Nikita Khrushchev

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was born April 15, 1894, in Kalinovka, Russian Empire. He rose through Communist Party ranks during the Stalin era, surviving the purges that killed most of his contemporaries in the party leadership. After Joseph Stalin's death in March 1953 he outmaneuvered rivals including Georgy Malenkov and Lavrentiy Beria to consolidate leadership of the Soviet Union. He died September 11, 1971, in Moscow, in relative obscurity following his removal from power.¹

De-Stalinization

In February 1956, Khrushchev delivered his "Secret Speech" to a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, denouncing Stalin's cult of personality, political murders, military failures, and deportations of entire peoples. The speech, leaked in its text to Western intelligence services within weeks, represented the most explicit official repudiation of Stalinist practices the Soviet system had yet produced. It triggered political crises in the Eastern bloc, including the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, suppressed by Soviet tanks.

The de-Stalinization policy created tensions with hardline Communist leaders who had built their authority on Stalinist foundations, including East German leader Walter Ulbricht, who resisted its implications for the GDR throughout the late 1950s and 1960s.¹

The Berlin Wall

The most consequential single decision involving East Germany and West Germany during Khrushchev's leadership was his authorization of the Berlin Wall's construction. The mass emigration of East Germans through Berlin's open crossing points - approximately three million since 1949, with the flow accelerating to tens of thousands per month in summer 1961 - threatened the GDR's survival. Ulbricht had been pressing Khrushchev for permission to seal the border for years.

Khrushchev provided authorization in the summer of 1961. The Wall's construction on the night of August 12-13, 1961, sealed the border and ended the emigration crisis. Khrushchev's calculation was that the Wall, while a propaganda embarrassment, was preferable to the collapse of the GDR as a viable Soviet client state. The Wall also eliminated the Western point that free movement between East and West Berlin represented a tacit concession of the failure of Soviet-style governance.¹

Cuban Missile Crisis

In October 1962, Khrushchev's decision to deploy Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba - intended to compensate for American strategic nuclear superiority and to deter a U.S. invasion of Cuba following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 - produced the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War. The thirteen-day Cuban Missile Crisis (October 16-28, 1962) brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear conflict before a compromise was reached: the Soviet Union would remove its missiles from Cuba in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret undertaking to remove American Jupiter missiles from Turkey.¹

Removal

In October 1964, while Khrushchev was on vacation, the Politburo convened and voted to remove him from all positions. The coup was led by Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, who had grown increasingly concerned about Khrushchev's impulsive decision-making, his reorganization of the party apparatus, and the international humiliation of the Cuban Missile Crisis outcome. Unlike Stalin's victims, Khrushchev was allowed to retire quietly. He spent the remainder of his life under effective house arrest, dictating memoirs that were smuggled to the West and published.¹