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Khrushchev: The Man and His Era

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One of the less commented upon consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union--an event that, in many ways, Nikita Khruschev set in motion--is the access into Russian documents and society the event has provided to historians trying to understand and document various aspects of the Soviet Communist experience. It is unlikely a book such as this could ever have been written before the collapse. One can only hope many more like it are in the offing.

Using access to documentation about and personalities surrounding Khruschev, Professor Taubman has written what will surely stand as the definitive Khruschev biography for a long time to come. Professor Taubman has vividly captured the essence of Khruschev-the insecure bombastic and idiosyncratic nature of this truly unique historical figure who owed both his rise as well as his fall to his love-hate relationship with Stalin, the man who he supported wholeheartedly and then denounced and debunked. The boo does a marvelous job of providing an insight into the truly ethnic Russian aspects of Khruschev's personality and behavior-his passions, his profanity, his impulsiveness-aspects that at once render him all too human in both genuinely sympathetic and concomitantly repulsive ways.

Khrushchev represents an intermediary between the cult-of-personality communism of Lenin and Stalin and the more corporate, politburo oriented communism of the Brezhnev/Andropov era. Professor Taubman also provides clear-cut and insightful analysis of Khrushchev's role in this area as well. Moreover, all of this is deftly presented within the context of the wider Soviet and international political events of the times.

Well written and very well paced for a genuinely scholarly historical work. This is one of the best biographies I have read in many, many years.

A brilliant effort.

Taubman's biography of Khrushchev is immensely readable, emphasizing the personal aspects of the dictator's life. It is the portrait of a man temperamentally unsuited to lead a great nation. Nevertheless, Khrushchev emerges as more human than the other dictators during the Soviet experiement, and most readers are likely to feel a grudging affection toward him.
Taubman begins with a quick summary of Khrushchev's childhood and quick rise in the Communist Party apparatus under Stalin. Seemingly unambitious, often to the point of evading promotion, Khrushchev thrived and survived during the worst of the Stalin era. After Stalin's death, Khrushchev adeptly asserted himself over supposedly stronger rivals to wield primary power by 1956.
Taubman doesn't give a complete, detailed account of Soviet domestic and foreign policy during the Khrushchev era, but concentrates instead on several key events: The Secret Speech, the Invasion of Hungary, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. There is also a fairly detailed account of Khrushchev's troubled and ambivalent relationship with artists and intellectuals, which reveals him at his worst, often devoid of elementary self-control.
Despite his blustering threats and personal vulgarity, Khrushchev was in many respects admirable and likeable, and it is hard to read of his ouster and lonely retirement without sympathy.
In Taubman's account Khrushchev suffered from an inferiority complex based on his lack of education and culture. I'd like to suggest an additional explanation for his intemperate behavior. I believe Taubman's biography shows Khrushchev as a basically decent man who wanted the party and government to which he'd dedicated his life to succeed. Not a cynical careerist like most of his colleagues, Khrushchev may have been stricken more by doubt about the system he represented than about his own capabilities.

Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev was a `simple' man. He was also an extraordinarily complex man full of internal contradictions and conflicts. The child of peasants, Khrushchev had only four years of formal education. Yet he rose up from the ranks of the proletariat (perhaps the only Soviet leader with true proletarian roots) to become the leader of one of the superpowers of the 20th century. William Taubman's meticulously researched and beautifully written, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, unravels the complexities of this `simple' soul.

Khrushchev the leader was everywhere during my cold-war youth. I grew up with images of his `kitchen debate' with then Vice President Nixon and his shoe banging episode at the United Nations. Khrushchev's alleged threat to bury the U.S. (he never actually said as much) was common knowledge even to children of the era and may explain my wearing a Khrushchev mask one Halloween while trick or treating.

Since his departure from the world stage in 1964, neither history nor historians have paid much attention to Khrushchev. Historians continue to pay far more attention to Lenin, Stalin, and even Trotsky than to Khrushchev and no one has ever really managed to take an extended look at the man behind that Halloween mask. William Taubman has, in one fell swoop, managed to balance the scales.

Taubman follows the normal chronological outlines of Khrushchev's life and times. As one would expect we begin with his impoverished childhood in the Donbass coal mining region of Russia. A skilled sheet metal worker at the outbreak of the October Revolution, Khrushchev joined the Communist Party and began what can best be described as a meteoric rise up the slippery and dangerous slope of the party leadership where sometimes the only thing worse than being too far from Joseph Stalin was being too close. It is from Khrushchev's first interactions with Stalin that Taubman's writing and analysis soars. It is from this point that the tragic contradictions that marked Khrushchev's life began to come to the surface.

We see Khrushchev in the role of devoted servant to Stalin, participating with no small amount of energy and satisfaction in party purges and the purges of ethnic nationalities. Up until Stalin's death, Taubman makes it clear that Khrushchev's hands (along with the hands of every other player in the court of the Red tsar) were stained with the blood of thousands of Soviet citizens. Yet this was the same Khrushchev who took a tremendous leap of faith in revealing Stalin's `crimes' at the famous Party Congress in 1956.

We see Khrushchev instituting what became known as the thaw in the USSR. In 1956, Khrushchev opened the gates of the Gulag and thousands of prisoners returned home from Siberia. Yet in this same year he did not hesitate to send tanks to Hungary to crush a popular democratic movement. The thaw enabled Solzhenitsyn to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, yet the work of Vasilly Grossman was physically destroyed by the KGB.

Taubman shows us Khrushchev in the role of cold-warrior. He had the Berlin Wall built, sent missiles to Cuba, and paraded Gary Power's downed U-2 spy plane through Red Square. Yet, at the same time Khrushchev understood that the massive amounts of money being poured into the military would have a drastic impact on the Soviet economy, a theory proven by later events. He suggested increasing the USSR's missile defense systems while proposing dramatic cuts in the strength of Soviet Navy and Army. Unfortunately these proposed cuts cost him the support of the military. Believing that the future of the USSR would be guaranteed by agricultural self-sufficiency he promoted scheme after scheme to increase production. Unfortunately most of these schemes turned out to be more than a bit silly and they all failed in a very public fashion. These failures cost Khrushchev public and political support. By October, 1964 Khrushchev was removed, peacefully from office. Khrushchev died a bitter, lonely, man.

Blaise Pascal wrote: "What a chimera, then, is man! what a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! A judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depositary of the truth, cloaca of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe!" Taubman has done a marvelous job exploring the chimera, chaos, and contradictions that made the life of Nikita S. Khrushchev so utterly fascinating.

Anyone interested in Soviet history, history generally, or who just likes well-written, well-informed biographies should read this book.

Khruschev spent all his life trying to get out of the Vozhd's shadow. Stalin made him what he was, and, until the end of his life, he ran from his legacy, while at the same time continuing to indulge in many of its ways. For a very long time Kruschev has been a walk-on character in the Stalin biographies (particularly egregiously in Volkogonov's "Autopsy of an Empire", where everyone after Stalin is a let-down). Stalin was so exceptional (and I'm not saying this as praise: rather the opposite) that everyone (including such extraordinary characters as Zhukov, Kaganovich, Bukharin, Beria, Kirov and also Khruschev) ends up looking pale by comparison.

Taubman's biography does justice to its subject. It emphasizes his duality: an ignorant man who prized culture and loved to deal with artists, but could never do so without alienating them; a true man of the people (the only real manual worker to have become leader of the USSR), with simple tastes, who was yet devious beyond measure; an exceptionally intelligent person who achieved the greatest power, but who probably would have been happier as a manager of a manufacturing concern; a warm man in public, who was yet extremely distant from his family, although he loved them deeply; a man who was a teetotaler who however was perceived as a drunk; a negotiator who wanted to end the Cold War, who did much more than anyone else to almost bring about nuclear apocalypse; a loyal Party man who ended up almost dismantling the Party and betraying its rules. One could go on, and on, because nothing about Khruschev was simple.

Although Taubman doesn't say so, Kruschev's strategy was similar to that used by other figures who managed to survive terrible masters. Robert Graves's Emperor Claudius comes to mind: according to Suetonius, he survived the madness of Caligula and the bloodshed of Tiberius by pretending to be a fool, a drunk and a cripple. Like Claudius, Khruschev survived Stalin's various Terrors by disguising his ambition and playing the buffoon endlessly: by appearing useful but harmless, in short. But, like Claudius, the abilities that led him to supreme power, deserted him once he achieved his goal: Claudius was easily destroyed by his cunning niece Agrippina the Younger, and her psycopath son, Nero. Similarly, Khruschev, after having disposed of such tough customers as Beria, Malenkov, Bulganin and Molotov, was brought down by a second-rater, Leonid Brezhnev, in a singularly inept coup that probably could have been easily dismantled if Khruschev had had his eye on the ball. Many of these leaders were grotesques (particularly Malenkov and Beria), and Taubman does a sterling job at presenting them like real human beings, which they also were.

The story Taubman tells is exceptional, and he tells it supremely well. One feels like another guest at Khruschev's dachas, or a fly-on-the-wall at yet another Politburo meeting. The cast of secondary characters is fascinating, including, on the American side, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, and key establishment types such as the Dulles brothers, Averell Harriman, Adlai Stevenson and Bobby Kennedy. Interesting brits, notably Harold Macmillan, make their appearances, as do Conrad Adenauer, Mao Ze Dong, Zhou En Lai, Josip Broz Tito, Fidel Castro, Pandit Nehru, Sukarno, Charles de Gaulle and Walter Ulbricht. That was a time when giants walked the earth, and this is truly the story of The Man and his Era, like the dustjacket says. I was particularly interested in Andropov's role in the publication of the Khruschev memoirs in the US: appparently, as KGB chief, he could have stopped it because Khruschev's contact was actually a KGB mole, but didn't, because he wasn't just a simple spymaster but also a complex character.

All the key episodes (like the infamous shoe-banging at the United Nations, the Cuban missile crisis, the several Berlin crises, the Hungary invasion, the secret speech at the end of the XX Party Congress, the launching of Sputnik and the Pasternak Nobel Prize) are told in just the right length, with all the context required for a non-specialist.

From the book one emerges with the view that Khruschev was not a demented villain like Stalin and Lenin, nor a useless careerist like Brezhnev. He was rather like Gorbachev: a true believer who thought that the system he served could survive and would become even stronger if cleansed of the accretions of 35 years of dictatorship. He was also a visionary. He understood the change in the role of armies as a consequence of nuclear and high-tech weapons (he knew that large standing armies would be unnecesary and even counter-productive in the new world). He saw that the so-called Third World was the next frontier for the Cold War. He realized the USSR would have to live with Chinese and Yugoslav socialism, and that this would not necessarily weaken Moscow's power in the long term. He realized that Mao's China meant that a rapprochement with the USA was necessary in order to maintain his country's status )if Khruschev hadn't been overthrown and Kennedy hadn't been killed, it's quite possible Nixon's entente with Mao would never have happened, because it would have been pre-empted by a new Soviet-American understanding). His moving the missiles into Cuba was actually no different from the US having missiles in other countries bordering the USSR, such as Turkey. He understood that Stalinism was an illness, which he tried to cure, although he failed to notice that, to a large extent, Stalinism was encoded in the Leninist DNA, and couldn't be done away it without losing Leninism as well.

He did many evil things. He was instrumental in collectivising the Ukraine, causing the worst famine in history after Mao's great leap forward. He led the purges in Ukraine in the 1930's, although he tried to protect the local culture and language from his own onslaught. He was instrumental in saving Stalingrad from the Germans, at a terrible cost. He persecuted religion in the USSR like even Stalin hadn't dared. He was a reckless gambler, and he sometimes lost sight of his bets.

Yet he was courageous and, on the whole, likeable. He was probably the nicest guy that worked for Stalin, which may not be saying a lot, but it's better than being called the worst of them all (and there's plenty of competition for that spot). Judged against these (admittedly low) standards, Khruschev didn't do too badly. Taubman's book will do much to give him the place he deserves in the history of the last century.

"Khrushchev: the Man and His Era" makes for a remarkably smooth reading. Taubman's even and unadorned language serves as a welcome backdrop for the plot full of nuance, intrigue and deeply hidden motives. The image of Khrushchev the mercurial and evil oaf has persisted for decades. This book, along with some recent research, took on the task of tilting the scale towards the commander's complexity and some goodness of heart.

The challenge is formidable. In Stalin's times, Khrushchev did send thousands to death on his own initiative. His domestic agricultural and political "miracle" solutions were invariably a flop. His international stance, with frequent outbursts in front of heads of state and numerous threats detailing how many Soviet nuclear heads it would take to obliterate such and such a country, were a disgrace. His inability to foresee consequences of his actions led to increased international tensions, including the Hungarian and Cuban crises.

Khrushchev's biggest counterweight to that was his speech on the 20th Party Congress, in which he denounced Stalin. It gave a tremendous impetus to the anti-Stalinist movement across the world and in the Soviet Union itself. Yet, none other than Beria was the first revisionist of Stalin's crimes. On the day of Stalin's funeral he released Molotov's wife from the camp. Less than a week later he ordered a review of all falsified cases, including the doctors' plot. A month after Stalin's death he announced that the doctors' plot was fabricated. Khrushchev's speech to the 20th Party Congress happened almost a year later. In addition, the speech clearly distanced all the members of the Party Central Committee from Stalin and was, if in part, a preventive strike, lest someone else point at the top Party apparatchicks as sharing the blame.

Khrushchev's most memorable domestic policies comprised the issuance of internal passports to the peasants, which made it easier for them to move around within the country, and doubling the speed of residential construction, which gave over 100 mln people a separate apartment. Despite serious flaws of these reforms (speed in housing construction was achieved at the expense of quality, and the internal passport, if a welcome reprieve for peasants, was originally designed as an instrument of control, rather than freedom), they had people's quality of life as the primary concern.

A boor and a bungler, Khrushchev nevertheless appears genuinely interested in improving the lot of the people in his country. Khrushchev's most disarming quality was speaking from the heart, as in his emotional denouncing of Stalin in a private conversation with a long-time friend (in 1938 no less, at the height of the Great Terror), for which he knew he was risking his liberty and possibly his life. The humane aspect of some of his reforms and the empathy that he often projected in personal communication may be his principal redeeming qualities.

His relationship with intelligentsia was spotty (personally helped Solzhenitsyn, personally attacked Pasternak). And yet, by allowing some liberal art and lifting up the internal and external iron curtain, Khrushchev gave the Soviet people an unprecedented taste of freedom. The freedom was short-lived, but at no other time in the 70 years from the Bolshevik revolution to Gorbachev could a Soviet person openly criticize the Soviet system or the Soviet government.

Perhaps the most important positive legacy of Khrushchev is the notion of freedom of expression in the Soviet State and of the mere possibility of "changing the course" in a totalitarian state.

Professor Taubman's study of Nikita Khrushchev exhaustively traces the life of the Soviet Premier. Indeed, the author carefully details the complex arc of Khrushchev's life. We see all the phases explored in a literate and exhaustive manner. The professor shows the reader Khrushchev as he moves through a number of distinct stages that, like some Shakespearean hero (or anti-hero), formed and destroyed him: traditional Russian peasant beginnings; immersion in the nascent Bolshevik movement; rapid rise through the local and central Party hierarchy; years as a loyal Stalinist; the grab for power; paradoxical anti-Stalinist reformer and power-hungry ruler enraged by any disagreement; the fall from power; isolation and political impotence.

Professor Taubman spares no effort to capture the intricacies or recreate the circumstances of Khrushchev's life. He conducted a multitude of interviews, including with Khruschev's son Sergei, other family members and former CPSU party officials. He even consulted the birth register from the church in the Soviet leader's hometown (Kalinovka) to determine his date of birth. In addition, the professor places Khruschev's own extensive memoirs in a full and proper context.

Ultimately, the reader sees a man at once insecure yet driven for power--the Soviet answer to "the man in the grey flannel suit", moving up the "Party" ladder, so to speak. Adherent to the romantic ideals of Bolshevism, Khrushchev nonetheless went along with Stalin's bloodlust and participated in the purges (although some evidence is presented as to his efforts to save select lives). The author evinces the complex nuances of Khrushchev, who became enraged when questioned on his role in the Stalinist inner circle and denounced his one-time "vohzd" in his famous 1956 secret speech. He also conveys Khruschev the reformer's intolerance for criticism of his policies, the same intolerance that heavily contributed to his downfall in 1964.

We also see the Khruschev contradiction in foreign policy. The man who wanted detente also tried to bully Western leaders whenever possible and caused (and lost) the Cuban missile crisis. Professor Taubman clearly documents how Khruschev alone, and against the advice of his advisors and the wishes of Fidel Castro, sent missiles to Cuba, and then had to back down in humiliation.

It is near impossible to do justice to this work and its analysis of the man who embodied Churchill's famous saying about the Russian enigma. The book is as complex as the man it describes so meticulously, and with such fairness and balance. Read it, digest it, reflect upon it and make your own decision: Was Khruschev one more violent Russian leader? Was he a survivor of a barbaric system who articulated humane and just impulses once he came to power? Was he both? Was he more? Just remember, as Professor Taubman obviously does, Russia is not the United States. A "reformer" within the context of a Tsar- and Stalin-ridden land cannot be a Jeffersonian.

Given how much has already been written about Khrushchev you might be forgiven for wondering exactly how much new material there can really be out there. The answer is a great deal. Taubman has done a wonderful job of using old and new archives to paint the gripping picture of a devious, suspicious, ill-educated yet extraordinarily canny man who survived the purges and then went on to become Soviet leader. What I found most illuminating was quite how short-tempered Khrushchev was most of the time and how staggeringly incompetent he and his fellow leaders were. It's amazing how the world wasn't plunged into a nuclear war when the Soviet Union was in the hands of such a bunch of nitwits. This is the best political biography I've read in years.

Nikita Khrushchev was an enigma, a contradiction, and a study in contrasts. He could be shrewd and calculating, and he could also be ignorant and shortsighted. He could be rude, bombastic and thoroughly insulting, and he could also be self-deprecating and sentimental. These traits are held by lots of people, no doubt, but they became highly relevant in the 1950s and 60s as Khrushchev led the Soviet Union in a series of events on the world stage that were often dramatic and, sometimes, potentially cataclysmic.
Author William Taubman brings the reader close to the true character that was N. Khrushchev. We get detailed insights into his upbringing and youth, and his peasant origins. Later, Taubman describes the stressful and ambivalent relationship that Khrushchev had with his predecessor, Joseph Stalin. The intrigues that surrounded the leadership transition from the latter to the former are one of the more fascinating parts of the book.
I highly recommend this work, which at times almost serves as a transcript of countless top-level meetings that involved Khrushchev, so plentiful are the direct quotations of the key players. The reader cannot help but feel close to the personalities, making the history of this troubled country, in those tumultuous times, very much alive.
The amazing thing that I learned from this book is just how informal and haphazard the running of the USSR was under Khrushchev. Policy was often formulated at a whim. Khrushchev would rant and rave about conditions in his country, make pronouncements accordingly as to how things should be managed, and his underlings would obediently carry out his wishes, seldom challenging or questioning him. Really, it is amazing that the USSR functioned as well as it did in the 1950's and 60's, given how few people there were "at the top" who actually thought through what was right for the country and its people.
Taubman provides wonderful detail on the relationships Khrushchev had, or tried to have, with Stalin, Mao Zedong, Castro, and US presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Khrushchev often used "bluff and bluster" with these men as a way of compensating for his lack of sophistication and formal education, of which he was all too often very conscious. For example, Mao got under Khrushchev's skin on a couple of occasions by swimming proficiently when he and the aquatically-challenged Khrushchev got took time out from meetings.
I never expected to laugh as much as I did when I set out to read this book. There are dozens of passages that reveal the baseness and profanity that Khrushchev was capable of dishing out, often as not while abroad, in the company of leaders and dignitaries. Khrushchev's shoe-banging at the UN was just one example of his unpredictable, wild behaviour that typically left his entire audience embarrassed and looking for a place to hide.
This book is well written, well researched, in all a smooth read despite its 650-page length. I also recommend Gulag, by Anne Applebaum, and The Fall of Berlin, by Antony Beevor, both of which shed light on the period prior to and in the early days of Khrushchev's influence on the USSR and the world.

When I got done reading this wonderful book, I felt as if I had been at Khrushchev's side throughout his entire life. The book goes into great detail about this man. In addition, it uncovers and debunks some of the myths of Khrushchev. For example, Taubmam debunks the myth that when the decision was made to place missiles in Cuba, it was a decision that the entire Soviet leadership embraced 100%. However, Taubman points out (and proves) that it was Khrushchev that was really the only big driving force behind the idea. I could go into a plethora of other details like that, but that would ruin the fun of the book. In my college class, we were discussing the Cuban Missile Crisis, a student asked how the Soviets were reacting behind the scenes and what lead to their decision. The Prof (a Ph.D holder of over 25 years)really wasn't sure the details of the nuclear standoff on the Soviet side. However, after finishing Taubman's book a couple of days before, I was able to explain exactly what happened. After that, the Prof asked me to stay after class and asked me to Xerox the Cuban Missile Crisis part of the book so he could know what really happened! If a person is interested in the Soviet Union, Khrushchev himself, or the "behind the scenes" of the Soviet Iron Curtain during the Cuban Missile Crisis, pick up this book. It will be a great learning experience .

Prof.Taubman has enlightened us with his book on one of the greatest dictators of the Cold War.This is undoubtedly going to be the best reference book on the topic.Though Prof.Taubman also shows us that Khrushchev was also a family man ,I conclude that Khrushchev got into the clothes of a sheep but was actually the big bad wolf.
This book is full with funny anecdotes and episodes -which brings the reader to see that its author has also the rare gift of an academic,which is:to tell an interesting story as if it were a thriller.
Bravo,Mr. Taubman!