re: #151 Targetpractice

It’s funny that this post is in the same thread as one about Khrushchev, considering one event the latter is famous for is the tradition of every new General Secretary coming into office and denouncing the more unpopular moves of his predecessor so as to set himself up as “different.”

Everything I read about him suggests that he was the only Gen Sec until Gorby who actually did it out of a sense of moral requirement, though. The USSR was freeer under Krushchev than his successors, and I think everyone has to agree that deStalinization was both a good thing and not particularly likely to have come from any of the other leaders surrounding Stalin. In particular, if Beria had succeeded, Stalinism would have looked good in hindsight…

So yeah, blame his successors for undoing the good he did, but Krushchev himself was probably the closest thing to a Third Way-ist that you would ever have seen in the mid-20th century…

…And something tells me I just earned my first cumulative downdings in a year…