A herdsboy from a desperately poor village rose to denounce Stalin in secret
Nikita Khrushchev's village teacher said she had never seen a place as poor as Kalinovka, where he tended herds as a boy and got four years of schooling. He went on to lead the Soviet Union, stun the world by attacking Stalin's memory, and steer it through the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Born in 1894 near what is now the Ukrainian border, in Kursk province, he was the son of poor peasants. His father chased better wages in the Donbas as a railwayman, miner and brickworker, usually leaving the family behind. His teacher, Lydia Shevchenko, was a freethinker who skipped church and slipped him books banned by the imperial government. She pushed him toward more education, but the family could not afford it.
He worked as a metalworker, served as a political commissar in the Civil War, and climbed under the patronage of Lazar Kaganovich. He was no bystander to terror: he backed the Great Purge, approved thousands of arrests, and carried the purges into Ukraine after taking charge there in 1938. In the Second World War he was again a commissar, relaying between Stalin and his generals, and he was proud to have been at Stalingrad.
Stalin died on 5 March 1953, and in the struggle that followed Khrushchev secured the post of First Secretary and removed his rival Lavrentiy Beria. Addressing the 20th Party Congress on 25 February 1956, he gave a Secret Speech that condemned Stalin's purges and opened a milder era. His efforts to improve daily life, farming above all, often misfired, and he slashed conventional forces in favour of missiles, even as the Cold War reached its most dangerous years.
Sputnik in 1957 and good outcomes in the Suez Crisis, the Syrian Crisis and the U-2 incident made him popular in the late 1950s. But failures at home and his handling of Cuba in 1962 eroded his position, and rivals ousted him on 14 October 1964. In retirement he wrote long memoirs, smuggled to the West and partly published in 1970. He died at his dacha in 1971.
Source: Nikita Khrushchev
