Khrushchev came into this world on April 15, 1894, in Kalinovka, a small Russian town near the Ukrainian border. At the age of fourteen he moved with his family to the Ukrainian mining town of Yuzovka, where he apprenticed as a metalworker and did other odd jobs. Despite his religious upbringing, Khrushchev joined the Bolshevik Communists in 1918, just a year after they seized power in the Russian Revolution. During the ensuing Russian Civil War, Khrushchev’s first wife, with whom he had two children, died of typhus. He later remarried as well and had 4 more children.
In 1929, Khrushchev moved to Moscow, where he steadily rose through the ranks of the Communist Party. Eventually Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin entered the inner circle of him, who at that particular time had consolidated control over the nation and instituted a bloody purge of perceived opponents. Millions of people were killed or imprisoned in Gulag labor camps, and millions more died in famines caused by the forced collectivization of agriculture.
During World War II, Khrushchev mobilized soldiers to fight Nazi Germany in the Ukraine and Stalingrad. After the battle, he helped rebuild the devastated countryside while simultaneously quelling Ukrainian nationalist dissent. When Stalin died in March 1953, Khrushchev had set himself up as a possible successor. 6 weeks later, he became the top leader of the Communist Party and probably the most powerful people in the USSR.
At first, Khrushchev and other high-ranking officials ruled through a kind of collective leadership. But in 1955, he arranged for the removal of Prime Minister Georgi Malenkov and replaced him with an ally, Nikolai Bulganin. Khrushchev foiled a Malenkov-led coup attempt in June 1957 and was reunited to take office as prime minister the following March.
As a staunch Stalinist, Khrushchev made a lengthy speech in February 1956 criticizing Stalin for arresting and deporting opponents, rising above the gathering, and incompetent wartime leadership, among several other elements. . It was claimed that this particular withering, albeit inconclusive, accusation of Stalin remained secret. However, by June of that year, the US State Department had printed the full text. Beginning in 1957, Khrushchev made some minor attempts to rehabilitate Stalin’s image. But he changed course again in 1961, when the name of the city of Stalingrad was changed and Stalin’s remains were removed from Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square.
Emboldened by Khrushchev’s so-called “secret speech,” protesters took to the roads in the Soviet satellites of Hungary and Poland. The Polish revolt was settled quite peacefully, although the Hungarian revolt was violently suppressed with tanks and troops. In all, a minimum of 2,500 Hungarians had been killed by the end of 1956 and also approximately 13,000 wounded. Many more fled to the West and others have been arrested or perhaps deported.
On the domestic front, Khrushchev managed, never successfully, to increase agricultural production and raise living standards. He also reduced the power of the Soviet Union’s feared secret police, freed many political prisoners, eased artistic censorship, launched much more of the country to international guests, and ushered in the space age in 1957 with the launch of the Sputnik satellite. . 2 years later, a Soviet rocket landed on the moon, and also in 1961 Soviet astronaut Yuri A. Gagarin became the first man in space.
Khrushchev had a complex relationship with the West. A fervent believer in communism, he preferred, however, peaceful coexistence with the capitalist nations. Unlike Stalin, he actually went to the United States. Relations between the 2 superpowers soured somewhat in 1960 when the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane deep in their territory. The following year, Khrushchev approved the construction of the Berlin Wall so that he could prevent East Germans from fleeing to capitalist West Germany.
Cold War tensions peaked in October 1962 when the United States found Soviet nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba. Although, after a 13-day standoff, Khrushchev agreed to remove the weapons, the planet appeared to be on the brink of nuclear conflict. In return, US President John F. Kennedy, who a season earlier had authorized the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, publicly agreed not to attack Cuba. Kennedy also privately agreed to withdraw US nuclear weapons from Turkey. In July 1963, the United States, the United Kingdom, and also the Soviet Union negotiated a partial ban on nuclear tests.
Among the sharpest thorns on Khrushchev’s blade was fellow communist Mao Zedong, the leader of China. Beginning around 1960, the two sides engaged in an increasingly vindictive battle of terms, with Khrushchev labeling Mao a “left-wing revisionist” who did not understand modern warfare. Meanwhile, the Chinese criticized Khrushchev as a “psalm-singing buffoon” who underestimated the dynamics of Western imperialism.
The clash with China, as well as food shortages in the USSR, eroded Khrushchev’s validity in the eyes of other top Soviet officials, who had previously resented what they saw as his erratic penchant for undermining their authority. In October 1964, Khrushchev was recalled from vacation in Pitsunda, Georgia, and forced to resign as prime minister and top leader of the Communist Party. Khrushchev wrote his memoir and lived in silence for the rest of his days before dying of a heart attack in September 1971. However, his reformist spirit endured through the perestroika era of the 1980s.
