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Reform, stability & stagnation - Coggle Diagram
Reform, stability & stagnation
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De Stalinisation
- K & M wanted to Humanise communism
→ wanted to end S use of terror & enhance lives of citizens by improving living standards, ending terror & enriching culture
- rejected cult of personality as they were Leninists
→ shift focus from heroic Stalin to achievements of com party & soviet people
- ending CoP begun after S death
→ turn S Dacha into museum celebrating his life SCRAPPED & annual S prizes cancelled w/ no official celebration of his bday
- Newspapers w/ S works replaced w/ quotes from Marx & Lenin
Secret Speech
- wanted to criticise Stalin BUT was a huge risk
→ highly respected - risked undermining SU & Comm. & outraging party - many senior comm. respected S
- negotiated w/ Presidium criticisms presented in secret of Twentieth party congress 1956 - started Feb 14
- 25 Feb 1 day after congress ended delegates sent to unscheduled meeting
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- claimed S committed serious crimes → ie. deaths of hundreds of thousand innocents in purges
- delegates shocked - accounts say some suffered heart attacks & killed themselves after learning scale of crimes
- kept secret but printed copies sent to senior comm in SU & Eastern Europe
Ending Terror
- May 1954 K & M set up commission to review cases of Political Prisoners sent to Gulags
→ first year 4620 of 113,739 released
→ June 1956 - 51,439 released
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Khrushchevs Retreat
- K accused of reforming too fast & DS destabilised govern.
- K backtracked agreeing that soviets not ready to know truth of S
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- Dec K secretly authorised establishment of a Special Commission, healed by Brezhnev to supress anti-communist activities
- Ks New Years Eve Speech acknowledged all communists were Stalinists
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