Khrushchev 1955

Nikita Sergeievich Khrushchev (1894-1971)

• born in poor village of Kalinovka, in the Kursk district of the Ukraine. He was the son of peasant Sergei Nicaronovich Khrushchev. At the age of 15 he moved to the mining town of Yuzovka in the Donbas. "I worked at a factory owned by Germans, at coal pits owned by Frenchmen, and at a chemical plant owned by Belgians. There I discovered something about capitalists. They are all alike, whatever their nationality." At the age of 24 he joined the Bolsheviks and served as a political worker for the Red Army in the Russian civil war. He married in 1915 but his wife died in the great famine of 1921. He married his second wife Nina Petrovna in 1924, while he was a political guide at the Donets Mining Technical School in Yuzovka. In 1925 he was appointed party secretary of a district near Yuzovka and rose in the party organization to become first secretary of the city of Moscow in 1935 and Politburo member by 1939. He began agricultural reform in 1950, merging small collective farms into larger ones organized around new agro-towns and adopting mechanization. By Sept. 1953 he was First Secretary of the Communist Party but shared power with Prime Minister Malenkov. In Feb. 1954 he began the Virgins Lands experiment, to cultivate the untilled steppes of Kazakhstan and southwestern Siberia, using 120,000 tractors to plow 32 million acres, triple the existing cultivated area in Russia at that time. The first harvest in the fall of 1954 was successful and he signed a trade agreement with Mao during a trip to China in 1954 with Bulganin and Mikoyan. He replaced Malenkov with Bulganin as Prime Minister in Feb. 1955.

• end of joint occup. of Ger. May 9, Austria May 15, 1955
  
• Khru. apologized to Tito May 30
  
• Sino-Soviet 2-year tech & scientific aid pact
  
• Malik disarmament proposal at UN - ground survel. OK
  
• Ike's Atoms for Peace speech Dec. 8, 1953
  
  • UN will create Internatl Atomic Energy Agency 1957
    

• H-bomb Castle-Bravo test March 1, 1954
• A-bombs by Britain 1952, France 1960, China 1964
• USS Nautilus sub 1954, USS Enterprise carrier 1960
• USAF began Atlas ICBM program 1953

• The RAND report on the "Vulnerability of U. S. Strategic Air Power" April 15, 1953, warned of danger of Russian bomber attack because the U.S. had no warning system. In July, Russian demonstrated its new swept-wing bomber, the Bison, and in August tested its first H-bomb and launched its first rocket, developed by 5000 German technicians taken from Peenemunde. Britain sent a Canberra bomber on spy flight in late August, 1953, over missile test site at Kapustin Yar in Ukraine, but hit by Soviet fighter gunfire and pictures too blurred. A crisis in intelligence developed due to the lack of means to acquire information.
• DEW Line, CONAD, NORAD, Texas Towers, radome planes
• James Killian appointed to science panel 1954; secret report to NSC Feb. 14, 1955, advised Ike to build more bombs, new weapons, and strengthen defenses
• U-2 spy plane built at Lockheed's Skunk Works by Kelly Johnson with camera from Edwin Land, tested by CIA at Groom Lake abandoned WWII air base (Area 51) starting July 29, 1955
• Project Genetrix put cameras in spy balloons Dec. 1955
• Army built missile test site at Point Arguello, became Vandenberg AFB, tested electronics by Caltech scientists who founded TRW, used in Corona 1960
• Civil Defense, "Duck and Cover," bomb shelters, Mount Weather

• Eden, Premier Edgar Faure, Ike, Premier Bulganin
  
• but Adams, Dulles opposed: not to be "another Yalta"
  
• Ike proposed Nelson Rockefeller's Open Skies plan
  

• de-Stalinization, "peaceful co-existence," "many roads to socialism"

• U.S. rhetoric of "liberation" & "rollback"
  
• balloon Project Focus caused air crash in Czeck 3/56
  

• liquid fuel, multi-stage developed by Sergei Korilev
  

• but AF's Atlas not ready - "missle gap" by critics
  

Sputnik II launched Nov. 3 - 1120 lbs - Laika, not Checkers

• Laika died in space - no landing of capsule
  

LBJ's Preparedness subcommittee investigation Nov. 28

Vanguard explodes at Cape Canaveral in live TV Dec. 6

Explorer I launched Jan. 31, 1958 - 31 lbs

NASA created July 16, began Mercury project using Atlas

Rockefeller and Gaither Reports 11/57 - like NSC-68

Life mag. story "Crisis in Education"

1958 - Year of Great Tests - Hardtack series until Aug. 22

midterm elections won by Democrats

next - Kitchen Debate

Sources:

• Beschloss, Michael R. MAYDAY: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair. New York: Harper, 1986.
• Crankshaw, Edward. Khrushchev: A Career. New York: Viking, 1966.