Rating: 
Summary: It deserves the Pulitzer it recently won.
Review: 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.
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Summary: ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS ON THE COLD WAR !!!
Review: Prof.Taubman has enlightened us with his book on one of the greatest dictators of the Cold War.This is undoubtedly going to be the best reference book on the topic.Though Prof.Taubman also shows us that Khrushchev was also a family man ,I conclude that Khrushchev got into the clothes of a sheep but was actually the big bad wolf.
This book is full with funny anecdotes and episodes -which brings the reader to see that its author has also the rare gift of an academic,which is:to tell an interesting story as if it were a thriller.
Bravo,Mr. Taubman!
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Summary: Informative and factual...the difinitive work on Khrushchev
Review: Professor Taubman has written the difinitive work on Khrushchev for years to come. From his work as a child in the Ukraine to his death in 1971, Khrushchev has been given his due credit in this book. Taubman has done well including every important event and decision throughout Khrushchev's life. His work in the Ukraine as party boss and then as political commissar for the Red Army, his consolidation of power and the destalinization campaign that many will remember him by are all here. As a student of Soviet history, I can say that Taubman's book is a great resource to anyone, no matter what level of knowledge on the subject.
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Summary: Stalinist Henchman, Soviet Reformer: The Khrushchev Enigma
Review: Professor Taubman's study of Nikita Khrushchev exhaustively traces the life of the Soviet Premier. Indeed, the author carefully details the complex arc of Khrushchev's life. We see all the phases explored in a literate and exhaustive manner. The professor shows the reader Khrushchev as he moves through a number of distinct stages that, like some Shakespearean hero (or anti-hero), formed and destroyed him: traditional Russian peasant beginnings; immersion in the nascent Bolshevik movement; rapid rise through the local and central Party hierarchy; years as a loyal Stalinist; the grab for power; paradoxical anti-Stalinist reformer and power-hungry ruler enraged by any disagreement; the fall from power; isolation and political impotence. Professor Taubman spares no effort to capture the intricacies or recreate the circumstances of Khrushchev's life. He conducted a multitude of interviews, including with Khruschev's son Sergei, other family members and former CPSU party officials. He even consulted the birth register from the church in the Soviet leader's hometown (Kalinovka) to determine his date of birth. In addition, the professor places Khruschev's own extensive memoirs in a full and proper context. Ultimately, the reader sees a man at once insecure yet driven for power--the Soviet answer to "the man in the grey flannel suit", moving up the "Party" ladder, so to speak. Adherent to the romantic ideals of Bolshevism, Khrushchev nonetheless went along with Stalin's bloodlust and participated in the purges (although some evidence is presented as to his efforts to save select lives). The author evinces the complex nuances of Khrushchev, who became enraged when questioned on his role in the Stalinist inner circle and denounced his one-time "vohzd" in his famous 1956 secret speech. He also conveys Khruschev the reformer's intolerance for criticism of his policies, the same intolerance that heavily contributed to his downfall in 1964. We also see the Khruschev contradiction in foreign policy. The man who wanted detente also tried to bully Western leaders whenever possible and caused (and lost) the Cuban missile crisis. Professor Taubman clearly documents how Khruschev alone, and against the advice of his advisors and the wishes of Fidel Castro, sent missiles to Cuba, and then had to back down in humiliation. It is near impossible to do justice to this work and its analysis of the man who embodied Churchill's famous saying about the Russian enigma. The book is as complex as the man it describes so meticulously, and with such fairness and balance. Read it, digest it, reflect upon it and make your own decision: Was Khruschev one more violent Russian leader? Was he a survivor of a barbaric system who articulated humane and just impulses once he came to power? Was he both? Was he more? Just remember, as Professor Taubman obviously does, Russia is not the United States. A "reformer" within the context of a Tsar- and Stalin-ridden land cannot be a Jeffersonian.
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Summary: Alienation, a stranger to oneself
Review: Quite the fool, Khrushchev is a survivor thus,a Stalin favorite, and finally his nemesis. This is a fascinating political chronicle of a world through the prism of the contradictory and devious Khrushchev and also an unwitting depiction of the extreme alienation of repressed conscience in self-deception of the actors of the Stalin tragedy. Although he maintained a remarkable degree of common sense throughout, enough to 'come to' and initiate the exodus from the catastrophe, the man at the end never quite had the anagnorisis or insight into what had befallen him. We should not do what he rivals did, which is to underestimate him, always the peasant as party hack. At the end, from the great Kremlin speech to the approval of Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovitch, we have a telling psychological portrait of a ruined being, yet a long distance runner cunning enough in his cunning to lead his world a major way toward the light at the end of the tunnel.
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Summary: Temperamentally Unsuited to Lead a Great Nation
Review: 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.
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Summary: Perhaps a wonderful book for professors, but not for the avg
Review: Taubman's work goes into great detail about the life and times of Khrushchev, however Taubman is writing to his fellow professors and not to the general public, which detracts from the work's value to the average reader. The text is drawn out and quite boring with little life or enthusiasm to add to Khrushchev's incredible times and remarkable achievements in climbing to the top of the soviet hierarchy while manipulating all those around him who thought him to be an ignorant peasant.
After attempting to complete this book several times yet failing in each attempt, I attributed my inability to make it past 20 pages without falling asleep to my long hours at work. However, after picking up Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex and devouring it in short order, I determined what was wrong. Taubman is so caught up in the exact details, and writes in a style that adds zero life to the text that one can not help but be bored unless you are preparing for a final or history class and are assigned the reading. This is the type of history text that most American's hate, if you can make it through this than you are a better reader than I, as well as the general public from what I can determine. I am not trying to take away from the work itself, for those of you who are inclined to read from this perspective and can, please do so. But I believe that Joseph Ellis summed the problem up after writing "Founding Brothers"; the issue with most history texts is that the authors are writing to each other and not the general public. If one can write to both, maintaining the facts, yet telling a compelling story about the times, and the lives of the principal characters that also maintains interest for the casual reader of history and the professor than why not do so.
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Summary: The Personal and the Political
Review: Things I didn't know until I read William Taubman's superb biography of Nikita Khrushchev: Chairman Mao was outraged at the presumptuous bullying of the upstart Soviets, and held K in contempt as a hick. One day without warning (during a conference in China), Mao suggested that he and K continue their consultation in the swimming pool. Mao, who was a powerful swimmer, plunged in from the deep end and continued lecturing K between strokes. K who could barely swim paddled around the shallow end until someone threw him a float (a rubber ducky?). K floated around in the ducky for a while as Mao continued to lecture. Finally K got out and sat on the edge of the pool, so at least Mao had to look up while he was talking. During Richard Nixon's memorable 1959 visit, K took Nixon for a boat ride on the Moskva River. He stopped to visit picnickers and would say: yo, comrade! Are you imprisoned? Are you enslaved? (I was on the Moskva River last summer - the picnickers are still there) K made the trip in an embroidered Ukrainian folk shirt. Nixon, true to form, wore his blue business suit. At the Ambassador Hotel in LA in 1960, K fell into an improvised harangue, expressing his resentment at not being permitted to go to Disneyland. Sitting at the table with K's wife, Nina Petrovna, Frank Sinatra leaned over to David Niven and said - screw the cops, tell the old lady we'll take him ourselves. And best of all (I can't put my finger on it; I quote from memory)-- At a public appearance In London in (1956?) someone booed K. He had never heard a boo before. He asked his handler - what is this "ooh ooh" sound? The handler explained. K was fascinated. For the rest of the day, he went around muttering "Boo! Boo!" These anecdotes only begin to suggest the richness of this wonderful biography, which accomplishes he formidable achievement of making K seem at once sympathetic and appalling. Sympathetic in that he was in so many ways a recognizable human being: energetic, warm-hearted, devoted to his (immediate?) family. He was also (and this is no small point) a true believer. We tend to think of the last generation of Soviet leaders as self-serving bureaucratic infighters who held onto power because they held onto power. But Taubman leaves you in no doubt that K thought he was building a better world. Sympathetic, yes, but appalling: K was at the end of the day an unsophisticated peasant, crass and violent and almost fatally out of his depth as a political leader. Time and again he launched into schemes that he hadn't thought through - or hadn't the capacity to think through - inflicting untold suffering on innocent bystanders and at least once (the Cuban Missile Crisis) bringing us all to the edge of disaster (on this last, Allison & Zelikow, Essence of Decision, is a great companion piece). Taubman's account is longish, and from time to time he seems to dawdle over stories that may not be central to his plot. He has a big story to tell, and his can hardly be the last word. But as a convincing portrait, setting the personal in the midst of the political, Taubman's biography of K can hardly be bettered.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent biography of an interesting personality
Review: This book tells the story of Nikita Khrushchev's rise in the world of Communist Russia and paints a picture of a man dedicated to the principles that Stalin espoused. By his willingness to not only condone but help bring about the liquidation of whomever Stalin considered an enemy, the ruthless side of his personality is shown.
But that is only part of the story. He was also a man capable of communicating with fellow party workers and peasants, and by his denouncing of Stalin after Stalin's death in 1953, laid the cornerstone of peristroika that led to the crumbling of the Soviet empire in the 1980's.
By overcoming a minimal education by hard work and the force of his personality, he rose to be the leader of the Soviet Union. This is an excellent book about an interesting personality of history. Recommended.
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Summary: Insightful
Review: This is an excellent biography of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Poorly educated but possessed of considerable native intelligence, energetic but erratic, and gifted with some charisma, Khrushchev is one of the most ambigous figures of the 20th century. The son of a poor peasant and unskilled laborer, the ambitious Khrushchev became a skilled metalworker and labor activist who joined the Communist party in the 1920s. He aspired originally to become an engineer or factory manager. In the US, Khrushchev might well have pushed himself into the middle class, in Western Europe, he might have become a prominent labor union official. In the nascent Soviet Union, Khrushchev cast his lot with the party. He was not, however, a simple careerist. There is no doubt that Khrushchev truly believed in the communist ideal, or more accurately, a rather simplified version of that ideal.
Khrushchev became a prominent member of Stalin's court, and after Stalin's death, his eventual successor. His survival and succession testify to his mastery of the brutal politics of the Stalinist state. As a party activist and Stalin's henchman, Khruschev was complicit in some of the great crimes of the Stalinist state. His best known and greatest accomplishment, however, was his attack on Stalin and the machinery of the Stalinist state. In the so-called secret speech in which in denounced Stalin, his regime's dissolution of the Gulag, and the rehabilitation of many of Stalin's victims, Khrushchev dealt Stalinism a mortal blow. He probably also and unintentionally fatally undermined the legitimacy of the whole Soviet enterprise. It is important to keep these positive achievements in perspective. All of Stalin's successors and potential successors realized that Stalin's policies were unsupportable. The Gulag was shrinking before Khrushchev attained primacy. In the immediate period after Stalin's death, the most radical proposals for reform came from the sinister Lavrenti Beria, the last great head of the NKVD. What distinguished Khrushchev was his vociferous and public attack on Stalin, something that is unlikely to have come from his rivals for Stalin's throne. Khrushchev became a crucial example for the next generation of Soviet reformers, that of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Taubman shows Khrushchev's limitations very well. He was a prisoner of relatively simple ideological constructs and his experience as one of Stalin's courtiers prepared him poorly for leadership. While his anti-Stalinism transformed Soviet life, his economic policies were sterile and his foreign policy largely unsuccessful. He wanted very much to reduce the perceived isolation of the Soviet Union and to reduce tensions with the Western powers. His clumsy and inconsistent use of bluster served him poorly. He reduced the size of the Soviet military establishment markedly (one of the reasons for his fall from power) but his adventurism in Cuba produced the most dangerous episode of the Cold War.
Implicit in Taubman's narrative is the fact Khrushchev was a product of the Stalinist system. Khrushchev in many ways was a typical Soviet leader of his generation; poorly educated, schooled by the experience of the Civil War and Stalin's attempts to impose revolution from above, and promoted by a ruthless autocrat who was hardly interested in independent thinking. Taubman's depiction of Khrushchev's career under Stalin is a superb portrait of how the government in the Soviet Union worked during Stalin's long reign. Taubman's careful analysis of Khrushchev's performance as Soviet leader is an equally good portrayal of decision making by the Soviet leadership during the 1950s and early 1960s.
This well written book is the product of years of work. Based on published Russian and Western literature, extensive archival research, and many hours of interviews with witnesses to these events. Special mention should be made of several members of Khrushchev's immediate family, who appear to have been very generous with their time in sharing recollections with Taubman.
It is impossible to render a simple judgement about Khrushchev. Khrushchev was one of Stalin's henchmen, and there can be few greater indictments of a human being. At his funeral, however, ordinary Soviet citizens spoke of how he had dismantled the Gulag and rehabilitated Stalin's victims, and no Soviet leader ever received a greater commendation.
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