Kruschev: The Man and His Era

This volume, with its brisk, enjoyable narrative, succeeds in every sense: sweep, depth, liveliness, color, tempo. Each chapter shines with mastery and authority. A conscientious biography of a worthy subject cannot help being a portrait of the times, and Taubman's book fully lives up to the ''and his era'' of the subtitle. It is a multifaceted study of the key political and economic forces of the first 47 years -- almost two-thirds of the total -- of the Soviet civilization ... Taubman provides a number of explanations, all plausible and helpful, as clues to Khrushchev's de-Stalinizing impulse, but characteristically he respects the reader and refrains from ex cathedra pronouncements. This is as it should be ... In the end, it is hard to summarize this man better than Taubman does: 'complicit in great evil yet also the author of much good.'

Taubman's book is by far the best and most thorough contribution to understanding Khrushchev's personality and politics ever written, but he is not always as sure-footed in discussing more recent political phenomena ... More fundamentally, Taubman is misleading when, citing as his source an interview he conducted with a leading Russian pollster, he says that 'the only two periods of the 20th century that Russians evaluate positively are those associated with the last tsar, Nicholas II, and Nikita Khrushchev'. The point about such surveys is that they reflect changing views of the present ...

The great achievement of Taubman's book is to offer a psychological portrait of Khrushchev, at once highly critical and deeply sympathetic, that captures this mixture. No other work has brought home so vividly just how extraordinary a figure Khrushchev was in the gallery of modern rulers ... told grippingly, with consistently good judgment and a feeling for telling detail. We are given a portrait of rare penetration ... Still, there remains some irreducible mystery in the emergence of this gaudy butterfly from the drabbest chrysalis. It is no fault of Taubman's that he seems stumped by it ... Taubman has made good use of the abundant, if highly selective, official reports and transcripts and participant recollections that have been published in Russia over the past decade. But he has not enjoyed much direct access to the archives. He was forced to rely heavily on interviews and worked in close collaboration with Khrushchev's family; the shape of his book is thus determined in considerable measure by these sources ... But there is a further reason why Taubman's book, for all its merits as a biography, is skewed as a history ... That lies in its starting point, as Taubman candidly describes it. The original concern with Khrushchev's U.S. policies has been submerged but not suppressed by the subsequent turn toward his 'life and times'...