Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
by William Taubman
Summary
William Taubman follows Nikita Khrushchev from a peasant childhood in the Russian village of Kalinovka, where his father worked in the Donbas coal mines, through years as a metal fitter and mine worker in industrial Ukraine before he joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and began the long climb through party ranks that patronage, first from Lazar Kaganovich and later from Stalin himself, made possible. Taubman does not soften Khrushchev's role in Stalin's terror: as party boss in Moscow and then Ukraine through the late 1930s, he approved thousands of arrests and pushed to meet execution quotas the Politburo itself had set, a record the book treats as inseparable from the reformer Khrushchev later became.
The biography follows Khrushchev through the Second World War as a political commissar at Stalingrad and Kiev, into the succession struggle that followed Stalin's 1953 death, and to the moment that defined his leadership, the February 1956 secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress denouncing Stalin's crimes, a speech intended for party ears alone that leaked worldwide and opened the partial thaw historians now name after him. Taubman traces the failures that followed just as closely: agricultural campaigns that did not work, the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when Khrushchev's decision to place missiles in Cuba brought the world to the edge of nuclear war before his own negotiated withdrawal ended it.
Drawing on Soviet archives that had only recently opened to Western historians and on interviews with Khrushchev's own family, Taubman builds a portrait of real contradiction, a man capable of both real brutality and a genuine, halting reform impulse that his own party colleagues eventually used to remove him from power in 1964. Reading the book means following a leader whose worst instincts and best instincts operated side by side, and it suits a reader who wants Soviet history explained through the psychology of the man running it rather than through policy alone.
Historical Context & Significance
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography over finalists James Gleick's Isaac Newton and Hayden Herrera's Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work. It had also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography for 2003, an unusual double for a work of Soviet history written by an American political scientist rather than a professional biographer.
Taubman, a longtime professor at Amherst College, drew on newly opened Soviet archives that earlier Western biographers of Khrushchev simply never had access to, and the book remains the standard English language life of a leader who denounced Stalin's terror while having helped carry it out himself. Taubman later applied the same method to a life of Mikhail Gorbachev, extending his study of Soviet leadership into the era that ended the country Khrushchev once ran.