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."

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."

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.

When Nikita Khrushchev finally fell from power, it was with astonishing abruptness. On an October day in 1964, he was talking by radiotelephone to the three cosmonauts who were Russia's latest space heroes. Hugely proud of Soviet triumphs in space during his years in power, Khrushchev told them of the grand reception planned for their return to Moscow. Then, chuckling loudly, he uttered a strangely prophetic farewell: "Here is Comrade Mikoyan. He is literally pulling the telephone from my hands. I don't think I can stop him."

Three days later, the Soviet news agency Tass issued a terse announcement: Nikita Khrushchev had been "released" from his duties "at his own request" for reasons of "age and deteriorating health." During the week in which he was ousted, China made a bid for superpower status by detonating its first nuclear weapon. Khrushchev's successors are still preoccupied with Peking's challenge as a rival center of Communist orthodoxy. In the next three months, the triumvirate that now rules Russia--Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, Premier Aleksei Kosygin and President Nikolai Podgorny--will visit eight nations in an extraordinary flurry of diplomatic activity. One of their prime goals will be to blunt China's recent skillful initiatives in foreign affairs, particularly its contacts with the U.S. and with Moscow's restless neighbors to the west--Yugoslavia, Rumania and Albania.

Harebrained Schemes. A variety of factors contributed to Khrushchev's downfall: his role in precipitating the Cuban missile crisis; his part in opening an unbridgeable abyss between Moscow and Peking; his emphasis on consumer production and economic decentralization, which infuriated the "metal eaters" of the armed forces and heavy industry; his concentration on missiles at the expense of conventional military forces; his flawed agricultural experiments.

Two specific events, however, may have triggered his fall. He had insisted on convening a Communist summit at which the Chinese were to be formally condemned as traitors to world Communism, but 26 invitations were issued by the Kremlin and only 15 acceptances were received. Second, Khrushchev had planned a January trip to Bonn for conferences with the then Chancellor, Ludwig Erhard, a venture that many of Khrushchev's colleagues evidently feared would lead to a deal with West Germany. In due course, Pravda summarized the Khrushchev era as a time of "harebrained schemes, immature conclusions, hasty decisions, bragging and phrasemongering."

Arduous Road. Khrushchev once told his family that he wanted to be remembered for three things: building the Moscow metro, eliminating the dreaded Lavrenty Beria from Soviet life, and debunking Stalin at the 20th Party Congress. All were notable accomplishments, particularly the last. But his place in history would be even more secure if he had brought his country farther than halfway along the arduous road from a backward dictatorship to a modern society that permits free expression. Instead he ended one era without really embarking on a new one. Lacking the power and personal penchant to move Russia too far toward freedom, he was ever the man of the partial transition.

In the final seven years of his life, Khrushchev remained mostly out of public view. Last year Khrushchev Remembers appeared in the West. LIFE, which contracted for its publication, described the book as a volume of "reminiscences" gathered from "various sources at various times and in various circumstances." Though Khrushchev was obliged to dismiss the book as a "fabrication," most Western Sovietologists believed that it was authentic.

One day last June, accompanied by Nina, Khrushchev appeared at the polling station in central Moscow. A correspondent asked him what he was doing in retirement. "I am a pensioner," he said. "What do pensioners do?" It was an almost pathetic question from a man who had ruled one of the world's two great powers for most of a decade.

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