Background

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was born on April 15, 1894, in Kalinovka, Russia, near the Ukrainian border. His parents were Sergei Khrushchev and Ksenia Khrushcheva. Unlike Lenin and most other Soviet leaders, who generally had middle-class backgrounds, Khrushchev was the son of a coal miner; his grandfather had been a serf who served in the tsarist army.

Education

When Nikita was a teenager, the family moved close to Yuzovka, Ukraine, to be nearer the mines. Although he was a bright student, Khrushchev attended school sporadically for several years because he was busy working. He took jobs herding cattle and working in a factory and finally became a mechanic in the coal mines.

Career

Because of Khrushchev's factory employment, he was not conscripted in the tsarist army during World War I. Even before the Russian Revolution of 1917, he had become active in workers’ organizations, and in 1918 - during the struggle between Reds, Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists for possession of Ukraine - he became a member of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik).

In January 1919 Khrushchev joined the Red Army and served as a junior political commissar, ultimately in the campaigns against the Whites and invading Polish armies in 1920. In 1922 Khrushchev secured admission to a new Soviet workers’ school in Yuzovka, where he received a secondary education along with additional party instruction. He became a student political leader and was appointed secretary of the Communist Party Committee at the school.

In 1925 Khrushchev went into full-time party work as party secretary of the Petrovsko-Mariinsk district of Yuzovka. He distinguished himself by his hard work and knowledge of mine and factory conditions. He soon came to the notice of Joseph Stalin’s close associate, Lazar M. Kaganovich, secretary-general of the Ukrainian Party’s Central Committee, who asked Khrushchev to accompany him as a nonvoting delegate to the 14th Party Congress in Moscow. For the next four years - in Yuzovka, then in Kharkov (now Kharkiv) and Kyiv - Khrushchev was active as a party organizer. In 1929 he received permission to go to Moscow to study metallurgy at the Stalin Industrial Academy. There he was appointed secretary of the academy’s Party Committee. In 1931 he went back to full-time party work in Moscow. By 1933 he had become the second secretary of the Moscow Regional Committee.

During the early 1930s, Khrushchev consolidated his hold on the Moscow party cadres. He supervised the completion of the Moscow subway, for which he received the Order of Lenin in 1935. That year he became the first secretary of the Moscow city and regional party organization - in effect, the governor of Moscow. In the preceding year, at the 17th Party Congress, he had been elected a full member of the 70-man Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

Khrushchev was a zealous supporter of Stalin in those years and participated in the purges of party leadership. He was one of only three provincial secretaries who survived the mass executions of the Great Purge of the 1930s. He became a member of the Constitutional Committee in 1936, an alternate member of the Central Committee’s ruling Politburo in 1937, and in the same year a member of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Supreme Soviet. A year later Khrushchev was made a candidate member of the Politburo and sent to Kyiv as the first secretary of the Ukrainian party organization. In 1939 he was made a full member of the Politburo.

In 1940, after Soviet forces had occupied eastern Poland, Khrushchev presided over the "integration" of this area into the Soviet Union. His principal objective was to liquidate both the Polish and Ukrainian nationalist movements, as well as to restore the Communist Party organization in Ukraine, which had been shattered in the Great Purge. This work was disrupted by the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Khrushchev’s first wartime assignment was to evacuate as much of Ukraine’s industry as possible to the east. Thereafter he was attached to the Soviet army with the rank of lieutenant general; his principal task was to stimulate the resistance of the civilian population and maintain liaison with Stalin and other members of the Politburo. He was a political adviser to Marshal Andrey I. Yeremenko during the defense of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and to Lieutenant General Nikolay F. Vatutin during the huge tank battle at Kursk.

After the liberation of Ukraine in 1944, Khrushchev reassumed control of Ukraine as the first secretary of the Ukrainian party organization. He worked to restore the civil administration and to bring that devastated country back to a subsistence level. A famine in 1946 was one of the worst in Ukraine’s history; Khrushchev fought to restore grain production and to distribute food supplies, against Stalin’s insistence on greater production from Ukraine for use in other areas. During this period Khrushchev gained a firsthand acquaintance with the problems of Soviet agricultural scarcity and planning. In 1949 Stalin called him back to Moscow, where he took over his old job as head of the Moscow City Party and concurrently was appointed secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

After Stalin’s death in March 1953 and the execution of the powerful state security chief, Lavrenty Beria - which Khrushchev engineered - he engaged in a power struggle with Malenkov, who was Stalin’s heir apparent. Khrushchev soon gained the decisive margin by his control of the party machinery. In September 1953 he replaced Malenkov as the first secretary and in 1955 removed Malenkov from the premiership in favor of his handpicked nominee, Marshal Nikolay A. Bulganin.

Significantly, by 1954 Khrushchev had been able to reform the Stalinist security apparatus by subordinating it to the top party leadership. Stalin’s Ministry of Internal Affairs was divided into criminal police and the security services - the Committee on State Security (KGB), which in turn reported to the U.S.S.R.’s Council of Ministers.

In May 1955, when Khrushchev made his first trip outside the Soviet Union - to Yugoslavia with Bulganin - he began to show his flexibility; he apologized to Josip Broz Tito for Stalin’s denunciation of Yugoslav communism in 1948. Later, in trips to Geneva, Afghanistan, and India, he began to exhibit a brash, extroverted personal diplomacy that was to become his trademark. Although his attacks on world capitalism were virulent and primitive, his outgoing personality and peasant humour were in sharp contrast to the image earlier Soviet public figures had cultivated.

Inevitably, the de-Stalinization movement had repercussions in the communist countries of eastern Europe. Poland revolted against its government in October 1956. Hungary followed shortly afterward. Faced with open revolution, Khrushchev flew to Warsaw on October 19 with other Soviet leaders and ultimately acquiesced in the Polish leader Władysław Gomułka’s national communist solution, which allowed the Poles a great deal of freedom. Khrushchev’s shared decision to crush the Hungarian Revolution by force, however, came largely because of the Hungarian premier Imre Nagy’s decision to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Aside from this sanguinary exception, Khrushchev allowed a considerable amount of freedom to the European communist parties.

The stresses in eastern Europe helped crystallize opposition to Khrushchev within the Soviet Communist Party. In June 1957 he was almost overthrown from his position, and, although a vote in the Presidium (i.e., the Politburo) actually went against him, he managed to reverse this by appealing to the full membership of the party’s Central Committee. In the end, with the help of Marshal Georgy Zhukov, he secured the permanent disgrace of Malenkov, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, and others, who were labeled members of the antiparty group. A few months later, in October, he dismissed Marshal Georgy Zhukov from his post as minister of defense. In March 1958 Khrushchev assumed the premiership of the Soviet Union.

The central crisis of Khrushchev’s administration was agriculture. An optimist, he based many plans on the bumper crops in 1956 and 1958, which fueled his repeated promises to overtake the United States in agricultural as well as in industrial production. He opened up more than 70 million acres of virgin land in Siberia and sent thousands of labourers to till them; but his plan was unsuccessful, and the Soviet Union soon again had to import wheat from Canada and the United States.

The failures in agriculture, the quarrel with China, and the humiliating resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, added to growing resentment of his own arbitrary administrative methods, were the major factors in Khrushchev’s downfall. On October 14, 1964, after a palace coup orchestrated by his protégé and deputy, Leonid Brezhnev, the Central Committee accepted Khrushchev’s request to retire from his position as the party’s first secretary and chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union because of "advanced age and poor health."

For almost seven years thereafter, Khrushchev lived quietly in Moscow and at his country dacha as a "non-person" - officially a special pensioner of the Soviet government. He was mentioned in the Soviet press occasionally and appeared in public only to vote in Soviet elections. The one break in this ordered obscurity came in 1970 with the publication of his memoirs in the United States and Europe, although not in the Soviet Union. This was the first installment of a large body of personal reminiscence that he dictated in secret during his retirement.

Achievements

• For the Soviet Union and indeed for the entire world communist movement, Nikita Khrushchev was the great catalyst of political and social change. In his seven years of power as first secretary and premier, he broke both the fact and the tradition of the Stalin dictatorship and established a basis for liberalizing tendencies within Soviet communism.
  
  Khrushchev was responsible for the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, for backing the progress of the early Soviet space program, and for several relatively liberal reforms in areas of domestic policy. The period of Khrushchev's rule is often called the "thaw": many political prisoners were released, compared to the period of Stalin's reign, the activity of repression declined significantly.
  
  Khrushchev also attempted to improve Soviet living standards and allow greater freedom in cultural and intellectual life. In the mid-1950s, he launched his 'Virgin Lands' campaign to encourage farming on previously uncultivated land in the Kazakh Republic (Kazakhstan). He invested in the Soviet space program, resulting in the 1957 flight of Sputnik I, the first spacecraft to orbit the earth.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Khrushchev Remembers 1970

Religion

The anti-religious campaign of the Khrushchev era began in 1959, coinciding with the twenty first Party Congress in the same year. It was carried out by mass closures of churches (reducing the number from 22, 000 in 1959 to 13, 008 in 1960 and to 7, 873 by 1965), monasteries, and convents, as well as of the still-existing seminaries (pastoral courses would be banned in general). The campaign also included a restriction of parental rights for teaching religion to their children, a ban on the presence of children at church services (beginning in 1961 with the Baptists and then extended to the Orthodox in 1963), and a ban on administration of the Eucharist to children over the age of four. Khrushchev additionally banned all services held outside of church walls, renewed enforcement of the 1929 legislation banning pilgrimages, and recorded the personal identities of all adults requesting church baptisms, weddings or funerals. He also disallowed the ringing of church bells and services in daytime in some rural settings from May to the end of October under the pretext of field work requirements. Non-fulfillment of these regulations by clergy would lead to disallowance of state registration for them (which meant they could no longer do any pastoral work or liturgy at all, without special state permission). According to Dimitry Pospielovsky, the state carried out forced retirement, arrests and prison sentences on clergymen for "trumped up charges," but he writes that it was in reality for resisting the closure of churches and for giving sermons attacking atheism or the anti-religious campaign, or who conducted Christian charity or who made religion popular by personal example.

Khrushchev set a new policy of "Reform Communism." In an attempt to humanize the Soviet system - but without sacrificing its ideology - he placed greater emphasis on producing consumer goods, in contrast to the Stalinist emphasis on heavy industry. With several million political prisoners newly released from the infamous labour camps of the Gulag, the domestic political atmosphere became freer. In his rough way, Khrushchev was a populist.

Politics

On February 25, 1956, during the 20th Party Congress in Moscow, Khrushchev delivered his memorable secret speech about the excesses of Stalin’s one-man rule, attacking the late Soviet ruler’s "intolerance, his brutality, his abuse of power." The spectacle of the first secretary of the Communist Party exposing the wrongful executions of the Great Purge of the 1930s and the excesses of Soviet police repression, after years of fearful silence, had far-reaching effects that Khrushchev himself could barely have foreseen. The resulting "thaw" in the Soviet Union saw the release of millions of political prisoners and the "rehabilitation" of many thousands more who had perished.

Khrushchev’s rule was not without its dark side - including an intensified persecution of religion. Nonetheless, by smashing the repressive icon of Stalinism and the mentality of terror that had been imposed on the general population, Khrushchev inspired a new intellectual ferment and widespread hopes for greater freedom, particularly among students and intellectuals.

Later Khrushchev set a new policy of "Reform Communism." In an attempt to humanize the Soviet system - but without sacrificing its ideology - he placed greater emphasis on producing consumer goods, in contrast to the Stalinist emphasis on heavy industry. With several million political prisoners newly released from the infamous labour camps of the Gulag, the domestic political atmosphere became freer. In his rough way, Khrushchev was a populist.

In foreign affairs, he widely asserted his doctrine of peaceful coexistence with the noncommunist world, which he had first enunciated in a public speech at the 20th Party Congress. In opposition to old communist writ, he stated that "war is not fatalistically inevitable." At the 21st Party Congress in 1959 he said: "We offer the capitalist countries peaceful competition." His visit to the United States in 1959, where he toured cities and farms with the ebullience of a politician running for office, was a decided success, and the "spirit of Camp David," in Maryland, where he conferred with United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower, brought Soviet-American relations to a new high. Notwithstanding these hopeful developments, Khrushchev as a diplomat remained irascible and blunt. At a Moscow reception in 1956 he directed his famous "We will bury you!" comment at the capitalist West. During a meeting with United States Vice Pres. Richard M. Nixon in Moscow in 1959 (the so-called "kitchen debate" named for the model American kitchen in which part of the meeting took place), Khrushchev failed to be impressed by a display of American innovations, boasting that the Soviet Union soon would surpass the United States in its technological developments. A long-planned summit conference with Eisenhower in Paris in May 1960 broke up with Khrushchev’s announcement that a United States plane (a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft) had been shot down over the Soviet Union and its pilot captured. Later that year, at the United Nations, he reacted to a comparison between Soviet control of eastern Europe and Western imperialism by banging his shoe on a desk (or perhaps just brandishing it menacingly, as some witnesses attested). In 1961 his blustering Vienna conference with the new United States president, John F. Kennedy, led to no agreement on the pressing German question; the Berlin Wall was built shortly thereafter.

Soviet success in lofting the world’s first space satellite in 1957 had been followed by increased missile buildups. In 1962 Khrushchev secretly attempted to base Soviet medium-range missiles in Cuba, but these efforts were detected by the United States. During the resulting tense confrontation in October 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union apparently stood on the brink of nuclear war, Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles on the promise that the United States would make no further attempt to overthrow Cuba’s communist government. (See Cuban missile crisis.) The Soviet Union was criticized by the Chinese communists for this settlement. The Sino-Soviet split, which began in 1959, reached the stage of public denunciations in 1960. China’s ideological insistence on all-out "war against the imperialists" and Mao Zedong’s annoyance with Khrushchev’s coexistence policies were exacerbated by Soviet refusal to assist the Chinese nuclear weapon buildup and to rectify the Russo-Chinese border. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty reached between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1963, although generally welcomed throughout the world, intensified Chinese denunciations of Soviet "revisionism."

Views

During Khrushchev’s time in office, he had to steer constantly between, on the one hand, popular pressures toward a consumer-oriented society and agitation by intellectuals for greater freedom of expression and, on the other, the growing fear of the Soviet bureaucracy that reform would get out of hand. Khrushchev himself was uneasy with intellectuals, and he sanctioned the repression of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) within the Soviet Union, culminating in the refusal to allow Pasternak to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. His crude condemnations of Soviet avant-garde artists recalled Stalin’s intolerance in cultural matters. On the other hand, Khrushchev permitted the 1962 publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, with its sweeping denunciation of Stalinist repression. Other similar works of protest followed, creating what the historian Martin Malia calls "a culture of dissidence" an emerging public opinion in Russia which later repression proved unable to completely control. Meanwhile, for the first time, Soviet tourists were permitted to go overseas, and Khrushchev often seemed amenable to widening exchanges with both socialist and capitalist countries.

Khrushchev’s desire to reduce conventional armaments in favor of nuclear missiles was bitterly resisted by the Soviet military. His often high-handed methods of leadership and his attempted decentralization of the party structure antagonized many of those who had supported his rise to power. By this time, four decades after the Revolution, the Communist Party had solidified into the so-called nomenklatura - a 10 million-strong elite of bureaucrats, managers, and technicians intent on guarding their power and prerogatives. In 1962 Khrushchev further weakened the party’s hold over the economy by announcing a policy of creating separate party-government networks in the fields of industry and agriculture.

Quotations: "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will dig you in."

"If you start throwing hedgehogs under me, I shall throw a couple of porcupines under you."

"My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul."

"Yes, today we have genuine Russian weather. Yesterday we had Swedish weather. I can't understand why your weather is so terrible. Maybe it is because you are immediate neighbours of NATO."

Personality

Khrushchev was a short, chubby, ebullient risk taker not shy about using profane language. He was also described as smart, friendly, down to earth and tough. He seemed genuinely interested in helping the Russian people. His biographer William Taubman said he fit the definition of a "hypomaniac" - "elated, energetic, self-promoting...work-addicted...lacking a systematic approach...Grand schemes, racing thought...constantly ‘up’ - until exhaustion eventually sets in."

During much of the Cold War, Khrushchev could be charming, playfully combative or belligerent, depending on his audience. Publicly, he called for a peaceful coexistence with the West and then warned "We will bury you!" And in what became known as the "kitchen debate," in July 1959 Khrushchev verbally sparred with United States Vice President Richard Nixon over Soviet versus American innovation in home appliances, among other major disagreements.

Khrushchev famously banged his shoe at his desk at a general assembly meeting at the United Nations in New York in October 1960. Even today, the most frequently asked question by visitors to the U.N. is where Khrushchev banged his shoe. But there is some debate as to what really went down that day. Many witnesses insist he didn’t bang his shoe while others insist he did.

Quotes from others about the person

• "He could be charming or vulgar, ebullient or sullen, he was given to public displays of rage (often contrived) and to soaring hyperbole in his rhetoric. But whatever he was, however, he came across, he was more human than his predecessor or even than most of his foreign counterparts, and for much of the world that was enough to make the USSR seem less mysterious or menacing." - Khrushchev biographer Tompson
  
  "He's a charming fellow between sentences." - John Charles Daly
  
  "Comrade Khrushchev often repeats that Socialism cannot be built with American wheat. I think it can be done by anyone who knows how to do it, while a person who doesn't know how to do it cannot build Socialism even with his own wheat. Khrushchev says we live on charity received from the imperialist countries … What moral right have those who attack us to rebuke us about American aid or credits when Khruschev himself has just tried to conclude an economic agreement with America?" - Josip Broz Tito

Connections

In 1914, Nikita Khrushchev married Yefrosinia Pisareva, daughter of the elevator operator at the Rutchenkovo mine. In 1915, they had a daughter, Yulia, and in 1917, a son, Leonid.

Later Khrushchev met Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk, a well-educated Party organizer and daughter of well-to-do Ukrainian peasants. The two lived together as husband and wife for the rest of Khrushchev's life, though they did not register their marriage until 1965. They had three children together: daughter Rada was born in 1929, son Sergei in 1935, and daughter Elena in 1937.

Father:

Sergei Khrushchev

Mother:

Ksenia Khrushcheva

late wife:

Yefrosinia Pisareva

Wife:

Nina Kukharchuk

Daughter:

Yulia Khrushcheva

Son:

Leonid Khrushchev

Daughter:

Rada Khrushcheva

Daughter:

Elena Khrushcheva

Son:

Sergei Khrushchev

References

• Khrushchev: The Man and His Era The definitive biography of the mercurial Soviet leader who succeeded and denounced Stalin. Combining a page-turning historical narrative with penetrating political and psychological analysis, this book brims with the life and excitement of a man whose story personified his era.
  1990
• Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev (Volume 1: Commissar, 1918–1945)
• Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev (Volume 2: Reformer, 1945–1964)
• Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev (Volume 3: Statesman, 1953–1964)
• Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower
  2000