Khrushchev, Nikita

Khrushchev, Nikita (Sergeyevich)

Nikita Khrushchev, 1960.

(credit: Werner Wolf/Black Star)

(born April 17, 1894, Kalinovka, Ukraine, Russian Empire—died Sept. 11, 1971, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.) Soviet leader. The son of a miner, he joined the Communist Party in 1918. In 1934 he was elected to its Central Committee, and in 1935 he became first secretary of the Moscow party organization. He participated in Joseph Stalin's purges of party leaders. In 1938 he became head of the Ukrainian party and in 1939 was made a member of the Politburo. After Stalin's death in 1953, he emerged from a bitter power struggle as the party's first secretary, and Nikolay Bulganin became premier. In 1955, on his first trip outside the Soviet Union, Khrushchev showed his flexibility and the brash, extraverted style of diplomacy that would become his trademark. At the party's Twentieth Congress in 1956, he delivered a secret speech denouncing Stalin for his “intolerance, his brutality, his abuse of power.” Thousands of political prisoners were released. Poland and Hungary used de-Stalinization to reform their regimes; Khrushchev allowed the Poles relative freedom, but he crushed the Hungarian Revolution by force (1956) when Imre Nagy attempted to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Opposition within the party crystallized in 1957, but Khrushchev secured the dismissal of his enemies and in 1958 assumed the premiership himself. Asserting a doctrine of peaceful coexistence with capitalist nations, he toured the U.S. in 1959, but a planned Paris summit with Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960 was canceled after the U-2 Affair. In 1962 he attempted to place Soviet missiles in Cuba; in the ensuing Cuban missile crisis, he retreated. Ideological differences and the signing of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (1963) led to a split with the Chinese. Agricultural failures that necessitated importation of wheat from the West, the China quarrel, and his often arbitrary administrative methods led to his forced retirement in 1964.

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Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich 

Born Apr. 5 (17), 1894, in the village of Kalinovka, Kursk Province; died Sept. 11, 1971, in Moscow. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the CPSU from 1918.

Khrushchev was the son of a miner. Over a period beginning in 1908 he worked at various plants and mines of the Donbas. He fought in the Civil War of 1918–20 and subsequently engaged in administrative and party work in the Ukraine. He studied at the Industrial Academy in Moscow in 1929. In 1931, Khrushchev undertook party work in Moscow. In 1935 he became first secretary of the Moscow oblast committee and the Moscow city committee of the ACP(B). From 1938 to March 1947 he was first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the Ukraine.

During the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45, Khrushchev was a member of the military councils of the Southwestern Axis and the Southwestern, Stalingrad, Southern, Voronezh, and First Ukrainian fronts. He was made a lieutenant general in 1943.

From 1944 to 1947, Khrushchev served as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (renamed the Council of Ministers in 1946) of the Ukrainian SSR. In December 1947 he was again elected first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the Ukraine. In December 1949 he became a secretary of the Central Committee of the ACP(B) and first secretary of the Moscow oblast committee. He was elected a secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU in March 1953, and in September of that year he was elected first secretary of the Central Committee; from 1958 to 1964 he held the additional post of chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR.

Khrushchev was a delegate to the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Seventeenth through Twenty-second Congresses of the CPSU and was elected a member of the party’s Central Committee at the Seventeenth through Twenty-second Congresses. He became a candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee in 1938, served as a member of the Politburo from 1939 to 1952, and became a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1952.

Khrushchev was relieved of his duties as first secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU and as a member of the Central Committee’s Presidium at a plenum of the Central Committee on Oct. 14, 1964. As a leader, Khrushchev showed signs of subjectivism and voluntarism.