Thus not much is known about the way in which Khrushchev
spent his early life. But the atmosphere he breathed, the concepts
and standards by which he was raised, the things that left their
mark on him in the form of early impressions are well recorded.
Russia was backward then. Most of the land was still tilled with
wooden plows. The serfs had been freed only three short decades
before his birth. Members of the landed gentry still led a genteel
existence, traveling around the countryside in handcarved sleighs,
and taking snuff from silver boxes.

In 1881, fifteen years before Khrushchev's birth, Czar Alex-
ander II was assassinated by an organization calling itself the
People's Will, a revolutionary group dedicated to stirring up
rebellion among the peasantry. His son, Alexander III, gorged
himself to death, and when he died he was succeeded by
Nicholas II, destined to be the last czar of the Empire.

The country was in turmoil in 1894. When the new czar, short
of stature, with watery gray eyes, ascended the throne, 2,000 per-
sons were trampled to death at the coronation, but the festivities
were not halted; nothing was allowed to interfere with imperial
custom. In Turkestan, far behind the Urals, were the Uzbeks and
Turkomans, who bad been conquered by Moscow only a genera-
tion previously. They hated but also feared the czar, whose sway
over all of the Empire was unchallenged. In Moscow and St.
Petersburg, Russian students, forever optimistic, were voicing
the hope, hard to understand in retrospect, that a new era of
liberty would arrive with the new czar. He, however, quickly
disabused them. "I will," he said, "follow in the footsteps of my
father of blessed memory. Let them give up their senseless
dream" And in faraway Kalinovka, as elsewhere in the numerous
villages of the Russian plain, peasants asked each other whether
they would receive land.

Nicholas II reigned for a quarter of a century before he and
his wife and children were massacred. The fabric of Russian
society and administration had worn so thin during his regime
that the Revolution of 1917, ending czarist rule once and for all,
was hardly more than the coup de gräce to a long-obsolete, decay-
ing order established in another era. An earlier revolution in

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