Khrushchev by William Taubman

It is often difficult for the successors of powerful leaders to escape the shadows of those they follow. In the American experience, think of John Adams, Andrew Johnson, or Harry Truman. Outside of America, look at John Major or Thabo Mbeki. There are any number of reasons for this: perhaps the predecessor was governing on the basis of a personal popularity unavailable to the next guy, or his power enabled him to ignore a pending crises that erupted after he left office, or perhaps he himself was the source of the trouble.

And of course the more powerful the leader, the more popular and dominant his reign, the greater the struggle for the next in line. It is hard to think of an example, in the 20th-century at least, of a man who had more governmental authority vested in his person and personality than Joseph Stalin. Of course not only did the Soviet Union not have a constitutional line of succession in place upon his unexpected death, Stalin had spent the past several decades periodically purging anyone who gained enough power to be viewed as an heir apparent. Thus the emergence of the man who eventually surfaced as Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was not grounded in precedent or consensus.

As historian William Taubman notes in the opening lines of his 2004 biography, Khrushchev, what "many Westerners, and not a few Russians" recall about the former Soviet leader is that he was a "crude, ill-educated clown who banged his shoe at the United Nations." Those with a bit more memory of the Cold War might also remember that it was Khrushchev who went eyeball-to-eyeball with JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, as Dean Rusk put it, "the other guy blinked." Taubman argues that the truth about Stalin's successor was a bit more abstruse:

[T]he short, thick-set man with small, piercing eyes, protruding ears, and apparently unquenchable energy wasn't a Soviet joke even though he figures in so many of them. Rather, he was a complex man whose story combines triumph and tragedy for his country as well as himself.

Complicit in Stalinist crimes, Khrushchev attempted to de-Stalinize the Soviet Union. His daring but bumbling attempt to reform communism began the long, erratic process of putting a human face (initially his own) on an inhumane system. Not only did he help prepare the way for Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin a quarter of a century later, but Khrushchev's failure to set a stable and prosperous new course for his country anticipated the setbacks that would thwart their attempts at reform.

Born in a small Russian village in 1894, there was little about Khrushchev's youth to lead one to believe he would rise to rule one of the world's two superpowers:

Beginning at age six or seven, village boys fetched water and wood and tagged along with their fathers to work in fields. At eight or nine they tended cattle or sheep, and by thirteen they worked alongside their fathers from dawn to dusk... We have no photograph of Nikita as a boy, but it is not hard to imagine an energetic towhead, wearing only a long peasant shirt until age six or seven, then rough, crude trousers home-sewn out of flax or wool. He recalled going barefoot as a boy from spring until late fall.

Moved to the Ukraine during his childhood, Khrushchev became political during the Revolution, and he served as a political commissar in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. He then began his march up the ranks of the Communist Party, serving as director of a mine he had previously worked at and then a series of progressively greater party positions. Khrushchev came under the tutelage of Lazar Kaganovich, then head of the party in Ukraine, further enhancing his rise. But it was to be in the 1930s that Khrushchev's career would take its greatest strides, a decade otherwise marked primarily by massive suffering amongst the Russian people and vicious party purges by Stalin:

Between 1939 and 1938 Khrushchev's career rocketed upward: May 1930, head of the Industrial Academy's party cell; January 1931, party boss of the Bauman District, in which the academy was located; followed six months later by the same job in Krasnopresnensky, the capital's largest and most important borough; January 1932, number two man in the Moscow party organization itself; January 1934, Moscow city party boss and member of the party Central Committee; early 1935, party chief of Moscow province too, a region about the size of England and Wales with a population of eleven million people. Even in an era of extraordinary upward mobility, Khrushchev's was stunning. Yet during the same decade in which he reached the heights, his country experienced nothing short of a holocaust.

The details of Stalin's purges, and the disastrous consequences of his policies for the rural masses, are well-covered by Taubman, largely tracking the story of paranoiac bloodletting described in Simon Sebag Montefiore's recent biography of the dictator, Stalin (reviewed here). Khrushchev was able to ride out some of the bloodiest episodes from his safe perch in Ukraine, where he was made party head in early 1938. He was to stay in the West into World War II, accompanying the invasion forces into Poland in 1939 and was later present in Stalingrad during the infamous siege:

Khrushchev served as chief political commissar (although that term itself was no longer used after 1941) on a series of crucial fronts. Military councils of which he was a member consisted of the front commander, the chief of staff for the area, and the top political officer. The latter's responsibility was equal to the commander's; no order could be issued without his signature. Actually, many commanders wanted only formal equality, preferring that their commissars concentrate on keeping up morale and lobbying with the Kremlin for supplies and reinforcements. However, Khrushchev wanted a voice in operational matters, and as a member of the ruling Politburo he got it.

Khrushchev emerged from the war as a member of the Soviet elite, but was still not viewed as a likely successor to the top spot. And in fact, after Stalin's sudden death in 1953 power was quickly seized by the butcher Beria, whose sadistic reign as security chief had involved numerous personal acts of rape, torture, and murder. Whether out of personal ambition or self-preservation, the other aspirants to the throne briefly united to oust Beria, at which point Malenkov was seen as the leading figure, only to be outmaneuvered by Khrushchev in late 1953 and early 1954. Khrushchev solidified his power over the next several years, culminating in his decision to make the famous "Secret Speech" in which he sought to justify his rise and his proposals by denouncing Stalin's cult of personality and those who had enabled it (naturally ignoring or minimizing his own part):

Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalin was the bravest and most reckless thing he ever did. The Soviet regime never fully recovered, and neither did he. Before he spoke, Malenkov and Molotov seemed defeated politically. Just to make sure, he had stacked the congress with his supporters and strengthened his position in the Central Committee. He was now first among supposed equals, perfectly positioned eventually to expel his rivals from the party.

The remainder of Khrushchev's decade or so of power is punctuated by a series of high-risk, high-reward endeavors. His triumphs included the success of the Soviet space program, the establishment of the Warsaw Pact, and his visit to the United States. Notably less triumphant were the violent crackdown on the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the disintegration of relations between the Soviet Union and China, the support for building the Berlin Wall, the repeated failure to meet his lofty economic goals, and the near-catastrophic decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba:

Khrushchev had not thought things through or prepared backup plans for various contingencies. He badly misjudged the American response, improvised madly when he was found out, and was fortunate the crisis ended as safely as it did... [These actions] reflect Khrushchev's domestic and personal position in 1962: besieged by troubles; increasingly irritated as setbacks mounted; determined to prove himself (to himself as well as to his colleagues); ready to lash out and take risks to regain the initiative. In that sense the Cuban missiles were a cure-all, a cure-all that cured nothing.

In many ways, Khrushchev was doomed from the start. It would have taken the most extraordinary of leaders to follow in the footsteps of a personality like Stalin and achieve success without doubling-down on the repression of the past. Khrushchev largely managed to avoid the worst excesses of the Stalinist instinct, but this left him with one less tool to suppress the various forces unleashed by the dictator's demise. He seemed to have a greater personal tendency toward freedom than Stalin (he could hardly have less, I suppose), but with a faltering economy beneath him and potential rivals surrounding him, he was in a rather difficult situation.

Fundamentally, Khrushchev did not have what it takes to be that extraordinary leader. In some ways what made him so interesting was simply how unexpected his success was, and the tumultuous nature of the times in which he presided on the world stage. But the aspects of his personality that made his rivals constantly underestimate him, particularly his lack of education and his crudity, were in the end true obstacles to his success. He did not have a strategic perspective, or a methodical mind. He often reacted impulsively, and he valued bombastic rhetoric over pragmatic planning. His development as a leader was also limited not just by his personal characteristics, but the nature of the system in which he rose. And that was a reality that would hamper the parade of successors whose tenures would be even more ignominious than the "crude, ill-educated clown who banged his shoe at the United Nations."