Nikita Khrushchev

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev[a] (15 April [O.S. 3

Nikita Khrushchev
April]  1894  – 11 September 1971) was the First
Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Никита Хрущёв
from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the country's
Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. During his
rule, Khrushchev stunned the communist world with
his denunciation of Stalin's crimes, and embarked on a
policy of de-Stalinization with his key ally Anastas
Mikoyan. He sponsored the early Soviet space
program, and enactment of relatively liberal reforms in
domestic policy. After some false starts, and a
narrowly avoided nuclear war over Cuba, he
conducted successful negotiations with the United
States to reduce Cold War tensions. In 1964, the
Kremlin leadership stripped him of power, replacing
him with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and
Alexei Kosygin as Premier.

Khrushchev was born in 1894 in a village in western

Russia. He was employed as a metal worker during Nikita Khrushchev in East Berlin in June 1963
observing East German leader Walter Ulbricht's
his youth, and he was a political commissar during the
70th birthday
Russian Civil War. Under the sponsorship of Lazar
Kaganovich, he worked his way up the Soviet First Secretary of the Communist Party of the
hierarchy. He supported Joseph Stalin's purges and Soviet Union
approved thousands of arrests. In 1938, Stalin sent In office
him to govern the Ukrainian SSR, and he continued 14 September 1953 – 14 October 1964
the purges there. During what was known in the Preceded by Joseph Stalin (as General
Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War, Khrushchev Secretary)
was again a commissar, serving as an intermediary
between Stalin and his generals. Khrushchev was Succeeded by Leonid Brezhnev (as General
present at the bloody defense of Stalingrad, a fact he Secretary)
took great pride in throughout his life. After the war, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the
he returned to Ukraine before being recalled to Soviet Union
Moscow as one of Stalin's close advisers. In office
27 March 1958 – 14 October 1964
On 5 March 1953, Stalin's death triggered a power
President Kliment Voroshilov
struggle in which Khrushchev emerged victorious
upon consolidating his authority as First Secretary of Leonid Brezhnev
the party's Central Committee. On 25 February 1956, Anastas Mikoyan
at the 20th Party Congress, he delivered the "Secret First Deputies See list
Speech", which denounced Stalin's purges and
Frol Kozlov
ushered in a less repressive era in the Soviet Union.
His domestic policies, aimed at bettering the lives of Alexei Kosygin
ordinary citizens, were often ineffective, especially in Dmitriy Ustinov
agriculture. Hoping eventually to rely on missiles for
national defense, Khrushchev ordered major cuts in Lazar Kaganovich
conventional forces. Despite the cuts, Khrushchev's
Anastas Mikoyan
time in office saw the tensest years of the Cold War,
culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Preceded by Nikolai Bulganin
Succeeded by Alexei Kosygin
Khrushchev enjoyed strong support during the 1950s
thanks to major victories like the Suez Crisis, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of
Ukraine (Bolsheviks)
launching of Sputnik, the Syrian Crisis of 1957, and
the 1960 U-2 incident. By the early 1960s however, In office
Khrushchev's popularity was eroded by flaws in his 26 December 1947 – 16 December 1949
policies, as well as his handling of the Cuban Missile Preceded by Lazar Kaganovich
Crisis. This emboldened his potential opponents, who
Succeeded by Leonid Melnikov
quietly rose in strength and deposed him in October
1964. However, he did not suffer the deadly fate In office
suffered by the losers of previous Soviet power 27 January 1938 – 3 March 1947
struggles and was pensioned off with an apartment in Preceded by Stanislav Kosior
Moscow and a dacha in the countryside. His lengthy
Succeeded by Lazar Kaganovich
memoirs were smuggled to the West and published in
part in 1970. Khrushchev died in 1971 of a heart Personal details
attack. Born Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev
15 April 1894
Kalinovka, Kursk Governorate,
Contents Russian Empire
Died 11 September 1971 (aged 77)
Early years
Moscow, Russian SFSR,
Party official
Soviet Union
Donbass years
Resting place Novodevichy Cemetery,
Kaganovich protégé
Moscow
Involvement in purges
Citizenship Soviet
World War II
Occupation of Polish territory Political party CPSU (1918–1964)
War against Germany Spouse(s) Yefrosinia Pisareva
(m. 1914; died 1919)
Rise to power
Return to Ukraine Nina Kukharchuk (m. 1965)

Stalin's final years Children 5

Struggle for control Yulia Khrushcheva (1915–
1981)
Leader (1956–1964)
Domestic policies Leonid Khrushchev (1917–
Consolidation of power and "Secret 1943)
Speech" Rada Khrushcheva (1929–
Liberalization and the arts 2016)
Political reform Sergei Khrushchev (1935–
Agricultural policy 2020)
Education
Elena Khrushcheva (1937–
Anti-religious campaign 1972)
Foreign and defense policies
Alma mater Industrial Academy
United States and NATO
Awards See List
 Early relations and U.S. visit
(1957–1960)
U-2 and Berlin crisis (1960–1961)
Signature
Cuban Missile Crisis and the test ban
treaty (1962–1964)
Eastern Europe
Military service
China
Allegiance  Soviet Union
Removal
Branch/service Red Army
Reasons for removal
Years of 1941–45
Life in retirement
service
Death
Rank Lieutenant General
Legacy
Commands Soviet Armed Forces
See also
Battles/wars World War II
Notes
Central institution membership
Citations 1939–64: Full member, 18th, 19th, 20th,
References 22nd Presidium
Print 1949–64: 18th, 19th, 20th, 22nd Secretariat
Others
1949–52: 18th Orgburo
Further reading
1938–39: Candidate member, 17th Politburo
External links 1934–64: Full member, 17th, 18th, 19th,
20th, 22nd Central Committee

Early years Other offices held

1956–64: Chairman, Bureau of the Central
Khrushchev was born on 15 April 1894,[b][2] in
Committee of the Russian SFSR
Kalinovka,[3] a village in what is now Russia's Kursk
Oblast, near the present Ukrainian border.[4] His 1949–53: First Secretary, Moscow Regional
parents, Sergei Khrushchev and Kseniya Committee
Khrushcheva, were poor peasants, and had a daughter 1944–47: Chairman, Ukrainian Council of
two years Nikita's junior, Irina.[2] Sergei Khrushchev Ministers
was employed in a number of positions in the Donbas
1938–47: First Secretary, Kiev Regional
area of far eastern Ukraine, working as a railwayman,
as a miner, and laboring in a brick factory. Wages Committee
were much higher in the Donbas than in the Kursk 1938–47: First Secretary, Kiev City
region, and Sergei Khrushchev generally left his Committee
family in Kalinovka, returning there when he had 1935–38: First Secretary, Moscow Regional
enough money.[5] Committee
Kalinovka was a peasant village; Khrushchev's 1934–50: First Secretary, Moscow City
teacher, Lydia Shevchenko, later stated that she had Committee
never seen a village as poor as Kalinovka had been.[6] Leader of the Soviet Union

Nikita worked as a herdsboy from an early age. He ← Malenkov [a] · Brezhnev →

was schooled for a total of four years, part in the
village school and part under Shevchenko's tutelage in a While he was unable to consolidate control over the
Kalinovka's state school. According to Khrushchev in party apparatus, Malenkov was still recognized as
his memoirs, Shevchenko was a freethinker who
"first among equals" for over a year after Stalin's
upset the villagers by not attending church, and when
her brother visited, he gave Khrushchev books which death. As late as March 1954, he was listed as first
had been banned by the Imperial Government.[7] She in the Soviet leadership and continued to chair
urged Nikita to seek further education, but family meetings of the Politburo. [1]
finances did not permit this.[7]
External video
In 1908, Sergei
Khrushchev moved to the Part One of Booknotes interview
Donbas city of Yuzovka with William Taubman on
(now Donetsk, Ukraine); Khrushchev: The Man and His Era,
fourteen-year-old Nikita 20 April 2003 (https://www.c-span.o
followed later that year, rg/video/?168865-1/khrushchev-ma
while Ksenia n-era-part-1), C-SPAN
Khrushcheva and her
Part Two of Booknotes interview
daughter came after.[8]
Yuzovka, which was with Taubman, 27 April 2003 (http
renamed Stalino in 1924 s://www.c-span.org/video/?168865-
and Donetsk in 1961, was 2/khrushchev-man-era-part-2), C-
at the heart of one of the SPAN
Khrushchev and his first wife most industrialized areas
Euphrasinia (Yefrosinia) in 1916 of the Russian Empire.[8]
After working briefly in other fields, Khrushchev's parents found
Nikita a place as a metal fitter's apprentice. Upon completing that
apprenticeship, the teenage Khrushchev was hired by a factory.[9] He lost that job when he collected
money for the families of the victims of the Lena Goldfields massacre, and was hired to mend underground
equipment by a mine in nearby Ruchenkovo,[10] where his father was the union organizer, and he helped
distribute copies and organize public readings of Pravda.[11] He later stated that he considered emigrating
to the United States for better wages, but did not do so.[12] He later recalled his working days:

I started working as soon as I learned how to walk. Until the age of fifteen, I worked as a
shepherd. I tended, as the foreigners say when they use the Russian language, "the little
cows," I was a sheepherder, I herded cows for a capitalist, and that was before I was fifteen.
After that, I worked at a factory for a German, and I worked in a French-owned mine, I
worked at a Belgian-owned chemical factory, and [now] I'm the Prime Minister of the great
Soviet state. And I am in no way ashamed of my past because all work is worthy of respect.
Work as such cannot be dirty, it is only conscience that can be.

— Khrushchev's speech in Hollywood, translated by Viktor Sukhodrev [13]

When World War I broke out in 1914, Khrushchev was exempt from conscription because he was a skilled
metal worker. He was employed by a workshop that serviced ten mines, and he was involved in several
strikes that demanded higher pay, better working conditions, and an end to the war.[14] In 1914, he married
Yefrosinia Pisareva, daughter of the lift operator at the Rutchenkovo mine. In 1915, they had a daughter,
Yulia, and in 1917, a son, Leonid.[15]

After the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917, the new Russian Provisional Government in Petrograd had
little influence over Ukraine. Khrushchev was elected to the worker's council (or soviet) in Rutchenkovo,
and in May he became its chairman.[16] He did not join the Bolsheviks until 1918, a year in which the
Russian Civil War, between the Bolsheviks and a coalition of opponents known as the White Army, began
in earnest. His biographer, William Taubman, suggests that Khrushchev's delay in affiliating himself with
the Bolsheviks was because he felt closer to the Mensheviks who prioritized economic progress, whereas
the Bolsheviks sought political power.[17] In his memoirs, Khrushchev indicated that he waited because
there were many groups, and it was difficult to keep them all straight.[17]

In March 1918, as the Bolshevik government concluded a separate peace with the Central Powers, the
Germans occupied the Donbas and Khrushchev fled to Kalinovka. In late 1918 or early 1919, he was
mobilized into the Red Army as a political commissar.[18] The post of political commissar had recently
been introduced as the Bolsheviks came to rely less on worker activists and more on military recruits; its
functions included indoctrination of recruits in the tenets of Bolshevism, and promoting troop morale and
battle readiness.[19] Beginning as commissar to a construction platoon, Khrushchev rose to become
commissar to a construction battalion and was sent from the front for a two-month political course. The
young commissar came under fire many times,[20] though many of the war stories he would tell in later life
dealt more with his (and his troops') cultural awkwardness, rather than with combat.[19] In 1921, the civil
war ended, and Khrushchev was demobilized and assigned as commissar to a labor brigade in the Donbas,
where he and his men lived in poor conditions.[19]

The wars had caused widespread devastation and famine, and one of the victims of the hunger and disease
was Khrushchev's wife, Yefrosinia, who died of typhus in Kalinovka while Khrushchev was in the army.
The commissar returned for the funeral and, loyal to his Bolshevik principles, refused to allow his wife's
coffin to enter the local church. With the only way into the churchyard through the church, he had the
coffin lifted and passed over the fence into the burial ground, shocking the village.[19]

Party official

Donbass years

Through the intervention of a friend, Khrushchev was assigned in

Khrushchev's second wife (though
they only officially married in 1965)
was Ukrainian-born Nina Petrovna
Kukharchuk, whom he met in 1922.
Photo taken in 1924
1921 as assistant director for political affairs for the Rutchenkovo
mine in the Donbass region, where he had previously worked.[21]
There were as yet few Bolsheviks in the area. At that time, the
movement was split by Lenin's New Economic Policy, which
allowed for some measure of private enterprise and was seen as an
ideological retreat by some Bolsheviks.[21] While Khrushchev's
responsibility lay in political affairs, he involved himself in the
practicalities of resuming full production at the mine after the chaos
of the war years. He helped restart the machines (key parts and
papers had been removed by the pre-Soviet mine-owners) and he
wore his old mine outfit for inspection tours.[22]

Khrushchev was highly successful at the Rutchenkovo mine, and

in mid-1922 he was offered the directorship of the nearby Pastukhov mine. However, he refused the offer,
seeking to be assigned to the newly established technical college (tekhnikum) in Yuzovka, though his
superiors were reluctant to let him go. As he had only four years of formal schooling, he applied to the
training program (rabfak, short for Рабочий факультет / Rabotchnyi Fakultyet, or Worker's Faculty)
attached to the tekhnikum that was designed to bring undereducated students to high-school level, a
prerequisite for entry into the tekhnikum.[23] While enrolled in the rabfak, Khrushchev continued his work
at the Rutchenkovo mine.[24] One of his teachers later described him as a poor student.[23] He was more
successful in advancing in the Communist Party; soon after his admission to the rabfak in August 1922, he
was appointed party secretary of the entire tekhnikum, and became a member of the bureau—the governing
council—of the party committee for the town of Yuzovka (renamed Stalino in 1924). He briefly joined
supporters of Leon Trotsky against those of Joseph Stalin over the question of party democracy.[25] All of
these activities left him with little time for his schoolwork, and while he later said he had finished his rabfak
studies, it is unclear whether this was true.[25]

According to William Taubman, Khrushchev's studies were aided by Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk, a well-
educated Party organizer and daughter of well-to-do Ukrainian peasants.[26] The family was poor,
according to Nina's own recollections. The two lived together as husband and wife for the rest of
Khrushchev's life, though they never registered their marriage. They had three children together: daughter
Rada was born in 1929, son Sergei in 1935 and daughter Elena in 1937.

In mid-1925, Khrushchev was appointed Party secretary of the Petrovo-Marinsky raikom, or district, near
Stalino. The raikom was about 400 square miles (1,000 km2 ) in area, and Khrushchev was constantly on
the move throughout his domain, taking an interest in even minor matters.[27] In late 1925, Khrushchev
was elected a non-voting delegate to the 14th Congress of the USSR Communist Party in Moscow.[28]

Kaganovich protégé

Khrushchev met Lazar Kaganovich as early as 1917. In 1925,

Kaganovich became Party head in Ukraine[29] and Khrushchev,
falling under his patronage,[30] was rapidly promoted. He was
appointed second in command of Stalin's party apparatus in late
1926. Within nine months his superior, Konstantin Moiseyenko,
was ousted, which, according to Taubman, was due to
Khrushchev's instigation.[29] Kaganovich transferred Khrushchev
to Kharkov, then the capital of Ukraine, as head of the
Organizational Department of the Ukrainian Party's Central
Committee.[31] In 1928, Khrushchev was transferred to Kiev,
where he served as head of the organizational department,[32]
second-in-command of the Party organization there.[33]

In 1929, Khrushchev again sought to further his education,

following Kaganovich (now in the Kremlin as a close associate of
Stalin) to Moscow and enrolling in the Stalin Industrial Academy.
Khrushchev never completed his studies there, but his career in the Lazar Kaganovich, one of the chief
Party flourished.[34] When the school's Party cell elected a number enforcers of Stalin's dictatorship and
of rightists to an upcoming district Party conference, the cell was Khrushchev's main patron.
attacked in Pravda. [35] Khrushchev emerged victorious in the
ensuing power struggle, becoming Party secretary of the school,
arranging for the delegates to be withdrawn, and, afterward, purging the cell of the rightists.[35]
Khrushchev rose rapidly through the Party ranks, first becoming Party leader for the Bauman district, site of
the Academy, before taking the same position in the Krasnopresnensky district, the capital's largest and
most important. By 1932, Khrushchev had become second in command, behind Kaganovich, of the
Moscow city Party organization, and in 1934, he became Party leader for the city[34] and a member of the
Party's Central Committee.[36] Khrushchev attributed his rapid rise to his acquaintance with fellow
Academy student Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's wife. In his memoirs, Khrushchev stated that Alliluyeva
spoke well of him to her husband. His biographer, William Tompson, downplays the possibility, stating that
Khrushchev was too low in the Party hierarchy to enjoy Stalin's patronage and that if influence was
brought to bear on Khrushchev's career at this stage, it was by Kaganovich.[37]
While head of the Moscow city organization, Khrushchev superintended the construction of the Moscow
Metro, a highly expensive undertaking, with Kaganovich in overall charge. Faced with an already-
announced opening date of 7 November 1934, Khrushchev took considerable risks in the construction and
spent much of his time down in the tunnels. When the inevitable accidents did occur, they were depicted as
heroic sacrifices in a great cause. The Metro did not open until 1 May 1935, but Khrushchev received the
Order of Lenin for his role in its construction.[38] Later that year, he was selected as First Secretary of the
Moscow Regional Committee which was responsible for Moscow oblast, a province with a population of
11 million.[34]

Involvement in purges

Stalin's office records show meetings at which Khrushchev

was present as early as 1932. The two increasingly built a
good relationship. Khrushchev greatly admired the dictator
and treasured informal meetings with him and invitations to
Stalin's dacha, while Stalin felt warm affection for his young
subordinate.[39]
Beginning in 1934, Stalin began a campaign
of political repression known as the Great Purge, during
which many were executed or sent to the Gulag. Central to
this campaign were the Moscow Trials, a series of show trials
of the purged top leaders of the party and the military. In
1936, as the trials proceeded, Khrushchev expressed his
vehement support:

Everyone who rejoices in the successes

Khrushchev (second from right) poses for a
photo alongside Joseph Stalin (far right)
sometime during the 1930s.
achieved in our country, the victories of our
party led by the great Stalin, will find only one
word suitable for the mercenary, fascist dogs of
the Trotskyite-Zinovievite gang. That word is
execution.[40]

Khrushchev assisted in the purge of many friends and

colleagues in Moscow oblast.[41]
Of 38 top Party officials in Moscow city and province, 35 were killed[41]
—the three survivors were transferred to other parts of the USSR.[42] Of the 146 Party secretaries of cities
and districts outside Moscow city in the province, only 10 survived the purges.[41] In his memoirs,
Khrushchev noted that almost everyone who worked with him was arrested.[43] By Party protocol,
Khrushchev was required to approve these arrests, and did little or nothing to save his friends and
colleagues.[44]

Party leaders were given numerical quotas of "enemies" to be turned in and arrested.[44] In June 1937, the
Politburo set a quota of 35,000  enemies to be arrested in Moscow province; 5,000 of these were to be
executed. In reply, Khrushchev asked that 2,000 wealthy peasants, or kulaks living in Moscow be killed in
part fulfillment of the quota. In any event, only two weeks after receiving the Politburo order, Khrushchev
was able to report to Stalin that 41,305 "criminal and kulak elements" had been arrested. Of the arrestees,
according to Khrushchev, 8,500 deserved execution.[44]

Khrushchev had no reason to think himself immune from the purges, and in 1937, confessed his own 1923
dalliance with Trotskyism to Kaganovich, who, according to Khrushchev, "blanched" (for his protégé's sins
could affect his own standing) and advised him to tell Stalin. The dictator took the confession in his stride,
and, after initially advising Khrushchev to
keep it quiet, suggested that Khrushchev tell
his tale to the Moscow party conference.
Khrushchev did so, to applause, and was
immediately reelected to his post.[45]
Khrushchev related in his memoirs that he was
also denounced by an arrested colleague.
Stalin told Khrushchev of the accusation
personally, looking him in the eye and
awaiting his response. Khrushchev speculated
in his memoirs that had Stalin doubted his
reaction, he would have been categorized as
an enemy of the people then and there.[46] Regional party leaders in 1935. In the front row sits Nikita
Nonetheless, Khrushchev became a candidate Khrushchev (Moscow), Andrei Zhdanov (Leningrad), Lazar
member of the Politburo on 14 January 1938 Kaganovich (Ukraine), Lavrentiy Beria (Georgia), and
and a full member in March 1939.[47] Nestor Lakoba (Abkhazia) (behind him stands Mir Jafar
Baghirov).
In late 1937, Stalin appointed Khrushchev as
head of the Communist Party in Ukraine, and
Khrushchev duly left Moscow for Kiev, again the Ukrainian External video
capital, in January 1938.[48] Ukraine had been the site of Khrushchev speech in 1937 (htt
extensive purges, with the murdered including professors in ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIh
Stalino whom Khrushchev greatly respected. The high ranks of DPL92SOY)
the Party were not immune; the Central Committee of Ukraine
was so devastated that it could not convene a quorum. After Khrushchev speech at the
Khrushchev's arrival, the pace of arrests accelerated.[49] All but opening of the Moscow Metro (http
one member of the Ukrainian Politburo Organizational Bureau s://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTD
and Secretariat were arrested. Almost all government officials and Q62dSMjg#t=3m47s)
Red Army commanders were replaced.[50] During the first few
months after Khrushchev's arrival, almost everyone arrested
received the death penalty.[51]

Biographer William Taubman suggested that because Khrushchev was again unsuccessfully denounced
while in Kiev, he must have known that some of the denunciations were not true and that innocent people
were suffering.[50] In 1939, Khrushchev addressed the Fourteenth Ukrainian Party Congress, saying
"Comrades, we must unmask and relentlessly destroy all enemies of the people. But we must not allow a
single honest Bolshevik to be harmed. We must conduct a struggle against slanderers."[50]

World War II

Occupation of Polish territory

When Soviet troops, pursuant to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, invaded the eastern portion of Poland on 17
September 1939, Khrushchev accompanied the troops at Stalin's direction. A large number of ethnic
Ukrainians lived in the invaded area, much of which today forms the western portion of Ukraine. Many
inhabitants therefore initially welcomed the invasion, though they hoped that they would eventually
become independent. Khrushchev's role was to ensure that the occupied areas voted for union with the
USSR. Through a combination of propaganda, deception as to what was being voted for, and outright
fraud, the Soviets ensured that the assemblies elected in the new territories would unanimously petition for
union with the USSR. When the new assemblies did so, their petitions were granted by the USSR Supreme
 Soviet, and Western Ukraine became a part of the Ukrainian Soviet
Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR) on 1 November 1939.[52]
Clumsy actions by the Soviets, such as staffing Western Ukrainian
organizations with Eastern Ukrainians, and giving confiscated land
to collective farms (kolkhozes) rather than to peasants, soon
alienated Western Ukrainians, damaging Khrushchev's efforts to
achieve unity.[53]

War against Germany

When Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, in June 1941,

Khrushchev was still at his post in Kiev.[54] Stalin appointed him a
political commissar, and Khrushchev served on a number of fronts
as an intermediary between the local military commanders and the
political rulers in Moscow. Stalin used Khrushchev to keep
commanders on a tight leash, while the commanders sought to have
him influence Stalin.[55]

Nikita Khrushchev posing in a Red As the Germans advanced, Khrushchev worked with the military to
Army uniform following the Soviets' defend and save Kiev. Handicapped by orders from Stalin that
entry into the conflict. under no circumstances should the city be abandoned, the Red
Army was soon encircled by the Germans. While the Germans
stated they took 655,000  prisoners, according to the Soviets,
150,541 men out of 677,085 escaped the trap.[56] Primary sources differ on Khrushchev's involvement at
this point. According to Marshal Georgi Zhukov, writing some years after Khrushchev fired and disgraced
him in 1957, Khrushchev persuaded Stalin not to evacuate troops from Kiev.[57] However, Khrushchev
noted in his memoirs that he and Marshal Semyon Budyonny proposed redeploying Soviet forces to avoid
the encirclement until Marshal Semyon Timoshenko arrived from Moscow with orders for the troops to
hold their positions.[58] Early Khrushchev biographer Mark Frankland suggested that Khrushchev's faith in
his leader was first shaken by the Red Army's setbacks.[30] Khrushchev stated in his memoirs:

But let me return to the enemy breakthrough in the Kiev area, the encirclement of our group,
and the destruction of the 37th Army. Later, the Fifth Army also perished ... All of this was
senseless, and from the military point of view, a display of ignorance, incompetence, and
illiteracy. ... There you have the result of not taking a step backward. We were unable to save
these troops because we didn't withdraw them, and as a result, we simply lost them. ... And yet
it was possible to allow this not to happen.[59]

In 1942, Khrushchev was on the Southwest Front, and he and Timoshenko proposed a massive
counteroffensive in the Kharkov area. Stalin approved only part of the plan, but 640,000  Red Army
soldiers would still become involved in the offensive. The Germans, however, had deduced that the Soviets
were likely to attack at Kharkov, and set a trap. Beginning on 12 May 1942, the Soviet offensive initially
appeared successful, but within five days the Germans had driven deep into the Soviet flanks, and the Red
Army troops were in danger of being cut off. Stalin refused to halt the offensive, and the Red Army
divisions were soon encircled by the Germans. The USSR lost about 267,000 soldiers, including more than
200,000 men captured, and Stalin demoted Timoshenko and recalled Khrushchev to Moscow. While Stalin
hinted at arresting and executing Khrushchev, he allowed the commissar to return to the front by sending
him to Stalingrad.[60]
Khrushchev reached the Stalingrad Front in
August 1942, soon after the start of the battle for
the city.[61] His role in the Stalingrad defense was
not major—General Vasily Chuikov, who led the
city's defense, mentions Khrushchev only briefly
in a memoir published while Khrushchev was
premier—but to the end of his life, he was proud
of his role.[62] Though he visited Stalin in
Moscow on occasion, he remained in Stalingrad
for much of the battle and was nearly killed at
least once. He proposed a counterattack, only to
find that Georgy Zhukov and other generals had
already planned Operation Uranus, a plan to Khrushchev (left) on the Stalingrad Front
break out from Soviet positions and encircle and
destroy the Germans; it was being kept secret.
Before Uranus was launched, Khrushchev spent much time checking on troop readiness and morale,
interrogating Nazi prisoners, and recruiting some for propaganda purposes.[61]

Soon after Stalingrad, Khrushchev met with personal tragedy, as his son Leonid, a fighter pilot, was
apparently shot down and killed in action on 11 March 1943. The circumstances of Leonid's death remain
obscure and controversial,[63] as none of his fellow fliers stated that they witnessed him being shot down,
nor was his plane found or body recovered. As a result, Leonid's fate has been the subject of considerable
speculation. One theory has Leonid surviving the crash and collaborating with the Germans, and when he
was recaptured by the Soviets, Stalin ordering him shot despite Nikita Khrushchev pleading for his life.[63]
This supposed killing is used to explain why Khrushchev later denounced Stalin in the Secret
Speech.[63][64] While there is no supporting evidence for this account in Soviet files, some historians allege
that Leonid Khrushchev's file was tampered with after the war.[65] In later years, Leonid Khrushchev's
wingmate stated that he saw his plane disintegrate, but did not report it. Khrushchev biographer Taubman
speculates that this omission was most likely to avoid the possibility of being seen as complicit in the death
of the son of a Politburo member.[66] In mid-1943, Leonid's wife, Liuba Khrushcheva, was arrested on
accusations of spying and sentenced to five years in a labor camp, and her son (by another relationship),
Tolya, was placed in a series of orphanages. Leonid's daughter, Yulia, was raised by Nikita Khrushchev
and his wife.[67]

After Uranus forced the Germans into retreat, Khrushchev served on other fronts of the war. He was
attached to Soviet troops at the Battle of Kursk, in July 1943, which turned back the last major German
offensive on Soviet soil.[68] Khrushchev related that he interrogated an SS defector, learning that the
Germans intended an attack—a claim dismissed by his biographer Taubman as "almost certainly
exaggerated".[69] He accompanied Soviet troops as they took Kiev in November 1943, entering the
shattered city as Soviet forces drove out German troops.[69] As Soviet forces met with greater success,
driving the Nazis westwards towards Germany, Nikita Khrushchev became increasingly involved in
reconstruction work in Ukraine. He was appointed Premier of the Ukrainian SSR in addition to his earlier
party post, one of the rare instances in which the Ukrainian party and civil leader posts were held by one
person.[70]

According to Khrushchev biographer William Tompson, it is difficult to assess Khrushchev's war record,
since he most often acted as part of a military council, and it is not possible to know the extent to which he
influenced decisions, rather than signing off on the orders of military officers. However, Tompson points to
the fact that the few mentions of Khrushchev in military memoirs published during the Brezhnev era were
generally favorable, at a time when it was "barely possible to mention Khrushchev in print in any
context".[71] Tompson suggests that these favorable mentions indicate that military officers held
Khrushchev in high regard.[71]

Rise to power

Return to Ukraine

Almost all of Ukraine had been occupied

by the Germans, and Khrushchev returned
to his domain in late 1943 to find
devastation. Ukraine's industry had been
destroyed, and agriculture faced critical
shortages. Even though millions of
Ukrainians had been taken to Germany as
workers or prisoners of war, there was
insufficient housing for those who
remained.[72] One out of every six
Ukrainians were killed in World War II.[73]

Khrushchev sought to reconstruct Ukraine A photo of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev after being devastated
but also desired to complete the interrupted by the Second World War.
work of imposing the Soviet system on it,
though he hoped that the purges of the
1930s would not recur.[74] As Ukraine was recovered militarily, conscription was imposed, and
750,000 men aged between nineteen and fifty were given minimal military training and sent to join the Red
Army.[75] Other Ukrainians joined partisan forces, seeking an independent Ukraine.[75] Khrushchev rushed
from district to district through Ukraine, urging the depleted labor force to greater efforts. He made a short
visit to his birthplace of Kalinovka, finding a starving population, with only a third of the men who had
joined the Red Army having returned. Khrushchev did what he could to assist his hometown.[76] Despite
Khrushchev's efforts, in 1945, Ukrainian industry was at only a quarter of pre-war levels, and the harvest
actually dropped from that of 1944, when the entire territory of Ukraine had not yet been retaken.[72]

In an effort to increase agricultural production, the kolkhozes (collective farms) were empowered to expel
residents who were not pulling their weight. Kolkhoz leaders used this as an excuse to expel their personal
enemies, invalids, and the elderly, and nearly 12,000  people were sent to the eastern parts of the Soviet
Union. Khrushchev viewed this policy as very effective and recommended its adoption elsewhere to
Stalin.[72] He also worked to impose collectivization on Western Ukraine. While Khrushchev hoped to
accomplish this by 1947, lack of resources and armed resistance by partisans slowed the process.[77] The
partisans, many of whom fought as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), were gradually defeated, as
Soviet police and military reported killing 110,825 "bandits" and capturing a quarter million more between
1944 and 1946.[78] About 600,000 Western Ukrainians were arrested between 1944 and 1952, with one-
third executed and the remainder imprisoned or exiled to the east.[78]

The war years of 1944 and 1945 had seen poor harvests, and 1946 saw intense drought strike Ukraine and
Western Russia. Despite this, collective and state farms were required to turn over 52% of the harvest to the
government.[79] The Soviet government sought to collect as much grain as possible to supply communist
allies in Eastern Europe.[80] Khrushchev set the quotas at a high level, leading Stalin to expect an
unrealistically large quantity of grain from Ukraine.[81] Food was rationed—but non-agricultural rural
workers throughout the USSR were given no ration cards. The inevitable starvation was largely confined to
remote rural regions and was little noticed outside the USSR.[79] Khrushchev, realizing the desperate
situation in late 1946, repeatedly appealed to Stalin for aid, to be met with anger and resistance on the part
of the leader. When letters to Stalin had no effect, Khrushchev flew to Moscow and made his case in
person. Stalin finally gave Ukraine limited food aid, and money to set up free soup kitchens.[82] However,
Khrushchev's political standing had been damaged, and in February 1947, Stalin suggested that Lazar
Kaganovich be sent to Ukraine to "help" Khrushchev.[83] The following month, the Ukrainian Central
Committee removed Khrushchev as party leader in favor of Kaganovich, while retaining him as
premier.[84]

Soon after Kaganovich arrived in Kiev, Khrushchev fell ill and was barely seen until September 1947. In
his memoirs, Khrushchev indicates he had pneumonia; some biographers have theorized that Khrushchev's
illness was entirely political, out of fear that his loss of position was the first step towards downfall and
demise.[85] However, Khrushchev's children remembered their father as having been seriously ill. Once
Khrushchev was able to get out of bed, he and his family took their first vacation since before the war, to a
beachfront resort in Latvia.[84] Khrushchev, though, soon broke the beach routine with duck-hunting trips,
and a visit to the new Soviet Kaliningrad, where he toured factories and quarries.[86] By the end of 1947,
Kaganovich had been recalled to Moscow and the recovered Khrushchev had been restored to the First
Secretaryship. He then resigned the Ukrainian premiership in favor of Demyan Korotchenko, Khrushchev's
protégé.[85]

Khrushchev's final years in Ukraine were generally peaceful, with industry recovering,[87] Soviet forces
overcoming the partisans, and 1947 and 1948 seeing better-than-expected harvests.[88] Collectivization
advanced in Western Ukraine, and Khrushchev implemented more policies that encouraged collectivization
and discouraged private farms. These sometimes backfired, however: a tax on private livestock holdings led
to peasants slaughtering their stock.[89] With the idea of eliminating differences in attitude between town
and countryside and transforming the peasantry into a "rural proletariat", Khrushchev conceived the idea of
the "agro-town".[90] Rather than agricultural workers living in villages close to farms, they would live
further away in larger towns which would offer municipal services such as utilities and libraries, which
were not present in villages. He completed only one such town before his December 1949 return to
Moscow; he dedicated it to Stalin as a 70th birthday present.[90]

In his memoirs, Khrushchev spoke highly of Ukraine, where he governed for over a decade:

I'll say that the Ukrainian people treated me well. I recall warmly the years I spent there. This
was a period full of responsibilities, but pleasant because it brought satisfaction ... But far be it
from me to inflate my significance. The entire Ukrainian people was exerting great efforts ... I
attribute Ukraine's successes to the Ukrainian people as a whole. I won't elaborate further on
this theme, but in principle, it's very easy to demonstrate. I'm Russian myself, and I don't want
to offend the Russians.[91]

Stalin's final years

From mid-December 1949, Khrushchev again served as head of the Party in Moscow city and province.
His biographer Taubman suggests that Stalin most likely recalled Khrushchev to Moscow to balance the
influence of Georgy Malenkov and security chief Lavrentiy Beria, who were widely seen as Stalin's
heirs.[92] The aging leader rarely called Politburo meetings. Instead, much of the high-level work of
government took place at dinners hosted by Stalin for his inner circle of Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev,
Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav
Molotov, and Nikolai Bulganin. Khrushchev took
early naps so that he would not fall asleep in Stalin's
presence; he noted in his memoirs, "Things went
badly for those who dozed off at Stalin's table."[93]

In 1950, Khrushchev began a large-scale housing

program for Moscow. Five- or six-story apartment
buildings became ubiquitous throughout the Soviet
Union; many remain in use today.[94] Khrushchev
had prefabricated reinforced concrete used, greatly
speeding up construction.[95] These structures were Joseph Stalin (third from right) presiding over a
completed at triple the construction rate of Moscow ceremony commemorating his 71st birthday a few
housing from 1946 to 1950, lacked elevators or years before his death.
balconies, and were nicknamed Khrushchyovka by
the public, but because of their shoddy workmanship
sometimes disparagingly called Khrushchoba, combining Khrushchev's name with the Russian word
trushchoba, meaning "slum".[96] In 1995, almost 60,000,000  residents of the former Soviet Union still
lived in these buildings.[94]

In his new positions, Khrushchev continued his kolkhoz consolidation scheme, which decreased the
number of collective farms in Moscow province by about 70%. This resulted in farms that were too large
for one chairman to manage effectively.[97] Khrushchev also sought to implement his agro-town proposal,
but when his lengthy speech on the subject was published in Pravda in March 1951, Stalin disapproved of
it. The periodical quickly published a note stating that Khrushchev's speech was merely a proposal, not
policy. In April, the Politburo disavowed the agro-town proposal. Khrushchev feared that Stalin would
remove him from office, but the leader mocked Khrushchev, then allowed the episode to pass.[98]

On 1 March 1953, Stalin suffered a massive stroke. As terrified doctors attempted treatment, Khrushchev
and his colleagues engaged in an intense discussion as to the new government. On 5 March, Stalin died.
[99]

Khrushchev later reflected on Stalin:

Stalin called everyone who didn't agree with him an "enemy of the people." He said that they
wanted to restore the old order, and for this purpose, "the enemies of the people" had linked up
with the forces of reaction internationally. As a result, several hundred thousand honest people
perished. Everyone lived in fear in those days. Everyone expected that at any moment there
would be a knock on the door in the middle of the night and that knock on the door would
prove fatal  ... [P]eople not to Stalin's liking were annihilated, honest party members,
irreproachable people, loyal and hard workers for our cause who had gone through the school
of revolutionary struggle under Lenin's leadership. This was utter and complete arbitrariness.
And now is all this to be forgiven and forgotten? Never![100]

Struggle for control

On 6 March 1953, Stalin's death was announced, as was the new leadership. Malenkov was the new
Chairman of the Council of Ministers, with Beria (who consolidated his hold over the security agencies),
Kaganovich, Bulganin, and former Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov as first vice-chairmen. Those
members of the Presidium of the Central Committee who had been recently promoted by Stalin were
demoted. Khrushchev was relieved of his duties as Party head for
Moscow to concentrate on unspecified duties in the Party's Central
Committee.[101] The New York Times listed Malenkov and Beria first
and second among the ten-man Presidium—and Khrushchev last.[102]

However, Malenkov resigned from the secretariat of the Central

Committee on 14 March.[103] This came due to concerns that he was
acquiring too much power. The major beneficiary was Khrushchev.
His name appeared atop a revised list of secretaries—indicating that he
was now in charge of the party.[104] The Central Committee formally
elected him First Secretary in September.[105]

After Stalin's death, Beria launched a number of reforms. According to

Taubman, "unparalleled in his cynicism, he [Beria] did not let ideology
stand in his way. Had he prevailed, he would almost certainly have
exterminated his colleagues, if only to prevent them from liquidating Georgy Malenkov, the man who
him. In the meantime, however, his burst of reforms rivaled briefly succeeded Stalin as leader
Khrushchev's and in some ways even Gorbachev's thirty-five years of the Soviet Union.
later."[103] One proposal, which was adopted, was an amnesty which
eventually led to the freeing of over a million non-political prisoners.
Another, which was not adopted, was to release East Germany into a united, neutral Germany in exchange
for compensation from the West[106]—a proposal considered by Khrushchev to be anti-communist.[107]
Khrushchev allied with Malenkov to block many of Beria's proposals, while the two slowly picked up
support from other Presidium members. Their campaign against Beria was aided by fears that Beria was
planning a military coup,[108] and, according to Khrushchev in his memoirs, by the conviction that "Beria
is getting his knives ready for us."[109] The key move by Khrushchev and Malenkov was to lure two of
Beria's most powerful deputy ministers, Sergei Kruglov and Ivan Serov, to betray their boss. This allowed
Khrushchev and Malenkov to arrest Beria as Beria belatedly discovered he had lost control of Ministry of
Interior troops and the troops of the Kremlin guard.[110] On 26 June 1953, Beria was arrested at a
Presidium meeting, following extensive military preparations by Khrushchev and his allies. Beria was tried
in secret and executed in December 1953 with five of his close associates. The execution of Beria proved
to be the last time the loser of a top-level Soviet power struggle paid with his life.[111]

The power struggle continued. Malenkov's power was in the central state apparatus, which he sought to
extend through reorganizing the government, giving it additional power at the expense of the Party. He also
sought public support by lowering retail prices and lowering the level of bond sales to citizens, which had
long been effectively obligatory. Khrushchev, on the other hand, with his power base in the Party, sought to
strengthen the Party and his position within it. While, under the Soviet system, the Party was to be
preeminent, it had been greatly drained of power by Stalin, who had given much of that power to himself
and to the Politburo (later, to the Presidium). Khrushchev saw that with the Presidium in conflict, the Party
and its Central Committee might again become powerful.[112] Khrushchev carefully cultivated high Party
officials, and was able to appoint supporters as local Party bosses, who then took seats on the Central
Committee.[113]

Khrushchev presented himself as a down-to-earth activist prepared to take up any challenge, contrasting
with Malenkov who, though sophisticated, came across as colourless.[113] Khrushchev arranged for the
Kremlin grounds to be opened to the public, an act with "great public resonance".[114] While both
Malenkov and Khrushchev sought reforms to agriculture, Khrushchev's proposals were broader and
included the Virgin Lands Campaign, under which hundreds of thousands of young volunteers would settle
and farm areas of Western Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan. While the scheme eventually became a
tremendous disaster for Soviet agriculture, it was initially successful.[115] In addition, Khrushchev
possessed incriminating information on Malenkov, taken from Beria's secret files. As Soviet prosecutors
 investigated the atrocities of Stalin's last years, including the
Leningrad case, they came across evidence of Malenkov's
involvement. Beginning in February 1954, Khrushchev
replaced Malenkov in the seat of honour at Presidium
meetings; in June, Malenkov ceased to head the list of
Presidium members, which was thereafter organized in
alphabetical order. Khrushchev's influence continued to
increase, winning the allegiance of local party heads, and with
his nominee heading the KGB.[116]

At a Central Committee meeting in January 1955, Malenkov

Khrushchev featured on the November
1953 cover of TIME after becoming First
Secretary of the Communist Party
was accused of involvement in atrocities, and the committee
passed a resolution accusing him of involvement in the
Leningrad case, and of facilitating Beria's climb to power. At a
meeting of the mostly ceremonial Supreme Soviet the
following month, Malenkov was demoted in favor of
Bulganin, to the surprise of Western observers.[117] Malenkov
remained in the Presidium as Minister of Electric Power
Stations. According to Khrushchev biographer William
Tompson, "Khrushchev's position as first among the members
of the collective leadership was now beyond any reasonable
doubt."[118]

The post-Stalin battle for political control reshaped foreign-policy. There was more realism and less
ideological abstraction when confronted by European and Middle Eastern situations. Khrushchev's "secret
speech" attack on Stalin in 1956 was a signal for abandoning Stalinist precepts and looking at new options,
including more involvement in the Middle East. Khrushchev in power did not moderate his personality—he
remained unpredictable, and was emboldened by the spectacular successes in space. He thought that would
give the USSR world prestige, leading to quick Communist advances in the Third World. Khrushchev's
policy was still restrained by the need to retain the support of the Presidium and to placate the inarticulate
but restive Soviet masses who were thrilled by Sputnik but demanded a higher standard of living on the
ground as well.[119]

Leader (1956–1964)

Domestic policies

Consolidation of power and "Secret Speech"

After the demotion of Malenkov, Khrushchev and Molotov initially worked together well. Molotov even
proposed that Khrushchev, not Bulganin, replace Malenkov as premier. However, Khrushchev and
Molotov increasingly differed on policy. Molotov opposed the Virgin Lands policy, instead proposing
heavy investment to increase yields in developed agricultural areas, which Khrushchev felt was not feasible
due to a lack of resources and a lack of a sophisticated farm labor force. The two differed on foreign policy
as well; soon after Khrushchev took power, he sought a peace treaty with Austria, which would allow
Soviet troops then in occupation of part of the country to leave. Molotov was resistant, but Khrushchev
arranged for an Austrian delegation to come to Moscow and negotiate the treaty.[120] Although
Khrushchev and other Presidium members attacked Molotov at a Central Committee meeting in mid-1955,
accusing him of conducting a foreign policy which turned the world against the USSR, Molotov remained
in his position.[121]

By the end of 1955, thousands of political prisoners had returned home and told their experiences of the
Gulag labor camps.[122] Continuing investigation into the abuses brought home the full breadth of Stalin's
crimes to his successors. Working together with his close ally Anastas Mikoyan, Khrushchev believed that
once the stain of Stalinism was removed, the Party would inspire loyalty among the people.[123] Beginning
in October 1955, Khrushchev fought to tell the delegates to the upcoming 20th Party Congress about
Stalin's crimes. Some of his colleagues, including Molotov and Malenkov, opposed the disclosure and
managed to persuade him to make his remarks in a closed session.[124]

The 20th Party Congress opened on 14

February 1956. In his opening words in his
initial address, Khrushchev denigrated
Stalin by asking delegates to rise in honour
of the Communist leaders who had died
since the last congress, whom he named,
equating Stalin with Klement Gottwald and
the little-known Kyuichi Tokuda.[125] In
the early morning hours of 25 February,
Khrushchev delivered what became known
as the "Secret Speech" to a closed session
of the Congress limited to Soviet delegates. General Secretary Khrushchev speaking before the 20th CPSU
In four hours, he demolished Stalin's Congress in 1956
reputation. Khrushchev noted in his
memoirs that the "congress listened to me
in silence. As the saying goes, you could have heard a pin drop. It was all so sudden and unexpected."[126]
Khrushchev told the delegates:

It is here that Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his brutality, and his
abuse of power  ... he often chose the path of repression and physical annihilation, not only
against actual enemies but also against individuals who had not committed any crimes against
the party or the Soviet Government.[127]

The Secret Speech, while it did not fundamentally change Soviet society, had wide-ranging effects. The
speech was a factor in unrest in Poland and revolution in Hungary later in 1956, and Stalin defenders led
four days of rioting in his native Georgia in June, calling for Khrushchev to resign and Molotov to take
over.[128] In meetings where the Secret Speech was read, communists would make even more severe
condemnations of Stalin (and of Khrushchev), and even call for multi-party elections. However, Stalin was
not publicly denounced, and his portrait remained widespread through the USSR, from airports to
Khrushchev's Kremlin office. Mikhail Gorbachev, then a Komsomol official, recalled that though young
and well-educated Soviets in his district were excited by the speech, many others decried it, either
defending Stalin or seeing little point in digging up the past.[128] Forty years later, after the fall of the Soviet
Union, Gorbachev applauded Khrushchev for his courage in taking a huge political risk and showing
himself to be "a moral man after all".[129]

The term "Secret Speech" proved to be an utter misnomer. While the attendees at the Speech were all
Soviet, Eastern European delegates were allowed to hear it the following night, read slowly to allow them
to take notes. By 5 March, copies were being mailed throughout the Soviet Union, marked "not for the
press" rather than "top secret". An official translation appeared within a month in Poland; the Poles printed
12,000 extra copies, one of which soon reached the West.[124] Khrushchev's son, Sergei, later wrote, "
[C]learly, Father tried to ensure it would reach as many ears as possible. It was soon read at Komsomol
meetings; that meant another eighteen million listeners. If you include their relatives, friends, and
acquaintances, you could say that the entire country became familiar with the speech ... Spring had barely
begun when the speech began circulating around the world."[130]

The anti-Khrushchev minority in the Presidium was augmented by those opposed to Khrushchev's
proposals to decentralize authority over industry, which struck at the heart of Malenkov's power base.
During the first half of 1957, Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich worked to quietly build support to
dismiss Khrushchev. At an 18 June Presidium meeting at which two Khrushchev supporters were absent,
the plotters moved that Bulganin, who had joined the scheme, take the chair, and proposed other moves
which would effectively demote Khrushchev and put themselves in control. Khrushchev objected on the
grounds that not all Presidium members had been notified, an objection which would have been quickly
dismissed had Khrushchev not held firm control over the military, through Minister of Defense Marshal
Zhukov, and the security departments. Lengthy Presidium meetings took place, continuing over several
days. As word leaked of the power struggle, members of the Central Committee, which Khrushchev
controlled, streamed to Moscow, many flown there aboard military planes, and demanded to be admitted to
the meeting. While they were not admitted, there were soon enough Central Committee members in
Moscow to call an emergency Party Congress, which effectively forced the leadership to allow a session of
the Central Committee. At that meeting, the three main conspirators were dubbed the Anti-Party Group,
accused of factionalism and complicity in Stalin's crimes. The three were expelled from the Central
Committee and Presidium, as was former Foreign Minister and Khrushchev client Dmitri Shepilov who
joined them in the plot. Molotov was sent as Ambassador to Mongolia; the others were sent to head
industrial facilities and institutes far from Moscow.[131]

Marshal Zhukov was rewarded for his support with full membership in the Presidium, but Khrushchev
feared his popularity and power. In October 1957, the defense minister was sent on a tour of the Balkans,
as Khrushchev arranged a Presidium meeting to dismiss him. Zhukov learned what was happening, and
hurried back to Moscow, only to be formally notified of his dismissal. At a Central Committee meeting
several weeks later, not a word was said in Zhukov's defense.[132] Khrushchev completed the consolidation
of power by in March 1958 arranging for Bulganin's dismissal as premier in favor of himself (Bulganin was
appointed to head the Gosbank) and by establishing a USSR Defense Council, led by himself, effectively
making him commander in chief.[133] Though Khrushchev was now preeminent, he did not enjoy Stalin's
absolute power.[133]

Liberalization and the arts

After assuming power, Khrushchev allowed a modest amount of freedom in the arts. Vladimir Dudintsev's
Not by Bread Alone,[134] about an idealistic engineer opposed by rigid bureaucrats, was allowed to be
published in 1956, though Khrushchev called the novel "false at its base".[135] In 1958, however,
Khrushchev ordered a fierce attack on Boris Pasternak after his novel Doctor Zhivago was published
abroad (he was denied permission to publish it in the Soviet Union). Pravda described the novel as "low-
grade reactionary hackwork", and the author was expelled from the Writer's Union.[136] Pasternak was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but under heavy pressure he declined it. Once he did so,
Khrushchev ordered a halt to the attacks on Pasternak. In his memoirs, Khrushchev stated that he agonized
over the novel, very nearly allowed it to be published, and later regretted not doing so.[136] After his fall
from power, Khrushchev obtained a copy of the novel and read it (he had earlier read only excerpts) and
stated, "We shouldn't have banned it. I should have read it myself. There's nothing anti-Soviet in it."[137]
Khrushchev believed that the USSR could match the West's living standards,[138] and was not afraid to
allow Soviet citizens to see Western achievements.[139] Stalin had permitted few tourists to the Soviet
Union, and had allowed few Soviets to travel. Khrushchev let Soviets travel (over two million Soviet
citizens travelled abroad between 1957 and 1961, 700,000 of whom visited the West) and allowed
foreigners to visit the Soviet Union, where tourists became subjects of immense curiosity.[140] In 1957,
Khrushchev authorized the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students to be held in Moscow that summer.
He instructed Komsomol officials to "smother foreign guests in our embrace".[141] The resulting "socialist
carnival" involved over three million Moscovites, who joined with 30,000 young foreign visitors in events
that ranged from discussion groups throughout the city to events at the Kremlin itself.[142] According to
historian Vladislav Zubok, the festival "shattered propagandist clichés" about Westerners by allowing
Moscovites to see them for themselves.[139]

In 1962, Khrushchev, impressed by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One

Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, persuaded the Presidium to
allow publication.[143] That renewed thaw ended on 1 December
1962, when Khrushchev was taken to the Manezh Gallery to view
an exhibit which included a number of avant-garde works. On
seeing them, Khrushchev exploded with anger, an episode known
as the Manege Affair, describing the artwork as "dog shit",[144]
and proclaiming that "a donkey could smear better art with its
Khrushchev, his wife, his son Sergei
tail".[145] A week later, Pravda issued a call for artistic purity.
(far right) and his daughter Rada
When writers and filmmakers defended the painters, Khrushchev during their trip to USA in 1959
extended his anger to them. However, despite the premier's rage,
none of the artists were arrested or exiled. The Manezh Gallery
exhibit remained open for some time after Khrushchev's visit, and experienced a considerable rise in
attendance after the article in Pravda.[144]

Political reform

Under Khrushchev, the special tribunals operated by security agencies were abolished. These tribunals,
known as troikas, had often ignored laws and procedures. Under the reforms, no prosecution for a political
crime could be brought even in the regular courts unless approved by the local Party committee. This rarely
happened; there were no major political trials under Khrushchev, and at most several hundred political
prosecutions overall. Instead, other sanctions were imposed on Soviet dissidents, including loss of job or
university position, or expulsion from the Party. During Khrushchev's rule, forced hospitalization for the
"socially dangerous" was introduced.[146] According to author Roy Medvedev, who wrote an early
analysis of Khrushchev's years in power, "political terror as an everyday method of government was
replaced under Khrushchev by administrative means of repression".[146]

In 1958, Khrushchev opened a Central Committee meeting to hundreds of Soviet officials; some were even
allowed to address the meeting. For the first time, the proceedings of the committee were made public in
book form, a practice which was continued at subsequent meetings. This openness, however, actually
allowed Khrushchev greater control over the committee, since dissenters would have to make their case in
front of a large, disapproving crowd.[147]

In 1962, Khrushchev divided oblast level Party committees (obkoms) into two parallel structures, one for
industry and one for agriculture. This was unpopular among Party apparatchiks, and led to confusions in
the chain of command, as neither committee secretary had precedence over the other. As there were limited
numbers of Central Committee seats from each oblast, the division set up the possibility of rivalry for office
between factions, and, according to Medvedev, had the potential for beginning a two-party system.[148]
Khrushchev also ordered that one-third of the membership of each committee, from low-level councils to
the Central Committee itself, be replaced at each election. This decree created tension between Khrushchev
and the Central Committee,[149] and upset the party leaders upon whose support Khrushchev had risen to
power.[30]

Agricultural policy

Khrushchev was an expert on agricultural policies and sensed an urgent need to reform the backward,
inefficient system with ideas that worked in the United States. He looked especially at collectivism, state
farms, liquidation of machine-tractor stations, planning decentralization, economic incentives, increased
labor and capital investment, new crops, and new production programs. Henry Ford had been at the center
of American technology transfer to the Soviet Union in the 1930s; he sent over factory designs, engineers,
and skilled craftsmen, as well as tens of thousands of Ford tractors. By the 1940s Khrushchev was keenly
interested in American agricultural innovations, especially on large-scale family-operated farms in the
Midwest. In the 1950s he sent several delegations to visit farms and land grant colleges, looking at
successful farms that utilized high-yielding seed varieties, very large and powerful tractors and other
machines, all guided by modern management techniques.[150] Especially after his visit to the United States
in 1959, he was keenly aware of the need to emulate and even match American superiority and agricultural
technology.[151][152]

A postage stamp from 1979 commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Virgin Lands
campaign

Khrushchev became a hyper-enthusiastic crusader to grow corn (maize).[153] He established a corn institute
in Ukraine and ordered thousands of acres to be planted with corn in the Virgin Lands.[154] In 1955,
Khrushchev advocated an Iowa-style corn belt in the Soviet Union, and a Soviet delegation visited the U.S.
state that summer. The delegation chief was approached by farmer and corn seed salesman Roswell Garst,
who persuaded him to visit Garst's large farm.[155] The Iowan visited the Soviet Union, where he became
friends with Khrushchev, and Garst sold the USSR 5,000 short tons (4,500  t) of seed corn.[156] Garst
warned the Soviets to grow the corn in the southern part of the country and to ensure there were sufficient
stocks of fertilizer, insecticides, and herbicides.[157] This, however, was not done, as Khrushchev sought to
plant corn even in Siberia, and without the necessary chemicals. The corn experiment was not a great
success, and he later complained that overenthusiastic officials, wanting to please him, had overplanted
without laying the proper groundwork, and "as a result corn was discredited as a silage crop—and so was
I".[157]

Khrushchev sought to abolish the Machine-Tractor Stations (MTS) which not only owned most large
agricultural machines such as combines and tractors but also provided services such as plowing, and
transfer their equipment and functions to the kolkhozes and sovkhozes (state farms).[158] After a successful
test involving MTS which served one large kolkhoz each, Khrushchev ordered a gradual transition—but
then ordered that the change take place with great speed.[159] Within three months, over half of the MTS
facilities had been closed, and kolkhozes were being required to buy the equipment, with no discount given
for older or dilapidated machines.[160] MTS employees, unwilling to bind themselves to kolkhozes and lose
their state employee benefits and the right to change their jobs, fled to the cities, creating a shortage of
skilled operators.[161] The costs of the machinery, plus the costs of building storage sheds and fuel tanks for
the equipment, impoverished many kolkhozes. Inadequate provisions were made for repair stations.[162]
Without the MTS, the market for Soviet agricultural equipment fell apart, as the kolkhozes now had neither
the money nor skilled buyers to purchase new equipment.[163]

In the 1940s Stalin put Trofim Lysenko in charge of agricultural research, with his ideas that flouted
modern genetics science. Lysenko maintained his influence under Khrushchev, and helped block the
adoption of American techniques.[164] In 1959, Khrushchev announced a goal of overtaking the United
States in the production of milk, meat, and butter. Local officials kept Khrushchev happy with unrealistic
pledges of production. These goals were met by farmers who slaughtered their breeding herds and by
purchasing meat at state stores, then reselling it back to the government, artificially increasing recorded
production.[165]

In June 1962, food prices were raised, particularly on meat and butter, by 25–30%. This caused public
discontent. In the southern Russian city of Novocherkassk (Rostov Region), this discontent escalated to a
strike and a revolt against the authorities. The revolt was put down by the military, resulting in a massacre
that killed 22 people and wounded 87 according to Soviet official accounts. In addition, 116 demonstrators
were convicted of involvement and seven of them executed. Information about the revolt was completely
suppressed in the USSR, but spread through Samizdat and damaged Khrushchev's reputation in the
West.[166]

Drought struck the Soviet Union in 1963; the harvest of 107,500,000 short tons (97,500,000 t) of grain was
down from a peak of 134,700,000 short tons (122,200,000 t) in 1958. The shortages resulted in bread lines,
a fact at first kept from Khrushchev. Reluctant to purchase food in the West,[167] but faced with the
alternative of widespread hunger, Khrushchev exhausted the nation's hard currency reserves and expended
part of its gold stockpile in the purchase of grain and other foodstuffs.[168][169]

Education

While visiting the United States in 1959, Khrushchev was greatly impressed by the agricultural education
program at Iowa State University, and sought to imitate it in the Soviet Union. At the time, the main
agricultural college in the USSR was in Moscow, and students did not do the manual labor of farming.
Khrushchev proposed to move the programs to rural areas. He was unsuccessful, due to resistance from
professors and students, who never actually disagreed with the premier, but who did not carry out his
proposals.[170] Khrushchev recalled in his memoirs, "It's nice to live in Moscow and work at the
Timiryazev Agricultural Academy. It's a venerable old institution, a large economic unit, with skilled
instructors, but it's in the city! Its students aren't yearning to work on the collective farms because to do that
they'd have to go out in the provinces and live in the sticks."[171]
Khrushchev founded several academic towns, such as
Akademgorodok. The premier believed that Western science
flourished because many scientists lived in university towns such as
Oxford, isolated from big-city distractions, and had pleasant living
conditions and good pay. He sought to duplicate those conditions in
the Soviet Union. Khrushchev's attempt was generally successful,
though his new towns and scientific centres tended to attract
younger scientists, with older ones unwilling to leave Moscow or
Leningrad.[172]
Khrushchev (right) with cosmonauts
Khrushchev also proposed to restructure Soviet high schools. Yuri Gagarin, Pavel Popovich and
Valentina Tereshkova, 1963
While the high schools provided a college preparatory curriculum,
in fact, few Soviet youths went on to university. Khrushchev
wanted to shift the focus of secondary schools to vocational
training: students would spend much of their time at factory jobs or in apprenticeships and only a small part
at the schools.[173] In practice, schools developed links with nearby enterprises and students went to work
for only one or two days a week; the organizations disliked having to teach, while students and their
families complained that they had little choice in what trade to learn.[174]

While the vocational proposal would not survive Khrushchev's downfall, a longer-lasting change was a
related establishment of specialized high schools for gifted students or those wishing to study a specific
subject.[175] These schools were modeled after the foreign-language schools that had been established in
Moscow and Leningrad beginning in 1949.[176] In 1962, a special summer school was established in
Novosibirsk to prepare students for Siberian math and science Olympiad. The following year, the
Novosibirsk Maths and Science Boarding-School became the first permanent residential school specializing
in math and science. Other such schools were soon established in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev. By the
early 1970s, over 100 specialized schools had been established, in mathematics, the sciences, art, music,
and sport.[175] Preschool education was increased as part of Khrushchev's reforms, and by the time he left
office, about 22% of Soviet children attended preschool—about half of urban children, but only about 12%
of rural children.[177]

Anti-religious campaign

The anti-religious campaign of the Khrushchev era began in 1959, coinciding with the 21st Party Congress
in the same year. It was carried out by mass closures of churches[178][179] (reducing the number from
22,000 in 1959[180] to 13,008 in 1960 and to 7,873 by 1965[181]), monasteries, convents, and still-existing
seminaries. The campaign also included a restriction of parental rights to teach religion to their children; a
ban on the presence of children at church services (beginning with the Baptists in 1961, it was then
extended to the Orthodox in 1963); and a ban on the administration of the Eucharist to children over the
age of four. Khrushchev additionally banned all services held outside of churches' walls, renewed
enforcement of 1929 legislation banning pilgrimages, and recorded the personal identities of all adults
requesting church baptisms, weddings, or funerals.[182] He also disallowed the ringing of church bells and
services in daytime in some rural settings from May to the end of October under the pretext of fieldwork
requirements. Non-fulfillment of these regulations by clergy would lead to disallowance of state
registration; meaning clergy could no longer do any pastoral or liturgical work without special state
permission). According to Dimitry Pospielovsky, the state carried out forced retirement, arrests, and prison
sentences for clergymen on "trumped-up charges," but in reality, he writes, said state actions were taken
against clergy who resisted the closure of churches; delivered sermons attacking the USSR's state atheism
and anti-religious campaign; conducted Christian charity; or made religion popular by personal
example.[183]
Foreign and defense policies

From 1950 to 1953 Khrushchev in the inner circle at the Kremlin

was well-placed to closely observe and evaluate Stalin's foreign
policy, while of course praising the dictator every day. Khrushchev
considered the entire Cold War to be a serious mistake on Stalin's
part. In long-term perspective, it created a militarized struggle with
NATO, a stronger capitalist coalition. That struggle was entirely
unnecessary, and was very expensive for the Soviet Union. It
diverted attention away from the neutral developing world, where
progress could be made, and it weakened Moscow's relationship
with its East European satellites. Basically Khrushchev was much
more optimistic about the future than Stalin or Molotov, and was
more of an internationalist. He believed the working classes and the
common peoples of the world would eventually find their way Khrushchev and Egyptian President
towards socialism and (possibly) even communism, and that Gamal Abdel Nasser aboard a train
conflicts like the Cold War diverted their attention from this returning to Cairo from Alexandria,
eventual goal. Peaceful coexistence was instead endorsed, or the during a visit by Khrushchev to
sort that Lenin himself had practiced at first. That would allow the Egypt, 1964.
Soviet Union and its satellite states to build up their economies and
their standard of living. In specific terms Khrushchev decided that
Stalin had made a series of mistakes, such as heavy-handed pressure in Turkey and Iran in 1945 and 1946,
and especially heavy pressure on Berlin that led to the failed Berlin blockade in 1948. Khrushchev was
pleased that when Malenkov replaced Stalin in 1953 he spoke of better relations with the West, and also
with building ties to the Communist Party movements in imperialistic European colonies that would soon
become independent nations across Africa and Asia. Germany was a major issue for Khrushchev, not
because he feared a NATO Invasion eastward, but because it weakened the East German regime, which
economically paled in comparison to the miraculous economic progress of West Germany. Khrushchev
blamed Molotov for being unable to resolve the conflict with Yugoslavia, and largely ignoring the needs of
the East European communist satellites.

Khrushchev wisely chose Austria as a way to quickly come to agreement with NATO. It became a small
neutralized nation economically tied to the West but diplomatically neutral and no threat.[184]

When Khrushchev took control, the outside world still knew little of him, and initially was not impressed
by him. Short, heavyset, and wearing ill-fitting suits, he "radiated energy but not intellect", and was
dismissed by many as a buffoon who would not last long.[185] British Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan
wondered, "How can this fat, vulgar man with his pig eyes and ceaseless flow of talk be the head—the
aspirant Tsar for all those millions of people?"[186]

Khrushchev biographer Tompson described the mercurial leader:

He could be charming or vulgar, ebullient or sullen, he was given to public displays of rage
(often contrived) and to soaring hyperbole in his rhetoric. But whatever he was, however, he
came across, he was more human than his predecessor or even than most of his foreign
counterparts, and for much of the world that was enough to make the USSR seem less
mysterious or menacing.[187]

United States and NATO

Early relations and U.S. visit (1957–1960)

Khrushchev sought to find a lasting solution to the problem of a

Khrushchev with Vice President
Richard Nixon, 1959
complex agenda of high-level summit meetings.[188]
divided Germany and of the enclave of West Berlin deep within
East German territory. In November 1958, calling West Berlin a
"malignant tumor", he gave the United States, United Kingdom
and France six months to conclude a peace treaty with both
German states and the Soviet Union. If one was not signed,
Khrushchev stated, the Soviet Union would conclude a peace
treaty with East Germany. This would leave East Germany, which
was not a party to treaties giving the Western Powers access to
Berlin, in control of the routes to the city. They proposed making
Berlin a free city, which meant no outside military forces would be
stationed there. West Germany, United States and France strongly
opposed the ultimatum, but Britain wanted to consider it as a
starting point for negotiations. No one wanted to risk war over the
issue. At Britain's request, Khrushchev extended and ultimately
dropped the ultimatum, as the Berlin issue became part of the

Khrushchev sought to sharply reduce levels of conventional weapons and to defend the Soviet Union with
missiles. He believed that without this transition, the huge Soviet military would continue to eat up
resources, making Khrushchev's goals of improving Soviet life difficult to achieve.[189] He abandoned
Stalin's plans for a large navy in 1955, believing that the new ships would be too vulnerable to either a
conventional or nuclear attack.[190] In January 1960, he took advantage of improved relations with the U.S.
to order a reduction of one-third in the size of Soviet armed forces, alleging that advanced weapons would
make up for the lost troops.[191] While conscription of Soviet youth remained in force, exemptions from
military service became more and more common, especially for students.[192]

Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko argue that Khrushchev thought

that policies like Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) were too
dangerous for the Soviet Union. His approach did not greatly change his
foreign policy or military doctrine but is apparent in his determination to
choose options that minimized the risk of war.[193] The Soviets had few
operable intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM); in spite of this,
Khrushchev publicly boasted of the Soviets' missile programs, stating
that Soviet weapons were varied and numerous. The First Secretary
hoped that public perception that the Soviets were ahead would put
psychological pressure on the West resulting in political
concessions.[194] The Soviet space program, which Khrushchev firmly
supported, appeared to confirm his claims when the Soviets launched
Sputnik 1 into orbit, a feat that astonished the world. When it became
clear that the launch was real, and Sputnik 1 was in orbit, Western
governments concluded that the Soviet ICBM program was further Khrushchev featured as Time
along than it actually was. [195] Khrushchev added to this Magazine's Man of the Year for
misapprehension by stating in an October 1957 interview that the USSR 1957 after the launch of Sputnik
had all the rockets, of whatever capacity, that it needed. [196]
For years,
Khrushchev would make a point of preceding a major foreign trip with
a rocket launch, to the discomfiture of his hosts.[196] In January 1960 Khrushchev told the Presidium that
Soviet ICBMs made an agreement with the U.S. possible because "main-street Americans have begun to
shake from fear for the first times in their lives".[197] The United States had learned of the underdeveloped
state of the Soviet missile program from overflights in the late 1950s, but only high U.S. officials knew of
the deception. The general U.S. and public perception of a "missile gap" led to a considerable defense
buildup on the part of the United States.[194]

During Vice President Nixon's visit to the Soviet Union in 1959 he and Khrushchev took part in what later
became known as the Kitchen Debate. Nixon and Khrushchev had an impassioned argument in a model
kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, with each defending the economic system of his
country.[30]

Nixon invited Khrushchev to visit the United States, and he agreed.

He made his first visit to the United States, arriving in Washington,
on 15 September 1959, and spending thirteen days in the country.
This first visit by a Soviet premier resulted in an extended media
circus.[198] Khrushchev brought his wife, Nina Petrovna, and adult
children with him, though it was not usual for Soviet officials to
travel with their families.[199] The peripatetic premier visited New
York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco (visiting a supermarket),
Coon Rapids, Iowa (visiting Roswell Garst's farm), Pittsburgh, and
Washington,[200] concluding with a meeting with President
Khrushchev with Agriculture
Eisenhower at Camp David.[201] During luncheon at the Twentieth
Secretary Ezra Taft Benson (left of
Century-Fox Studio in Los Angeles Khrushchev engaged in an
Khrushchev) and U.S. Ambassador
to the United Nations Henry Cabot
improvised yet jovial debate with his host Spyros Skouras over the
Lodge (far left) during his visit on 16 respective merits of capitalism and communism.[202] Khrushchev
September 1959 to the Agricultural was also to visit Disneyland, but the visit was canceled for security
Research Service Center reasons, much to his disgruntlement.[203][204] He did, however,
visit Eleanor Roosevelt at her home.[205] While visiting IBM's new
research campus in San Jose, California, Khrushchev expressed
little interest in computer technology, but he greatly admired the self-service cafeteria, and, on his return,
introduced self-service in the Soviet Union.[206]

This visit resulted in an informal agreement that there would be no firm deadline over Berlin, but that there
would be a four-power summit to try to resolve the issue. The Russian's goal was to present warmth, charm
and peacefulness, using candid interviews to convince Americans of his humanity and good will. He
performed well and Theodore Windt calls it, "the zenith of his career."[207] The friendly American
audiences convinced Khrushchev that he had achieved a strong personal relationship with Eisenhower and
that he could achieve détente with the Americans. Eisenhower was actually unimpressed by the Soviet
leader.[208] He pushed for an immediate summit but was frustrated by French President Charles de Gaulle,
who postponed it until 1960, a year in which Eisenhower was scheduled to pay a return visit to the Soviet
Union.[209]

U-2 and Berlin crisis (1960–1961)

A constant irritant in Soviet–U.S. relations was the overflight of the Soviet Union by American U-2 spy
aircraft. On 9 April 1960, the U.S. resumed such flights after a lengthy break. The Soviets had protested the
flights in the past but had been ignored by Washington. Content in what he thought was a strong personal
relationship with Eisenhower, Khrushchev was confused and angered by the flights' resumption, and
concluded that they had been ordered by CIA Director Allen Dulles without the U.S. President's
knowledge. Nikita Khrushchev planned to visit the U.S. to meet President Eisenhower, however, the visit
was canceled when Soviet Air Defence Forces brought down the U.S. U-2.[210] On 1 May, a U-2 was shot
down, its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, captured alive.[211] Believing Powers to have been killed, the U.S.
announced that a weather plane had been lost near the Turkish-Soviet border. Khrushchev risked
destroying the summit, due to start on 16 May in Paris, if he
announced the shootdown, but would look weak in the eyes of his
military and security forces if he did nothing.[211] Finally, on 5
May, Khrushchev announced the shootdown and Powers' capture,
blaming the overflight on "imperialist circles and militarists, whose
stronghold is the Pentagon", and suggesting the plane had been
sent without Eisenhower's knowledge.[212] Eisenhower could not
have it thought that there were rogue elements in the Pentagon
operating without his knowledge, and admitted that he had ordered
the flights, calling them "a distasteful necessity".[213] The
admission stunned Khrushchev and turned the U-2 affair from a
possible triumph to a disaster for him, and he even appealed to U.S.
Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson for help.[214]

Khrushchev was undecided what to do at the summit even as he

boarded his flight to Paris. He finally decided, in consultation with
his advisers on the plane and Presidium members in Moscow, to
demand an apology from Eisenhower and a promise that there
would be no further U-2 flights in Soviet airspace.[214] Neither Khrushchev and head of USSR
Eisenhower nor Khrushchev communicated with the other in the delegation Zoya Mironova at the
days before the summit, and at the summit, Khrushchev made his United Nations, September 1960
demands and stated that there was no purpose in the summit, which
should be postponed for six to eight months, that is until after the
1960 United States presidential election. The U.S. president offered no apology, but stated that the flights
had been suspended and would not resume, and renewed his Open Skies proposal for mutual overflight
rights. This was not enough for Khrushchev, who left the summit.[211] Eisenhower accused Khrushchev
"of sabotaging this meeting, on which so much of the hopes of the world have rested".[215] Eisenhower's
visit to the Soviet Union, for which the premier had even built a golf course so the U.S. president could
enjoy his favorite sport,[216] was cancelled by Khrushchev.[217]

Khrushchev made his second and final visit to the United States in September 1960. He had no invitation
but had appointed himself as head of the USSR's UN delegation.[218] He spent much of his time wooing
the new Third World states which had recently become independent.[219] The U.S. restricted him to the
island of Manhattan, with visits to an estate owned by the USSR on Long Island. The notorious shoe-
banging incident occurred during a debate on 12 October over a Soviet resolution decrying colonialism.
Khrushchev was infuriated by a statement of the Filipino delegate Lorenzo Sumulong charging the Soviets
with employing a double standard by decrying colonialism while dominating Eastern Europe. Khrushchev
demanded the right to reply immediately and accused Sumulong of being "a fawning lackey of the
American imperialists". Sumulong resumed his speech and accused the Soviets of hypocrisy. Khrushchev
yanked off his shoe and began banging it on his desk.[220] This behavior by Khrushchev scandalized his
delegation.[221]

Khrushchev considered U.S. Vice President Nixon a hardliner and was delighted by his defeat in the 1960
presidential election. He considered the victor, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, as a far more likely
partner for détente, but was taken aback by the newly inaugurated U.S. President's tough talk and actions in
the early days of his administration.[222] Khrushchev achieved a propaganda victory in April 1961 with the
first human spaceflight, while Kennedy suffered a defeat with the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. While
Khrushchev had threatened to defend Cuba with Soviet missiles, the premier contented himself with after-
the-fact aggressive remarks. The failure in Cuba led to Kennedy's determination to make no concessions at
the Vienna summit scheduled for 3 June 1961. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev took a hard line, with
Khrushchev demanding a treaty that would recognize the two German states and refusing to yield on the
remaining issues obstructing a test-ban treaty. Kennedy, in contrast, had been led to believe that the test-ban
 treaty could be concluded at the summit, and felt that a deal on
Berlin had to await easing of east–west tensions. Kennedy
described negotiating with Khrushchev to his brother Robert as
"like dealing with Dad. All give and no take."[223]

An indefinite postponement
of action over Berlin was
unacceptable to
Khrushchev if for no other
reason than that East
Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy,
Germany was suffering a
Vienna, June 1961
continuous "brain drain" as
highly educated East
Germans fled west through
Berlin. While the boundary between the two German states had
elsewhere been fortified, Berlin, administered by the four Allied
powers, remained open. Emboldened by statements from former
U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Charles E. Bohlen and United States The maximum territorial extent of
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Chairman J. William countries in the world under Soviet
Fulbright that East Germany had every right to close its borders, influence, after the Cuban Revolution
which were not disavowed by the Kennedy Administration, of 1959 and before the official Sino-
Khrushchev authorized East German leader Walter Ulbricht to Soviet split of 1961
begin construction of what became known as the Berlin Wall,
which would surround West Berlin. Construction preparations were
made in great secrecy, and the border was sealed off in the early hours of Sunday, 13 August 1961, when
most East German workers who earned hard currency by working in West Berlin would be at their homes.
The wall was a propaganda disaster, and marked the end of Khrushchev's attempts to conclude a peace
treaty among the Four Powers and the two German states.[224] That treaty would not be signed until
September 1990, as an immediate prelude to German reunification.

Cuban Missile Crisis and the test ban treaty (1962–1964)

Superpower tensions culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis (in the USSR, the "Caribbean crisis") of
October 1962, as the Soviet Union sought to install medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, about 90 miles
(140 km) from the U.S. coast.[30] Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro was reluctant to accept the missiles,
and, once he was persuaded, warned Khrushchev against transporting the missiles in secret. Castro stated,
thirty years later, "We had a sovereign right to accept the missiles. We were not violating international law.
Why do it secretly—as if we had no right to do it? I warned Nikita that secrecy would give the imperialists
the advantage."[225]

On 16 October, Kennedy was informed that U-2 flights over Cuba had discovered what were most likely
medium-range missile sites, and though he and his advisors considered approaching Khrushchev through
diplomatic channels, they could come up with no way of doing this that would not appear weak.[226] On
22 October, Kennedy addressed his nation by television, revealing the missiles' presence and announcing a
blockade of Cuba. Informed in advance of the speech but not (until one hour before) the content,
Khrushchev and his advisors feared an invasion of Cuba. Even before Kennedy's speech, they ordered
Soviet commanders in Cuba that they could use all weapons against an attack—except atomic
weapons.[227]
As the crisis unfolded, tensions were high in the U.S.; less so in the Soviet Union, where Khrushchev made
several public appearances and went to the Bolshoi Theatre to hear American opera singer Jerome Hines,
who was then performing in Moscow.[30][228] By 25 October, with the Soviets unclear about Kennedy's
full intentions, Khrushchev decided that the missiles would have to be withdrawn from Cuba. Two days
later, he offered Kennedy terms for the withdrawal.[229] Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in
exchange for a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba and a secret promise that the U.S. would withdraw
missiles from Turkey, near the Soviet heartland.[230] As the last term was not publicly announced at the
request of the U.S., and was not known until just before Khrushchev's death in 1971,[30] the resolution was
seen as a great defeat for the Soviets and contributed to Khrushchev's fall less than two years later.[30]
Castro had urged Khrushchev to launch a preemptive nuclear attack on the U.S. in the event of an invasion
of Cuba,[231] and was angered by the outcome, referring to Khrushchev in profane terms.[232]

After the crisis, superpower relations improved, as Kennedy gave a conciliatory speech at American
University on 10 June 1963, recognizing the Soviet people's suffering during World War II, and paying
tribute to their achievements.[233] Khrushchev called the speech the best by a U.S. president since Franklin
D. Roosevelt, and, in July, negotiated a test ban treaty with U.S. negotiator Averell Harriman and with
Lord Hailsham of the United Kingdom.[234] Plans for a second Khrushchev-Kennedy summit were dashed
by the U.S. President's assassination in November 1963. The new U.S. president, Lyndon Johnson, hoped
for continued improved relations but was distracted by other issues and had little opportunity to develop a
relationship with Khrushchev before the premier was ousted.[235]

Eastern Europe

The Secret Speech, combined with the death of the Polish

Khrushchev & Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej at
Bucharest's Băneasa Airport in June
1960. Nicolae Ceaușescu can be seen at
Gheorghiu-Dej's right hand side.
liberalization, known as the Polish October, followed.
communist leader Bolesław Bierut, who suffered a heart attack
while reading the Speech, sparked considerable liberalization
in Poland and Hungary. In Poland, a worker's strike in Poznań
developed into disturbances that left more than 50 dead in June
1956.[236] When Moscow blamed the disturbances on Western
agitators, Polish leaders ignored the claim, and instead made
concessions to the workers. With anti-Soviet displays
becoming more common in Poland, and crucial Polish
leadership elections upcoming, Khrushchev and other
Presidium members flew to Warsaw on 19 October to meet
with the Polish Presidium. The Soviets agreed to allow the
new Polish leadership to take office, on the assurance there
would be no change to the Soviet-Polish
relationship. [236][237][238] A period of at least partial

The Polish settlement emboldened the Hungarians, who decided that Moscow could be defied.[239] A mass
demonstration in Budapest on 23 October turned into a popular uprising. In response to the uprising,
Hungarian Party leaders installed reformist Premier Imre Nagy.[240] Soviet forces in the city clashed with
Hungarians and fired on demonstrators, with hundreds of both Hungarians and Soviets killed. Nagy called
for a cease-fire and a withdrawal of Soviet troops, which a Khrushchev-led majority in the Presidium
decided to obey, choosing to give the new Hungarian government a chance.[241] Khrushchev assumed that
if Moscow announced liberalization in how it dealt with its allies, Nagy would adhere to the alliance with
the Soviet Union.
On 30 October Nagy announced multiparty elections, and the next morning that Hungary would leave the
Warsaw Pact.[242] On 3 November, two members of the Nagy government appeared in Ukraine as the self-
proclaimed heads of a provisional government and demanded Soviet intervention, which was forthcoming.
The next day, Soviet troops crushed the Hungarian uprising, with a death toll of 4,000 Hungarians and
several hundred Soviet troops. Nagy was arrested, and was later executed. Despite the international outrage
over the intervention, Khrushchev defended his actions for the rest of his life. Damage to Soviet foreign
relations was severe, and would have been greater were it not for the fortuitous timing of the Suez crisis,
which distracted world attention.[240]

In the aftermath of these crises, Khrushchev made the statement for

which he became well-remembered, "We will bury you" (in
Russian, "Мы вас похороним!" (My vas pokhoronim!)). While
many in the West took this statement as a literal threat, Khrushchev
made the statement in a speech on peaceful coexistence with the
West.[243] When questioned about the statement during his 1959
U.S. visit, Khrushchev stated that he was not referring to a literal
burial, but that, through inexorable historical development,
communism would replace capitalism and "bury" it.[244] Khrushchev (left) and East German
leader Walter Ulbricht, 1963
Khrushchev greatly improved relations with Yugoslavia, which had
been entirely sundered in 1948 when Stalin realized he could not
control Yugoslav leader Josip Tito. Khrushchev led a Soviet delegation to Belgrade in 1955. Though a
hostile Tito did everything he could to make the Soviets look foolish (including getting them drunk in
public), Khrushchev was successful in warming relations, ending the Informbiro period in Soviet-Yugoslav
relations.[245] During the Hungarian crisis, Tito initially supported Nagy, but Khrushchev persuaded him of
the need for intervention.[246] Still, the intervention in Hungary damaged Moscow's relationship with
Belgrade, which Khrushchev spent several years trying to repair. He was hampered by the fact that China
disapproved of Yugoslavia's liberal version of communism, and attempts to conciliate Belgrade resulted in
an angry Beijing.[133]

China

After completing his takeover of mainland China in 1949, Mao

Zedong sought material assistance from the USSR, and also called
for the return to China of territories taken from it under the
Tsars.[30] As Khrushchev took control of the USSR, he increased
aid to China, even sending a small corps of experts to help develop
the new communist country.[247] This assistance was described by
historian William C. Kirby as "the greatest transfer of technology in
world history".[248] The Soviet Union spent 7% of its national
Khrushchev with Mao Zedong, 1958
income between 1954 and 1959 on aid to China.[249] On his 1954
visit to China, Khrushchev agreed to return Port Arthur and Dalian
to China, though Khrushchev was annoyed by Mao's insistence
that the Soviets leave their artillery as they departed.[250]

Mao bitterly opposed Khrushchev's attempts to reach a rapprochement with more liberal Eastern European
states such as Yugoslavia. Khrushchev's government, on the other hand, was reluctant to endorse Mao's
desires for an assertive worldwide revolutionary movement, preferring to conquer capitalism through
raising the standard of living in communist-bloc countries.[30]
Relations between the two nations began to cool in 1956, with Mao angered both by the Secret Speech and
by the fact that the Chinese had not been consulted in advance about it.[251] Mao believed that de-
Stalinization was a mistake, and a possible threat to his own authority.[252] When Khrushchev visited
Beijing in 1958, Mao refused proposals for military cooperation.[253] Hoping to torpedo Khrushchev's
efforts at détente with the U.S., Mao soon thereafter provoked the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, describing
the Taiwanese islands shelled in the crisis as "batons that keep Eisenhower and Khrushchev dancing,
scurrying this way and that. Don't you see how wonderful they are?"[254]

The Soviets had planned to provide China with an atomic bomb complete with full documentation, but in
1959, amid cooler relations, the Soviets destroyed the device and papers instead.[255] When Khrushchev
paid a visit to China in September, shortly after his successful U.S. visit, he met a chilly reception, and
Khrushchev left the country on the third day of a planned seven-day visit.[256] Relations continued to
deteriorate in 1960, as both the USSR and China used a Romanian Communist Party congress as an
opportunity to attack the other. After Khrushchev attacked China in his speech to the congress, Chinese
leader Peng Zhen mocked Khrushchev, stating that the premier's foreign policy was to blow hot and cold
towards the West. Khrushchev responded by pulling Soviet experts out of China.[257] In the dispute
between Mao and Khrushchev, Albania was on the side of China, labelling Khrushchev "Rrapo Lelo",
after an Albanian anti-communist peasant.[258]

Removal
Beginning in March 1964, Supreme Soviet presidium chairman and
thus nominal head of state Leonid Brezhnev began plotting
Khrushchev's removal with his colleagues.[259] While Brezhnev
considered having Khrushchev arrested as he returned from a trip
to Scandinavia in June, he instead spent time persuading members
of the Central Committee to support the ousting of Khrushchev,
remembering how crucial the committee's support had been to
Khrushchev in defeating the Anti-Party Group plot.[259] Brezhnev
was given ample time for his conspiracy, as Khrushchev was Nikita Khrushchev with Anastas
absent from Moscow for a total of five months between January Mikoyan (far right) in Berlin
and September 1964.[260]

The conspirators, led by Brezhnev, First Deputy Premier Alexander Shelepin, and KGB chairman Vladimir
Semichastny, struck in October 1964, while Khrushchev was on vacation at Pitsunda, Abkhaz ASSR with
his friend and Presidium colleague Anastas Mikoyan. On 12 October, Brezhnev called Khrushchev to
notify him of a special Presidium meeting to be held the following day, ostensibly on the subject of
agriculture.[261] Even though Khrushchev suspected the real reason for the meeting,[262] he flew to
Moscow, accompanied by the head of the Georgian KGB, General Aleksi Inauri, but otherwise taking no
precautions.[263]

Khrushchev arrived at the VIP hall of Vnukovo Airport; KGB chairman Semichastny waited for him there,
flanked by KGB security guards. Semichastny informed Khrushchev of his ouster and told him not to
resist. Khrushchev did not resist, and the plotters' coup went off smoothly; Khrushchev felt betrayed by
Semichastny, as he considered him a friend and ally until that very moment, not suspecting that he had
joined his enemies within the Party.[264] Khrushchev was then taken to the Kremlin, to be verbally attacked
by Brezhnev, Suslov and Shelepin. He had no stomach for a fight, and put up little resistance. Semichastny
was careful not to create the appearance of a coup:
 I didn't even close the Kremlin to visitors. People were
strolling around outside, while in the room the
Presidium was meeting. I deployed my men around
the Kremlin. Everything that was necessary was done.
Brezhnev and Shelepin were nervous. I told them:
Let's not do anything that isn't necessary. Let's not
create the appearance of a coup.[265]

That night, after his ouster, Khrushchev called Mikoyan, and told
Universal Newsreel about
him:
Khrushchev's resignation

I'm old and tired. Let them cope by themselves. I've

done the main thing. Could anyone have dreamed of
telling Stalin that he didn't suit us anymore and
suggesting he retire? Not even a wet spot would have
remained where we had been standing. Now
everything is different. The fear is gone, and we can
talk as equals. That's my contribution. I won't put up a
fight.[266]

On 14 October 1964, the Presidium and the Central Committee each voted to accept Khrushchev's
"voluntary" request to retire from his offices for reasons of "advanced age and ill health." Brezhnev was
elected First Secretary (later General Secretary), while Alexei Kosygin succeeded Khrushchev as
premier.[267][268]

Reasons for removal

There were multiple reasons for Khrushchev's sudden downfall. It was not a coup, because it followed the
Central Committee procedures for naming leadership that Khrushchev had himself introduced. As William
Tompson has noted, there were no show trials, no ritual attacks, no public confessions, and no
executions.[269] For most members of the Central Committee, there was growing annoyance with his
arbitrary decision-making and lack of collegiality. They complained about the unwieldy bureaucracy that
Khrushchev had fostered. These bureaucrats were now making the real decisions leaving the Party much
less important, especially when Khrushchev circumvented local party leaders with his own specialized
troubleshooters. Many were angry with his high-handed disregard for Central Committee procedures,
including those he himself had been responsible for introducing. Foreign policy issues were not a major
factor in his removal because the leadership agreed with his policies. The military was not involved in the
removal but the KGB was a key center of opposition. Agriculture was his signature field and the glaring
failure of massive efforts to improve agriculture was the most serious domestic issue, and resulted in hostile
public opinion regarding food shortages.[270] In the end Khrushchev was too old and tired, and paid less
and less attention to maintaining his political base, while his enemies carefully and systematically assembled
their irresistible coalition in the Party's Central Committee.[271][272]

Life in retirement
Khrushchev was granted a pension of 500 rubles per month and was given a house, a dacha and a car.[273]
Following his removal, he fell into deep depression. He received few visitors, especially since his security
guards kept track of all guests and reported their comings and goings.[274] His pension was reduced to 400
rubles per month, though his retirement remained comfortable by Soviet standards.[275][276] One of his
grandsons was asked what the ex-premier was doing in retirement, and the boy replied, "Grandfather
cries."[277] Khrushchev was made a non-person to such an extent that the thirty-volume Great Soviet
Encyclopedia omitted his name from the list of prominent political commissars during the Great Patriotic
War.[30]

As the new rulers made known their conservatism in artistic matters, Khrushchev came to be more
favorably viewed by artists and writers, some of whom visited him. One visitor whom Khrushchev
regretted not seeing was former U.S. Vice President Nixon, then in his "wilderness years" before his
election to the presidency, who went to Khrushchev's Moscow apartment while the former premier was at
his dacha.[278]

Beginning in 1966, Khrushchev began his memoirs. He initially tried to dictate them into a tape recorder
while outdoors, in an attempt to avoid eavesdropping by the KGB. These attempts failed due to
background noise, so he switched to recording indoors. The KGB made no attempt to interfere until 1968,
when Khrushchev was ordered to hand over his tapes, which he refused to do.[279] While Khrushchev was
hospitalized with heart ailments, his son Sergei was approached by the KGB in July 1970 and told that
there was a plot afoot by foreign agents to steal the memoirs.[280] Sergei Khrushchev handed over the
materials to the KGB since the KGB could steal the originals anyway, but copies had been made, some of
which had been transmitted to a Western publisher. Sergei instructed that the smuggled memoirs should be
published, which they were in 1970 under the title Khrushchev Remembers. Under some pressure, Nikita
Khrushchev signed a statement that he had not given the materials to any publisher, and his son was
transferred to a less desirable job.[281] Upon publication of the memoirs in the West, Izvestia denounced
them as a fraud.[282] Soviet state radio carried the announcement of Khrushchev's statement, and it was the
first time in six years that he had been mentioned in that medium.[30] In the Great Soviet Encyclopedia,
Khrushchev was given a short characterization: "As a leader, Khrushchev showed signs of subjectivism
and voluntarism".[283]

In his final days, Khrushchev visited his son-in-law and former aide Alexei Adzhubei (1924–1993)[284]
and told him, "Never regret that you lived in stormy times and worked with me in the Central Committee.
We will yet be remembered!"[285]

Death
Khrushchev died of a heart attack around noon in the Kremlin hospital in Moscow on 11 September 1971,
at the age of 77. He was denied a state funeral with interment in the Kremlin Wall and was instead buried in
the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. Fearing demonstrations, the authorities did not announce
Khrushchev's death until the hour of his wake and surrounded the cemetery with troops. Even so, some
artists and writers joined the family at the graveside for the interment.[286]

Pravda ran a one-sentence announcement of the former premier's death; Western newspapers contained
considerable coverage.[287] Veteran New York Times Moscow correspondent Harry Schwartz wrote of
Khrushchev, "Mr. Khrushchev opened the doors and windows of a petrified structure. He let in fresh air
and fresh ideas, producing changes which time already has shown are irreversible and fundamental."[288]

Legacy
Many of Khrushchev's innovations were reversed after his fall. The requirement that one-third of officials
be replaced at each election was overturned, as was the division in the Party structure between industrial
and agricultural sectors. His vocational education program for high school students was also dropped, and
his plan for sending existing agricultural institutions out to the land
was ended. However, new agricultural or vocational institutions
thereafter were located outside major cities. When new housing
was built, much of it was in the form of high rises rather than
Khrushchev's low-rise structures, which lacked elevators or
balconies.[289]

Historian Robert Service summarizes Khrushchev's contradictory

personality traits. According to him, Khrushchev was:
A khrushchyovka is destroyed,
Moscow, January 2008
at once a Stalinist and an anti-Stalinist, a communist
believer and a cynic, a self-publicizing poltroon and a
crusty philanthropist, a trouble-maker and a
peacemaker, a stimulating colleague and a
domineering boor, a statesman and a politicker who
was out of his intellectual depth.[290]

Some of Khrushchev's agricultural projects were also easily overturned. Corn became so unpopular in 1965
that its planting fell to the lowest level in the postwar period, as even kolkhozes which had been successful
with it in Ukraine and other southern portions of the USSR refused to plant it.[291] Lysenko was stripped of
his policy-making positions. However, the MTS stations remained closed, and the basic agricultural
problems, which Khrushchev had tried to address, remained.[289] While the Soviet standard of living
increased greatly in the ten years after Khrushchev's fall, much of the increase was due to industrial
progress; agriculture continued to lag far behind, resulting in regular agricultural crises, especially in 1972
and 1975.[292] Brezhnev and his successors continued Khrushchev's precedent of buying grain from the
West rather than suffer shortfalls and starvation.[289] Neither Brezhnev nor his colleagues were personally
popular, and the new government relied on authoritarian power to assure its continuation. The KGB and
Red Army were given increasing powers. The government's conservative tendencies would lead to the
crushing of the "Prague Spring" of 1968.[293]

Though Khrushchev's strategy failed to achieve the major goals he sought,

Aleksandr Fursenko, who wrote a book analyzing Khrushchev's foreign
and military policies, argued that the strategy did coerce the West in a
limited manner. The agreement that the United States would not invade
Cuba has been adhered to. The refusal of the western world to
acknowledge East Germany was gradually eroded, and, in 1975, the
United States and other NATO members signed the Helsinki Agreement
with the USSR and Warsaw Pact nations, including East Germany, setting
human rights standards in Europe.[294]
Decree of the Presidium of
The Russian public's view of Khrushchev remains mixed.[295] According the Supreme Soviet "On the
to a major Russian pollster, the only eras of the 20th century that Russians transfer of the Crimean
in the 21st century evaluate positively are those under Nicholas II, and Oblast". In 1954, the Soviet
under Khrushchev.[295] A poll in 1998 of young Russians found that they leadership, which included
felt Nicholas II had done more good than harm, and all other 20th-century Khrushchev, transferred
Russian leaders more harm than good—except Khrushchev, about whom Crimea from Russian SFSR
they were evenly divided.[295] Khrushchev biographer William Tompson to Ukrainian SSR.
related the former premier's reforms to those which occurred later:
 Throughout the Brezhnev years and the lengthy interregnum that followed, the generation
which had come of age during the 'first Russian spring' of the 1950s awaited its turn in power.
As Brezhnev and his colleagues died or were pensioned off, they were replaced by men and
women for whom the Secret Speech and the first wave of de-Stalinization had been a
formative experience, and these 'Children of Twentieth Congress' took up the reins of power
under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev and his colleagues. The Khrushchev era provided
this second generation of reformers with both an inspiration and a cautionary tale.[296]

See also
1954 transfer of Crimea
History of the Soviet Union (1953–64)
Outline of the Cold War

Notes
a. /ˈkrʊʃtʃɛf, ˈkruːʃ-, -tʃɒf/;
Russian: Никита Сергеевич Хрущёв, tr. Nikita Sergeyevich
Khrushchyov, IPA: [nʲɪˈkʲitə sʲɪrˈɡʲejɪvʲɪtɕ xrʊˈɕːɵf] ( listen)
b. Soviet reports list his birth date as 17 April (5 April old style) but recent discovery of his birth
certificate has caused biographers to accept 15 April date. See Tompson 1995, p. 2.

Citations
1. Brown 2009, pp. 232–233.
2. Tompson 1995, p. 2.
3. Taubman 2003, p. 20.
4. Taubman 2003, p. 18.
5. Tompson 1995, pp. 2–3.
6. Taubman 2003, p. 27.
7. Taubman 2003, p. 26.
8. Taubman 2003, p. 30.
9. Tompson 1995, pp. 6–7.
10. Taubman 2003, pp. 37–38.
11. Tompson 1995, p. 8.
12. Carlson 2009, p. 141.
13. Khrushchev in Hollywood (1959) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=LnsD5ZjFWcw&t=198), CBS News (3:50–6:09)
14. Tompson 1995, pp. 8–9.
15. Taubman 2003, pp. 38–40.
16. Taubman 2003, p. 47.
17. Taubman 2003, pp. 47–48.
18. Taubman 2003, pp. 48–49.
19. Taubman 2003, p. 50.
20. Tompson 1995, p. 12.
21. Taubman 2003, p. 52.
22. Taubman 2003, pp. 54–55.
23. Taubman 2003, p. 55.
24. Tompson 1995, p. 14.
25. Taubman 2003, pp. 56–57.
26. Taubman 2003, pp. 58–59.
27. Tompson 1995, pp. 16–17.
28. Taubman 2003, p. 63.
29. Taubman 2003, pp. 64–66.
30. Whitman 1971.
31. Taubman 2003, p. 66.
32. Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich (2005). Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev. Volume 1,
Commissar, 1918-1945. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University. p. 28.
ISBN 0271058536.
33. Taubman 2003, p. 68.
34. Taubman 2003, p. 73.
35. Tompson 1995, pp. 31–32.
36. Taubman 2003, p. 78.
37. Tompson 1995, pp. 33–34.
38. Taubman 2003, pp. 94–95.
39. Taubman 2003, pp. 105–06.
40. Taubman 2003, p. 98.
41. Taubman 2003, p. 99.
42. Tompson 1995, p. 57.
43. Taubman 2003, pp. 99–100.
44. Taubman 2003, p. 100.
45. Taubman 2003, pp. 103–04.
46. Taubman 2003, p. 104.
47. Tompson 1995, p. 69.
48. Taubman 2003, pp. 114–15.
49. Taubman 2003, p. 116.
50. Taubman 2003, p. 118.
51. Tompson 1995, p. 60.
52. Taubman 2003, pp. 135–37.
53. Tompson 1995, p. 72.
54. Taubman 2003, p. 149.
55. Taubman 2003, p. 150.
56. Taubman 2003, p. 163.
57. Taubman 2003, pp. 162–64.
58. Khrushchev 2004, p. 347.
59. Khrushchev 2004, pp. 349–50.
60. Taubman 2003, pp. 164–68.
61. Taubman 2003, pp. 168–71.
62. Tompson 1995, p. 81.
63. Birch 2008.
 64. Taubman 2003, pp. 157–58.
65. Tompson 1995, p. 82.
66. Taubman 2003, p. 158.
67. Taubman 2003, pp. 158–62.
68. Taubman 2003, pp. 171–72.
69. Taubman 2003, pp. 177–78.
70. Tompson 1995, pp. 81–82.
71. Tompson 1995, p. 73.
72. Tompson 1995, p. 86.
73. Taubman 2003, p. 179.
74. Taubman 2003, p. 180.
75. Taubman 2003, p. 181.
76. Taubman 2003, pp. 193–95.
77. Tompson 1995, pp. 87–88.
78. Taubman 2003, p. 195.
79. Tompson 1995, p. 91.
80. Taubman 2003, p. 199.
81. Taubman 2003, pp. 199–200.
82. Taubman 2003, pp. 200–201.
83. Tompson 1995, p. 92.
84. Taubman 2003, p. 203.
85. Tompson 1995, p. 93.
86. Khrushchev 2000, p. 27.
87. Tompson 1995, p. 95.
88. Taubman 2003, p. 205.
89. Tompson 1995, p. 96.
90. Tompson 1995, pp. 96–97.
91. Khrushchev 2006, pp. 16–17.
92. Taubman 2003, p. 210.
93. Khrushchev 2006, p. 43.
94. Tompson 1995, p. 99.
95. Taubman 2003, p. 226.
96. Irina H. Corten (1992). Vocabulary of Soviet Society and Culture: A Selected Guide to
Russian Words, Idioms, and Expressions of the Post-Stalin Era, 1953–1991 (https://archive.
org/details/vocabularyofsovi00cort/page/64). Duke University Press. p. 64 (https://archive.or
g/details/vocabularyofsovi00cort/page/64). ISBN 978-0-8223-1213-0.
97. Tompson 1995, pp. 100–01.
98. Taubman 2003, pp. 228–30.
99. Taubman 2003, pp. 236–41.
100. Khrushchev 2006, pp. 167–68.
101. Tompson 1995, p. 114.
102. The New York Times, 1953-03-10.
103. Taubman 2003, p. 245.
104. "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" (https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/614785/
Union-of-Soviet-Socialist-Republics) at Encyclopædia Britannica
105. Taubman 2003, p. 258.
106. Taubman 2003, pp. 246–247.
107. Khrushchev 2006, p. 184.
108. Tompson 1995, p. 121.
109. Khrushchev 2006, p. 186.
110. Timothy K. Blauvelt, "Patronage and betrayal in the post-Stalin succession: The case of
Kruglov and Serov" Communist & Post-Communist Studies (2008) 43#1 pp 105–20.
111. Tompson 1995, p. 123.
112. Tompson 1995, pp. 125–26.
113. Taubman 2003, p. 259.
114. Taubman 2003, p. 263.
115. Tompson 1995, p. 174.
116. Taubman 2003, pp. 260–264.
117. Fursenko 2006, pp. 15–17.
118. Tompson 1995, p. 141–42.
119. Paul Marantz, "Internal Politics and Soviet Foreign Policy: A Case Study." Western Political
Quarterly 28.1 (1975): 130–46. online (https://www.jstor.org/stable/447860)
120. Fursenko 2006, p. 27.
121. Taubman 2003, pp. 266–69.
122. Taubman 2003, p. 275.
123. Taubman 2003, p. 276.
124. Taubman 2003, pp. 279–80.
125. Tompson 1995, p. 153.
126. Khrushchev 2006, p. 212.
127. The New York Times, 1956-05-06.
128. Taubman 2003, pp. 286–91.
129. Taubman 2003, p. 282.
130. Khrushchev 2000, p. 200.
131. Tompson 1995, pp. 176–83.
132. Taubman 2003, pp. 361–64.
133. Tompson 1995, p. 189.
134. Taubman 2003, p. 307.
135. Taubman 2003, p. 308.
136. Taubman 2003, p. 385.
137. Taubman 2003, p. 628.
138. Khrushchev speech, Los Angeles, 19 September 1959 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
6DkdGcjM7tQ). Youtube
139. Zubok 2007, p. 175.
140. Zubok 2007, p. 172.
141. Zubok 2007, p. 174.
142. Zubok 2007, pp. 174–75.
143. Taubman 2003, pp. 525–28.
144. Tompson 1995, pp. 257–60.
145. Neizvestny 1979.
146. Medvedev & Medvedev 1978, pp. 41–42.
147. Tompson 1995, pp. 198–99.
148. Medvedev & Medvedev 1978, pp. 154–57.
149. Medvedev & Medvedev 1978, p. 153.
150. Aaron Hale-Dorrell, "The Soviet Union, the United States, and Industrial Agriculture" Journal
of World History (2015) 26#2 pp 295–324.
151. Lazar Volin, "Soviet agriculture under Khrushchev." American Economic Review 49.2
(1959): 15-32 online (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1816099).
152. Lazar Volin, Khrushchev and the Soviet agricultural scene (U of California Press, 2020).
153. Aaron Hale-Dorrell, Corn Crusade: Khrushchev's Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin
Soviet Union (2019) PhD dissertation version
(https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/downloads/hd76s0171).
154. Carlson 2009, p. 205.
155. Stephen J. Frese, "Comrade Khrushchev and Farmer Garst: East-West Encounters Foster
Agricultural Exchange." The History Teacher 38#1 (2004), pp. 37–65. online (http://www.jsto
r.org/stable/1555626).
156. Carlson 2009, pp. 205–06.
157. Taubman 2003, p. 373.
158. Medvedev & Medvedev 1978, p. 85.
159. Medvedev & Medvedev 1978, pp. 86–87.
160. Medvedev & Medvedev 1978, pp. 87–89.
161. Medvedev & Medvedev 1978, pp. 89–91.
162. Medvedev & Medvedev 1978, pp. 92–93.
163. Medvedev & Medvedev 1978, pp. 91–92.
164. David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (1970) pp 172–180.
165. Tompson 1995, pp. 214–16.
166. Taubman 2003, pp. 519–523.
167. Taubman 2003, p. 607.
168. Medvedev & Medvedev 1978, pp. 160–61.
169. Il'ia E. Zelenin, "N. S. Khrushchev's Agrarian Policy and Agriculture in the USSR." Russian
Studies in History 50.3 (2011): 44-70.
170. Carlson 2009, p. 221.
171. Khrushchev 2007, p. 154.
172. Medvedev & Medvedev 1978, p. 108.
173. Tompson 1995, pp. 192–93.
174. Tompson 1995, p. 193.
175. Kelly 2007, p. 147.
176. Laurent 2009.
177. Perrie 2006, p. 488.
178. Daniel, Wallace L. (2009). "Father Aleksandr men and the struggle to recover Russia's
heritage". Demokratizatsiya. 17 (1): 73–92. doi:10.3200/DEMO.17.1.73-92 (https://doi.org/10.
3200%2FDEMO.17.1.73-92).
179. Letters from Moscow, Gleb Yakunin and Lev Regelson, Yakunin, Gleb; Regelson, Lev.
"Religion and Human Rights in Russia" (https://web.archive.org/web/20090816211643/htt
p://www.regels.org/humanright.htm). Archived from the original (http://www.regels.org/human
right.htm) on 16 August 2009. Retrieved 18 June 2009.
180. Pospielovsky 1987, p. 83.
181. Chumachenko, Tatiana A. in Church and State in Soviet Russia: Russian Orthodoxy from
World War II to the Khrushchev years. Edward E. Roslof (ed.). (ME Sharpe, 2002) p. 187.
ISBN 9780765607492
182. Tchepournaya, Olga (2003). "The hidden sphere of religious searches in the Soviet Union:
independent religious communities in Leningrad from the 1960s to the 1970s". Sociology of
Religion. 64 (3): 377–388. doi:10.2307/3712491 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F3712491).
JSTOR 3712491 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3712491).
183. Pospielovsky 1987, p. 84.
184. Aleksandr Fursenko, and Timothy Naftali, ‘'Khrushchev's cold war: the inside story of an
American adversary'’ (2006) pp 23-28.
185. Tompson 1995, p. 146.
186. Tompson 1995, p. 149.
187. Tompson 1995, p. 150.
188. Tompson 1995, pp. 195–96.
189. Tompson 1995, pp. 187, 217.
190. Zubok 2007, p. 127.
191. Tompson 1995, pp. 216–17.
192. Zubok 2007, pp. 183–84.
193. Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko, "MAD, not Marx: Khrushchev and the nuclear
revolution." Journal of Strategic Studies (2018) 41#1/2:208-233.
194. Tompson 1995, p. 188.
195. Walter A. McDougall, "The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower's Response to the Soviet
Satellite." Reviews in American History 21.4 (1993): 698-703.
196. Tompson 1995, p. 187.
197. Zubok 2007, p. 131.
198. Carlson 2009, p. 247.
199. Taubman 2003, pp. 421–22.
200. Carlson 2009, p. 63.
201. Carlson 2009, pp. 226–27.
202. Khrushchev speech, 19 September 1959 (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUQ88Ms
GVT2GWoHtL3GbYhHnLOe22MPRc). Youtube
203. Carlson 2009, pp. 155–59.
204. Khrushchev speech, Los Angeles, 19 September 1959 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
5pRaYsbFpKY). Youtube
205. Carlson 2009, p. 133.
206. Khrushchev 2000, p. 334.
207. Theodore Otto Windt Jr., "The Rhetoric of Peaceful Coexistence: Khrushchev in America,
1959" Quarterly Journal of Speech (1971) 57#1 pp 11–22.
208. Tompson 1995, p. 211.
209. Tompson 1995, p. 218.
210. Hamilton, Martha (10 November 2000). "Gem of a Jeweler Faces a Final Cut" (https://www.w
ashingtonpost.com/archive/business/2000/11/10/gem-of-a-jeweler-faces-a-final-cut/d2394c5
f-de3a-4db3-8792-3c1ddeba959c/). The Washington Post. Retrieved 6 April 2019.
211. Tompson 1995, pp. 219–20.
212. Tompson 1995, p. 223.
213. Tompson 1995, p. 224.
214. Tompson 1995, p. 225.
215. UPI 1960 Year in Review.
216. Taubman 2003, p. 441.
217. Taubman 2003, p. 469.
218. Carlson 2009, pp. 265–66.
219. Tompson 1995, p. 230.
220. Carlson 2009, pp. 284–86.
221. Zubok 2007, p. 139.
222. Tompson 1995, p. 232.
223. Tompson 1995, pp. 233–35.
224. Tompson 1995, pp. 235–36.
225. Tompson 1995, p. 248.
226. Fursenko 2006, pp. 465–66.
227. Fursenko 2006, pp. 469–72.
228. Life, 1962-11-09.
229. Zubok 2007, p. 145.
230. Taubman 2003, p. 575.
231. Zubok 2007, p. 148.
232. Taubman 2003, p. 579.
233. Kennedy 1963.
234. Taubman 2003, p. 602.
235. Taubman 2003, pp. 604–05.
236. Tompson 1995, pp. 166–68.
237. "Trzy dni października" (https://dziennikpolski24.pl/trzy-dni-pazdziernika/ar/2447598).
Dziennik Polski. 19 October 2001.
238. Michalczyk, Bartłomiej (7 June 2019). "1956: Sowieci idą na Warszawę!" (https://histar.pl/20
19/06/07/1956-sowieci-ida-na-warszawe/).
239. Fursenko 2006, p. 122.
240. Tompson 1995, pp. 168–70.
241. Fursenko 2006, pp. 123–24.
242. Fursenko 2006, p. 125.
243. Taubman 2003, pp. 427–28.
244. Carlson 2009, p. 96.
245. Tompson 1995, pp. 145–47.
246. Tompson 1995, p. 169.
247. Taubman 2003, p. 336.
248. Taubman 2003, p. 337.
249. Zubok 2007, p. 111.
250. Taubman 2003, pp. 336–37.
251. Taubman 2003, p. 338.
252. Zubok 2007, p. 136.
253. Taubman 2003, p. 391.
254. Taubman 2003, p. 392.
255. Zubok 2007, p. 137.
256. Taubman 2003, p. 394.
257. Taubman 2003, pp. 470–71.
258. Hoxha, Enver (1976). Albania Challenges Khrushchev Revisionism. New York: Gamma
Publishing Co. p. 119.
259. Taubman 2003, p. 615.
260. Taubman 2003, p. 617.
261. Taubman 2003, p. 5.
262. Taubman 2003, p. 6.
263. Taubman 2003, pp. 11–13.
264. "Vladimir Semichastny" (https://www.economist.com/obituary/2001/01/18/vladimir-semichast
ny). economist.com. 18 January 2001. Retrieved 8 October 2022.
265. Mccauley, Martin (1995) The Khrushchev Era 1953–1964. Longman. p. 81.
ISBN 9780582277762
266. Taubman 2003, p. 13.
267. Taubman 2003, p. 16.
268. "Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev" (https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/316972/Nikit
a-Sergeyevich-Khrushchev). Encyclopædia Britannica.
269. William J. Tompson, "The Fall of Nikita Khrushchev." Soviet Studies 43.6 (1991): 1101-1121
online (https://www.jstor.org/stable/152407).
270. Lazar Volin, Khrushchev and the Soviet agricultural scene (2020).
271. Tompson 1997. pp. 272–275
272. Roy Medvedev, Khrushchev: A Biography (1983) pp 237–244, evaluates the 15 allegations
that were unanimously adopted.
273. Taubman 2003, pp. 16–17.
274. Taubman 2003, pp. 622–23.
275. Tompson 1995, p. 278.
276. Taubman 2003, p. 623.
277. Taubman 2003, pp. 623–24.
278. Tompson 1995, p. 279.
279. Tompson 1995, p. 280.
280. Wehner, Markus (1996). "Chruschtschows letzter Kampf: Der ehemalige Parteiführer vor
dem Kontrollkomitee der KPdSU" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/44919697). Osteuropa. 46 (7):
A325–A333. ISSN 0030-6428 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0030-6428). JSTOR 44919697
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/44919697) – via JSTOR.
281. Tompson 1995, pp. 280–81.
282. Shabad 1970.
283. "Khrushchev, Nikita" (https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Khrushchev%2c+Nikita).
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (3rd ed.). The Gale Group, Inc. 1970–1979. Retrieved
24 August 2022 – via TheFreeDictionary.com.
284. "Obituary: Alexei Adzhubei" (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-alexei-ad
zhubei-1499406.html). The Independent. 18 September 2011. Archived (https://ghostarchiv
e.org/archive/20220621/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-alexei-adzhub
ei-1499406.html) from the original on 21 June 2022.
285. Tompson 1995, p. 281.
286. Tompson 1995, pp. 282–83.
287. Carlson 2009, p. 299.
288. Schwartz 1971.
289. Medvedev & Medvedev 1978, pp. 180–82.
290. Service, Robert (1997) A History of Twentieth-Century Russia. Harvard UP. p. 375.
ISBN 9780713991482.
291. Medvedev & Medvedev 1978, p. 128.
292. Medvedev & Medvedev 1978, p. 185.
293. Medvedev & Medvedev 1978, p. 184.
294. Fursenko 2006, p. 544.
295. Taubman 2003, p. 650.
296. Tompson 1995, pp. 283–84.

References

Print
Birch, Douglas (2 August 2008), "Khrushchev kin allege family honor slurred" (https://www.u
satoday.com/news/world/2008-08-02-1193707578_x.htm), USA Today, retrieved 14 August
2009
Brown, Archie (2009), The Rise and Fall of Communism, HarperCollins Publishers,
ISBN 978-0-06-113882-9
Carlson, Peter (2009), K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude Starring Nikita
Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist, PublicAffairs, ISBN 978-1-58648-497-2
Laurent, Coumel (2009), "The scientist, the pedagogue, and the Party official: Interest
groups, public opinion, and decision-making in the 1958 education reform" (https://books.go
ogle.com/books?id=bF-pSkjIdOAC&pg=PA66), in Ilič, Melanie; Smith, Jeremy (eds.), Soviet
state and society under Nikita Khrushchev (http://hollis.harvard.edu/?q=ISBN0415476496),
Taylor & Francis, pp. 66–85, ISBN 978-0-415-47649-2
Fursenko, Aleksandr (2006), Khrushchev's Cold War (https://archive.org/details/isbn_97803
93058093), W.W. Norton & Co., ISBN 978-0-393-05809-3

Hale-Dorrell, Aaron. Corn Crusade: Khrushchev's Farming Revolution in the Post-Stalin

Soviet Union (2019) PhD dissertation version (https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/downloads/hd76s0171)
Kelly, Catriona (2007), Children's world: growing up in Russia, 1890–1991 (https://archive.or
g/details/childrensworldgr00kell/page/147), Yale University Press, p. 147 (https://archive.org/
details/childrensworldgr00kell/page/147), ISBN 978-0-300-11226-9
Khrushchev, Nikita (2004), Khrushchev, Sergei (ed.), Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Volume
1: Commissar, The Pennsylvania State University Press, ISBN 978-0-271-02332-8
Khrushchev, Nikita (2006), Khrushchev, Sergei (ed.), Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Volume
2: Reformer, The Pennsylvania State University Press, ISBN 978-0-271-02861-3
 Khrushchev, Nikita (2007), Khrushchev, Sergei (ed.), Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, Volume
3: Statesman, The Pennsylvania State University Press, ISBN 978-0-271-02935-1
Khrushchev, Sergei (2000), Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (https://arc
hive.org/details/nikitakhrushchev00khru_0), The Pennsylvania State University Press,
ISBN 978-0-271-01927-7
Medvedev, Roy; Medvedev, Zhores (1978), Khrushchev: The Years in Power, W.W. Norton &
Co., ISBN 978-0231039390
Perrie, Maureen (2006), The Cambridge History of Russia: The twentieth century,
Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-81144-6
Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. (1987), "A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and
the Believer", A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti-Religious Policies,
vol. 1, New York: St Martin's Press, ISBN 978-0333423264
Schwartz, Harry (12 September 1971), "We know now that he was a giant among men" (http
s://web.archive.org/web/20110606123851/http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F
30714FE345B137A93C0A81782D85F458785F9), The New York Times, archived from the
original (http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30714FE345B137A93C0A81782
D85F458785F9) on 6 June 2011, retrieved 25 September 2009 (fee for article)
Shabad, Theodore (24 November 1970), "Izvestia likens 'memoirs' to forgeries" (http://select.
nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0E14FC3F5F1B7493C6AB178AD95F448785F9),
The New York Times, retrieved 25 September 2009 (fee for article)
Taubman, William (2003), Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, W.W. Norton & Co., ISBN 978-
0-393-32484-6
Tompson, William J. (1995), Khrushchev: A Political Life (https://archive.org/details/khrushch
evapolit0000tomp), St. Martin's Press, ISBN 978-0-312-12365-9
Volin, Lazar. Khrushchev and the Soviet agricultural scene (U of California Press, 2020).
Volin, Lazar. "Soviet agriculture under Khrushchev." American Economic Review 49.2
(1959): 15-32 online (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1816099).
Whitman, Alden (12 September 1971), "Khrushchev's human dimensions brought him to
power and to his downfall" (http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30B1FF7355B
137A93C0A81782D85F458785F9), The New York Times, retrieved 25 September 2009
(fee for article), free version (https://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0417.
html)
Zhuravlev, V. V. "NS Khrushchev: A Leader's Self-Identification as a Political Actor." Russian
Studies in History 42.4 (2004): 70–79, on his Memoirs
Zubok, Vladislav (2007), A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to
Gorbachev, University of North Carolina Press, ISBN 978-0-8078-5958-2

Others
Kennedy, John F. (10 June 1963), President Kennedy Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Speech,
American University 1963 Commencement (https://web.archive.org/web/20111231050039/h
ttp://www1.media.american.edu/speeches/Kennedy.htm), American University, archived
from the original (http://www1.media.american.edu/speeches/Kennedy.htm) on 31
December 2011, retrieved 31 December 2011
Neizvestny, Ernst (1979), "My dialogue with Khrushchev" (http://www.vtoraya-literatura.com/
publ_163.html), Vremya I My (Times and Us) (in Russian), no. 41, pp. 170–200, retrieved
1 January 2011
Guildsovfoto, Special to The New York Times Sovfotofree Lance Photographers (6 May
1956), "Text of Speech on Stalin by Khrushchev as released by the State Department" (htt
 p://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30D1FFB3D5B157B93C7A9178DD85F4285
85F9), The New York Times, retrieved 23 August 2009 (fee for article)
"The historic letter that showed Mr. K's hand" (https://books.google.com/books?id=qUoEAA
AAMBAJ&q=khrushchev+cuban+crisis+singer&pg=PA46), Life, vol. 53, no. 19, 9 November
1962, ISSN 0024-3019 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0024-3019), retrieved 5 November
2009
"Vast Riddle; Demoted in the latest Soviet shack-up" (http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.h
tml?res=F10D16FE345B117A93CAA91788D85F478585F9), The New York Times, 10
March 1953, retrieved 23 August 2009 (fee for article)
"1959 Year in Review; Nixon visits Russia" (http://www.upi.com/Audio/Year_in_Review/Eve
nts-of-1959/Nixon-visits-Russia/12295509433704-7/), United Press International, 1959,
retrieved 31 December 2011
"1960 Year in Review; The Paris Summit Falls Apart" (http://www.upi.com/Audio/Year_in_R
eview/Events-of-1960/The-Paris-Summit-Falls-Apart/12295509435928-2/), United Press
International, 1960, retrieved 31 December 2011

Further reading
Alvandi, Roham. "The Shah's détente with Khrushchev: Iran's 1962 missile base pledge to
the Soviet Union." Cold War History 14.3 (2014): 423–444.
Artemov, Evgeny, and Evgeny Vodichev. "The Economic Policies of the Khrushchev
Decade: Historiography." Quaestio Rossica 8.5 (2020): 1822–1839. online (https://qr.urfu.ru/
ojs/index.php/qr/article/download/qr.562/3310)
Beschloss, Michael. The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963 (1991) online
(https://archive.org/details/crisisyears00mich)
Breslauer, George W. Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders (1982) online (https://archive.or
g/details/khrushchevbrezhn0000bres)
Conterio, Johanna. "" Our Black Sea Coast": The Sovietization of the Black Sea Littoral
under Khrushchev and the Problem of Overdevelopment." Kritika: Explorations in Russian
and Eurasian History 19.2 (2018): 327-361. online (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Joh
anna_Conterio/publication/325395298_Our_Black_Sea_Coast_The_Sovietization_of_the_
Black_Sea_Littoral_under_Khrushchev_and_the_Problem_of_Overdevelopment/links/5c23
b304458515a4c7fada57/Our-Black-Sea-Coast-The-Sovietization-of-the-Black-Sea-Littoral-u
nder-Khrushchev-and-the-Problem-of-Overdevelopment.pdf)
Craig, Campbell, and Sergey Radchenko. "MAD, not Marx: Khrushchev and the nuclear
revolution." Journal of Strategic Studies 41.1-2 (2018): 208–233. online (http://orca.cf.ac.uk/1
05003/1/Khrushchev%20article%20JSS%20May%202017%20final.pdf)
Dallin, David. Soviet foreign policy after Stalin (1961) online (https://archive.org/details/sovie
tforeignpol00dall)
Dobbs, Michael. One minute to midnight : Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the brink of
nuclear war (2008) online (https://archive.org/details/oneminutetomidni0000dobb)
Frankel, Max. High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile
Crisis. (Random House 2005). online (https://archive.org/details/highnoonincoldwa00fran)
Fursenko, Aleksandr and Timothy Naftali. Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an
American Adversary (2010)
Hardy, Jeffrey S. The Gulag after Stalin: Redefining Punishment in Khrushchev's Soviet
Union, 1953–1964. (Cornell University Press, 2016).
Harris, Jonathan. Party Leadership under Stalin and Khrushchev: Party Officials and the
Soviet State, 1948–1964 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).
 Iandolo, Alessandro. "Beyond the Shoe: Rethinking Khrushchev at the Fifteenth Session of
the United Nations General Assembly." Diplomatic History 41.1 (2017): 128–154.
Khrushchev, Nikita (1960). For Victory in Peaceful Competition with Capitalism (https://archi
ve.org/details/forvictoryinpea00khru). E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc. OCLC 261194 (https://www.wor
ldcat.org/oclc/261194).
McCauley, Martin. The Khrushchev Era 1953–1964 (Routledge, 2014).
Pickett, William B. (2007). "Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and the U-2 Affair: A Forty-six Year
Retrospective". In Clifford, J. Garry; Wilson, Theodore A. (eds.). Presidents, Diplomats, and
Other Mortals. Columbia, Missouri: U of Missouri Press. pp. 137–153. ISBN 978-0-8262-
1747-9.
Schoenbachler, Matthew, and Lawrence J. Nelson. Nikita Khrushchev's Journey into
America (UP of Kansas, 2019).
Shen, Zhihua. "Mao, Khrushchev, and the Moscow Conference, 1957." in A Short History of
Sino-Soviet Relations, 1917–1991 (Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore, 2020) pp. 189–207.
Smith, Jeremy and Melanie Ilic. Khrushchev in the Kremlin: Policy and Government in the
Soviet Union, 1953–64 (Taylor & Francis, 2011)
Sodaro, Michael. Moscow, Germany, and the West from Khrushchev to Gorbachev (Cornell
UP, 2019).
Thatcher, Ian D. "Gulag Studies: From Stalin to Khrushchev." Canadian-American Slavic
Studies 53.4 (2019): 489-493 online (https://www.academia.edu/download/64743490/Gulag
StudiesfromStalintoKhrushchev.pdf).
Torigian, Joseph. 2022. ""You Don't Know Khrushchev Well": The Ouster of the Soviet
Leader as a Challenge to Recent Scholarship on Authoritarian Politics." Journal of Cold War
Studies 24(1): 78–115.
Watry, David M. Diplomacy at the Brink: Eisenhower, Churchill, and Eden in the Cold War.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. ISBN 9780807157183.
Zelenin, Il'ia E. "N. S. Khrushchev's Agrarian Policy and Agriculture in the USSR." Russian
Studies in History 50.3 (2011): 44–70.
Zubok, Vladislav and Constantine Pleshakov. Inside the Kremlin’s cold war: from Stalin to
Khrushchev (Harvard UP, 1996) online (https://archive.org/details/insidekremlinsco00zubo)

External links
Nikita Khrushchev Archive at marxists.org (https://www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/ind
ex.htm)
Nikita Khrushchev archival footage – Net-Film Newsreels and Documentary Films Archive
(https://www.net-film.ru/en/found-page-1/?search=qKhrushchev)
The CWIHP at the Wilson Center for Scholars: The Nikita Khrushchev Papers (https://web.ar
chive.org/web/20090101173400/http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?topic_id=1409&fuse
action=va2.browse&sort=Collection&item=The%20Nikita%20Khrushchev%20Papers)
Obituary, The New York Times, 12 September 1971, "Khrushchev's Human Dimensions
Brought Him to Power and to His Downfall" (https://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthi
sday/bday/0417.html)
The Case of Khrushchev's Shoe (http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2014/04/cas
e-khrushchevs-shoe), by Nina Khrushcheva (Nikita's great-granddaughter), New Statesman,
2 October 2000
Modern History Sourcebook: Nikita S. Khrushchev: The Secret Speech — On the Cult of
Personality, 1956 (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1956khrushchev-secret1.html)
"Tumultuous, prolonged applause ending in ovation. All rise." Khrushchev's "Secret Report"
& Poland (http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/article_khrushchev_stalin_cult_individual.ht
 m)
Thaw in the Cold War: Eisenhower and Khrushchev at Gettysburg, a National Park Service
Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) lesson plan – archived at Wayback Machine (https://w
eb.archive.org/web/20120313233507/http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/29
ike/29ike.htm)
Khrushchev photo collection (http://rian.ru/photolents/20090417/168321071.html)
Nikita Khrushchev on Face the Nation in 1957 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAG6D7
3gttA)

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nikita_Khrushchev&oldid=1116623761"

This page was last edited on 17 October 2022, at 14:18 (UTC).

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0;

additional terms may apply. By
using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.