This is the story of the rise and fall of one man against the background of his country's history - bloody, tumultuous, yet immensely significant - since the revolution in 1917.

Nikita Sergei Khrushchev was born in 1894, the child of peasants driven from the land by poverty. The infant Khrushchev was one of a vast family of nearly one hundred million peasants, mainly illiterate, latterly liberated from serfdom. He was a child without history, and as an infant, lucky to survive. Sixty years later, nevertheless, he was to become the dominant leader of the Soviet Empire.

In this biography Edward Crankshaw describes how this was achieved. Crankshaw provides a vivid and convincing appreciation of Khrushchev's extraordinary and contradictory character within the context of Russian history and society.

"[Khrushchev's] career is sketched and his personality analyzed in vivid, readable book by the British Kremlinologist." -Chicago Tribune