One event dominates Soviet dissident historian Medvedev's account
of Nikita Khrushchev's life: the former premier's denunciation of
Stalin's crimes and subsequent efforts to rehabilitate some of his
predecessor's victims. This, then, is a Khrushchev with relatively
clean hands. A true son of the working class, he owed his rise from
local labor militant to party official to good luck: during a
reaction against intellectuals in top leadership positions, he was
tapped for a position in the Ukrainian party organization. From
there he was brought to Moscow, where his background and hard work
brought him rewards. (Medvedev convincingly rebuts the K. story
that he was helped by Stalin's first wife.) In the 1930s,
Khrushchev administered Stalin's brutal collectivization from a
distance and, moving up the ladder, stayed as far as possible from
the fate of others. By 1938, he was one of the USSR's top ten and
installed in Kiev as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist
Party. The worst of the purges were over, but he was still in
charge when, after the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Soviet troops crossed
into the western Ukraine (then part of Poland) - precipitating the
deportation of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews to the eastern USSR. It
was then, too, that Khrushchev began to spend more time on
agricultural issues, which was critically important to him later.
Medvedev notes that Khrushchev repeatedly, and unavailingly, warned
Stalin of the impending German attack and the inadequacy of Soviet
defenses. (Neither the deportations nor the unheeded warnings were
mentioned in K.'s denunciation of Stalin.) Khrushchev's final leap
to power resulted from his determination to restore the political
importance of the party: when the troika emerged after Stalin's
death, he assumed the party leadership, and parlayed it to come out
on top. His 1956 denunciation of Stalin, says Medvedev, sowed the
seeds of his downfall eight years later - too many were implicated
in Stalin's crimes to feel completely comfortable. The later
failure of Khrushchev's "virgin lands" program, together with
unpopular administrative reforms, left the premier with no
constituents and his fall was relatively quiet. Medvedev's account
of his years in power is a whirlwind of foreign travel that sheds
almost no light on world events. But his straightforward, if
single-minded, chronicle of Khrushchev's rise is factually
informative and politically illuminating. (Kirkus Reviews)
Two prominent Soviet dissidents portray Khrushchev in power as a
shrewd, complex, decisive, and impetuous innovator, impatient to
remedy defects in the Soviet system but carried away by initial
successes.
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