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'Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev' (, ''Nikita Sergeevič Khruščjov''; , in English, , or , occasionally ); surname more accurately romanized as 'Khrushchyov'
[1];
[2] –
September 11,
1971) was the chief director of the
Soviet Union after the death of
Joseph Stalin. He was
First Secretary of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and
Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. He was removed from power by his party colleagues in 1964 and replaced by
Leonid Brezhnev. He spent the last seven years of his life under the close supervision of the
KGB.
Early days
Nikita Khrushchev was born in the village of
Kalinovka, Dmitriyev
Uyezd,
Kursk Guberniya,
Russian Empire, now occupied by the present-day
Kursk Oblast in
Russia. His father was the peasant Sergei Nikanorovich Khrushchev (d. 1938 of tuberculosis); his mother was Aksinia Ivanovna Khrushcheva. He had a sister two years his junior, Irina. In 1908, his family moved to
Yuzovka (now
Donetsk,
Ukraine). Later, since he spent much time working in Ukraine, Khrushchev gave off the impression of being Ukrainian. He supported this image by wearing Ukrainian national shirts. However, he has personally stated that "I Myself Am Russian".
[1]
Although he was apparently highly intelligent, he only received about two years of
education as a child and probably only became fully literate in his late twenties or early thirties.
He was trained and worked as a joiner in various factories and mines. During
World War I, Khrushchev became involved in
trade union activities, and, after the
Bolshevik revolution in 1917, he fought in the
Red Army. He became a Party member in 1918 and worked at various management and Party positions in
Donbass and
Kiev.
In 1931, Khrushchev was transferred to Moscow and, in 1935, he became 1st Secretary of the Moscow City Committee (Moscow Gorkom) of VKP(b). The Moscow city secretaryship was a traditional proving ground for rising stars in the party (cf
Boris Yeltsin) and Khruschev apparently impressed with his leadership of the
Moscow Metro works.
In 1938, he became the 1st Secretary of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, one of the most senior regional party positions.
Beginning in 1934, Khrushchev was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow, and he was a member of the
Politburo beginning in 1939.
Great Patriotic War
During the
Great Patriotic War, Khrushchev served as a
''zampolit'' with the equivalent
rank of
Lieutenant General.
In the months following the
German invasion, in 1941, Khrushchev, as a local party leader, was coordinating the defense of Ukraine, but was dismissed and recalled to Moscow after surrendering Kiev. Later, he was a
political commissar at the
Battle of Stalingrad and was the senior political officer in the south of the Soviet Union throughout the war time period - at
Kursk, entering
Kiev on liberation, and in the suppression of the
Bandera nationalists of the
Ukrainian Nationalist Organisation, who had earlier allied with the
Nazis before fighting them in
Western Ukraine.
In the years leading up to 1953, Khrushchev was an ardent Stalinist, carrying out Stalin's orders with uncritical obedience; he earned the nickname "the Butcher of the Ukraine" in the late 1940s.
[3]
Rise to power
After Joseph Stalin's death in March 1953, there was a power struggle between different factions within the party. Initially
Lavrenty Beria controlled much of the political realm by merging the Ministry of Internal Affairs and State security. Fearing that Beria would eventually kill them,
Georgy Malenkov,
Lazar Kaganovich,
Vyacheslav Molotov,
Nikolai Bulganin and others united under Khrushchev to denounce Beria and remove him from power. With Beria imprisoned awaiting execution (which followed in December), Malenkov was the heir apparent. Khrushchev was not nearly as powerful as he would eventually become even after his promotion. Becoming party leader on
September 7 of that year, and eventually rising above his rivals, Khrushchev's leadership marked a crucial transition for the Soviet Union. He pursued a course of reform and shocked delegates to the
20th Party Congress on
25 February 1956 by making his famous
Secret Speech denouncing the "
cult of personality" that surrounded Stalin (although he himself had no small part in cultivating it), and accusing Stalin of crimes committed during the
Great Purges. This effectively alienated Khrushchev from the more conservative elements of the Party, but he managed to defeat what he termed the
Anti-Party Group after they failed in a bid to oust him from the party leadership in 1957.
In 1958, Khrushchev replaced Bulganin as prime minister and established himself as the undisputed leader of both state and party. He became
Premier of the Soviet Union on
March 27, 1958. Khruschev promoted reform of the Soviet system and began to place an emphasis on the production of consumer goods rather than on heavy industry.
He sought to lower the burden of defense spending on the Soviet economy by placing a new emphasis on rocket based defense. The Soviet lead in this technology was emphasized by the success of
Sputnik 1 and subsequently
Yuri Gagarin's
Vostok flight. However, real Soviet missile forces remained small and the price that Khruschev paid inside the Soviet system - hostility from the armed forces - was a major contribution to his eventual removal from office.
At the same time the fear of Soviet missile forces was real enough in the West - prompting then United States of America Senator
John F. Kennedy to attack then United States of America Vice-President
Richard M. Nixon over the
missile gap in the
United States Presidential election, 1960 and culminating in the stand off of the
Cuban missile crisis.
Domestically Khruschev did not seek to roll back the
collectivisation of agriculture but instead promoted the
virgin lands campaign programme with the claim that the Soviet Union could meet and surpass western levels of agricultural production through application of modern techniques and use of new crops. Initial successes here rapidly turned sour.
In 1959, during Richard Nixon's journey to the Soviet Union, he took part in what was later known as the
Kitchen Debate. Khrushchev reciprocated the visit that September, spending thirteen days in the United States, where he visited many American sites but was famously refused entry to
Disneyland. His new attitude towards the West as a rival instead of as an evil entity alienated
Mao Zedong's China. The Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, too, would later be involved in a similar "cold war" triggered by the
Sino-Soviet Split in 1960.
In 1961, Khrushchev approved plans proposed by
East German leader
Walter Ulbricht to build the
Berlin Wall, thereby reinforcing the Cold War division of
Germany and
Europe as a whole.
Khrushchev's personality
Khrushchev was regarded by his political enemies in the Soviet Union as boorish. He had a reputation for interrupting speakers to insult them. The Politburo accused him once of 'hare-brained scheming' — referring to his erratic policies. He regularly humiliated the Soviet ''
nomenklatura'', or ruling elite, with his gaffes. He once branded Mao, who was at odds with Khruschev ever since the denunciation of Stalin at the 1956 Congress, an "old galosh", which was translated as "old boot". In Mandarin, the word "boot" is used to describe a prostitute or immoral woman. The Soviet leader also famously condemned his
Bulgarian counterpart, making
xenophobic comments about the Bulgarian people as well.
Khrushchev's blunders were partially the result of his limited formal education. Although intelligent, as even his political enemies admitted after he had defeated them, and certainly cunning, he lacked knowledge and understanding of the world outside of his direct experience and often proved easy to manipulate by hucksters who knew how to appeal to his vanity and prejudices. For example, he was a supporter of
Trofim Lysenko even after the Stalin years and became convinced that the Soviet Union's agricultural crises could be solved through the planting of
maize (corn) on the same scale as the United States, failing to realize that the differences in climate and soil made this inadvisable.
Khrushchev repeatedly disrupted the proceedings in the
United Nations General Assembly in September-October 1960 by pounding his fists on the desk and shouting in
Russian. On
29 September 1960, Khrushchev twice interrupted a speech by British Prime Minister
Harold Macmillan. The unflappable Macmillan famously commented over his shoulder to
Frederick Boland, the Assembly President (Ireland), that if Mr Khrushchev wished to continue, he would like a translation.
[4] Khrushchev is frequently alleged to have removed his shoe and banged it on the desk during Macmillan's speech, though no contemporary evidence exists to support this.
[5]
The notorious shoe-banging incident occurred during a debate, on October 12, over a Russian resolution decrying colonialism. Khrushchev was infuriated by a statement from the rostrum by
Lorenzo Sumulong which charged the Soviets with employing a double standard, pointing to their domination of Eastern Europe as an example of the very type of colonialism their resolution criticized. According to newspaper reports, published the following day, Mr. Khrushchev thereupon pulled off his right shoe, stood up, brandishing it at the Philippine delegate on the other side of the hall and began to furiously bang the shoe on his desk. The enraged Khrushchev accused Mr. Sumulong of being "Холуй и ставлeнник импeриализма", which was translated as "a jerk, a stooge and a lackey of imperialism". The Premier alternately shouted, waved a brawny right arm, shook his finger and removed his shoe a second time. The second shoe incident occurred during a speech by
Francis O. Wilcox, an Assistant U.S. Secretary of State. The chaotic scene finally ended when General Assembly President
Frederick Boland broke his gavel calling the meeting to order, but not before the image of Khrushchev as a hotheaded buffoon was indelibly etched into the collective memory of the international community. On another occasion, Khrushchev said in reference to capitalism, "Мы вас похороним!", translated to "
We will bury you". This phrase, ambiguous both in the English language and in the Russian language, was interpreted in several ways. Later, he would refer back to the comment and state, "I once got in trouble for saying, 'We will bury you'. Of course, we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you".
Forced retirement
Khrushchev's downfall came as a result of an apparent conspiracy among the Party bosses, irritated by his erratic policies and cantankerous behaviour, which was seen by the Party as an embarrassment on the international stage. The Communist Party accused Khrushchev of making political mistakes, such as mishandling the 1962
Cuban missile crisis and disorganizing the Soviet economy, especially in the agricultural sector.
The conspirators, led by
Leonid Brezhnev,
Aleksandr Shelepin and the
KGB chief
Vladimir Semichastny, struck in October 1964, when Khrushchev was on vacation in
Pitsunda,
Abkhazia. They called a special meeting of the
Presidium of the
Central Committee and, when Khrushchev arrived on
13 October, voted to remove him from his positions in the Party and in the
Soviet government. A special meeting of the
Central Committee was hastily convened the next day and approved the decisions of the
Presidium without debate. On
15 October 1964, the
Presidium of the USSR
Supreme Soviet accepted Khrushchev's resignation as the
Premier of the Soviet Union.
Following his ousting, Khrushchev spent the rest of his life as a
pensioner, living in quiet retirement in
Moscow. He remained a member of the
Central Committee until 1966. For the rest of his life, he was closely watched by the
KGB, but managed to dictate his memoirs and smuggle them to the West. He died at his home in
Moscow on
11 September 1971 and is buried in the
Novodevichy Cemetery,
Moscow, Russia, having been denied a state funeral and interment in the
Kremlin wall.
Key political actions
★ In his
Secret Speech, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for his
personality cult and his regime for "violation of Leninist norms of legality", marking the onset of the
Khrushchev Thaw.
★ Dissolved the
Cominform organization and reconciled with
Josip Broz Tito, which ended the
Informbiro period in the history of
Yugoslavia.
★ Established the
Warsaw Pact in 1955 in response to the formation of
NATO.
★ Ordered the 1956 Soviet military intervention in
Hungary (''see''
Hungarian Revolution of 1956).
★ Ceded
Crimea from the
Russian SFSR to the
Ukrainian SSR in 1955.
★ Provided support for
Egypt against the West during the 1956
Suez Crisis.
★ Promoted the doctrine of "
Peaceful co-existence" in the foreign policy, accompanied by the slogan "To catch up and overtake the West" in internal policy.
★ Triggered the
Sino-Soviet Split through talks with the U.S. and a refusal to support the Chinese nuclear program.
★ Initiated the
Soviet space program that launched
Sputnik I and
Yuri Gagarin, getting a head start in the
space race. Participated in negotiations with U.S. President
John F. Kennedy for a joint moon program, negotiations that ended when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
★ Cancelled a summit meeting over the
Gary Powers U-2 incident.
★ Met with
Eisenhower at
Camp David, Maryland in September 1959. He was the first Russian leader to visit the United States in a diplomatic capacity.
★ Initiated the deployment of
nuclear missiles in
Cuba, which led to the
Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
★ Approved
East Germany's construction of the
Berlin Wall in 1961, after the West ignored his request that
West Berlin be incorporated into a neutral, demilitarized "free city".
Key economic actions
★ Second wave of the
reclamation of virgin and abandoned lands (''see''
Virgin Lands Campaign).
★ Introduction of
sovnarkhozes, (Councils of People's Economy), regional organizations, in an attempt to combat the centralization and departmentalism of the ministries
★ Reorganization of agriculture, with preference given to
sovkhozes (state farms), including conversion of
kolkhozes into sovkhozes, introduction of
maize (earning him the
sobriquet ''
kukuruznik'', "the maize enthusiast").
★ Coping with
housing crisis by quickly building millions of apartments according to simplified
floor plans, dubbed
khrushchovkas.
★ Created a minimum wage in 1956.
★ Redenomination of the
ruble 10:1 in 1961.
Legacy
Khrushchev's grave at the Novodevichy Cemetery was designed by
Ernst Neizvestny, a sculptor he had denounced for promoting "
degenerate art". It was made out of black and white stone to suggest that Khrushchev was both a good and a bad ruler.
Khrushchev sculpture at Nixon Library
On the positive side, he was admired for his efficiency and for maintaining an economy which, during the 1950s and 1960s, had growth rates higher than most Western countries, contrasted with the stagnation beginning with his successors. He is renowned for his liberalisation policies, whose results began with the widespread
exoneration of political sentences.
With Khrushchev's amnesty program, former political prisoners and their surviving relatives could now live a normal life without the infamous "
wolf ticket".
Khrushchev placed more emphasis on the production of consumer goods and housing instead of heavy industry, precipitating a rapid rise in living standards.
The arts benefited from this environment of liberalisation, where works like Solzhenitsyn's ''
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich'' created an attitude of dissent that would escalate during the subsequent Brezhnev-Kosygin era.
His
de-Stalinization had a huge impact on young Communists of the day. Khrushchev encouraged more liberal communist leaders to replace hard-line Stalinists throughout the Eastern bloc.
Alexander Dubček, who became the leader of
Czechoslovakia in January 1968, accelerated the process of liberalisation in his own country with his
Prague Spring programme.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who became the Soviet Union's leader in 1985, was inspired by it and it became evident with his policies of
glasnost and
perestroika. Khrushchev is sometimes cited as "the last great reformer" among Soviet leaders before Gorbachev.
On the negative side, he was criticized for his ruthless crackdown of the
1956 revolution in Hungary, even though he and
Zhukov were pushing against intervention until Hungary's declaration of withdrawal from the
Warsaw Pact. He encouraged the East German authorities to set up the notorious
Berlin Wall in August 1961. He had very poor diplomatic skills, giving him the reputation of being a rude, uncivilized peasant in the West and as an irresponsible clown in his own country. He renewed persecutions against the
Russian Orthodox Church, publicly promising to show the "last priest" on
Soviet television. Between 1960 and 1962, as many as 30 percent of churches were destroyed, with the number of monasteries falling by a quarter.
[6]
His administration, although efficient, were also known to be erratic since he disbanded a large number of Stalinist-era agencies. He made a dangerous gamble in 1962 over Cuba, which almost made a Third World War inevitable. Agriculture barely kept up with population growth, as bad harvests mixed with good ones, culminating with a disastrous harvest in 1963, due to weather. All this damaged his prestige after 1962 and was enough for the Central Committee, Khrushchev's critical base of support, to take action against him. His right-hand man,
Leonid Brezhnev, led the bloodless coup.
Many dissidents tended to view the Khrushchev era with nostalgia as his successors began discrediting or backtracking on his liberal reforms.
Personal life
Khrushchev married Yefrosinia Pisareva (1896-1921) in 1914. A year later their daughter Yulia (d. 1981) was born, and they had a son, Leonid, three days after the
October Revolution. Yefrosinia died in 1921 of hunger, exhaustion and typhus during the famine following the
Russian Civil War. In 1922 Khrushchev married a girl of 17 named Marusia but, as she attended to her young daughter and neglected her stepchildren, Khrushchev's mother soon convinced him to leave her.
[Taubman, William, ''Khrushchev: The Man and His Era'', p. 58. W. W. Norton, New York, 2003.] His third wife was Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk (1900-1984), with whom he began living soon afterward (though the marriage was not officially registered until the late 1960s);
[ besides Sergei, they had two daughters, Rada (born 1929) and Lena (1937-1972).]
Khrushchev's eldest son Leonid died in 1943 during the Great Patriotic War. His younger son Sergei emigrated to the United States and is now an American citizen and a Professor at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. He often speaks to American audiences to share his memories of the "other" side of the Cold War.
References
1. Due to various Reforms of Russian orthography, the ''ё'' letter is often replaced by ''е'' in writing. Hence ''Khrushchev'' is the standard English transliteration, even though it is more closely rendered as ''Khrushchyov''.
2. According to official Soviet sources and his memoirs. His birth certificate gives 3/15 April. Tompson, p. 2.
3. Pearson, Raymond, ''The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire'', p. 55. Palgrave, London, 2002.
4. BBC News, 28 October 2002, When the diplomatic mask slips
5.
6. Kulavig, Erik, ''Dissent in the years of Khrushchev'', p. 39. Palgrave, London, 2003.
Further reading
★ William Taubman, ''Khrushchev: The Man and His Era'', London: Free Press, 2004
★ Schecter, Jerrold L, ed. and trans., ''Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes'', Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990
★ Talbott, Strobe, ed., ''Khrushchev Remembers'', 1970
★ Khrushchev, Sergei N., ''Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower'', Penn State Press, 2000.
★ Levy, Alan, ''Nazi Hunter: The Wiesenthal Files'', Carroll and Graf, 2002
★ Khrushchev, Sergei N., translated by William Taubman, ''Khrushchev on Khrushchev'', Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990.
★ Rettie, John. "How Khrushchev Leaked his Secret Speech to the World", ''Hist Workshop J''. 2006; 62: 187–193.
★ Tompson, William J. ''Khrushchev: A Political Life''. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995
External links
★ Obituary, ''The New York Times'', September 12, 1971, ''Khrushchev's Human Dimensions Brought Him to Power and to His Downfall''
★ The Case of Khrushchev's Shoe, by Nina Khrushcheva (Nikita's granddaughter), ''New Statesman'', Oct. 2, 2000
★ Modern History Sourcebook: Nikita S. Khrushchev: The Secret Speech - On the Cult of Personality, 1956
★ A "Stalinist" rebuttal of Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" from the CPUSA, 1956
★ ''Serye volki'' (1993), Film chronicles the plot to expel Nikita Khrushchev from his post of CPSU Secretary General
★ "Tumultuous, prolonged applause ending in ovation. All rise." Khrushchev's "Secret Report" and Poland
★ Archival video of N.Khrushchyov and F.Castro on the Red Squire
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