The World: The Man Between Two Eras

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During World War II, Khrushchev served as the Politburo's military representative in the Ukraine. He remained there until 1949, when he was brought back from the Ukraine to become head of the Moscow party organization and later overlord of agriculture. Three months after Stalin's death, Khrushchev—with the aid of eleven generals and marshals—arranged the arrest of Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's hated secret-police chief; Beria was executed six months later. Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Communist Party in September 1953, but that powerful post was not enough. Sixteen months later, he ousted Malenkov, the Premier and Stalin's successor, and replaced him with his own puppet, Nikolai Bulganin. Finally, in March 1958, he assumed the premiership himself, acquiring undisputed control.

History will probably best remember Nikita Khrushchev for his 1956 speech before the 20th Party Congress in which he denounced the crimes of Joseph Stalin. His motives for delivering the speech were decidedly mixed. He was by no means a crusader for personal liberties, but he was sufficiently disenchanted with the old dictator's legacy of fear and repression to repudiate Stalin in 20,000 graphic words. The speech was a personal triumph and helped Khrushchev consolidate his power. But it also loosed forces that inexorably led to the fragmentation of the Communist world.

The immediate effect was a wave of destalinization that shook Eastern Europe and resulted in the Poznan riots in Poland and the Hungarian uprising. It set the stage for Czechoslovakia's experiment in "Communism with a human face"—which was also ended by Soviet intervention. By trying to loosen the bureaucratic and ideological straitjacket that Stalinism had wrapped around the entire Communist world, Khrushchev helped to widen the Sino-Soviet split. The Chinese were—and remain—rigid dogmatists who are unlikely to forgive him even in death for his "revisionist" heresy. When French Maoist Regis Bergeron heard that Khrushchev had died, for example, he exulted: "Good! Another revisionist less. Unfortunately, Khrushchevism does not die with him." A large number of Nikita Khrushchev's experiments ended in failure. His attempts to grant greater intellectual freedom to his countrymen were largely nullified by his subsequent actions—partly because he was under pressure from his own hard-liners not to go too far and partly because he preferred order to ideas. Perhaps most disastrous to his standing at home was the failure of many of his domestic programs. He knew something was wrong with the Soviet system, but he could not break through its intellectual and institutional limits. It was clear that agriculture needed radical reform, but Khrushchev's seemingly revolutionary programs for dealing with the problem were in fact rather superficial. He even tried to reorganize the sacrosanct party structure, but every scheme failed.