Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev was one of the country's most memorable leaders of the Soviets. Two items are most often associated with his name - a corn cob and a boot.
Nikita Sergeevich considered the first “the queen of the fields” and the main agrarian leader of the country. The second, he either threatened a potential enemy, or pretended to knock a nonexistent pebble out of the sole, at a meeting of the 15th UN Assembly. But little is known about Khrushchev's pre-revolutionary life.
Khrushchev's youth
The fourth head of the USSR was born on April 15, 1894 in a rather poor family in the present Kursk region. In winter he studied at school, in summer he worked as a shepherd. At the age of 14, when the Khrushchev family moved to Ukraine, he became a locksmith's apprentice at the Machine-Building and Iron Foundry, after which he worked in a mine.
The Khrushchevs lived in the Ukrainian Yuzovka (now Donetsk) rather poorly. The barracks for 50-70 people did not even have banal furniture. Dirty clothes were dried in them on ropes hung around the perimeter, and some workers, according to the recollections of Nikita Sergeevich himself, relieved a small need directly from the upper shelves to the floor.
In his youth, Nikita had a great desire to go to study and get a good education. But the grandfather of the future secretary general was against the study. Khrushchev's father reacted directly to the idea of studying: "All the same, you won't earn more than 30 rubles in your life, and you have nothing to learn." Khrushchev, leaving school at the behest of his father, went to work in the field. Later he tried to get a job as an assistant to a shoemaker, but he did not like this business. Then his father sent Nikita to work in a local shop as a salesman.
“My father said that a shoemaker will never be left without bread: everyone needs boots, so I will always have a roof over my head and money in my pocket. I flatly refused, even threatened my father that if he forced me to work in the shop, then I would run away from home,”Khrushchev recalls his childhood in his memoirs.
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Dream of the future secretary general
By the time of the revolution, Khrushchev was 23 years old. By this time, he had already managed to work as a chimney sweep, a shepherd, a locksmith's assistant, and after that he rose to the position of a locksmith, which allowed him to live quite well and in relative prosperity.
The profession of a locksmith also contributed to the fulfillment of the dream of Nikita Sergeevich's youth - to have his own motorcycle. Once, in one of the German magazines, Nikita saw a photograph of a motorcycle. We set ourselves the goal of assembling exactly the same, the locksmith Khrushchev began to realize his dream.
A bicycle frame was welded from pipe scraps, on which a motor of its own design was installed. The motorcycle assembled by Khrushchev's hands worked for more than a dozen years.
Revolution and becoming strongly politics
Khrushchev, who earned as much as 30 rubles a month, was considered an enviable groom. The wife of the future ruler of the country was his colleague Efrosinya Petrova, to whom Khrushchev made an offer within a few months after the meeting. In 1915, their daughter Julia was born, and in 1917, three days after the October Revolution, their son Leonid.
Khrushchev was released from military service in the First World War as a skilled worker. He did not have to fight for a long time in the Civil War, soon after the revolution he was busy in the party life of the country.
Being a rather intelligent and charming person (Nikita Sergeevich grew fat much later after a serious illness) Khrushchev began to build a rather successful party career, which in 1955 brought him to the post of head of the Soviet Union.
Pavel Uspensky