When Joseph Stalin died on 5 March 1953, almost no one inside the Kremlin or in Western capitals expected Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev to become the next master of the Soviet Union. Georgy Malenkov, Stalin’s deputy in the government, looked like the heir. Lavrenty Beria, who ran the secret police and the nuclear program, looked like the most dangerous man in the room. Khrushchev was the blunt, poorly educated former miner who had run Ukraine and Moscow. He was energetic, crude, and widely underestimated. Within five years he had destroyed or humiliated every serious rival and held both the party and the government in his own hands. His rise was not a tidy succession. It was a ruthless, improvised power struggle that showed how unstable the Soviet system remained after the dictator’s death.70706b
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Peasant Origins and Stalin’s Machine
Khrushchev was born on 17 April 1894 in the village of Kalinovka, near the Ukrainian border. His family was poor. He received only a few years of schooling, worked as a shepherd and then as a metalworker in the Donbas mines, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1918. During the Civil War he served as a political commissar. After the war he rose through the Ukrainian party under the patronage of Lazar Kaganovich, a close Stalin ally. In 1929 he moved to Moscow to attend the Stalin Industrial Academy. From there his ascent was rapid. By 1935 he was first secretary of the Moscow party organization and had overseen construction of the Moscow Metro, for which he received the Order of Lenin.0eda6f
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He survived the Great Terror of 1936–38 because he was useful and loyal. In 1938 Stalin sent him to Ukraine to replace the party leadership that had just been purged. Khrushchev carried out further arrests and later admitted his role. During World War II he served as a political commissar with the armies, including at Stalingrad. After the war he returned to Ukraine to rebuild industry and agriculture while suppressing nationalist resistance. In 1949 Stalin recalled him to Moscow as a counterweight to Malenkov and Beria. By the time Stalin died, Khrushchev knew the party apparatus better than almost anyone still alive. That knowledge became his decisive weapon.be877e
History
The Vacuum After Stalin
The first days after Stalin’s death produced a collective leadership. Malenkov became chairman of the Council of Ministers, the most visible post. Beria took control of the combined interior and state-security ministries. Khrushchev was given responsibility for the party secretariat. The arrangement was meant to prevent any single man from repeating Stalin’s personal dictatorship. It lasted only weeks. Beria moved quickly. He released some prisoners, proposed a milder policy toward East Germany, and appeared to be positioning the security organs for a bid of his own. Khrushchev and others concluded that if they waited, Beria would move against them first.65059c
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Removing Beria
In late June 1953 they acted. At a Presidium meeting inside the Kremlin, Beria was denounced and arrested by military officers led by Marshal Georgy Zhukov. The charge that he was a British spy was convenient fiction. The real accusation was that he intended to use the secret police against his colleagues. Beria was tried in secret and shot in December 1953. Khrushchev had been the principal organizer of the plot. Eliminating the most feared man in the Soviet Union was the first and most dangerous step in his rise. It also taught the remaining leaders that the army could be used against the security services when the party leadership was united enough to ask.caead4
Babel
Capturing the Party, Then the Government
On 7 September 1953 the Central Committee elected Khrushchev First Secretary of the Communist Party. The title looked weaker than Malenkov’s premiership. In the Soviet system it was the stronger office. Control of appointments, promotions, and the party machine allowed Khrushchev to place his people and isolate his rivals. Malenkov tried to win public support by promising more consumer goods and a lighter industrial policy. Khrushchev used the party to attack him on agriculture and defense. In February 1955 Malenkov was forced to resign as premier. Nikolai Bulganin, a Khrushchev ally, took the job. Malenkov was demoted but left on the Presidium. The unfinished business would return two years later.ec1628
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By 1955 Khrushchev was the dominant figure, though not yet unchallenged. He launched the Virgin Lands campaign to grow grain on previously unused land in Kazakhstan and Siberia. The program produced short-term gains and long-term problems, but it showed his style: restless, experimental, and impatient with the old Stalinist caution.
The Secret Speech
On 25 February 1956, at a closed session of the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev delivered the speech that defined his era. For four hours he denounced Stalin’s cult of personality, the mass arrests of the 1930s, the wartime disasters caused by the dictator’s paranoia, and the terror that had consumed the Communist Party itself. The speech was incomplete. It said little about Khrushchev’s own participation in the purges. It was still explosive. Copies leaked to the West. Inside the communist world it shattered the official myth of Stalin’s infallibility. Thousands of prisoners were released. Cultural life loosened. The “thaw” had begun.8bf5f7
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The speech also had immediate political use. It damaged the old Stalinists—Molotov, Kaganovich, and Malenkov—whose records were bloodier and more visible than Khrushchev’s. It did not, however, make him safe. De-Stalinization encouraged unrest in Poland and a full revolution in Hungary. In November 1956 Khrushchev sent in Soviet tanks. The man who had just condemned Stalin’s crimes was now the “butcher of Budapest.” The contradiction would follow him for the rest of his career.
The Anti-Party Group and the Final Consolidation
In June 1957 the old guard struck back. Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich and several others won a majority in the Presidium and tried to remove Khrushchev as First Secretary. They expected the Central Committee to rubber-stamp the decision, as it usually did. Khrushchev refused. He demanded a full plenum of the Central Committee, where his supporters were stronger. Marshal Zhukov made clear that the army would not accept a palace coup. After days of debate the Central Committee reversed the Presidium vote. The plotters were labeled the “Anti-Party Group,” expelled from the leadership, and given humiliating minor posts. A few months later Khrushchev dismissed Zhukov as well. In March 1958 he took the premiership from Bulganin. Party and state were now in one pair of hands.8b4c06
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Why the Rise Was Dangerous
Khrushchev did not recreate Stalin’s personal dictatorship. He reduced the power of the secret police, released many political prisoners, and tried to shift resources toward consumer goods and housing. He talked of peaceful coexistence with the West. Those changes were real. The method of his ascent, however, was the old method. He used conspiracy, denunciation, control of the party machine, and the threat of military force. He survived Stalin’s system because he had been a loyal participant in it. He then used the same tools against the men who had shared that system with him.
The danger was not only to his rivals. It was to the stability of the state he now led. His style was impulsive. Agricultural campaigns produced waste as well as grain. Administrative reorganizations created confusion. In foreign policy the same restlessness produced both the 1959 visit to the United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis three years later. The system he inherited had no reliable way to restrain a leader once he held both party and government. The men who watched him climb understood the lesson. In October 1964 they applied it to him.
Khrushchev’s rise showed that after Stalin the Soviet Union was still a place where power belonged to whoever mastered the party apparatus, summoned the army at the right moment, and moved first. A relatively underestimated operator could seize the state. The same system could just as easily take it back.
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