Breaking Stalin's Grip

...His first wife died young of typhus, and he abandoned the second one...

...He broke the grip of Stalinism, and started its disintegration...

...Despite their overlapping for nearly a year, they never met...

...The personal detail Taubman has marshaled is extraordinary, even if his references to the broader historical context are occasionally shaky...

...They illustrated the old adage that you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy...

...For that period this book is the most illuminating investigation of Soviet history yet to appear...

...But there is a more remarkable parallel with a former President of the United States— namely, Lyndon B. Johnson...

...This alone was enough to imprint his personality on history...

...Rather, Taubman focuses on the toplevel infighting for the succession to Stalin that went on in the Kremlin up to that crucial point...

...author, "The End of the Communist Revolution" Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, one of the most colorful and contradictory figures in modern Russian history, has been the subject of shelf after shelf ofbooks...

...Taubman accurately sums him up: "Both true believer and cold-eyed realist, opportunistic yet principled in his own way, fearful of war while all too prone to risk it, the most unpretentious of men even as he pretended to power and glory exceeding his grasp, complicit in great evil yet also the author of much good...

...He builds his account above all on an exhaustive examination of memoirs and interviews that mostly reached the light of day after the advent of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's glasnost policy in 1985, supplemented with references to newly opened archival materials...

...Then, in rapid succession, come Khrushchev's role as boss of the whole Ukraine, his World War II record as a top political commissar, and his survival in the "snake pit" that was Stalin's entourage...

...Khrushchev's own memoirs, authentic though incomplete prior to the 1990 editions, are crucial though hardly objective...

...The book is not a work of Kremlinology in the sense of arcane extrapolations about the hierarchy of power based on obscure clues in the official press...

...Khrushchev was far better equipped with the shrewdness to win power in the Soviet order than with the sagacity to exercise it constructively...

...The book is at its best on Khrushchev's personality...

...The heart of the book covers Khrushchev's maneuvers to achieve supreme power after Stalin's death in 1953, and his leadership of the Soviet Union, especially internationally, until he hit the skids after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis...

...Like millions of Stalin's other victims, she was amnestied in 1953, but out of fear and afterward perhaps shame, Khrushchev saw her only once the rest of his life...

...The family suffered directly from Stalin's practice of keeping his subordinates in line by arresting their relatives, in this case the widow of Khrushchev's son Leonid, a fighter pilot killed in the War...

...The wife the world came to know, Nina Kukharchuk, was hardly the complaisant peasant of her public image...

...In an aside, Taubman draws the obvious parallel, in personality and style if not in their ideological guidelines, between Khrushchev and Boris N. Yeltsin...

...Sometimes a ghostly figure emerges from the shadows to become a source—like Vladimir Semichastny, the KGB head when Khrushchev was overthrown, whom the author interviewed in 1999...

...He was truly a bundle of contradictions—sensitive about his lowly origins, yet uninhibited in his boorishness...

...He has produced a fascinating tale of Kremlin infighting and international confrontation that reads so much like a novel it is hard to put down...

...This enabled the new boss to withstand the challenge of his Stalinist rivals, Georgi M. Malenkov, Vyacheslav M. Molotov and Lazar M. Kaganovich in 1957, and clear them out of his path to unbridled power...

...In the world arena he was a dangerous man, but not for the reasons often adduced abroad, as a presumed aspirant to world domination by nuclear force...

...He was genuinely outraged when he was crossed, in everything from Western resistance to his schemes for Germany, to criticisms of his agricultural ideas and the excesses of modernist artists...

...Khrushchev may have been the last convinced Communist, but in his actions and in his manner he did more than anyone else to shake the legitimacy of the Communist regime...

...There is scarcely a paragraph here on the putative leader of the opposition, Second Secretary Frol R. Kozlov...

...As the author demonstrates, the trouble was his touchiness, personal as well as national, leading him to turn embarrassments into battles, as he did at the 1960 Paris summit meeting following the U-2 affair...

...His descent from the triumph of 1961, when he banished Stalin's corpse from the Lenin mausoleum in Red Square, was astonishingly rapid...

...But none is more lucid and gripping than this definitive biography by William Taubman, a professor of political science at Amherst College...

...He is utterly spellbinding as he assembles memoir material depicting the plot to purge police chief Lavrenti P. Beria in 1953, the abortive 1957 conspiracy, and the machinations against Khrushchev himself that led to his downfall in 1964...

...He does not go into Khrushchev's removing and replacing underlings to gain control of the Party apparatus and Central Committee, just as Stalin did in the 1920s...

...Taub man's account does not give much support to the theory, long entertained by this reviewer, that Khrushchev was more of a reformer and peacemaker than his Party entourage wouldpermit, especially in the tense years between the downing of the U-2 spy plane in 1960 and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963...

...Khrushchev was a key transitional figure in the history of the Soviet system...

...Taubman started his work in the 1980s as an exchange researcher in Moscow, where he was still afraid to reveal his real interest...

...she was a tough, ambitious woman, culturally her husband's superior, and as much a Communist (though a Ukrainian...

...an accomplished intriguer yet offensively direct...

...citizen doing research at Brown University...

...There was a naïve exuberance as well as a childish petulance about him, and he used language that a respectable publication would be embarrassed to reproduce...

...What Khrushchev feared most was looking foolish, but that worry sometimes got him into deeper trouble.The West, meanwhile, often made the mistake of taking his bluff and bluster too seriously...

...For all his frictions with John F. Kennedy, Taubman shows, Khrushchev was genuinely shocked at his adversary's assassination, and he viewed Johnson as the leader of a reactionary plot to sabotage his predecessor's course toward détente...

...By the mid-1930s Khrushchev had reached the upper echelon as the Party boss of Moscow, Joseph Stalin's "pet" and, inevitably, an accomplice in the purges...

...With the sources now available, that art is obsolete...

...Instead, Taubman is able to write classic political history about the clashes of live characters, and to give color to historical personages who were not allowed to show it in their lifetimes...

...How much worse or better things would have been for Russia and the world had he never come to power, or had he survived his enemies, we will never know...

...But as Sergei N. Khrushchev explains in his own memoir, that was merely a theoretical boast about the funeral of capitalism, not a threat by his father to launch Soviet missiles...

...His fall from power and his pathetic last years wrap up the story...

...Europeans were appalled by them...

...Although his native gifts sustained him during his rise to the top," Taubman writes, "they failed him once he was there...

...History, as they say, has no subjunctive mood...

...Both had a measure of true conviction about the betterment of their own societies, both became entangled in grave international confrontations out of concern for their political flanks, and both were brought down by resistance to their headstrong leadership...

...Beneath the surface," says Taubman, "Khrushchev's efforts at de-Stalinization, awkward and erratic though they had been, had allowed a nascent civil society to take shape where Stalinism had once created a desert...

...Some of the most interesting pages are devoted to the tribulations and tragedies of Khrushchev's family...

...Taubman passes over the "We will bury you" remark of 1956 and its indelible imprint on the American perception of Khrushchev...

...The two men had risen from humble origins and needed power to legitimize themselves...

...Neither got over his sensitivities on that score, and each flaunted his instinctive rudeness...

...impulsive and boastful, yet often moody and even self-doubting...

...Taubman traces Khrushchev's trail from his birth in 1894 in the obscure southern Russian village of Kalinovka, through his youth as a worker in the eastern Ukraine, his hesitancy about the 1917 Revolution, his marginal experience in the Russian Civil War, his efforts to get a night school education in the so-called rabfaks (workers' faculties), and his rise in the organizational apparatus of the Communist Party...

...To be sure, Khrushchev was insensitive to the rancor that both his manner and his initiatives aroused among the stickin-the-muds of the Party apparatus, to the point that he failed to detect the conspiracy that ultimately toppled him from power...

...Best known of his offspring is his son Sergei, literally a rocket scientist, memoirist, and now a U.S...