ars of formal education was an important advantage. In 1909, at the age of fifteen, Khrushchev became an apprentice fitter at the German owned Bosse engineering works in Yuzovka. The living and working conditions in the Donbas, where Yuzovka was situated, "were as bad as the most lurid political agitator could have depicted them, and Khrushchev's experience gave him the experience gave him the emotional charge that seems genuinely to have lasted all of his life." It also showed him the true face of capitalism.
             In the summer of 1914, Russia was at war with the Axis Powers, but this had no effect on Khrushchev. He avoided conscription into the army because he was a skilled worker, and at the end of the year he moved to Rutchenko mechanical workshops. It was around this time that he married, although not much is known of his wife. His political career started when he helped organize strikes by Rutchkovo miners in 1915 and 1916. In Kalinovaka, Khrushchev had felt the hopelessness of the land-hungry peasant and so got himself actively involved with the Revolution. He was elected a member of the Rutchenkovo soviet, whose first act was to disband the local police.
             With the whole of the Ukraine in German hands, Khrushchev went to his hometown of Kalinovka where he took part in the division of the local land owner estates among the peasants. But by far the most important event at this time was Khrushchev joining the Bolshevik Party, which took place between April and autumn of 1918. In the autumn of 1918, he was sent to work within the political department of the 9th Army, which was fighting the anti-Bolshevik General Denkin in the north of the Donbas. While Stalin was maneuvering against Trotsky, Khrushchev was engaged in the important work of forming party cells in the front line units of the 9th Army. In other words, he was becoming the most junior sort of military commissar, the Party's representative a...