Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894–1971), First Secretary of the CPSU (1953–1964), is Infrared's exhibit A of revisionism in power — the man who turned the party's ideological authority against its own history.
Record
- The Secret Speech (1956) — see Kruschev, Secret Speech — shattered world communist unity; Hungary 1956; the Sino-Soviet split deepened by his "peaceful coexistence" and "state of the whole people" doctrines, which Mao identified as the theoretical liquidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
- Adventurism and capitulation combined: the Cuban Missile deployment and its humiliating withdrawal; the Virgin Lands campaign's soil-mining agriculture; corn crusades; the Berlin Wall.
- Material incentives doctrine (Liberman reforms' precursor), hostility to Stalin's legacy paired with preservation of the nomenklatura's privileges.
- Ousted by his own Presidium (1964) — the coup mechanism he had used on others.
Infrared assessment
Haz treats Khrushchevism as the template of all later degeneration: subjective, anti-theoretical rule dressed as anti-dogmatism; the cult-of-personality critique deployed selectively while constructing a new cult. The Chinese polemics ("On Khrushchev's Phoney Communism") are cited approvingly: once the class analysis was dropped, restoration became only a matter of time (see Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, Socialism With a Human Face).