Nikita Khrushchev

• 1. Introduction

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  Nikita Khrushchev stood before a closed session of the 20th Party Congress on the 25th of February 1956, and in four hours dismantled the reputation of a man who had ruled the Soviet Union for decades. The silence in the hall was absolute. Khrushchev noted in his memoirs that "you could have heard a pin drop." The man delivering this demolition had started life as a herdsboy in a desperately poor village in western Russia, worked in mines owned by foreigners, and risen through a system built on purges he had personally helped carry out. How does a peasant's son from Kalinovka become the ruler of a superpower? And what does it mean to denounce a monster when you helped that monster operate? Those are the questions that run through the life of the leader who presided over the launch of Sputnik, nearly brought the world to nuclear war over Cuba, and was ultimately thrown out by the very party apparatus he had spent a lifetime mastering.

• 2. From Kalinovka to the Mines

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  Kalinovka, a village in what is now the Khomutovsky District of Kursk Oblast, was so poor that Khrushchev's own teacher, Lydia Shevchenko, later stated she had never seen a village as poor. Khrushchev was born there on the 15th of April 1894 to Sergei and Kseniya Khrushchev, peasants who scraped by while Sergei commuted to work in the Donbas region, laboring as a railwayman, a miner, and a factory hand where wages were higher. Nikita began working as a herdsboy before he was in his teens and received only four years of formal schooling, part of it under Shevchenko's instruction.

  Shevchenko left a lasting mark on her student. She was a freethinker who refused to attend church, and she slipped Khrushchev banned books when her brother visited. She urged him to seek more education, but family finances closed that door.

  In 1908, the family relocated permanently to Yuzovka, the industrial city that would later be renamed Stalino and then Donetsk. There, the teenage Khrushchev completed a metal fitter's apprenticeship and was hired by a factory. He lost that position after collecting money for families affected by the Lena Goldfields massacre, and then found work at a mine in Ruchenkovo, where his father was the union organizer. He helped distribute and organize public readings of Pravda. He later recalled considering emigration to the United States for better wages but deciding against it.

  When World War I began in 1914, Khrushchev was exempt from conscription as a skilled metal worker. That same year he married Yefrosinia Pisareva. In 1917, following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, he was elected to the workers' council in Rutchenkovo and by May had become its chairman. He did not join the Bolsheviks until 1918, telling his memoirs that there were many groups and it was difficult to keep them all straight. His biographer William Taubman suggests he felt closer to the Mensheviks, who prioritized economic progress over political seizure of power.

• 3. The Civil War and Early Party Work

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  In late 1918 or early 1919, Khrushchev was mobilized into the Red Army as a political commissar, a role recently introduced to indoctrinate recruits and maintain morale. He started as commissar to a construction platoon and rose to command a construction battalion, was sent away from the front for a two-month political course, and came under fire many times. The war stories he later told, however, tended to dwell on cultural awkwardness more than combat.

  The civil war also brought personal catastrophe. His wife Yefrosinia died of typhus in Kalinovka while Khrushchev was still in the army. True to his Bolshevik principles, he refused to allow her coffin inside the local church. With the only path to the burial ground running through the church, he had the coffin lifted over the fence, shocking the village.

  After demobilization in 1921, Khrushchev was assigned as assistant director for political affairs at the Rutchenkovo mine, where he threw himself into the practical work of restarting production, wearing his old mine outfit on inspection tours. By mid-1922 he was offered the directorship of a nearby mine but turned it down. He wanted education. With only four years of schooling, he enrolled in the rabfak, a remedial program attached to the technical college in Yuzovka designed to bring undereducated students up to high-school level. One teacher later described him as a poor student. He was far more successful inside the Party; he was appointed party secretary of the entire tekhnikum shortly after enrolling.

  Khrushchev's studies were supported by Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk, a well-educated Party organizer. The two lived as husband and wife for the rest of Khrushchev's life without ever formally registering the marriage. They had three children: daughter Rada, born in 1929; son Sergei, born in 1935; and daughter Elena, born in 1937.

• 4. Kaganovich's Protégé

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  Khrushchev met Lazar Kaganovich as early as 1917. When Kaganovich became Party head in Ukraine in 1925, he took Khrushchev under his wing, and within months Khrushchev was second in command of Stalin's party apparatus. By 1928 he had moved to Kiev as head of the organizational department. In 1929, he followed Kaganovich to Moscow to enroll in the Stalin Industrial Academy, and though he never completed his studies, his Party career accelerated dramatically.

  At the Academy, a power struggle in the school's Party cell ended with Khrushchev victorious: he became Party secretary of the school, arranged for problematic delegates to be withdrawn, and purged the cell of rightists. He rose to lead the Bauman district, then the Krasnopresnensky district, the capital's largest. By 1932 he was second in command of the Moscow city Party organization. By 1934 he was Party leader for Moscow itself and a member of the Central Committee.

  Khrushchev claimed his rapid rise owed something to Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's wife, whom he knew from the Academy and who spoke well of him to her husband. His biographer William Tompson is skeptical, pointing to Kaganovich as the more plausible patron.

  As head of Moscow's Party organization, Khrushchev supervised the construction of the Moscow Metro, a project announced with an opening date of the 7th of November 1934. Faced with that hard deadline, he took considerable risks, spending much of his time down in the tunnels himself. The Metro did not actually open until the 1st of May 1935, but Khrushchev received the Order of Lenin for his role. Later that year he was selected as First Secretary of the Moscow Regional Committee, responsible for a province of 11 million people.

• 5. Purges and Complicity

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  Stalin's Great Purge began in earnest in 1934. Khrushchev did not merely witness it; he participated in it. In 1936, as the Moscow Trials proceeded, he publicly demanded execution for those accused: "Everyone who rejoices in the successes achieved in our country... will find only one word suitable for the mercenary, fascist dogs of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite gang. That word is execution."

  Of the 38 top Party officials in Moscow city and province, 35 were killed. Only three survived, transferred elsewhere. Of the 146 Party secretaries of cities and districts outside Moscow city in the province, only 10 survived. In June 1937, the Politburo set a quota of 35,000 enemies to be arrested in Moscow province, with 5,000 slated for execution. Khrushchev asked that 2,000 kulaks living in Moscow be killed in partial fulfillment. Two weeks after receiving the order, he reported to Stalin that 41,305 "criminal and kulak elements" had been arrested, with 8,500 in his estimation deserving execution.

  Khrushchev was not immune to the terror himself. In 1937, he confessed his own 1923 flirtation with Trotskyism to Kaganovich, who, according to Khrushchev, "blanched." Stalin took the confession in stride and ultimately suggested Khrushchev tell the story publicly at the Moscow party conference. Khrushchev did, and was immediately reelected.

  In late 1937, Stalin sent Khrushchev to govern the Ukrainian SSR. He arrived in January 1938 to find a Party already devastated; the Central Committee of Ukraine could not even convene a quorum. After his arrival, the pace of arrests accelerated. At the Fourteenth Ukrainian Party Congress in 1939, Khrushchev told delegates: "Comrades, we must unmask and relentlessly destroy all enemies of the people. But we must not allow a single honest Bolshevik to be harmed." Biographer William Taubman noted that because Khrushchev was unsuccessfully denounced while in Kiev, he must have known that some of the denunciations were fabricated and that innocent people were suffering.

• 6. War, Loss, and Stalingrad

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  When Nazi Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941, Khrushchev was still at his post in Kiev. Stalin appointed him political commissar and he served as an intermediary between commanders in the field and Moscow. The defense of Kiev ended in catastrophe. While Marshal Georgy Zhukov later claimed Khrushchev persuaded Stalin not to evacuate troops, Khrushchev's memoirs say he and Marshal Semyon Budyonny proposed redeployment, only for Marshal Semyon Timoshenko to arrive with orders to hold. The Germans stated they took 655,000 prisoners; Soviet records counted 150,541 men escaping out of 677,085.

  In his memoirs, Khrushchev condemned the outcome without restraint: "All of this was senseless, and from the military point of view, a display of ignorance, incompetence, and illiteracy.... We were unable to save these troops because we didn't withdraw them, and as a result, we simply lost them."

  In 1942, Khrushchev and Timoshenko proposed a massive counteroffensive near Kharkov. Stalin approved part of it, committing 640,000 soldiers. The Germans had anticipated the attack and set a trap. Beginning on the 12th of May 1942, the offensive initially looked promising. Within five days, German forces had driven deep into Soviet flanks. Stalin refused to halt the attack. The USSR lost about 267,000 soldiers, including more than 200,000 captured. Khrushchev was recalled to Moscow and then dispatched to Stalingrad.

  He reached the Stalingrad Front in August 1942, soon after the battle began. His role, as General Vasily Chuikov's memoir makes clear, was not central, but Khrushchev took pride in it for the rest of his life. He remained in Stalingrad for much of the battle and was nearly killed at least once.

  Personal loss arrived in the aftermath. On the 11th of March 1943, Khrushchev's son Leonid, a fighter pilot, was apparently shot down and killed. No fellow flier witnessed the crash; no plane was found; no body was recovered. Controversy over what actually happened to Leonid has persisted ever since. Leonid's wife, Liuba, was subsequently arrested on spying charges and sentenced to five years in a labor camp. Her son by another relationship was placed in orphanages. Leonid's daughter Yulia was raised by Nikita Khrushchev and his wife.

• 7. The Secret Speech and Its Echoes

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  By the end of 1955, thousands of survivors had returned from the Gulag labor camps and were telling their stories. Accounts from survivors including Alexei Snegov and Olga Shatunovskaya reached Khrushchev and his close ally Anastas Mikoyan. Beginning in October 1955, Khrushchev fought within the leadership to expose Stalin's crimes at the upcoming 20th Party Congress. Molotov and Malenkov opposed open disclosure and pushed for a closed session.

  The Congress opened on the 14th of February 1956. In his opening address, Khrushchev pointedly asked delegates to rise in honor of Communist leaders who had died since the last congress, naming Stalin in the same breath as the little-known Kyuichi Tokuda. Then, in the early morning of the 25th of February, he delivered a four-hour address to a closed session of Soviet delegates.

  He told the delegates: "Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his brutality, and his abuse of power... he often chose the path of repression and physical annihilation, not only against actual enemies but also against individuals who had not committed any crimes against the party or the Soviet Government."

  The speech triggered unrest in Poland and revolution in Hungary. Defenders of Stalin rioted for four days in his native Georgia. The label "Secret Speech" turned out to be misleading almost immediately. Eastern European delegates were allowed to hear it the following night, reading slowly so they could take notes. By the 5th of March, copies were circulating throughout the Soviet Union marked only "not for the press." An official Polish translation appeared within a month; the Poles printed 12,000 extra copies, one of which reached the West. Khrushchev's son Sergei later wrote that the speech was soon read at Komsomol meetings, reaching another 18 million listeners, and that "spring had barely begun when the speech began circulating around the world."

  Mikhail Gorbachev, then a Komsomol official, recalled that young educated Soviets in his district were excited by the speech while many others decried it. Forty years later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev applauded Khrushchev for showing himself to be "a moral man after all."

• 8. Fall, Memoirs, and Aftermath

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  By the early 1960s, the accumulation of failures had eroded Khrushchev's standing. His agricultural policies had misfired badly. The Virgin Lands Campaign, initially successful, had become a disaster. A corn-growing crusade inspired by his admiration for American farming methods collapsed partly because he ordered corn planted even in Siberia, without the fertilizers and chemicals that farmer Roswell Garst had warned were essential. The abolition of the Machine-Tractor Stations, done in haste rather than the gradual transition originally planned, left kolkhozes impoverished and short of skilled operators. Drought in 1963 drove the grain harvest down to 107,500,000 short tons, well below the 1958 peak of 134,700,000. Khrushchev exhausted the nation's hard currency reserves buying grain abroad.

  In June 1962, food prices rose by 25-30%, particularly on meat and butter. In the southern Russian city of Novocherkassk, a strike escalated into a revolt. The military put it down in a massacre that, according to Soviet official accounts, killed 22 people and wounded 87. Another 116 demonstrators were convicted; seven were executed. The information was suppressed inside the USSR.

  The handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 damaged Khrushchev further. On the 14th of October 1964, his rivals in the nomenklatura moved against him and removed him from the Soviet leadership. He was sent into forced retirement.

  In retirement at his dacha outside Moscow, Khrushchev composed lengthy memoirs, which were smuggled to the West and published in part in 1970. He died on the 11th of September 1971. In those final years, he read Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago in full, having earlier read only excerpts, and stated: "We shouldn't have banned it. I should have read it myself. There's nothing anti-Soviet in it." The man who had ordered the attack on Pasternak spent his last years reaching a quieter verdict.