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Khrushchev's Fundamentalism |
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"Gorbachev Factor"
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In
the years immediately following the Twentieth Party Congress,
Khrushchev’s power and prestige were at their peak. His policies,
like the project to develop vast virgin lands in Kazakhstan, were
popular and seemingly successful. In October 1957 the launch of the
Soviet space satellite Sputnik inaugurated the exploration of outer
space. In 1961 it was followed by the first manned space flight of
the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. As a result, the Soviet Union
established itself as a world leader in science and technology.
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These indisputable achievements were admired all over the world and
served to heighten further Khrushchev’s personal prestige. They also
seemed to have reinforced Khrushchev’s Marxist-Leninist
fundamentalist beliefs.
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Khrushchev was the last Soviet leader who was a product of the
revolutionary epoch and retained some of its epic fervor. He never was a profound ideologist or a deep
theoretician, and his faith in communism was perhaps naive and
simplistic. His idea of communism was akin to the traditional
peasant dream of having enough to live in comfort. For the first
time since the NEP of the 1920s, he pursued policies designed to
appeal to Soviet consumers. The rapid construction of prefabricated
buildings, for example, enabled millions of Soviet families to move
from hostels and communal flats into tiny but separate apartments.
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Soviet Russia |
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