Nikita Khrushchev, Part 1
-Jason

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Nikita Khrushchev was Premier of the Soviet Union following the resignation of Georgy Malenkov, who held the position for just over a year immediately after the death of Joseph Stalin.  Khrushchev inherited a Soviet Union still reeling from the devastation of both World War II and Stalin’s brutal regime.  He sought to bring his nation and political ideology into the post-war world as a modern power.  His early personal and political life did not make it seem that Khrushchev would be leader of one of the world’s two Superpowers.

Khrushchev was the son of poor Russian peasants born in Kalinkov, near the Russian-Ukrainian border, on 15 April 1894.  While he lacked much formal education, Khrushchev made a living early in his life as a skilled tradesman.  Due to this status, Khrushchev was not drafted when World War I broke out in August 1914.  Rather he was in Ukraine for most of the Great War doing metalwork which supported mining operations. 

His life was irrevocably changed by  the Russian Revolution in 1917.  A temporary provisional government was established in St. Petersburg which too was overthrown in 1918 by the Bolsheviks and the Russian Civil War erupted.  Khrushchev joined the Bolshevik Party later that year: it has been argued this was because he felt closer to the Mensheviks, another communist party who prioritized economic progress, whereas the Bolsheviks sought political power.  Because of the disorder involved with so many political groups, Khrushchev stated he waited to see which would be the strongest.

The end of World War I did not end conflict in the former Russian Empire, rather the Russian Civil War raged on until 1923.  Khrushchev was appointed as a political commissar in Ukraine.  His duties were not so much concerned with workers’ activities; he was to help indoctrinate new recruits with the ideals of Bolshevism and help conduct military operations.  With the end of the Russian Civil War, Khrushchev was a low-ranking member of the Bolshevik Party and remained stationed in Ukraine.  

His career was fast-tracked after he became the protégé of Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s key enforcers.  Kaganovich was placed as the Party head for Ukraine by Stalin in 1925.  Between 1927 and 1928, Khrushchev was promoted to oversee first Kharkov and then Kiev before following Kaganovich to Moscow in 1929.  Khrushchev enrolled in the Stalin Industrial Academy to further his education while at the capital: he never finished his studies, but his career certainly blossomed.  By 1932, Khrushchev was the Party leader for the city and became a member of the Party’s Central Committee. 

Stalin began his Great Purges in 1924,decimating the leadership of the Party and Soviet military.  Khrushchev took an active part in the Purges that centered around Moscow: 35 top officials and 136 party secretaries for the surrounding cities were murdered.  He also understood that he was not immune to the threat of execution and so signed the authorization for the arrest of his friends and colleagues.  Khrushchev narrowly avoided the same fate by confessing to Stalin during 1937 that he had briefly considered following Leon Trotsky’s communist ideology in 1923: he survived after talking about this to the Central Community.  This in turn led to him becoming a full member of the Politburo in March 1939.

The outbreak of World War II further altered the course of Khrushchev’s life.  When the Soviet Union occupied the eastern half of Poland beginning in September 1939, Khrushchev was placed in charge of incorporating the new territory into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.  The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany operated together under a non-aggression pact until Hitler broke the treaty in June 1941.  

The German invasion of the Soviet Union, code-named Operation Barbarossa, helped propel Khrushchev higher in the Soviet leadership.  German and Romanian forces penetrated deep into Ukraine by the fall of 1941 and were poised for further advances as the spring of 1942 dawned.  Khrushchev had been part of the Soviet command structure fighting in the south since Axis forces had attacked.  

A failed counterattack saw Soviet forces pushed further east until they reached the city of Stalingrad in August 1942.  The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the major turning points of World War II: the fighting lasted between August 1942 and January 1943.  During this campaign, the Soviets pulled the overstretched Germans into a trap and cut them off.  

The German Sixth Army became embroiled in bitter urban warfare while their flanks were held by weaker Hungarian, Italian, and Romanian units.  The Soviets shifted massive numbers of divisions along the flanks as the German forces became separated from their allied units.  Feeling confident by November 1942 that the Germans were fully committed, the Soviets launched their encircling maneuver: Operation Uranus.  Hitler refused to allow his battered troops to withdraw from the city and by February 1943, they surrendered to the Red Army.

Most of Ukraine had been occupied by the Germans until their expulsion in late 1943.  Khrushchev was placed in charge of the devastated region and began to assess the damage.  He hoped that this process would be not interfered with by Moscow since the war was still raging, however, the newly liberated Ukrainians would face more of Stalin’s wrath.  Stalin had previously starved millions of Ukrainians to death during the forced collectivization of their farms in the mid-1930s.  Now NKVD units, the dreaded Soviet secret police, flooded into Ukraine and began deporting the people they deemed as enemies of the state.  Ethnic Ukrainians were deported to Kazakhstan and ethnic Russians were settled in their place.  Khrushchev believed that Stalin’s forced population exchanges crippled the ability for a quicker recovery of Ukraine.  An estimated one in six Ukrainians had been killed between 1941 and 1945.  Even those who managed to survive had inadequate housing and food for years to come.

The expulsion of the Germans from Ukraine did not end the bitter fighting in the region.  The Ukrainian Insurgent Army sought to push the returning Soviets out of the area and a further three years of fighting took place.  This encouraged Stalin’s brutal treatment of the Ukrainians; rather than incorporate the resistance groups into the Soviet sphere, Stalin sought to crush them.  Khrushchev spent from 1944 – 1947 trying to save the flagging region.  Stalin viewed his efforts to subjugate the Ukrainians as too lax and he briefly replaced Khrushchev with Lazar Kaganovich.

We’ll cover the rest of his life in a later episode