Khrushchev: The Man and His Era [ペーパーバック]

One of the less commented upon consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union--an event that, in many ways, Nikita Khruschev set in motion--is the access into Russian documents and society the event has provided to historians trying to understand and document various aspects of the Soviet Communist experience. It is unlikely a book such as this could ever have been written before the collapse. One can only hope many more like it are in the offing.

Using access to documentation about and personalities surrounding Khruschev, Professor Taubman has written what will surely stand as the definitive Khruschev biography for a long time to come. Professor Taubman has vividly captured the essence of Khruschev-the insecure bombastic and idiosyncratic nature of this truly unique historical figure who owed both his rise as well as his fall to his love-hate relationship with Stalin, the man who he supported wholeheartedly and then denounced and debunked. The boo does a marvelous job of providing an insight into the truly ethnic Russian aspects of Khruschev's personality and behavior-his passions, his profanity, his impulsiveness-aspects that at once render him all too human in both genuinely sympathetic and concomitantly repulsive ways.

Khrushchev represents an intermediary between the cult-of-personality communism of Lenin and Stalin and the more corporate, politburo oriented communism of the Brezhnev/Andropov era. Professor Taubman also provides clear-cut and insightful analysis of Khrushchev's role in this area as well. Moreover, all of this is deftly presented within the context of the wider Soviet and international political events of the times.

Well written and very well paced for a genuinely scholarly historical work. This is one of the best biographies I have read in many, many years.

A brilliant effort.

Taubman's biography of Khrushchev is immensely readable, emphasizing the personal aspects of the dictator's life. It is the portrait of a man temperamentally unsuited to lead a great nation. Nevertheless, Khrushchev emerges as more human than the other dictators during the Soviet experiement, and most readers are likely to feel a grudging affection toward him.
Taubman begins with a quick summary of Khrushchev's childhood and quick rise in the Communist Party apparatus under Stalin. Seemingly unambitious, often to the point of evading promotion, Khrushchev thrived and survived during the worst of the Stalin era. After Stalin's death, Khrushchev adeptly asserted himself over supposedly stronger rivals to wield primary power by 1956.
Taubman doesn't give a complete, detailed account of Soviet domestic and foreign policy during the Khrushchev era, but concentrates instead on several key events: The Secret Speech, the Invasion of Hungary, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. There is also a fairly detailed account of Khrushchev's troubled and ambivalent relationship with artists and intellectuals, which reveals him at his worst, often devoid of elementary self-control.
Despite his blustering threats and personal vulgarity, Khrushchev was in many respects admirable and likeable, and it is hard to read of his ouster and lonely retirement without sympathy.
In Taubman's account Khrushchev suffered from an inferiority complex based on his lack of education and culture. I'd like to suggest an additional explanation for his intemperate behavior. I believe Taubman's biography shows Khrushchev as a basically decent man who wanted the party and government to which he'd dedicated his life to succeed. Not a cynical careerist like most of his colleagues, Khrushchev may have been stricken more by doubt about the system he represented than about his own capabilities.

Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev was a `simple' man. He was also an extraordinarily complex man full of internal contradictions and conflicts. The child of peasants, Khrushchev had only four years of formal education. Yet he rose up from the ranks of the proletariat (perhaps the only Soviet leader with true proletarian roots) to become the leader of one of the superpowers of the 20th century. William Taubman's meticulously researched and beautifully written, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, unravels the complexities of this `simple' soul.

Khrushchev the leader was everywhere during my cold-war youth. I grew up with images of his `kitchen debate' with then Vice President Nixon and his shoe banging episode at the United Nations. Khrushchev's alleged threat to bury the U.S. (he never actually said as much) was common knowledge even to children of the era and may explain my wearing a Khrushchev mask one Halloween while trick or treating.

Since his departure from the world stage in 1964, neither history nor historians have paid much attention to Khrushchev. Historians continue to pay far more attention to Lenin, Stalin, and even Trotsky than to Khrushchev and no one has ever really managed to take an extended look at the man behind that Halloween mask. William Taubman has, in one fell swoop, managed to balance the scales.

Taubman follows the normal chronological outlines of Khrushchev's life and times. As one would expect we begin with his impoverished childhood in the Donbass coal mining region of Russia. A skilled sheet metal worker at the outbreak of the October Revolution, Khrushchev joined the Communist Party and began what can best be described as a meteoric rise up the slippery and dangerous slope of the party leadership where sometimes the only thing worse than being too far from Joseph Stalin was being too close. It is from Khrushchev's first interactions with Stalin that Taubman's writing and analysis soars. It is from this point that the tragic contradictions that marked Khrushchev's life began to come to the surface.

We see Khrushchev in the role of devoted servant to Stalin, participating with no small amount of energy and satisfaction in party purges and the purges of ethnic nationalities. Up until Stalin's death, Taubman makes it clear that Khrushchev's hands (along with the hands of every other player in the court of the Red tsar) were stained with the blood of thousands of Soviet citizens. Yet this was the same Khrushchev who took a tremendous leap of faith in revealing Stalin's `crimes' at the famous Party Congress in 1956.

We see Khrushchev instituting what became known as the thaw in the USSR. In 1956, Khrushchev opened the gates of the Gulag and thousands of prisoners returned home from Siberia. Yet in this same year he did not hesitate to send tanks to Hungary to crush a popular democratic movement. The thaw enabled Solzhenitsyn to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, yet the work of Vasilly Grossman was physically destroyed by the KGB.

Taubman shows us Khrushchev in the role of cold-warrior. He had the Berlin Wall built, sent missiles to Cuba, and paraded Gary Power's downed U-2 spy plane through Red Square. Yet, at the same time Khrushchev understood that the massive amounts of money being poured into the military would have a drastic impact on the Soviet economy, a theory proven by later events. He suggested increasing the USSR's missile defense systems while proposing dramatic cuts in the strength of Soviet Navy and Army. Unfortunately these proposed cuts cost him the support of the military. Believing that the future of the USSR would be guaranteed by agricultural self-sufficiency he promoted scheme after scheme to increase production. Unfortunately most of these schemes turned out to be more than a bit silly and they all failed in a very public fashion. These failures cost Khrushchev public and political support. By October, 1964 Khrushchev was removed, peacefully from office. Khrushchev died a bitter, lonely, man.

Blaise Pascal wrote: "What a chimera, then, is man! what a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! A judge of all things, feeble worm of the earth, depositary of the truth, cloaca of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe!" Taubman has done a marvelous job exploring the chimera, chaos, and contradictions that made the life of Nikita S. Khrushchev so utterly fascinating.

Anyone interested in Soviet history, history generally, or who just likes well-written, well-informed biographies should read this book.