Sergei Khrushchev – författare

More is known about Nikita Khrushchev than about many former Soviet leaders, partly because of his own efforts to communicate through speeches, interviews, and memoirs. (A partial version of his memoirs was published in three volumes in 1970, 1974, and 1990, and a complete version was published in Russia in 1999 and will appear in an English translation to be published by Penn State Press.) But even with the opening of party and state archives in 1991, as William Taubman points out in his Foreword, many questions remain unanswered. "How did Khrushchev manage not only to survive Stalin but to succeed him? What led him to denounce his former master [an event that some interpreters herald as the first act in the drama that led to the end of the USSR]? How could a man of minimal formal education direct the affairs of a vast intercontinental empire in the nuclear age? Why did Khrushchev’s attempt to ease East-West tensions result in two of the worst crises of the Cold War in Berlin and Cuba? To resolve these and other contradictions, we need more than policy documents from archives and memoirs from associates. We need firsthand testimony by family members who knew Khrushchev best, especially by his only surviving son, Sergei, in whom he often confided."As Sergei says, "During the Cold War our nations lived on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, and not only was it an Iron Curtain but it was also a mirror: one side perceived the other as the 'evil empire,' and vice versa; so, too, each side feared the other would start a nuclear war. Neither side could understand the real reasons behind many decisions because Americans and Russians, representing different cultures, think differently. The result was a Cold War filled with misperceptions that could easily have led to tragedy, and we are lucky it never happened. And still, after the Cold War, American-Russian relations are based on many misunderstandings." In this book Sergei tells the story of how the Cold War happened in reality from the Russian side, not from the American side, and this is his most important contribution.Sergei N. Khrushchev was born in 1935 when his father was Moscow party chief. He accompanied his father on major foreign trips—to Great Britain in 1956, East Germany in 1958, the United States in 1959, Egypt in 1964, among many others. After he became a control systems engineer and went to work for leading Soviet missile designer Vladimir Chelomei, Sergei attended many meetings at which his father transacted business with key leaders in the Soviet defense establishment. He has received many awards and honors for his work in computer science, missile design, and space research. Besides his many technical publications, he has published widely on political and economic issues. In 1991 Little Brown published his memoir about his father’s last years, Khrushchev on Khrushchev. In that same year he received an appointment to the Center for Foreign Policy Development of the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, where he is today. He and his wife, Valentina Nikolayevna, applied for U. S. citizenship in 1999, an event widely covered in the media.

This is the third and last volume of the only complete and fully reliable English-language version of the memoirs of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In the first two volumes, published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 2005 and 2006, respectively, Khrushchev tells the story of his rise to power and his part in the fight against Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. He also discusses agriculture, the housing problem, and other issues of domestic policy, as well as defense and disarmament. This volume is devoted to international affairs. Khrushchev describes his dealings with foreign statesmen and his state visits to Britain, the United States, France, Scandinavia, India, Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, and Indonesia. In the first part, Khrushchev talks about relations between the Soviet Union and the Western powers. Of particular interest is his perspective on the Berlin, U-2, and Cuban missile crises. The second part focuses on the Communist world—above all, the deterioration of relations with China and the tensions in Eastern Europe, including relations with Tito’s Yugoslavia, Gomulka’s Poland, and the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary. In the third part, Khrushchev discusses the search for allies in the Third World. The Appendixes contain biographies, a bibliography, and a chronology, as well as the reminiscences of Khrushchev’s chief bodyguard about the visit to the United Nations in 1960 at which the famous “shoe-banging” incident occurred—or, perhaps, did not occur.

Nikita Khrushchev’s proclamation from the floor of the United Nations that “we will bury you” is one of the most chilling and memorable moments in the history of the Cold War, but from the Cuban Missile Crisis to his criticism of the Soviet ruling structure late in his career, the motivation for Khrushchev’s actions wasn’t always clear. Many Americans regarded him as a monster, while in the USSR he was viewed at various times as either hero or traitor. But what was he really like, and what did he really think? Readers of Khrushchev’s memoirs will now be able to answer these questions for themselves (and will discover that what Khrushchev really said at the UN was “we will bury colonialism”).This is the second volume of three in the only complete and fully reliable version of the memoirs available in English. In the first volume, published in 2004, Khrushchev takes his story up to the close of World War II. In the first section of this second volume, he covers the period from 1945 to 1956, from the famine and devastation of the immediate aftermath of the war to Stalin’s death, the subsequent power struggle, and the Twentieth Party Congress. The remaining sections are devoted to Khrushchev’s recollections and thoughts about various domestic and international problems. In the second and third sections, he recalls the virgin lands and other agricultural campaigns and his dealings with nuclear scientists and weapons designers. He also considers other sectors of the economy, specifically construction and the provision of consumer goods, administrative reform, and questions of war, peace, and disarmament. In the last section, he discusses the relations between the party leadership and the intelligentsia.Included among the Appendixes are the notebooks of Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk, Khrushchev’s wife.