I.

Introduction

Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971), first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) from 1953 to 1964, who concurrently held the post of Soviet prime minister from 1958 to 1964. Khrushchev is best known for his criticism of his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, and for his efforts to promote peaceful coexistence with non-Communist states. He was ousted as the result of what his critics in the leadership called “harebrained schemes” to reorganize the party and state structure, radically increase agricultural production, and raise the standard of living in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

Khrushchev was born to a poor family in Kalinovka, near the village of Kursk in southwestern Russia. His grandfather had been a serf, or indentured farm laborer, and his father was a peasant who sometimes worked in the mines. Khrushchev received very little formal education. After leaving school to herd cows, he worked as a pipe fitter in a coal mine in the Donets Basin (in present-day Ukraine). He joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in 1918 and served in the Red Army as a junior political officer during the Russian Civil War (1918-1921). He returned to Ukraine, which had become a union republic of the USSR, and worked as the assistant manager of a Donets coal mine.

II.

Early Career

In 1929 Khrushchev moved to Moscow to attend the Stalin Industrial Academy, where he soon became leader of the academy’s Communist Party organization. In 1931 he began full-time work as secretary of two distinct party organizations in Moscow. He continued to move up the party ranks under the patronage of Lazar Kaganovich, who held the position of first secretary in the Moscow City Party Committee. In 1935 Khrushchev succeeded Kaganovich in that post. Khrushchev went on to become party first secretary in Ukraine in 1938. The following year he became a full member of the Politburo, the party’s highest decision-making body. From 1939 to 1945, during World War II, he worked as a political commissar (a party official supervising army officers), earning the rank of lieutenant general. After the war, he was in charge of the recovery effort in Ukraine.

III.

Soviet Leader

A firm supporter of Stalin during his early career, Khrushchev became a secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1949. Soon after Stalin died in March 1953, Khrushchev became leader of the party, which suffered from a loss of power and prestige because of Stalin’s violent, massive purges of the party and civilian population. It took several years for Khrushchev to consolidate his power and become the dominant leader. Immediately after Stalin’s death, other leaders—including Georgy Malenkov (who became prime minister), Lavrenty Beria (head of the Soviet secret police and a deputy prime minister), and Vyacheslav Molotov, (also a deputy prime minister)—were more powerful than Khrushchev. Beria was soon arrested, tried, and executed for his involvement in the Stalinist purges, and the power of the secret police, or KGB, was reduced.

In an effort to deal with the massive problems the Soviet Union faced as the result of Stalin’s policies, the new leadership initiated a policy called the New Course. As part of this policy, they promised to increase the standard of living, give more emphasis to light industry and agriculture, and ease the burden of quotas on farmers. The leadership also allowed somewhat greater freedom in cultural and intellectual life.

IV.

De-Stalinization

Khrushchev succeeded in removing Malenkov from the position of prime minister in February 1955, replacing him with Nikolay Bulganin. Many of his opponents and rivals in the party, however, were still on the Politburo. In February 1956, Khrushchev gave his “secret speech” at the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party. In this speech, which was not released in full to the Soviet press, Khrushchev sharply criticized Stalin for his purge of the party, the large-scale executions of Soviet citizens, the deportation of a number of national minorities from their homelands, his cult of personality, and widespread violations of the law. This speech started a campaign of de-Stalinization to eliminate the worst of the excesses of Stalinism.

Political leaders succeeded in keeping the process of de-Stalinization under elite control in the Soviet Union. Important changes were made. The widespread use of terror against the population stopped, and the secret police came to play a less significant role in political life. The leadership promised to pay more attention to socialist legality. Nevertheless, the basic elements of the Soviet system, including the dominance of the Communist Party, remained intact. In Central and Eastern Europe, where Communist regimes had been in power for a shorter time than in the Soviet Union, de-Stalinization was more destabilizing and eventually threatened the dominance of the Soviet Union over its satellite states. In Hungary and Poland, citizens used the division de-Stalinization created among political leaders to try to change the system. Khrushchev ordered troops of the Warsaw Pact, an alliance of Communist states, to invade Hungary in 1956 to put down the country’s widespread uprising and to install a Communist regime loyal to the Soviet Union.

V.

Domestic Policies

At home, Khrushchev faced opposition from conservative elements in the leadership for his plans to decentralize the system. In order to undermine the position of the central ministries, he initiated a reorganization that transferred the functions of many central economic ministries to regional economic councils, a scheme that caused considerable chaos. In May 1957 he proposed a campaign to surpass the United States in production of key agricultural products—such as meat, milk, and butter—by 1961. In June Khrushchev’s opponents in the Presidium (formerly Politburo) tried to remove him while he was on a trip abroad. Upon his return home, Khrushchev refused to accept the vote and insisted that the issue be decided by the broader Central Committee of the party, where his supporters overturned the vote of the Presidium. He then removed many of his opponents from their party positions. In March 1958 Khrushchev removed Bulganin from his position as prime minister and took over the position himself.

Khrushchev initiated many radical programs during his tenure as top leader. One of the most important of these was his effort to raise living standards. He gave more emphasis to agriculture and consumer goods. In the mid-1950s he launched his dramatic Virgin Lands campaign to initiate farming on vast tracts of previously uncultivated lands, mainly in the northern part of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (present-day Kazakhstan). He divided the party at the regional level into two bodies, an industrial and a regional committee. Khrushchev emphasized the Soviet space program, which resulted in the flight of Sputnik I, the first spacecraft to orbit the earth, in 1957. He also built up the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

VI.

Foreign Affairs

Under Khrushchev’s leadership, the Soviet Union adopted the policy of peaceful coexistence with the West. This policy, which reflected an understanding of the mutual destruction that use of nuclear weapons would cause, replaced the old doctrine of the inevitability of war between Communist and capitalist countries. According to the doctrine of peaceful coexistence, Communism would still triumph over capitalism. However, it would do so not through war but by demonstrating its superiority to capitalism. This change in doctrine, together with the renunciation of Stalinism, contributed to the split with the Chinese Communists, who under Mao Zedong remained loyal to a more militant brand of Communism. Khrushchev broke with precedent and undertook diplomatic trips abroad and high-level meetings with Western leaders. In 1955 Khrushchev reopened diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia, whose leader Josip Broz Tito had broken with Stalin in 1948. In the Western world Khrushchev became known for his unconventional behavior, such as an incident when he banged his shoe on a table at the United Nations (UN) in New York in 1960. Khrushchev’s foreign policy was at times marked by antagonism with the West. In 1958 he challenged the status of Berlin, but the West would not yield to his demands that all of the city be incorporated into East Germany; he then approved the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. In 1962 Khrushchev provoked the United States and brought the world dangerously close to nuclear war by sending Soviet nuclear missiles to Cuba. In a dramatic eleventh-hour concession, he withdrew the missiles at the insistence of U.S. president John F. Kennedy.

A.

Khrushchev’s Fall

By 1964 Khrushchev had alienated most segments of the Soviet elite as the result of his inability to achieve the impossible goals he promised in agricultural production and his foreign policy setbacks. His opponents within the party removed him from both his state and party positions in October 1964 while he was on vacation in Crimea, a peninsula in southern Ukraine. Khrushchev’s critics, including his former protégé Leonid Brezhnev, who succeeded him as head of the Communist Party and eventually top leader of the USSR, accused him of acting with disregard for the best interests of the state and for wielding power in an arbitrary, capricious manner.

In the end, Khrushchev failed to achieve his objectives. Even so, his effort to reform the Soviet system had a significant influence on young people in the Soviet Union, including many who would come to positions of power under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.