Khrushchev Hailed as Godfather of Soviet Reform
The late Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, written out of official history for two decades, was hailed at a Moscow meeting Sunday night as the man who sowed the seeds for Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s program of reform, known as perestroika .
About 2,000 people marking Khrushchev’s 95th birthday in a hall near the Kremlin heard survivors of Josef Stalin’s labor camps as well as Soviet intellectuals persecuted under former leader Leonid I. Brezhnev say current reforms would have been impossible without him.
But speakers at the meeting said Khrushchev’s reform bid faltered because of opposition from conservatives and because he himself was tainted by Stalinism.
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