released 12 oct 03 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* William Taubmann's NIKITA KRUSCHEV is an attempt to provide a definitive biography of Nikita Sergeyich Kruschev, Stalin's controversial successor as leader of the USSR.
Taubmann's biography is thorough, tracing Kruschev's origins as a Ukrainian-born Russian who grew up under conditions of grinding poverty, rising above his origins through his cleverness and drive to become a metalworker and enter a higher social class. Had the Revolution not come along, Kruschev would have probably become a factory manager (and might well have had a happier life if he had). However, Kruschev was a young man on the make and threw his lot in with the Bolsheviks, judging that they provided him with the most opportunity for advancement.
This pattern of opportunism continued into the 1930s, when he became what he himself described as "Stalin's pet", serving the Party as a high Moscow city official to push through the construction of the Moscow subway system, and then as Party boss of the Ukraine. Though he would ever try to obscure the fact, his prominence with Stalin's regime meant that he was up to his neck in the terror, helping to send thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of innocent people off to imprisonment or the executioners. He didn't like doing it -- but he did it anyway.
He served through most of the war as a military political commissar, and then in the last years of Stalin's rule consolidated his position. After Stalin's death in 1953, Lavrenti Beria of the secret police took charge for a short time, only to be betrayed by Kruschev and his colleagues, then shot.
Kruschev's years in power are the heart of Taubmann's book, and they paint an odd picture, showing Kruschev to be energetic but often chasing off in different directions; good-natured but full of bluster and inclined, through simply peasant crudeness, to step on toes and make enemies; wanting peace while giving the impression of being warlike; and chopping away at the cult of Stalin while remaining clearly in awe of him.
Taubmann does a thorough job of portraying Kruschev, making him seem sympathetic even though there are times when he seems to need a good kick where it might do him some good. It is by no means an entirely pleasant story, not so much because of the brutalities in which Kruschev was a party, than because of the background of bureaucratic toadying and back-stabbing that runs through the narrative. Anybody who's ever worked for a big organization will find such games unpleasantly familiar -- it's sad to find out how badly people behave under such circumstances, and though Soviet Communism was an extreme example it was by no means unique or even all that unusual.
I have to say that I am impressed by all the work Taubmann did on this book, since he seems to have done a painstaking amount of scholarship. At the same time, though, I found reading KRUSCHEV to be a bit of a slog. It has about 650 pages of text, not counting footnotes and so on, which is not excessively long, but I would have been happier if it had been about 300 pages long.
I have to add that I say that about most of the biographies I read, and that I understand that a shorter and simpler biography would probably be rejected by most publishers. It certainly would not get the author much respect from his peers. Still, from the consumer's point of view I feel like I'm being given more than I really need to know, or for that matter can usefully retain. So, in sum, I have to say this is a thorough, well-researched book -- just not one which is entirely lively and smoothly-crafted reading from front to back.