Nikita Khrushchev was born April 17, 1894. He was born in Kalinovka, Kursk. Nikita was born as a Ukrainian peasant but than later in his life he joined the Communists party in 1918. He had a close connection with the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. In 1934 he became part of the Soviet Unions central committee. As 4 decades rose he got higher and higher in the ranks. In 1953 Joseph Stalin Died and so Nikita Khrushchev became the leader of the Soviet Union. When working he reformed Joseph Stalin’s brutal excesses and then later found crimes that Stalin had committed. Khrushchev also tried to become closer to the US by having a tour of it and then later meeting with Dwight Eisenhower himself, the current US president. Then in 1960 a US spy plane shot down a Russian plane. This caught Khrushchev’s attention. It made him very angry. He was so angry that at a United Nations that fall conference he stamped his foot on the table. This astounded the nation. Soon after the incident the Cold War began and it made some big issues appear in the 1960 US presidential contest between Nixon and Kennedy, which Kennedy won. Despite the hate of the US Nikita Khrushchev was forced to back down because of the threat of a nuclear war between Cuba and the United States. This was a short but intense fight. Cuba constructed bombs aiming directly at America threatened to shoot them. When John F. Kennedy found out he enforced that if Khrushchev shot one nuclear bomb at the US that he would declare war. So Cuba didn’t want that so they backed down and dissembled their weapons and the Soviet Union fled from the area back to Russia. As the years went on Nikita Khrushchev weakened in office and then was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev. Then in September 1971 Nikita Khrushchev died. In the Soviet Union he will always be remembered as the leader of the USSR