienated Mao Zedong.
As the Chinese Cultural Revolution proceeded, there was no worse insult than to be scorned for being a "Chinese Khrushchev," the equivalent of an ideological turncoat. Furthermore, by Khrushchev effectively managed to reform the Stalinist security apparatus by subordinating it to the top party leadership.
His attempted decentralization of the party structure begun antagonizing many of those who had previously supported his rise to power. According to various authors, political terror as an everyday government method was replaced under Khrushchev by his administrative means of repression.
In , Khrushchev opened a public Central Committee meeting to hundreds of Soviet officials for the first time. This expansion of the Central Committee allowed Khrushchev even greater control. Anyone who dissented from him would have to make their case in front of a large, disapproving crowd. By this time, after all, the Communist Party had solidified into the so-called nomenclature — 10 million-strong elite of bureaucrats, managers, and technicians intending on guarding their power and prerogatives at all cost.
He optimistically based many plans on the crops in and , which fueled his repeated promises to overtake the United States in agricultural and industrial production.
He opened up more than 70 million acres of virgin land in Siberia and sent thousands of laborers. Still, this plan was unsuccessful, and the Soviet Union soon had to import wheat from Canada and the US once again. When Khrushchev took control, the outside world still knew little of him, and he was initially not highly recognized. Short, heavyset, and wearing ill-fit suits, he was commonly seen as very energetic but not intellectual and was dismissed by many as a buffoon who would not last long.
Although his attacks on world capitalism were virulent and primitive, his outgoing personality and peasant humor were in sharp contrast to the image introduced by all earlier Soviet public figures. He also had abysmal diplomatic skills, giving him the reputation of being a rude, uncivilized peasant in the West and an irresponsible clown in his own country. His methods of administration, although efficient, were also acknowledged as erratic since they threatened to abolish a large number of Stalinist-era agencies.
In foreign affairs, Khrushchev widely asserted his doctrine of peaceful co-existence with the non-communist world, which he had first proclaimed in his public speech at the 20th Party Congress. In , Khrushchev conferred with President Eisenhower, which brought Soviet-American relations to new highs.
Notwithstanding these hopeful developments, Khrushchev, as a diplomat, remained irascible and blunt. Khrushchev repeatedly disrupted the proceedings in the United Nations General Assembly in September-October by pounding his fists on the desk and shouting in Russian. The new Soviet leadership increased military aid to the North Vietnamese without trying to persuade them to attempt a negotiated end to hostilities. With this support and no external pressure to negotiate, the North Vietnamese leadership was free to carry on the war as they saw fit.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Harmony singing was a part of rock and roll right from the beginning, but the three- and four-part harmonies of doo-wop, derived from black gospel and blues traditions, would never have given us Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles or the Byrds.
To get those groups, you first had to Before a campaign speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt is shot at close range by saloonkeeper John Schrank while greeting the public in front of the Gilpatrick Hotel. At the end of the bloody, all-day battle, Harold was killed—shot in the eye with an arrow, according to African American civil rights leader Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. At 35 years of age, the Georgia-born minister was the youngest person ever to receive the award. Martin Luther King, Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound. He shot down 13 German planes and was himself shot down On the domestic front, Khrushchev worked—not always successfully—to increase agricultural production and raise living standards.
Two years later, a Soviet rocket hit the moon, and in Soviet astronaut Yuri A. Gagarin became the first man in space. Khrushchev had a complicated relationship with the West. A fervent believer in communism, he nonetheless preferred peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries.
Unlike Stalin, he even visited the United States. Relations between the two superpowers deteriorated somewhat in when the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane deep inside their territory. The following year, Khrushchev approved the construction of the Berlin Wall in order to stop East Germans from fleeing to capitalist West Germany.
Cold War tensions reached a high point in October when the United States discovered Soviet nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba. The world appeared to be on the brink of nuclear conflict, but, after a day standoff, Khrushchev agreed to remove the weapons.
In return, U. President John F. Kennedy , who one year earlier had authorized the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, publicly consented not to attack Cuba. Kennedy also privately agreed to take American nuclear weapons out of Turkey. In October Khrushchev was called back from a vacation in Pitsunda, Georgia , and forced to resign as both premier and head of the Communist Party. Khrushchev wrote his memoirs and quietly lived out the remainder of his days before dying of a heart attack in September Nonetheless, his spirit of reform lived on during the perestroika era of the s.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. An arms race occurs when two or more countries increase the size and quality of military resources to gain military and political superiority over one another.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.
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