Summary Of Khrushchev's Rise To Power

Sometimes, people attribute the collapse of the Soviet Union to Khrushchev’s destalinization after Stalin’s death in 1953. Many also regard the USSR victory in the Great Patriotic War as the most brilliant success of the Soviet system. However, Juliane Furst demonstrates that the Soviet actually achieved a Pyrrhic victory, and the turning point of the history of the Soviet Union is years earlier than Khrushchev’s rise to power. She finds that the youths in the late Stalin era are the main force to undermine the foundation of the USSR. The young generation, who had hardly experienced the Great War but been influenced by the Western culture, became disenchanted by the state ideology and propaganda. The state, especially the Komsomol whose leadership had been decimated by the war, found it increasingly difficult to direct the youths’ behavior and thinking, which was exacerbated by the influence of Western culture after WWII. Although the Soviet youths did not blatantly rebel against the state, they adopted various strategies to negotiate with the official norms to create a new identity as non-conformists to the state ideology. The silent struggle between the state’s futile project to regulate the youths and the latter’s …show more content…
Like what Krylova argues, the war opened new roles to women, and they became more confident that they were equally qualified for men’s job though the postwar state policy forced them to domestic roles (270-272). However, the postwar young women were freer in pursuing fashion and sex (274). For the young men who had not fought in the front, they also suffered from a crisis of gender identity, both due to the threat of the empowered women and the discrepancy between the official images of veterans and their actual miserable postwar lives (275-277). The sexual mores of men also underwent significant shifts due to the gender inequality caused by the war