About
Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) led the Soviet Union from 1953 (Stalin's death) to 1964, presiding over the most dangerous and simultaneously most hopeful period of the Cold War. His 'Secret Speech' (1956) to the 20th Party Congress — denouncing Stalin's cult of personality, purges, and crimes — was one of history's most significant political speeches, shocking the Communist world and enabling a partial de-Stalinization.
Khrushchev's crises: the Hungarian Revolution (1956, Soviet suppression); Sputnik and the Space Race (1957); the 1960 U-2 incident (US spy plane shot down, wrecking a summit); the Berlin Wall (1961); the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962, the closest the Cold War came to nuclear war — Khrushchev agreed to remove missiles from Cuba after Kennedy promised not to invade Cuba and secretly agreed to remove US missiles from Turkey). He was famously removed by Brezhnev and others while on holiday in 1964.
# Top 10 Khrushchev facts
- 1Secret Speech (1956) against Stalin
- 2Hungarian Revolution suppression
- 3Sputnik launched
- 4Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
- 5'We will bury you'
- 6shoe-banging at UN (disputed)
- 7Berlin Wall
- 8Virgin Lands agricultural campaign
- 9removed in 1964 coup
- 10memoirs smuggled to West
Fascinating Facts
- ◆Khrushchev's 'Secret Speech' denouncing Stalin (1956) was so shocking that several Politburo members fainted during the reading — it was the most significant internal Soviet political document ever leaked to the West
- ◆During the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet submarine captain (Vasili Arkhipov) voted against launching a nuclear torpedo when his submarine was being depth-charged by US destroyers — one man's decision prevented nuclear war
- ◆Khrushchev's shoe-banging at the UN (1960) — the most famous diplomatic incident in UN history — may have been deliberate theater; his shoe was already off for an orthopedic reason when he chose to bang it on the desk
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