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.

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