KHRUSHCHEV The Man and His Era. By William Taubman. Illustrated. 876 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $35.
He was one of Stalin's most trusted henchmen, up to his elbows in blood -- yet he dealt Stalinism, the Soviet system and the world Communist movement a
wound from which they would never recover. He brutally crushed the Hungarian
revolution -- yet he opened the gates of the gulag for millions, and authorized the publication of Solzhenitsyn's ''One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.'' He built the Berlin Wall and put nuclear-tipped missiles into Cuba -- yet he ordered deep unilateral cuts in Soviet conventional forces and initiated the first detente with the United States. He was crude, dogmatic and merciless; also generous, public-spirited and forgiving.
He was Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev: a top Soviet leader since the mid-1930's, the dominant member of the post-Stalin leadership (1953-57) and the Soviet Union's unchallenged dictator-ruler between 1957 and 1964. Although eminently worthy of a serious biography, Khrushchev until now has been the subject of rather thin Kremlinological exegeses. In ''Khrushchev: The Man and His Era,'' which took almost two decades to research and write, William Taubman, a professor of political science at Amherst College, finally gives us what we (and Khrushchev) deserve: a portrait unlikely to be surpassed any time soon in either richness or complexity.
Taubman has made use of materials from over two dozen Russian and American archives, of more than 70 personal interviews (including ones with Khrushchev's children, grandchildren, in-laws and other relatives), of published and unpublished memoirs, innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, even Soviet newsreels. The list of published books and articles consulted by the author extends across 13 pages. This volume, with its brisk, enjoyable narrative, succeeds in every sense: sweep, depth, liveliness, color, tempo. Each chapter shines with mastery and authority.
A conscientious biography of a worthy subject cannot help being a portrait of the times, and Taubman's book fully lives up to the ''and his era'' of the subtitle. It is a multifaceted study of the key political and economic forces of the first 47 years -- almost two-thirds of the total -- of the Soviet civilization: from the revolution of October 1917, which found the 23-year-old Nikita (with only four years of parochial school) a skilled metalworker in the heart of Russia's coal mining region, to Oct. 13, 1964, when, returning from a Presidium meeting in the Kremlin, he pushed his briefcase into his son's hands and sighed: ''It's over. I'm retired.''
In between, as he climbs up the increasingly bloody pole to the pinnacle of Soviet power, we follow Nikita Sergeyevich through virtually all the key events of Soviet history. Some he witnessed, some he helped to shape: the doomed struggle of the anti-Stalin opposition inside the party during the 1920's; the horrors of Stalinist ''collectivization''; the Great Purge of 1936-39, when, as a member of tribunals, he sent thousands to torture and death; the wholesale arrests, deportations and executions that he supervised
in western Ukraine after Hitler and Stalin divided Poland in 1939; the Kiev and Kharkov disasters during World War II and the Stalingrad triumph, in all
of which he played a role as Stalin's political emissary to the armies in the field.
Khrushchev was one of the three Soviet leaders closest to an increasingly insane and paranoid Stalin during the post-World War II years (the two others were the secret police chief Lavrenty Beria and Deputy Prime Minister Georgy
Malenkov). Following the tyrant's death in 1953, he first disposed of the universally feared Beria (who was arrested and shot as a ''spy'') before proceeding gradually to outmaneuver Malenkov and another top rival, Stalin's
foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov.
Then came February 1956 and the weightiest of Khrushchev's claims to a place
in history (and one of the 20th century's greatest surprises): the ''secret speech'' to a party congress detailing Stalin's crimes. There were, to be sure, obvious tactical reasons for it: Khrushchev lessened or obscured his own very formidable culpability in the regime's war on the Soviet people, and he also undermined his rivals Molotov and Malenkov, whose complicity in the purges was demonstrably greater than his own. Yet power struggle considerations cannot fully account for Khrushchev's de-Stalinization, especially since he resumed his attack on Stalin in broad daylight at the 1961 party congress, four years after all his competitors had been vanquished.
Even though he limited his description of Stalin's crimes solely to Communist victims (passing in silence over millions of ''class enemies'' and other categories), Khrushchev knew how enormous the stakes were. ''Stalin personifies the multiple victories of the Soviet people,'' one Presidium bigwig objected. ''Examining possible mistakes . . . will raise doubts about
the correctness of our whole course.'' Another top leader lamented: ''If these are facts, can we really call this Communism? This is unforgivable.''
The four-hour speech was listened to by several thousand people in ''deathly
silence.'' The shock was palpable. Two weeks later, after he read the speech, Poland's Communist dictator Boleslaw Bierut had a heart attack and died. Within months, workers rose up in Poznan. Then the Hungarian revolution exploded.
Taubman provides a number of explanations, all plausible and helpful, as clues to Khrushchev's de-Stalinizing impulse, but characteristically he respects the reader and refrains from ex cathedra pronouncements. This is as
it should be: here was an instance of human mystery of the highest order, of
an inextinguishable spark that ignites an irresistible human inclination to choose, albeit often inconsistently and by degrees, good over evil, liberty over slavery, truth over lies. Even decades of brutalization and degradation
by so supremely talented an ''engineer of human souls'' as Stalin proved no match for these imperatives of the human spirit.
Those who successfully plotted against Khrushchev in October 1964 cited many
perfectly valid reasons for his removal: the failures in agriculture, the embarrassment and loss of face caused by his boorish behavior abroad (including the famous shoe-banging episode at the United Nations), the ''adventurism'' of the Cuban fiasco, the man's rudeness and arrogance. Still, to the neo-Stalinists who would rule the Soviet Union for the next 20 years,
Khrushchev's cardinal sin, without doubt, was the secret speech. Summoned six years after his ouster to the Party Control Committee to be berated for publishing his memoirs in the West, a very sick 76-year-old Khrushchev told his accusers: ''I too was infected by Stalin, but I also freed myself from him, whereas you did not.'' As late as 1984, 13 years after his death, Politburo members railed against the ''scandalous disgraces'' Khrushchev had
committed ''in relation to Stalin.'' ''He soiled and stained us,'' one said.
''He dealt an irreversible blow to the positive image of the Soviet Union in
the eyes of the world,'' another added.
Even in defeat Khrushchev proved dangerous to them -- perhaps, in the end, more dangerous than ever. For his demise demonstrated to a young and up-and-coming Mikhail Gorbachev, along with his liberal alter ego, Aleksandr
Yakovlev, a key lesson of Soviet (and Russian) history: liberalizations from
above are subverted by the resistance of functionaries (and the liberalizer-in-chief is inevitably overthrown in a palace coup) unless a project of liberty is protected by an alliance with the Russian people, who,
like any other people, thirst for truth, justice, dignity and trust.
When in power, Gorbachev and Yakovlev pursued that alliance by permitting the intelligentsia to tell people the truth in newspapers, magazines, books and television programs. Indeed, Gorbachev acknowledged his debt to Khrushchev after he became general secretary in 1985 by scheduling the first party congress over which he presided to coincide, 30 years to the day, with Khrushchev's secret speech. There followed the firestorm of glasnost, and within three short years (1988-90) the entire legitimizing mythology of the Soviet party-state went up in smoke, leaving behind a charred empty shell that Boris Yeltsin kicked aside in August 1991.
Khrushchev had a hand in it all, and his life represents a hefty slice of history, admirably served up in this monumental biography, one that is likely to be definitive for years to come. In the end, it is hard to summarize this
man better than Taubman does: ''complicit in great evil yet also the author of much good.''