- Paperback: 896 pages
- Publisher: Free Press; New edition edition (6 Jun 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0743275640
- ISBN-13: 978-0743275644
- Product Dimensions: 13.4 x 19.7 x 4.7 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 259,704 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
A portrait unlikely to be surpassed any time soon in either richness or complexity....shines with mastery and authority. --Leon Aron
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Leon Aron, New York Times
'A portrait unlikely to be surpassed any time soon either in richness or complexity . . . [A] monumental biography'
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I was encouraged to buy this book by the reviews it's been getting and was not disappointed. As much about Soviet Russia, in its most important decades, as about Khrushchev himself, it is a wonderful, sweeping and gripping biography, full of pace and intrigue. Taubman has apparently spent over a decade researching and writing it, and it shows! A fantastic achievement and surely one of the best books ever written about the Soviet Union.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
After having read Montefiori's biography on Stalin I started wondering how Khrushchev was able to survive Stalin's rule for three decades without being sent off to Siberia or shot as an alleged "enemy of the people" or "spy"? And how much did he change the course of history in the Soviet Union when he got rid of his rivals after Stalin's death and became his own man? And how was the decisionmaking done in the politbureau?
By reading this book I got answers to all my questions and many others as well. It is amazing that so many details of those years in the secretive Communist state are now available to historians and journalists. And Taubman has really made a great researching effort and managed to write the ultimate biography in my view. He deals with all the major conflicts of that time and give great insight into Khrushchev's deliberations and decisions - with a wide range of sources including in depth interviews with his son Sergei.
This book is enlightening and entertaining.
By reading this book I got answers to all my questions and many others as well. It is amazing that so many details of those years in the secretive Communist state are now available to historians and journalists. And Taubman has really made a great researching effort and managed to write the ultimate biography in my view. He deals with all the major conflicts of that time and give great insight into Khrushchev's deliberations and decisions - with a wide range of sources including in depth interviews with his son Sergei.
This book is enlightening and entertaining.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This book is so readable that one barely notices as the 650-odd pages go by. While it is an excellent narrative account there are clear themes within so that it does not feel like just one thing after another. Taubman also, uses another technique that works well, by analysing the outcome of a narrative before recounting the detail. In fact, the whole book starts with Khrushchev's own downfall! This does not spoil in any way the reading experience but helps one to retain the facts by giving a higher priority and structure to their meaning.
The author's use of quotes is masterly and almost gives the reader a feeling of being an eye-witness to the events. After reading Taubman's Khrushchev, one can no longer view that period of Soviet history after Stalin as a rather murky, grey haze.
Taubman is damning of Khrushchev's weaknesses (his lack of education, arrogance, self-centredness, impulsiveness, foul-mouthed bad-temperedness and cruelty, to name but a few), being so merciless that it is hard to see how the biographer can remain, in any way, sympathetic toward his subject. But what Taubman is really doing here is exposing Khrushchev's very humanity to the reader, a humanity that is full of contradictions and vulnerabilities. He can ridicule Soviet writers and artists, who have flowered under his own de-Stalinisation programme, with one breath, then later regret his mistake and apologise. This very humanity makes Khrushchev, as a personality, both appealing to the reader and contrasts starkly with his grey contemporaries in the rest of the Soviet elite. Indeed, even Khrushchev declares that if he had nothing left but to beg on the streets of Moscow, he would, at least, get enough to live on, while his fellow bureaucrats, in the same position, would likely get nothing!
Overall, Taubman credits Khrushchev with taking the risk of denouncing Stalin, and by doing so, paving the way to the future freedom of the Soviet people from tyranny. Unfortunately, for Khrushchev, this came far too late to save himself from less-reconstructed Stalinists like Leonid Brezhnev.
He was eventually toppled in a Politburo palace coup and the dark waves of Stalinism closed over his head, and those of the Soviet people, and stayed there, with a vengeance, for another generation. In the meantime, Khrushchev became, officially, a `non-person' as the soviet system could only tolerate the grey! The last part of the book is particularly moving - so don't by any means give up once he falls from power! It recounts the final, sad years of Khrushchev's life with immense sensitivity.
A great biography should always leave one feeling sad that it's finished and with a tear in one's eye for its subject. This one certainly did that for me.
The author's use of quotes is masterly and almost gives the reader a feeling of being an eye-witness to the events. After reading Taubman's Khrushchev, one can no longer view that period of Soviet history after Stalin as a rather murky, grey haze.
Taubman is damning of Khrushchev's weaknesses (his lack of education, arrogance, self-centredness, impulsiveness, foul-mouthed bad-temperedness and cruelty, to name but a few), being so merciless that it is hard to see how the biographer can remain, in any way, sympathetic toward his subject. But what Taubman is really doing here is exposing Khrushchev's very humanity to the reader, a humanity that is full of contradictions and vulnerabilities. He can ridicule Soviet writers and artists, who have flowered under his own de-Stalinisation programme, with one breath, then later regret his mistake and apologise. This very humanity makes Khrushchev, as a personality, both appealing to the reader and contrasts starkly with his grey contemporaries in the rest of the Soviet elite. Indeed, even Khrushchev declares that if he had nothing left but to beg on the streets of Moscow, he would, at least, get enough to live on, while his fellow bureaucrats, in the same position, would likely get nothing!
Overall, Taubman credits Khrushchev with taking the risk of denouncing Stalin, and by doing so, paving the way to the future freedom of the Soviet people from tyranny. Unfortunately, for Khrushchev, this came far too late to save himself from less-reconstructed Stalinists like Leonid Brezhnev.
He was eventually toppled in a Politburo palace coup and the dark waves of Stalinism closed over his head, and those of the Soviet people, and stayed there, with a vengeance, for another generation. In the meantime, Khrushchev became, officially, a `non-person' as the soviet system could only tolerate the grey! The last part of the book is particularly moving - so don't by any means give up once he falls from power! It recounts the final, sad years of Khrushchev's life with immense sensitivity.
A great biography should always leave one feeling sad that it's finished and with a tear in one's eye for its subject. This one certainly did that for me.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Excellent for A2 Historical Enquiry option for Khrushchev
I bought this on advice from my History Teacher and it has proved invaluable for my research into the impact of Khrushchev on the modernisation of Russia. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Peter Davis
The definitive account of Stalin's successor
Nikita Khruschev is one of the most significant figures of the 20th century. Alone amongst Stalin's successors he was prepared to denounce his predecessor's excesses and attempt... Read more
Published 8 months ago by paulinprague
"Complicit in great evil,yet also the author of much good."
There is a case to be made out that Khruchshev, of all the Soviet leaders, was the most complex and the most interesting one, crude, boastful, insecure, volatile, blustering and... Read more
Published 22 months ago by Ralph Blumenau
Mediocre biography of Khrushchev
William Taubman's biography of N.S. Khrushchev won the American prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for best biography. Read more
Published on 11 May 2009 by M. A. Krul
He's off Stalin's Christmas card list!
When I was growing up in the late 50s/early 60s Khrushchev was the West's bogey man. I remember my father being distinctly anxious at the time of the Cuban missile crisis; I only... Read more
Published on 31 Mar 2008 by Dog trainer (failed)
Well deserved Pulitzer prize winner
This is a splendidly detailed and expertly researched biography, while still being eminently readable. Read more
Published on 31 May 2007 by John Hopper
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