Word: khrushchev
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Khrushchev first met Stalin in 1925, when the younger man was elected a delegate from the Yuzovka party organization in the southern Ukraine to the 14th Party Congress in Moscow. By then Khrushchev had discarded his mother's intensely religious training, fathered two children, lost his first wife during the famine of 1921 and married his second, Nina. Khrushchev recalls how, the first morning after reaching Moscow, he tried to take a streetcar to the Kremlin, but didn't know which number to take and ended up getting lost. He took to skipping breakfast so that he could...
Everyone Trembled. In 1930, while he was studying metallurgy at Moscow's Industrial Academy and rising swiftly in party ranks, Khrushchev was sent to deliver funds to a newly collectivized farm in the Samara region. He and his companion were appalled at conditions there, he recalls. "The farmers were starving to death. When we told them that the money was allocated for farm equipment, they told us they weren't interested in equipment-what they wanted was bread...
...Khrushchev soon began hearing other reports about the disastrous effects of collectivization. But it was not until many years later that he realized the scale of the "starvation and repression which accompanied collectivization as it was carried out under Stalin." Long afterward, for example, he heard of a train that had pulled into Kiev filled with the bodies of Ukrainians who had starved to death. Some officials wanted to sound an alarm at the time, but none had the courage to confront Stalin. "We had already moved into the period when one man had the collective [leadership] under his thumb...
Lucky Ticket. Yet Khrushchev's own career skyrocketed, and by 1934 he was party leader of Moscow. One reason: Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva, who had been a fellow student at the Industrial Academy, was impressed by Khrushchev and told her husband about him. "Nadya," mother of Svetlana Alliluyeva, committed suicide in 1932. But her judgment of Khrushchev endured in Stalin's mind, a stroke of luck that the old Soviet leader readily acknowledges. In the years that followed, he says, "I stayed alive while most of my contemporaries, my classmates at the academy, lost...
Others did not fare so well. Stalin had little respect for Nadezhda Konstanti-novna Krupskaya and Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova, Lenin's widow and sister, recalls Khrushchev. He used to say that he did not think either of these women was making a positive contribution to the party's struggle. "After Stalin's death we found an envelope in a secret compartment, and inside the envelope was a note written in Lenin's hand. Lenin accused Stalin of having insulted Nadezhda Kon-stantinovna. Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] demanded that Stalin apologize; otherwise Lenin would no longer consider Stalin...