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Soviet leader who served as First Secretary of the Communist Party (1953–1964), known for de-Stalinization, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and peaceful coexistence.
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894–1971) led the Soviet Union as First Secretary of the Communist Party from 1953 until his ouster in 1964, and additionally served as Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. He rose through the party apparatus under Stalin, becoming a Politburo member and overseeing Ukraine during and after World War II.
Khrushchev is best remembered internationally for several defining acts:
He also championed peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world as a doctrinal shift from Stalinist inevitability of war, while simultaneously presiding over the Sino-Soviet split that hardened by the early 1960s. Domestically, he pushed the Virgin Lands agricultural campaign in Kazakhstan and southern Siberia, expanded housing construction (the prefabricated khrushchyovka apartment blocks), and accelerated the Soviet space program, which launched Sputnik in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin's flight in 1961.
His colleagues in the Presidium, led by Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, removed him in October 1964, citing "hare-brained schemes" and erratic leadership. He lived out his retirement near Moscow, dictating memoirs that were smuggled to the West and published as Khrushchev Remembers. He died on 11 September 1971.
Delivered on 25 February 1956 to a closed session of the 20th Party Congress, it denounced Stalin's cult of personality, mass purges, and wartime errors, triggering de-Stalinization across the Eastern Bloc.
On 14 October 1964 the Communist Party Presidium, led by Leonid Brezhnev, voted him out, citing erratic decision-making, agricultural failures, and the humiliation of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Khrushchev's doctrine, articulated at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, holding that war between capitalist and socialist states was not inevitable and that the two systems could compete peacefully.