Biography: William Taubman, an American expert in Soviet affairs, has written the first detailed biography of Khrushchev in the English language, which according to Ian Thomson must rank as one of the best books ever written on the Soviet Union.
The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, was a career antagonist with a tough, prize-fighter's face. In New York in 1960, he banged his shoe on the table to attract attention at a UN conference. Khrushchev could be charming and impulsive, but he was morally tainted by Stalinism and complicit in the dictator's Great Terror of 1937-38. In the space of one year, close to two million Russian army chiefs, priests, professors and other "enemies of the people" were shot or sent to the Gulag.
In his memoirs, unsurprisingly, Khrushchev underplays his involvement with the Stalinist liquidations. The only way to save his skin and that of his family - he said - was to kowtow to Stalin, the great vozhd (leader). Yet the slaughter did not end with Stalin. In the 70 years after the 1917 Revolution, the Soviet regime killed almost 62 million. The figure is so monstrous, so unimaginable, that it becomes almost irrelevant. And Khrushchev, as a young apparatchik in his native Ukraine, played his part in the state murders.
Although Stalin was a megalomaniac in the mould of Tamburlaine, his protégé, Khrushchev, did have a humane side. In 1956, three years after Stalin died, he bravely denounced the dictator at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. Stalin's "cult of personality" and "executions without trial" were roundly condemned in a speech lasting nearly four hours. Khrushchev's unmasking of Stalin was a turning-point for the 20th century; with it, the die was cast for Gorbachev's glasnost in the mid-1980s.
William Taubman, an American expert in Soviet affairs, has written the first detailed biography of Khrushchev in the English language. It should be said that this is an astonishing achievement: scholarly, authoritative, running to almost 900 pages, with never a dull moment. With immense skill, Taubman places Khrushchev within the larger frame of 20th-century Russia and America; we are left with a teeming, James Ellroy-like canvas of political schemings, arrests, corruption but, also, triumphantly, perestroika in the making.
Khrushchev's attempts to humanise and modernise the Soviet system were made the more difficult as they coincided with the Cold War. Americans then spoke fearfully of Russia's nuclear capabilities and asked how long it would be before a Red Square appeared in New York. Such fears were real: in October 1962, following the US's discovery of Khrushchev's missile sites in Cuba, the world seemed on the brink of a nuclear conflagration. Mercifully, after military briefing, both the Soviet leader and President Kennedy acknowledged the importance of saving lives. So the Armageddon was averted. After his shoe-banging at the UN, Khrushchev is best remembered today for the redemptive role he played in the Cuban missile crisis.
He was born in 1894 to a peasant family in southern Russia. According to family legend, his maternal grandfather lived in such poverty that he had taken only two baths in his entire life: once when he was christened, and again when neighbours prepared his corpse for burial.
Khrushchev did not join the Bolshevik Party until 1918 (more than a year after it had seized power) yet he rapidly made his way up through the party apparatus. He boasted to Stalin of having extirpated "vermin" (Trotskyists, kulaki or peasant proprietors) from Ukraine territories. And in gratitude, the great vozhd promoted him to the Central Committee in Moscow; during the early 1930s, Khrushchev oversaw construction of the the city's metro, a classic Stalinist project.
When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Khrushchev was traumatised. The carnage as German troops advanced across the Stalin Line was appalling (27 million Soviet citizens perished in the conflict they called the Great Patriotic War). Khrushchev was in the thick of the battle at Kiev and later Stalingrad, where he showed great courage as Stalin's chief political commissar. But with the dictator's long-awaited death in 1953, Khrushchev was quick to manipulate the party machine against Stalin's old allies, to make new friends and to betray former cohorts.
In the struggle to succeed Stalin, he ordered the execution of the former NKVD (the KGB of its day) chief, Lavrenty Beria, and purged the Politburo of rivals.
However, Khrushchev had no sooner denounced Stalin at the 20th Congress than, with Stalinist ruthlessness, he ordered Soviet tanks to crush the Hungarian uprising in 1956. (If the revolt was not subdued, Khrushchev reasoned, the entire Soviet bloc threatened to crumble.) Budapest was Khrushchev's hardest, and ultimately most shaming hour.
In Taubman's view, Khrushchev's tragedy was that power made demands on him that he could not, ultimately, meet. On state visits abroad, his peasant coarseness was seen to combine with a bitter, anti-intellectual envy and sense of social inferiority. At Buckingham Palace in 1955, Khrushchev's idea of dinner-table repartee was to declare that Soviet missiles "could easily reach your island and quite a bit further". (Queen Elizabeth II, within earshot, was not best pleased.)
Moscow suspected that power had gone to Khrushchev's head. He had become obsessed with his place in history and appeared increasingly vain. Indeed, when M15 bugged his room at Claridge's (the poshest hotel in London), they were amazed to pick up, not state secrets, but long monologues addressed to his valet on what he should wear.
After Khrushchev was toppled from office in October 1964, he spent his last days in a dacha with his dog and his long-suffering wife. He died in 1971, vilified and largely forgotten. Nevertheless, his efforts at de-Stalinisation and attempts at Soviet/American détente make him a founding father of reform. And William Taubman, in this superb biography, has done the wily Russian proud.
Indeed, with its diligent archival research and narrative verve, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era must rank as one of the best books ever written on the Soviet union.
Ian Thomson recently won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Award for his biography of Primo Levi
Khrushchev: The Man and his Era. By William Taubman, The Free Press (Simon & Schuster), 876pp, £25