Latest news with #Khrushchev
Times
07-07-2025
- Politics
- Times
Khrushchev's anti-Stalin speech was mistake
When Nikita Khrushchev spoke out against Joseph Stalin's rule of terror at a Communist Party congress in 1956, his words sent shock waves throughout the Soviet Union and ushered in a thaw of Kremlin policies. Almost 70 years on, amid President Putin's ruthless crackdown on domestic dissent, Russia's modern-day Communist Party has declared that Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin was a mistake. At its own congress, held near Moscow at the weekend, the party described Khrushchev's landmark speech as 'erroneous and politically biased' and alleged it contained 'falsified facts and false accusations' against the man responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens. Although it has not held power since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Communist Party remains the country's second biggest political party after Putin's ruling United Russia. It is a vocal supporter of Russia's war in Ukraine. Khrushchev's 'secret' speech, 'On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences', was delivered behind closed doors and caused some Communist Party members who were present to faint with shock. Besides denouncing Stalin's deadly purges, Khrushchev also criticised the dictator who ruled from 1924 to 1953 for seeking to become 'akin to a god'. He also revealed that Vladimir Lenin, the first Soviet leader, had warned against appointing Stalin as his successor. The speech was later read out at party meetings and slowly became public knowledge. Under Khrushchev, the Soviet Union embarked on a campaign of de-Stalinisation, tearing down statues to the Soviet tyrant and renaming streets, squares and cities that had been named in his honour. Stalin's name was almost taboo in Russia until 2000, when Putin, a former KGB officer, took power and orchestrated a revival of his reputation. More than 100 monuments of Stalin have appeared across Russia during Putin's rule, opposition journalists have reported. Most of them have been erected since 2014, when Moscow's relations with the west plunged to a new low after the Kremlin's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. In May a life-sized replica of a Stalin statue, which was torn down from the Moscow metro in the Sixties, was unveiled at the city's Taganskaya station, less than two miles from the Red Square. Videos showed passers-by laying flowers next to it. One man was even seen praying at the statue, apparently unconcerned by Stalin's anti-religion campaign between 1928 and 1941. Kirill Martynov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta Europe, a Russian opposition website that has been banned by the Kremlin, said the Communist Party's move to denounce Khrushchev was part of a struggle with ultra-Orthodox Christians. 'They are proving to Putin that it is their interpretation of the past that will best contribute to his eternal power,' he wrote. Nina Khrushcheva, an international relations analyst in New York who is the great-granddaughter of Khrushchev, said the Communist Party was trying to curry favour with Putin to maintain its status as a Kremlin-funded pseudo-opposition party. 'The Kremlin is not ready to fully cancel Khrushchev, though they do not like him, but the Communist Party decided to try out those waters,' she told The Times. 'With people being arrested and prosecuted in Russia now with little legal basis, the 'secret speech' could become inconvenient and get banned from the top. Also, the speech questions Stalin's heroic role in the Second World War, which also could become a reason to ban it.'
Russia Today
05-07-2025
- Politics
- Russia Today
Russian Communists want Stalin rehabilitated
The Russian Communist Party (CPRF) has set the goal of restoring the reputation of Joseph Stalin, adopting a resolution calling for 'historical justice' for the one-time Soviet leader. According to the document supported at a party convention held this week, the criticism of the Stalin era and his policies leveled by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was 'misdirected' and 'politically motivated.' In its resolution, the CPRF distanced itself from Khrushchev's assessment of what he called Stalin's 'personality cult.' In 1956, Khrushchev, who himself played a significant role in the political oppression of the Great Terror – a period of mass repressions in the USSR in 1930s – denounced during a famous Communist Party congress the crimes of his former boss and the cult of personality he cultivated during his reign. He also introduced a policy of 'de-Stalinization,' removing memorials to his predecessor around the country. Stalin's legacy still divides opinion inside modern Russia. Some revere him for his leadership through World War II, while others view him as a tyrant responsible for the death of imprisonment of many. Russia's modern Communist Party views Stalin in an increasingly positive light. In 2021, the Communists in Nizhny Novgorod Region announced their plans to construct a museum dedicated to him. 'Stalin is a symbol of victory, the commonwealth of fraternal nations, the power and greatness of the Power that ensured peace in the world and kept it from World War III,' the head of the local party branch, Vladislav Yegorov, said at the time. According to Yegorov, the Nizhny Novgorod Stalin Center should become the first step towards opening similar museums across Russia. The party also organized the erection of monuments to Stalin throughout the country. At the latest convention, the CPRF also adopted another resolution calling on President Vladimir Putin to rename the city of Volgograd back to Stalingrad. Long-time CPRF party head Gennady Zyuganov has long advocated for such a step. He made a similar appeal ahead of the 80th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War in May. According to the CPRF resolution, Volgograd Region should revert to its 'historical' name as well. The Kremlin has so far not commented on the initiatives.
Atlantic
26-06-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Nuclear Roulette
On October 27, 1962, the 12th day of the Cuban missile crisis, a bellicose and rattled Fidel Castro asked Nikita Khrushchev, his patron, to destroy America. 'I believe that the imperialists' aggressiveness makes them extremely dangerous,' Castro wrote in a cable to Moscow, 'and that if they manage to carry out an invasion of Cuba—a brutal act in violation of universal and moral law—then that would be the moment to eliminate this danger forever, in an act of the most legitimate self-defense. However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other.' We exist today because Khrushchev rejected Castro's demand. It was Khrushchev, of course, who brought the planet to the threshold of extinction by placing missiles in Cuba, but he had underestimated the American response to the threat. Together with his adversary, John F. Kennedy, he lurched his way toward compromise. 'In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to carry out a nuclear strike against the enemy's territory,' Khrushchev responded. 'Naturally you understand where that would lead us. It would not be a simple strike, but the start of a thermonuclear world war. Dear Comrade Fidel Castro, I find your proposal to be wrong, even though I understand your reasons.' Castro was 36 years old during the missile crisis. He was 84 when I met him, in Havana, in late summer 2010. He was in semiretirement, though he was still Cuba's indispensable man. I spent a week with him, discussing, among other things, the Nuclear Age and its diabolical complexities. He still embraced the cruel dogmas of Communist revolution, but he was also somewhat reflective about his mistakes. I was deeply curious about his October 27 cable, and I put this question to him: 'At a certain point it seemed logical for you to recommend that the Soviets bomb the U.S. Does what you recommended still seem logical now?' His answer: 'After I've seen what I've seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn't worth it.' The problem with wisdom is that it tends to come slowly, if it comes at all. As a species, we are not particularly skilled at making time-pressured, closely reasoned decisions about matters of life and death. The sociobiologist E. O. Wilson described the central problem of humanity this way: 'We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.' The main challenge of the 80 years since the Trinity atomic test has been that we do not possess the cognitive, spiritual, and emotional capabilities necessary to successfully manage nuclear weapons without the risk of catastrophic failure. Khrushchev and Castro both made terrifying mistakes of analysis and interpretation during the missile crisis. So, too, did several of Kennedy's advisers, including General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, who argued that a naval blockade of Cuba, unaccompanied by the immediate bombing of missile sites, was ' almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.' Today, the Global Operations Center of the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees America's nuclear forces, is housed in an Offutt Air Force Base building named for LeMay. This decision has always struck me as an indirect endorsement by America's nuclear establishment of the bias toward action embodied by the sometimes-Strangelovian LeMay. Bias toward action is an all-purpose phrase, but I first heard it in the context of nuclear warfare many years ago from Bruce Blair, a scholar of nonproliferation and a former Air Force missile-launch officer. It means that the nuclear-decision-making scripts that presidents are meant to follow in a crisis assume that Russia (or other adversaries) will attempt to destroy American missiles while they are still in their silos. The goal of nuclear-war planners has traditionally been to send those missiles on their way before they can be neutralized—in the parlance of nuclear planning, to 'launch on warning.' Many of the men who served as president since 1945 have been shocked to learn about the impossibly telescoped time frame in which they have to decide whether to launch. The issue is not one of authority—presidents are absolute nuclear monarchs, and they can do what they wish with America's nuclear weapons (please see Tom Nichols's article ' The President's Weapon '). The challenge, as George W. Bush memorably put it, is that a president wouldn't even have time to get off the 'crapper' before having to make a launch decision, a decision that could be based on partial, contradictory, or even false information. Ronald Reagan, when he assumed the presidency, was said to have been shocked that he would have as little as six minutes to make a decision to launch. Barack Obama thought that it was madness to expect a president to make such a decision—the most important that would ever be made by a single person in all of human history—in a matter of minutes. We are living through one of the more febrile periods of the nuclear era. The contours of World War III are visible in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia has been aided by Iran and North Korea and opposed by Europe and, for the time being, the United States. Pakistan and India, two nuclear states, recently fought a near-war; Iran, which has for decades sought the destruction of Israel through terrorism and other means, has seen its nuclear sites come under attack by Israel and the United States, in what could be termed an act of nonproliferation by force; North Korea continues to expand its nuclear arsenal, and South Korea and Japan, as Ross Andersen details elsewhere in this issue, are considering going nuclear in response. Humans will need luck to survive this period. We have been favored by fortune before, and not only during the Cuban missile crisis. Over the past 80 years, humanity has been saved repeatedly by individuals who possessed unusually good judgment in situations of appalling stress. Two in particular—Stanislav Petrov and John Kelly—spring to my mind regularly, for different reasons. Petrov is worth understanding because, under terrible pressure, he responded skeptically to an attack warning, quite possibly saving the planet. Kelly did something different, but no less difficult: He steered an unstable president away from escalation and toward negotiation. In September 1983, Petrov was serving as the duty officer at a Soviet command center when its warning system reported that the United States had launched five missiles at Soviet targets. Relations between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were tense; just three weeks earlier, the Soviets had shot down a civilian South Korean airliner. Petrov defied established protocols governing such an alert and declared the launch warning to be false. He understood that the detection system was new and only partially tested. He also knew that Soviet doctrine held that an American attack, should it come, would be overwhelming, and not a mere five missiles. He reported to his superiors that he believed the attack warning to be a mistake, and he prevented a nuclear exchange between the two superpowers by doing so. (Later, it was determined that a Soviet satellite had mistakenly interpreted the interplay between clouds and the sun over Montana and North Dakota as missile launches.) John Kelly, the retired four-star Marine general who served as White House chief of staff for part of Donald Trump's first term, is known for his Sisyphean labors on behalf of order in an otherwise anarchic decision-making environment. Kelly, during his 17 months as chief of staff, understood that Trump was particularly dangerous on matters of national security. Trump was ignorant of world affairs, Kelly believed, and authoritarian by instinct. Kelly experienced these flaws directly in 2017, when Trump regularly insulted the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, who was widely regarded as inexperienced and unstable himself. After North Korea threatened 'physical action' against its enemies, Trump said, 'They will be met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.' Kelly repeatedly warned Trump that such language could cause Kim, eager to prove his bona fides to the senior generals around him, to overreact by attacking South Korea. But Trump continued, tweeting: 'Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!' Kim later responded by firing missiles over Japan and calling Trump a 'mentally deranged U.S. dotard.' According to reporting in Michael S. Schmidt's book, Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, Kelly told Trump, 'You're pushing him to prove he's a man. If you push him into a corner, he may strike out. You don't want to box him in.' Schmidt wrote, 'The president of the United States had no appreciation for the fact that he could bring the country not just to the brink of a war at any moment—but a nuclear war that could easily escalate into the most dangerous one in world history.' Kelly realized that his warnings to Trump weren't penetrating, so he played, instead, on Trump's insecurities, and on his need to be a hero, or, at the very least, a salesman. 'No president since North Korea became a communist dictatorship has ever tried to reach out,' Kelly told Trump, according to Schmidt. 'No president has tried to reason with this guy—you're a big dealmaker, why don't you do that.' Kelly's diversion worked: Trump quickly became enamored of the idea that he would achieve a history-making rapprochement with North Korea. Kelly understood that such a deal was far-fetched, but the pursuit of a chimera would cause Trump to stop threatening nuclear war. Trump remains an unstable leader in a world far more unstable than it was during his first term. No president has ever been anything close to a perfect steward of America's national security and its nuclear arsenal, but Trump is less qualified than almost any previous leader to manage a nuclear crisis. (Only the late-stage, frequently inebriated Richard Nixon was arguably more dangerous.) Trump is highly reactive, sensitive to insult, and incurious. It is unfair to say that he is likely to wake up one morning and decide to use nuclear weapons—he has spoken intermittently about his loathing of such weapons, and of war more generally—but he could very easily mismanage his way, again, into an escalatory spiral. From the November 1947 issue: Albert Einstein on avoiding atomic war The successful end of the Cold War caused many people to believe that the threat of nuclear war had receded. It has historically been difficult to get people to think about the unthinkable. In an article for this magazine in 1947, Albert Einstein explained: The public, having been warned of the horrible nature of atomic warfare, has done nothing about it, and to a large extent has dismissed the warning from its consciousness. A danger that cannot be averted had perhaps better be forgotten; or a danger against which every possible precaution has been taken also had probably better be forgotten. We forget at our peril. We forget that 80 years after the world-changing summer of 1945, Russia and the United States alone possess enough nuclear firepower to destroy the world many times over; we forget that China is becoming a near-peer adversary of the U.S.; we forget that the history of the Nuclear Age is filled with near misses, accidents, and wild misinterpretations of reality; and we forget that most humans aren't quite as creative, independent-minded, and perspicacious as Stanislav Petrov and John Kelly. Most of all, we forget the rule articulated by the mathematician and cryptologist Martin Hellman: that the only way to survive Russian roulette is to stop playing.
BBC News
25-06-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Thinking Allowed Russian Propaganda
Laurie Taylor talks to Nina Khrushcheva, Professor of International Affairs at The New School in New York City about her research into the propaganda formulas deployed by Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin over the last two decades. As the great granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union between 1958 and 1964, she offers personal, as well as political insights, into these developments, drawing on previous periods of oppression in Russian history. She argues that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has intensified 'hard' propaganda, leading to a pervasive presence of military images in every day life and the rehabilitation of Josef Stalin, the former dictator of the Soviet Union, as a symbol of Russian power. She suggests that lessons from past eras, described by such Soviet classics as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, can offer small grounds for optimism and hope, as ordinary people absorb alternative narratives. How else to explain the fact that George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, has been a bestseller for many years and has seen a surge in popularity since the start of the war in Ukraine? Producer: Jayne Egerton
Scoop
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Scoop
Using Cuba 1962 To Explain Trump's Brinkmanship
People of a certain age will be aware that the 1962 Cuba Missile Crisis was, for the world as a whole, the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. The 1962 'Battle of Cuba' was a 'cold battle' in the same sense that the Cold War was a 'cold war'. (Only one actual shot was fired, by Cuba.) Nevertheless, it is appropriate to ask, "who won"? In military events hot or cold – it is surprisingly difficult to answer such a question. But it's actually quite easy in this case. The cold Battle of Cuba was about three countries, and three charismatic leaders: Nikita Khrushchev (Soviet Union), John F Kennedy (United States), and Fidel Castro (Cuba). Following the disastrous American invasion of Cuba in 1961, Cuba had taken on the role of a Soviet Union 'client state' – hence a military proxy – of the Soviet Union. (Prior to the Bay of Pigs assault, Cuba, while a revolutionary country, was not a communist country; though at least one prominent revolutionary, the Argentinian doctor Che Guevara, was certainly of the communist faith and took every opportunity to convert Cuba into a polity that followed the Book of Marx. The actions of the United States facilitated Castro's eventual conversion.) The situation that Khrushchev faced in late 1961 was that NATO had an installation of American nuclear-armed missiles in Turkey (now Türkiye). While Turkey had a common border with the Soviet Union – Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia – the missiles were essentially facing north across the Black Sea, into Ukraine and Russia. This was a clear and open – though not widely publicised in 'the west' – security threat to the Soviet Union. Taking advantage of the political fallout between Cuba and the United States, Khrushchev – in an act of bravado, indeed brinkmanship – negotiated with Castro to install nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba, one of the few genuine security threats that the United States has ever faced. The world trembled at the prospect of imminent (and possibly all-out) nuclear war. Castro looked forward to a hot battle which he was sure Khrushchev and Castro would together win. But Castro was doomed to disappointment. Khrushchev dismantled his missiles in Cuba, and Kennedy dismantled his missiles in Turkey. So, compare, say, October 1963 with October 1961. The only real difference was that in 1961 there were American missiles in Turkey pointing in the direction of Moscow, and in 1963 there were not. Game, set, and match to Khrushchev. (And of course, the whole world was the winner, in that not a nuclear missile was fired in anger. Though the Cubans did shoot down an American reconnaissance aircraft.) That's not the narrative which the western world has taken on board though. In the West, it's interpreted as a Soviet Union backdown, in the face of relentless diplomatic pressure from the Kennedy brothers (with Robert Kennedy playing a key negotiating role). Certainly, the world was on tenterhooks; brinkmanship can go disastrously wrong. There are some analogies with the current Ukraine crisis. Though the Ukraine War is certainly a hot war. Brinkmanship failed in 2021 and 2022. Nevertheless, Volodymyr Zelenskyy does pose as a good analogue to Fidel Castro (though not as an incipient communist!). Donald Trump's brinkmanship re China and the European Union Trump's war is a 'trade war', Winston Peters' rejection of the 'war analogy' notwithstanding. This is a war that uses the language of war. Two longstanding mercantilist economic nations (China, European Union) and one mercantilist leader are slugging it out to see who can export more goods and services to the world; the prize being a mix of gold and virtual-gold, the proceeds of unbalanced trade. (Historically the United States has also been a mercantilist nation, going right back to its origins as a 'victim' of British mercantilism in the eighteenth century. The United States has always been uneasy about its post World-War-Two role as global consumer-of-last-resort and its historical instincts towards mercantilism; an instinct that contributed substantially to the global Great Depression of 1930 to 1935. 'Mercantilism' is often confused by economists with 'protectionism', and indeed the American Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 were a mix of both.) My reading of Donald Trump is that he is a mercantilist, but not a protectionist; that he's not really a tariff-lover, just as Khrushchev was not really a missile lover. Instinctively, China and especially the European Union are protectionist as a way of supporting their ingrained mercantilism. But a country that is 'great again' – in this 'making money' context – can prevail in a trade war without tariffs. Indeed, that's exactly why the United Kingdom moved sharply towards tree trade in the 1840s and 1850s. England had not lost its mercantilist spots. But at the heart of an English Empire within a British Empire, London had the power to win a 'free trade' trade war. It was the other would-be powers – the new kids on the global block; the USA, Germany's Second Reich, and later Japan and Russia – which turned to tariff protection in order to stymie the United Kingdom. Trump's super-tariffs against China and the European Union – trade weapons, economic 'missiles' – are designed to get those two economic nations to remove their various trade barriers that existed in 2024. Once they do that, then Trump may remove his tariff threats. Trump is playing brinkmanship in the way of Khrushchev. Xi Jinping is Kennedy; so, in a way, is Ursula von der Leyen. Canada, in a sense, is Cuba. (Though Mark Carney may not like to think of himself as Castro!) If Trump gets his way, the United States' economy in 2026 will be as free as it was in 2024. The Chinese and European Union economies will have significantly fewer tariff and non-tariff import barriers than in 2024. Significantly fewer 'trade weapons' poised to 'rip off' the United States! Canada will be much the same in 2026 as in 2024, albeit with a newfound sense of national identity. Implications for the Wider World, and the Global Monetary System The wider world will probably not be better off with a mercantilist war, albeit a free-trade war. When hippopotamuses start dancing …! We already see how free trade in 'big guns' is creating military instability in Africa and South Asia. And we must expect to see the United States' special role as the fulcrum of the world's monetary system dissipate if the United States significantly reduces its trade deficits; requiring some other deficit countries to take up that challenge. Canada? Australia? India? United Kingdom? A new anti-mercantilist British Empire? I don't think so. Türkiye? Saudi Arabia? Brazil? Maybe not. Japan? Maybe. Russia? If the Ukraine war ends, Russia will struggle to import more than it exports; though I am sure that Donald Trump would like to see the United States exporting lots of stuff to Russia. The International Monetary Fund? Maybe, but only if it changes some of its narratives. The challenge here will be for it to reform itself in line with John Maynard Keynes' proposals at and after Bretton Woods, the 1944 conference which set itself the task of establishing the post-war global monetary order. Keynes envisaged a World Reserve Bank; though he didn't envisage monetary policy – with New Zealand in 1989 acknowledged as the world's lead 'reformer' – falling into the hands of the 'monetarists' and their false narratives about inflation. ------------- Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Keith Rankin Political Economist, Scoop Columnist Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s. Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like. Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.
