Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was the first overall leader of the Soviet Union to have risen entirely within the ranks of the organized party apparatus (see Communist Party of the Soviet Union), being of the generation after the original leaders who had organized the machinery of the state. Having fought, as a young man, with the Red Army in the Civil War that followed the Revolution, he rose rapidly in the party, serving as regional First Secretary in Moscow from 1936 and in Ukraine during and after the Second World War. As he managed not only to survive the Stalin purges, but even to be trusted by Stalin in the late 1940s to reorganize agricultural production, he must have been a very safe and orthodox apparatchik. His rise to overall command after Stalin’s death was delayed by the introduction of collective leadership, as a result of a fear of another period of Stalinism, though he had risen to hold one of the two most important posts, First Secretary of the party, within six months of Stalin’s death. Only in 1958, in the wake of a failed attempt to oust him, did he collect enough power to have himself appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers (premier and effectively head of state), finally removing rivals such as Nikolai Bulganin and Georgy Malenkov. His supremacy lasted for only six years, being himself ousted in 1964.
Khrushchev had, in part, come to power as an agricultural specialist, and tried to reorganize the party to give more freedom and influence to agricultural interests, so the continued failure of the agricultural sector was a personal failure. This was by no means his only reverse, however. He attempted a complicated balancing act in which investment demands, military as well as agricultural, were supported and an attempt to increase the consumer production side of industry, to win public support, was also made.
These mutually conflicting demands could not be satisfied, and he gradually lost the support of all the sectors that had helped put him in power. Nevertheless, it was almost certainly his foreign-policy failures that finally cost him his position. The most notorious of these was his entanglement of the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis, against the advice of the military, who held him responsible for their embarrassing inability to frighten the USA because he had failed to back them earlier in their demands for weapons development, and had, indeed, presided over the biggest reduction of Soviet military power by any leader until Gorbachev. At much the same time his intransigence towards Mao Zedong’s China brought fears of a Sino–Soviet war. On his removal the Soviet Union reverted, briefly, to a collective leadership, with Aleksei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev holding the posts of prime minister and First Secretary, respectively. Yet again the First Secretary triumphed, with Brezhnev rapidly becoming the sole ruler. The agricultural system was put back into the orthodox party model, consumer investment decreased, and a major arms programme started. Khrushchev had, however, presided over a slight liberalization of Soviet society, and had never attempted Stalinist tactics. However, tolerant though he may have been internally, he had fiercely crushed any moves towards liberalization in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland and in the draconian crushing of the 1956 Hungarian uprising.
This is the complete article, containing 547 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
