re: #179 Chrysicat

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…

Krushchev also ordered the Hungarian revolt of 1956 crushed, threatened to ‘bury’ the west, approved of the building of the Berlin Wall, and increased support of communist insurgents in several nations.

He had his good points, but IMO the bad is still sufficient to damn him in my eyes.