De-Stalinization

Penner had worked tirelessly for over five years to get to this point, and now Nikita Khrushchev could be the one to reunite Penner's family.

Despite rising to power under the ruthless regime of Joseph Stalin, who had purposefully starved millions of citizens and sentenced hundreds of thousands of them to work camps, Khrushchev subsequently adopted a policy of de-Stalinization.

He rose to a position of influence as the Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1964 and, while still serving as Secretary, also became Premier from 1958 to 1964.

Khrushchev was the son of a coal miner, a stark difference from the other party leaders' middle-class backgrounds.

Stalin's dead, right? 1953, he's dead.

Body, '56, dragged out of the mausoleum with de-Stalinization.

Khrushchev is the man in charge.

Who is Khrushchev? Some little clown from the point of view of Mao.

One final argument to the people who now think that Joseph Stalin was a great guy.

What about the policy known as de-Stalinization? After Stalin died, there was a scramble to see who would be ruling the USSR.

A man named Nikita Khrushchev came out on top.

On February 25, 1956, Khrushchev gave a speech to the 20th Party Congress.

and for the famines and for ordering mass terror.

Khrushchev even blamed Stalin for mistakes that led to the appalling loss of life in World War II and the German occupation and devastation of large sections of the USSR.

Under this policy of de-Stalinization, millions of prisoners were released and the gulag system was eventually eliminated.

Don't get the wrong idea here.

common form to answer kind of the second half of that question was the international communist organization led by the Soviet Union to organize communist parties across Europe.

But as Chinese communism became stronger and made that less relevant, it was just kind of dissolved as part of the de-Stalinization that happened after Stalin's death.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, everything that we, that we have, we possess, any kind of tradition, any kind of family, they've, they're se- this regime seeks to deracinate us, uh, from, and just basically strip us down into nothing.

Well, we don't have anything comparable to gulags or, um, or even the de-Stalinization process, um, within living memory.

And, uh, the further we get from these references that, you know, our grandparents, you know, uh, your grandparents, your, you know, uh [laughs]

Yeah.

And we saw the exact same violently corrective swing in the Soviet Union.

After Stalin died, Nikita Khrushchev initiated the de-Stalinization campaign in 1956.

It was a monumental undertaking.

They systematically dismantled thousands of Stalin statues across the entire Eastern Bloc.

And that leaves me with a lingering thought, a question that isn't directly answered in our AGI sources today but builds on everything we've discussed about the illusion of permanence.

What's the question?

If history shows us unequivocally that authoritarian regimes eventually fall and that their vanity monuments are inevitably and violently scrubbed from the map in massive waves of de-Stalinization and denazification-

Yeah