Nikita Khrushchev arrived in 1894 inside a cramped peasant hut near Kalinovka, in Kursk province, Russia, with dirt floors and no running water. His father was an itinerant laborer and his mother could not read. He worked in coal mines before he was twenty, joined the Bolshevik Party during the Russian Civil War, and rose through the Communist Party hierarchy with the dogged persistence of a man who had learned that survival meant never stopping. He was appointed to oversee the completion of the Moscow Metro in the 1930s, and the success of the project brought him to Stalin's attention. He survived the purges by demonstrating absolute loyalty while privately witnessing horrors that would later fuel his denunciation of Stalin's cult of personality. His "Secret Speech" at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, in which he detailed Stalin's crimes, shocked the communist world and triggered uprisings in Poland and Hungary. He crushed the Hungarian revolution with tanks but continued his program of de-Stalinization at home, releasing millions from the gulag system and allowing limited cultural liberalization. His confrontation with the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any point before or since, and his decision to withdraw Soviet missiles from Cuba was viewed by hardliners as a humiliation. The "Kitchen Debate" with Vice President Richard Nixon in 1959, where he argued for communism over a model kitchen in Moscow, captured his combative, earthy style. He was removed from power in October 1964 by colleagues who found his reforms destabilizing and his behavior erratic. He died on September 11, 1971, at seventy-seven.