Khrushchev: The Man and His Era

"Khrushchev started off a miner’s son and had one of those rocket rides in the social stratosphere that could happen once Stalin had got rid of all the old Bolsheviks and needed a completely new political class. He went being from being a semi-literate party member out in the country to the deputy mayor of Moscow in about five years, and he finally ended up as one of Stalin’s inner circle. He worked closely with Stalin for nearly 20 years and approved thousands of arrests and executions and then went on to lead Russia during the Cold War. For me this is a magisterial biography and strangely funny. Khrushchev was a funny guy – it is one of the things about him which was appealing and then, when you think about it, more worrying still. Of all the Soviet leadership, Khrushchev is the one who is recognisable as a human being. He had that rare gift among politicians of remaining recognisable, thinking on his feet and cracking jokes. He had an almost Clintonesque gift of the gab, which really wasn’t a crucial skill among high-level Stalinists. In some ways I would guess that he survived at the top of Stalin’s Russia in spite of it. He was assumed to be too nice and too much of a peasant to be threatening, as a result of which he outwitted all of his contemporaries. One of the things I like about this biography is that as well as being the best record of Khrushchev, with the most use made of the archival stuff that has become available in the last 20 years, it is also a continuous lively attempt to think through the man, to keep fitting the new stuff you find into a picture that makes sense of him. There is a wonderful passage about Khrushchev succeeding as Stalin’s henchman which talks about just how often he records what nice guys the other members of the group are, and not just to butter them up but in conversations as well. Taubman makes the point that some of these people were the worse mass murderers of the 20th century. And Taubman concludes that what he was doing is reflecting a genuine part of his personality on to them. Compared to his colleagues it was important for him to seem a ‘nice guy’ despite everything he was doing. Khrushchev was a true monster and he also had an undestroyed conscience, which was a very awkward combination. Once he had fought his way ruthlessly to the top and succeeded Stalin, he tried his best to undo the worst excesses of Stalinism and to justify the suffering of the past by a genuine effort to deliver everything that the revolution had promised. He was not an immensely clever or subtle man but he really did believe that the land of milk and honey was coming in the Soviet Union."