Chapter 6 Summary

Khrushchev doubts he has the experience and qualifications to head the Ukrainian party organization and feels awkward among people whose language he has not mastered. Stalin dispatches him nonetheless in January 1938. Ukraine is second only to Russia itself in its importance to the USSR, and from the time of Lenin, Ukrainians enjoy cultural freedom and native leaders. In 1925 however, Stalin sends the antagonistic Kaganovich to head the party. Khrushchev arrives only after additional failures, and inside six months replaces all party, government, and military leaders save one. Khrushchev approves NKVD arrests, including the mastermind of an assassination plot against him. By 1939, even Stalin sometimes admits innocent people are being arrested by an out-of-control NKVD. At the Fourteenth Ukrainian Party Congress, Khrushchev demands a balance between unmasking and destroying of enemies of the people and the struggle against false slanderers.

Stalin warns Khrushchev to...