Concept
De-Stalinization
Overview
De-Stalinization (Russian: десталинизация, romanized: destalinizatsiya) comprised a series of political reforms in the Soviet Union after the death of long-time leader Joseph Stalin in 1953, and the thaw brought about by the ascension of Nikita Khrushchev to power, and his 1956 speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", which denounced Stalin's cult of personality and the Stalinist political system.
Monuments to Stalin were removed, his name was removed from places, buildings, and the state anthem, and his body was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum (known as the Lenin and Stalin Mausoleum from 1953 to 1961) and buried. These reforms were started by the collective leadership which succeeded him after his death on 5 March 1953, comprising Georgi Malenkov, Premier of the Soviet Union; Lavrentiy Beria, head of the Ministry of the Interior; and Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Absolutism, parliamentary monarchy, democracy--in the presence of imperialism (and, consequently, in the presence of the revolution rising to take its place), all the state forms of bourgeois supremacy, from Russian Tsarism to North American quasi-democratic federalism, have been given equal rights, bound up in such combinations as to supplement one another in an indivisible whole. Imperialism succeeded by means of…
Leon Trotsky, Dictatorship vs. Democracy
Close in meaning to De-Stalinization; the term itself is not named.
Liberal exhortations were not enough to make them give up the machinery of the state and their land possessions. A revolutionary onslaught of the masses was required. This the bourgeoisie did not want. The agrarian revolts of the peasants, the ever growing struggle of the proletariat and the spread of insurrections in the army caused the liberal bourgeoisie to fall back into the camp of the Tzarist bureaucracy and…
Leon Trotsky, Our Revolution
Close in meaning to De-Stalinization; the term itself is not named.
Since, however, the ideal of culture as complete development of personality persisted, educational philosophy attempted a reconciliation of the two ideas. The reconciliation took the form of the conception of the "organic" character of the state.
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
Close in meaning to De-Stalinization; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
- East Germany
- Cult of personality
- Joseph Stalin
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- Moscow
- Columbia University Press
- Mao Zedong
- Marxism–Leninism
- Western world
- North Korea
- Russia
- Soviet Union
- Stalinism
- The New York Times
- Cold War
- Warsaw
- World War II
- Budapest
- China
- Communist Party of the Soviet Union
- Routledge
- Communism
- Encyclopædia Britannica
- Eastern Bloc
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Communism.