The End of the Khrushchev Era

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 412.

Text 7

III. Work in pairs. Each student makes a list of 5 questions to the text and tests his/her partner on how he/she has learnt the information presented there. Correct your partner's mistakes if there are any.

I. Scan the text, single out the words and expressions new to you. Search the dictionary for examples and collocations these words are used in. Make up 5 sentences with the new vocabulary and let your group mates translate them.

Foreign Affairs and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Text 6

III. Find information about the following spheres of culture during Khrushchev: painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, dance, fashion, foreign art. Make a Power Point presentation of your findings.

Immediately after Stalin's death his successors moved to relax tensions with the West. Over the next three years that approach evolved into what Khrushchev called “peaceful coexistence,” a doctrine that repudiated the assumption of the Lenin and Stalin eras that the struggle between capitalism and communism would be settled by war. It was a logical and an essential step in a world of nuclear weapons. But “peaceful coexistence” did not mean normal relations, or even coexistence as that term is normally understood. The struggle to spread communism would continue. It would be peaceful insofar as it directly involved the nuclear superpowers. But in the developing world of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the Soviets would continue to promote what Khrushchev called “wars of national liberation” to help overthrow pro-Western regimes and bring Communists to power.

The continued commitment to expanding Communist power led to periods of tension and several crises during Khrushchev's tenure in power. One source of continual tension was Berlin, the former German capital. Like Germany itself Berlin had been divided into four Allied occupation zones at the end of World War II. By 1949 the United States, Britain, and France had combined their zones into the German Federal Republic (West Germany) while the Soviets set up the Communist German Democratic Republic (East Germany). In 1955 West Germany became a member of the Western military alliance the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), while East Germany entered the Soviet dominated Warsaw Pact. Paralleling that arrangement, Berlin, which lay deep inside the Soviet zone and therefore after 1949 inside East Germany, was divided into East Berlin and West Berlin.

The tense and awkward arrangement led to several of the major crises of the Cold War. By 1961 the most urgent Berlin issue facing the Soviets and the East German regime was the huge flow of refugees to West Berlin, especially young people seeking a better life. Berlin was the escape route of choice because, unlike the fortified border between the two Germanys, there was no physical barrier between the two Berlins. By 1961 the exodus had reached thousands of people per week. It was at once a constant humiliation for both East Germany and the Soviet Union and a potentially crippling loss of skilled manpower for the East German regime. With Soviet approval the East Germans responded in August by building a barbed-wire fence through the center of the city that quickly was supplanted by a concrete structure that came to be known as the Berlin Wall. The Wall did its job, stopping the flight of East Germans to freedom. It also became a symbol of both the Cold War and the inability of Soviet-style communism to compete successfully with Western democratic capitalism in providing the things that most people, at least in Europe, seemed to value.

Following the relative success of the Berlin Wall, Khrushchev blundered into the disaster of the Cuban Missile Crisis. By 1962, along with a host of domestic concerns, the Soviet leader had to contend with serious foreign policy problems. Most urgent was the Soviet Union's military inferiority vis-à-vis the United States, especially in the area of ICBMs. The United States had several times more ICBMs than the Soviet Union, the American missiles were technologically more advanced, Washington was deploying new missiles at a faster rate than Moscow, and the newer Soviet missiles were plagued with technical problems. Under sharp criticism from hard-liners within the party leadership for slighting military needs in favor of civilian economic priorities, Khrushchev looked for a way to redress the military imbalance with the United States quickly and cheaply without waiting for a new generation of Soviet missiles to come on line.

At the same time Moscow was concerned about a newfound ally, Fidel Castro, the Communist dictator of Cuba who had come to power in a revolution in 1959. The United States had already mounted an unsuccessful invasion of Cuba in 1961 using Cuban exiles, and both Castro and Khrushchev expected the Americans to make another effort to bring down the Communist regime only 90 miles from Florida.

In the spring of 1962 Khrushchev came up with a plan to solve both foreign policy problems at once. He would secretly place Soviet medium range (1,200 miles) and intermediate-range (2,500 miles) nuclear missiles in Cuba. With that one stroke Khrushchev believed Moscow could partially redress its nuclear imbalance with Washington and protect Castro and his Communist regime from another U.S. invasion.

The result was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. In the short run it brought the world to the brink of nuclear war; in the long run it undermined Khrushchev at home and contributed to his fall from power two years later. The Soviet plan was reckless. Ignoring cautionary advice from a few of his more independent-minded advisers, Khrushchev disregarded both the strong possibility the missiles would be discovered before they were deployed – the United States had Cuba under constant surveillance – and the likelihood that President John F. Kennedy would react strongly to stop a deployment that violated Washington's most fundamental security imperatives. The plan also had a curious element of unreality. One proposal for hiding the missiles after they were installed called for them to be covered by palm fronds to make them look like palm trees. However dubious that idea, it rested on the equally unrealistic assumption that well before these weapons reached their launching pads the United States would fail to detect and be alerted by dozens of Soviet ships docking in Cuba laden with huge suspicious cargoes and then not notice 80-foot-long transport vehicles lumbering along narrow rural roads.

The Soviet plan unraveled in mid-October when U.S. intelligence planes discovered construction sites before any missiles could be made operational. President Kennedy then ordered a blockade around Cuba to prevent further Soviet military matériel from reaching the island and demanded that the missiles already there be withdrawn. For almost two weeks the superpowers faced each other at the nuclear brink until, as U.S. secretary of state Dean Rusk put it, the Soviets “blinked.” They had little choice in the face of overwhelming American military superiority, both strategically and in the skies above and seas around Cuba. The face-saving formula that resolved the crisis called for all Soviet missiles to be removed in return for a public American promise not to invade Cuba. The United States also secretly promised to remove its intermediate nuclear missiles from Turkey, which Kennedy had planned to do in any case since they were obsolete.

II. Read the text for detail and make a logical plan of it. Use your plan and the list of clichés and useful phrases (given above) to summarize the information presented in the text in 7–10 sentences.

I. Scan the text. Fill in the gaps with the phrases given below:

a) deposed and then succeeded him;

b) the artists in the Novodevichy cemeter;

c) removing the most unbearable parts of the Stalinist inheritance;

d) far better than most of Russia's leaders;

e) failure and success;

f) the negative and positive aspects of Khrushchev's career;

g) to create his tombstone;

h) to improve communications during any future crisis;

i) to be relieved from his duties because of ill health;

j) confusion and further eroded his base of support.

The resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis gave Castro the security he needed. In 1963 two important agreements provided both the United States and the Soviet Union with small measures of additional security: a direct “hot line” teletype between the White House and the Kremlin (1) ____, and a partial nuclear test-ban treaty (signed by Great Britain as well) that banned all atmospheric nuclear tests.

But Khrushchev himself was vulnerable. Dissatisfaction with his leadership within top Communist Party circles, already widespread, mounted. A second round of de-Stalinization that had followed the 22nd Party Congress included the wholesale renaming of places and things named after Stalin – most notably, the city of Stalingrad was now to be Volgograd – but little else. Khrushchev's efforts at further reforms, including a program to divide the Communist Party in half – one branch responsible for industry and the other for agriculture – produced nothing but (2) ____. By the fall of 1964 even some of his closest aides and former protégés were plotting against him. They prepared carefully, both in the Presidium and in the Central Committee, and in October 1964 Khrushchev was removed from power. A terse announcement informed the Soviet people of his “request” (3) ____. He was allowed a comfortable retirement, albeit in obscurity – all public mention of him stopped – and under constant surveillance by his successors.

The Khrushchev era was an amalgam of (4) ____. His reforms did not make the centralized Soviet economy an efficient competitor of the economies of the Western democracies. As a staunch Leninist Khrushchev made no effort to modify the one-party dictatorship that ruled over the Soviet Union. Yet he played a pivotal role in (5) ____. The secret police terror was ended, the Gulag was dissolved, the country's standard of living improved considerably, and the range of permissible cultural expression was broadened significantly. By 1964 life in the Soviet Union was both quantitatively and, more important, qualitatively better than it had been in 1953. Whatever his faults and failures, Nikita Khrushchev had served his country (6) ____, whatever their titles or claims to fame.

Khrushchev's career probably was best summed up by Neizvestny, who was informed nine years after the famous confrontation at the Manezh art exhibit that Khrushchev's will had designated him (7) ____. Neizvestny responded brilliantly with a bronze bust surrounded by two interlocking marble columns, one black and one white, respectively, symbolizing (8) ____.

This small episode in Soviet history contains another touch of irony. Because he was so disliked by those who (9) ____, Khrushchev was denied the honor of internment in the Kremlin wall with other deceased Communist Party dignitaries. The bust over his grave therefore stands several miles distant in the cemetery of the beautiful Novodevichy Monastery, coincidentally the final resting place of many of Russia's greatest writers, musicians, and painters, among them Gogol, Chekhov, Scriabin, and Serov. When one considers each group's respective contributions to Russian life, it seems fair to conclude that Khrushchev, on balance, more appropriately belongs among (10) ____than with the Communist functionaries whose ashes are stuffed in and alongside the Kremlin Wall.