Nikita Khrushchev (right) Politic Commissar at the
Stalingrad Front.
Nikita Khrushchev
(b. April 17 [April 5, old style], 1894, Kalinovka, Ukraine, Russian
Empire--d. Sept. 11, 1971, Moscow), first secretary of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union (1953-64) and premier of the Soviet Union (1958-64)
whose policy of destalinization had widespread repercussions
throughout the Communist world. In foreign policy he pursued a policy
of "peaceful coexistence." (see also Index: de-Stalinization)
Unlike Lenin and many other Soviet leaders, who had generally
middle-class backgrounds, Khrushchev was the son of a miner; his grandfather
had been a serf who served in the tsarist army. After a village education,
Khrushchev went with his family to Yuzovka (later named Stalino, now Donetsk),
a mining and industrial centre in the Donets Basin, where he began work
as a pipe fitter at the age of 15. Because of his 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 the Ukraine--he
became a member of the Russian Communist Party
(Bolsheviks).
In January 1919 he joined the Red Army and served as a junior
political commissar, ultimately in the campaigns against the Whites and
invading Polish armies in 1920. Soon after he was demobilized his wife,
Galina, died during a famine. In 1922 Khrushchev secured admission to a
new Soviet worker's 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. There he married his second wife, Nina Petrovna, a schoolteacher,
in 1924.
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 Stalin's close associate, Lazar M. Kaganovich, secretary
general of the Ukrainian Party 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 and Kiev--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 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 first
secretary of the Moscow party organization--in effect, the mayor 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 Soviet Party.
Khrushchev was a zealous supporter of Stalin in those years and participated
in the purges of party leadership. He was one of three provincial secretaries
who survived the executions of the Yezhovshchina, a period that took its
name from the head of the Soviet security forces. He became an alternate
member of the ruling Presidium in 1935, a member of the Constitutional
Committee in 1936, and a member of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the
Supreme Soviet in 1937. A year later
Khrushchev was made a candidate member of the Central Committee's
Politburo and sent to Kiev as first secretary of the Ukrainian party
organization, and in the following year 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 Polish and Ukrainian separatist
movements, as well as to restore the Communist Party organization, which
had been shattered in the purge. This work was disrupted by the
German invasion in June 1941. Khrushchev's first wartime assignment
was to evacuate as much of the 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 political adviser to Marshal Andrey I.
Yeryomenko during the defense of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and to
Lieut. Gen. Nikolay F. Vatutin during the huge tank battles at Kursk.
After the liberation of the Ukraine in 1944, Khrushchev worked to restore
the civil administration and to bring that devastated country back to a
subsistence level. A famine in 1946 was probably the worst in the Ukraine's
history; Khrushchev fought to restore grain production and to
distribute food supplies, against Stalin's insistence on greater production
from the Ukraine for use in other areas. During this period Khrushchev
made 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 All-Union Central Committee.
The period 1949-53 was far from pleasant for Khrushchev and other members
of the Soviet leadership, who found themselves pawns in Stalin's palace
politics. Khrushchev moved more and more into agriculture, where he began
his schemes for the agrogorod ("farming town") and larger state farms at
the expense of the conventional collectives.
After Stalin's death and the execution of deputy prime minister and
state security chief, Lavrenty Beria, Khrushchev engaged in a power struggle
with Georgy Malenkov, Stalin's heir apparent, and gained the decisive margin
by his control of the party machinery. In September 1953 he replaced Malenkov
as first secretary and in 1955 removed Malenkov from the premiership in
favour of his handpicked nominee, Marshal Nikolay A. Bulganin.
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 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 picture earlier Soviet public figures had cultivated.
On Feb. 24-25, 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 thousands of political prisoners and the "rehabilitation"
of manythousands more who had perished.
The destalinization 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 Wladyslaw Gomulka's
national Communist solution, which allowed the Poles a great deal of freedom.
Khrushchev's shared decision to crush the Hungarian Revolution by force
came largely because of the Hungarian premier Imre
Nagy's decision to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. With this sanguinary
exception, however, 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 Party. In June 1957 he was almost overthrown
from his position, and, although a vote in the Presidium actually went
against him, he managed to reverse this by appealing to the full membership
of the party Central Committee. In the end he secured the permanent disgrace
of Malenkov, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, and others, who were labelled members
of the antiparty group. In October he
dismissed Marshal Georgy Zhukov from his post as minister of defense,
and in March 1958 he assumed the premiership of the Soviet Union.
Confirmed in power, Khrushchev widely asserted his doctrine of peaceful
coexistence, 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 Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, brought Soviet-American relations to a
new high. A long-planned summit conference with Eisenhower in Paris in
1960 broke up, however, with Khrushchev's announcement that a U.S. plane
(a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft) had
been shot down over the Soviet Union and its pilot captured. In 1961
his Vienna conference with the new U.S. 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 attempted
to emplace Soviet medium-range missiles in Cuba. During a tense confrontation
in October 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union apparently
stood on the brink of 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. The Soviet
Union was attacked 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 Tse-tung'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 Soviet Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty with
the United States in 1963, although generally welcomed throughout the world,
intensified Chinese denunciations of Soviet "revisionism."
During Khrushchev's time in office, he had to rudder constantly
between popular pressures toward a consumer-oriented society and agitation
by intellectuals for greater freedom of expression; these were offset by
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 Doctor Zhivago (1957)
within the Soviet Union, culminating in the refusal to allow Pasternak
to accept the Nobel Prize in 1958. 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. 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 favour 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. The central
crisis of Khrushchev's administration, however,
was agriculture. An optimist, he based many plans on the bumper crops
in 1956 and 1958, which fuelled his repeated promises to overtake the United
States in agricultural as well as in industrial production. He opened
up more than 70,000,000 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 and the China quarrel, added to his arbitrary
administrative methods, were the major factors in Khrushchev's downfall.
On Oct. 14, 1964, 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 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.
Almost 48 hours elapsed after his death before it was announced to the
Soviet public. He was denied a state funeral and interment in the Kremlin
wall, although he was allowed a quiet burial at Novodevichy Convent Cemetery
in Moscow.
For the Soviet Union and indeed for the entire world Communist movement,
Nikita Khrushchev was the great catalyzer 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 a thoroughgoing political pragmatist who had learned
his Marxism by rote, but he never hesitated to adapt his beliefs to the
political urgencies of the moment. His experience with international realities
confirmed him in his doctrine of peaceful coexistence with the non-Communist
world--in itself a drastic break with established Soviet Communist teaching.
He publicly recognized the limitations as well as the power of nuclear
weapons, and his decision to negotiate with the United
States for some form of nuclear-testing control was of vast importance.
At the same time, Khrushchev's rough empathy with the Soviet people resulted
in concessions to a consumer economy and in a general relaxation
of security controls, which had equally far-reaching effects. Despite his
repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, his acceptance of "different
roads to Socialism" led to growing independence among
European Communist parties, but his Russian nationalism and his
suspicion of Mao Tse-tung's Communism helped create an unexpectedly deep
fissure between China and the Soviet Union. By the time he was removed
from office, he had set up guidelines for and limitations to Soviet policy
that his successors were hard put to alter.
The cautious handling of his death announcement reflected his increasingp
opularity in his last years, both in the Soviet Union and the outside world,
as many contrasted his consistent, if occasionally stormy, peaceful-coexistence
diplomacy with the more restricted and conservative policy of his successors.
At the time of his death it was widely felt that the basic changes in Soviet
life made under his regime would be hard to uproot and might indeed result
in ultimate changes in the pattern of Soviet society and world power relationships.
Whatever the view of his personal eccentricities, his boisterousness, his
vulgarity,
and his bewildering shifts, he was accounted a man of stature.
As his son Sergey pronounced in a short eulogy at the cemetery, "There
were those who loved him, there were those who hated him, but there were
few who would pass him by without looking in his direction."
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