In the current national climate, the notion that Washington might learn from the experience of former Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev or Mikhail Gorbachev would strike most as ludicrous. Certainly the Bush Administration consensus is that the cold war's overriding lesson was that only power really matters in international affairs. The dwindling number of Americans who even know of Khrushchev mostly recall him as the buffoon who banged his shoe at the United Nations, or the gambler whose nuclear bluff was called over Cuba. And even such liberal tribunes as the New York Times no longer question the right's claim that it was essentially American might--"Star Wars brought the Soviets to their knees!"--that forced Gorbachev into retreat and reform.

How timely, then, is the appearance of several important books that call these flawed and dangerous certitudes into question. Although they examine different periods of Soviet history, through varied lenses, they point to some common lessons of enduring relevance. Among these are the enormous difficulties of reforming a quasi-autocratic political system, the cultural as well as political obstacles to liberalizing and opening a long-isolated society, and the attendant need for more patience and subtlety in relations toward such states than Washington has usually shown. These books also invite a rethinking of the conventional wisdom on several key historical judgments. For example, in the real context of the tremendous opposition they faced, the failures of the "bumbling" Khrushchev and "fatally indecisive" Gorbachev are surely outweighed by their accomplishments. Similarly, in light of the real international opportunities that were missed--both during and after the cold war--the reigning triumphalist assessments of US foreign policy cry out for revision. It hardly needs emphasizing that, in dictatorial or autocratic political systems, leadership is of paramount importance. This certainly was so for Soviet Russia when, at the end of the 1920s, Joseph Stalin turned his country from the evolutionary path of market socialism to that of hyper-centralization and militarization via a murderous "revolution from above." So pitiless was Stalin's twenty-year purging of the Soviet political and intellectual elite, and so extensive was his cultivation of xenophobia and international confrontation, that when the tyrant finally died in 1953 the chances of liberalizing the country's domestic and foreign policy were judged to be virtually nil by most foreign observers. Party members with reformist inclinations, they argued, would inevitably be crushed by the totalitarian structures Stalin had created --the "permanent purge," in one famous description. Therefore, one of the enduring puzzles of Soviet history is how quickly these judgments were proved wrong when, shortly after Stalin's death, Khrushchev embarked on the reforms commonly known as "the thaw."

What were Khrushchev's motives? Was he seeking primarily to outflank Stalinist rivals, or to revive stagnant production, or to ease confrontation with the West? All of these explanations are well developed in the political science literature. But only a political biography could illuminate the personal, human dimension of Khrushchev's decision to follow the risky path of de-Stalinization. William Taubman subtly explores that dimension, and much else, in his comprehensive new study of the enigmatic Soviet leader, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. Drawing on a vast range of documentary and interview sources, Taubman's treatment of Khrushchev's youth and political rise shows the persistent dualities in his character and career: his yearning for education and culture, matched by an often-shocking coarseness; his ambition and opportunism, tempered by an enduring idealism; his capacity for both ruthlessness and remorse; and his schizophrenic attitude toward the towering figure of Stalin.

Taubman vividly recounts Khrushchev's advance from peasant childhood to accomplished (and well-paid) metalworker on the eve of the Russian Revolution. At the time, Khrushchev was living in Yuzkova, in Russian-dominated Eastern Ukraine, and also working as a labor activist. He later admitted that it pained him "to remember that as a worker under capitalism I'd had much better living conditions than my fellow workers living under Soviet power." Recalling Khrushchev's early trade-unionist orientation, Stalin's henchman Vyacheslav Molotov once sneered, "He was no revolutionary. It was only in 1918 that he joined the party. That's how active he was! By that time plenty of simple workers had joined. Yet this is the kind of man who later became leader of our party! It's absurd!"

Yet once Khrushchev had joined, his organizing talent and inexhaustible energy propelled him rapidly, particularly in the midst of the intraparty struggles that followed Bolshevik founder Lenin's death in 1924. Here Taubman's readers unfamiliar with Soviet history may find the going a bit rough, as such figures as Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin--and the political alternatives they represented--are difficult to distinguish. But so were they for Khrushchev, who, like other workers-cum-rising party officials, was confused by the policy debates of the late 1920s and so drawn to Stalin's simple, brutal promises to stamp out vestiges of capitalism and accelerate progress toward socialism. Still, by the time of Khrushchev's service as Moscow party boss (and Central Committee member) in the mid-to-late 1930s, he began to experience doubts about the human costs of Stalinist Communism as the purge trials and attendant terror mowed down former friends and associates. At the time, however, these doubts were pushed aside by the euphoria he felt as one of Stalin's young lieutenants who, barely fifteen years earlier, had been but a "simple worker." As Taubman writes:

What a heady feeling it must have been to rise so high so fast, to come to know Stalin himself, to sit by the great man's side in the Kremlin and at family dinners at his dacha, to think that the leader of the USSR and of world communism regarded him with respect and even affection.... Disappointed as he was in his own father, is it too much to say that Stalin seemed like a father figure to Khrushchev, one he insisted on idealizing despite increasingly powerful evidence of his flaws? "Stalin liked me," Khrushchev later insisted.

It was likely only the trauma of World War II, with its direct experience of Stalin's blundering, caprice and senseless sacrifice of millions of loyal Soviet lives (as opposed to those of suspected "traitors"), that prompted Khrushchev's first serious, though still mostly silent, reappraisal of the godlike tyrant. And, after the flush of victory and postwar reconstruction, it was apparently only during the paranoid sickness of Stalin's final years that the ever-ambitious Khrushchev resolved that, should he survive and emerge in the top leadership, things would change.

This is what began in earnest at the landmark Twentieth Party Congress of 1956, famous for Khrushchev's "secret speech" denouncing Stalin. Taubman details Khrushchev's "manic ambivalence" at this critical juncture: his mix of political and personal motives, his indignation at what the investigation of the purges revealed and his remorse over his own responsibility for the bloodletting. Khrushchev also feared the fallout of his impending parricide, yet held "a naïve faith that socialism, once purified of its Stalinist stain, would command ever more loyalty from its beneficiaries."

A political masterstroke, de-Stalinization nevertheless failed to have the desired effect upon its beneficiaries. In the Soviet satellites of Poland and Hungary, it sparked unrest and rebellion. At home, intellectuals pushed debate beyond what the party (and an angry Khrushchev, admiring yet ever suspicious of the cultural elite) could tolerate. And the economy, after an initial surge and such triumphs as Sputnik in 1957, slumped anew. Much of the blame lies with Khrushchev's belief that enthusiasm and reorganization--as seen in the ill-fated campaigns to plant corn widely and cultivate marginal "virgin lands"--were enough to get the country moving. Khrushchev himself, in words that would be echoed by Russian reformers, faulted a deeper, systemic inertia:

You'd think I, as first secretary, could change anything in this country. Like hell I can! No matter what changes I propose and carry out, everything stays the same. Russia's like a tub full of dough, you put your hand in it, down to the bottom, and think you're the master of the situation. When you pull out your hand, a little hole remains, but then, before your very eyes, the dough expands into a spongy, puffy mass. That's what Russia is like!

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