Khrushchev
Article
Khrushchev is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 28, 2022 and February 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Khrushchev et al. ruled by committee. Then Khrushchev was deposed”; “A story about Khruschev (h/t @JackTindale , taken from The Soviet Sixties )“. It most often appears alongside China, Mongolia, UK.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: April 28, 2022
- Last seen: February 29, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Mongolia (2 shared issues)
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- UK (2 shared issues)
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- @BoyanSlat (1 shared issues)
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- @eigenrobot (1 shared issues)
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- @JackTindale (1 shared issues)
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- @literalbanana (1 shared issues)
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- @NiohBerg (1 shared issues)
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- @seanw_m (1 shared issues)
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- A16Z (1 shared issues)
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- Abolition Of Man (1 shared issues)
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- ACX Grants (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I read somewhere that after Stalin's death, his successors wanted to make sure one-man rule would not return. They all had experienced first-hand how not even the highest ranking Polit-buro member had been safe from Stalin's vindictiveness. Therefore Khrushchev et al. ruled by committee. Then Khrushchev was deposed, so maybe power was diluted too much. Brezhnev et all reverted to a more authoritarian rule but never killed fellow communists again, and were not nearly as brutal as Stalin's regime.
The story goes that Khrushchev was intensely proud of being shuffled off to his dacha instead of shot in the basement. He supposedly said as he was ushered out something like “See how far we’ve come, that I’m leaving this way instead of that? I did that. I changed the USSR. That was me.”
When Khruschev addressed a crowd of several hundred thousand people in the Uzbek capital Tashkent during December 1955, he got himself in an unseemly muddle. He opened by mistakenly calling his audience "Tajiks" and noting how well they were now doing in growing cotton, compared to their neighbors the Uzbeks. An aide eventually managed to tell him that he was, in fact, talking to Uzbeks rather than Tajiks. As was his way, Khrushchev tried to ride out the faux pas in style, telling the audience he had misspoken on purpose, in order to test their reaction, and then expressing his happiness that they had responded correctly to his joke.