A vintage original 8x8 3/8 inch 1961 photo of Soviet Premier Krushchev greeted Red Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai on his arrival in Moscow.



Zhou Enlai (Simplified Chinese: 周恩来; Traditional Chinese: 周恩來; Pinyin: Zhōu Ēnlái; Wade-Giles: Chou En-lai) (March 5, 1898 – January 8, 1976), a prominent Communist Party of China leader, was Premier of the People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death in January 1976, and China's foreign minister from 1949 to 1958. Zhou was instrumental in the Communist Party's rise to power, and subsequently in the construction of the Chinese economy and reformation of Chinese society. On the international scene Zhou was a skilled and able diplomat, having advocated for peaceful co-existence and been a participant at the Geneva Conference in 1954. As a result of his moral character, he was very popular with the Chinese public, and Zhou's death brought an outpouring of support which turned out to be crucial in China's transition of power between Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping.
Contents


 Early years and education

Zhou Enlai was born in Huaian, Jiangsu Province. His family, although of the educated scholar class, was not well off. His grandfather, a minor civil servant of the Emperor, was poorly paid. His father repeatedly failed the Imperial examinations, and throughout his life would be employed in low-paying minor clerkships.

Zhou Enlai was the eldest son and eldest grandson of the Zhou family. When Enlai was still less than one year old, he was adopted by his father's youngest brother who was dying of tuberculosis. This adoption took place so that the younger brother would not die childless, a serious scandal to a traditional Confucian family of high status.

Lady Chen, his adoptive mother, began to teach him Chinese characters as soon as he could toddle. By the time he was four years old he could read and write several hundred words.

In 1907, Zhou’s birth mother died of Tuberculosis, and in the summer of 1908 Lady Chen also died. Zhou was orphaned at the age of ten, so it was arranged that he leave Huai'an and go to the city of Shenyang in Manchuria to live with his Uncle, Yikang. At the age of twelve, Zhou was enrolled in the Tung Guan model school that taught “new learning,” i.e. mathematics and natural science, as well as Chinese history, geography and literature. The students were also exposed to translations of western books, where Enlai learned about freedom, democracy and the American and French revolutions.

In 1913, at the age of fifteen, Zhou graduated from Tung Guan and in September of that year he was enrolled in the Nankai school, located in Tianjin. For the next four years he was a diligent student of this prestigious American funded missionary school. Throughout the period of his schooling China was in great turmoil. In 1911 the Xinhai Revolution of Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Qing dynasty and established the Republic of China. The outbreak of the Great War in Europe relieved the pressure from European intruders, but presented an opportunity for Japan to push its own dominance. Enlai could see that China was being ruined by foreign intervention. He shared in the wrath, the protest, and the indignation at the plight of China.

The next step in Zhou’s education was to attend university in Tokyo. His goal was to become a teacher so that he could have influence on the youth of China. But he found he could not concentrate. He could not study and his Japanese language was poor also, which lead to him unable to catch up with any study. In Nankai he had written and spoken against Japan’s military and political pressure upon China, and its inexorable slide into anarchy. He challenged his fellow students on what his generation could do to save China. Their answer was to study, to become educated in the sciences and professions. China needed elite, knowledgeable doctors, engineers, and teachers. “But why?” he asked. “If China is to disappear, what is the use of studying?”. Zhou decision to leave Japan was also partly influrence by his fellow Nankai student also studying in Japan at that time, TUNG Kwang Hsien (Chinese simplified: 童冠贤，Chinese Traditional: 童冠賢）to leave Japan.

In early May 1919, dejected and without completing his education, he left Japan. Zhou arrived in Tianjin on May 9, in time to take part in the momentous May Fourth Movement of 1919.

 Revolutionary activities
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Zhou first came to national prominence as an activist during the May Fourth Movement. He had enrolled as a student in the literature department of Nankai University, which enabled him to visit the campus, but he never attended classes. He became one of the organizers of the Tianjin Students Union, whose avowed aim was “to struggle against the warlords and against imperialism, and to save China from extinction." Zhou became the editor of the student union’s newspaper, Tianjin Student. In September, he founded the Awareness Society with twelve men and eight women. Fifteen year old Deng Yingchao, Enlai’s future wife, was one of the founding female members. (They were not married until much later, on August 8, 1925). Zhou was instrumental in the merger between the all male Tianjin Students Union and the all female Women’s Patriotic Association.

In January 1920, the police raided the printing press and arrested several members of the Awareness Society. Enlai led a group of students to protest the arrests, and was himself arrested along with 28 others. After the trial in July, they were found guilty of a minor offense and released. An attempt was made by the Comintern to induct Zhou into the Communist Party of China, but although he was studying Marxism he remained uncommitted. Instead of being selected to go to Moscow for training, he was chosen to go to France as a student organizer. Deng Yingchao was left in charge of the Awareness Society in his absence.

 French "studies" and the European years

On November 7, 1920, Zhou Enlai and 196 other Chinese students sailed from Shanghai for Marseilles, France. At Marseilles they were met by a member of the Sino-French Education Committee and boarded a train to Paris. Almost as soon as he arrived Zhou became embroiled in a wrangle between the students and the education authorities running the “work and study” program. The students were supposed to work in factories part time and attend class part time. Because of corruption and graft in the Education Committee, however, the students were not paid. As a result they simply provided cheap labour for the French factory owners and received very little education in return. Zhou wrote to newspapers back in China denouncing the committee and the corrupt government officials.

Zhou traveled to Britain in January; he applied for and was accepted as a student at Edinburgh University. But the university term didn’t start until October so he returned to France, moving in with Liu Tsingyang and Zhang Shenfu, who were setting up a Communist cell. Zhou joined the group and was entrusted with political and organizational work. There is some controversy over the date Zhou joined the Communist Party of China. For secrecy reasons members did not carry membership cards. Zhou himself wrote "autumn, 1922" at a verification carried out at the Party's Seventh Congress in 1945.

There were 2,000 Chinese students in France, some 200 each in Belgium and England and between 300 and 400 in Germany. For the next four years Zhou was the chief recruiter, organizer and coordinator of activities of the Socialist Youth League. He traveled constantly between Belgium, Germany and France, safely conveying party members through Berlin to entrain for Moscow, to be taught the art of revolution.

At first the CCP, established in July 1921 by Chen Duxiu, rejected the suggestion of the Comintern that they establish a “united front” with Sun Yat-sen’s new Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist Party), but in 1923 the CCP changed its policy. Zhou was now charged with the task of coordinating cooperation between the two vastly different political movements in Europe. He apparently did such a good job he was ordered back to China to take charge of the united front work in the Kuomintang stronghold in Guangzhou. He arrived in Hong Kong in July 1924.

 The First United Front
Zhou Enlai (middle) and his wife Deng Yingchao with American journalist Edgar Snow, approx. 1938.
Zhou Enlai (middle) and his wife Deng Yingchao with American journalist Edgar Snow, approx. 1938.

In January, 1924, Sun Yat-sen had officially proclaimed an alliance between the Kuomintang and the Communists, and a plan for a military expedition to unify China and destroy the warlords. The Whampoa Military Academy was set up in March to train officers for the armies that would march against the warlords. Russian ships unloaded crates of weapons at the Guangzhou docks. Comintern advisers from Moscow joined Sun’s entourage. In October, shortly after he arrived back from Europe, Zhou Enlai was appointed deputy-director of the political department at the Whampoa Military Academy in Guangzhou.

Zhou soon realized the Kuomintang was riddled with intrigue. The powerful right wing of the Kuomintang was bitterly opposed to the Communist alliance. Zhou was convinced that the CCP, in order to survive must have an army of its own. "The Kuomintang is a coalition of treacherous warlords" he told his friend Nie Rongzhen, recently arrived from Moscow and named a vice director of the academy. Together they set about to organize a nucleus of officer cadets who were CCP members and who would follow the principles of Marx. For a while they met no hindrance, not even from Chiang Kai-shek, the director of the academy.

Sun Yat-sen died on March 12, 1925. No sooner was Sun dead than trouble broke out in Guangzhou. A warlord named Chen Chiungming made a bid to take the city and province. The East Expedition, led by Zhou, was organized as a military offensive against Chen. Using the disciplined core of CCP cadets they met with resounding success. Zhou was promoted to head Whampoa’s martial law bureau. Zhou quickly crushed an attempted coup by another warlord within the city. Chen Chiungming once again took the field in October 1925. Once again Zhou defeated him and this time captured the important city of Shantou on the South China coast. Zhou was appointed special commissioner of Shantou and surrounding region. Zhou began to build up a party branch in Shantou whose membership he would keep secret.

On August 8, 1925, he and Deng Yingchao were finally married after a long distance courtship of nearly five years. The couple remained childless, but adopted many orphaned children of "revolutionary martyrs"; one of the more famous was future Premier Li Peng.

After Sun’s death the Kuomintang was run by a triumvirate composed of Chiang Kai-shek, Liao Zhungkai and Wang Jingwei, but in August, 1925 the left wing member, Liao Zhungkai, was murdered. Chiang Kai-shek used this murder to declare martial law and consolidate right wing control of the Nationalists. On 18 March 1926, while Mikhail Borodin, the Russian comintern advisor to the United Front, was in Shanghai. Chiang created a further incident to usurp power over the communists. The commander and crew of a Kuomintang gunboat was arrested at the Whampoa docks, See Zhongshan Warship Incident. This was followed by raids on the First Army Headquarters and Whampoa Military Academy. Altogether 65 communists were arrested, including Nie Rongzhen. A state of emergency was declared and curfews were imposed. Zhou had just returned from Shantou and was also detained for 48 hours. On his release he confronted Chiang and accused him of undermining the United Front but Chiang argued that he was only breaking up a plot by the communists. When Borodin returned from Shanghai he believed Chiang’s version and rebuked Zhou. At Chiang's request Borodin turned over a list of all the members of the CCP who were also members of the Kuomintang. The only omissions from this list were the members Zhou had secretly recruited. Chiang dismissed all the rest of the CCP officers from the First Army. Wang Jingwei, considered too sympathetic to the communists, was persuaded to leave on a “study tour” in Europe. Zhou Enlai was relieved of all his duties associated with the First United front, effectively giving complete control of the United Front to Chiang Kai-shek.

 From Shanghai to Yan'an

After the Northern Expedition began, he worked as a labour agitator. In 1926, he organized a general strike in Shanghai, opening the city to the Kuomintang. When the Kuomintang broke with the Communists, Zhou managed to escape the white terror. Zhou eventually made his way to the Jiangxi base area and gradually began to shift his loyalty away from the more orthodox, urban-focused branch of the CCP to Mao's new brand of rural revolution, and became one of the prominent members of the CCP. This transition was completed early in the Long March, when in January 1935 Zhou threw his total support to Mao in his power struggle with the 28 Bolsheviks Faction.

In the Yan'an years, Zhou was active in promoting a united anti-Japanese front. As a result, he played a major role in the Xi'an Incident, helped to secure Chiang Kai-shek's release, and negotiated the Second CCP-KMT United Front, and coining the famous phrase "Chinese should not fight Chinese but a common enemy: the invader". Zhou spent the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) as CCP ambassador to Chiang's wartime government in Chongqing and took part in the failed negotiations following World War II.

 Premiership

In 1949, with the establishment of the People's Republic of China, Zhou assumed the role of Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs. In June 1953, he made the five declarations for peace. He headed the Communist Chinese delegation to the Geneva Conference and to the Bandung Conference (1955). He survived a covert proxy assassination attempt by the nationalist Kuomintang under the government of President Truman on his way to Bandung. An American-made MK7 was planted on a charter plane Kashmir Princess scheduled for Zhou's trip. Zhou secretly changed plane but the rest of his crew of 16 people died. In 1958, the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs was passed to Chen Yi but Zhou remained Prime Minister until his death in 1976.

Zhou's first major domestic focus after becoming premier was China's economy, in a poor state after decades of war. He aimed at increased agricultural production through the even re-distribution of land. Industrial progress was also on his to-do list. He additionally initiated the first environmental reforms in China.

In 1958, Mao Zedong began the Great Leap Forward, aimed at increasing China's production levels in industry and agriculture with unrealistic targets. As a popular and practical administrator, Zhou maintained his position through the Leap. The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was a great blow to Zhou. At its late stages in 1975, he pushed for the "four modernizations" to undo the damage caused by the campaigns.
Zhou, shown here with Henry Kissinger and Mao Zedong.
Zhou, shown here with Henry Kissinger and Mao Zedong.

Known as an able diplomat, Zhou was largely responsible for the re-establishment of contacts with the West in the early 1970s. He welcomed US President Richard Nixon to China in February 1972, and signed the Shanghai Communiqué.

After discovering he had cancer, he began to pass many of his responsibilities onto Deng Xiaoping.

During the late stages of the Cultural Revolution, Zhou was the new target of Chairman Mao's and Gang of Four's political campaigns in 1975 by initiating "criticizing Song Jiang, evaluating the Water Margin", alluding to a Chinese literary work, using Zhou as an example of a political loser. In addition, the Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius campaign was also directed at Premier Zhou because he was viewed as one of the Gang's primary political opponents.

 Death and reactions
  
  
Zhou Enlai 3d.jpg

Zhou was hospitalized in 1974 for bladder cancer, but continued to conduct work from the hospital, with Deng Xiaoping as the First Deputy Premier handling most of the important State Council matters. Zhou died on the morning of January 8, 1976, 8 months before Mao Zedong. While Zhou was in critical condition Mao refused to go to the hospital to see Zhou, despite suggestions to do so by many people. Mao's defense was that he was not a doctor. Mao refused to attend Zhou's funeral. It was rumored Mao had people light fireworks after he heard of Zhou's death. In their book, Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday assert that Mao had intentionally denied Zhou treatment for his cancer while in the hospital because Mao did not want Zhou to outlive him.[1] Zhou's death brought messages of condolences from many non-aligned states that he affected during his tenure as an effective diplomat and negotiator on the world stage, and many states saw his death as a terrible loss. Zhou's body was cremated and the ashes scattered by air over hills and valleys, according to his wishes.

Inside China, Mao's helpers, the infamous Gang of Four (Jiang Qing and Co.) had seen Zhou's death as an effective step forward in their political maneuvering, as the last major challenge was now gone in their plot to seize absolute power. At Zhou's funeral, Deng Xiaoping delivered the official eulogy, but later he was forced out of politics until after Mao's death.

Because Zhou was very popular with the people, many rose in spontaneous expressions of mourning across China, which the Gang considered to be dangerous, as they feared people might use this opportunity to express hatred towards them. During the Tiananmen Incident in April 1976, party leaders including Mao, tried to supress mourning for the "Beloved Premier", which resulted in rioting. Anti-Mao and Gang of Four poetry was found on some wreaths that were laid, and all wreaths were subsequently taken down at the Monument to the People's Heroes. These actions, however, only further enraged the people. Thousands of armed worker-soldiers brutally crushed the people’s protest in Tiananmen Square, and hundreds of people were arrested. Chairman Mao blamed Deng Xiaoping for the movement and removed him from all his official positions.

Since his death, a memorial hall has been dedicated to him and his beloved wife in Tianjin, named Tianjin Zhou Enlai Deng Yingchao Memorial Hall (天津周恩來鄧穎超紀念館), and there was a statue erected in Nanjing city, where in the 1940s he was working with the Kuomintang. There was an issue of national stamps commemorating the 1 year anniversary of his death in 1977, and again in 1998 to commemorate his 100th birthday.

 Assessment

Zhou Enlai is generally regarded as a skilled negotiator, a master of policy implementation, a devoted revolutionary, and a pragmatic statesman with infinite patience and an unusual attentiveness to detail and nuance. He was also known for his tireless and dedicated work ethic. He is reputedly the last Mandarin bureaucrat in the Confucian tradition. Zhou's political behavior should be viewed in light of his political philosophy as well as his personality. To a large extent, Zhou epitomized the paradox inherent in a communist politician with traditional Chinese upbringing: at once conservative and radical, pragmatic and ideological, possessed by a belief in order and harmony as well as a conviction to rebellion and revolution.

Though a firm believer in the Communist ideal on which modern China was founded, Zhou is widely seen by many to have had a moderating influence on some of the worst excesses of Mao's regime, although he did not wield the power necessary to bring about major changes to policy. It has been suggested that he used his powers to protect some of China's oldest religious and royalist sites from the rampages of Mao's Red Guards, as well as many top-level military and government leaders going through purges.

Though criticism of Chinese leaders and their decision has become more common in recent years, very few on mainland China as well as the Chinese community at large criticize Zhou. Many Chinese youths view him as their political idol and some scholars even consider his influence on the youth as greater than Mao's.

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (Russian: Ники́та Серге́евич Хрущёв (help·info), Nikita Sergeevič Chruščiov; IPA: [nʲɪˈkʲitə sʲɪˈrgʲejɪvʲɪtɕ xruˈɕːof], in English, ['krustʃɛv], ['krustʃof] or [krus'tʃof], occasionally ['kruʃof]); surname more accurately romanized as Khrushchyov[1]; April 17 [O.S. April 5] 1894[2]–September 11, 1971) was the chief director of the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin. He was First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. He was removed from power by his party colleagues in 1964 and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev. He spent the last seven years of his life under the close supervision of the KGB.
Contents

 Early days

Nikita Khrushchev was born in the village of Kalinovka, Dmitriyev Uyezd, Kursk Guberniya, Russian Empire, now occupied by the present-day Kursk Oblast in Russia. His father was the peasant Sergei Nikanorovich Khrushchev (d. 1938 of tuberculosis); his mother was Aksinia Ivanovna Khrushcheva. He had a sister two years his junior, Irina. In 1908, his family moved to Yuzovka (now Donetsk, Ukraine). Later, since he spent much time working in Ukraine, Khrushchev gave off the impression of being Ukrainian. He supported this image by wearing Ukrainian national shirts.

Although he was apparently highly intelligent, he only received about two years of education as a child and probably only became fully literate in his late twenties or early thirties.

He was trained and worked as a joiner in various factories and mines. During World War I, Khrushchev became involved in trade union activities, and, after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, he fought in the Red Army. He became a Party member in 1918 and worked at various management and Party positions in Donbass and Kiev.

In 1931, Khrushchev was transferred to Moscow and, in 1935, he became 1st Secretary of the Moscow City Committee (Moscow Gorkom) of VKP(b). The Moscow city secretaryship was a traditional proving ground for rising stars in the party (cf Boris Yeltsin) and Khruschev apparently impressed with his leadership of the Moscow Metro works.

In 1938, he became the 1st Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, one of the most senior regional party positions.

Beginning in 1934, Khrushchev was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow, and he was a member of the Politburo beginning in 1939.

 Great Patriotic War
Khrushchev (left) at the military council of Stalingrad Front.
Khrushchev (left) at the military council of Stalingrad Front.

During the Great Patriotic War (Eastern Front of World War II, as known in Russia and several other countries), Khrushchev served as a zampolit with the equivalent rank of Lieutenant General.

In the months following the German invasion, in 1941, Khrushchev, as a local party leader, was coordinating the defense of Ukraine, but was dismissed and recalled to Moscow after surrendering Kiev. Later, he was a political commissar at the Battle of Stalingrad and was the senior political officer in the south of the Soviet Union throughout the war time period - at Kursk, entering Kiev on liberation, and in the suppression of the Bandera nationalists of the Ukrainian Nationalist Organisation, who had earlier allied with the Nazis before fighting them in Western Ukraine.

In the years leading up to 1953, Khrushchev was an ardent Stalinist, carrying out Stalin's orders with uncritical obedience; he earned the nickname "the Butcher of the Ukraine" in the late 1940s.[3]

 Rise to power
Dwight Eisenhower, Nikita Khrushchev and their wives in 1959
Dwight Eisenhower, Nikita Khrushchev and their wives in 1959

After Joseph Stalin's death in March 1953, there was a power struggle between different factions within the party. Initially Lavrenty Beria controlled much of the political realm by merging the Ministry of Internal Affairs and State security. Fearing that Beria would eventually kill them, Georgy Malenkov, Lazar Kaganovich, Vyacheslav Molotov, Nikolai Bulganin and others united under Khrushchev to denounce Beria and remove him from power. With Beria imprisoned awaiting execution (which followed in December), Malenkov was the heir apparent. Khrushchev was not nearly as powerful as he would eventually become even after his promotion. Few of the top members of the Central Committee saw the ambition lurking within him. Becoming party leader on September 7 of that year, and eventually rising above his rivals, Khrushchev's leadership marked a crucial transition for the Soviet Union. He pursued a course of reform and shocked delegates to the 20th Party Congress on 25 February 1956 by making his famous Secret Speech denouncing the "cult of personality" that surrounded Stalin (although he himself had no small part in cultivating it), and accusing Stalin of crimes committed during the Great Purges. This effectively alienated Khrushchev from the more conservative elements of the Party, but he managed to defeat what he termed the Anti-Party Group after they failed in a bid to oust him from the party leadership in 1957.

In 1958, Khrushchev replaced Bulganin as prime minister and established himself as the undisputed leader of both state and party. He became Premier of the Soviet Union on March 27, 1958. Khruschev promoted reform of the Soviet system and began to place an emphasis on the production of consumer goods rather than on heavy industry.

He sought to lower the burden of defense spending on the Soviet economy by placing a new emphasis on rocket based defense. The Soviet lead in this technology was emphasized by the success of Sputnik 1 and subsequently Yuri Gagarin's Vostok flight. However, real Soviet missile forces remained small and the price that Khruschev paid inside the Soviet system - hostility from the armed forces - was a major contribution to his eventual removal from office.

At the same time the fear of Soviet missile forces was real enough in the West - prompting then United States of America Senator John F. Kennedy to attack then United States of America Vice-President Richard M. Nixon over the missile gap in the United States Presidential election, 1960 and culminating in the stand off of the Cuban missile crisis.

Domestically Khruschev did not seek to roll back the collectivisation of agriculture but instead promoted the virgin lands campaign programme with the claim that the Soviet Union could meet and surpass western levels of agricultural production through application of modern techniques and use of new crops. Initial successes here rapidly turned sour.

In 1959, during Richard Nixon's journey to the Soviet Union, he took part in what was later known as the Kitchen Debate. Khrushchev reciprocated the visit that September, spending thirteen days in the United States. His new attitude towards the West as a rival instead of as an evil entity alienated Mao Zedong's China. The Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, too, would later be involved in a similar "cold war" triggered by the Sino-Soviet Split in 1960.

In 1961, Khrushchev approved plans proposed by East German leader Walter Ulbricht to build the Berlin Wall, thereby reinforcing the Cold War division of Germany and Europe as a whole.
Khruschev and Yuri Gagarin
Khruschev and Yuri Gagarin

 Khrushchev's personality

Khrushchev was regarded by his political enemies in the Soviet Union as boorish. He had a reputation for interrupting speakers to insult them. The Politburo accused him once of 'hare-brained scheming' — referring to his erratic policies. He regularly humiliated the Soviet nomenklatura, or ruling elite, with his gaffes. He once branded Mao, who was at odds with Khruschev ever since the denunciation of Stalin at the 1956 Congress, an "old galosh", which was translated as "old boot". In Mandarin, the word "boot" is used to describe a prostitute or immoral woman. The Soviet leader also famously condemned his Bulgarian counterpart, making xenophobic comments about the Bulgarian people as well.

Khrushchev's blunders were partially the result of his limited formal education. Although intelligent, as even his political enemies admitted after he had defeated them, and certainly cunning, he lacked knowledge and understanding of the world outside of his direct experience and often proved easy to manipulate by hucksters who knew how to appeal to his vanity and prejudices. For example, he was a supporter of Trofim Lysenko even after the Stalin years and became convinced that the Soviet Union's agricultural crises could be solved through the planting of maize (corn) on the same scale as the United States, failing to realize that the differences in climate and soil made this inadvisable.

Khrushchev repeatedly disrupted the proceedings in the United Nations General Assembly in September-October 1960 by pounding his fists on the desk and shouting in Russian. On 29 September 1960, Khrushchev twice interrupted a speech by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, removing his shoe and proceeding to bang his desk with it. The unflappable Macmillan famously commented over his shoulder to Frederick Boland, the Assembly President (Ireland), that if Mr Khrushchev wished to continue, he would like a translation.

During a debate, on October 12, over a Russian resolution decrying colonialism, he was infuriated by a statement from the rostrum by Lorenzo Sumulong. The Filipino delegate had charged the Soviets with employing a double standard, pointing to their domination of Eastern Europe as an example of the very type of colonialism their resolution criticized. According to newspaper reports, published the following day, Mr. Khrushchev thereupon pulled off his right shoe, stood up, brandishing it at the Philippine delegate on the other side of the hall and began to furiously bang the shoe on his desk. The enraged Khrushchev accused Mr. Sumulong of being "Холуй и ставлиник импиральизма", which was translated as "a jerk, a stooge and a lackey of imperialism". The Premier alternately shouted, waved a brawny right arm, shook his finger and removed his shoe a second time. The second shoe incident occurred during a speech by Francis O. Wilcox, an Assistant U.S. Secretary of State. The chaotic scene finally ended when General Assembly President Frederick Boland broke his gavel calling the meeting to order, but not before the image of Khrushchev as a hotheaded buffoon was indelibly etched into the collective memory of the international community. On another occasion, Khrushchev said in reference to capitalism, "Мы вас похороним!", translated to "We will bury you". This phrase, ambiguous both in the English language and in the Russian language, was interpreted in several ways. Later, he would refer back to the comment and state, "I once got in trouble for saying, 'We will bury you'. Of course, we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you".

 Forced retirement

Khrushchev's downfall came as a result of an apparent conspiracy among the Party bosses, irritated by his erratic policies and cantankerous behaviour, which was seen by the Party as an embarrassment on the international stage. The Communist Party accused Khrushchev of making political mistakes, such as mishandling the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and disorganizing the Soviet economy, especially in the agricultural sector.

The conspirators, led by Leonid Brezhnev, Aleksandr Shelepin and the KGB chief Vladimir Semichastny, struck in October 1964, when Khrushchev was on vacation in Pitsunda, Abkhazia. They called a special meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee and, when Khrushchev arrived on 13 October, voted to remove him from his positions in the Party and in the Soviet government. A special meeting of the Central Committee was hastily convened the next day and approved the decisions of the Presidium without debate. On 15 October 1964, the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet accepted Khrushchev's resignation as the Premier of the Soviet Union.

Following his ousting, Khrushchev spent the rest of his life as a pensioner, living in quiet retirement in Moscow. He remained a member of the Central Committee until 1966. For the rest of his life, he was closely watched by the KGB, but managed to dictate his memoirs and smuggle them to the West. He died at his home in Moscow on 11 September 1971 and is buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow, Russia, having been denied a state funeral and interment in the Kremlin wall.

 Key political actions
Khrushchev embracing Cuban President Fidel Castro
Khrushchev embracing Cuban President Fidel Castro
Khrushchev meeting U.S. president John F. Kennedy in 1961
Khrushchev meeting U.S. president John F. Kennedy in 1961

    * In his Secret Speech, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for his personality cult and his regime for "violation of Leninist norms of legality", marking the onset of the Khrushchev Thaw.
    * Dissolved the Cominform organization and reconciled with Josip Broz Tito, which ended the Informbiro period in the history of Yugoslavia.
    * Established the Warsaw Pact in 1955 in response to the formation of NATO.
    * Ordered the 1956 Soviet military intervention in Hungary (see Hungarian Revolution of 1956).
    * Ceded Crimea from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR in 1955.
    * Provided support for Egypt against the West during the 1956 Suez Crisis.
    * Promoted the doctrine of "Peaceful co-existence" in the foreign policy, accompanied by the slogan "To catch up and overtake the West" in internal policy.
    * Triggered the Sino-Soviet Split through talks with the U.S. and a refusal to support the Chinese nuclear program.
    * Initiated the Soviet space program that launched Sputnik I and Yuri Gagarin, getting a head start in the space race. Participated in negotiations with U.S. President John F. Kennedy for a joint moon program, negotiations that ended when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
    * Cancelled a summit meeting over the Gary Powers U-2 incident.
    * Met with Eisenhower in Iowa.
    * Initiated the deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba, which led to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
    * Approved East Germany's construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, after the West ignored his request that West Berlin be incorporated into a neutral, demilitarized "free city".

 Key economic actions

    * Second wave of the reclamation of virgin and abandoned lands (see Virgin Lands Campaign).
    * Introduction of sovnarkhozes, (Councils of People's Economy), regional organizations, in an attempt to combat the centralization and departmentalism of the ministries
    * Reorganization of agriculture, with preference given to sovkhozes (state farms), including conversion of kolkhozes into sovkhozes, introduction of maize (earning him the sobriquet kukuruznik, "the maize enthusiast").
    * Coping with housing crisis by quickly building millions of apartments according to simplified floor plans, dubbed khrushchovkas.
    * Created a minimum wage in 1956.
    * Redenomination of the ruble 10:1 in 1961.

 Legacy
Khrushchev's grave at the Novodevichy Cemetery was designed by Ernst Neizvestny, a sculptor he had denounced for promoting "degenerate art". It was made out of black and white stone to suggest that Khrushchev was both a good and a bad ruler.
Khrushchev's grave at the Novodevichy Cemetery was designed by Ernst Neizvestny, a sculptor he had denounced for promoting "degenerate art". It was made out of black and white stone to suggest that Khrushchev was both a good and a bad ruler.
Khrushchev sculpture at Nixon Library
Khrushchev sculpture at Nixon Library

On the positive side, he was admired for his efficiency and for maintaining an economy which, during the 1950s and 1960s, had growth rates higher than most Western countries, contrasted with the stagnation beginning with his successors. He is renowned for his liberalisation policies, whose results began with the widespread exoneration of political sentences.

With Khrushchev's amnesty program, former political prisoners and their surviving relatives could now live a normal life without the infamous "wolf ticket".

Khrushchev placed more emphasis on the production of consumer goods and housing instead of heavy industry, precipitating a rapid rise in living standards.

The arts benefited from this environment of liberalisation, where works like Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich created an attitude of dissent that would escalate during the subsequent Brezhnev-Kosygin era.

He also allowed Eastern Europe to have a greater freedom of action in their domestic and external affairs, without the intervention of the Soviet Union.

His de-Stalinization had a huge impact on young Communists of the day. Khrushchev encouraged more liberal communist leaders to replace hard-line Stalinists throughout the Eastern bloc. Alexander Dubček, who became the leader of Czechoslovakia in January 1968, accelerated the process of liberalisation in his own country with his Prague Spring programme. Mikhail Gorbachev, who became the Soviet Union's leader in 1985, was inspired by it and it became evident with his policies of glasnost and perestroika. Khrushchev is sometimes cited as "the last great reformer" among Soviet leaders before Gorbachev.

On the negative side, he was criticized for his ruthless crackdown of the 1956 revolution in Hungary, even though he and Zhukov were pushing against intervention until Hungary's declaration of withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. He encouraged the East German authorities to set up the notorious Berlin Wall in August 1961. He had very poor diplomatic skills, giving him the reputation of being a rude, uncivilized peasant in the West and as an irresponsible clown in his own country. He renewed persecutions against the Russian Orthodox Church, publicly promising to show the "last priest" on Soviet television. Between 1960 and 1962, as many as 30 percent of churches were destroyed, with the number of monasteries falling by a quarter.[4]

His administration, although efficient, were also known to be erratic since he disbanded a large number of Stalinist-era agencies. He made a dangerous gamble in 1962 over Cuba, which almost made a Third World War inevitable. Agriculture barely kept up with population growth, as bad harvests mixed with good ones, culminating with a disastrous harvest in 1963, due to weather. All this damaged his prestige after 1962 and was enough for the Central Committee, Khrushchev's critical base of support, to take action against him. His right-hand man, Leonid Brezhnev, led the bloodless coup.

Many dissidents tended to view the Khrushchev era with nostalgia as his successors began discrediting or backtracking on his liberal reforms.

 Personal life

Khrushchev married Yefrosinia Pisareva (1896-1921) in 1914. A year later their daughter Yulia (d. 1981) was born, and they had a son, Leonid, three days after the October Revolution. Yefrosinia died in 1921 of hunger, exhaustion and typhus during the famine following the Russian Civil War. In 1922 Khrushchev married a girl of 17 named Marusia but, as she attended to her young daughter and neglected her stepchildren, Khrushchev's mother soon convinced him to leave her.[5] His third wife was Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk (1900-1984), with whom he began living soon afterward (though the marriage was not officially registered until the late 1960s);[5] besides Sergei, they had two daughters, Rada (born 1929) and Lena (1937-1972).

Khrushchev's eldest son Leonid died in 1943 during the Great Patriotic War. His younger son Sergei emigrated to the United States and is now an American citizen and a Professor at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. He often speaks to American audiences to share his memories of the "other" side of the Cold War.

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On Jun-04-07 at 23:06:15 PDT, seller added the following information: