It was Saturday evening, October 27, 1962, the day the world came very close to destruction. Soviet ships had not yet tried to run the United States (US) naval blockade, but the missiles were still on Cuban soil. In Cuba, work continued on the missile sites to make them operational. The situation could either be resolved soon, or events could get out of hand and people would die. That afternoon, a US U-2 reconnaissance plane had been shot down by mistake. "The Soviet leader had given orders not to shoot down any U-2 surveillance planes. A local Soviet commander violated those orders on October 27 when he downed Major Rudolph's Anderson's U-2 with a surface-to-air missile. Soviet officials seem to have understood this could have brought retaliatory strikes and perhaps even a U.S. invasion."i The Soviet position seemed to be hardening with the arrival of a letter Saturday morning from Khrushchev demanding that the US remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey as a condition of Soviet removal of the missiles in Cuba. "The letter struck U.S. officials as an ominous hardening of the Soviet position from the previous day's letter from Khrushchev, which had omitted any mention of American missiles in Turkey but had instead implied that Washington's pledge not to invade Cuba would be sufficient to obviate the need for Soviet nuclear protection of Castro's revolution."ii.

             The seeds of this crisis go back several years. In 1953, Stalin died and there was a struggle for leadership of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev prevailed, becoming party leader on September 7 of that year, and on December 7th of that year he had his main rival, NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria, executed. Khrushchev's leadership marked a crucial transition for the Soviet Union. He pursued a course of reform and shocked delegates to the 20th Party Congress on February 23, 1956 by making what became known in the West as his "secret speech" denouncing the cult of Stalin, and accusing him of crimes committed during the Great Purges.