Nikita Khrushchev (b. April 17 [April 5, old style], 1894, Kalinovka, Ukraine, Russian Empire--d. Sept. 11, 1971, Moscow), first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1953-64) and premier of the Soviet Union (1958-64). Unlike Lenin and many other Soviet leaders, who had generally middle-class backgrounds, Khrushchev was the son of a miner; his grandfather had been a serf who served in the tsarist army. After a village education, Khrushchev went with his family to Yuzovka (later named Stalino, now Donetsk), a mining and industrial centre in the Donets Basin, where he began work as a pipe fitter at the age of 15. Because of his factory employment, he was not conscripted in the tsarist army during World War I. Even before the Russian Revolution of 1917, he had become active in workers' organizations, and in 1918--during the struggle between Reds, Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists for possession of the Ukraine--he became a member of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). In January 1919 he joined the Red Army and served as a junior political commissar, ultimately in the campaigns against the Whites and invading Polish armies in 1920. Soon after he was demobilized his wife, Galina, died during a famine. In 1922 Khrushchev secured admission to a new Soviet worker's school in Yuzovka, where he received a secondary education along with additional party instruction. He became a student political leader and was appointed secretary of the Communist Party Committee at the school. There he married his second wife, Nina Petrovna, a schoolteacher, in 1924. In 1925 Khrushchev went into full-time party work, as party secretary of the Petrovsko-Mariinsk district of Yuzovka. He distinguished himself by his hard work and knowledge of mine and factory conditions. He soon came to the notice of Stalin's close associate, Lazar M. Kaganovich, secretary general of the Ukrainian Party Central Committee, who asked Khrushchev to accompany him as a nonvoting delegate to the 14th Party Congress in Moscow. For the next four years--in Yuzovka, then in Kharkov and Kiev--Khrushchev was active as a party organizer. In 1929 he received permission to go to Moscow to study metallurgy at the Stalin Industrial Academy. There he was appointed secretary of the academy's Party Committee. In 1931 he went back to full-time party work in Moscow. By 1933 he had become second secretary of the Moscow Regional Committee. During the early 1930s Khrushchev consolidated his hold on the Moscow party cadres. He supervised the completion of the Moscow subway, for which he received the Order of Lenin in 1935. That year he became first secretary of the Moscow party organization--in effect, the mayor of Moscow. In the preceding year, at the 17th Party Congress, he had been elected a full member of the 70-man Central Committee of the Soviet Party. Khrushchev was a zealous supporter of Stalin in those years and participated in the purges of party leadership. He was one of three provincial secretaries who survived the executions of the Yezhovshchina, a period that took its name from the head of the Soviet security forces. He became an alternate member of the ruling Presidium in 1935, a member of the Constitutional Committee in 1936, and a member of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Supreme Soviet in 1937. A year later Khrushchev was made a candidate member of the Central Committee's Politburo and sent to Kiev as first secretary of the Ukrainian party organization, and in the following year he was made a full member of the Politburo. In 1940, after Soviet forces had occupied eastern Poland, Khrushchev presided over the "integration" of this area into the Soviet Union. His principal objective was to liquidate both Polish and Ukrainian separatist movements, as well as to restore the Communist Party organization, which had been shattered in the purge. This work was disrupted by the German invasion in June 1941. Khrushchev's first wartime assignment was to evacuate as much of the Ukraine's industry as possible to the east. Thereafter, he was attached to the Soviet Army with the rank of lieutenant general; his principal task was to stimulate the resistance of the civilian population and maintain liaison with Stalin and other members of the Politburo. He was political adviser to Marshal Andrey I. Yeryomenko during the defense of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and to Lieut. Gen. Nikolay F. Vatutin during the huge tank battles at Kursk. After the liberation of the Ukraine in 1944, Khrushchev worked to restore the civil administration and to bring that devastated country back to a subsistence level. http://216.198.255.120/russianpart/rusredarfrcom.html
Khrushchev was probably the only man during Stalin´s dictatorship that tried to bring new ideas on developing USSR. Other men that tried were eliminated.
