The World: The Man Between Two Eras

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Wrestling Match. He was the first Soviet leader to travel widely throughout the world, and foreigners hardly knew what to make of him. His tantrum at a press conference after the collapse of the Paris summit seemed to reveal either a man whose emotions were temporarily out of control or perhaps an actor at the height of his powers. On one memorable occasion in Yugoslavia, he rolled in the dust of a rural roadside in an impromptu wrestling match with Georgy Malenkov. During his 1960 visit to the United Nations, he called ceremoniously on Fidel Castro at his hotel in Harlem, and conducted a flamboyant press conference from the balcony of the Soviet embassy on Park Avenue.

He often displayed a rough humor. Once, after spending a week viewing Indonesian temples, Khrushchev turned to Indonesian President Sukarno and asked: "Don't you have anything new around here?" When he described Berlin as the American testicles that he could squeeze whenever he chose, sensitive translators changed it to the American big toe that he could step on.

He could exude an earthy, appealing charm. On a Scandinavian tour, after what journalists suspected was a spat between Khrushchev and his wife Nina, the Soviet Premier asked the mayor of a Danish village if he performed marriage ceremonies. "Yes," said the mayor. "Well," said Khrushchev, "how does the ceremony go?" "You mean," said His Honor, "that you want me to read it now?" "Yes," said Khrushchev, and then, taking his wife's hand, he exchanged vows with her. Touched, Nina forgot that she was cross, and when the mayor intoned, "Do you take this man . . ." she lowered her eyes and said, "Da."

Lottery Ticket. Until the very moment of his fall, Nikita Khrushchev was noted for similarly compelling powers of persuasion—and political survival. The son of a peasant farmer in the Ukraine, he worked as a shepherd, steam fitter and coal miner. In 1918 he joined the Red Army, quickly becoming a political commissar. As a delegate to the 14th Party Congress in 1925, he skipped breakfast every morning so he could get a front seat near Stalin.

By 1934, after studying a few years at Moscow's industrial academy and rising steadily in the party hierarchy, Khrushchev became party leader of Moscow. He survived the party purges of the 1930s, he believed, because Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva, was impressed by him and recommended him to her husband. "I've often asked myself, how was I spared?" Khrushchev later said. "I think part of the answer is that Nadya's reports helped determine Stalin's attitude toward me. I call it my lucky lottery ticket. Right up to the last day of his life, he liked me."