On This Day: Khrushchev made Soviet premier after Stalin dies

SEPT 13, 1953: Nikita Khrushchev was appointed Soviet premier six months after the death of tyrant Joseph Stalin on this day in 1953.

The miner’s son, who rose to prominence while serving in the defence of Stalingrad during World War II, would later denounce his former boss as a murderous dictator. The new Communist Party boss first took a swipe at Stalin’s personality cult, which he claimed had reached 'monstrous size' and transformed him into a 'godhead'.

He also revealed the hidden truth about Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin’s deathbed fears about the iron-willed Georgian who won the 1924 battle of succession.

And Khrushchev claimed he had veered from the founder’s path by 'trampling on the Leninist principle of collective party leadership' and killing 'innocent people'.

Khrushchev, in his speech to the Twentieth Party Congress, said investigators had discovered 'fabrication of cases and glaring abuses of socialist legality'.

Stalin’s machinery of terror – alluded to in a British Pathé newsreel - was responsible for the death of more than nine million people either in purges or by starvation.

The brutal dictator, whose adopted surname meant 'man of steel' in Russian, even went as far as remove rivals from photographs.

Among those killed were hundreds of Red Army officers, including seven generals and 80 per cent of its colonels.

This left the USSR with a severe shortage of skilled military leadership when Nazi Germany abandoned its non-aggression pact and invaded in June 1941.

Up to 27million Soviet citizens – from a pre-war population of 168million – died in a war Stalin had failed to see coming.

The denunciation Stalin in 1956 led a period known as the Khrushchev Thaw when thousands of prisoners were released while censorship and other repressive laws were relaxed.

Yet many still revered Stalin for industrialising the country, leading it to victory in World War II and turning the USSR into a superpower during his 29-year rule.

However, voices of criticism grew louder over time and in 1961 Stalin’s embalmed body was removed from lying beside Lenin’s publicly displayed corpse.

The remains of the shoemaker’s son, who seized peasants’ land and triggered a famine, were taken from the mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square and buried.

But Khrushchev, whose fighter pilot son died in mysterious circumstances and whose daughter-in-law was locked up for spying, could not hold on to power like Stalin.

He was ousted in 1964 by Leonid Brezhnev, who ramped up repression again and vastly increased military spending.

This allowed the economy to stagnate, which historians mostly agree was the biggest reason the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and communism ended in Eastern Europe.

Yet more than two decades on, Russians – even right-wing ones - continue to idolise Stalin and his strongman image.

President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer whose rule has become increasingly authoritarian, has praised the communist dictator.

School textbooks, introduced in 2010, also claim his ruthless purges were 'entirely rational'.

Lenin is also still admired and – thanks to charity donations - his preserved body remains in Red Square and is viewed by two million people a year.

Khrushchev is also viewed in a generally positive light – but mainly due to the technological accomplishments of the country’s cosmonauts during that era.

During his rule, the Soviet Union beat America by putting the first satellite, animal and man in space.