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So Far So Fast. In any year, Khrushchev was as extraordinary a dictator as the world has ever seen. Not since Alexander the Great had mankind seen a despot so willingly, so frequently, and so publicly drunk. Not since Adolf Hitler had the world known a braggart so arrogantly able to make good his own boasts. In 1957 Nikita Khrushchev did more than oversee the launching of man's first moons. He made himself undisputed and single master of Russia. Few men had traveled so far so fast.
As 1957 opened, Khrushchev and his policies were in jeopardy. His denunciation of Stalin and his proclaimed "separate roads to socialism" had resulted in rebellion in Hungary, defiance in Poland and denunciation by the world. The restless spirit of dissent seethed in Rumania, in East Germany, even in docile Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. In France and Italy, in every Western country, the Communist parties were in turmoil; everywhere veteran comrades were resigning in outrage over his brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolt. At the December 1956 Plenum of the Communist Party Central Committee in Moscow, he was conspicuously not one of the speakers.
In 1957's twelve months, Nikita Khrushchev, peasant's son and cornfield commissar scorned by the party's veteran intellectuals, disposed of all his serious rivals—at least for the time. For good measure, he turned on the Soviet Union's No. 1 soldier and war hero, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, dismissed him with an airy promise of "some job for which he is experienced and qualified." He reorganized Soviet industry, laid down the law to Soviet intellectuals, stemmed the tide of desertions from the Western Communist parties, soothed the incipient rebellion in the satellites, and got from China's Mao Tse-tung a showpiece pledge of allegiance.
Internationally, he achieved what the Czars had long desired: a foothold for Russia—however uncertain it might be—in the Middle East. He proved the foothold's reality by a war scare that set the world's nerves on edge, creating it with one brash rocket-rattling threat against Turkey, then dispelling it with one cocktail-party crack as soon as his pro-Communists had consolidated their control of Syria. More than any other man, Nikita Khrushchev dominated 1957's news and left his mark—for good or evil—on history.
Pigs & Sandhogs. Few would have picked Khrushchev as Joseph Stalin's heir. This was the muzhik from Kalinovka whom Stalin commanded to dance the gopak, the hayseed at whom Beria sneered years ago as "our beloved chicken statesman," "our potato politician." When Stalin put Nikita in charge of the Moscow party back in the '30s, Khrushchev used to don navvies' rough clothes, crawl down to visit the sandhogs tunneling out the new subway, take a hand with a pneumatic drill, and talk with the lads in the unprintable language for which, even in the Kremlin, he is famous. The palace courtiers dubbed him "Comrade Lavatory Lover" because Nikita not only insisted on equipping the Moscow metro with the world's best subway toilets, but often broke in rudely on conference speakers: "All right, all right, comrade, you have achieved this and that, but what about lavatories in your factory? How many lavatories? What is their cultural state?"