Biography Of Nikita Khrushchev – Free PDF Download

EARLY LIFE

• Born on April 15, 1894 in Kalinovka, Russia, Nikita Khrushchev became Premier of the Soviet Union after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. His parents, Sergei Khrushchev and Xeniya Khrushcheva, were poor peasants of Russian
• After a few years at the village school, Khrushchev found work in a factory at age fifteen. In 1918, he joined the Communist Party and fought in the Red Army during the Russian Revolution. After the war, he received a technical education and became a true believer of communism.

THE RISING

• In 1914, he married Yefrosinia Pisareva, daughter of the lift operator at the Rutchenkovo mine. In 1915, they had a daughter, Yulia, and in 1917, a son, Leonid.
• After the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917, the new Russian Provisional Government in Petrograd had little influence over Ukraine. Khrushchev was elected to the worker’s council (or soviet) in Rutchenkovo, and in May he became its chairman.
• He did not join the Bolsheviks until 1918. n late 1918 or early 1919 he was mobilized into the Red Army as a political commissar.

 THE RISING

• In 1921, the civil war ended, and Khrushchev was demobilised and assigned as commissar to a labour brigade in the Donbas, where he and his men lived in poor conditions.
• By 1932, Khrushchev had become second in command, behind Kaganovich, of the Moscow city Party organization, and in 1934, he became Party leader for the city and a member of the Party’s Central Committee.
• Beginning in 1934, Stalin began a campaign of political repression known as the Great Purge, during which millions of people were executed or sent to the Gulag. In 1936, as the trials proceeded, Khrushchev expressed his vehement support.

PURGES

• In his memoirs, Khrushchev noted that almost everyone who worked with him was arrested.By Party protocol, Khrushchev was required to approve these arrests, and did little or nothing to save his friends and colleagues.
• In June 1937, the Politburo set a quota of 35,000 enemies to be arrested in Moscow province; 5,000 of these were to be executed. In reply, Khrushchev asked that 2,000 wealthy peasants, or kulaks living in Moscow be killed in part fulfillment of the quota.

PURGES

• Nonetheless, Khrushchev became a candidate member of the Politburo on 14 January 1938 and a full member in March 1939.
• In late 1937, Stalin appointed Khrushchev as head of the Communist Party in Ukraine, and Khrushchev duly left Moscow for Kiev, again the Ukrainian capital, in January 1938.
• Ukraine had been the site of extensive purges, with the murdered including professors in Stalino whom Khrushchev greatly respected.

WORL WAR 2

• When Nazi Germany invaded the USSR, in June 1941, Khrushchev was still at his post in Kiev. Stalin appointed him a political commissar, and Khrushchev served on a number of fronts as an intermediary between the local military commanders and the political rulers in Moscow.
• Stalin used Khrushchev to keep commanders on a tight leash, while the commanders sought to have him influence Stalin. As the Germans advanced, Khrushchev worked with the military in an attempt to defend and save Kiev.
• Handicapped by orders from Stalin that under no circumstances should the city be abandoned, the Red Army was soon encircled by the Germans. While the Germans stated they took 655,000 prisoners, according to the Soviets, 150,541 men out of 677,085 escaped the trap.

 RISE

• Khrushchev reached the Stalingrad Front in August 1942, soon after the start of the battle for the city. Almost all of Ukraine had been occupied by the Germans, and Khrushchev returned to his domain in late 1943 to find devastation.
• In February 1947, the Ukrainian Central Committee removed Khrushchev as party leader in favor of Kaganovich, while retaining him as premier.
• After Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev deftly used his political skills to transfer or isolate political enemies who threatened his rise to party leadership

HUMANIST?

• In February 24, 1956, he denounced the excesses of the Stalin era for several hours, stunning delegates attending the 20th Communist Party Congress.
• His de-Stalinization policy prompted movements against Soviet control in Poland and Hungary. To avoid being deposed, Khrushchev nonetheless used some Stalin-like methods to divide and outmaneuver opponents.
• Domestically, Nikita Khrushchev became known for his dramatic ideas, with some perceived as more humanistic and others ill-conceived. He attempted to humanize the Soviet system by relaxing restrictions on free expression and releasing waves of political prisoners from the infamous Gulag forced labor camps.

REFORMS

• POLITICIAL REFORMS
• AGRICULTURAL REFORMS
• EDUCATION REFORMS
• FOREIGN

COUP

• Beginning in March 1964, Supreme Soviet presidium chairman and nominal head of state Leonid Brezhnev began discussing Khrushchev’s removal with his colleagues.
• The conspirators, led by Brezhnev, First Deputy Premier Alexander Shelepin, and KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny, struck in October 1964.
• On 14 October 1964, the Presidium and the Central Committee each voted to accept Khrushchev’s “voluntary” request to retire from his offices for reasons of “advanced age and ill health.” Brezhnev was elected First Secretary (later General Secretary), while Alexei Kosygin succeeded Khrushchev as premier

 DEATH

• Khrushchev was granted a pension of 500 rubles per month and was assured that his house and dacha were his for life.
• Following his removal from power, he fell into deep depression. He received few visitors, especially since his security guards kept track of all guests and reported their comings and goings.
• Khrushchev died of a heart attack in a hospital near his home in Moscow on 11 September 1971, at the age of 77. He was denied a state funeral with interment in the Kremlin Wall and was instead buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

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