Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev

Joseph Stalin , long-time ruler of the USSR, died of a stroke; his body was embalmed, and lay in state for three days, during which time crowds massed to view their former leader.

On orders from Nikita Krushchev , Lavrenty Beria (former head of Stalin 's NKVD ) was shot dead in secret by a firing squad. He was cremated and his ashes dispersed by a fan.

The Twentieth Congress of the SovietCommunist Party sowed the seeds of de-Stalinization. It opened with a report from Khrushchev critical of Stalin , and closed with his revelation of some selected truths about Stalin's regime.

The Twentieth Congress of the SovietCommunist Party ended with a speech by Nikita Khrushchev , which mentioned for the first time some of Stalin 's political assassinations and general repression.

Nikita Khrushchev made another important speech reflecting a change in Soviet opinion about the legacy of Joseph Stalin .

The Berlin Wall was built to separate the western sections of Berlin (under the rule of the Allied Powers of World War II) from the eastern section (under Soviet rule).

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the first of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 's novels about the Soviet Russian system of forced-labour camps, was published in the cautiously reform-minded journal Novy Mir.

Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshovka returned to Earth aboard the spaceship Vostok VI, after making forty-eight revolutions of the globe in less than three days and becoming the first woman to circle the globe in...

Nearly a year after the Cuban missile crisis, a hot-line telephone was installed linking the Kremlin in Moscow (seat of the government of the USSR) and the White House in Washington, DC.