On September 11, 1971, Nikita Khrushchev died of a heart attack in a hospital in Moscow. He was 77. He had run the Soviet Union for eleven years, from 1953 to 1964, and had spent the last seven years of his life in retirement, having been removed by his own colleagues.
Khrushchev came up through the party apparatus in Ukraine, survived Stalin's purges and the war, and took power after a struggle that ended with the arrest and execution of Lavrenti Beria in 1953. What defined his time in office was the secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, in which he denounced Stalin's cult of personality and the repression, and set off a process of releasing prisoners and closing camps that changed the country.
Abroad, his record was a series of gambles. He sent troops into Hungary in 1956 and threatened the West over Berlin. He put missiles into Cuba in 1962 and had to take them out in front of the world, which is usually taken as the beginning of the end for him. He split with Mao's China, and he met Eisenhower and Kennedy, and he visited the United States in 1959.
At home he tried reforms that were sometimes improvised and often failed: planting maize where it would not grow, splitting the party organizations into industrial and agricultural halves, setting regional economic councils against the ministries in Moscow. The party apparatus tolerated all of it until it began to feel permanent, and in October 1964, while he was on holiday, the Central Committee voted him out and replaced him with Leonid Brezhnev.
He then did something no previous Soviet leader had done. He was not shot. He was not exiled. He was given a dacha, a pension and a car. He spent his last years recording memoirs on tape, and they were smuggled out and published in the West as Khrushchev Remembers, which he never saw in print in his own country. He was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow rather than at the Kremlin Wall, and the authorities did not announce the funeral in advance, in order to keep the crowd small.