ISBN: 0393051447
W.W. Norton & Co., 2003

What does one say about the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Biography? A biography which has received rave reviews from Los Angeles to Washington? I say: Read this book. It is a remarkable look at Nikita Khrushchev and the forces which made him. The book is filled with facts enough for the most demanding historian, especially in the notes which follow the text. Yet, it is written with a grace and elegance usually found in the highest quality of literature. Here it more than meets the needs of the less historically minded reader. And, so it is both first class biography and elegant literature.

My elementary and high school years, and first years of college occurred during the rule of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. As an unsophisticated country boy, I did not know what to think at first -- my thinking guided being by my elders. For much of the time, I was aware that trouble lurked out there “somewhere,” but it was always “somewhere else.”

On the one hand, he was the enemy, the impetus for the one home-dug fallout shelter in a two-county area. The one who threatened to bury us and later pounded his shoe on a UN table. The one who delivered missiles to Cuba – then blinked.

Conversely, there also seemed to be a different persona. In his rumpled, ill-fitting suits and dumpy body, he could have been anybody’s grandfather straight off the farm down the road. Unlike other leaders of the day (Eisenhower, Churchill, Macmillan, de Gaulle, Kennedy), Khrushchev seemed to be so down-to-earth (so “earthy” I learned as I read), so human, a man of the people.

One of my dearest ancient aunts always sent us out of the room if Eisenhower appeared on the television - a Republican, you know. Khrushchev seemed to pose less danger in her mind. Look at his smiling picture on the cover of this biography. How could such a man harm anyone?

And yet, this grandfather, as William Taubman so eloquently tells us, was cut from the same cloth as Stalin. He supported and actively participated in Stalin’s worst excesses. With Stalin gone, Khrushchev remade his image to deny or ameliorate his participation, even to initiating reforms which made the rise of Gorbachev possible. And, in a true test of Soviet revisionist history, he got away with it for years. Ultimately, it seems, the coarseness of his youth caught up to him and he became an embarrassment to the Soviet Union. Pushed from power, he died a “personal pensioner.”

Outside of his family and a few close friends, no one came to the barely announced wake and funeral.

Let his son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, capture the ethos of the Soviet Union of the time: “You ate and drank with somebody whose favor you cultivated; you hunted, fished, asked advice, rushed to help, but then came the moment when you claimed not even to know him. Your very bones trembled lest someone remember that you, too, brother, were his friend.”

His life, then, had come full circle. From that small, unknown, unpromising boy who met an old woman in the forests of Kalinovka, he rose to the heights of Soviet society and fell back again. She had told him, “Little boy, a great future awaits you….” It was a story he told and re-told throughout his life, telling it a final time a few days before his death to Adzhubei. (Herein lies the only place I could find any fault with this superb biography. On page 27, Professor Taubman says Khrushchev told this story to Adzhubei “the very day before Khrushchev died,….” On page 641, this story is said to have been told on Sunday, September 5, a week before Khrushchev’s death on September 11. It’s a minor error which should have been caught by the editor, although it does not distract.)

Born on a farm, a peasant, he emphasized the time he spent as a metal worker. Largely uneducated (2 – 4 years of formal but poor schooling), he repeatedly lamented his lack of education and, most importantly, used this lack to keep expectations of his abilities low; therefore, his accomplishments were seen as even more remarkable. He supported Stalin and ordered and signed for the execution of thousands, including friends and close associates. He tried to end the Cold War, yet made a series of serious mistakes which had the opposite effect. Many of these mistakes stemmed from his mercurial temper and his feelings of personal inadequacy.

If I may refocus Churchill’s famous quote about Russia: Khrushchev was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

This is a massive and eminently successful effort. It was selected a “Best Book of 2003” by such disparate newspapers as The Economist, the New York Times, and the Toronto Globe and Mail. A lifetime of studying the Soviet Union formed the foundation. Taubman is the author of numerous books about the Soviet Union, including Stalin’s American Policy and Moscow Spring.