The Stalinist past still shapes Soviet society today, even if no longer defining it. Nowhere is this more evident than in the crises of procurement with which Soviet agriculture recurrently beset the Soviet economy. From the October Revolution to détente, the peasantry have been a destiny for the Soviet State. This, however, need not have been the case: that “destiny” was a man-made one. If the “thaw” of 1956 was short-lived, this is not surprising considering that it had been ushered in by one of Stalin's closest political associates, the sturdy survivor, Nikita Krushchev. Krushchev's exposé was thus not a critique of the surreal social system whose chief architect Stalin had been, but of Stalin the man, his “sickly suspicions,” and his “crimes against socialist legality.”