Khrushchev was born in 1894 to an illiterate peasant family in Kalinovka, a village near Russia's border with Ukraine. To supplement his family's meager income he began working at an early age, but despite this, and despite his father's second job as a coal miner, Khrushchev's family was unable to survive as farmers. In 1908 they moved to an industrial center in Ukraine, where young Nikita began working in a factory. It was the beginning of his activist career: at the age of 18, Khrushchev joined a group of workers who had organized a strike ....