Nikita S. Khrushchev

Premier of the Soviet Union (1958-1964)

• Born: April 17, 1894
• Birthplace: Kalinovka, Russia
• Died: September 11, 1971
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Khrushchev ruled the Soviet Union for a tumultuous decade, during which he began de-Stalinization and released millions of his countryfolk from the Siberian Gulag. In foreign affairs, the Sino-Soviet split, the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the Cuban Missile Crisis characterized his time in power.

Early Life

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (nih-KEE-tah syehr-GYAY-yuh-vihch KREWSH-chehf) was born in Kalinovka, in the Kursk region of Russia. He started working in factories and mines of the Ukrainian Donets Basin when he was fourteen years old. In 1918, he joined the Communist Party and fought in the Russian Civil War. By the mid-1920’s, he had become a local party secretary, and he held various party jobs in the Ukraine over the next decade. In 1935, he became first secretary of the Moscow Communist Party. In 1938, he returned to the Ukraine as first secretary in that republic. In 1939, he became a full member of the Politburo. During World War II, Khrushchev was a member of the Military Council on the Southern Front.

When Stalin died on March 5, 1953, Georgi M. Malenkov became the senior Communist Party secretary and head of the Soviet government. Khrushchev, while one of the party secretaries, was still a secondary figure. Eight days after Stalin’s death, Malenkov miscalculated. He had a picture of the signing of the 1950 Sino-Soviet Treaty cropped to show only Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and himself, and published the picture. Malenkov’s colleagues interpreted this maneuver as a bid for sole power. They forced him to relinquish his position as head of the party, although he remained the dominant governmental figure. The party leaders subsequently made Khrushchev the senior party secretary, apparently assuming that Khrushchev would pose no serious threat to their own power positions.

Life’s Work

In March of 1953, Lavrenty Beria, the head of the secret police, was generally regarded as the second most powerful person in the Soviet Union, after Malenkov. Beria inspired both loathing and fear. In an action of notable courage, Khrushchev went secretly to his colleagues and convinced them that Beria was plotting a supreme power-grab that might bring a terror worse than that of Stalin. Beria was arrested in July of 1953 and executed in December. When Khrushchev was asked after his fall what his greatest achievement had been, he answered that it was the saving of his country from Beria.

The balance of power between Khrushchev and Malenkov shifted gradually in Khrushchev’s favor. In the autumn of 1954, an open policy dispute erupted between them, with Malenkov advocating consumer goods and Khrushchev favoring heavy industry and military strength. Khrushchev won, and Malenkov was forced from his position as head of government on February 8, 1955.

It was not long before Khrushchev began to cut a wide swath in foreign affairs. In late 1954, Khrushchev visited Mao in Beijing, and the Chinese pressed unsuccessfully for the return to China of Mongolia, then a Soviet puppet state, and for other concessions. When Khrushchev returned to Moscow, as he reports in his memoirs, he told his colleagues that “conflict with China is inevitable.” In Europe, Khrushchev visited Yugoslavia and tried unsuccessfully to undo the 1948 Stalin-Tito break. West Germany was moving toward participation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1954, and Khrushchev tried to convince the Germans that neutrality might open the door to German reunification. Perhaps as an example, he agreed to a neutral, unified Austria, and the withdrawal of Soviet forces. Khrushchev also gave up the Porkkala Peninsula naval base in Finland. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov opposed these concessions and was later forced out as foreign minister. West Germany did enter NATO, however, and the Warsaw Pact was the Eastern bloc’s response. In 1956, twin crises erupted in Poland and Hungary. The Poles, led by Władysław Gomułka, faced down Khrushchev in a tense Warsaw confrontation and achieved half the loaf of their national autonomy. In Hungary, the crisis resulted in the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet tanks and troops. In the Suez crisis , which broke out at the same time, Khrushchev waited until the worst was over before he threatened to support Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser with rockets.

In domestic affairs, Khrushchev encouraged a “thaw” and permitted greater literary freedom. Works by nonconformist writers, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, were published. Khrushchev was also notably, if not always consistently, liberal with cultural figures and scientists. In February of 1956, at a closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Khrushchev delivered his so-called Secret Speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes. De-Stalinization swept the land, and statues and portraits of Stalin disappeared. Khrushchev followed up with an amnesty, which led to the release of millions of Soviets from the Siberian gulag. In addition, Khrushchev restored national autonomy to Caucasian and other peoples whom Stalin had deported, and allowed most survivors to return to their homes. He launched a program to build apartments everywhere and more than doubled annual housing construction during his time in office.

In agricultural policy, Khrushchev abolished the machine and tractor stations that had served both as mechanized service units and centers of political control in the countryside. He transformed many collective farms into state farms (state-run factories in the countryside). He pushed a drive to plant corn for fodder with such vigor that underlings forced plantings where the corn would not grow. He also launched the Virgin Lands Program in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, forcing the planting of vast stretches of prairie in wheat. By 1956, Soviet wheat production had risen by 50 percent, but bad years, such as 1958 and 1963, reflected emerging dust bowl conditions. Khrushchev promised that the Soviet Union would soon overtake the United States in the production of milk, meat, and butter, but that program faltered.

In 1957, Khrushchev’s opponents in the Communist Party Presidium (Politburo) combined against him. His opponents included Malenkov and Molotov (for reasons already indicated), Old Stalinists, and ambitious careerists. Khrushchev’s adversaries formed a majority to oust him. Khrushchev appealed the decision to the party Central Committee. Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the minister of defense and a World War II hero, helped Khrushchev fly in Central Committee supporters from distant places, and the Presidium vote was overturned. Key members of the Presidium majority were then publicly branded as an “anti-Party Group.” Molotov was sent off as ambassador to Mongolia, and Malenkov became manager of an electric power station in Semipalatinsk. Khrushchev removed his erstwhile ally Zhukov in October.

Khrushchev decreed a system of rotation in party jobs and limits to incumbency. Later he split the Communist Party leadership in each region, constituting a separate agricultural and industrial party organization, to the deep resentment of many local party chiefs. Khrushchev reformed education, forcing adolescents to interrupt their academic studies to work in factories and on farms. He launched an antireligious drive that resulted in the closing of more than 40 percent of the Russian Orthodox churches in the country. He turned from support of heavy industry to consumer goods, scrapped Navy cruisers and destroyers, reduced the Red Army by more than a million men, and cut the perquisites of military and police officers. Many of these initiatives made for Khrushchev new enemies in the establishment.

Relations with China worsened as the Great Leap Forward of 1957-1958 produced turmoil and failure. In 1959, Khrushchev scrapped the Sino-Soviet arms aid agreement and supported India during Chinese-Indian border hostilities. In 1960, the Soviet Union withdrew its technicians from China and sent Chinese students home. In Moscow in October of 1961, the Sino-Soviet split became public. Zhou Enlai laid a wreath at Stalin’s bier in the Red Square mausoleum and went home. Eight days later, Khrushchev had Stalin’s body removed, cremated, and buried by the Kremlin wall.

With respect to the West, Khrushchev issued a six-month ultimatum on Thanksgiving Day of 1958 to get out of Berlin. He let the ultimatum slide, however, as preparations went forward for a two-week visit to the United States in September, 1959. The visit proved a success, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower hoped that a planned return visit and the Paris Summit of May, 1960, would bring important new arms control agreements. The shooting down of Francis Gary Powers and his U-2 “spy plane” dashed these hopes. When Eisenhower refused to apologize, Khrushchev broke up the Paris summit. In the autumn of 1960, Khrushchev returned to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, banging a shoe on his desk in protest during a debate about the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution.

John F. Kennedy was inaugurated in January of 1961, and a series of incidents convinced Khrushchev that Kennedy was weak. First, there was an American humiliation in Laos. In April, there was the Bay of Pigs. In June, there was the Khrushchev-Kennedy summit in Vienna, where Khrushchev was able to browbeat Kennedy. In August, there was the erection of the Berlin Wall. All this no doubt influenced Khrushchev in his decision to place intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis ensued and, in Dean Rusk’s words, Khrushchev blinked first. While the settlement guaranteed that the United States would not invade Cuba, the identity of the loser was clear. Nevertheless, Khrushchev did not withdraw into sullen isolationism but responded to Kennedy’s initiative the next year and negotiated the Atmospheric Nuclear Test Ban Treaty a blessing to the health of the world.

The seeds of discontent had produced dense thickets of opposition in the Soviet Union by the summer of 1964. Aleksandr Shelepin, chief of the Party-State Control Commission, reportedly argued with other Presidium members that Khrushchev would soon purge them. The head of the secret police Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (KGB), Vladimir Semichastny, joined the plotters. There was discontent among army and navy officers. The bad harvest of 1963 had produced bread rationing, and the Cuban Missile Crisis had been a humiliation. The shoe banging had not helped. Old Stalinists smoldered, party bureaucrats grumbled, and defense-minded advocates of heavy industry fumed. Many blamed Khrushchev for the break with China. Perhaps the last straw was the knowledge in Communist Party circles that Khrushchev intended a new shake-up when he returned from his 1964 Black Sea vacation.

Leonid Brezhnev telephoned Khrushchev on October 13, 1964, and convinced him to cut short his vacation for an important meeting in Moscow. When Khrushchev drove to the nearby airport, he found an unfamiliar plane. In Moscow he found a different car, driver, and bodyguards, and he was met by KGB chief Semichastny. When Khrushchev arrived at the Kremlin, he found the nine other members of the Presidium waiting. Mikhail Suslov, from a current copy of Pravda and one from Stalin’s day, showed Khrushchev that he had promoted his own “personality cult,” as Stalin had. As in 1957, Khrushchev demanded a Central Committee meeting. His colleagues, anticipating this, had already assembled a hand-picked quorum, the members of which had already waited for days in the Kremlin incommunicado, watching films to while away the time. Khrushchev was led to the meeting and obliged to resign.

Khrushchev retired to his country house in Petrovo-Dalnee, near Moscow. He planted a vegetable garden and began to dictate his memoirs into a tape recorder. The tapes were smuggled to the West and published. It is said that the ensuing pressure on Khrushchev to repudiate the memoirs hastened the two heart attacks that resulted in his death on September 11, 1971.

Significance

Khrushchev’s flamboyant style left a residue of amusement, admiration, outrage, and fear. In some ways, Khrushchev did better by his country then either his countryfolk or the world appreciated. The monument over his tomb displays a dramatic juxtaposition of black-and-white marble, as the sculptor correctly proclaims that Khrushchev’s life was a contrasting mixture of darker deeds and gleaming white ones. He was a forerunner of Gorbachev and his policies, including perestroika (economic restructuring) and glasnost (openness).

Bibliography

Crankshaw, Edward. Khrushchev: A Career. New York: Viking Press, 1966. This work by one of the foremost experts on the Soviet Union covers Khrushchev’s career in its entirety. Includes a chronology, notes, and an index.

Frankel, Max. High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Ballantine Books, 2004. Frankel, a former reporter for The Travel, reconstructs the incidents of the crisis.

Fursenko, Aleksandr, and Timothy Naftali. Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary. New York: Norton, 2006. Based on newly acquired documents from the Soviet era, this book recounts Khrushchev’s foreign policy by describing his handling of Cold War crises between 1956 and 1962.

Heller, Mikhail, and Aleksandr Nekrich. Utopia in Power. New York: Summit Books, 1986. Two prominent dissident émigrés have written a critical history of Soviet rule. They include about a hundred pages of description and commentary on the Khrushchev period, when they were intellectual leaders in the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev, Nikita S. Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament. Edited and translated by Strobe Talbot. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. These are Khrushchev’s own memoirs, spoken into a tape recorder after his fall from power. They represent more than eleven hundred pages of fascinating and indispensable commentary on Khrushchev’s time in power.

Medvedev, Roy A. Khrushchev. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Medvedev has long been recognized as the leading dissident Communist historian working in Moscow. His book has discerning judgments and much information about Khrushchev’s period of rule.

Serov, Alexei, ed. Nikita Khrushchev: Life and Destiny. Moscow: Novosti Press Agency, 1989. This small volume brings together reminiscences by members of Khrushchev’s family, a colleague on the Politburo in Khrushchev’s time, and other prominent Soviet writers and political figures.

Shevchenko, Arkady N. Breaking with Moscow. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. Shevchenko became the senior Soviet diplomat at the United Nations secretariat before he defected. Much of his diplomatic career was spent under Khrushchev, and his unvarnished account is rich in anecdotes and insights.

Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: Norton, 2003. Taubman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, the first full-length American biography of Khrushchev, provides a thorough and detailed account of the Soviet leader’s life, career, and political ideas.