Heard him mentioned on Hexbear before but forgot the details. He was probably on the ball.
I dunno that guy but I think Mao and Deng both said similar things. Fuckin hated the corn man. Allegedly Mao invited Kruschev to Beijing in 1958 to talk shop, but when Kruschev got there Mao was already vibin in the pool. Kruschev couldn’t swim but Mao refused to get out, so in goes Kruschev with his floaties on.
I think Khrushchev gets a bad rap. He was trying to play a tricky hand
The soviet union needed in order to compete with America to adapt to having a more educated workforce and away from a purely industrial economy. This wasn’t feasible with the systems and institutions as set up by Stalin when the biggest priority was rightly building the nations industrial capacity, modernising the infrastructure and getting rid of the counterrevolutionary elements. He also struggled to reform these elements that had been necessary but had become a hindrance without getting ousted by hardcore Stalin loyalists so the only option he had that he could think of was to get rid of Stalins image. Unfortunately this threw the baby out with the bathwater and disilusioned a lot of people with Communism in general
he fucked up but he had a difficult job to do and he was trying his best
Learning about him in Blowbacks Cuba series made me see him more sympathetically.
Kruschev was smart enough to get himself into trouble but never quite smart enough to get out of it. Tragically Beria was capable of running the Soviet Union post Stalin but was on a personal level a monster.
Like how Henry the 8th was the one to break the political power of the dukes and barons thus enabling England to modernise but was also a serial killer
I don’t know what Hexbear’s general opinion of Furr is, but I’m currently reading through his book “Krushchev Lied” and it’s an interesting picture. I don’t think you’re wrong, the USSR was absolutely at a tricky point and needed to adapt to stay competitive, but (assuming Furr is even sort of correct, I need to read other historians (and probably learn some Russian as well)) he was pretty damn shady in undermining Stalin’s image.
And for the record, I do think he handled the Missile Crisis pretty well, all things considered.
Khrushchev reminded me of a livestock dealer. A small-time livestock dealer. A man of little culture, certainly. A regular livestock trader, a man who deals in cattle.
Stalin’s mistake was that he had not trained anyone to fill his position. Khrushchev took over, not by chance. Of course he was not the right man for the top office. But we had no unity in our group, and we had no program.
Shoulda never decommissioned the comically large spoon smh
