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A magisterial, definitive and compelling assessment of one of the giants of twentieth-century history: former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. William Taubman's brilliant biography of one of the key figures of the Soviet Union is a study in contrasts -- how the boy from a peasant background rose to the heights of power; how a single-minded, ambitious political player survived twenty years under Stalin; how he opened up to the West after Stalin's death and yet brought the world close to oblivion in the Cuban Missile Crisis. What emerges is a fascinating picture of a man constantly torn between benevolence and malevolence -- a man who made himself cultured and yet who could never really escape his image as a bullying country bumpkin (most famously demonstrated by his interruption of Macmillan's speech to the UN in 1960 by banging his shoe on the table -- the urbane Macmillan responded, 'Mr President, perhaps we could have a translation, I could not quite follow'). William Taubman has previously edited collections of Nikita Khrushchev's speeches and reminiscences and is completely immersed in this subject -- his biography is likely to remain the standard work for years to come.
- Sales Rank: #14447261 in Books
- Brand: Example Product Brand
- Published on: 2003-04-07
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- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 896 pages
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From Publishers Weekly
Amherst College political science professor Taubman's thorough and nuanced account is the first full-length American biography of Khrushchev-and will likely be the definitive one for a long time. Russians, Taubman explains, are still divided by Khrushchev's legacy, largely because of the great contradiction at the heart of his career: he worked closely with Stalin for nearly 20 years, approved thousands of arrests and executions, and continued to idolize the dictator until the latter's death. Yet it was Khrushchev who publicly revealed the enormity of Stalin's crimes, denounced him, and introduced reforms that, Taubman argues, "allowed a nascent civil society to take shape"-eventually making way for perestroika. Taubman untangles the fascinating layers of deception and self-deception in Khrushchev's own memoir, weighing just how much the leader was likely to have known about the purges and his own culpability in them. He also shows that shadows of Stalinism lingered through Khrushchev's 11 years in power: his fourth-grade education left him both awed and threatened by the Russian intelligentsia, which he persecuted; intending to de-escalate the Cold War, the mercurial, blustering first secretary ended up provoking dangerous standoffs with the U.S. The bumbling, equivocal speeches quoted here make Khrushchev seem a rank amateur in international affairs-or, as Taubman politely puts it, he had trouble "thinking things through." Working closely with Khrushchev's children, and interviewing his surviving top-level Central Committee colleagues and aides, Taubman has pieced together a remarkably detailed chronicle, complete with riveting scenes of Kremlin intrigue and acute psychological analysis that further illuminates some of the nightmarish episodes of Soviet history. 32 pages of photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
There has been a surprising paucity of information produced about the baby boomers' biggest bogeyman. During the 1960s, Khrushchev's bluster and missile rattling jangled the nerves of a generation of Americans fearing a nuclear holocaust. Khrushchev's antics and methods provided the basis for Soviet behavior for the next 20 years and sowed the seeds of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Taubman (political science, Amherst Coll.; Stalin's America Policy, Moscow Spring) has produced a massive biography that is both psychologically and politically revealing. According to Taubman, Khrushchev's rise in the Bolshevik party and patronage by Stalin can be partially laid to Stalin's diminutive stature. Though only 5'6", he still towered comfortably over Khrushchev at 5'1". Drawing on newly opened archives, Taubman threads together all the unanswered questions that Americans have, e.g., why did Khrushchev de-Stalinize Russia, and was Khrushchev himself implicated in Stalin's terrors? The shoe-banging incident, the Berlin Wall, Sputnik, and the Cuban Missile Crisis are all woven together with the accuracy of an academic and the style of a writer. Recommended for all public, academic, and special libraries.
Harry Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. Syst., Iola
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Taubman masterfully replicates in his biography of Krushchev the career contrasts expressed by his grave marker--a bust framed half by black stone, half by white. Up to his elbows in blood, Khrushchev will nevertheless go down in history as the denouncer of Stalin. He partially denounced Stalin in the celebrated "secret speech" of 1956, and did so as a maneuver in a power struggle with inveterate Stalinists; however, his revulsion for Stalin's rule was genuine. The paradox of Khrushchev's complicity in the repression and his natural humanity induces Taubman to treat his life as a mirror of the entire Soviet experience. The author observes that the young Khrushchev might have been a successful factory manager but for the revolution. After initial hesitation, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and in a dozen years ascended to Stalin's inner circle, enforcing the boss' edicts in various posts. Ambition, guilt, a true belief in Communism, and self-doubt churned within him, and the effects of his exuberant, tension-filled character, on the cold war and on Soviet domestic affairs up to his overthrow in 1964, close out Taubman's outstandingly composed work, assuredly the reference point for future writings on Khrushchev. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Great book. Really gave you a sense of the ...
By Common Sense
Great book. Really gave you a sense of the man and his insecurities that drove him to do what he did. Also during periods like the Cuban Missile crisis, it jumps back and forth between what the White House and the Kremlin were thinking. That era was just a little before my time, but I do remember hiding under our desks in case of nuclear attack and I did have a neighbor who had a bomb shelter so I did grow up hearing about the threat.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Ivan the fool, but not only
By Gene Zafrin
"Khrushchev: the Man and His Era" makes for a remarkably smooth reading. Taubman's even and unadorned language serves as a welcome backdrop for the plot full of nuance, intrigue and deeply hidden motives. The image of Khrushchev the mercurial and evil oaf has persisted for decades. This book, along with some recent research, took on the task of tilting the scale towards the commander's complexity and some goodness of heart.
The challenge is formidable. In Stalin's times, Khrushchev did send thousands to death on his own initiative. His domestic agricultural and political "miracle" solutions were invariably a flop. His international stance, with frequent outbursts in front of heads of state and numerous threats detailing how many Soviet nuclear heads it would take to obliterate such and such a country, were a disgrace. His inability to foresee consequences of his actions led to increased international tensions, including the Hungarian and Cuban crises.
Khrushchev's biggest counterweight to that was his speech on the 20th Party Congress, in which he denounced Stalin. It gave a tremendous impetus to the anti-Stalinist movement across the world and in the Soviet Union itself. Yet, none other than Beria was the first revisionist of Stalin's crimes. On the day of Stalin's funeral he released Molotov's wife from the camp. Less than a week later he ordered a review of all falsified cases, including the doctors' plot. A month after Stalin's death he announced that the doctors' plot was fabricated. Khrushchev's speech to the 20th Party Congress happened almost a year later. In addition, the speech clearly distanced all the members of the Party Central Committee from Stalin and was, if in part, a preventive strike, lest someone else point at the top Party apparatchicks as sharing the blame.
Khrushchev's most memorable domestic policies comprised the issuance of internal passports to the peasants, which made it easier for them to move around within the country, and doubling the speed of residential construction, which gave over 100 mln people a separate apartment. Despite serious flaws of these reforms (speed in housing construction was achieved at the expense of quality, and the internal passport, if a welcome reprieve for peasants, was originally designed as an instrument of control, rather than freedom), they had people's quality of life as the primary concern.
A boor and a bungler, Khrushchev nevertheless appears genuinely interested in improving the lot of the people in his country. Khrushchev's most disarming quality was speaking from the heart, as in his emotional denouncing of Stalin in a private conversation with a long-time friend (in 1938 no less, at the height of the Great Terror), for which he knew he was risking his liberty and possibly his life. The humane aspect of some of his reforms and the empathy that he often projected in personal communication may be his principal redeeming qualities.
His relationship with intelligentsia was spotty (personally helped Solzhenitsyn, personally attacked Pasternak). And yet, by allowing some liberal art and lifting up the internal and external iron curtain, Khrushchev gave the Soviet people an unprecedented taste of freedom. The freedom was short-lived, but at no other time in the 70 years from the Bolshevik revolution to Gorbachev could a Soviet person openly criticize the Soviet system or the Soviet government.
Perhaps the most important positive legacy of Khrushchev is the notion of freedom of expression in the Soviet State and of the mere possibility of "changing the course" in a totalitarian state.
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Temperamentally Unsuited to Lead a Great Nation
By David A. Caplan
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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