Khruschev spent all his life trying to get out of the Vozhd's shadow. Stalin made him what he was, and, until the end of his life, he ran from his legacy, while at the same time continuing to indulge in many of its ways. For a very long time Kruschev has been a walk-on character in the Stalin biographies (particularly egregiously in Volkogonov's "Autopsy of an Empire", where everyone after Stalin is a let-down). Stalin was so exceptional (and I'm not saying this as praise: rather the opposite) that everyone (including such extraordinary characters as Zhukov, Kaganovich, Bukharin, Beria, Kirov and also Khruschev) ends up looking pale by comparison.Taubman's biography does justice to its subject. It emphasizes his duality: an ignorant man who prized culture and loved to deal with artists, but could never do so without alienating them; a true man of the people (the only real manual worker to have become leader of the USSR), with simple tastes, who was yet devious beyond measure; an exceptionally intelligent person who achieved the greatest power, but who probably would have been happier as a manager of a manufacturing concern; a warm man in public, who was yet extremely distant from his family, although he loved them deeply; a man who was a teetotaler who however was perceived as a drunk; a negotiator who wanted to end the Cold War, who did much more than anyone else to almost bring about nuclear apocalypse; a loyal Party man who ended up almost dismantling the Party and betraying its rules. One could go on, and on, because nothing about Khruschev was simple.Although Taubman doesn't say so, Kruschev's strategy was similar to that used by other figures who managed to survive terrible masters. Robert Graves's Emperor Claudius comes to mind: according to Suetonius, he survived the madness of Caligula and the bloodshed of Tiberius by pretending to be a fool, a drunk and a cripple. Like Claudius, Khruschev survived Stalin's various Terrors by disguising his ambition and playing the buffoon endlessly: by appearing useful but harmless, in short. But, like Claudius, the abilities that led him to supreme power, deserted him once he achieved his goal: Claudius was easily destroyed by his cunning niece Agrippina the Younger, and her psycopath son, Nero. Similarly, Khruschev, after having disposed of such tough customers as Beria, Malenkov, Bulganin and Molotov, was brought down by a second-rater, Leonid Brezhnev, in a singularly inept coup that probably could have been easily dismantled if Khruschev had had his eye on the ball. Many of these leaders were grotesques (particularly Malenkov and Beria), and Taubman does a sterling job at presenting them like real human beings, which they also were.The story Taubman tells is exceptional, and he tells it supremely well. One feels like another guest at Khruschev's dachas, or a fly-on-the-wall at yet another Politburo meeting. The cast of secondary characters is fascinating, including, on the American side, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, and key establishment types such as the Dulles brothers, Averell Harriman, Adlai Stevenson and Bobby Kennedy. Interesting brits, notably Harold Macmillan, make their appearances, as do Conrad Adenauer, Mao Ze Dong, Zhou En Lai, Josip Broz Tito, Fidel Castro, Pandit Nehru, Sukarno, Charles de Gaulle and Walter Ulbricht. That was a time when giants walked the earth, and this is truly the story of The Man and his Era, like the dustjacket says. I was particularly interested in Andropov's role in the publication of the Khruschev memoirs in the US: appparently, as KGB chief, he could have stopped it because Khruschev's contact was actually a KGB mole, but didn't, because he wasn't just a simple spymaster but also a complex character.All the key episodes (like the infamous shoe-banging at the United Nations, the Cuban missile crisis, the several Berlin crises, the Hungary invasion, the secret speech at the end of the XX Party Congress, the launching of Sputnik and the Pasternak Nobel Prize) are told in just the right length, with all the context required for a non-specialist.From the book one emerges with the view that Khruschev was not a demented villain like Stalin and Lenin, nor a useless careerist like Brezhnev. He was rather like Gorbachev: a true believer who thought that the system he served could survive and would become even stronger if cleansed of the accretions of 35 years of dictatorship. He was also a visionary. He understood the change in the role of armies as a consequence of nuclear and high-tech weapons (he knew that large standing armies would be unnecesary and even counter-productive in the new world). He saw that the so-called Third World was the next frontier for the Cold War. He realized the USSR would have to live with Chinese and Yugoslav socialism, and that this would not necessarily weaken Moscow's power in the long term. He realized that Mao's China meant that a rapprochement with the USA was necessary in order to maintain his country's status )if Khruschev hadn't been overthrown and Kennedy hadn't been killed, it's quite possible Nixon's entente with Mao would never have happened, because it would have been pre-empted by a new Soviet-American understanding). His moving the missiles into Cuba was actually no different from the US having missiles in other countries bordering the USSR, such as Turkey. He understood that Stalinism was an illness, which he tried to cure, although he failed to notice that, to a large extent, Stalinism was encoded in the Leninist DNA, and couldn't be done away it without losing Leninism as well.He did many evil things. He was instrumental in collectivising the Ukraine, causing the worst famine in history after Mao's great leap forward. He led the purges in Ukraine in the 1930's, although he tried to protect the local culture and language from his own onslaught. He was instrumental in saving Stalingrad from the Germans, at a terrible cost. He persecuted religion in the USSR like even Stalin hadn't dared. He was a reckless gambler, and he sometimes lost sight of his bets.Yet he was courageous and, on the whole, likeable. He was probably the nicest guy that worked for Stalin, which may not be saying a lot, but it's better than being called the worst of them all (and there's plenty of competition for that spot). Judged against these (admittedly low) standards, Khruschev didn't do too badly. Taubman's book will do much to give him the place he deserves in the history of the last century.