ABSTRACT
N.S.Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) from 1953 to 1964, attempted to reform the Communist system to make life easier for Soviet citizens. In Stalin’s last years a form of Russian messianism had become integrated into official thinking. Khrushchev did not renounce the idea of the Russian people as the elder brother of the other peoples of the USSR, but he did end the extreme Russian chauvinism which characterized the final period of the rule of his predecessor. While Russian national consciousness under Stalin was tightly controlled, Khrushchev’s deStalinization process, heralded by his “secret speech” denouncing the dictator at the XX Party Congress in 1956, allowed the appearance of some autonomous manifestations. The ending of Stalin’s terror produced the “Thaw” in Russian culture, and in the non-Russian republics gave confidence to the local ethnic political and cultural elites.
