Why nikita khrushchev important

But in he organized the ouster of Premier Georgi Malenkov and replaced him with an ally, Nikolai Bulganin. Khrushchev foiled a Malenkov-led coup attempt in June and took over the premiership the following March. Once a loyal Stalinist, Khrushchev gave a long speech in February that criticized Stalin for arresting and deporting opponents, for elevating himself above the party and for incompetent wartime leadership, among other things.

This withering, albeit incomplete, indictment of Stalin was supposed to remain secret. By that June, however, the U. State Department had published the complete text.

The Polish revolt was resolved fairly peacefully, but the Hungarian revolt was violently suppressed with troops and tanks. In all, at least 2, Hungarians were killed in late , and about 13, were wounded. Many more fled to the West, and others were arrested or deported. On the domestic front, Khrushchev worked—not always successfully—to increase agricultural production and raise living standards.

Two years later, a Soviet rocket hit the moon, and in Soviet astronaut Yuri A. Gagarin became the first man in space. Khrushchev had a complicated relationship with the West. A fervent believer in communism, he nonetheless preferred peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries. Unlike Stalin, he even visited the United States. Relations between the two superpowers deteriorated somewhat in when the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane deep inside their territory.

The following year, Khrushchev approved the construction of the Berlin Wall in order to stop East Germans from fleeing to capitalist West Germany. Cold War tensions reached a high point in October when the United States discovered Soviet nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba. The world appeared to be on the brink of nuclear conflict, but, after a day standoff, Khrushchev agreed to remove the weapons.

In return, U. President John F. After Stalin's death in , Khrushchev became the Party's First Secretary in the collective leadership that emerged after it had eliminated Lavrenti Beria and his faction. Subsequently, he used Stalin's established technique to divide and conquer his rivals, replace them with his own people, and emerge as the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union, with the difference that he did not kill these people, but had them assigned to such faraway and harmless posts as Ambassador to Mongolia.

In , at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, Khrushchev stunned the delegates with his so-called "secret speech", during which he denounced the excesses of the Stalin era and Stalin's personality cult for six hours.

Until the speech, it was still considered taboo to say anything negative about Stalin. Khrushchev's speech seems somewhat mild in hindsight, now that the scale of the horrors of the Great Purges and the Gulag are well known.

At the time, however, his revelations limited only to Stalin's crimes against the Party, not the country at large were earth shattering. Khrushchev honestly believed in the superiority of Communism, and felt that it was only a matter of time before it would destroy the Capitalist system once and for all. He set bold and ultimately unattainable goals of "overtaking the West" in food production, initiating massive programs to put vast tracts of virgin lands in Kazakhstan and Siberia under the plow with the help of thousands of urban Komsomol volunteers who brought little but their enthusiasm with them to the open steppes.

Despite being hailed as an expert on agriculture, Khrushchev miscalculated when, after a trip to Iowa in , he became a huge enthusiast of corn and decided to introduce it to his country, most of which has an unsuitable climate. While working as a miner, he continued his education by attending high school.

Khrushchev worked for the Communist Party in Kiev and then in Moscow. While in the capital, he gained a reputation for efficiency and in Khrushchev was appointed Secretary of the Moscow Regional Committee. He would have needed the support of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to have held such a post. Khrushchev further enhanced his reputation by being very closely associated with the building of the Moscow Underground — the construction of which was deemed an engineering success and a sign to the world of Soviet skills that were more closely associated with the West.

While it was the engineers who were rightly credited with the success of this project, the managerial skills of Khrushchev within such a prestigious project were also recognised. Between and , Khrushchev was mainly involved in affairs that affected the Ukraine.