This is CBS, I On the World. I'm John Batchel, visiting with Professor Sean McMeakin.

His new book is to overthrow the world, the rise and fall and rise of communism.

It is 1956 in Moscow and Nikita Khrushchev, who has emerged as the first among equals of the Pollock Borough.

Stalin is dead in March of 53.

There's trouble with Baria, the secret police chief,

and eventually the trouble is that he's complaining too much and he's murdered, executed, I believe, is a polite way to put it, as a traitor.

And Khrushchev becomes the center of interest outside and making a statement inside.

And he makes something called a secret speech, which has, at this point, you'd have to say, was secret from no one.

Because everybody immediately knew about it, and it rocked the Warsaw Pact,

in Eastern Europe that were all under the boot of the Soviets and had been since

1944-45 when they were overrun at the end of the war.

So what we're looking at here is a temptation to break away from the absolute obedience to Moscow.

It leads to disruption in Poland, in Germany, in Hungary eventually, all very badly damaged

by their contradictions, yearning to be free, and then the Soviet armor shows up.

But I want to go from what happens in the 1950s. I want to race ahead to

first Berlin and then the confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, the Soviets, over Cuba,

because that was a temptation for the first time ever of a nuclear exchange. Washington

believed it was coming. Moscow believed it was coming. Sean, here's the puzzle about the Soviet

Union. I can't find Marx anywhere here. This looks like straight power politics between imperial

powers. Is that how to read it?

Well, if you're talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis, I think you could definitely see an element of just raw, traditional great power politics.

But the impetus behind it, that is to say, why, despite supposedly unearthing the crimes under Stalin and the secret speech and thawing out at least

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