The man known to history as Nikita Khrushchev
was born on the 15th of April 1894 in Kalinovka in southern Russia. His father was Sergei Khrushchev, a peasant
who made his living working in a range of temporary jobs in and around Yuzovka, the
modern day city of Donetsk in Ukraine. He started on the railroads, later moved to
a brick factory, before eventually working as a miner extracting the resources that would
fuel the Russian Empire’s rapidly industrialising economy. In 1908, when Nikita was fourteen years old,
Sergei would move the entire family to Yuzovka. His mother Aksinia, nicknamed Ksenia, was
the daughter of a poor peasant who served for 25 years in the ranks of the Russian army
before returning to the countryside. She was a strong-willed woman who managed
the household and held a dismissive attitude towards her husband, to whom she gave a son,
Nikita, and a daughter, Irina, two years later. Ksenia adored her son and had high hopes for
him, confident that he would be destined for greatness. The place Nikita was born in, Kalinovka, was
a village of just over 1,000 inhabitants, it was a backwater in the vast Russian Empire,
which stretched from Poland in the west to the Pacific coast in the east. The young Khrushchev was born into a poor
peasant family and spent his childhood in the cottage of his grandfather, in a peasant’s
hut which usually accommodated eight people. Despite such a modest background, this son
of Kalinovka would one day become one of the most powerful men in the world. Ksenia Khrushcheva’s high hopes for her
son were echoed by Nikita’s school teacher Lydia Shevchenko, who was impressed by the
child’s abilities in arithmetic and encouraged him to study in the city. However, for all these hopes, greatness would
have seemed a distant dream for young Nikita. In 1861, Tsar Alexander II had abolished serfdom,
but under the terms of their emancipation, peasants would have to pay 49 years’ worth
of taxes to the state to redeem their freedom. This financial burden forced many peasant
families to stay put and limited their social and economic prospects. When Alexander II was assassinated in 1881,
his son and successor Alexander III sought to reverse his father’s liberal reforms
and maintain the unequal social structures which saw peasants at the mercy of wealthy
landowners. At the same time, Russia was experiencing
the beginning of a rapid industrial revolution, in order to catch up with the economic and
military power of other European states such as Britain and Germany. In 1869, the Welsh businessman John Hughes,
owner of the New Russian Company, was granted the right to build an ironworks for the manufacture
of railroads in eastern Ukraine, and the vast industrial complex that was created was named
Yuzovka, originally “Hughesovka” after its founder. By the time the Khrushchev’s moved there
in 1908, the city’s population was around 50,000, and by 1913 its mines would produce
87 percent of Russia’s coal. Work in the mines created economic opportunity
for peasants from the country such as Sergei Khrushchev. However, working conditions were poor, accidents
were common, as was the spread of diseases such as cholera, prompting a series of strikes
in the early 1910s. In 1909, at the age of 15, young Nikita was
apprenticed to a fitter, responsible for assembling metal components into a whole machine. Although metalworkers were near the top of
the labour hierarchy in Yuzovka, Khrushchev began to read the radical newspapers which
highlighted the poor working conditions of industrial workers and encouraged them to
demand better from their employers. As he became more active politically, Khrushchev
was dismissed from his apprenticeship in 1912, but by 1914 he was working at a machine repair
shop at the Rutchenkovo mine. By this time, he had befriended Ivan Pisarev,
the mine’s relatively well-off elevator operator, and began to court his eldest daughter
Yefrosinia. The couple were married in 1914 and had a
daughter named Yulia the following year, while a son, Leonid, followed in 1917. When the First World War broke out in 1914,
Khrushchev was exempt from military service as a metalworker. Although the war had been welcomed enthusiastically
and almost universally in Russia, by 1916 Russia’s participation in the war had become
increasingly unpopular, and Khrushchev was involved in organizing strike action amongst
the miners. When news of Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication
reached Yuzovka in February 1917, Khrushchev and his fellow workers were delighted at the
news and welcomed the prospect not only of better working conditions, but greater political
power, especially after the communist Bolshevik Party led by Vladimir Lenin seized power on
behalf of the working class in October 1917. For all his political activities, Khrushchev
remained eager to continue his training as an engineer, and although he was elected chair
of the soviet or worker’s council at the Rutchenkovo mine in May 1917, he considered
the Bolsheviks too radical and did not join the party until 1918. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik October
Revolution, a bloody civil war broke out all over the former Russian Empire. In Yuzovka and the surrounding Donbass region,
the revolutionary mine workers were not only fighting the White armies seeking to restore
the Tsar, but also Ukrainian nationalists, anarchists, and the German army. After returning to his native village to escape
the German onslaught in the summer of 1918, by 1919 Khrushchev joined the Red Army to
defend the revolution and served as a political commissar and instructor with a construction
battalion in the Ninth Army. Although General Anton Denikin’s White Army
saw considerable success in southern Russia in the summer of 1919 and was within striking
distance of Moscow, the lack of manpower and popular support for the Whites allowed the
Reds to launch a successful counteroffensive, driving the remnants of Denikin’s army,
under Baron Pyotr Wrangel, out of the Crimea by November 1920. Following the Communist victory in the Russian
Civil War, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, otherwise known as the USSR or the Soviet
Union, was founded in 1922, bringing together the independent Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian,
and Transcaucasian socialist republics. The same year the Soviet Union was founded,
Khrushchev was made assistant director of political affairs at the Rutchenkovo mine,
where he witnessed the impact of the war on Yuzovka. The mines had ceased coal production, basic
necessities were subject to hyperinflation, and disease and famine swept through the town. In 1921, Lenin announced the New Economic
Policy, which allowed a limited return to a market economy and gave farmers more incentives
to increase production, but it would take time for these measures to take effect. During his nine months in the post, Khrushchev
laboured hard and applied his own engineering skills to get the mines operational. He was so successful that he was named head
of a nearby mine, but rather than accept the assignment he asked to instead study at the
miners’ technical college, he also served as party secretary. Although he remained keen on receiving an
education and claimed to have completed his course, his political duties meant that even
though he was on the commission that granted diplomas to the first cohort of graduates
in September 1924, he did not receive one himself. Back in 1918, Khrushchev had evacuated his
family to Kalinovka, where his wife Yefrosinia tragically died of typhus. When he returned to Yuzovka in 1922, Khrushchev
met and married a seventeen year old girl named Marusia. However, her unwillingness or inability to
look after her husband’s children from his first marriage angered Khrushchev’s mother,
who soon persuaded him to abandon her. Not long afterwards, he met Nina Petrovna
Kukharchuk, who despite being six years younger than him, had received a higher education
and was more committed to communist ideology. Khrushchev attended the political lectures
she gave to the miners at Rutchenkovo and at the technical institute and she would later
become his third wife, though their marriage was not made official until the 1960s. The couple would have two more children, a
daughter Rada in 1929, and a son Sergei in 1935. In 1925 and 1926 Khrushchev would work as
a local party boss in a mining district near Yuzovka, which had been renamed Stalino after
Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party who was in the process of
consolidating his power as leader of the Soviet Union after Lenin’s death in 1924. At the end of 1925 he was chosen as a delegate
from Stalino to the 14th Communist Party Congress, during which Stalin sought to assert his authority
against his opponents Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev. In Ukraine, Khrushchev was an enthusiastic
supporter of Stalin and the Ukrainian party boss Lazar Kaganovich. Thanks to the latter’s influence, Khrushchev
was appointed deputy head of the Stalino party organisation in December 1926 and in 1928
he served in a succession of posts in Kharkov and Kiev, before being granted permission
to study at the Industrial Academy in Moscow. By this time, Stalin had moved against his
remaining ally, Nikolai Bukharin, abolished the Leninist New Economic Policy and embarked
on an ambitious programme of agricultural collectivisation and industrialisation to
build a socialist economy in the USSR. As a student of the Industrial Academy, after
a three-year course Khrushchev was expected to have the skills to run factories and government
economic agencies. Despite his desire for education, once again
Khrushchev found himself skipping classes in order to carry out political duties. Appointed head of the party cell at the academy
in May 1930, he led the purge of students suspected of supporting Bukharin. As Stalin’s young wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva
was a student in the academy’s textile section and worked as a party organiser, Khrushchev’s
activities were closely followed by the Soviet leader. After brief stints running a couple of Moscow
districts, by 1932 he was appointed deputy to Kaganovich, who was now running the Moscow
party organisation. As his superior also held a senior position
as Stalin’s deputy in the Central Committee, the 38-year-old Khrushchev was largely responsible
for running the capital city. His greatest legacy during this period was
overseeing the construction of the Moscow Metro, a Stalinist project to deliver a cheap
means of mass transportation, with richly decorated stations serving as ‘palaces of
the people.’ With his background as a mining engineer,
Khrushchev took a great interest in supervising the construction of the tunnels, and when
the metro was opened on the 1st of May 1935, he was aboard the first trains and was awarded
the coveted Order of Lenin for his efforts. Meanwhile, Stalin had set about eliminating
his political opponents. On the 1st of December, the Leningrad party
boss Sergei Kirov, whose popularity made him a potential threat to Stalin, was assassinated
in unclear circumstances. Stalin responded by purging the Leningrad
and Moscow parties, and in January 1935 his former rivals Kamenev and Zinoviev were charged
with Kirov’s assassination. By August 1936, both men were executed, and
over the next couple of years prominent military and political leaders including Marshal Mikhail
Tukhachevsky and Nikolai Bukharin also faced the firing squad. By 1935 Khrushchev had succeeded Kaganovich
as head of the party in both the city and surrounding province of Moscow and supported
Stalin’s suppression of real and perceived enemies, forcing victims into making false
confessions and approving the arrest and execution of the vast majority of his subordinates in
the Moscow party organisation, including close friends and associates. While Khrushchev may have eagerly supported
the purges, in order to save his own skin, he supported Stalin’s political vision and
was grateful for his political patronage, regarding the Soviet leader as a father figure. In January 1938, Khrushchev left Moscow to
take over as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Central Committee, the most important political
office in Ukraine, and the following year he was elected to the Politburo, the top decision-making
body in the USSR. Upon his return to Kiev, he learned of the
devastating impact of Stalin’s agricultural policies in the country, as up to three million
Ukrainians perished from famine in 1932 and 1933. While he was disheartened to learn that many
of his former comrades in Stalino had been arrested, as a zealous supporter of Stalin’s,
he continued the purges and according to Stalin’s Premier Vyacheslav Molotov, Khrushchev sent
more than 50,000 people to their deaths during his three-year tenure in Ukraine, even as
he recognised that many victims had been arrested on false charges. While in Ukraine, Khrushchev turned his attention
to agriculture and worked on a plan to allow the peasants on collective farms to decide
what to grow, rather than having targets determined by the state. After this policy was implemented, the 1939
harvest exceeded the previous year’s by 22 percent. Khrushchev’s tenure as party leader in Ukraine
coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War. Although the Soviets had been concerned about
the territorial ambitions of Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany, the two parties signed
an infamous Non-Aggression Pact at the end of August 1939. On the 17th of September, two weeks after
the German invasion of Poland, Khrushchev accompanied General Semyon Timoshenko’s
troops as they marched west into Poland, seeking to conquer western Belarus and Ukraine and
join them to the existing Soviet republics. Khrushchev played an instrumental role in
incorporating western Ukraine into the USSR on the 1st of November, organising sham elections
and ensuring that everyone in the western Ukrainian assembly would speak and vote in
favour of union. The Soviet occupation was accompanied by the
deportation of more than a million people from the newly conquered territories to the
Soviet interior, as well as the arrest of 500,000 more. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union
on the 22nd of June 1941, Khrushchev had just returned to Kiev from Moscow. Based on information from Marshal Timoshenko,
now serving as Defence Commissar, and Georgy Zhukov, his successor as the head of Kiev’s
military district, Khrushchev knew that the Soviet defences in western Ukraine were inadequate. More than 80% of the Red Army’s officer
corps had been purged by Stalin, Soviet military technology and doctrine was outdated, the
western front soon collapsed and German tanks were racing towards Kiev at a rate of 125
miles a week. During the war Khrushchev served as chief
political commissar on several fronts, and due to his political status, he acted as a
conduit between Stalin in Moscow and the generals on the front line. On the 16th of September, Kiev fell to the
invaders with more than 500,000 Soviet soldiers taken captive. According to Zhukov, Khrushchev had urged
Stalin not to abandon the city even though the generals advocated withdrawal to save
the army. In the May of 1942, Khrushchev was involved
in another military disaster as political commissar on the southwestern front. Reunited with Timoshenko, the two men planned
a counteroffensive to retake Kharkov and persuaded a reluctant Stalin to give his approval. Despite early successes, Timoshenko’s flanks
were exposed to the enemy and a German pincer movement managed to capture 200,000 men, a
third of the Soviet force. Summoned to Moscow, Khrushchev feared the
worst, but rather than demotion he was transferred to the Stalingrad front, where he mediated
between the generals and Stalin’s headquarters in Moscow and went along the front talking
to the troops and keeping morale high. The Germans attacked Stalingrad in August
1942, aiming to break through and capture the oil fields of the Caucasus. The Soviet defenders fought tenaciously from
house to house, until a successful counteroffensive in November encircled the German Sixth Army
and turned the tide of the whole war. In July 1943 the Red Army prevailed at the
Battle of Kursk, during which Khrushchev was near the front encouraging the men, and by
November he was riding through the streets of Kiev preparing to resume his duties as
the party leader in Ukraine. By the end of the war, Khrushchev had been
promoted to Lieutenant General in the Soviet Army and received several medals for his efforts,
However, he had found the experience traumatic and in addition to the devastation he had
seen, he learned that his eldest son Leonid, a skilled pilot, had died during a battle
in March 1943. The war had also taken a heavy toll on Ukraine,
with 5.3 million killed and an additional 2.3 million sent to Germany for forced labour. The party organisation was also heavily hit,
and Khrushchev set about organising and instructing these new officials throughout the Ukrainian
provinces, including the mines at Stalino, and by 1945 coal output reached 40% of what
it had been under pre-war levels, an impressive feat given the scale of devastation caused
by the war. During his second stint in Ukraine, Khrushchev
was also involved in a brutal suppression campaign against the Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists or OUN, a Ukrainian independence movement which fought both the Nazis and the
Soviets during the Second World War. Even after the end of the war, the OUN carried
out thousands of terrorist attacks against Communist targets, and in May 1945 Khrushchev
himself barely survived an assassination attempt, prompting the Soviet authorities to use any
means necessary to eliminate the OUN. In 1946, the economic situation in Ukraine
deteriorated following a drought the previous year. However, rather than reduce the quota the
farms were expected to provide to the state, the authorities in Moscow increased them,
partly to supply Communist allies in Eastern Europe. Khrushchev had promised Stalin that the Ukrainian
harvest would be abundant, but by the time he received reports of starvation and cannibalism
and recognised the seriousness of the famine, it was too late for him to influence Moscow,
and Stalin responded angrily to any requests to alleviate the burden on Ukraine. In 1947 he was temporarily demoted by being
stripped of his role as party leader in Ukraine, though he retained his position as head of
government, but by the end of the year, he was back in favour and returned to the senior
leadership role. The following two years were among Khrushchev’s
best in Ukraine as agricultural production recovered, and in 1949 he returned to Moscow
to join Stalin’s inner circle, resuming his former leadership roles in the Moscow
party and serving as a secretary to the Central Committee. By the time Khrushchev returned to Moscow,
Stalin’s health was already in decline and his behaviour became increasingly erratic
and paranoid. Khrushchev was one of several party leaders
who would join Stalin in the Kremlin and his dacha for late night drinking sessions, during
which the Soviet leader enjoyed playing practical jokes at their expense. On occasion, Stalin would make Khrushchev
dance the Ukrainian hopak, but the humiliation he and others experienced was preferable to
elimination. By sticking to Stalin, they hoped not only
to survive but to outlast their leader and be in a position to succeed him. The leading contenders included Georgy Malenkov,
in charge of party personnel, and his ally Lavrenty Beria, the sadistic head of the secret
police. Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had been
Stalin’s right-hand man and was also a leading contender, though he was out of favour in
Stalin’s final years. While Khrushchev had ambitions to succeed
Stalin himself, his colleagues did not consider him much of a threat, especially when a proposal
to consolidate collective farms into larger villages went too far and was condemned by
Stalin. During Stalin’s final years, Khrushchev
kept close to Malenkov and Beria, not only to save his own skin but so he could turn
against them later. On the 1st of March, Stalin had suffered a
massive stroke but had been left unattended for several hours as his guards were ordered
not to disturb him. When Beria and Malenkov arrived, they were
hesitant to call a doctor, knowing that Stalin had been afraid that his doctors would kill
him. Khrushchev and other senior leaders later
arrived to accompany Stalin over his final days. When the Soviet leader died on the 5th of
March, they gathered to allocate the top government posts among them. Malenkov would succeed Stalin as Chairman
of the Council of Ministers and head of government, Beria would take charge of the Ministry of
Internal Affairs, responsible for state security, while Khrushchev stepped down as Moscow party
leader to serve as senior secretary to the Central Committee, though was given the honour
of organising Stalin’s funeral. Although they agreed to a collective leadership,
everyone knew there would be a power struggle. Khrushchev believed that Beria would use the
secret police to eliminate his rivals and attain supreme power. In the weeks following Stalin’s death, Beria
ordered an examination of the cases involving political prisoners and began a process to
release more than a million non-political prisoners. He condemned Stalin’s approach of forcing
the non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union to adopt Russian culture and criticised fellow
Communist leaders in Eastern Europe for persecuting innocent people. Beria had been one of Stalin’s cruellest
associates and was no closet liberal but was instead seeking to bolster his popularity,
in order to assume the role of supreme leader. For three months, Khrushchev supported Malenkov
and Beria, but soon began to plot for the latter’s removal. Initially this amounted to resisting some
of Beria’s proposals at the Presidium, the 10-member body which replaced the Politburo. By mid-June, he approached his fellow Presidium
colleagues one by one and invited them to the plot, starting with Malenkov, revealing
that Beria was already plotting to get rid of him. On the 26th of June, Beria was denounced by
his colleagues during a meeting of the Presidium, and after two hours of discussion Malenkov
ordered his arrest, upon which Marshal Zhukov and several Red Army officers entered the
room and overpowered Beria, who was taken into custody before facing the firing squad
in December. After ousting Beria, in September 1953, Khrushchev
was appointed First Secretary of the Central Committee, effectively succeeding Stalin as
party leader. While Malenkov was head of government and
could appoint his supporters to senior positions in the state bureaucracy, as head of the party
organisation, Khrushchev was in charge of the most powerful political institution in
the Soviet Union. The two men seemed to be close allies, but
viewed each other with suspicion, and when Malenkov criticised the corruption of senior
party officials and threatened to transfer government agencies from the party to the
state, Khrushchev defended the party’s preeminent position. After Malenkov proposed agricultural reforms
to reduce taxes and encourage individual plots independent of collective farms, Khrushchev
went further by proposing a Virgin Lands programme to develop more than 13 million hectares of
uncultivated land in Kazakhstan and western Siberia. In 1954 Khrushchev ensured that the party
apparatus was gradually strengthened, and by early 1955 he was confident enough to denounce
Malenkov publicly by pointing to his close association with Beria. Although he was removed from his post as head
of government and replaced by Khrushchev’s ally Nikolai Bulganin, Malenkov remained on
the Presidium. In the immediate years after Stalin’s death,
his memory had been honoured by the party and the Soviet press, but all this changed
with the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, which met in February 1956. On the 25th of February on the final day of
the Congress, Khrushchev spoke to delegates for four hours at an unscheduled secret session,
where he launched a devastating attack on Stalin’s legacy, denouncing the arrests
and executions of innocent victims carried out on the basis of forced confessions extracted
under torture. He accused Stalin of betraying Lenin’s legacy
and called him a coward for his conduct during the war against Nazi Germany. The speech had a shocking effect on the audience
and was the bravest act of Khrushchev’s political career, since he himself had supported
Stalin’s purges in the 1930s and risked being caught up in any campaign against Stalin’s
legacy. Although Khrushchev’s so-called ‘secret
speech’ was delivered to a closed session, copies were freely distributed and circulated
within the Soviet Union, and the speech was soon known to both Communist and capitalist
states. In the aftermath of the speech Khrushchev
launched a campaign of destalinization, releasing political prisoners, rehabilitating many of
those wrongly executed, and allowing the removal of busts and portraits of Stalin from public
display. The secret speech led to repercussions among
the Soviet Union’s Communist allies in Eastern Europe, especially Poland and Hungary. Communist regimes had been installed in both
countries following Soviet occupation during the Second World War, and the debate over
Stalin’s legacy undermined the Communist party leadership in both countries. While Khrushchev was persuaded by the Polish
Communists not to send Soviet troops when they appointed the moderate Władysław Gomułka
as party leader in October 1956, demonstrations in Budapest in favour of the reformist Imre
Nagy on the 23rd of October prompted the Soviet leader to send thousands of Soviet troops
and tanks into the city the following day. Although a new government was formed under
János Kádár, the Hungarians continued to resist the Soviet troops. On the 30th of October the Soviet leadership
considered withdrawing from Hungary, but the following day Khrushchev decided that losing
Hungary may destabilise other Communist governments in Europe and approved further intervention. On the 4th of November, Soviet tanks entered
Budapest and crushed the Hungarian Revolution over the ensuing week, leaving more than 2,000
Hungarians dead. The Hungarian crisis undermined Khrushchev’s
leadership, and he sought to consolidate his power by launching a series of reforms, including
the devolution of economic decision-making to the regions, which was motivated not only
by economic considerations, but by Khrushchev’s desire to send political opponents to the
provinces. In May 1957, he made the bold claim that Soviet
per capita production of meat, butter and milk would overtake that of the United States
by 1960, despite the fact, that the Soviet economy would need to increase its output
more than threefold in as many years. These boasts and proposed reforms encouraged
fellow party leaders led by Malenkov, Molotov and Kaganovich to move against him in June
1957. In a scene reminiscent of Beria’s deposition,
Khrushchev was summoned to a Presidium meeting where his leadership was denounced, but deliberations
continued long enough for him to mobilise his allies. Having regained the initiative, Khrushchev’s
ally Marshal Zhukov, then defence minister and a Candidate Member of the Presidium, launched
a devastating attack on Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich, naming them as the main culprits
behind the Stalinist purges in the late 30s. Despite owing his survival to Zhukov, in October
1957 Khrushchev dismissed him as Minister of Defence on the grounds that he was preparing
a military takeover. When Bulganin stepped down as premier in 1958,
Khrushchev took over, combining the roles of party leader and head of government as
Stalin had done. Despite maintaining the illusion of collective
leadership, Khrushchev was the undisputed leader and was in a position to send his rivals
to minor posts far away from Moscow. Meanwhile, he turned his focus to agriculture,
championing the cultivation of corn not only for human consumption but as high quality
fodder for cattle. Although he was ideologically opposed to the
market economy in the United States, he saw the Iowa corn belt as an example for the Soviet
Union and consulted American experts on the technologies and processes involved in improving
the yield of the crop. Corn became an obsession for Khrushchev, who
believed that it was the only crop that would enable him to meet his goals of exceeding
American meat and dairy production. In addition to agriculture, Khrushchev was
keen to address the housing crisis in Moscow, which saw an increase in population after
the war. He encouraged the rapid construction of five-story
apartment buildings made from cheap materials, and while millions of Muscovites were initially
grateful for the housing, their poor quality soon became notorious. Prior to becoming Soviet leader, Khrushchev
had little experience in foreign policy. After the end of the Second World War, the
wartime alliance between the capitalist United States and the communist USSR broke down,
resulting in the Cold War, a decades-long struggle between capitalism and communism
led by the two global superpowers. Following Stalin’s death, his successors
made limited attempts to improve relations with the capitalist West. Khrushchev continued this approach, making
diplomatic visits to Geneva and London in an effort to reduce tensions with the United
States and Western Europe. Meanwhile, in 1949 the Chinese Communist Party
under Mao Zedong had taken power from the nationalist government. The Soviet Union provided considerable economic
and technological aid to China, but Khrushchev’s relationship with Mao soured after the latter
considered the secret speech too critical of Stalin’s legacy. In 1958, Soviet proposals for a joint submarine
fleet angered Mao, who considered it a threat to Chinese sovereignty, and when Khrushchev
flew to China for negotiations, the Chinese leader openly mocked his Soviet counterpart
and invited him to swim in an outdoor pool. The athletic Mao swam lengths back and forth
setting out his political views while the overweight Khrushchev struggled to stay afloat. While Khrushchev was horrified about the prospect
of nuclear war, he believed that making nuclear threats was the best way to avoid such a conflict. President Eisenhower of the United States
was of a similar opinion, threatening “massive retaliation” rather than the use of conventional
forces. Between them, Khrushchev and Eisenhower developed
the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, the idea that direct warfare between the two
superpowers was unthinkable because both would be destroyed in a nuclear war. Even though the Soviets did not have any missiles
that could threaten the United States, Khrushchev cut back on conventional weapons and reduced
the size of the army by 3.5 million men between 1955 and 1960. Yet for all his efforts to reduce tensions,
he threatened to go to war over the fate of Berlin in November 1958. At the end of the Second World War, Germany
was divided into British, French, American, and Soviet occupation zones. A similar division took place within the capital
of Berlin, which was surrounded by the Soviet zone. By 1949, the British, French, and American
zones in the west merged into the Federal Republic of Germany, while the Soviet zone
in the east became the communist German Democratic Republic. During the ensuing decade many German professionals
and intellectuals fled from communist East Germany to the West via Berlin. In November 1958, Khrushchev threatened to
cut off access to West Berlin unless a treaty was signed recognising the division of Germany
and turning West Berlin into a neutral zone. Throughout 1958, Khrushchev was intent on
being invited to a diplomatic summit in the United States to discuss the international
situation with Eisenhower and other western leaders, and he used the Berlin crisis as
leverage for this purpose. A visit to the United States in January 1959
by his close ally and Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan brought no summit, nor did a visit
by British prime minister Harold Macmillan to the Soviet Union in February. However, when a foreign ministers’ summit
in Geneva later in the year failed to make progress, Eisenhower became increasingly alarmed
by Khrushchev’s wild nuclear threats and in July he agreed to invite the Soviet leader
to the United States for informal discussions and a tour of the country. In the meantime, US Vice President Richard
Nixon visited the USSR at the end of July, keen to defend the superiority of the American
way of life. When Khrushchev accompanied Nixon to open
the American exhibition at Sokolniki Park, he dismissed the exhibits and claimed that
the USSR would soon surpass the standard of living in the United States. As the two men moved through the exhibit,
newsreels captured them aggressively arguing with each other in an American kitchen surrounded
by the latest appliances. Delighted with his invitation to the United
States, Khrushchev and his Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko made extensive preparations
for the visit, determined to ensure that the Soviet Union would receive a good press in
the capitalist west. The Soviet delegation left for Washington
on the 15th of September and received a grand welcome upon arrival. While he felt a sense of pride that as leader
of the communist superpower he was being welcomed by his most powerful adversary, Khrushchev
was careful not to be too critical or too praiseworthy of what he saw as he travelled
around the country. However, he was irritated by difficult questions
addressed to him at press conferences, which he routinely answered with a combination of
humour and anger. In New York he addressed a group of wealthy
businessmen and hoped to improve trade relations, while at a gathering of Hollywood celebrities
in Los Angeles he expressed disappointment that a planned visit to Disneyland was cancelled
due to security reasons, asking if the resort “had been seized by bandits who might destroy
me?” After visits to San Francisco, Iowa, Pittsburgh,
and back to Washington, on the 25th of September the two leaders met at Camp David to discuss
Berlin and Germany. The meeting began cordially with Khrushchev
expressing his desire and that of the Soviet people to improve relations with the United
States, little substantive progress was made, though the Soviet leader prevailed on Eisenhower
to agree to a four-party conference involving Britain and France. Both sides sought to portray the meeting as
a success, and Khrushchev invited his American counterpart to make a return visit to the
Soviet Union for a week in June 1960, but the shooting down of an American U-2 spy plane
over Soviet territory on the 1st of May undermined prospects of both Eisenhower’s visit and
the proposed summit. On the 5th of May Khrushchev revealed the
fate of the American spy plane, challenging Eisenhower to deny knowledge of the flights
so that the conference could go ahead. When the Americans claimed that it was a NASA
plane making weather observations, Khrushchev revealed that the pilot, Gary Powers, had
survived and was in Soviet captivity, and that the Soviets had parts of the plane. Placed in an impossible position, Eisenhower
admitted that the U-2 programme had presidential authorisation, since to do otherwise would
be an admission that the US president was not in control of his intelligence services. The Soviet leader felt betrayed and when the
two men met in Paris on the 16th, an angry Khrushchev threatened to withdraw from the
conference and rescind the invitation for the American president to visit the USSR if
Eisenhower did not apologise. Khrushchev’s outburst shocked his fellow
leaders: Eisenhower, French President Charles de Gaulle, and British prime minister Harold
Macmillan. The failure of the Paris summit was welcomed
by China, which had been suspicious about any efforts by the Soviets to improve relations
with the West and warned Khrushchev that no good would come from them. However, in an address to the Romanian Communist
Party in June, Khrushchev defended his approach to the West and attacked Mao and the Chinese
Communists. When the leader of the Chinese delegation
mocked him for having no foreign policy, the Soviet premier immediately withdrew all Soviet
military and economic advisors in China, tearing up hundreds of contracts and cooperation agreements
in the process. Khrushchev’s allies, including his protégé
and newly appointed head of state Leonid Brezhnev, criticised his impulsive behaviour and lamented
the worsening relations with China. In August, Khrushchev shifted his attention
back west by announcing his intention to appear at the United Nations General Assembly in
New York the following month. Arriving by boat on the 19th of September,
he gave several long speeches and participated in lengthy debates during the meetings. While championing the causes of disarmament
and decolonisation, Khrushchev hoped to take revenge for the failed Paris conference and
his behaviour proved extremely erratic. On one occasion, he protested a speech by
Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld by pounding his desk with his fist, soon followed by the
entire Soviet delegation and members of all other Communist delegations. On his final day in New York, during a debate
about decolonisation, a Philippines delegate’s claim that Moscow had deprived Eastern Europeans
of their political and civil rights so infuriated Khrushchev that he took off his right shoe
and banged it on the table repeatedly until it attracted the attention of everyone in
the assembly hall. Such theatrics were criticised both by fellow
Communist leaders as well as members of the Soviet delegation, who questioned their leader’s
sanity. Upon his return to Moscow in October, Khrushchev
faced an agricultural crisis at home. Despite his lofty targets to exceed American
production by this point in time, there was a shortage of meat and dairy products throughout
the country. In early 1961, Khrushchev travelled extensively
around the country in an effort to mobilise the farmers and officials to increase production. In the meantime, Berlin continued to be a
thorn in Khrushchev’s side, especially when Walter Ulbricht, the communist leader of East
Germany, began to unilaterally take action by trying to subject Western ambassadors to
passport controls. Having fallen out with Eisenhower, the Soviet
leader hoped for better relations with the newly elected President of the United States,
John F. Kennedy. Khrushchev sought to meet Kennedy as soon
as possible to discuss the Berlin crisis, but the president sought to avoid the issue,
hoping to maintain the status quo indefinitely, prompting Khrushchev to entertain the prospect
of further unilateral action on the part of East Germany. Despite his disappointments over Berlin and
Kennedy’s unwillingness to meet with him, Khrushchev was able to celebrate a major triumph
in the US-Soviet competition over space. Four years earlier, the Soviet Union had been
the first country to send a satellite to space, with the launch of Sputnik-1 on the 4th of
October 1957. The Soviet success caused considerable alarm
in the United States about the sophistication of Soviet rocket technology and prompted an
American effort to catch up in the space race. On the 12th of April 1961, the Soviets scored
a further triumph when Yuri Gagarin carried out the first manned space flight, orbiting
the earth for 108 minutes in the spacecraft Vostok-1. Khrushchev was delighted at news of the pioneering
flight, promoted Gagarin to major, awarded him the Hero of the Soviet Union medal, and
greeted the cosmonaut personally upon his return to Moscow. Four days later, the United States launched
the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion in an effort to overthrow Fidel Castro’s communist
government, which had taken power in 1959. Initially angered by news of the attempted
invasion, Khrushchev was delighted at its catastrophic failure. Meanwhile, finding himself in a position of
weakness early in his presidency, Kennedy resolved to meet his Soviet counterpart in
person to prove that the United States could stand up to the Soviet Union. When the two leaders met in Vienna on the
3rd and 4th of June, Kennedy was surprised by Khrushchev’s aggressive and intimidating
approach and sensed that his counterpart considered him young and inexperienced in matters of
diplomacy. During the discussions Kennedy admitted that
his domestic position was weak and he could not be seen by Congress to make so many concessions. The Berlin crisis remained unresolved, and
Khrushchev threatened repeatedly to resolve it unilaterally by recognising East Germany
and cutting off West Berlin. In back-channel communications, the Americans
informed the Soviets that Kennedy preferred death to surrender and in July the president
approved a $3.5 billion military build-up in preparation for war, a far stronger stance
than Khrushchev had been expecting. Khrushchev had once again backed himself into
a difficult corner, Soviet diplomats found themselves in an impossible position unable
to back down, while the Soviet military was alarmed that they were expected to act on
Khrushchev’s empty threats. Not only was the Soviet Union unprepared for
a nuclear conflict, it was not prepared for a general war with the combined might of the
United States and their western allies. Khrushchev’s threats over Berlin also increased
the flow of East German refugees, as almost 50,000 people crossed over into West Berlin
in the two months of June and July 1961. Desperate to find a solution to the crisis,
Khrushchev endorsed an idea Ulbricht proposed earlier in March to build a wall dividing
East and West Berlin in order to stop the flow of people. After the Soviet leader endorsed the idea,
the plans for construction were kept secret, and by the 13th of August a barbed wire fence
divided the German capital in half. Khrushchev feared a western response but Kennedy
accepted the wall on the basis that he had only promised to protect West Berlin rather
than liberate those in East Berlin. Once it was clear that the Americans would
not tear down the barbed wire, a concrete wall would be built, serving as a symbol of
the division of the communist East and the capitalist West during the Cold War. After arriving at an acceptable solution to
the Berlin crisis, Khrushchev was optimistic about the success of his reforms after receiving
positive data on agricultural and industrial output in the summer of 1961. He was so optimistic that he felt confident
enough to announce that the USSR was about to achieve the goal of becoming a fully communist
society. Under Marxist theory, communism was the highest
level of human development when society would no longer need to be subject to any controls
and economic abundance would be shared to “each according to his need.” Before this utopian state could be reached,
however, Marx argued that there would need to be a period of socialism in order to eliminate
social and economic privileges and to ensure that old elites would not seek to regain their
previous status. In his interpretation of Marxism, Lenin argued
that only a powerful state led by workers’, the dictatorship of the proletariat, could
prepare society for the eventual transition to communism. While Stalin had talked about the advent of
communism, he never set a specific date, but at the 21st Party Congress in 1959, Khrushchev
announced that the “full and final construction of socialism” was now complete, and therefore
communism was next. He asked the State Planning Commission and
the State Economic Council for estimates of Soviet economic output over the next two decades. By projecting the impressive growth rates
of the late fifties into the next twenty years, they painted an extremely optimistic picture,
and Khrushchev declared that the USSR would overtake the United States in per capita economic
output by 1970. At the 22nd Party Congress in October 1961,
Khrushchev proudly presented his ambitious programme to build communism within twenty
years. At the same party meeting, he set out plans
to limit party leaders to two or three terms in office, while creating an exception for
individuals of “recognised authority” like himself. That Khrushchev could make these proposals
was a sign of his confidence in his authority over the party, as were his denunciations
of Stalin and his associates Molotov and Kaganovich. During the Congress, Stalin’s body was removed
from Lenin’s Mausoleum where he had been lying for eight years, and his coffin was
moved to a plot behind the mausoleum. As part of this new wave of destalinisation,
Khrushchev’s old home town of Stalino was renamed Donetsk, and the heroic city of Stalingrad
on the banks of the River Volga was renamed Volgograd. The unexpectedly violent denunciations of
Stalin encouraged the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn to seek the publication of his novel One Day
in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, portraying life in a Stalinist labour camp from the eyes
of a peasant. When Khrushchev got his hands on the manuscript
in September 1962, he was delighted by the text and the novel was published the following
month. Once again, Khrushchev’s optimism displayed
at the Congress would prove short-lived. The 1961 harvest did not live up to expectations,
and output from his Virgin Lands programme was the lowest for five years. When he toured the country to meet farmers
and party officials in the fields, they informed him that they had nothing more to give. Back in Moscow, he committed to increased
investment in agriculture in March 1962, only to reverse course four days later when it
became clear that other parts of the economy were equally strained and could not spare
any additional resources. Instead, Khrushchev resorted to another administrative
reorganisation which would have little effect. Meanwhile, the low agricultural production
forced Khrushchev to increase retail prices of agricultural products between 25 and 35
percent. Although this made economic sense and would
allow the state to pay more to the farmers and increase production, for many years the
Soviet people lived in the expectation that prices would fall rather than rise. Although Khrushchev claimed that they were
temporary, when the price increases came into effect on the 1st of June, there were widespread
protests throughout the major cities in the Soviet Union. The worst disturbances took place in the town
of Novocherkassk near the Caucasus, where on the 2nd of June the army fired on a peaceful
demonstration and killed more than 20 people. In response to the crisis in food production
and the associated price changes, Khrushchev turned to his favoured remedy of administrative
reform. In September 1962 he proposed a reorganisation
of the Communist party’s economic management structure, dividing the party into two branches
which would focus on agriculture and industry respectively. Khrushchev believed that party officials did
not take much of an interest in agricultural issues, and it was therefore necessary to
force a number of them to do so. Although Khrushchev’s colleagues on the
Presidium supported the proposals when consulted on them, in private they were appalled at
the idea of splitting the party and considered it nonsensical. Vladimir Semichastny, the head of the KGB,
later recalled asking in jest whether he would have to split the secret police into rural
and urban agents, but for the time being Khrushchev’s authority remained unassailable and nobody
dared to question him. This equation would change after further blunders
by Khrushchev in domestic and foreign policy over the next couple of years. On the 14th of October 1962, an American spy
plane flying over Cuba found that the Soviets were constructing bases for ballistic missiles
within range of the United States. Kennedy and his advisors were shocked at Khrushchev’s
boldness and questioned his motives for doing so. While the Americans believed that the Soviets
were hoping to gain leverage over the situation in Germany, Khrushchev claimed that the move
was intended to protect Communist Cuba from further invasion attempts after the Bay of
Pigs. He later recalled that even if the Americans
were to bomb the launch sites, enough missiles would survive to inflict significant damage
on major population centres such as New York, and as a result the United States would be
deterred from taking any action. It was the same sort of bluff that he had
used with Eisenhower, but Kennedy’s understanding of nuclear deterrence encouraged him to gain
a decisive advantage in capacity over the Soviets. By 1961, Kennedy was confident enough to announce
that the United States had a strategic advantage over the Soviets in numbers of intercontinental
ballistic missiles, fatally undermining Khrushchev’s defence policy. Moreover, in April 1962, Khrushchev learned
that American nuclear missiles were operational in Turkey. Sending medium range nuclear weapons to Cuba
was part of the Soviet leader’s efforts to restore the balance of power. Despite attempts to conceal the transportation
of the missiles and the military engineers and personnel required to operate and defend
them, they were easily identified from above by American aircraft. Although Castro and the Cuban government expressed
doubts about the operation, Khrushchev assured them that Kennedy would not risk nuclear war
over the missiles, but when the American president met with his advisors to consider a response,
Kennedy was adamant to take action, either by bombing the launch sites or to establish
a naval blockade to prevent the arrival of additional missiles. Under attack from opposition Republicans for
being soft on communism, the president was also keen to show that he could stand up to
Soviet provocations and accordingly, on the 22nd of October, Kennedy addressed the nation
and announced a naval blockade. Khrushchev, who feared that the Americans
would bomb the missiles in conjunction with an invasion of Cuba, was relieved when the
president appeared to back down from direct military confrontation, even though a naval
blockade was considered an act of war in itself. The crisis was not yet over, and when the
American blockade was in place by the 24th of October and the US military placed on full
alert, Kennedy could not be certain of the Soviet response. On the 25th, realising that his bluff had
been called, Khrushchev decided to deescalate and avoid a conflict which threatened to go
nuclear. On the 26th, he sent Kennedy an emotional
letter offering to withdraw the missiles in return for a pledge that the United States
would not invade Cuba, but the following day added the further demand that the Americans
should withdraw their missiles from Turkey. The shooting down of a U-2 plane over Cuba
on the 27th by Soviet forces acting without permission from Moscow further underlined
the need to reach a deal before the situation spun out of control. Kennedy dismissed calls from his advisors
to retaliate and instead replied to Khrushchev’s first offer, agreeing to give assurances about
Cuba if the Soviets were to withdraw the missiles subject to verification from the United Nations. In a meeting between the president’s brother
Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the former promised
that the president would consent to the secret withdrawal of the missiles from Turkey. On Sunday the 28th of October 1962, Khrushchev
convened a meeting of the Presidium to discuss Kennedy’s offer and accepted his terms,
bringing an end to the crisis. In the immediate aftermath, Khrushchev felt
as though he had saved the world from nuclear annihilation while securing Cuba’s defence,
but over time the Soviet leadership considered the withdrawal of missiles a defeat. Since Kennedy did not give formal assurances
about Cuba in writing, and the withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey was kept
a secret, Khrushchev could not point to any American concession in return. The fallout from the Cuban crisis also meant
that Khrushchev signalled to the world that despite his bombastic threats, he was prepared
to back down at the last minute, destroying the credibility of his foreign policy in the
process. Nevertheless, the way in which the two leaders
worked together to avoid war helped Khrushchev in his mission to achieve peaceful co-existence
with the West. In mid-1963, a hot line was established between
Washington and Moscow to keep communication open during crises, and by the end of July,
a wide-ranging nuclear test ban treaty was signed between the United States and the USSR. Khrushchev was optimistic that he could work
with Kennedy at a further summit to resolve outstanding issues between the two superpowers
and was shocked to hear news of his assassination on the 22nd of November. The Soviet premier was convinced that American
conservatives were responsible for killing the president due to his conciliatory approach
towards the Soviet Union. While he was improving relations with the
Americans, Khrushchev was undermining and alienating his colleagues at home. In March 1963, he appalled his generals by
suggesting that there was no need for a mass army and that it would be enough to have a
small army with a few nuclear missiles to ensure the defence of the Soviet Union. In the meantime, the party apparatus, which
had been his base for his rise to power, resented Khrushchev’s efforts to split the party
into agricultural and industrial branches, considering it a betrayal of Lenin’s legacy. The domestic situation got worse with drought
in the autumn of 1963, leading to a disastrous grain harvest almost 30 million tons short
of the previous year, and forcing the Soviets to buy more than 10 million tons from Canada,
Australia, and the United States. Although this was a reflection on Khrushchev’s
progress improving political and economic relations with capitalist countries, being
forced to buy grain from the western world was a humiliation for the man who promised
to build communism by 1980. By 1964, Khrushchev had alienated his colleagues
to the extent that they began to plot against him. Although they had risen up the political ranks
as his supporters, his foreign policy blunders, his party reforms, and his tendency to lose
his temper during party meetings caused widespread dissatisfaction. The leader of the plot was the 57-year-old
Leonid Brezhnev, whom Khrushchev appointed head of state as Chairman of the Presidium
of the Supreme Soviet in May 1960, and deputy party leader in June 1963. On the 12th of October 1964, while Khrushchev
was on holiday at his dacha in Pitsunda in Georgia, he received a call from Brezhnev
summoning him back to Moscow on the pretext of discussing urgent agricultural matters. Khrushchev had been warned by his family about
a plot to oust him and dismissed the rumours, but upon receiving the call from Brezhnev
he suspected that a coup was indeed taking place. During the meeting of the Presidium on the
13th, its members criticised Khrushchev’s leadership one by one, accusing him of making
decisions without consulting them and of establishing his own cult of personality. After the meeting was adjourned, Khrushchev
told his remaining political ally Anastas Mikoyan that he would not resist the coup. On the 14th of October, after everyone had
had their turn, Brezhnev concluded the meeting by proposing Khrushchev’s removal from his
posts as party leader and premier. On the 15th, Brezhnev assumed the post of
General Secretary of the Communist Party, while Khrushchev’s First Deputy Premier
Alexei Kosygin succeeded him as Premier. Khrushchev spent most of his retirement at
his dacha at Petrovo-Dalneye, which was given to him in the beginning of 1965. He had fallen into a deep depression and spent
most of his time taking long walks around the grounds. He kept up with the latest political news
on the radio and television but found little to cheer him up as his reforms were reversed
by his successors. With time to reflect on his political legacy,
he regretted not going further with destalinization and condemned the imprisonment of liberal
dissident writers. In August 1966, he began working on his memoirs
with help from his son Sergei, focusing on Stalin’s crimes and his experience of the
war. He initially refrained from talking about
his time in power, claiming that he wanted to avoid offending his successors, but eventually
covered his domestic and foreign achievements in great detail. When a party delegation confronted him at
his dacha and asked him to stop work on his memoirs, Khrushchev adamantly refused and
invited them to arrest him. Fearing that the tapes and transcripts would
be destroyed by the Soviet authorities, Khrushchev made several copies and used his family’s
connections to smuggle the manuscripts out of the Soviet Union and have them published
in London. In 1970, Khrushchev suffered two serious heart
attacks and over the following year his health continued to decline. After suffering further heart attacks at the
beginning of September, he died in hospital on the 11th of September 1971 at the age of
77. The Soviet authorities decided against a state
funeral and instead authorised a private funeral at Novodevichy Cemetery, the resting place
of many famous Russians. No condolence messages were received from
Khrushchev’s former colleagues in the party, though Mikoyan arrived at the end of the funeral
to place a wreath on the grave. Four years later, Khrushchev’s family received
permission to erect a monument at his grave designed by Ernst Neizvestny, a modernist
artist whom Khrushchev had earlier criticised in the sixties. It features slabs of white marble and black
granite, among which sits a bronze head of Khrushchev. The black and white of Khrushchev’s grave
monument, starkly echoed the contradictions of his eventful life. He was born a peasant and became an industrial
worker, and although he always sought a proper education, he was a poor student and never
graduated from his studies. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Stalin
and his purges in the 1930s, only to later denounce his legacy and his crimes in the
secret speech. While denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality,
he was criticised for building one himself. He was terrified at the prospect of nuclear
war and sought to avoid it at all costs, but his erratic actions brought the world extremely
close to nuclear conflict over Cuba. He was optimistic about building communism
in the Soviet Union but sought peaceful co-existence with the capitalist world. His political skills enabled him to outmanoeuvre
some of Stalin’s closest colleagues, but he was eventually removed from power by a
group of party officials whom he promoted up the ranks. What do you think of Nikita Khrushchev? Was he a great statesman and political leader
who was brave enough to speak out against Stalin’s crimes and who sought to make the
world a safer place during the dawn of the nuclear age? Or was he a hypocrite who never acknowledged
his own complicity in the bloodshed and suffering inflicted on the Soviet people during the
Stalin years? Please let us know in the comment section
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
