Editing Nikita Khrushchev (section)

==Legacy==
[[File:DestroyKhrusch.JPG|thumb|alt=The remains of a low rise building are seen between two high rises|A ''[[khrushchyovka]]'' is destroyed, Moscow, January 2008]]

Many of Khrushchev's innovations were reversed after his fall. The requirement that one-third of officials be replaced at each election was overturned, as was the division in the Party structure between industrial and agricultural sectors. His vocational education program for high school students was dropped, and his plan for sending existing agricultural institutions out to the land was ended. However, new agricultural or vocational institutions thereafter were located outside major cities. When new housing was built, much of it was in the form of high rises rather than [[Khrushchevka|Khrushchev's low-rise structures]].{{sfn|Medvedev|Medvedev|1978|pp=180–182}}

Historian [[Robert Service (historian)|Robert Service]] summarizes Khrushchev's contradictory personality traits:

<blockquote>[he was] at once a Stalinist and an anti-Stalinist, a communist believer and a cynic, a self-publicizing poltroon and a crusty philanthropist, a trouble-maker and a peacemaker, a stimulating colleague and a domineering boor, a statesman and a politicker who was out of his intellectual depth.<ref>Service, Robert (1997) ''A History of Twentieth-Century Russia''. Harvard UP. p. 375. {{ISBN|9780713991482}}.</ref></blockquote>

Some of Khrushchev's agricultural projects were easily overturned. Corn became so unpopular in 1965 that its planting fell to the lowest level in the postwar period.{{sfn|Medvedev|Medvedev|1978|p=128}} [[Trofim Lysenko|Lysenko]] was stripped of his policy-making positions. However, the MTS stations remained closed, and the basic agricultural problems, which Khrushchev had tried to address, remained.{{sfn|Medvedev|Medvedev|1978|pp=180–182}} While the Soviet standard of living increased greatly in the ten years after Khrushchev's fall, much of the increase was due to industrial progress; agriculture continued to lag far behind, resulting in regular agricultural crises, especially in 1972 and 1975.{{sfn|Medvedev|Medvedev|1978|p=185}} Brezhnev and his successors continued Khrushchev's precedent of buying grain from the West rather than suffer shortfalls and starvation.{{sfn|Medvedev|Medvedev|1978|pp=180–182}} Neither Brezhnev nor his colleagues were personally popular, and the new government relied on authoritarian power. The government's conservative tendencies would lead to the crushing of the "[[Prague Spring]]" of 1968.{{sfn|Medvedev|Medvedev|1978|p=184}}

[[File:The transfer of Crimea.jpg|thumb|upright=0.75|Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet "On the transfer of the [[Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic|Crimean Oblast]]". In 1954, the Soviet leadership, which included Khrushchev, transferred Crimea from [[Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic|Russian SFSR]] to [[Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic|Ukrainian SSR]].]]

Though Khrushchev's strategy failed to achieve the major goals he sought, Aleksandr Fursenko, who wrote a book analyzing Khrushchev's foreign and military policies, argued that the strategy did coerce the West in a limited manner. The agreement that the US would not invade Cuba has been adhered to. The refusal of the western world to acknowledge East Germany was gradually eroded, and, in 1975, the US and other NATO members signed the [[Helsinki Agreement]] with the USSR and Warsaw Pact nations.{{sfn|Fursenko|2006|p=544}}

The Russian public's view of Khrushchev remains mixed.{{sfn|Taubman|2003|p=650}} According to a major Russian pollster, the only eras of the 20th century that Russians in the 21st century evaluate positively are those under [[Nicholas II of Russia|Nicholas II]] and under Khrushchev.{{sfn|Taubman|2003|p=650}} A poll in 1998 of young Russians found that they felt Nicholas II had done more good than harm, and all other 20th-century Russian leaders more harm than good—except Khrushchev, about whom they were evenly divided.{{sfn|Taubman|2003|p=650}} Khrushchev biographer William Tompson related the former premier's reforms to those which occurred later:

<blockquote>
Throughout the Brezhnev years and the lengthy interregnum that followed, the generation which had come of age during the "first Russian spring" of the 1950s awaited its turn in power. As Brezhnev and his colleagues died or were pensioned off, they were replaced by men and women for whom the Secret Speech and the first wave of de-Stalinization had been a formative experience, and these "Children of Twentieth Congress" took up the reins of power under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev and his colleagues. The Khrushchev era provided this second generation of reformers with both an inspiration and a cautionary tale.{{sfn|Tompson|1995|pp=283–284}}
</blockquote>