"Even so, the new leadership, among whom Nikita Khrushchev slowly emerged as the head, went ahead with gradually setting free many of those imprisoned in the GULag. While labor camps would continue to exist right up to the end of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev removed them as a key part of the country’s economy, which under Stalin had been completely dependent on prison labor. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners—political protesters, petty thieves, foreign soldiers, those who belonged to the “wrong” nationality, and those many who had no idea why they had been arrested—started to emerge from the camps, and struggled to get home or find a new place in society. These are the people the Russian Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn immortalized in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the process Ilya Ehrenburg called “The Thaw.” But Khrushchev himself later admitted that the new leaders “were scared—really scared. We were afraid that the thaw might unleash a flood, which we wouldn’t be able to control and which would drown us.”"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Politicians from RussiaGeneral Secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet UnionPoliticians from UkraineSoviet premiersAtheists from Russia
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A Global History (2017)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Nikita Khrushchev
52 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Nikita Khrushchev →
Related Quotes
"Yes, today we have genuine Russian weather. Yesterday we had Swedish weather. I can't understand why your weather is …"
"Finding a reason for an armed conflict now would be very easy, but finding a way to put an end to such a conflict wou…"
"Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will dig you in. (.)"
"When it is a question of fighting against imperialism we can state with conviction that we are all Stalinists. We can…"
"I am very glad to hear this, since I come from the Ukraine. From now on I can sleep peacefully. I will immediately te…"
"If Adenauer were here with us in the sauna, we could see for ourselves that Germany is and will remain divided but al…"
"A man emaciated by a grave illness is at first treated by doctors gradually. Food is administered to him in small dos…"
"The thought sometimes -- the unpleasant thought sometimes creeps up on me here as to whether perhaps Khrushchev was n…"
"I happened to read recently a remark by the American nuclear physicist W. Davidson, who noted that the explosion of o…"
"They say that the Soviet delegates smile. That smile is genuine. It is not artificial. We wish to live in peace, tran…"