ABSTRACT
When in March 1953 the heirs of Josef Stalin took up the reins of government of a huge country and assumed the dominant position in the even greater "socialist camp" in which a third of the human race was living, they were faced with a number of political priorities. Priority was given first and foremost to the struggle for power, or for the individual's own place in the upper echelons of power. All the Soviet leaders had inherited and personally shared, with more or less sincerity, the basic ideological and political views of Stalin. Khrushchev, a self-made man and something of a rough diamond, became a prominent political leader with a wealth of practical experience outside the Kremlin, although he was a tragic rather than a comic figure. Political practice, which was becoming more flexible than it had been previously, demanded that remaining Messianic slogans - without which it could not exist - should be changed and inveterate formulations abandoned.
