Consider though, doing that, may have avoided Stalin being eventually overthrown in a military coup, which would have probably thrown the Soviet Union into total anarchy. I think Khrushchev himself even considered the possibility of leading a coup against Stalin, if the situation deteriorated even further.
He should have been overthrown, but besides the poor quality of his army under Stalin, his purges were almost suicidal:
Beginning in 1936, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin set about deliberately murdering 700,000 people in the Great Purge, an act of mass killing that “constituted a form of rule” unto itself, as Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin explained.
The armed forces were not spared. The purges swept through the officer corps, including 154 division commanders — of 186 in total — and resulted in the NKVD executions of several of the country’s most innovative and senior military thinkers, including Mikhail Tukhachevsky who was forced into signing a confession under torture before his murder. Thousands of officers were executed.
Georgy Zhukov, then a cavalry commander, escaped the purges and went on to become one of the most senior Soviet military leaders, a war hero and one of the most well-known and respected generals in modern history — implementing the theory of “deep operations” on the Eastern Front which Tukhachevsky had pioneered on the drawing board.
Zhukov was also once marked for death. (Russia Might Have Lost World War II If Stalin Killed His Best General)
During the first months of the war, scores of commanders, most notably General Dmitry Pavlov, were made scapegoats for failures. Pavlov was arrested and executed after his forces were heavily defeated in the early days of the campaign. Only two of the accused were spared: People's Commissar of Armaments Boris Vannikov (released in July) and Deputy People's Commissar of Defense General Kirill Meretskov (released in September). The latter had admitted guilt, under torture.[2]
About 300 commanders, including Lieutenant General Nikolay Klich, Lieutenant General Robert Klyavinsh, and Major General Sergey Chernykh, were executed on October 16, 1941, during the Battle of Moscow. Others were sent to Kuybyshev, provisional capital of the Soviet Union, on October 17. On October 28 twenty individuals were summarily shot near Kuybyshev on Lavrentiy Beria's personal order, including Colonel Generals Alexander Loktionov and Grigory Shtern, Lieutenant Generals Fyodor Arzhenukhin, Ivan Proskurov, Yakov Smushkevich, and Pavel Rychagov with his wife, as well as several individuals who had been previously arrested during the immediate aftermath of the Great Purge in 1939, prior to the Red Army Purge of 1941, including politicians Filipp Goloshchyokin and Mikhail Kedrov.[2] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1941_Red_Army_Purge)
Stalin initiated the purge by ordering some of the truly professional officers of the Tukhachevskii group to be arrested on false charges, emanating from the security services, that they were traitors in the pay of Nazi Germany. Voroshilov subsequently called on all servicemen to vigilantly report suspicious activity and denounce enemies of the people hidden in their ranks. Officers and men enthusiastically heeded these instructions, especially those in Communist Party organizations. As a result, a wave of denunciations spread throughout the armed forces. From June through December 1937, 2,238 officers were arrested and 15,426 discharged. By the time the Ezhovshchina was over, twothirds of the more than 9,500 arrests had been orchestrated by special sections of Ezhov’s NKVD assigned to the army; the People’s Commissariat of Defense (NKO), playing Stalin’s game, had ordered the arrest of the remaining third.
Military district staffs in particular played an important role in the scale of the Ezhovshchina, because the NKO gave them wide latitude. In October 1937 the NKO authorized military districts to expel Communists under suspicion from the party without consulting the central authorities in Moscow and to relieve expelled officers of their military duties on the spot. What constituted grounds for discharge or arrest was not always clear. A man could be denounced for any type of military inefficiency or political unreliability, from criticizing some aspect of party policy to holding favorable views of the policies of Stalin’s former rivals to having even the slightest connection with a foreign country. Six months earlier, in March 1937, the Politburo had ordered that all senior officers expelled from the party were to be discharged from active duty. Many men found themselves in trouble simply for not being Russian: In 1938 orders went out to the military districts to discharge all officers with German, Polish, Latvian, Estonian, Korean, Finnish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Turkish, Hungarian, or Bulgarian backgrounds. Accordingly, NKO leadership initiated the discharge of 4,030 army and political officers and the military districts discharged another 7,148 men.
In November, Beria successfully lobbied Stalin to simplify the procedure for carrying out death sentences issued by local military courts so that they would no longer require approval of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court and Politburo for the first time since the end of the Great Purge. The right to issue extrajudicial death sentences was granted to the Special Council of the NKVD. With the approval of Stalin, 46 persons, including 17 generals, among them Lieutenant Generals Pyotr Pumpur, Pavel Alekseyev, Konstantin Gusev, Yevgeny Ptukhin, Nikolai Trubetskoy, Pyotr Klyonov, Ivan Selivanov, Major General Ernst Schacht, and People's Commissar of Ammunition Ivan Sergeyev, were sentenced to death by the Special Council. They were executed on the Day of the Red Army, February 23, 1942.
The Red Army had never been in good shape; it continuously struggled with indiscipline, rampant alcoholism, equipment and weapon shortages, and inattentiveness to training. Social strife between workers and peasants in the ranks was also a problem: The peasantry had suffered when agriculture had been collectivized in the 1930s and a famine early in that decade only worsened matters, as did the party’s idealization of workers (https://www.historynet.com/stalin-attacks-red-army.htm)