Khrushchev?

Long live Khrushchev.

The picture there is Khrushchev.

You fell in love with Khrushchev?

No, silly, the one that's carrying Khrushchev.

He was carrying a picture of Khrushchev.

To hell with the revolution and to hell with Khrushchev!

As chairman Khrushchev said... on the 40th anniversary of the revolution...

Did Mr. Khrushchev feel he'd put Mr. Kennedy in the doghouse?

Khrushchev was ousted in a palace coup sponsored by the KGB and blessed by the military. Had the Red Army been completely loyal to Khrushchev, the conspirators would not have succeeded.

I can show you countless photographs of the president shaking hands with Khrushchev.

The Nixon Khrushchev Kitchen Debate happened about 50 feet from where this was shown.

I don't want to be namedropper... but what do you think Khrushchev did to Malenkov?

Yet Khrushchev, isolated and in disgrace, continued to see a bond between himself and the great author. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in his memoir The Oak and the Calf as late as 1966, he Khrushchev sent me New Year s greetings which astonished me because I was on the brink of arrest.

And I think that's something that we have to be in the room, whether it's Nixon going to China or Khrushchev and Kennedy or Reagan and Gorbachev.

Around midnight, the door opened and the secretary asked my father to take a phone call. When Khrushchev came back, he was smiling Sputnik s launch was successful.

Király, Kolakowski, and Khrushchev each in his own way is a symbol of today s new and uniting Europe, a Europe of rapprochement and forgiveness among erstwhile opponents.

Putin s own game of prime ministerial musical chairs does not reflect a desire to secure for himself a quiet position behind the scenes while someone else rules, for he knows all too well that the path from the Kremlin leads only to inner exile and the grave. Stalin replaced the dying Lenin, Khrushchev denounced Stalin, Brezhnev banished Khrushchev to his dacha, and Gorbachev buried Chernenko.

Yet, within days, the word Stalinism was being expunged from a new Soviet dictionary, and three years later my grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin s cult of personality in his famous Secret Speech to the Communist Party s XXth Congress. The Khrushchev thaw that followed may have been short lived, but for the first time in Soviet history the possibility of change was opened a possibility that Mikhail Gorbachev seized upon in 1985.

Mikhail Gorbachev continued to uncover the crimes of Stalinism, shedding light on dark pages that Khrushchev lacked the courage to open to public view. During Boris Yeltsin s presidency, this criticism became even stronger.

Initially, Khrushchev didn t plan to keep his denunciation of Stalin a secret. Five days after the Congress, his speech was sent to all the leaders of the socialist countries and read at local party meetings across the Soviet Union.

That first war among socialist states shattered the myth of inviolable fraternal bonds between the Soviet Union and the captive nations of Eastern Europe. But Khrushchev never envisioned the breakup of the Soviet empire as part of his thaw.

On October 4, 1957, my father, Nikita Khrushchev, awaited a telephone call. Chief Designer Sergei Korolev was expected to call from the Tyuratam launch site (later renamed Baikonur Cosmodrome) in Kazakhstan to report on the launch of the world s first man made satellite.

The doubts inspired at the Congress may have been inchoate, but they nonetheless sowed genuine unrest. In the first of the protests that rocked the communist world in 1956, huge crowds in Georgia demanded that Khrushchev be fired and Stalin s memory reinstated.

The crisis subsided when Soviet ships carrying additional missiles turned back, and Khrushchev agreed to remove the existing missiles from the island. As then US Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it We were eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.

Khrushchev had, of course, been an intimate part of Stalin s repressions, but he also didn t know half of what was going on. The whole Stalinist system of government was built on absolute secrecy, in which only the General Secretary himself knew the whole story.

MOSCOW On October 4, 1957, my father, Nikita Khrushchev, awaited a telephone call. Chief Designer Sergei Korolev was expected to call from the Tyuratam launch site (later renamed Baikonur Cosmodrome) in Kazakhstan to report on the launch of the world s first man made satellite.

Khrushchev transferred the peninsula to Ukraine in 1954 as a gift to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the unification of Ukraine and Russia. At the time, the gesture was largely symbolic, as Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and few could envisage an independent Ukraine.

Leaders whose foreign policy adventures end in defeat do not usually survive long in office. Either formal mechanisms are used to dethrone them as occurred, for example, in the Soviet Union, when the Central Committee forced Nikita Khrushchev out of power in 1964 or informal mechanisms come into play.

(But, even here, my ideas and policies were not novel in 1955 Khrushchev talked albeit in a very different context about uniting two Germanys.) My task, as I saw it, was to ensure Central and Eastern Europe's peaceful return to full sovereignty with a minimum of Soviet interference.

Kennedy s speech provoked a highly positive response from his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, who called in the US envoy and told him that the speech was the finest by any American president since Franklin Roosevelt. Within a few weeks, both sides had agreed to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

In choosing to allow One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to be published, Khrushchev knew that he was undermining the entire Soviet era up to that point. But, with Khrushchev s overthrow in 1964, Leonid Brezhnev lost no time in restoring orthodoxy and purging books that threatened the Party s reputation.

The success of US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in reaching the 1963 Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, at the height of the Cold War, provides an instructive lesson. At the time, hardliners on both sides denounced the LTBT as a weakening of national defense in the face of an implacable enemy.

And yet the US did not preemptively attack Soviet missile sites, which were relatively vulnerable, because the risk that even one or two of the Soviet missiles would be fired at an American city was enough to deter a first strike. In addition, both Kennedy and Khrushchev feared that rational strategies and careful calculation might spin out of control.

Dwight D. Eisenhower invited Nikita Khrushchev to the United States in 1959 to open the eyes of the first Soviet leader ever to visit America. The bilateral US China talks in Warsaw in the 1960 s were fruitless until Richard M. Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger opened a different, more direct discussion through the auspices of Pakistan.

Over the years, a mutual friend often tried to introduce me to General Király, but, to my regret, that meeting never happened. Any man who would frame the four death sentences he had received (one signed by Khrushchev, another by Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador in Budapest in 1956) and hang them in his drawing room has the sort of quirky humor I relish.

Elsewhere in the communist world, such murderous purges were renounced long ago, first in the Soviet Union by Khrushchev, following his denunciation of Stalin, and then in China by Deng Xiaoping, following his rehabilitation and return to power in the late 1970 s. This reform did not make these regimes any more beneficent or efficient, but it did bring a degree of stability and predictability to their behavior.