Nikita Khrushchev Cause of Death

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as well as the chairman of the country’s Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964 died on September 11, 1971, at the age of 77, of a heart attack at the Kremlin hospital in Moscow.

He was denied a state funeral with interment in the Kremlin Wall and was instead laid to rest in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery.

Fearing protests, the authorities delayed announcing Khrushchev’s death until the hour of his funeral, and then surrounded the cemetery with troops. Nonetheless, some artists and writers attended the interment with the family.

During his reign, Khrushchev stunned the communist world by denouncing Stalin’s crimes and embarked on a de-Stalinization policy with his key ally Anastas Mikoyan.

He supported the early Soviet space programme and the implementation of relatively liberal domestic policy reforms. After a few false starts and a narrowly avoided nuclear war over Cuba, he successfully negotiated with the US to reduce Cold War tensions.