Nikita Khrushchev

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was born on April 3, 1894, in Kalinovka, a farming village in Kursk Province near the border between Russia and Ukraine ^[1]. His father Sergei worked the land in summer and traveled to the Donbas coalfields in winter to earn cash wages, a pattern common among peasants of the region. His mother Ksenia was remembered by neighbors as the stronger personality in the household. The family owned little, and Nikita received only about four years of formal schooling in the village before work replaced the classroom ^[2].

Around 1908 the family moved permanently to Yuzovka (later Donetsk), a rough industrial settlement in eastern Ukraine built around coal mines and metalworks. The teenage Khrushchev herded cattle, cleaned boilers, and eventually apprenticed as a metal fitter, a skilled trade that gave him steadier pay than most miners earned ^[1]. The experience marked him for life. Decades later, as ruler of a nuclear superpower, he still spoke of himself as a worker and judged policies by whether they would put meat and housing within reach of ordinary families.

His skills as a fitter exempted him from conscription during the First World War. Instead he witnessed the collapse of the old order from the mining towns of the Donbas, where strikes and shortages radicalized the workforce. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1918, after the revolution rather than before it, and served as a junior political commissar with the Red Army during the Russian Civil War ^[2]. His first wife, Yefrosinia Pisareva, whom he had married in 1914, died of typhus in 1919, leaving him with two small children.

After the civil war Khrushchev returned to the Donbas, studied at a workers' faculty in Yuzovka, and began climbing through local party posts. A decisive move came in 1929, when he enrolled at the Industrial Academy in Moscow. There he met Nadezhda Alliluyeva, a fellow student who happened to be Stalin's wife, a connection that historians believe helped bring the energetic provincial to the attention of the Kremlin ^[1]. His ascent was rapid. By 1935 he headed the Moscow city party organization and drove the construction of the Moscow Metro, whose first line opened that year and earned him the Order of Lenin ^[2].

Khrushchev's rise coincided with the Great Terror, and he was a participant, not a bystander. As Moscow party chief and then, from 1938, as head of the Communist Party of Ukraine, he approved arrests and publicly demanded the destruction of supposed enemies of the people ^[3]. Biographer William Taubman documents that Khrushchev signed off on repressions in both posts, a record that later gave his denunciation of Stalin an unavoidable personal edge ^[1].

During the Second World War he served as a senior political commissar with the rank of lieutenant general, attached to front commands at some of the war's bloodiest battles, including the defense of Stalingrad ^[2]. His son Leonid, a fighter pilot, was killed in 1943. After the war Khrushchev governed Ukraine through famine and reconstruction, then returned to Moscow in 1949 as one of the small circle of men around the aging Stalin, sitting through the dictator's late-night dinners at his dacha and, by his own later account, never certain of surviving them.

Stalin died on March 5, 1953, and the succession played out over several years rather than a single day. Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Communist Party in September 1953, and his position hardened when the secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria was arrested and executed later that year ^[2]. By 1955 he had outmaneuvered Georgy Malenkov, and in 1957 he defeated an attempt by Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich to remove him, having the plotters demoted rather than shot, a break with Stalinist practice that itself signaled a new era ^[1]. From 1958 he combined party leadership with the post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers, the head of government.

The defining act of his rule came on February 25, 1956, at the 20th Party Congress. In a closed session, Khrushchev delivered what became known as the Secret Speech, a four-hour indictment of Stalin's cult of personality, the torture of party members, and the mass arrests of the 1930s ^[3]. The text leaked abroad within months and was published by Western newspapers. The speech stunned communists worldwide, contributed to unrest in Poland and to the Hungarian uprising of 1956 (which Khrushchev crushed with Soviet tanks), and opened a breach with Mao Zedong's China that widened into the Sino-Soviet split ^[4].

At home, the years after 1956 brought what Soviets called the Thaw, a term taken from an Ilya Ehrenburg novel. Millions of Gulag prisoners were released and many victims posthumously rehabilitated. Censorship loosened enough for Alexander Solzhenitsyn's labor camp novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to appear in print in 1962 with Khrushchev's personal approval ^[1]. The limits of tolerance stayed narrow, though: Boris Pasternak was hounded into refusing the Nobel Prize in 1958, and Khrushchev also reopened a harsh campaign against the Orthodox Church.

Any honest account of Nikita Khrushchev achievements has to start above the atmosphere. Under his leadership the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957, and sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit on April 12, 1961, the first human spaceflight ^[2]. These triumphs owed most to the engineer Sergei Korolev and his design bureau, but Khrushchev funded the program, publicized it relentlessly, and turned space into the loudest argument for Soviet prestige during the Cold War.

Housing was the achievement ordinary citizens felt most directly. A mass construction drive covered Soviet cities with prefabricated five-story apartment blocks, nicknamed khrushchevki, that moved millions of families out of communal apartments and barracks into private flats for the first time ^[5]. The buildings were cramped and shoddy, and many still stand, but the program changed daily life on a scale few Soviet policies ever matched.

Agriculture told a harsher story. The Virgin Lands campaign, begun in 1954, plowed up tens of millions of hectares of steppe in Kazakhstan and Siberia. Early harvests were strong, and hundreds of thousands of young volunteers moved east, but thin soils and drought brought erosion and disappointing yields by the early 1960s ^[1]. Khrushchev's enthusiasm for planting corn across unsuitable regions became a national joke, and his promise that the USSR would overtake America in meat and milk production went unmet. After a poor harvest in 1963 the country had to buy grain from abroad, a humiliation for a state that claimed agricultural superiority ^[2]. Constant reorganizations of the party and economic administration, meanwhile, unsettled the very officials whose support kept him in office.

Khrushchev conducted foreign policy in person and at high volume. He proclaimed peaceful coexistence with the capitalist West, arguing that war between the systems was not inevitable, yet he coupled the doctrine with nuclear boasting and manufactured crises ^[4]. He toured the United States for thirteen days in 1959, the first Soviet leader to do so, trading barbs with politicians and farmers and famously fuming when security concerns kept him out of Disneyland ^[1]. A planned Paris summit collapsed in May 1960 after a Soviet missile shot down an American U-2 spy plane and Khrushchev demanded an apology President Eisenhower would not give ^[2].

Berlin was his recurring pressure point. He issued ultimatums in 1958 and 1961 demanding the Western powers leave the divided city, and in August 1961 the East German government, with his approval, sealed the border with what became the Berlin Wall ^[4]. That October, at the United Nations the previous year, he had already supplied one of the Cold War's enduring images when he protested a speech by pounding his desk, with widespread press accounts describing him brandishing his shoe ^[2].

The gravest episode came in October 1962. Khrushchev had secretly shipped nuclear missiles to Cuba, gambling that they could be installed before Washington noticed, both to protect Fidel Castro's revolution and to offset American missiles near Soviet borders. When U-2 photographs exposed the sites, President Kennedy imposed a naval quarantine, and for thirteen days the world watched the two nuclear powers face each other ^[6]. Khrushchev ultimately withdrew the missiles in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba and a private undertaking to remove US Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The retreat helped produce the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and a Moscow-Washington hotline, but at home and in Beijing it was read as capitulation, and it damaged him badly ^[4].

By 1964 Khrushchev had exhausted the patience of the men he had promoted. Food prices had risen, the harvest failures stung, his administrative shake-ups threatened careers, and colleagues found his one-man style and public outbursts increasingly embarrassing. In October 1964, while he vacationed on the Black Sea, the Presidium summoned him to Moscow and confronted him with a catalogue of failures. Led by Leonid Brezhnev, they voted him out of both his posts on October 14 ^[1]. Khrushchev did not fight. He reportedly told colleagues that the very possibility of removing a leader by a vote, rather than by arrest, was itself something his years in power had made real ^[3].

The official announcement cited age and health, and his name promptly vanished from Soviet newspapers. He lived out his remaining years as a pensioner under quiet KGB watch at a dacha outside Moscow, gardening, taking long walks, and sinking at times into depression. In defiance of the authorities he dictated his memoirs onto tape; the recordings were smuggled to the West, where they appeared in 1970 as Khrushchev Remembers, infuriating the Brezhnev leadership ^[3].

Khrushchev died of a heart attack in Moscow on September 11, 1971, at the age of 77. Denied a state funeral and burial at the Kremlin wall, he was interred at Novodevichy Cemetery ^[2]. His grave is marked by a monument that the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, once the target of Khrushchev's crude tirade against modern art, built from interlocking blocks of white marble and black granite, a deliberate statement about a man of light and dark in equal measure ^[1].

Khrushchev married three times. After the death of his first wife Yefrosinia, a brief second marriage ended in the early 1920s. Around 1924 he began his lifelong partnership with Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk, a Ukrainian-born party teacher who accompanied him on foreign trips, including the 1959 American tour, and struck Western observers as a warm counterpoint to her volcanic husband ^[1]. He raised five children. His son Sergei Khrushchev became a rocket engineer, later emigrated, taught at Brown University in the United States, and became an American citizen ^[7].

For readers asking who was Nikita Khrushchev, the honest answer resists a single verdict, which is what keeps any Nikita Khrushchev biography interesting. He was a true believer shaped by poverty and by complicity in Stalin's terror, who then did more than anyone to expose that terror. He freed prisoners while crushing Hungary, preached coexistence while building the Berlin Wall, and pushed the world toward catastrophe over Cuba before helping pull it back ^[4]. Taubman's Pulitzer Prize-winning study calls attention to exactly this doubleness, a reformer whose methods remained those of the system he tried to soften ^[1].

The basic Nikita Khrushchev facts secure his place in history regardless of judgment: the Secret Speech of 1956, Sputnik and Gagarin, the mass housing drive, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the first peaceful removal of a supreme Soviet leader. De-Stalinization was partial and was partly reversed after 1964, yet the ideas released in 1956 never fully went back in the bottle. Mikhail Gorbachev, a student in Moscow when the Secret Speech was read aloud at party meetings, later acknowledged the Thaw generation's influence on his own reforms ^[3]. Khrushchev buried the worst of Stalinism without escaping it, and the Soviet Union he left behind was less fearful, better housed, and still unfree.