The Whole Shoe-Bang

The further Soviet Communism recedes into history, the more bewildering the whole experiment appears. Portentously claiming to be changing human nature, the Soviet Union and its satellites in fact were a mechanism for self-impoverishment, political malfunctioning, and secret-police brutality. How could intelligent people have collaborated in this manmade disaster maintained in the face of reality itself?

Lenin and Stalin had the power to deceive the masses and compel obedience through terror. Their immediate successor is the subject of this important new biography: Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, in many ways a more complex character than either of the two calculating mass- murderers who had put Communism into place. In the Cold War years between 1953 and 1964, he kept the Soviet system going. Disillusioned—after his downfall—about having dedicated his life to the cause of the Soviet Union, he

About the Author

David Pryce-Jones

David Pryce-Jones (1936–2025) was a British author and commentator and served as a senior editor of National Review.

The further Soviet Communism recedes into history, the more bewildering the whole experiment appears. Portentously claiming to be changing human nature, the Soviet Union and its satellites in fact were a mechanism for self-impoverishment, political malfunctioning, and secret-police brutality. How could intelligent people have collaborated in this manmade disaster maintained in the face of reality itself?

Lenin and Stalin had the power to deceive the masses and compel obedience through terror. Their immediate successor is the subject of this important new biography: Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, in many ways a more complex character than either of the two calculating mass- murderers who had put Communism into place. In the Cold War years between 1953 and 1964, he kept the Soviet system going. Disillusioned—after his downfall—about having dedicated his life to the cause of the Soviet Union, he