Nikita Khrushchev

Nikita Khrushchev

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894 – 11 September 1971) was a Soviet politician who led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He was responsible for the de-Stalinization of theSoviet Union, for backing the progress of the early Soviet space program, and for several relatively liberal reforms in areas of domestic policy. His popularity was eroded by flaws in his policies, as well as his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1964 he was deposed by his party colleagues and replaced with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier. He died of a heart attack in 1971 at the age of 75.

About Nikita Khrushchev in brief

Summary Nikita KhrushchevNikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894 – 11 September 1971) was a Soviet politician who led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He was responsible for the de-Stalinization of theSoviet Union, for backing the progress of the early Soviet space program, and for several relatively liberal reforms in areas of domestic policy. His popularity was eroded by flaws in his policies, as well as his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1964 he was deposed by his party colleagues and replaced with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier. His lengthy memoirs were smuggled to the West and published in part in 1970. He died of a heart attack in 1971 at the age of 75. He is buried in the Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky National Cemetery, near the village of Yuzhnoye in the Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. His daughter Irina Khrushcheva is also buried in Yuznoye, in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. He had a son, Sergei, who died in a car crash in the Ukraine in 1968. He also had a daughter, Ksenia, who was born in the city of Donetsk in 1961. His son Sergei died in an auto accident in 1992, aged 89. He has a son and a daughter-in-law, both of whom died in car crashes in the 1990s. His grandson, Yevgeny, is a Russian politician and former Prime Minister of Ukraine and a former head of state of the Donetsk oblast. His great-grandson, Vladimir, is the current President of Russia.

He served as a commissar during the Russian Civil War and was a close ally of Joseph Stalin. He supported Stalin’s purges, and approved thousands of arrests. In 1938, Stalin sent him to govern the Ukrainian SSR, and he continued the purges there. On 5 March 1953, Stalin’s death triggered a power struggle in which Kh Rushchev emerged victorious upon consolidating his authority. On 25 February 1956, at the 20th Party Congress, he delivered the \”Secret Speech\”, which denounced Stalin’s purges and ushered in a less repressive era in the SovietUnion. He enjoyed strong support during the 1950s thanks to major victories like the Suez Crisis, the launching of Sputnik, the Syrian Crisis of 1957, and the 1960 U-2 incident. His time in office saw the tensest years of the cold War, culminating in the Cuban missile Crisis. He ordered major cuts in conventional forces. Despite the cuts, he took great pride in the bloody defense of Stalingrad, a fact he took very pride in throughout his life. He lived in Moscow and was pensioned off with an apartment and a dacha in the countryside. His parents were poor peasants of Russian origin. His father Sergei was employed in a number of positions in theDonbas area of far eastern Ukraine, working as a railwayman, as a miner, and labouring in a brick factory. He generally left his family in Kalinovka, returning there when he had enough money.