Nikita Khrushchev

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:

• The "Secret Speech" delivered to the 20th Party Congress in February 1956, which denounced Stalin's cult of personality and inaugurated a partial de-Stalinization of Soviet political life.
• The suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in November 1956, when Soviet forces crushed the Nagy government in Budapest.
• The construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, following the failed Vienna summit with U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
• The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, during which his decision to place medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba brought the superpowers to the brink of war before he agreed to withdraw them in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba and the later removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey.

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.