Khrushchev: The Man and His Era

Rating:
Summary: A Lucid and Informative Biography
Review: It is a very rare occassion in the world of biographies that a biography comes along that can combine masterful prose with a wealth of important and interesting information. However, William Taubman's "Khrushchev" manages to accomplish both!

Told chronologically through his life and political career, Taubman lays down the major political events in Khruschnev's life and also documents how they effected those around him. By the end of the book all readers will have a better understanding not only of the man, but more importantly, the effect the man had on his people and the world.

I would highly recommend this book to any historical enthusiasts or anyone else even remotely interested in the Soviet Union.

(I would also recommend Mark Remenick's "Lenin's Tomb" as a preface to reading this book.)

Rating:
Summary: At last he steps from under his master's shadow
Review: Khruschev spent all his life trying to get out of the Vozhd's shadow. Stalin made him what he was, and, until the end of his life, he ran from his legacy, while at the same time continuing to indulge in many of its ways. For a very long time Kruschev has been a walk-on character in the Stalin biographies (particularly egregiously in Volkogonov's "Autopsy of an Empire", where everyone after Stalin is a let-down). Stalin was so exceptional (and I'm not saying this as praise: rather the opposite) that everyone (including such extraordinary characters as Zhukov, Kaganovich, Bukharin, Beria, Kirov and also Khruschev) ends up looking pale by comparison.

Taubman's biography does justice to its subject. It emphasizes his duality: an ignorant man who prized culture and loved to deal with artists, but could never do so without alienating them; a true man of the people (the only real manual worker to have become leader of the USSR), with simple tastes, who was yet devious beyond measure; an exceptionally intelligent person who achieved the greatest power, but who probably would have been happier as a manager of a manufacturing concern; a warm man in public, who was yet extremely distant from his family, although he loved them deeply; a man who was a teetotaler who however was perceived as a drunk; a negotiator who wanted to end the Cold War, who did much more than anyone else to almost bring about nuclear apocalypse; a loyal Party man who ended up almost dismantling the Party and betraying its rules. One could go on, and on, because nothing about Khruschev was simple.

Although Taubman doesn't say so, Kruschev's strategy was similar to that used by other figures who managed to survive terrible masters. Robert Graves's Emperor Claudius comes to mind: according to Suetonius, he survived the madness of Caligula and the bloodshed of Tiberius by pretending to be a fool, a drunk and a cripple. Like Claudius, Khruschev survived Stalin's various Terrors by disguising his ambition and playing the buffoon endlessly: by appearing useful but harmless, in short. But, like Claudius, the abilities that led him to supreme power, deserted him once he achieved his goal: Claudius was easily destroyed by his cunning niece Agrippina the Younger, and her psycopath son, Nero. Similarly, Khruschev, after having disposed of such tough customers as Beria, Malenkov, Bulganin and Molotov, was brought down by a second-rater, Leonid Brezhnev, in a singularly inept coup that probably could have been easily dismantled if Khruschev had had his eye on the ball. Many of these leaders were grotesques (particularly Malenkov and Beria), and Taubman does a sterling job at presenting them like real human beings, which they also were.

The story Taubman tells is exceptional, and he tells it supremely well. One feels like another guest at Khruschev's dachas, or a fly-on-the-wall at yet another Politburo meeting. The cast of secondary characters is fascinating, including, on the American side, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, and key establishment types such as the Dulles brothers, Averell Harriman, Adlai Stevenson and Bobby Kennedy. Interesting brits, notably Harold Macmillan, make their appearances, as do Conrad Adenauer, Mao Ze Dong, Zhou En Lai, Josip Broz Tito, Fidel Castro, Pandit Nehru, Sukarno, Charles de Gaulle and Walter Ulbricht. That was a time when giants walked the earth, and this is truly the story of The Man and his Era, like the dustjacket says. I was particularly interested in Andropov's role in the publication of the Khruschev memoirs in the US: appparently, as KGB chief, he could have stopped it because Khruschev's contact was actually a KGB mole, but didn't, because he wasn't just a simple spymaster but also a complex character.

All the key episodes (like the infamous shoe-banging at the United Nations, the Cuban missile crisis, the several Berlin crises, the Hungary invasion, the secret speech at the end of the XX Party Congress, the launching of Sputnik and the Pasternak Nobel Prize) are told in just the right length, with all the context required for a non-specialist.

From the book one emerges with the view that Khruschev was not a demented villain like Stalin and Lenin, nor a useless careerist like Brezhnev. He was rather like Gorbachev: a true believer who thought that the system he served could survive and would become even stronger if cleansed of the accretions of 35 years of dictatorship. He was also a visionary. He understood the change in the role of armies as a consequence of nuclear and high-tech weapons (he knew that large standing armies would be unnecesary and even counter-productive in the new world). He saw that the so-called Third World was the next frontier for the Cold War. He realized the USSR would have to live with Chinese and Yugoslav socialism, and that this would not necessarily weaken Moscow's power in the long term. He realized that Mao's China meant that a rapprochement with the USA was necessary in order to maintain his country's status )if Khruschev hadn't been overthrown and Kennedy hadn't been killed, it's quite possible Nixon's entente with Mao would never have happened, because it would have been pre-empted by a new Soviet-American understanding). His moving the missiles into Cuba was actually no different from the US having missiles in other countries bordering the USSR, such as Turkey. He understood that Stalinism was an illness, which he tried to cure, although he failed to notice that, to a large extent, Stalinism was encoded in the Leninist DNA, and couldn't be done away it without losing Leninism as well.

He did many evil things. He was instrumental in collectivising the Ukraine, causing the worst famine in history after Mao's great leap forward. He led the purges in Ukraine in the 1930's, although he tried to protect the local culture and language from his own onslaught. He was instrumental in saving Stalingrad from the Germans, at a terrible cost. He persecuted religion in the USSR like even Stalin hadn't dared. He was a reckless gambler, and he sometimes lost sight of his bets.

Yet he was courageous and, on the whole, likeable. He was probably the nicest guy that worked for Stalin, which may not be saying a lot, but it's better than being called the worst of them all (and there's plenty of competition for that spot). Judged against these (admittedly low) standards, Khruschev didn't do too badly. Taubman's book will do much to give him the place he deserves in the history of the last century.

Rating:
Summary: wonderful, insightful,
Review: Khrushchev, always undersestimated and now largely glossed over in history is broguth alive in this great bography of one of the 20th centuries greatest leaders. I encourage everyone interested in the Cold war, soviet studies or leaders of our time to read this very informative book about a complex man who towered above the other leaders of soviet russia in his ideas and charisma.

Rating:
Summary: Eye opener
Review: Khrushchev: The Man and His Era is a big, engaging book about a political giant, and author William Taubman has skillfully painted his life on a large historical canvas. Khrushchev emerges in vivid, engaging prose as an intriguing and commanding historical figure whose life affords us an insider's view of the inner workings and evolution of the Soviet political system, from its founding to its demise. MJS TU

Rating:
Summary: Soviet Special K
Review: Krushchev has been a mystery to us as to how he gained and lost power in the Soviet Union. This book allows the reader to enter into the day-to-day existance of a ruler in an oppressed society. The book shows Special K as sometimes a buffoon, a simple peasant/worker but in reality a coniver and plotter. To me it felt that the author tried to portray Khrushchev as a sympathetic character but, he was a man that willingly participated in the murder of thousands upon thousands of innocents.

The author does well in potraying and explaining Special K to us through the use of such source as his son however, I did not feel he went deep enough into what he was really like. I temper this with the fact that we are gaining access into teh secret aschives and more information is always forthcoming so I find this book helpful. Hence, I can only give a four star rating.

Rating:
Summary: Remarkable book about a complex man
Review: Nikita Khrushchev was an enigma, a contradiction, and a study in contrasts. He could be shrewd and calculating, and he could also be ignorant and shortsighted. He could be rude, bombastic and thoroughly insulting, and he could also be self-deprecating and sentimental. These traits are held by lots of people, no doubt, but they became highly relevant in the 1950s and 60s as Khrushchev led the Soviet Union in a series of events on the world stage that were often dramatic and, sometimes, potentially cataclysmic.
Author William Taubman brings the reader close to the true character that was N. Khrushchev. We get detailed insights into his upbringing and youth, and his peasant origins. Later, Taubman describes the stressful and ambivalent relationship that Khrushchev had with his predecessor, Joseph Stalin. The intrigues that surrounded the leadership transition from the latter to the former are one of the more fascinating parts of the book.
I highly recommend this work, which at times almost serves as a transcript of countless top-level meetings that involved Khrushchev, so plentiful are the direct quotations of the key players. The reader cannot help but feel close to the personalities, making the history of this troubled country, in those tumultuous times, very much alive.
The amazing thing that I learned from this book is just how informal and haphazard the running of the USSR was under Khrushchev. Policy was often formulated at a whim. Khrushchev would rant and rave about conditions in his country, make pronouncements accordingly as to how things should be managed, and his underlings would obediently carry out his wishes, seldom challenging or questioning him. Really, it is amazing that the USSR functioned as well as it did in the 1950's and 60's, given how few people there were "at the top" who actually thought through what was right for the country and its people.
Taubman provides wonderful detail on the relationships Khrushchev had, or tried to have, with Stalin, Mao Zedong, Castro, and US presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Khrushchev often used "bluff and bluster" with these men as a way of compensating for his lack of sophistication and formal education, of which he was all too often very conscious. For example, Mao got under Khrushchev's skin on a couple of occasions by swimming proficiently when he and the aquatically-challenged Khrushchev got took time out from meetings.
I never expected to laugh as much as I did when I set out to read this book. There are dozens of passages that reveal the baseness and profanity that Khrushchev was capable of dishing out, often as not while abroad, in the company of leaders and dignitaries. Khrushchev's shoe-banging at the UN was just one example of his unpredictable, wild behaviour that typically left his entire audience embarrassed and looking for a place to hide.
This book is well written, well researched, in all a smooth read despite its 650-page length. I also recommend Gulag, by Anne Applebaum, and The Fall of Berlin, by Antony Beevor, both of which shed light on the period prior to and in the early days of Khrushchev's influence on the USSR and the world.


Rating:
Summary: Superb Biography Of Stalin
Review: No one is less understood in the so-called Western democracies than former Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who assumed the reins following the death of long-time ruler Joseph Stalin under somewhat mysterious circumstances in 1953. One of the reasons he is so poorly understood and appreciated not only here in the West but within greater Russia itself is largely due to the internal contradictions that marked his many-starred career as Soviet apparatchik and eventual ascension to the seat of power. After all, he rose due largely to the sponsorship and special status he held with Stalin himself, a man noted for his treachery and endless paranoid actions against enemies and allies alike. With this book, entitled "Khrushchev: The Man And His Era", we are presented with what is by far the most comprehensive, nuanced and carefully researched biographical effort to date. Indeed, this wonderful study by acclaimed history scholar, Professor William Taubman of Amherst College, in Amherst Massachusetts will likely become the benchmark study by which all others are henceforth compared.

Given his long association with Stalin, and having been complicit with all of the atrocities associated with the Stalinist era, including thousands of politically motivated arrests, executions, and deportations to the endless locations within the Gulag, as well as his well-known public endorsements of Stalin and his policies, it may be hard to understand how the same man could so quickly rebound to the other end of the ball park in terms of his subsequent harsh and quite critical public denouncements of the policies of the years under Stalin. Indeed, it was Khrushchev who more than anyone else within the Politburo who dared to reveal to the public the sheer scope and scale of Stalin's crimes against the Soviet people, using the shocking revelations as a political screen for the introduction of a wide series of reforms that began to allow the emergence of a rudimentary smattering of civil society where none had been allowed before. In this sense, Taubman maintains that Khrushchev deserves historical credit for having originated the beginnings of a thaw in Cold War relations that would eventually lead to the policy of "perestroika" under Mikhail Gorbachev three decades later.

However, this is not to suggest that Nikita Khrushchev boldly walked away from the policies instituted by Stalin into the cold light of another, more enlightened era in Soviet politics. Instead, he moved quite cautiously and with great care and aplomb amid the swirling quicksilver currents of Politburo politics, having learned from personal experience what it takes to survive in such a Machiavellian environment. What he had was a natural gift for political compromise and accommodating his colleagues; without it this rough and tumble man who was so limited in terms of education would not have survived in the murderous political atmosphere of the soviet Union in the Stalin years. His intellectual limitations made him less suspect in Stalin's eye, however, and Khrushchev later took particualr delight in embarrassing and even persecuting the better-educated elements of the intelligentsia. His poor stumbling efforts at public speaking belied his cleverness and political adroitness in dealing with comrades and enemies alike. In one amusing passage one of his successors, Leonid Brezhnev, complaining aloud to other Politburo members of how difficult a man to deal with Nikita could be; crocodile tears shed in the company of other reptiles.

Khrushchev was in many ways unprepared to be launched onto the international scene in terms of his native abilities or his legendary difficulty with elocution in particular or public oratory in general. Neither was he particularly adept at the more theoretical and intellectual aspects of ruling the Soviet Union. Bu the was easily the single best choice the Politburo had in terms of who to forward as the front man for the years immediately following Stalin's demise, and he provided the Soviet Union with the necessary leadership to survive the decade of the fifties and was quietly shelved in a bloodless removal n the early 1960s. This is a superb historical biography of one of the most enigmatic and least well understood public figures of the 20th century. This is surely a biography that will enjoy a long and sustained readership. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Khrushchev: Behind the Soviet Monolith: Contradiction
Review: No one, least of all Nikita Khrushchev, expected him to survive the purges of Stalin to succeed him as First Secretary of the Soviet Union. In KHRUSHCHEV: THE MAN AND HIS ERA, William Taubman has written what surely ranks as the definitive biography of a Soviet leader, who until recently, was seen as little more than a rather clownish figure who occupied the seat of power only until a more seasoned Brezhnev ousted him in 1964.

Taubman begins, surprisingly enough, with the very day that Khrushchev was ousted in 1964. As far as Khrushchev was concerned, that day was nothing special. Leonid Brezhnev, his long time flunky, verbally attacked his boss in tones that left no doubt in Khrushchev's mind that this was his last day on the job. Khrushchev exits in an unexpectedly obliging way, an exit which shocks the reader since it would have been unimaginable for Stalin to have been similarly replaced. It is this unceremonius exit of Nikita Sergeivich Khrushchev that stamps him as a man full of a myriad of contradictions. Taubman details NSK's early life as a man who used his grubby fingers to climb the slippery pole of industrial communist leadership in Ukraine in the early 1920s. NSK is seen as an uneducated worker who both reveres and fears the mystery that a university degree provides. For the remainder of his life, Taubman portrays a NSK who is in constant internal turmoil with how to deal with degreed types who know more than he does but must take their marching orders from one who all too often has to offer more bluster than reason.

When Stalin began to solidify his hold on Russia with innumerable purges and executions in the mid 1930s, he could not do so alone. Stalin relied on NSK to sign the necessary execution orders, with the result that NSK's hands were forever stained with the very blood of those who, decades later, he would have to somehow explain away without implicating himself. Taubman does not allow NSK to get off the hook lightly, as NSK himself admits that he did what he did because he had no real choice. While many of NSK's communist party friends were getting their heads lopped off, he kept his. He knew that the reason most likely had little to do with his strong party convictions. Rather, with his buffoonish aspect, he was less of a threat than say, Nikolai Ezhov, who as Stalin's chief KGB executioner, was the first to go in a long line of close comrades. Taubman shows NSK as a dedicated party loyalist who overcame astounding odds to succeed Stalin as First Secretary after Stalin's death in 1953.

Taubman shines as he shows how the very qualities that allowed him to survive the purges of the 30s were the same ones that spelled his ouster in 1964. NSK was tempermental, toadying, bullying, blustering, and a host of other adjectives that neither Stalin nor Brezhnev were. What marks NSK as unique in the Soviet pantheon was not merely that he was a transition figure between the suppressive brutality of Stalin and a similar brutishness of Brezhnev and his successors, but rather it is arguable that the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991 was more a result of NSK's liberalization policies than a similar liberalizing under Mikhail Gorbachev. On that day in 1964, when NSK was stripped of power, Taubman delineates the inevitability of the rise and fall of a man of mutually exclusive contradictions. KHRUSHCHEV: THE MAN AND HIS ERA is a readable and scholarly biography that clearly points the way to a country that even now has a leader who has to grapple with a failed history and an uncertain future.

Rating:
Summary: An Informative and Readable Biography
Review: Not including the notes this is a 651 page biography on the former Russian leader. I was somewhat intimidated by the size of the book, but since my knowledge of the man is limited to what I remember of him during the 1950's and early '60's I decided to give the book a try. I was plesantly surprised to find the book to be very readable and interesting. Khrushchev comes across as a man from humble origins with a very limited education. Perhaps this helps to explain his bluster and bravado in dealing with other individuals to cover up his insecurities. He denounced Stalin following the dictator's death in 1953 even though Khrushchev himself was responsible along with others for the death of numerous individuals during the Soviet purges. I found paranoia to reign supreme among Khrushchev and other party leaders as they back-stabbed one another due to envy and fear. With the election of John Kennedy to the United States presidency in 1960 Khrushchev resorted to his usual attempt to browbeat another, and tried to take advantage of Kennedy's inexperience by smuggling missles into Cuba. Kennedy stood up to the Russian leader's bluster, and Khrushchev backed down. While Khrushchev claimed victory back home, in reality, others in Russia knew better. Russia's bullying tactics had failed. Cuban dictator Fidel Castro had harsh words for Khrushchev for not standing up to the United States. Khrushchev's behavior could be gross and embarrassing to others in social situations in addition to those well-known tactics he engaged in at the United Nations. After being forced out of office in 1964 Khrushchev didn't adapt well to retirement. His friends, if he had any among party leaders, didn't have anything to do with him. He did some reading and fishing, but it was walking and gardening that he enjoyed the most. It must have been a shock to have too much to do to not having enough to do. The Russian leader died of heart failure in 1971 at the age of 78. I would suggest reading about 50-75 pages at a time. The book is long, but it is well rewarding.

Rating:
Summary: An Informative and Readable Biography
Review: Not including the notes this is a 651 page biography on the former Russian leader. I was somewhat intimidated by the size of the book, but since my knowledge of the man is limited to what I remember of him during the 1950's and early '60's I decided to give the book a try. I was plesantly surprised to find the book to be very readable and interesting. Khrushchev comes across as a man from humble origins with a very limited education. Perhaps this helps to explain his bluster and bravado in dealing with other individuals to cover up his insecurities. He denounced Stalin following the dictator's death in 1953 even though Khrushchev himself was responsible along with others for the death of numerous individuals during the Soviet purges. I found paranoia to reign supreme among Khrushchev and other party leaders as they back-stabbed one another due to envy and fear. With the election of John Kennedy to the United States presidency in 1960 Khrushchev resorted to his usual attempt to browbeat another, and tried to take advantage of Kennedy's inexperience by smuggling missles into Cuba. Kennedy stood up to the Russian leader's bluster, and Khrushchev backed down. While Khrushchev claimed victory back home, in reality, others in Russia knew better. Russia's bullying tactics had failed. Cuban dictator Fidel Castro had harsh words for Khrushchev for not standing up to the United States. Khrushchev's behavior could be gross and embarrassing to others in social situations in addition to those well-known tactics he engaged in at the United Nations. After being forced out of office in 1964 Khrushchev didn't adapt well to retirement. His friends, if he had any among party leaders, didn't have anything to do with him. He did some reading and fishing, but it was walking and gardening that he enjoyed the most. It must have been a shock to have too much to do to not having enough to do. The Russian leader died of heart failure in 1971 at the age of 78. I would suggest reading about 50-75 pages at a time. The book is long, but it is well rewarding.