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Dancing the Gopak. Khrushchev is of peasant stock, forthright and outgoing, but at the same time full of wile and guile. Before the revolution he was remembered in his village as an accomplished performer on the Ukrainian flute, the town's best dancer of the gopak (hearing of this, Stalin once ordered him to dance the gopak; he did), and a prodigious drinker of yorsh (a potent mass boilermaker made of six pints of beer to iV pints of vodka). Born in a reed-and-mud hut, the son of a miner, he had taught himself to read, worked as a pipe fitter. In bell-bottomed pants and a grey wool cap, Sunday costume of the Donets worker of his day, he was often seen around the taverns, downing yorsh and saying: "Beer's all right for the Germans, but vodka's the stuff for Russians."
He joined the Red army and fought in the Ukraine during the 1918-20 Civil War. He caught the eye of Party Worker Kaganovich, and his career began, first as a minor party secretary at Stalino, then in Kiev. When Kaganovich was assigned to supervise the building of the Moscow subway, he brought in the untutored young tough from the Donets to watchdog the workers. Khrushchev got into the Moscow city party organization in 1931, and when Stalin started liquidating the party leaders Khrushchev quickly put himself on the road to power with a whole string of speeches condemning the fingered Communists as a ''pack of murderers and scoundrels" (1936), "a warning to all who think of raising a hand against our Stalin" (1937)> "a victorious crushing of these Fascist enemies" (1939).
Kaganovich introduced his protege to the top Kremlin big shots, and Khrushchev, who had wit and a fund of droll peasant sayings, and could laugh with his hands on his hips at the boss's mordant quips, was soon a regular visitor at the dacha Stalin kept for his fun-loving consort Roza Kaganovich, Lazar's sister. Khrushchev was a good deal more useful to Stalin than many of his Kremlin dummies. Twice Stalin sent him into the Ukraine to deal with troublesome peasants and bourgeois nationalists. Nikita, dressed in a Ukrainian shirt and cloth cap, deported scores of thousands of peasants to Siberia, dismissed hundreds of Ukrainian party members. It was while on one of these assignments that he struck up an acquaintanceship with Colonel Ivan Serov, NKVD expert in genocide.
Khrushchev's Stalinist guilt was as great as that of any other Politburocrat, if not greater, but in the eyes of the Moscow party hierarchy this did not matter so much because his victims had not been members of their families, but peasants and Ukrainians. Besides, he had a quality that could be put to great use at this moment. During World War II a Communist journalist, who had seen him scrambling over Kiev's rubble-filled Kreshchatik Street ahead of his entourage of generals and party officials, talking fast with his hands to everybody he met, put the quality in a few words: "He was the first Soviet leader I had ever seen walking among the people. It was obvious that they liked him."