Pugnacious and charming, single-minded and ambivalent, benevolent and malevolent, Nikita Khrushchev may be best remembered as the Soviet leader who banged his shoe on the table at the United Nations - an episode held to demonstrate his perceived lack of refinement, and one certainly exacerbated by the contrast of Harold Macmillan's characteristically urban response: "Mr President, perhaps we could have a translation, I could not quite follow."
But Khrushchev was in fact one of the most complex and important political figures of the twentieth century. The ruler of the Soviet Union during the first decade after Stalin's death, Khrushchev left his contradictory stamp on his country and the world. More than that, his life and career hold up a mirror to the Soviet age as a whole: revolution, civil war, famine, collectivisation, industrialisation, terror, world war, Cold War, Stalinism, post-Stalinism.
Complicit in terrible crimes, he managed to retain his humanity. His daring attempt to reform Communism - by denouncing Stalin and releasing and rehabilitating millions of his victims - prepared the ground for the system's eventual collapse. And his awkward efforts to ease the Cold War triggered its most dangerous crises, in Berlin and Cuba.
This is the first full and comprehensive biography of Khrushchev in the English language, and the first of any Soviet leader to reflect the full range of sources that have become available since the collapse of the USSR.
William Taubman, one of the foremost experts in this field, weaves together Khrushchev's personal triumphs and failures with those of his country. He draws on newly-opened archives in Russia and the Ukraine, visits to places where Khrushchev lived and worked, and extensive interviews with Khrushchev family members, friends, colleagues, subordinates, and the diplomats who jousted with him.
Taubman chronicles Khrushchev's life from his humble beginnings in a poor peasant village to his improbable rise into Stalin's inner circle, from his stunning, unexpected victory in the deadly struggle to succeed Stalin to the startling reversals of fortune that led to his sudden and ignominious ousting in 1964.
Combining a page-turning narrative with penetrating political and psychological analysis, this is the definitive work on its subject, and brims with the life and excitement of a man whose story holds the essence of his era.
