Geoffrey Swain - Khrushchev

Today Khrushchev tends to be remembered for his buffoonery: as the man who banged his shoe on his desk at the assembly of the United Nations. This approachable introduction to Khrushchev displays another side, that of the serious politician attempting to reform the Soviet Union after Stalins death.

Khrushchev was a key player in the Soviet experiment. He was a labour activist in the pre-revolutionary years, fought in the civil war, rose through the party ranks, denounced Stalin, and beat the United States in the space race. Once Khrushchev became Soviet leader, he realized that the system Stalin had bequeathed him needed to be modernized and reformed. And when those reforms in turn ran out of steam, he came to the conclusion that only further radical change could prevent the atrophy of the Soviet Union.

In this book, Geoffrey Swain offers an engaging account of Khrushchevs political career and his wider role in Soviet and world politics, arguing that Khrushchev was overthrown in 1964 not because of his incompetence, but because the radical reforms he had in mind threatened the interests of the communist party apparatus.

Geoffrey Swain holds the Alexander Nove Chair in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK.

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Khrushchev

Geoffrey Swain

Geoffrey Swain 2016

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First published 2016

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Khrushchevs life was framed around Stalin. From their first meeting in 1925 until the completion of his memoirs shortly before his death, Khrushchev analysed and re-analysed his relationship with Stalin. This is the story of how a pre-revolutionary labour activist, one who flirted with Trotskyism, became a convinced Stalinist, was first mesmerised and then appalled by the personality of Stalin, and in the process of rejecting Stalin, rejected Stalinism as well, reintroducing towards the end of his rule debates about the role of the party in the economy that had not been current since the early 1920s. Khrushchevs evolution as a Stalinist was not untypical. He was a legal labour activist before the revolution; he did not join the revolutionary underground but preferred to be with the masses, organising at the work place, distributing literature, running a workers retail co-operative. During 1917 he was a classic member of the revolutionary sub elite, the middle rank activist who spread the word and served on a local soviet. As with many such activists, who favoured labour militancy, opposed the war, criticised the Provisional Government and welcomed the formation of the Soviet Government in October 1917, it was the civil war which forced them to identify fully with the Bolshevik Party rather than Bolshevik policies. Radicalised by the civil war, on returning to the Donbas mines destroyed in the fighting, he was frustrated by the near impossibility of getting things done and, unsurprisingly, railed against the incipient bureaucracy in the Communist Party identified by Trotsky. Nor is it surprising that such a radical hot-head should perform a radical zig-zag and be seduced by Stalin in 1925. Stalin made clear that socialism in one country was possible, and it was precisely the construction of socialism that Khrushchev was so keen to embark upon.