Khrushchev sought to promote himself through his agricultural policy. As head of the party Secretariat (which ran the day- to-day affairs of the party machine) after Stalin's death, he could use that vehicle to promote his campaigns. Pravda ("Truth"), the party newspaper, served as his mouthpiece. His main opponent in the quest for power, Georgy M. Malenkov, was skilled in administration and headed the government, lzvestiya ("News"), the government's newspaper, was Malenkov's main media outlet. Khrushchev's agricultural policy involved a bold plan to rapidly expand the sown area of grain. He chose to implement this policy on virgin land in the North Caucasus and west Siberia, lying in both Russia and northern Kazakhstan, The Kazakh party leaders were not enamoured of the idea, since they did not want more Russians in their republic. The Kazakh leadership was therefore dismissed, and the new first secretary was a Malenkov appointee; he was soon replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, a Khrushchev protege who eventually replaced Khrushchev as the Soviet leader. Thousands of young communists descended on Kazakhstan to grow crops where none had been grown before.
Khrushchev's so-called "secret speech" about the excesses of Stalin's one-man rule, attacking the late Soviet ruler's "intolerance, his brutality, his abuse of power", at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 had far-reaching effects on both foreign and domestic policies. Through its denunciation of Stalin, it substantially destroyed the infallibility of the party. The congress also formulated ideological reformations, which softened the party's hardline foreign policy. De-Stalinization had unexpected consequences, especially in 1956 in eastern and south-eastern Europe, where unrest became widespread. The Hungarian uprising in that year was brutally suppressed, with Yury V. Andropov, Moscow's chief representative in Budapest, revealing considerable talent for double-dealing. (He had given a promise of safe conduct to Imre Nagy, the Hungarian leader, but permitted, or arranged for, Nagy's arrest.) The events in Hungary and elsewhere stoked up anti-Russian fires.
Khrushchev invested heavily in and set great store by rocketry, and successes in space exploration under his regime brought Russia great acclaim. On August 26, 1957, the USSR had startled the world by announcing the successful firing of its first intercontinental ballistic missile. On October 4 of the same year, the first space satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched, followed on November 3 by Sputnik 2, with the dog i.aika on board. So great was Khrushchev's faith in rocketry that he began to regard ground forces as less important and even to cut the size of the military. He also tried to translate the USSR's advances in rocketry into tangible diplomatic success, threatening the West with Soviet missiles if it dared to think of attacking. The strategy misfired, however: the result was to stimulate even greater western defence spending and thereby involve the Soviet Union in an expensive arms race that it could not win.
Before the escalation of the arms race, Khrushchev's rule witnessed another crucial development in the Cold War. While from 1953 to 1957 tensions relaxed somewhat, the stand-off remained. It became increasingly apparent that the United States and the Soviet Union were avoiding direct military confrontation in Europe, engaging in actual combat operations only to keep allies from defecting to the other side or to overthrow them after they had done so. This rationale can be seen in the Soviet Union sending troops to preserve communist rule in East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956); for its part, the United States helped overthrow a left-wing government in Guatemala (1954). In 1955 a unified military organization among the Soviet-bloc countries, the Warsaw Pact, was formed, and West Germany was admitted into the six-year-old NATO that same year. East—West relations deteriorated in 1958-62, particularly during the civil war in the Congo in the early 1960s and over the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
In October 1962 the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles by both the United States and the Soviet Union brought the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war. When the Soviets began secretly installing missiles in Cuba that could be used to launch nuclear attacks on US cities, the US Navy blockaded Cuba; the Soviet ground commanders were then given the authority to launch a missile attack, without approval from Moscow, if they perceived that an American invasion was under way. Eventually Khrushchev backed off, and an agreement was reached to withdraw the missiles. The Chinese severely criticized Khrushchev for giving in to the United States and capitalism, and relations between China and the USSR, already uneasy, became worse as a result.
In the following year the two superpowers signed the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, which banned above-ground nuclear weapons testing. But the crisis also hardened the Soviets' determination never again to be humiliated by their military inferiority, and they began a build-up of both conventional and strategic forces that the United States was forced to match for the next 25 years.
While Khrushchev had failures and triumphs in foreign policy, he was often viewed in the West as eccentric and blunt, traits that sometimes negated his own diplomacy. On one occasion he appeared at the United Nations and emphasized a point in his speech by banging a shoe on his desk. Such conduct tended to reinforce certain western prejudices about oafish, peasant behaviour by Soviet leaders, and harmed the Russian image abroad. Khrushchev's forthright remarks occasionally caused massive unrest in the world. He told the United States, "We will bury you," and boasted that his rockets could hit a fly over the United States, statements that added to the alarm of Americans, who subsequently increased their defence budget.
As the Soviet defence burden increased, living standards in Russia improved only slowly. Here Khrushchev was often his own worst enemy. He launched many industrial and agricultural initiatives, but the net result was an overall decline of growth rates. US specialists calculated that between 1961 and 1965 the annual increase of gross national product (GNP) in the USSR slowed to 5 per cent, industrial output to 6.6 per cent, and agricultural growth to 2.8 per cent. Since the population growth was about 1.4 per cent annually, this meant that there was no tangible improvement in the diet available. Khrushchev correctly perceived that the party apparatus was a major barrier to economic progress. In an effort to revitalize the apparatus he split it into separate industrial and agricultural branches in November 1962, but discovered that industrial and local political networks had developed, which made it very difficult for the central authority to impose its will. This reform made Khrushchev deeply unpopular and accelerated his departure from high office, while economic problems continued to plague the union.
Khrushchev was a patriot who had a sincere desire to improve the lot of all Soviet citizens. Under his leadership there was a cultural thaw, and Russian writers who had been suppressed began to publish again. Western ideas about democracy began to penetrate universities and academies. These were to leave their mark on a whole generation of Russians, most notably Mikhail Gorbachev, who was to become the last leader of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev had effectively led the Soviet Union away from the harsh Stalin period. Under his rule Russia continued to dominate the union, but there was considerably more concern for minorities.