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vive. In June 1957, Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and other old-guard Stal-
inists, including Bulganin, later dubbed the “anti-Party group,” engineered a
vote in the Presidium to dismiss Khrushchev. With the help of war hero Mar-
shal Georgii Zhukov, Khrushchev responded by calling an emergency meeting
of the Central Committee that overturned the Presidium's decision. Malenkov,
Molotov and Kaganovich were banished to minor positions in such outlying
regions as Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and the Urals. Many consider the fact that
they were not executed for their defeat as one of the most significant of
Khrushchev's departures from the Stalinist practices of the previous decades.
More difficult for the Soviet leadership and the Soviet people to address was
the nature of Stalin's legacy in a polity he had mostly created. The next decade
witnessed Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaigns begun by the Secret Speech
of 1956 that denounced the most extreme excesses of Stalin's rule, but not its
foundations, the removal of Stalin's body from the Lenin mausoleum in 1961 to
be interred along with other Soviet heroes in the Kremlin wall, followed by the
partial re-Stalinization of the Brezhnev years (1964-1982). Only three decades
later in the late 1980s, under then-Secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev's glas-
nost (openness) campaign, did a free and candid discussion of all aspects of
Stalin's rule become possible. Even then, many older Soviets remained uncom-
fortable in discussing Stalin's era, while a die-hard minority longed for his “firm
hand” as the antidote to the troubles Russia faced in the 1990s.
Aside from his dramatic denunciation of the Stalin personality cult, as leader
Krushchev became known for erratic policies and impetuous bureaucratic reor-
ganizations. In domestic politics he allowed a limited degree of latitude to Soviet
writers and artists (which his successors were later to try to rescind), while try-
ing to shift the balance of Soviet industrial policy a little away from its relent-
less concentration on heavy industry in favor of consumer goods production. In
international politics he sought to divide and delude the Western bloc by alter-
nate bouts of peaceful coexistence and violent threats including “ultimatums”
over Berlin, unrestrained testing of nuclear weapons, encouragement of wars of
“national liberation,” and stationing medium-range missiles on Cuba to threaten
the United States, on the one hand, and the acceptance of the partial test-ban
treaty with the United States in 1963, on the other. The penalty for these swings
of policy was the alienation of the doctrinally rigid in the Communist bloc, espe-
cially the Chinese, led by Mao Zedong, the successive acceptance of Polish
national communism under Władysław Gomułka and armed suppression of rev-
olution in Hungary in 1956, loss of control over the Communist parties of West-
ern Europe in the name of polycentrism, and, finally, his overthrow in 1964 by
the other members of the CPSU leadership. The failure of his grandiose attempts
to solve chronic Soviet food shortages by wholesale ploughing up of the “Virgin
Lands” of Soviet Asia eased their task in overthrowing him. In October 1964,
while resting in the Crimea, Khrushchev was removed from office by his Polit-
buro colleagues and replaced as party secretary by Leonid Brezhnev.
The party officials who deposed Khrushchev deliberately set out to govern
the Soviet Union in a collective fashion. Even though a single figure, Leonid
Brezhnev, eventually dominated the system, the era from 1964 to his death in
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