Khrushchev Thaw
[1] Several major leaders among the Red Army commanders, such as Marshal Georgy Zhukov and his loyal officers, had some serious tensions with Stalin's secret service.
[1] Stalin's leadership had reached new extremes in ruling people at all levels,[12] such as the deportations of nationalities, the Leningrad Affair, the Doctors' plot, and official criticisms of writers and other intellectuals.
At the same time, millions of soldiers and officers had seen Europe after World War II and had become aware of different ways of life which existed outside the Soviet Union.
Upon Stalin's orders many were arrested and punished again,[12] including the attacks on the popular Marshal Georgy Zhukov and other top generals, who had exceeded the limits on taking trophies when they looted the defeated nation of Germany.
[1][14] The temporary union between Nikita Khrushchev and Marshal Georgy Zhukov was founded on their similar backgrounds, interests and weaknesses:[1] both were peasants, both were ambitious, both were abused by Stalin, both feared the Stalinists, and both wanted to change these things.
[14][15] In 1953, Zhukov helped Khrushchev to eliminate Lavrenty Beria,[1] then a First Vice-Premier, who was promptly executed in Moscow, as well as several other figures of Stalin's circle.
[1] Then Khrushchev promoted Brezhnev to Presidium (Politburo) and made him the Head of Political Directorate of the Red Army and Navy and moved him up to several other powerful positions.
Brezhnev in return helped Khrushchev by tipping the balance of power during several critical confrontations with the conservative hard-liners, including the ouster of pro-Stalinists headed by Molotov and Malenkov.
[17] After the delivery of the speech, it was officially disseminated in a shorter form among members of the Soviet Communist Party across the USSR starting 5 March 1956.
[1] Khrushchev's 1956 speech was the strongest effort ever in the USSR to bring political change,[1] at that time, after several decades of fear of Stalin's rule, that took countless innocent lives.
The street fighting against the invading Red Army caused thousands of casualties among Hungarian civilians and militia, as well as hundreds of the Soviet military personnel killed.
[24] At the extraordinary session of the Central Committee held in late June 1957, Khrushchev labeled his opponents the Anti-Party Group[17] and won a vote which reaffirmed his position as First Secretary.
In a politically motivated move to weaken the central state bureaucracy in 1957, Khrushchev replaced the industrial ministries in Moscow with regional Councils of People's Economy, sovnarkhozes, making himself many new enemies among the ranks in Soviet government.
In 1961, Khrushchev finalized his battle against Stalin: the body of the dictator was removed from Lenin's Mausoleum on the Red Square and then buried outside the walls of the Kremlin.
Some classical musicians, filmmakers and ballet stars were allowed to make appearances outside the Soviet Union in order to better represent its culture and society to the world.
The event was made pompous in the Soviet style: Moscow hosted large sports teams and groups of fans in national costumes who came from all Union republics.
Some previously banned writers and composers, such as Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko, among others, were brought back to public life, as the official Soviet censorship policies had changed.
[1] Actions against religion that had temporarily halted during the war effort and the years after toward the end of Stalin's rule intensified under Khrushchev, a new campaign launched in 1959.
[34] During the late 1950s and early 1960s, young composers such as Andrei Volkonsky and Edison Denisov, among others, developed abstract musical practices that created sounds that were new to the common listener's ear.
While a number of participants in unofficial concerts "claimed them to be a liberating activity, connoting resistance, opposition, or protest of some sort",[34] some critics claim that rather than taking an active role in opposing Soviet power, composers of unofficial music simply "withdrew" from the demands of the socialist realist music and chose to ignore the norms of the system.
Literary thaws actually preceded the congress in Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and the GDR and later burgeoned briefly in Czechoslovakia and Chairman Mao's China.
The Soviet presentation of downed pilot Francis Gary Powers at the May 1960 Paris Peace Summit and Eisenhower's refusal to apologize ended much of the progress of this era.
Many Russian women became involved in love affairs with men visiting from all over the world, what resulted in the so-called "inter-baby boom" in Moscow and Leningrad.
Khrushchev finally liberated millions of peasants; by his order the Soviet government gave them identifications, passports, and thus allowed them to move out of poor villages to big cities.
Economic reforms were contemplated by Alexei Kosygin, who was chairman of the USSR State Planning Committee in 1959 and then a full member of the Presidium (also known as Politburo after 1966) in 1960.
American sociologist David Riesman coined the term "Operation Abundance" also known as the "Nylon War" which predicted "Russian people would not long tolerate masters who gave them tanks and spies instead of vacuum cleaners and beauty parlors.
Khrushchev stated: "We are producing an ever-growing quantity of all kinds of consumer goods; all the same, we must not force the pace unreasonably as regards the lowering of prices.
Despite the increasing demands of housework, women were expected to maintain jobs outside the home in order to sustain the national economy as well as fulfill the ideals of a Soviet well-rounded individual.
[58] Additionally, furniture was designed to suit the average height of Moscow women, emphasizing a modern, simple style that allowed for efficient mass production.
[17] Many historians compare Khrushchev's Thaw and his massive efforts to change the Soviet society and move away from its past, with Gorbachev's perestroika[17] and glasnost during the 1980s.
