When Nikita Khrushchev was born in 1894, shoes were a luxury for peasants.¹ In his memoirs, the Soviet leader says he went barefoot from spring until late autumn. “Every villager dreamed of owning a pair of boots.” The best they could muster were lapti, easily frayed slippers woven from tree bark.²

It’s fitting that when many people think of Khrushchev today, a shoe comes to mind. By 1960, he’d long outgrown his lapti. The leather shoes he wore to the United Nations General Assembly that year were so new and tight that he found them uncomfortable and took them off after getting seated. Later, angered during the session, he picked one up and started banging a table in disgust. For the Communist leadership, it was an embarrassing episode. Yet it was also a subtle reminder of not only an individual’s unlikely elevation from poverty to the helm of a superpower but the transformation in Russia from tsarist underdevelopment to abundance.³

The pounding of shoes and machinery meant that millions around the world took Khrushchev seriously when, in another well-known outburst, he promised that history was on socialism’s side and the system would soon bury capitalism. The Soviet party program aimed to catch up with the United States in terms of infrastructure, labor productivity, and even consumer goods by 1980. “We shall see,” Khrushchev told a Moscow crowd of thousands in 1958, “who eats better and who has more clothing.” The optimism was matched by worry from Western analysts about Soviet growth rates and technological success, symbolized in the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. Washing machines, televisions, and personal automobiles were still hard to come by, but the Soviet system was delivering on the basics, with promises of more to come.⁴