Nikita Khrushchev

Nikita Khrushchev, a peasant's son from the borderlands of Russia and Ukraine, led the Soviet Union for about a decade after Stalin's death, as party First Secretary from 1953 and also premier from 1958 until he was ousted in 1964. He shook the communist world by denouncing Stalin's crimes, ended the mass terror of the previous era and led his country through the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the tensest moment of the Cold War.

Khrushchev was born on 15 April 1894 in Kalinovka, a poor village in Kursk province. In 1908 he followed his father to the mining town of Yuzovka (now Donetsk), where he trained as a metal fitter. He joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and served as a political commissar in the Russian Civil War. Back in the Donbas he rose through the party with the patronage of Lazar Kaganovich, and in 1929 he moved to Moscow. By 1934 he led the city's party organisation and supervised the building of the Moscow Metro.

Khrushchev was a loyal participant in the Great Purge. He publicly called for the execution of accused "enemies", and in 1937 reported to Stalin that more than 41,000 people had been arrested in the Moscow region. Sent to run Ukraine in 1938, he presided over further mass arrests there. During World War II he served as a political commissar with the Red Army, including at the Battle of Stalingrad. In December 1949 Stalin recalled him to Moscow.

When Joseph Stalin died on 5 March 1953, power passed to a collective leadership. Khrushchev took over the party secretariat, becoming First Secretary in September. He and Georgy Malenkov had the security chief Lavrentiy Beria arrested in June 1953, and Beria was shot that December. Khrushchev then sidelined Malenkov, survived an attempt by the so-called Anti-Party Group to remove him in June 1957 by appealing to the Central Committee, and added the premiership in March 1958.

On 25 February 1956, at a closed session of the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev spoke for four hours attacking Stalin's purges and personality cult. Political prisoners returned from the Gulag, the security police's special tribunals were abolished, and some writers, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, were allowed to publish. There were limits: Boris Pasternak was hounded for Doctor Zhivago, a campaign closed thousands of churches, and in 1962 troops fired on protesters at Novocherkassk. The speech also helped set off unrest in Eastern Europe, and in November 1956 Soviet troops crushed the Hungarian Revolution, leaving about 4,000 Hungarians dead.

At home Khrushchev promised better living standards. He launched the Virgin Lands Campaign to farm the steppes of Kazakhstan and Siberia, promoted maize, and built cheap prefabricated flats on a huge scale. Farming results were disappointing, and in 1963 grain had to be bought abroad.

Abroad he preached peaceful coexistence but boasted of Soviet missiles. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin's spaceflight in 1961 were great propaganda victories. He toured the United States in 1959, but the downing of an American U-2 spy plane in May 1960 wrecked a summit in Paris. In August 1961 he allowed East Germany to seal off West Berlin with what became the Berlin Wall. In October 1962 his decision to station nuclear missiles in Cuba led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. He withdrew them in exchange for an American pledge to leave Cuba alone and a secret undertaking to withdraw American missiles from Turkey; because that second part was kept secret, the outcome looked like a Soviet retreat. A limited nuclear test ban treaty followed in 1963. Relations with Mao's China meanwhile collapsed.

Weakened by failures at home and by the Cuban outcome, Khrushchev was deposed by Leonid Brezhnev and other colleagues on 14 October 1964, officially for reasons of age and health. In retirement he recorded memoirs, smuggled abroad and published in 1970, and died in Moscow on 11 September 1971.

Our 1960 map shows the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies at the height of Khrushchev's power.