To
view an interview with this author, click here:http://khrushchev.soar.psu.edu
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.
William
Taubman is Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. He is the author
of Stalin's American Policy (Norton, 1983) and Moscow's
Silent Spring (Simon and Schuster, 1990). He won the 2004 National
Book Critics Circle Award for biography for his book Khrushchev:
The Man and His Era.
William C. Wohlforth is Assistant Professor of
International Politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign
Service of Georgetown University. He is the author of Elusive
Balance: Power and Perceptions during the Cold War (Cornell,
1993) and editor of Witnesses to the End of the Cold War (Johns Hopkins, 1996) and Cold
War Endgame: Oral History, Analysis, and Debates (Penn
State, 2003) |
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