Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev

Nikita Khrushchev was born in 1894 in a poor peasant village in Russia. He worked as a metalworker as a young man and married in 1914. In the 1920s, Khrushchev began advancing in the Communist Party and was eventually appointed a Party secretary. In the early 1930s, Khrushchev started working with Stalin, and in 1937, Khrushchev was appointed head of the Communist Party in Ukraine. During WWII, Khrushchev served as an intermediary between Stalin and his generals, and he returned to Moscow to advise Stalin after the war. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev eventually became the new leader of the Soviet Union, leading the Soviet Union through part of the Cold War and ushering in a less repressive era.