Nikita Khrushchev

Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin, nearly caused a nuclear war, and was removed by his own colleagues in a vote. Born in 1894 in a village near the Ukrainian border, he was a metalworker with about four years of schooling, joined the Bolsheviks in 1918, and rose through the Moscow party organisation under Kaganovich — signing off on the purges in Ukraine and Moscow, which is the part of his record he never accounted for. He organised the defence of Stalingrad as a political commissar and ran Ukraine after the war. He emerged from the collective leadership after Stalin's death in 1953, having had Beria arrested and shot. His secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956 is the act that defines him. Over four hours he catalogued Stalin's crimes against the party, the cult of personality, the fabricated confessions and the wartime blunders, to an audience that had helped commit them. It was not published in the Soviet Union for thirty-three years and reached the West within weeks, and it split the communist movement worldwide. He released millions from the camps, permitted Solzhenitsyn to publish, and opened the virgin lands to cultivation. He also crushed Hungary in 1956, built the Berlin Wall in 1961, and put missiles in Cuba in 1962 — then withdrew them, in exchange for an American undertaking not to invade and a secret removal of missiles from Turkey. The Presidium voted him out in October 1964. He was the first Soviet leader to be retired rather than buried.

• Lived: 1894 CE – 1971 CE
• Nationality: Soviet
• Roles: head_of_state, party_leader

Related

• The Cold War
• Death of Stalin and the Thaw
• Hungarian Revolution
• Sputnik: The Space Race Begins
• Construction of the Berlin Wall
• Cuban Missile Crisis