April 15, 1894
В Kursk province, He was born into a family of a miner and a laundress Nikita Khrushchev — First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee after Stalin's death. A symbol of the "thaw" within the country and the apogee of the "Cold War" with the United States. Author of the "corn" reform.
The current generation of Soviet people will live under communism
He only finished elementary school—he had to help his parents because they were short of money. He worked as a shepherd, cleaned steam boilers, apprenticed as a shoemaker, and worked as a shop assistant.
I started working as soon as I could walk. Until I was 15, I tended sheep for a landowner and cows for a capitalist. There's no such thing as "dirty work," only a dirty conscience.
In 14 he moved to Donetsk, He was an apprentice mechanic at a machine-building and iron foundry. At 18, he got a job at a mine, servicing winches.
After the February Revolution of 1917, he became close to the Bolsheviks and joined the district Council of Workers' Deputies. He participated in the Civil War.
His peasant and proletarian background helped him quickly advance in his career. At 26, he graduated with honors from the party school. He served as deputy head of a mine in Donbas and headed one of the local districts.
At 35, he entered the Industrial Academy in Moscow, where he studied with Stalin's wife. By Nadezhda Alliluyeva. He called meeting her a lucky “lottery ticket.”
Politicians are the same everywhere: they promise to build a bridge where there is no river.
As secretary of the academy's party committee, he conducted his first party "purge" and was promoted to the district committee. In the 1930s, he continued to purge Moscow party organizations alongside Kaganovich. He celebrated his 40th birthday as first secretary of the Moscow city committee and a member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).
In 1937, he served for three weeks on one of the NKVD's "execution troikas." No documents signed by him are known to have been executed, but some believe they may have later been purged by the KGB. His denunciations, however, remain in the KGB archives.
From 1938 to 1940, he continued the repressions as the First Secretary of the Party in Ukraine. According to various sources, during his three years as leader, up to 170 people were arrested, including several thousand from the party elite.
During the war, he was a member of the highest command echelon. He unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Stalin to halt the offensive in the Kharkov region, which resulted in the USSR losing the Donbass.
After the end of the war, he was one of the informal three secretaries of the Central Committee, who effectively governed the country.
After Stalin's death, he initiated Beria's arrest and soon became First Secretary of the Central Committee. In 1956, he delivered a report at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences," launching de-Stalinization.
His 11-year reign is considered the "Thaw." Under Khrushchev, political prisoners were amnestied, and the rehabilitation of victims of Stalin's repressions began. Abortion and being late for work were decriminalized, social benefits for workers were expanded, pensions were introduced, affordable "Khrushchev-era" apartments began to be built, and space exploration was launched.
We don't just hit flies with our nostrils either.
The Cold War between the USSR and the USA under Khrushchev reached its climax with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Relations with China deteriorated.
Like it or not, history is on our side. We'll bury you! (at a meeting with Western ambassadors, 1956)
Under his rule, workers were shot in Novocherkassk, the Hungarian uprising was suppressed, currency dealers and workshop owners were sentenced to death, and religion was actively fought.
From a saxophone to a knife - just one step!
Khrushchev’s reign also saw miscalculations in the development of virgin lands (people nicknamed him “Pig” and “Corn Duster”), persecution Boris Pasternak and a campaign against avant-garde artists.
Can't you draw? Are you men or damned faggots? Are we going to join communism with this scribbled mess? Do you have any conscience? (exhibition at the Manege, 1962)
In October 1964, he was removed from power for "subjectivism" and "voluntarism." He died in 1971, at 77, of a heart attack. The monument on his grave was made Ernst Unknown — a sculptor whom Khrushchev threatened to bring to trial for embezzlement of copper and called his work “nauseating daub.”
