A lot of leftists really seem to hate Khrushchev, it's like everyone points at him and says "and this is where it all went down hill". If you're a Khrushchev-stan in the comments show yourself because more than likely there isn't one. Lenin's the goat, Stalin's a problematic fav, but Khrushchev leaves the bland taste of cardboard in my mouth. The thing is, IDK who would really have been better? Zhukov might have been a good general but I can't say he would have been a good governor, like I said IDK. Please enlighten me oh wise hexbear with your years of theory under your girthy communism enjoyer belts.
I don't think Beria at the top would have been good news, but any reasonably competent actual Marxist would have been better imo, including Molotov as another said (and I think for a period while Stalin was the leader Molotov held the highest office anyway, since the government wasn't actually as centralized on one consistent single office like the US).
Also as another said, K shouldn't have been an option because he should have been purged for being a fucking conspiracist along with anti-Marxist.
Legitimately things might have been easier if Trotsky was immediately killed or put in solitary rather than exiled, since he was towards the center of an absurd network of conspiracy that ended up enabling Khrushchev on various levels, even two decades after Trotsky finally was killed. It was Trotsky's collaborators among the Old Bolsheviks that precipitated the Great Purge and one of the heads of the KGB during the peak of the Purge was confirmed to be a conspiracist by a member of the conspiracy who was in the west and admitted it freely! It was the one before Yezhov, I forget his name.
I come back to read about this topic now and then and my brain fries more and more each time.