The black farce of the Khrushchev years.(History)

HOW DOES ONE recognise psychotic regimes? Surprisingly, no matter where they are swung along the left-to-right spectrum, the signs are amazingly consistent. The military march like marionettes, oversized statues line unnaturally large public squares, the bureaucracy is faceless, mediocrities rise to the top posts by kowtowing, one half of the population are recruited to spy on the other half, the press is muzzled and prison camps overflow. The principled and the foolhardy are always the first to vanish.

If there is one figure who exemplifies the tragedy of Russia--that great lumbering giant whose footfalls shook the earth it must surely be Nikita Khrushchev, who is the subject of the splendid 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by William Taubman. The book is a spellbinding act of exhaustive forensic research, deft psychological penetration and graceful writing.

Khrushchev's life, Taubman tells us, is the mirror held up to the Soviet age as a whole: revolution, civil war, collectivisation, industrialisation, terror, world war, cold war, late Stalinism--and post-Stalinism. Khrushchev was there for all of it: from a hamlet of blackened one-room huts and woven hark shoes to a centrally heated five-room apartment in Moscow and his clumsy brinkmanship with some taller and better looking chaps--the Kennedys--in 1962. (The latter event was examined with equivalent forensic skill in a recent biography: John F. Kennedy: An Unfinished Life 1917-1963, by Robert Dallek.)

Excessive record keeping was another pathology of psychotic regimes, and Taubman has consulted archives which have increasingly become accessible--albeit in a desultory fashion, as Anthony Beaver pointed out in his book Stalingrad--since Gorbachev embarked on his policy of glasnost (openness). Tanbman finds he must agree with earlier biographers who found it impossible to take Khrushchev's own estimation of himself seriously--his capacity for self-delusion was immense, as was his delusion that the regime he rose within had an end that would transcend its means. Here Khrushchev was not alone. Those that survived the various wars, were not purged by Stalin's henchmen, and did not starve in the denuded countryside, still looked to a regime which they believed promised a fairer, better life for all. The poisonous machinations at the heart of this regime do not diminish the efforts of the millions of unfortunates who toiled diligently and selflessly towards this phantom goal.

Khrushchev was born in Kalinovka, west of Kursk in the Ukraine in 1894, but when he was fourteen his father and mother moved to Yuzovka, where his father found work in the mines. Khrushchev later recalled: "It seemed to me that Karl Marx had actually been at the mines ... he had based his laws on what he observed of our lives." Taubman suggested that "living and working conditions in Yuzovka were the stuff of which anticapitalist tracts were made". Given the harsh conditions of life in Kalinovka and Yuzovka, it is not surprising that Khrushchev eventually embraced the revolution. Communism was a secular religion, which "in Khrushchev's understanding of it, boiled down to believing in a better life for ordinary men and women".

Ironically, Yuzovka, while sounding Russian, was founded in 1869 by a Welshman, John Hughes, whose firm had contracted with the Tsarist government to build an ironworks and manufacture railroad rails.

Khrushchev joined the youths who chipped away the slag from inside the mine boilers, then he became a fitter. "A fitter is to metals what a carpenter is to wood," he said years later, when asked why he chose it. "A fitter assembles all the parts and breathes life into the whole machine so that it begins to work."