Nikita Khrushchev on socialism

This was sent to me, the subject being 'tag on someone's post in a food forum.' Any idea if it's true? It could be, as this is what we are currently seeing in Amerika.

"You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you’ll fall like overripe fruit into our hands." -- Nikita Khrushchev

[Astra]

A quick search shows it has an entry in the book They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions. Aside from that, it seems to have picked up a great deal of popularity in the past two years. There aren't many results aside from it being reposted in political forums and discussion groups, and none that appear to be academic references for it. I wouldn't put much stock in it being an accurate quote.

As far as saying it could be true based on "what we are currently seeing," I don't see much of a connection between words that may or may not have been said at least 40 years ago and the current state of the country.

By the way, you misspelled "America."

[snopes]

Of course, that's the same book that said the Edison "doctor of the future" quote was apocryphal:

http://books.google.com/books?id=NCO...ure%22&f=false

Turns out it wasn't:

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/edison.asp

[snopes]

"You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you’ll fall like overripe fruit into our hands." -- Nikita Khrushchev

I believe the original form was less direct (i.e., it was said about Americans, not to Americans): "We cannot expect the Americans to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialsm, until they suddenly awake to find they have communism."

As noted in Morris Kominsky's The Hoaxers, this chestnut has been kicking around since soon after Khrushchev's 1959 visit to the U.S. (for example, Strom Thurmond used it in a U.S. Senate speech in July 1961), but in all that time nobody's been able to definitively track it back to Khrushchev himself (or anyone else).

Thanks for the link, very enlightening! Oh, and the misspelling was intended as a joke