'Khrushchev': a deceptively 'nice guy'

What did Nikita Khrushchev know, and when did he know it? Was he just "following orders" (his own words) when he helped Joseph Stalin murder millions? Did "Stalin's pet," as Khrushchev was sometimes known, have no choice if he wanted to survive?

"He conceived himself to be, and compared with his Kremlin cronies, he actually was, a nice guy," writes his biographer, William Taubman. Indeed, Khrushchev was, by all accounts, a warmer, more gregarious person than Stalin, who nicknamed him "my little Marxist." He seemed to make friends easily.

He also watched them die, rarely making an attempt to stop the vicious machinery that turned his closest associates into "enemies of the people" — perhaps because he believed, at least for a while, that Stalin could do no wrong. Taubman proposes that "Khrushchev's stunning blend of deception and self-deception is not so much an obstacle to understanding as itself the main point to be understood."

Khrushchev's own sanitized 1970 memoir is of limited help in telling how he rose within the Communist Party, succeeding Stalin as the Soviet Union's leader, bravely denouncing him in 1956, and eventually bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962.

To bring fresh depth to this story, Taubman makes revelatory use of material released in Russia since 1991, plus recent interviews with families, colleagues and enemies. He visited Khrushchev's home town, searching for letters and diaries, and admits to consulting with psychologists to come up with a profile of the Cold War's most memorable bogeyman.

If you're old enough to remember Khrushchev banging his shoe on a United Nations desktop, or declaring "We will bury you" to the West in general, or boorishly condemning modern art and literature, you won't find that image necessarily contradicted. But Taubman does establish the sometimes-ambiguous context of these events, demonstrating that such bad impressions weren't created in isolation.

The unnecessary brinksmanship of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, for instance, baffled Fidel Castro, President Kennedy and most high-ranking Soviets. Khrushchev was clearly and chiefly to blame for creating the 20th century's scariest nuclear confrontation.

Yet it's possible, as Taubman suggests, to trace the Cuban crisis to Khrushchev's sense of betrayal two years earlier, when President Eisenhower recklessly allowed a U-2 espionage flight over the Russian-Pakistan border. After all, Eisenhower himself once claimed that nothing would make him "request authority to declare war more quickly than violation of our air space by Soviet aircraft."

When Kennedy succeeded Ike, Khrushchev couldn't resist testing the younger president while avenging himself on Eisenhower, by shipping nuclear missiles to Cuba. "What if we throw a hedgehog down Uncle Sam's pants?" he suggested to a colleague. This debacle led directly to the end of Khrushchev's political career in 1964, after which he became a "non-person," essentially ostracized by all but his immediate family.

Perhaps Khrushchev's most notable achievement was the "rehabilitation" of many people who had been persecuted by Stalin. Eventually he too was rehabilitated, many years after his death, by Mikhail Gorbachev, who broke the silence about Khrushchev by praising his courage in exposing Stalin, and by young people who were inspired by the realism and relative openness he brought to Soviet politics.

Still, he was very much a part of Stalin's purges and government-induced famines, which starved millions, even leading some crazed parents to dine on the corpses of their children. In the end, he couldn't escape his memories of a period dominated by almost-unimaginable fear and Machiavellian backstabbing.

"My arms are up to the elbows in blood," he said shortly before he died in 1971. "That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul."