Becoming a Party Apparatchik, 1894–1929

Nikita Khrushchev was typical of the radicalised workers of his generation. He was born on 15 April 1894 in the village of Kalinovka, situated some way to the west of the Russian town of Kursk but scarcely 10 miles from what would become, as the Russian Empire disintegrated, the border with Ukraine. Owing to a clerical error when the Russian calendar was changed on 1 February 1918, his birthdate was recorded as 17 April and that is the date which he celebrated. The Khrushchev family home was primitive, an earth floor, an area where the livestock were brought in and a stove without a chimney. “When the fire was burning and the food was being cooked, you could not stay inside; the smoke went out the door”, he recalled. Kalinovka was big enough to have a school run by the local administrative council but Khrushchev was frequently absent from school because he was needed in the fields - one summer he joined his mother and father in working on the estate of a wealthy local landowner, Khrushchev being put in charge of the oxen team used for ploughing. However, like so many peasants of that era, Khrushchev’s father supplemented his income with migrant work in the growing network of mines and ironworks on the River Donets, the Donets Basin or Donbas.