Burying Nikita.

• Author: Eisenhower, Susan
• Position: Books

William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 768 pp., $35.

FOR THE BABY boomers among us, Nikita Khrushchev was the personification of the "Soviet bogeyman", the nuke-wielding, shoe-banging premier who warned that he would bury us-we the grandchildren. I met him on my grandparents' Gettysburg sun porch in 1959, one afternoon in the midst of the Camp David summit. Khrushchev was affable, attentive and full of plans for the President's forthcoming trip to Moscow. I remember well his Santa Claus shape and his deep belly laugh; but I also remember being both intrigued and terrified by the things associated with him, from the screaming newspaper headlines to the duck-and-cover drills I endured at school.

Despite the menace Khrushchev seemingly posed to us in our youth, he has since that time been painted in more benign terms. In some circles he is seen as someone who tried to bring reform and enlightenment to the USSR before his time; a well-meaning man who just could not bring his hardliners along, in part--some have argued--because the United States would never slide him a break.

Those who have gone wobbly on the image of Nikita Khrushchev will find new stability in William Taubman's biography, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. Taubman has done a masterful job of reminding us not only how complex a man Khrushchev was, but also how much blood he had on his hands, and what a wild ride it was in international relations while he was in power. Taubman takes us from Khrushchev's humble beginnings as the son of an illiterate peasant family through the end of his political career--covering both domestic politics and international relations. There is much fertile ground to cover and no shortage of crises to dissect.

In extraordinary detail, Taubman describes Khrushchev as cunning, conniving and freewheeling; a man of stubborn nature and primitive instincts. He is also well described as a self-made careerist with overwhelming ambition: at one moment, emotional and sentimental, the next, prideful, boorish and unyielding. One comes to see why Khrushchev was eventually ousted from the Kremlin. It was not just because his reformist bent failed to produce real reform, or that his secret speech to the 20th Party Congress was out of step with the hardliners in post-Stalinist Russia. Rather, he was deposed at the height of his power because even his most faithful subordinates regarded him as a loose cannon. It is hard to imagine that any government, no matter how despotic, could withstand any more irresponsible political adventures like the legendary ones over which Khrushchev presided: from his campaign in agriculture--which included his disastrous courtship and patronage of Trofym Lysenko (who ultimately destroyed biology in th e USSR)--to provocative but wrongheaded approaches on how the USSR could achieve strategic advantage, which contributed significantly to the U-2 debacle and the Cuban Missile crisis.

Throughout, Taubman makes a great deal of Khrushchev's contradictory instincts and his duality--giving us psychological insights to interpret Khrushchev's most outlandish and barbaric acts, and emphasizing the guilt he carried with him in consequence. He suggests that Khrushchev was both a man bent on personal survival and one possessed by self-deception. After several hundred pages, however, Nikita Khrushchev does not seem as complicated as Taubman suggests. He comes across not only as a master politician during his meteoric rise, but as a master manipulator as well, knowing perfectly well what he was doing while he was doing it. The problem was that Khrushchev could not anticipate the repercussions of his actions over time, and...