"The support given by United States rulers is rather in the nature of the support a rope gives a hanged man." These were words once uttered from the mouth of the Soviet Union's most ambitious and successful ruler, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. Khrushchev was a man that took over power in the Soviet Union very soon after Stalin's death; despite his overt criticism of the United States, he was the first ruler to actually believe that the West and the Soviet Union could get along peacefully. Despite being ousted from power by some of his most trusted followers, Khrushchev was perhaps the reason why the Russians and the Americans get along as well as they do today. His "backward" thinking started a new era for Communism; he led them to glory that was only deserving of the Soviet Union.
             Khrushchev was born into a very poor family located in Kalinovka, near the village of Kursk in southwestern Russia. His grandfather had worked as a serf and his father worked as a peasant and as a miner. Khrushchev received very little education in schools because his family needed him to work on the family farm. After only about eight years of education, Khrushchev dropped out of school to herd his family's cattle. He later became a pipe fitter in a coalmine in the Donets Basin, which is near present-day Ukraine. He soon joined the Bolshevik Communist Party in 1918, and he served in the Red Army as a junior political officer in Russian Civil War from 1918-1921. After the civil war, he returned to Ukraine and he began working as the assistant manager of a coalmine back in the Donets Basin.
             Khrushchev moved to Moscow in 1929 to go to school at the Stalin Industrial Academy, where he became the leader of the academy's Communist Party organization. Khrushchev then began to work full time as a secretary of the Communist Party in Moscow. Under the tutelage of Lazar Kaganovich, who was the first secretary ...