Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (15 April [O.S. 3 April] 1894 – 11 September 1971) was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and the Chairman of the Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. As leader of the Soviet Union, he stunned the communist world by denouncing his predecessor Joseph Stalin, embarking on a campaign of de-Stalinization, and presiding over the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Nikita Khrushchev was born in a village in western Russia on 15 April 1894. He was employed as a metal worker during his youth and was a political commissar in the Russian Civil War. Under the sponsorship of Lazar Kaganovich, Khrushchev rose through the ranks of the Soviet hierarchy. During Stalin's rule, he actively supported the Great Purge and approved thousands of arrests. In 1938, Stalin sent him to govern the Ukrainian SSR, and he continued the purges there. During the Great Patriotic War, Khrushchev was again a commissar, serving as an intermediary between Stalin and his generals. Khrushchev was present at the defense of Stalingrad, a fact he took great pride in. After the war, he returned to Ukraine before being recalled to Moscow as one of Stalin's close advisers.

On 5 March 1953, the death of Stalin triggered a power struggle in which Khrushchev ultimately emerged victorious upon consolidating his authority as First Secretary of the party's Central Committee. On 25 February 1956, at the 20th Party Congress, he delivered the "Secret Speech", which denounced Stalin's purges and ushered 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 time in office saw the tensest years of the Cold War, culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

As leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev enjoyed considerable popularity throughout the 1950s due to the successful launching of Sputnik and victorious outcomes in the Suez Crisis, the Syrian Crisis of 1957, and the 1960 U-2 incident. By the early 1960s, support for Khrushchev's leadership was significantly eroded by domestic policy failures and the prevailing perception that he had mishandled the Cuban Missile Crisis. Such developments emboldened his political rivals who quietly rose in strength and ultimately deposed him in October 1964. However, he did not suffer the deadly fate of those of previous 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, and he died the next year in his dacha.

Khrushchev was born on 15 April 1894 in Kalinovka (within what was then Dmitriyevsky Uyezd, Kursk Governorate), a Russian village in what is now Khomutovsky District, Kursk Oblast, near the present Ukrainian border. His parents, Sergei Khrushchev and Kseniya Khrushcheva, were poor Russian peasants, and had a daughter two years Nikita's junior, Irina. Sergei Khrushchev was employed in a number of positions in the Donbas area of far eastern Ukraine, working as a railwayman, as a miner, and laboring in a brick factory. Wages were much higher in the Donbas than in the Kursk region, and Sergei Khrushchev generally left his family in Kalinovka, returning when he had enough money. When Nikita was six or seven, the family moved to Yuzovka (now Donetsk) for about a year before returning to Kalinovka.

Kalinovka was a peasant village; Khrushchev's teacher, Lydia Shevchenko, later stated that she had never seen a village as poor. Nikita worked as a herdsboy from an early age. He was schooled for a total of four years, part in the village school and part under Shevchenko's tutelage in Kalinovka's state school. According to Khrushchev's memoirs, Shevchenko was a freethinker who upset the villagers by not attending church, and when her brother visited, she gave Khrushchev books which had been banned by the Imperial Government. She urged Nikita to seek further education, but family finances did not permit this.

In 1908, Sergei Khrushchev moved to the Donbas city of Yuzovka; fourteen-year-old Nikita followed later that year, while Kseniya Khrushcheva and her daughter came after. Yuzovka, which was renamed Stalino in 1924 and Donetsk in 1961, was at the heart of one of the most industrialized areas of the Russian Empire. After working briefly in other fields, Khrushchev's parents found Nikita a place as a metal fitter's apprentice. Upon completing that apprenticeship, the teenage Khrushchev was hired by a factory. He lost that job when he collected money for the families of the victims of the Lena Goldfields massacre, and was hired to mend underground equipment by a mine in nearby Ruchenkovo, where his father was the union organizer, and he helped distribute copies and organize public readings of Pravda. He later stated that he considered emigrating to the United States for better wages, but did not do so. He later recalled his working days:

I started working as soon as I learned how to walk. Until the age of fifteen, I worked as a shepherd. I tended, as the foreigners say when they use the Russian language, "the little cows," I was a sheepherder, I herded cows for a capitalist, and that was before I was fifteen. After that, I worked at a factory for a German, and I worked in a French-owned mine, I worked at a Belgian-owned chemical factory, and [now] I'm the Prime Minister of the great Soviet state. And I am in no way ashamed of my past because all work is worthy of respect. Work as such cannot be dirty, it is only conscience that can be.