ABSTRACT
By 1964, virtually every major elite constituency had significant grievances against Nikita Khrushchev. Senior party and state bureaucrats were fed up with his endless and often ill-considered administrative reorganisations, his public bullying of subordinates and his frequent changes of course with respect to policy. In 1960, Leonid Brezhnev was 'kicked upstairs' from the Secretariat to the largely ceremonial post of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet — formally the country's head of state. In 1953, television sets had been virtually unknown in the Soviet Union; by 1965, around one-quarter of Soviet households owned them. A Soviet-American hotline was installed to facilitate direct contact between the two leaders in a crisis, a partial nuclear test ban was agreed, and Khrushchev's relationship with the US President, John Kennedy, developed. The Chinese challenge to Soviet leadership both within the Socialist Commonwealth and in the developing world was by 1964 regarded as an extremely serious threat.
