Nikita Khrushchev

Khrushchev and Kennedy at the Vienna Summit in 1961.

Nikita Khruschev (1894 - 1971) became dictator over the Soviet Union when Joseph Stalin died in 1953. Khruschev denounced Stalin as soon as he died and tried to purge all memory of Stalin (“destalinization”). Khruschev repressed a freedom movement in Hungary in October 1956 and executed the Hungarian leader Imre Nagy. Khruschev replaced him with a pro-Soviet puppet. In 1960 Khruschev stopped sharing atomic bomb secrets with China, and later there was a little violence along their long border. He also ordered the building of the Berlin Wall in 1962.

Khrushchev met with President Kennedy during Kennedy's first year in office at the Vienne Summit of 1961. Journalist James Reston wrote afterward, "Kennedy went there shortly after his spectacular blunders at the Bay of Pigs, and was savaged by Khrushchev.... I had an hour alone with President Kennedy immediately after his last meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna at that time," Reston reported. "Khrushchev had assumed, Kennedy said, that any American President who invaded Cuba without adequate preparation was inexperienced, and any president who then didn't use force to see the invasion through was weak. Kennedy admitted Khrushchev's logic on both points." Within one year Khrushchev tested Kennedy's resolve in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In 1964 a group led by Leonid Brezhnev arranged to strip him of power. The group persuaded the Politburo, which governed the Communist Party, to replace Khruschev with Brezhnev. Khruschev then lived out the remainder of his life under the watch of the Soviet secert police known as the KGB. He managed to smuggle out his memoirs for publication in the West.

External link

• Gianni Agnelli quoted on Khruschev, 11 May 2003.