Nikita was born in the town of Kalinovka in Russia. He later moved to Ukraine. He worked in mines, and became part of the Bolshevik movement. He was a political commissar in the Red Army in the Russian Civil War and again in World War II and moved his way up in the Communist Party, eventually becoming trusted by Joseph Stalin.

Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev was born on April 17, 1894, in a peasant’s hut in the poverty-stricken village of Kalinovka, in southern Russia. Like his father, he became a coal miner. He joined the Communist party in 1918, during the civil war, and became an untiring organizer. Little is known about his first wife, whom he married in 1920.