Khrushchev: The Man and His Era

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 Gross

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 si

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.

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.

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.