S. for assistance. Under the Platt Amendment, which was adopted after the 1898 aggression involving Cuba, Spain, and the United States, the intervention of the United States was allowed whenever order was threatened in Cuba . More importantly, many saw a Cuban and USSR alliance to be threatening to the shores of the southern U.S.
Nikita Khrushchev was born to a poor family in Kalinovka, near the village of Kursk in southwestern Russia. His grandfather had been a serf, or indentured farm laborer, and his father was a peasant who sometimes worked in the mines. Khrushchev received very little formal education. After leaving school to herd cows, he worked as a pipe fitter in a coal mine in the Donets Basin (in present-day Ukraine). He joined the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in 1918 and served in the Red Army as a junior political officer during the Russian Civil War (1918-1921). He returned to Ukraine, which had become a union republic of the USSR, and worked as the assistant manager of a Donets coal mine. In 1929 Khrushchev moved to Moscow to attend the Stalin Industrial Academy, where he soon became leader of the academy's Communist Party organization. In 1931 he began full-time work as secretary of two distinct party organizations in Moscow. He continued to move up the party ranks under the patronage of Lazar Kaganovich, who held the position of first secretary in the Moscow City Party Committee. In 1935 Khrushchev succeeded Kaganovich in that post. Khrushchev went on to become party first secretary in Ukraine in 1938. The following year he became a full member of the Politburo, the party's highest decision-making body. From 1939 to 1945, during World War II, he worked as a political commissar (a party official supervising army officers), earning the rank of lieutenant general. After the war, he was in charge of the recovery effort in Ukraine. A firm supporter of Stalin during his early career, Khrushchev became a secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1949.