MAN OF THE YEAR: Up From the Plenum

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Sent by Stalin to the Ukraine, Khrushchev skipped theories and philosophies, talked pigs and potatoes with peasants and workers. "Comrades!" he cried. "Socialism means first of all full stomachs, felt boots and sheepskin jackets." In those down-on-the-farm days, Khrushchev opposed building a rocket-research center near Dnepropetrovsk. "Rockets are the weapons of imperialist aggressors, not the weapons of the peace-loving U.S.S.R.," he told a visiting Kremlin bureaucrat.

Fish in Water. Nikita Khrushchev was not a student of Marxist theory. As peasant and sometime miner, he did not finish elementary school, did not begin serious reading until he entered an adult training class at the age of 27. Unlike Malenkov or Molotov, doctrinaire intellectual theoreticians, Khrushchev learned his Communism not out of a book but by contact. Alone among Stalin's lieutenants, he lived and spoke as a man who moves in Communism as a fish in water, oblivious of dialectical debate or moral pang. Drunk or sober, he never seemed to worry about what he said, who was listening, how it might diverge "from the current line. A man in motion, he had the air of a man who never looked nervously back over his shoulder in his life.

Khrushchev recognized what his rivals did not. By terror and personality, Stalin had built Russia into a technological and military power. But at Stalin's death, the technocrats were coming to political maturity. A man encouraged to think at his job could not be forbidden to think the moment he stepped outside the laboratory. The peasants, filled with new chauvinistic pride after Russia's armies had defeated Hitler, would be demanding butter and neckties. Uninterested in fomenting world revolution, they wanted a better life at home. Coldly and pragmatically, Khrushchev recognized that in post-Stalin Russia, terror on the Stalin scale would not produce results.

The Fable. Stalin's successors installed the potato politician in the tyrant's key job as First Party Secretary because they never supposed such a clodhopper could fill such shoes. But Khrushchev, as ruthless as any of Stalin's other minions (he killed 3,000 party men in the Ukraine during World War II), used the job to build a party machine in his own image, replaced so many regional and local secretaries that he came to the crucial 20th Party Congress in February 1956 with some 500 delegates in his pocket; the Central Committee that the delegates chose became the instrument with which he destroyed his rivals in 1957. In a burst of typical frankness, Khrushchev told Western reporters a fable: