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WWII Role: Political Commissar in the Red Army
WWII Role: Political Commissar in the Red Army
“An anxious concern about the fate of our country came as second nature to my three brothers, my sister, and myself.” (Charles de Gaulle)
Unlike Lenin and most other Soviet leaders, who generally had middle-class backgrounds, Khrushchev was the son of a coal miner; his grandfather had been a serf who served in the tsarist army. After a village education, Khrushchev went with his family to Yuzovka (later named Stalino, now Donetsk, Ukraine), a mining and industrial center in the Donets Basin, where he began work as a pipe fitter at age 15. Because of his factory employment, he was not conscripted in the tsarist army during World War I. Even before the Russian Revolution of 1917, he had become active in workers’ organizations, and in 1918—during the struggle between Reds, Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists for possession of Ukraine—he became a member of the Russian Communist Party.
Khrushchev and his first wife, Galina in 1916
Khrushchev and his second wife, Nina (center), flanked by U.S. President Eisenhower and his wife.
In January 1919 Khrushchev joined the Red Army and served as a junior political commissar. Soon after he was demobilized, his wife, Galina, died during a famine. In 1922 Khrushchev secured admission to a new Soviet workers’ school in Yuzovka, where he received a secondary education along with additional party instruction. He became a student political leader and was appointed secretary of the Communist Party Committee at the school. There he married his second wife, Nina Petrovna, a schoolteacher, in 1924.
In 1925 Khrushchev went into full-time party work as a regional party secretary and distinguished himself by his hard work and knowledge of mine and factory conditions. He later supervised the completion of the Moscow subway, for which he received the Order of Lenin in 1935. That year he became first secretary of the Moscow city and regional party organization—in effect, the governor of Moscow. Khrushchev was a zealous supporter of Stalin in those years and participated in the purges of party leadership. He was one of only three provincial secretaries who survived the mass executions of the Great Purge of the 1930s.
Khrushchev and Stalin in the 1930s.
In 1939 he was made a full member of the Politburo, the primary Soviet governing committee. During World War Two, Khrushchev worked as a political commissar in the army and continued to take on key roles in the party afterwards.
Stalin died in March 1953. Khrushchev became leader of the party shortly afterwards, but it took him several years to consolidate his position. In February 1956, he made a secret speech to the 20th Party Congress, denouncing Stalin. It caused a sensation in the Communist Party and in the West, although Khrushchev failed to mention his own role in the Stalinist terror.
Khrushchev and Stalin in 1936.
The speech initiated a campaign of 'de-Stalinisation'. Khrushchev also attempted to improve Soviet living standards and allow greater freedom in cultural and intellectual life. In the mid-1950s, he launched his 'Virgin Lands' campaign to encourage farming on previously uncultivated land in the Kazakh Republic (Kazakhstan). He invested in the Soviet space programme, resulting in the 1957 flight of Sputnik I, the first spacecraft to orbit the earth.
In relations with the West, Khrushchev's period in office was marked by a series of crises - the shooting down of an American U2 spy-plane over the Soviet Union in 1960, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and, most significantly, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Despite this, Khrushchev also attempted to pursue a policy of co-existence with the West. This change in doctrine, together with Khrushchev's rejection of Stalinism, led to a split with Communist China in 1960.
Significantly, Khrushchev was not prepared to loosen the grip of the Soviet Union on its satellite states in Eastern Europe and, in 1956, an uprising in Hungary against Communist rule was brutally suppressed.
By 1964, Khrushchev hd alienated much of the Soviet elite and was forced to retire by opponents led by Leonid Brezhnev. Khrushchev died on 11 September 1971 in Moscow.
Khrushchev makes a fiery speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York City, 1960. He denounced U.S. spy plane flights and demanded an apology before the General Assembly.
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica and the BBC
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