ABSTRACT
The Khrushchev era was a time of enormous changes, some contained in the reforms of the post-Stalinist leadership, others spontaneously welling up ‘from below’ after the end of Stalinism. The negotiations of the Stalinist legacies bequeathed to Stalin’s successors after his death in 1953, until the end of the Khrushchev era, are the subject of this volume. The dilemmas of de-Stalinization encompassed all realms of Soviet life, from party politics to the economy, from art and literature to the writing of history, from criminal justice to the maintenance of social order. In each of these realms, the sudden absence of Stalin, whose charismatic authority had substituted for real political legitimacy, forced his successors to sift the legacy of Stalinism to determine how much of it should be preserved, and how much discarded.1
