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Contemporary historians regard the beginning of de-Stalinization as a turning point in the history of the Soviet Union that began during the Khrushchev Thaw. The de-Stalinization process stalled during the Brezhnev period until the mid-1980s, and accelerated again with the policies of perestroika and glasnost under Mikhail Gorbachev. De ...
Many victims were exonerated posthumously during de-Stalinization in the 1950s–1960s. In December 1953 a special secret session of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union , itself without due process , found Beria guilty of terrorism for the extrajudicial executions of October 1941 and other crimes, and was given the death penalty as his sentence.
The Khrushchev Thaw (Russian: хрущёвская о́ттепель, romanized: khrushchovskaya ottepel, IPA: [xrʊˈɕːɵfskəjə ˈotʲːɪpʲɪlʲ] or simply ottepel) [1] is the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were relaxed due to Nikita Khrushchev's policies of de-Stalinization [2] and peaceful coexistence with other nations.
Purges of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union (Russian: "Чистка партийных рядов", chistka partiynykh ryadov, "cleansing of the party ranks") were Soviet political events, especially during the 1920s, [1] in which periodic reviews of members of the Communist Party were conducted by other members and the security organs to get rid of "undesirables". [2]
This did not last, however, and Nikita Khrushchev eventually won the ensuing power struggle by the mid-1950s. In 1956, he denounced Joseph Stalin and proceeded to ease controls over the party and society. This was known as de-Stalinization.
The administration then began planning to intervene in this situation. The CIA initially proposed sabotaging the sugar refineries in Cuba, but President Eisenhower felt the threat was Castro and that he was the issue the United States needed to resolve. The CIA then began planning for an overthrow or possible assassination of Castro in December ...
The Soviets bore the brunt of World War II because the West did not open up a second ground front in Europe until the invasion of Italy and the Battle of Normandy. Approximately 26.6 million Soviets, among them 18 million civilians, were killed in the war. Civilians were rounded up and burned or shot in many cities conquered by the Nazis.
In 1961, the city was renamed Volgograd by Nikita Khrushchev during his de-Stalinization campaign. In 1937, the battles for Tsaritsyn acted as the background for Alekey Tolstoy 's novel Bread . In 1942, the Vasilyev brothers dramatized the events in a two-part film The Defense of Tsaritsyn .