The World: The Man Between Two Eras

HE was a man of stupefying contrasts, an earthy and unschooled Ukrainian peasant who came to wield power undreamt of by the czars. He was a custodian of the nuclear peace, yet he frequently rattled the Soviet saber, once bellowing that Communism would "bury" America. He served the party and the government with an iron hand, and in the 1930s helped send thousands to slave labor camps. Despite that, he is remembered as the crucial transitional figure who led the Soviet Union from an evil era of Stalinist tyranny toward a more moderate form of Communism. Near the end of his life, in the controversial reminiscences that restored him to the center of the international stage, he observed of his country's stifling travel restrictions: "Why should we build a good life and then keep our borders bolted with seven locks?" For nine years he was one of the two most powerful men on earth. Yet when he is buried in Moscow this week, following his death of a heart attack at 77, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev will be laid to rest in Novodyevichy Cemetery. That is the burial spot for prominent Russians who are not important enough—or, as in Khrushchev's case, in sufficiently good repute—for a state funeral and interment in the hallowed Kremlin Wall.

Mixed Record. "In all his actions," observes British Sovietologist Robert Conquest, "one saw a limited but not hidebound mind, and with it a sort of peasant cunning. But in the end, he antagonized his subordinates without sufficiently terrorizing them, a fatal lapse." Khrushchev died in official disgrace, reduced by the Soviet monolith to an unperson. To Russia's masses, his performance was at best ambiguous. Heralded for relaxing the prison-camp atmosphere that prevailed under Stalin, he was also bitterly blamed for recurring failures in the economy and agriculture. To most Westerners, too, his record is mixed. A shrewd man who carefully preserved his peasant touch, an unabashed ham who pounded his shoe on a desk at the United Nations in 1960, he was the first Soviet ruler to admit a touch of humanism into Communism, and a leading proponent of peaceful coexistence between East and West. But he knew how to use power and often did so ruthlessly, as in his attacks on Boris Pasternak after the publication of Doctor Zhivago, and his brutal suppression of rebellious Hungary in 1956.

In his dealings with U.S. leaders, Khrushchev often behaved brusquely and temperamentally. He disliked Richard Nixon, particularly after his 1959 debate with the then Vice President in the U.S. "kitchen exhibit" in Moscow. He respected Dwight Eisenhower, but this did not prevent him from savagely attacking Ike and torpedoing the 1960 summit conference following the U-2 overflight. He thought John Kennedy a pushover when they met in Vienna in 1961—a miscalculation that led directly to the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the verge of nuclear war. Khrushchev proclaimed the confrontation a triumph because it ended in an assurance from Kennedy that the U.S. would not attempt to invade Cuba again, but he was forced to admit that many people thought he had "turned coward and backed down."