Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev Visit To America | Cold War Roadshow | Documentary Channel. Welcome to DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL - home of the best documentary films and documentary movies! Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev[a] (April 15 [O.S. April 3] 1894 – September 11, 1971) was a politician who led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964. Khrushchev was responsible for the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, for backing the progress of the early Soviet space program, and for several relatively liberal reforms in areas of domestic policy. Khrushchev's party colleagues removed him from power in 1964, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier. Khrushchev was born in the village of Kalinovka in 1894, close to the present-day border between Russia and Ukraine. He was employed as a metalworker in his youth, and during the Russian Civil War was a political commissar. With the help of Lazar Kaganovich, he worked his way up the Soviet hierarchy. He supported Joseph Stalin's purges, and approved thousands of arrests. In 1938, Stalin sent him to govern Ukraine, and he continued the purges there. During what was known in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War (Eastern Front of World War II), Khrushchev was again a commissar, serving as an intermediary between Stalin and his generals. Khrushchev was present at the bloody defense of Stalingrad, a fact he took great pride in throughout his life. After the war, he returned to Ukraine before being recalled to Moscow as one of Stalin's close advisers. In the power struggle triggered by Stalin's death in 1953, Khrushchev, after several years, emerged victorious. On February 25, 1956, at the 20th Party Congress, he delivered the "Secret Speech", denouncing Stalin's purges and ushering in a less repressive era in the Soviet Union. His domestic policies, aimed at bettering the lives of ordinary citizens, were often ineffective, especially in agriculture. Hoping eventually to rely on missiles for national defense, Khrushchev ordered major cuts in conventional forces. Despite the cuts, Khrushchev's rule saw the most tense years of the Cold War, culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Some of Khrushchev's policies were seen as erratic, particularly by his emerging rivals within the Party, who quietly rose in strength and deposed him in October 1964. He did not suffer the deadly fate of some previous losers of Soviet power struggles, and was pensioned off with an apartment in Moscow and a dacha in the countryside. His lengthy memoirs were smuggled to the West and published in part in 1970. Khrushchev died in 1971 of heart disease. Read more about "Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev Visit To America | Cold War Roadshow | Documentary Channel": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev Subscribe to Documentary Channel to be the first to receive updates on documentary films and documentary movies: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy8eAkymY43vMAtihCmfOzw Join us in our documentary channel community discussion by following documentary channel Google+ page: https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/114533443629020316644 Thanks for watching DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL - home of the best documentary films and documentary movies! #DocumentaryFilms #DocumentaryMovies #History #DocumentaryChannel Thanks for watching "Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev Visit To America | Cold War Roadshow | Documentary Channel"

• published: 06 Apr 2016
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