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Vydvizhenets. Born the son of a miner in a poor Russian village on the edge of the Ukraine, Khrushchev is what the Communists call a Vydvizhenets—one who has been "pushed forward." Instead of going to school, he was put to work first as a shepherd boy, then as a child laborer in the Czar's coal mines. When the Red revolution came in 1917, he jumped eagerly into party harness. The Reds sent him to school in a Leninist Rab-Fak, one of the schools intended to prepare illiterate adults for service to Communism. Khrushchev emerged the very prototype of Soviet Man—brainwashed of the old, riveted to the new, a creature who, in Lenin's words, was divorced from history.
In the first Five-Year Plan (1928-32), Khrushchev was sent to Moscow, and attached for two years to Communism's M.I.T.: the Stalin Industrial Academy. His foot was on the ladder, for in Communist jargon, Moscow is "the forge of cadres," "the city of foremost culture." Merely to glow in Moscow is to blaze like a shooting star across the length and breadth of Russia.
Khrushchev soon became first secretary of the Moscow Oblast (region) Committee. then a member, rubbing shoulders with Malenkov and Beria, of the omnipotent Central Committee, whose secretary was Stalin himself. He bossed the excavation of Moscow's subway system. He showed an unexpected Grover Whalen-style talent in making the giant Red Square parades a permanent feature of Soviet ceremonial. Khrushchev's reward was the Order of Lenin and one of the party's toughest assignments: to stamp out the lingering embers of Ukrainian nationalism.
Embroidered Shirt. The Ukrainians. 40 million strong and proud of their own mother tongue, have a national pride that centuries of conflict—with Poles, Turks, Swedes, Germans and Russians—have not dimmed, but glorified. It was to root out just such bourgeois nonconformity that Khrushchev returned to Kiev in the fall of 1938.
Khrushchev wore an embroidered Ukrainian shirt and pretended an affection for Ukrainian art. One day he visited the Kharkov Art Center to view a local painter's panel called End of Harvesting. It showed a group of farmers with an elderly man in the center and a girl in Ukrainian dress sitting at table.
"Khorosho [fine]," said Khrushchev.
"Well," said Comrade Aksiutin, Politruk of Art Factories, "why does the girl wear Ukrainian dress? It brings up shades of nationalism . . ."
Khrushchev corrected himself. "The politruk is right; the pictures must be purged of error."
Khrushchev found greater errors in the Ukrainian Communist Party. He ordered a purge of "the enemies of the people" (local patriots), and of "all Communists who have lost their vigilance." Of 15,000 local party secretaries, 3,000 were removed—presumably shot or shipped off to Siberia. Khrushchev's reward from Joseph Stalin was the Order of the Red Banner of Labor—and a small gift package from the Ukrainian patriots. Tossed into his railway carriage one wintry day in 1939, the package exploded, killing two of Khrushchev's companions and peppering him with steel shards.