Abstract
Khrushchev had defeated Malenkov by casting himself as defender of the true faith and attacking Malenkov as a rightist, but their ideological conflict must be seen in context: the disagreements between them, though real, were limited. Malenkov’s revisionism was rather mild, while Khrushchev’s brand of orthodoxy was far less rigid than Stalin’s. Neither man challenged the institutional or ideological bases of the Soviet system, and both were agreed on the need to raise living standards, to keep the secret police under party control and to achieve some relaxation in tensions with the outside world. Khrushchev’s relative conservatism was largely tactical: he occupied the only political ground which Malenkov, by occupying the right, had left open to him.
Though indulgence in terrorist action against any section of the population may corrupt the entire personality . . . nevertheless, the contrary is also true ’ that the preservation of more or less humanist attitudes, even if only in a limited field, may, when the particular motives for terror against others have lapsed, spread out again and rehumanise the rest.
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror1
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© 1997 William J. Tompson
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Tompson, W.J. (1997). Dethroning Stalin. In: Khrushchev. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25608-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25608-2_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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