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Nikita Khrushchev is undoubtedly one of the most important and interesting political figures of the twentieth century. Rising from a background of extreme poverty, he became an early supporter of the November 1917 bolshevik revolution. During the inter war years he joined the Communist Party, and rose steadily through its ranks; by the outbreak of World War II, he was firmly entrenched as one of the most important Soviet politicians and statesmen. He continued on in this capacity throughout the war years, and rose to power following the death of Stalin in 1953. Khrushchev then initiated a series of great reforms, which completely changed the face of politics and indeed life in general in the Soviet Union. Ultimately however, many of these reforms failed to achieve of their primary goals, and these failures led not only to Khrushchev's personal political downfall, but also to major changes in the global political climate.
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was born on 17 April 1894 in Kalinovka, a small village in the province of Kursk, which lies just on the Russian side of the border with the Ukraine. Sergi Nikanorovich Khrushchev, his father, was an average poor peasant who left the family each winter to work in the coalfields of the Donets Basin. Khrushchevs family lived in an area cursed with overpopulation; many people lived there because of the fertile soil, which they hoped to use to feed their families. The overpopulated, malnourished villages were centers for disease; diphtheria, typhus, and syphilis was widespread. This poverty was to dominate Khrushchev's memories of peasant life. Like most peasant boys, Khrushchev started work at an early age.
His first job was guarding the village animals. Later he worked as a herds boy for the local land owner. Khrushchev attended the village school for approximately two years between the ages of seven and twelve. In a land of general illiteracy, even two years of formal education was an important advantage. In 1909, at the age of fifteen, Khrushchev became an apprentice fitter at the German owned Bosse engineering works in Yuzovka.
The living and working conditions in the Donbas, where Yuzovka was situated, were as bad as the most lurid political agitator could have depicted them, and Khrushchev's experience gave him the experience gave him the emotional charge that seems genuinely to have lasted all of his life. It also showed him the true face of capitalism. In the summer of 1914, Russia was at war with the Axis Powers, but this had no effect on Khrushchev. He avoided conscription into the army because he was a skilled worker, and at the end of the year he moved to Rutchenko mechanical workshops. It was around this time that he married, although not much is known of his wife. His political career started when he helped organize strikes by Rutchkovo miners in 1915 and 1916.
In Kalinovka, Khrushchev had felt the hopelessness of the land-hungry peasant and so got himself actively involved with the Revolution. He was elected a member of the Rutchenkovo soviet, whose first act was to disband the local police. With the whole of the Ukraine in German hands, Khrushchev went to his hometown of Kalinovka where he took part in the division of the local land owner estates among the peasants. But by far the most important event at this time was Khrushchev joining the Bolshevik Party, which took place between April and autumn of 1918. In the autumn of 1918, he was sent to work within the political department of the 9 th Army, which was fighting the anti-Bolshevik General Denkin in the north of the Donbas.
While Stalin was maneuvering against Trotsky, Khrushchev was engaged in the important work of forming party cells in the front line units of the 9 th Army. In other words, he was becoming the most junior sort of military commissar, the Partys representative at the Army's grass roots. This was a very important job because it was the commissars job to keep the troops fighting since desertion was as bad in the Red Army as it was in the White. By the Spring of 1920, Denkin' army had been pushed back down the Black Sea coast to Novorossisk, where part of it managed to escape to British and French navies.
Units of the 9 th Army, including Khrushchev's, chased another contingent of White forces down the coast to the Georgian seaports of Sochi, and with their subsequent surrender Khrushchev's first military career came to an end. It had been in no way particularly remarkable, although one Soviet source claims that by the wars end Khrushchev was working with the political department of the 9 th Army which implies promotion. Men like Khrushchev were the noncommissioned officers of the Bolshevik armies, a group essential for victory. In the Donbas, one third of all the industrial enterprises were ruined, and Khrushchev, along with other mineworkers, was drafted as an industrial soldier to restore them.
Khrushchev's job there involved a good deal of propaganda. He was to explain to the miners the first great change, which was the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP). At this time his first wife died, probably from malnourishment and / or disease, leaving Khrushchev with a son and daughter. In 1922, Khrushchev was lucky enough to be sent to the Workers Faculty of the Don Technical College at Yuzovka. This was definite sign of the partys approval, as the schools capacity was set at only 1500 students.
Candidates were chosen based on their loyalty to the regime and their proletariat background. Khrushchev was also appointed to the position of Party secretary for the entire college. At the college (among other subjects), the students were well versed in Marxism. Marx's writings struck Khrushchev as almost a revolution, and he provided Khrushchev with an explanation of all that he and his family had endured before the Revolution. In 1924, the year before graduation from the technical college, Khrushchev married again to a Yuzovka schoolteacher named Nina.
They had three children, two girls and one boy. After graduation in April 1925, at the age thirty-one, Khrushchev was appointed Secretary of the Petrovo-Marninsky District Party Committee. This put Khrushchev at the lowest command post in the Party s territorial hierarchy. In the same month that Khrushchev went to the Petrovo-Marninsky District, Lazar Kaganovich, a staunch Stalinist, and later major supporter of Khrushchev, became the head of the Ukrainian Party. It was from this time forward that Stalin can truly be said to have dominated Khrushchev's career, a domination that was to persist even after Stalin's death.
The Party as Stalin created it, disciplined to absolute subservience, with all decisions made at the top, suited a man like Khrushchev. Khrushchev eagerly endorsed all Stalin's attacks on his opponents. At the 1 st All-Ukrainian Party Conference in October of 1926, (his first speech on such an important occasion) he declared that the recent public confession of error, made by Trotsky, Zinovyev and Kamenev was not sincere, and he demanded repressive measures be taken against the opposition. Shortly after came his promotion to head of the Stalin Partys organization department, in order to head the battle of the communists of the region against the Zinovyevists and Trotskyists. All along Khrushchev followed the leadership of his chief Kaganovich. In the autumn of 1929, Khrushchev moved to Moscow to become a student at the Academy of Heavy Industry.
The academy was one of a number of institutions established to train Party members of correct proletarian background. Stalin's fight with Bukharin, who led the Anti Five-Year Plans, came to an end in 1929, when Bukharin was forced out of office. This was important to Khrushchev because in April 1930 his supporter Kaganovich replaced Bukharin and took over leadership of the Moscow organization. At Kaganovich's order, and to weed out the many Bukharin supporters still within the academy, a new Party cell was formed with Khrushchev as secretary. From this point, Khrushchev's link to Kaganovich was clear. Khrushchev's new job as the Industrial Academy's Party secretary brought him into Moscow politics at an excellent moment for his political advancement.
Stalin was well into the process of weeding out the untrustworthy and unreliable from the Moscow party and Khrushchev, with Kaganovich's support, stood only to gain from this. In January of 1931, Khrushchev was made Party secretary of the Bauman district where the Academy was situated. Within months he moved on again to the Command of the Kranoprensky district, which was of far greater industrial importance. Khrushchev's political rise after this point was spectacular. In 1933 he became Kaganovich's No. 2 in the Moscow City Party and he then took over leadership in early 1934, following being elected to the Soviet Central Committee at the 17 th Party Congress in February. This made Khrushchev one of the hundred or so most important Party members in the country.
His rapid advancement continued with his succeeding Kaganovich as the leader of the Party for the whole Moscow region in 1935. In the five-year interim between Khrushchev's arrival in Moscow and that point, he had risen from complete obscurity to the leadership position of the most important of the regional Party organizations. The thirties were the time of the Blood Purges of Stalin's opponents. Stalin systematically removed any opposition by means of a series of arrests and or executions, (which Khrushchev later condemned in his secret speech of 1956). Of the nine Moscow district Party secretaries appointed with Khrushchev in January of 1931, he was the only one to be still in politics at the end of the decade.
Some one hundred of the 139 members of the Central Committee to which Khrushchev was elected in 1934 were arrested (and most of them shot) by 1938. Khrushchev's Moscow speeches were full of praise for Stalin and he was always careful to included Kaganovich in Moscow achievements. His speeches were also loaded with abuse against Stalin's opponents. In August of 1937, a powerful and ominous trio came to the Ukrainian Capitol of Kiev, composed of Molotov, Soviet Prime Minister and Stalin's right hand man; Yezhov, the head of the NKVD; and Khrushchev. The three were accompanied by a special detachment of NKVD troops from Moscow. The purpose of the trio was to get Khrushchev in power and to start weeding out the Ukrainian nationalists who were seen as a threat in the time of the stresses of the Five-Year Plan.
An Assembly of the Ukrainian Central Committee was summoned to meet the guests. Molotov opened the meeting with a long speech that demanded that Kaiser, the Ukrainian first se...
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