Khrushchev : the man and his era / William Taubman.

Maps on lining papers.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The fall : October 1964 -- Kalinovka's own : 1894-1908 -- Making it as ametalworker : 1908-1917 -- To be or not to be an apparatchik : 1918-1929 -- Stalin's pet : 1929-1937 -- Stalin's viceroy : 1938-1941 -- Khrushchev at war : 1941-1944 -- Ukrainian viceroy again : 1944-1949 -- The heir nonapparent : 1949-1953 -- Almost triumphant : 1953-1955 -- From the secret speech to the Hungarian Revolution : 1956 -- The jaws of victory : 1956-1957 -- The wider world : 1917-1957 -- Alone at the top : 1957-1960 -- The Berlin crisis and the American trip : 1958-1959 -- From the U-2 to the UN shoe : April-September 1960 -- Khrushchev andKennedy : 1960-1961 -- "A Communist society will be just about built by 1980" :1961-1962 -- The Cuban cure-all : 1962 -- The unraveling : 1962-1964 -- After the fall : 1964-1971.

"Remembered by many as the Soviet leader who banged his shoe at the United Nations, Nikita Khrushchev was in fact one of the most complex and important political figures of the twentieth century. Complicit in terrible Stalinist crimes, he managed to retain his humanity. His daring attempt to reform Communism - by denouncing Stalin and releasing and rehabilitating millions of his victims - prepared the ground for its eventual collapse.

His awkward efforts to ease the Cold War triggered its most dangerous crises in Berlin and Cuba. The ruler of the Soviet Union during the first decade after Stalin's death, Khrushchev left his contradictory stamp on his country and the world. More than that, his life and career hold up a mirror to the Soviet age as a whole: revolution, civil war, famine, collectivization, industrialization, terror, world war, cold war, Stalinism, post-Stalinism.".