Colorful personality
Our country's history has had enough extraordinary leaders. However, Nikita Sergeevich surpassed (at least in recent history) everyone. Nobody allowed so many nonsense and outright rudeness.
Some (in the West) considered him a scumbag (not without reason), others (official media) as a charismatic proletarian leader, and still others (the opinion of most of the Union) - a clown. Probably in many respects, such assessments were the result of his indefatigable "efforts". Judge for yourself.
Limitless
Khrushchev tried to maintain the reputation of the Soviet Union as a powerful world power, not retreating before anything and not afraid of anything. In its own way, really. It turned out so-so.
A very vivid illustration of Khrushchev's character is the episode of his meeting with an American senator. Nikita Sergeevich liked the American, and he asked, "Where are you from?" - From Minneapolis. The first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union approached the map of the world, drew a pencil around Minneapolis and joked: "This is so that I don't forget that this city must survive when our missiles fly."
In the late 1950s, Khrushchev stunned the American ambassador by analyzing the actions of German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer with a metaphor: “We will never accept Adenauer as a representative of Germany. If you take off his pants and look at his ass, you can see that Germany is divided. And if you look at it from the front, you can be sure that Germany will never rise."
Promotional video:
The wreckage of the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft.
After the spy plane U-2 of the American pilot Powers was shot down near Sverdlovsk on May 1, 1960, Nikita Sergeevich threatened the United States to show Kuzkin's mother. Bewildered Americans were told that "showing Kuzkin's mother" is a phraseological unit that means a strong threat. The further fate of "Kuz'ka's mother" is well known - it was clearly expressed in the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb at the Semipalatinsk test site.
On October 12, 1960, the New York Times published on the front page a photograph of Soviet leader Nikita Sergeevich at the UN session with a boot in his hands and gave the comment: "Russia is threatening the world again, this time with the boot of its leader."
Needless to say that the reaction to these and other similar antics of the First Person of the USSR made the whole world freeze in horror and fall into a stupor ?! The image of "a monkey with a grenade", which Khrushchev professed in the international arena, still accompanies (abroad) all our leaders.
The same * Kuz'kina mother *.
Stalin's "guard"
After Stalin's death, the need to weaken the atmosphere of fear of imminent repressions ripened in the political elite and Nikita Sergeevich became the mouthpiece of this part of the CPSU.
February 25, 1956 - on the last day of the XXth Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev read a report "On the cult of the individual and its consequences", in which he left no stone unturned on the reputation of Joseph Stalin.
It was the "BOMB", the blast waves from which shake our society to this day. And although Khrushchev, according to some historians, himself “stained his hands in blood up to the elbows” of those very repressions, this speech opened a new page in the life of Soviet citizens.
The next loud challenge to the personality cult was the removal of Stalin's body from Lenin's mausoleum. The people and the party were silent. And most importantly, Khrushchev rehabilitated most of the victims of Stalin's repression. This allowed not only many political prisoners to return from the camps, but also to return their families a good name.
Novocherkassk uprising, still from the film, collage.
Dictatorial habits
In March 1956, demonstrations in support of Stalin were brutally dispersed in Georgia (at least 22 killed). Already in the fall of the same year, the USSR army brutally suppressed the uprising in Hungary (about 3,000 killed Hungarians and 700 killed Soviet citizens).
In the spring of 1957, Nikita Sergeevich, in fact, declared an internal default, deciding to terminate payments on all issues of "Stalinist" bonds, which at one time were "obligatory" and a Soviet citizen sometimes took up to three monthly salaries to subscribe to them annually. He simply "threw" his compatriots.
A terrible tragedy occurred in the spring of 1962 in Novocherkassk, when a demonstration of workers (against the increase in food prices) was suppressed with machine-gun bursts (at least 26 dead).
The queen of the fields is corn.
I waved without looking …
One gets the impression that Khrushchev often made decisions on a whim - that the first thing comes to mind.
1) Everyone knows his corn epic. Khrushchev met a certain farmer Garst, who convinced him that the whole country can be fed with corn alone. They immediately decided to make the "Queen of the Fields" the main grain crop of the USSR. But something went wrong. In the Union, as always, it snowed suddenly …
It turned out that thermophilic corn does not survive in our climate. But she occupied a quarter of the arable fields. This led to a real disaster. While some choked on boring bread, butter, sugar and God knows what else from corn, others were corny undernourished. The campaign was deemed a failure and was quickly abandoned.
The first manned flight into space also took place during his period, Gagarin Yu. A.
2) During the period of rapid urbanization of the Union, he made a strong-willed decision to build faceless block five-story buildings. Small rooms now seem to us squalor, but at that time it allowed to settle millions of people. Most of these houses still stand in the countries of the former USSR. By the way, the West followed the path of low-rise construction.
3) Obeying only one well-known logic, in 1954 he took and handed over the primordially Russian Crimea to Ukraine - the Bolshevik "Republic-Frankenstein". Without any grounds for this, except for the traditionally raking policy of the Ukrainian "leaders". Having created a stable cause for mortal grievance among the fraternal peoples.
4) In the same 1954, continuing to deny the entire Stalinist legacy by inertia, Khrushchev surrendered to the Chinese the jointly used Potr-Arthur.
Russia lost Port Arthur (or rather, the entire Kwantung Peninsula received on a long-term lease, on which, in addition to the fortress, it also built the port city of Dalniy) as a result of the war with Japan in 1904-1905, along with South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.
Soviet sailors in the liberated Port Arthur, 1945.
In 1945, following the results of the Second World War, the USSR returned what was lost: the Kuriles, Sakhalin, and Port Arthur (more precisely, the entire Kwantung Peninsula). After the establishment of communist rule in China, Stalin made a broad "territorial gesture" to Mao Zedong: in 1950, the Kwantung Peninsula was transferred to the PRC free of charge (Port Arthur, however, was not included in the "gift package").
Against this friendly background, Soviet-Chinese relations developed more than actively, four large joint industrial corporations were created, and there were other far-reaching plans. Khrushchev canceled everything, Port Arthur gave it away, withdrew the troops, transferred the property to the Chinese (as usual) free of charge.
The first freak politician.
The Chinese comrades, led by Mao, quietly went wild from such turns and were angry, not forgetting to joke about Moscow. As a result, in the summer of 1958, at a personal meeting between Mao and Khrushchev in Beijing, the leaders quarreled to the core. By his stupidity, NS made an unheard-of generous gift to the West: the alliance of China and the USSR was the most serious threat to the imperialists.
5) In October 1962, Khrushchev (by sending Soviet missiles to Cuba) almost plunged the world into the hell of a nuclear war with his harsh US response to the deployment of missiles in Turkey. The Cuban Missile Crisis is still considered the most troubling period in history. During the 12 days of October, literally anything could have happened, including a large-scale war between the ATS and NATO.
Epilogue
Talking about the period of Khrushchev's rule, I did not set myself the goal of somehow defaming him personally. I just tried to draw the readers' attention to the harm to the interests of the country, which can bring an authoritarian style of government. And let everyone give their own assessment.