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Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev [b] [c] (15 April [ O.S. 3 April] 1894 – 11 September 1971) was First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and Chairman of the Council of Ministers (premier) from 1958 to 1964.
- 1941–45
- CPSU (1918–1964)
- Overview
- Early life
- Political career under Stalin
Nikita Khrushchev (born April 17 [April 5, Old Style], 1894, Kalinovka, Russia —died September 11, 1971, Moscow, Russia, Soviet Union) first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1953–64) and premier of the Soviet Union (1958–64) whose policy of de-Stalinization had widespread repercussions throughout the communist world. In foreign...
Unlike Lenin and most other Soviet leaders, who generally had middle-class backgrounds, Khrushchev was the son of a coal miner; his grandfather had been a serf who served in the tsarist army. After a village education, Khrushchev went with his family to Yuzovka (later named Stalino, now Donetsk, Ukraine), a mining and industrial centre in the Donets Basin, where he began work as a pipe fitter at age 15. Because of his factory employment, he was not conscripted in the tsarist army during World War I. Even before the Russian Revolution of 1917, he had become active in workers’ organizations, and in 1918—during the struggle between Reds, Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists for possession of Ukraine—he became a member of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik).
In January 1919 Khrushchev joined the Red Army and served as a junior political commissar, ultimately in the campaigns against the Whites and invading Polish armies in 1920. Soon after he was demobilized, his wife, Galina, died during a famine. In 1922 Khrushchev secured admission to a new Soviet workers’ school in Yuzovka, where he received a secondary education along with additional party instruction. He became a student political leader and was appointed secretary of the Communist Party Committee at the school. There he married his second wife, Nina Petrovna, a schoolteacher, in 1924.
In 1925 Khrushchev went into full-time party work as party secretary of the Petrovsko-Mariinsk district of Yuzovka. He distinguished himself by his hard work and knowledge of mine and factory conditions. He soon came to the notice of Joseph Stalin’s close associate, Lazar M. Kaganovich, secretary general of the Ukrainian Party’s Central Committee, who asked Khrushchev to accompany him as a nonvoting delegate to the 14th Party Congress in Moscow. For the next four years—in Yuzovka, then in Kharkov (now Kharkiv) and Kiev—Khrushchev was active as a party organizer. In 1929 he received permission to go to Moscow to study metallurgy at the Stalin Industrial Academy. There he was appointed secretary of the academy’s Party Committee. In 1931 he went back to full-time party work in Moscow. By 1933 he had become second secretary of the Moscow Regional Committee.
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During the early 1930s Khrushchev consolidated his hold on the Moscow party cadres. He supervised the completion of the Moscow subway, for which he received the Order of Lenin in 1935. That year he became first secretary of the Moscow city and regional party organization—in effect, the governor of Moscow. In the preceding year, at the 17th Party Congress, he had been elected a full member of the 70-man Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
Khrushchev was a zealous supporter of Stalin in those years and participated in the purges of party leadership. He was one of only three provincial secretaries who survived the mass executions of the Great Purge of the 1930s. He became a member of the Constitutional Committee in 1936, an alternate member of the Central Committee’s ruling Politburo in 1937, and in the same year a member of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Supreme Soviet. A year later Khrushchev was made a candidate member of the Politburo and sent to Kiev as first secretary of the Ukrainian party organization. In 1939 he was made a full member of the Politburo.
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Nov 9, 2009 · Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) led the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, serving as premier from 1958 to 1964. Though he largely pursued a policy of peaceful coexistence with the...
Apr 2, 2014 · Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev publicized Stalin's crimes, was a major player in the Cuban Missile Crisis and established a more open form of Communism in the USSR. Updated: Jun 11, 2020....
Leadership of the Soviet Union of Nikita Khrushchev. After Stalin’s death in March 1953 and the execution of the powerful state security chief, Lavrenty Beria—which Khrushchev engineered—he engaged in a power struggle with Malenkov, who was Stalin’s heir apparent. Khrushchev soon gained the decisive margin by his control of the party ...
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Oct 29, 2018 · Nikita Khrushchev (April 15, 1894—September 11, 1971) was the leader of the Soviet Union during a critical decade of the Cold War. His leadership style and expressive personality came to represent Russian's hostility toward the United States in the eyes of the American public.
Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1953-1964. Certainly the most colorful Soviet leader, Khrushchev is best remembered for his dramatic ...
