Dear comrades,
As we all know there are two soviet eras pre and post death of Stalin. We all know Khrushchev basically did a coupe detat, by killing all Stalinists and also by starting the anti Stalin propaganda. We know he was the cause of the Soviet Sino split.
But what exactly caused the split? What policies did he push that were reformist or capitalist in nature ? How exactly did he fuck up? I know the results, but I lack in knowledge of the causes.
This is an excellent answer comrade! This topic is very important imo as it helps us to understand why things in the SU went so wrong later on. The capitalist restorationists around Gorbachev did not suddenly appear out of nowhere in the 80s, the groundwork for the economic mistakes and the degeneration of the CPSU had been laid decades prior. This whole subject really should have its own section on Prolewiki that newcomers who have these same questions can be referred to.
To all of this I’ll add that many of the reforms implemented under Khrushchev (or at least the general idea behind them) weren’t necessarily out of place - things like some amount of social liberalization or increasing availability of consumption goods (the light industry), given what the USSR and its people have been through. As is always the case, the appeal for these things didn’t appear out of nowhere - there were material reasons. And, of course, if implemented prudently, they could have produced positive results for the USSR. It’s just that the way they were conducted was overall a failure. Khrushchev’s shallow understanding of Marxist theory, his tendency of favoring short-term easy solutions aimed at quick returns (opportunism, essentially), as well as monumental loss of experienced ML cadres certainly played a part too.