Nikita Khrushchev
person · earth
First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 and head of government from 1958 until he was removed in October 1964. He is the author of most of the period's deliberate risk-taking: the Berlin ultimatum of 1958, the decision to wall the city in 1961, and the deployment of missiles to Cuba in 1962 under the codename Anadyr. His reasoning in the Cuban case is still argued over and probably had several strands at once — protecting a new revolutionary ally from invasion, answering American missiles already deployed in Turkey and Italy, and correcting a strategic imbalance that was much worse than Western publics believed, since the Soviet intercontinental force at that moment was small. He also ended the Cuban confrontation by public radio announcement on 28 October, accepting a settlement his own colleagues regarded as humiliating, and the episode contributed to his removal two years later. Nothing in this Journey is a better illustration of how differently the same crisis looks from the two capitals.
A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.
Read in · 1
Timeline
No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.
Connections · 1
- The Cuban missile crisisparticipated_in
Assembled narrative · 1
Assembled from 20 blocks · 1 evidence · 10 related
- Story
- First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 and head of government from 1958 until he was removed in October 1964. He is the author of most of the period's deliberate risk-taking: the Berlin ultimatum of 1958, the decision to wall the city in 1961, and the deployment of missiles to Cuba in 1962 under the codename Anadyr. His reasoning in the Cuban case is still argued over and probably had several strands at once — protecting a new revolutionary ally from invasion, answering American missiles already deployed in Turkey and Italy, and correcting a strategic imbalance that was much worse than Western publics believed, since the Soviet intercontinental force at that moment was small. He also ended the Cuban confrontation by public radio announcement on 28 October, accepting a settlement his own colleagues regarded as humiliating, and the episode contributed to his removal two years later. Nothing in this Journey is a better illustration of how differently the same crisis looks from the two capitals.
- Knowledge
- Nikita Khrushchev
- The Cuban missile crisis
- Connections
- The Cuban missile crisis
- The Cuban missile crisis
- The Washington–Moscow Direct Communications Link
- John F. Kennedy
- Nikita Khrushchev
- A U-2 photographs missile construction in western Cuba
- Cuba
- The San Cristóbal medium-range missile sites
- John F. Kennedy
- Nikita Khrushchev
- The Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft
- The B-59 submarine incident
- Evidence
- Named as the principal declassified-document collection behind this pack's account of the crisis, the B-59 submarine incident and the later disclosures about tactical warheads on the island. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted — nsarchive.gwu.edu is blocked by the environment's egress proxy. Everything this pack says about the crisis is from standing knowledge of the published historiography, and the degree of documentary support for the B-59 account in particular is not established here.
Observed changes · 0
No public Signals are attached to this object. Signals show what changed and when it was observed — never a direction or a rank.
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/atlas?object=PERSON_NIKITA_KHRUSHCHEV&experience=PERSON_NIKITA_KHRUSHCHEV