Nikita Khrushchev

Years after Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was dead and buried in Moscow's Nogovody Cemetery, Vyacheslav Molotov - yes, the same Molotov who gave us the name "Molotov cocktail" - commented on how was it that a second-rate country bumpkin who could barely read and write and wasn't even a real Communist could find his way into Josef's Stalin's inner circle and then rise to be one of the most powerful men in the world. "Absurd!" he said. "Absolutely absurd!"

Actually, it was probably because Josef saw Nikita as a second-rate country bumpkin that kept him alive. After all, one of the worst things in Stalinist Russia was to be 1) be a blood relative of Stalin, 2) be an in-law of Stalin, 3) be a good friend of Stalin, and 4) look like you were smarter than Stalin. Before long you would be an ex-blood relative of Stalin, an ex-in-law of Stalin, an ex-good friend of Stalin, and no longer smarter than Stalin.

But what made Josef really nervous were people who he thought could replace him. But that round bald headed деревенщина from the Ukraine, Nikita Sergeyevich? сукин сын, not bloody likely.

Actually Nikita was not from the Ukraine. He was born in the city of Kalinovka, about one-and-a-half miles from the border. Nikita was Russian through-and-through, and although he understood Ukrainian well enough, he was never really comfortable speaking it.

Like most families in Tsarist Russia, the Khrushchevs were quite poor. His dad, Sergei, worked as a peasant in the summers and as a coal miner in winter. Sergei was a rather mild-mannered and easy going man, and his wife, Ksenia (Nikita's mom) was a pistol. She thought her husband would never get anywhere unless she gave him swift and regular kicks in the tail. But Papa Khrushchev's only ambition in life was to own a horse, an ambition that he never realized.

He did, though, want his son to have something more. That meant having a marketable skill with a steady reliable job working indoors. He told Nikita he should be a cobbler. After all, he said, everyone needs shoes.

But Nikita didn't want to be a cobbler or anything else his dad suggested. Then when Nikita was fourteen, his dad got a job in the mining city of Yuzovka, now called Donetsk. Although located in the Ukraine, the mines were run by a Welshman, John Hughes. John was a true robber baron, and the region saw rapid industrialization with labor strikes which could turn violent. When times got bad, Nikita's parents would send him back to Kalinovka and have him return when things simmered down.

At first he worked at various unskilled jobs with other teenagers. Although the work was hard, Nikita enjoyed his job, and most people saw him as a boisterous and happy-go-lucky kid who got along with everyone.

Then one of the shop foremen invited him to learn metal working and asked what type of job he wanted. Nikita opted to be a fitter, that is a worker who took the various parts and then machined and finished them so they would fit together (hence the name). It was, he said, far more satisfying to put everything together to make the final product than being a lathe operator and making the same part over and over.

Nikita was evidently good at his job and he even used his skills to make a bicycle from spare parts. He later attached a motor and so had a motorbike so he could drive the two miles to work rather than walk.

Soon Nikita was one of the higher paid workers in the mines. But the pay was still not much. This was the time when many Russians were emigrating to the United States, and Nikita gave it serious thought. Later when New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller told Nikita that people came to America for freedom, Nikita snorted that was a bunch of дерьмо. "They only came to get higher wages," he said. "I was almost one of them. I gave very serious consideration to coming."

Like so many young men working 12 hours a day, the young Nikita was fit and trim with a pretty good head of hair. He made a lot of friends, one of whom was another metal worker named Ilya Kosenko. It was Ilya's daughter, Olga, who eighty years later gave us some first hand accounts of the young Nikita.

It was in Yuzovka that Nikita met and married Yefrosinia Pisarev. They had two kids. It seems to have been a happy marriage but sadly, Yefrosinia died of typhus during the First World War. Nikita had a second, brief, and rather mysterious marriage shortly after Yefrosinia died. The story was his mother didn't like the girl because she wasn't nice to the step-kids. So Ksenia forced the split-up. Then in 1919, Nikita married Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk, and they remained married for the rest of his life.

The Pisarevs were a cultured family, and all their daughters had completed their secondary education. In fact, all of Nikita's wives came from well-educated families. Nikita always envied his wives their education, and one thing he wanted was for his own kids was to have the education he lacked. When his son by Nina, Sergei, became a university-trained engineer, Nikita couldn't have been more proud.

As we'll see, when Nikita had risen in the Communist party, he had the opportunities to further his education. He was not, though, the best of students, and he never finished any formal curriculum. One teacher remembered how he didn't even come close to completing her course work. Nikita himself always pleaded the pressure of his job, but that's probably not entirely true. Actually Nikita, although good at multi-tasking, had corresponding trouble focusing on any one thing for very long.

But that was in the future, and in the early 20th century, Russian society was reaching the point that France found itself in the 1780's. There was a small, elite, and rich upper class and a huge and near-destitute lower class whose labor kept the small and rich upper class well fed and living in luxury. Things needed only a little push to bring everything crashing down. So you can imagine what happened when a big push - like World War I - came along.

The Russians - that is, Tsar Nicholas II - decided he should support his first-cousin, George V of England, and fight the Germans. Although George appreciated Nicky's help, he thought his cousin was a naive though well-meaning buffoon who couldn't pour ссаки out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel in Cyrillic script. We should also mention that although the ruler of Russia was called the Tsar and his wife the Tsarina, it is not true that the kids were called Tsardines.

In any case, the war was a disaster for Russia (and the loss of nearly a million young men wasn't great for England either). Eventually things got so bad - defeats in battle, no food, no pay - that the Russian troops rebelled against their officers. Russia withdrew from the war, Lenin returned from exile, and with him came the Revolution of 1917.

It really isn't true that once Lenin rolled into St. Petersburg's Finland Station, hey, presto!, the Commies stormed the Winter Palace and set up the Soviet Union. Actually, what happened was far more complex and drawn out. There were really four groups contending for power once the Tsar and his family were shot wearing their jewel-padded clothes. For some reason each group adopted a color as their nickname. You had the democratic Whites under Alexander Kerensky (who later came to the US and ended up in a conservative think tank), the Blacks who were anarchists, the Greens composed of the peasant armies, and of course, the Reds who were in turn subdivided into various factions of which the Bolsheviks were just one. All these groups fought a horrible civil war for almost five years, and as we know, the Bolshevik's won out in 1922, just after Lenin had his second stroke.

Today people give Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov - Lenin was a pen name - a hard time. But Vladimir is the one of the early Communist leaders whose motives are easy to understand. After all, his brother, Alexander, had been executed by Tsar Alexander III. True, the Tsar in turn thought that he had a good reason for his actions since Big Brother Alexander and his buddies had been lying in wait to lob a few bombs at the Tsar as he drove by. But Lenin did not take a charitable attitude toward the Imperial Family and made it his life's work to end the rule of the Russian monarchy. But all in all we should cut Vladimir some slack. Besides, any man who liked cats can't be all bad.

As a member of the Red Army, Nikita had joined the Communist Party and liked what he saw. Despite Vyacheslav's comment that Nikita wasn't a real communist (Vyacheslav actually used the word "revolutionary"), Nikita quickly became a committed and a true believer in Marxism. Then once the Revolution was over, he returned to work in the mines, but as an assistant manager for political affairs. Today this would be a combination of chief operating officer and HR manager. He did all right, but it was when Lazar Kaganovich, one of Lenin's earliest and most long-lived associates, met and liked the young provincial that Nikita really began to move up the corporate ladder. Lazar was, if anything, more of a survivor than Nikita and made it not only through the Stalin years but missed outliving the Soviet Union itself by only five months.

Nikita's ability to improve production and his sincere belief in Marxism impressed Lazar. In 1929 and through Lazar's support, Nikita was invited to move to Moscow where it was soon apparent that there was a new golden boy in town. The term is particularly apt. Not only did Nikita have reddish hair (although by now seriously thinning), the Communist Party actually pioneered many of the techniques the later corporate world adapted for training their golden boys. The CP set up training institutes for their up-and-comers and then moved them around to various short termed but ever-rising positions. But, as we said, although Nikita never completed any full curriculum, he was still evidently impressing someone.

Of course, that someone was Iósif Vissariónovich Dzhugashvili, who saw himself as a man of steel and so called himself Stalin. Although after he advanced in - ah - shall we say - "civil service", Josef (as the name is often transcribed) pudged up a bit, during his early and bank robbing days he was slim and fit and sported a thick pre-Jedward brush cut. Despite his later trashing of Josef, Nikita always looked back with real fondness that one of the worst mass murderers in history respected the young dynamo from the provinces. Nikita's rise was rapid, and by 1938 he was the head of the Communist Party for the City of Moscow.

You read that the party officials in the USSR enjoyed free housing, special privileges, and access to special luxury stores. This is all true. So when Nikita, Nina, and the kids got to Moscow, they settled in a nice five-room apartment.

But lest we mutter against such a cushy lifestyle, many middle class Americans had it much - and we mean much - cushier. The Khrushchev apartment not only housed Nikita, Nina, and five kids, but also four grandparents, various and sundry nieces and nephews, in-laws, and Nikita's personal bodyguards, who, we read, slept in the same rooms as the grandparents. Such a residence, though, was extremely cushy by the standards of Stalin's day when it wasn't unusual for two families to share a one-room apartment.

So we shouldn't be surprised to hear that Nikita's kids tell us that home life was a bit stressful. Not only was the apartment crowded, but Nina had a tendency to be rigid in her upbringing of the kids. She also opted to work full time organizing a CP school at a factory and later as a manager. To avoid intimidating her co-workers as the wife of a Party honcho, she used her maiden name and arrived at work by streetcar rather than riding a party-provided limo (which she could have used). Although she liked the jobs and had a state-supplied nanny to help with the kids, she sometimes left the house at eight in the morning and got home no earlier than ten at night. Eventually she decided to devote her time just to running the family. This, her daughter Rada said, eased things a bit, but she and her mother often were at odds, something that happens betwixt mothers and adolescent daughters even in our best capitalistic families.

Nikita , of course, always saw himself as a good family man, supporting traditional Russian family values and wanting what's best for Nina and the kids. When he had the time, he would take the family out fishing and skiing and for vacations at their country dacha. All in all Nikita was fairly even-keeled at home, and the few times the kids saw their dad actually angry was when they didn't do well in school or otherwise got into mischief.

It didn't matter how old the kids were, Nikita expected them to behave. Once Leonid, who was Nikita and Yfresinia's grown son, had a photo taken of him and his own wife, Liuba, (who, like Leonid, was a licensed airplane pilot) with a bunch of friends gathered about as if they were having a big blowout. It was no big deal, just a group of young twenty-somethings all sitting around with дерьмо-eating grins on their faces and Liuba holding a bottle of champagne. But when Nikita, who at this time rarely drank (and didn't smoke) saw the picture, he flew off the handle even though the kids told him that the picture had just been taken as a joke. Still Nikita was fond of Liuba and would sometimes jokingly razz Leonid that his wife had qualified as a pilot before he had. All in all, though, the kids didn't really see Nikita a whole lot. He was certainly a busy man.

Nikita flourished at his Moscow job and worked there until 1938. Then like all good fledgling executives, he was given his big assignment. Stalin himself called Nikita in and told him he was sending him to be head of the Party in the Ukraine. The Ukraine was in a mess. Factory and farm production was - to use the modern term - "not meeting expectations", and now it was up to Nikita to fix things right. Nikita told Josef he didn't think he was the man for the job. After all, he had no experience in agriculture. But when Josef said to do something, dang it, you did something, and Nikita himself admitted that he was flattered that Josef thought he was the right man for a tough job.

And it was tough. It had been scarcely five years since the Ukraine had emerged from one of the worst famines in history. Maybe 5,000,000 people died. Of course, the famine was entirely man-made. It seems that once Josef had taken charge, he did a lot of things that were pretty ridiculous. The worst thing, of course, was combining the small privately owned and prosperous farms into the big hulking state-owned collectives. Collectives were horribly inefficient, and their output was far below agricultural yields during the years of the Tsars, a situation that didn't change until the 1950's. Josef also wanted to diversify - not necessarily a bad idea in itself - but he insisted that the farms raise crops totally unsuited for the region. Of course, it didn't help that what grain was harvested was then shipped to the cities, leaving the Ukrainians to starve. So when we say the Ukrainian famine was man-made we mean that it was made by one man. But Nikita knew there was no point in mentioning that.

And of course, there were the purges. Even after the Great Purge - that's after the Great Purge of 1937 - the Russian records tell us from 10,000 to 40,000 people were being arrested per annum, shipped to the labor camps (now called the Gulag), or simply out-and-out killed. As a high level party official in Moscow during the 1930's, Nikita had been fully involved, and we have extant signed documents proving he personally authorized arrests. Later he tried to cover his tracks.

But how in the heck could something like the purges happen in a country supposedly dedicated to the good of the worker? First, we need to realize that Stalin expected the Russian citizens to happily work to make the Soviet Union a modern industrialized power and focus on commodity, not consumer, industries (a scenario unintentionally satirized in the film, the Fall of Berlin). Industrial and agricultural success would then allow the upper party members to live well and run the country. Then as time got better prosperity would trickle down to the lower classes. Naturally this required continual success and growth in the new industries.

But that didn't happen because, as we said, Josef's business plan wasn't sound. So he turned to one of the oldest management tricks in the book. If you screw up, blame someone else. Then you do something, even if it is absolutely ineffective and even counter productive.

And Josef also had an extra trick up his sleeve. This was the nice neat law called Article 58. This statute set the definition for the "enemies of the state", what they did, and told you what to do with them. In short, anything that Stalin didn't like - and that included failure to attain stipulated business goals - was an act of treason.

So if a collective farm didn't make the grain quota? Well, enemies of the state must have been destroying the crops. A factory didn't achieve the production targets? There must have been enemies of the state deliberately sabotaging the lines.

Now there was a bit of flexibility in the actual implementation of Article 58. Say the district director didn't like Comrade So-and-So who ran a factory. The way you handle this now, of course, is you announce a reorganization and bring in one of your buddies to take his place. But back then what you did was to report Comrade So-and-So was an enemy of the state and had been sabotaging the production to bring down the revolution. Then the police came in and No-Longer-Comrade So-and-So was hauled off to the Gulag. Or if he wasn't a good prospect to work in the forests or mines of Siberia, to the basement of Lubyanka Prison.

On the other hand, if the district manager did like Comrade So-and-So, he would simply ask for an explanation for falling production, missed deadlines, etc., etc. Then Comrade So-and-So would finger people below him as the real enemies of the state, and they had been sabotaging production to bring down the revolution. Then you'd ship them out.

The era of the purges were certainly the worst of times to live in Russia. Friends were informing on friends, parents on children, and children on parents. Those who survived remembered whole families disappearing. Conservative estimates are that 5 % of the total population were sent to labor camps. No one knows the total number of those out-and-out executed, but the Russian records indicate that during the mid- to late 1930's you could have 1000 people shot in a single day. In one particular day over 3000 were executed. You can do the numbers.

There are reasons to think Nikita did have sincere regret on his part and blamed Stalin early on. There was one interesting episode that was told by Olga Kosenko, the daughter of Ilya, Nikita's friend that we mentioned earlier. During World War I, Ilya, like Nikita, had joined the Red Army and had high hopes for the Revolution. He had also joined the party. But when Stalin began his infamous "war against the kulaks" - arresting and confiscating the land of peasants who dared to run a successful farm and were prosperous enough to own a horse and a cow - Ilya quickly became disillusioned and left the party.

Then one day seven black limousines rolled up to Ilya's house, and out jumped a line of security guards. A well-dressed man stepped out and told Olga - who was twelve at the time - he wanted to talk to her father. Olga called to her dad that men had come to arrest him. But when Ilya walked outside he saw it was Nikita, and the two men went inside.

Ilya was inhibited by the presence of the guards and didn't say much when he was asked how things were. So later Nikita came back without such an intimidating entourage. He begged Ilya to rejoin the party and come to Moscow. Yes, things were bad, he said, but they had to weather the storm. Things would get better once that mudakshvili - a pun on both Stalin's real name and the parts of the anatomy that many men hold dearer than gold - was gone. His friend still refused, and Nikita sadly left. Amazingly both Ilya and Olga managed to live through the Stalin years and beyond.

Nikita knew full well that he, like anyone else, could be hauled off and sent to a labor camp or shot. In fact, once he was talking to a former assistant, a man named Lukashov, who had been arrested by the secret police. But as sometimes happened, although rarely, Luk had been released. Nikita asked what had happened. In between descriptions of the torture and beatings, Luk said the police had been trying to get a statement from him that his boss, Khrushchev, had once sent him abroad to contact "enemies of the state". Nikita almost dropped a load. The trip had been to buy seeds for vegetables.

Nikita could think of only one way out. He went to Moscow and sat down with Stalin. Comrade, he said, he had learned the police had been trying to implicate him, Nikita Segeyevich, as an enemy of the state. That was clearly untrue, and he appealed to Josef to believe what he said. The reply was as strange as it was false. "Yes," said Josef, "They're gathering evidence against me, too."

[Ironically, at a time when Americans were decrying the purges based on the vague "enemies of the state" concept, there was a similar effort in the US government led by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) who later adopted the very Soviet sounding name, the House Committee on Internal Security. Beginning in 1938 (the year Nikita went to the Ukraine) and finally disbanding in 1975, this was a bunch of - and there's no other word for it - fathead congressmen who took it on themselves to decide who was loyal and disloyal to the United States. Though they may have fingered a couple of real spies (possibly Alger Hiss), they also did things like ask witnesses if the 16th century English writer Christopher Marlowe or the ancient Greek playwright Euripidides were Communists. True, HUAC didn't necessarily ship people off to the America's prison farms or the basement of the DC jail, but they also had no hesitation in doing their best to destroy the careers of loyal Americans whose politics didn't fit certain prescribed standards. Among HUAC's targets were screen writer Dalton Trumbo (who wrote Spartacus), black singer and actor Paul Robeson (whose Ballad for Americans sounds amazingly patriotic), composer Elmer Bernstein (who wrote the score for the Great Escape), black writer Richard Wright (author of the classic novel Native Son), Yip Harburg (composer for the Wizard of Oz), playwright Arthur Miller (The Crucible), Eddie Albert (star of Green Acres), Burgess Meridith (the Penguin on TV's Batman), comedian Charlie Chaplin (whose film The Great Dictator was strongly anti-Fascist), actor Will Geer (the grandfather on the Waltons), and, of course, many others. That the HUAC itself, despite some recent attempts to paint the jerks as misunderstood and unjustly vilified heroes, was one of the most Un-American of activities is a topic we need not dwell on.]

In the end, the things that kept Nikita off Josef's дерьмо list were 1) Josef didn't think Nikita was a threat, and 2) under Nikita's management the Ukraine production - both manufacturing and agriculture - rose substantially. In 1939 alone output increased over 20 %. Whether he was really responsible for the rise is something historians can debate.

But Nikita did take his job seriously. We have Nikita' own account, of course, and like all autobiographies it tends to be a bit self-serving. We read of the busy manager driving around the provinces, talking to people, getting input, and identifying the problems. But people who knew him more or less confirm the story. He would indeed travel from town to town, farm to farm, and factory to factory, talking to the managers and the workers. He sought out their opinions and if the ideas were good, he'd try to get them implemented.

Nikita even once asked his chauffeur, called by the Khrushchev children as Uncle Shasha (although his real name was Alexander Zhuravlev), if he had anything he'd like to see improved. Yes, said Alexander, the Russians needed better tires. They wore out much too quickly. In his next meeting with Josef, Nikita mentioned the problem. Now one trick a good manager learns is that when people bring up a problem, you always assign them the job of fixing it. This way you can 1) find out who is the type of person who likes to fix what's wrong and 2) discourage people from complaining who aren't. So Josef told Nikita to take care of it.

According to Nikita, he then went to the factories and began to learn the ins and outs of the rubber and tire industry. He found, he said, that to make the production quotas, the workers were skipping two layers of the cord. So he managed to get the factories to follow the proper procedure. Again, this is according to Nikita himself. It may even be true.

But production in the Ukraine - and everywhere else - hit a big blip in April, 1941 when Hitler decided he didn't like the non-aggression pact he made with Russia in 1939. So he invaded the country, besieged St. Petersburg (then called Leningrad), and even made it as far as the center city of Volgograd (i. e., Stalingrad).

As the party official in charge of the Ukraine, Nikita was around the worst fighting. He was at Kiev (which was a horrible military defeat) but also at Stalingrad (where the German's were finally driven back). It was a horrible time. Nikita - nearly 50 - began smoking and drinking.

The generals tended to see Nikita and the other party officials as meddlers who should have been walking around, boosting morale, and helping them get supplies and not be trying to tell them, the professionals, how to run a war. Nikita, on the other hand, thought that since he was ultimately accountable for what happened in the Ukraine, then he should be involved in the actual military planning. But whoever was really responsible for the successes or failures, the Germans were eventually driven out of Russia, and when you get down to it, nothing succeeds like success. In early 1943, Nikita was given the rank of lieutenant general.

The worst personal tragedy of the war for Nikita was when his son, Leonid, as an army pilot, died when his plane was shot down by the Germans. Then as a perfect example of how Stalin would keep his own underlings in tow by going after family members, Leonid's wife, Liuba was arrested by the NKVD, the secret police force that kept changing it's name. There was no real reason for the arrest although we should point out that Liuba was in fact Jewish. She was accused of spying and sent to a Siberian work camp where she worked as a logger. She was finally released in 1948, but remained in Siberia until 1953 when she was able to return to Moscow. But she never had further dealings with her in-laws.

We have to emphasize such a modus Stalinandi was not unusual. It was, in fact, Josef's preferred way to keep people off balance. Even Molotov's wife - who was also Jewish - had been arrested and sent to a labor camp. And so were the sister, brother-in-law, and mother-in-law of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Josef was not a nice man.

Despite the fact that his daughter-in-law had been arrested as a spy, General Nikita Sergeyevich emerged as one of the war's heroes. But the Ukraine had been devastated. Over 5 million people had been killed (15 % of the population), towns, farms, and factories totally destroyed. There was another famine in 1946 (which even Nikita himself pointed out was so bad that some inhabitants resorted to cannibalism), and up until 1950, there was a Civil War where Ukrainian partisans were fighting for independence. Nikita had a handful.

As tough as Nikita's job was, life at home was plush. The family now lived in a large spacious home built in the time of the Tsars, and they regularly went on picnics, to the theater, and to the movies. But the household still had its old tension. Nina was as strict as ever and brought in special tutors to teach the kids English. From what the kids say, they didn't find it a nice convivial atmosphere. When the opportunity came for them to get out and live on their own, they got the heck out.

By 1949, the Ukraine was in good order, or it was at least good enough for Josef. Nikita returned to Moscow and began to deal with problems in increasingly off-beat ways. One incident in particular shows us how Nikita could go way off into left field with his ideas. Josef asked Nikita to draw up a plan for improving agriculture around Moscow whose land was not as good as the farmland in the south. Well, he got right to work with a very strange plan.

What they needed, he said, was to urbanize the countryside. Get rid of the individual farm houses where farmers lived. You then build apartments, put in sidewalks, and street lights. Nikita was proud of the idea and presented it a speech at a Party meeting. It was picked up and printed in the papers, where Josef first read about it. He thought the idea was stupid.

Oops.

Then began a series of official denunciations where the other members of the Presidium (which had replaced the older Politburo) all stood up and joined in trashing Nikita's hair-brained scheme. The paper even made a retraction and said they had accidentally printed what was really a list of ideas for discussion at a meeting, not a final recommendation. Nikita was completely and ultimately humiliated.

Then, amazingly, the whole thing blew over. So it isn't all that bad if everyone thinks you're a hick from the sticks who doesn't know any better. Josef even laughed about it. At one meeting he walked up to Nikita and playfully tapped him on the forehead with his pipe. "It's empty," Josef joked.

When you get down to it, Josef did like his little тупица. Still he and the others on his staff, like Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Nikolai Bulganin, and even Lazar Kaganovich, saw Nikita as a second-rate player.

But being a second rate player on the staff of the #1 man of the country isn't small potatoes. Pictures taken in the early 1950's show that when Josef was out and about, Nikita was almost always in tow. Also at Josef's side was Lavrenty Beria, who was now the head of the secret police which had recently been renamed the MGB. (Yes, that's the MGB. Don't get ahead of the story.)

If there had to be one man in the world whom you can give the name "scumbucket", it has to be Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria. He was the type of mass murderer that even mass murderers don't like. We would compare him to the lowest of worms, except you don't want to insult the worms.

What everyone agrees on is that Lavrenty was a degenerate of the lowest order. His predatory nature was known to everyone, and Stalin warned his teenaged daughter, Svetlana, to never - that's never, never, never - accept a ride from Beria. On a typical night, Lavrenty would get in his chauffeured government car and cruise Moscow looking for young women and girls. Finding those to his liking, he would take them, willing or no, back to his office. What happened to them afterwards varied. If they were cooperative, then he sent them on their way. If not, he did not send them on their way. From time to time, human bones - some identified as young females - are still being found in and around the building where he worked.

And Josef, Nikita, and the rest? Well, by 1950, Josef had begun to show increasing signs of paranoia and irrationality, which was pretty bad for a man who was paranoid and irrational on his best of days. Josef was now over seventy, which at the time was a fairly advanced age. His heavy drinking, eating, and smoking was not helping his arteriosclerosis, and there is good reason to think he was becoming senile. He was no longer the busy industrious murderous dictator who spent 18 hours at his desk. Instead, he was an increasingly indolent overweight murderous dictator running the country from the dinner table.

On a usual day Josef would get up around noon. He would pass word to his bodyguards that he was up, and they should bring him a cup of tea. Then he would examine state papers and deal with matters of the day until he would decide who he wanted for his evening guests.

Nikita, Georgy, Vyacheslav, Nikolai, and Lavrenty had no idea if they would be invited to dinner or not. The summons might come at any time - early afternoon or late evening. It was possible that they would have already finished up a good meal and were getting ready for bed only to get a phone call that Josef wanted them over.

The first item on the evening's agenda was to see a ballet or play. But Josef had also become a fan of the cinema and would often have screenings of films - Russian and foreign - at the Kremlin. Not knowing English and as this was the years before closed captions, one of the English speakers would give a running translation. Josef liked westerns and comedies, but one thing he despised were movies with risqué plots.

In general it was not a pleasant time for the guests. There was the story that once Josef was watching a Russian film and had invited the director to the screening. An aide brought in a document, which after glancing at it, Josef commented "This is rubbish." The director, overhearing the remark, thought Josef was referring to the film, fainted, and soiled his trousers. A good story, yes, but there are other stories told about other people spoiling their pantaloons due to a remark by Josef, including one about the head of the composer's union, Tikhon Khrennikov. So we may have to take this story with a grain of salt.

After the show Josef and his bunch would go to dinner. This was usually not at the Kremlin but at Josef's private residence in Kuntsevo, a suburb a short distance off. At Josef's insistence, they fueled their meal with copious amounts of wine and liquor. They would then plow their way through mounds of food, often selected from the cuisine of Josef's native Georgia. Everyone would propose toasts and then indulge in drinking games where the loser had to chug his glass of vodka. By now Nikita could drink with the best of them although there were times he would try to get the waiters to substitute colored water for his wine.

Finally around 4 or 5 a. m., all would begin to wind their way back to their homes. Supposedly during the night they took some time off to discuss business matters. But from the descriptions of the servers and guards (and some of the diners), the episodes come off as a Friday night of six frat boys who couldn't get a date.

On March 1, 1953, the usual gang met for dinner. As always there was plenty to eat and drink. As the party began to break up in the early morning, the chief guard, a young soldier named Ivan Khrustalev, told the others they wouldn't be needed. The "Boss" said they could all go to sleep. Most unusual.

By noon, Josef had not yet stirred. True, even when he awoke early, he might not get up until 10:00. So the guards weren't too worried. But after 1:00 p. m., Josef still hadn't called for his tea, and the guards were under strict orders never to wake the Boss - as they called him - should he sleep late.

Finally at 6:30 in the evening the guards saw a light in Josef's apartment. At least the Boss was up. So they expected to be called soon. However, they kept waiting. Finally at 10:00 p. m., Ivan decided to look in. He found Josef on the floor next to a copy of Pravada and lying in a puddle of urine. His broken watch had stopped at 6:30. Evidently Josef had gotten up, walked to the table to turn on the lamp, and was felled by a stroke.

There was a bit of a problem. At the time most of the doctors at the Kremlin had been Jewish and Josef had decided they were all enemies of the state. The trials of the so-called "Doctor's Plot" were scheduled to begin later that month. So the best doctors were all in jail.

Instead the guards called Lavrenty who told them not to call anyone else. A couple of hours later he showed up and took charge. Finally thirteen hours after Ivan found Josef lying on the floor, they located a doctor who wasn't in jail. He confirmed there had been a stroke.

Eventually Nikita, Georgy, Vyacheslav, and Nikolai arrived to wait the inevitable along with Lavrenty. After a couple of days. Josef was still the same. One story is that when it became clear Josef would probably not recover, Beria began striding around the room bad-mouthing his comatose boss in most discourteous terms. Then suddenly Josef began to stir, and Lavrenty threw himself on his knees by the sofa and began kissing Josef's hand. Only then, we read, did Stalin die.

This story, as good as it is, doesn't jibe with what Svetlana, Stalin's daughter said. She just said as the end neared, Josef's skin darkened, his features distorted, and he died. It was 9:50 p. m. on March 5, 1953.

The day after Stalin's funeral, Lavrenty drove to a prison camp and personally brought Molotov's wife back to Moscow. The doctors were freed from prison, and soon Lavrenty had liberated over a million prisoners. He even abandoned the plan that East Germany was going to become a separate socialist state and said that all he wanted was a peaceful Germany even if capitalist. He had other plans for liberalizing art and literature, and one author pointed out that Lavrenty's proposals not only went beyond Nikita's later "De-Stalinization" efforts, but were even more far ranging than those of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika over thirty years later. But don't get the wrong ideas. Lavrenty was just trying to cover his more than guilty зад.

Officially, though, it was Malenkov who was the #1 man, and Lavrenty was just the enforcer. Next in order of office, you had Molotov and Bulganin. Nikita, who the others still saw as a bit of a knucklehead, was actually #5 in line.

So it's all the more ironic that it fell to Nikita to plan Beria's removal. Although we might dismiss his own account as Nikita blowing hot air, even people who couldn't stand him - like Molotov - confirmed his account. Still there was considerable collaboration as everyone had more or less come to the independent conclusion that they had to get rid of Lavrenty before he got rid of them.

The final plan was to arrange an arrest at one of the meetings of the Presidium. Of course, there was one wee little problem. Lavrenty not only had the MGB with units of armed men at his beck and call, but he also controlled the military units around Moscow. His own personal bodyguard of fifteen agents followed him everywhere, and although they were not usually present at the Presidium meetings, would be waiting in a nearby room.

So the plan then was to make sure the army commanders had been called away for maneuvers. They also took steps so they could announce that Lavrenty had left the building before his guards knew what happened. During all this planning Lavrenty never saw anything amiss which shows that he had no idea what was going on.

Nikita knew one thing they needed was muscle, and fortunately an old friend from the army, Kirill Moskeshenko, was in charge of the air defense around Moscow. So Nikita called Kirill and asked him to get together a group of soldiers for the July 26 meeting. The Presidium would discuss (wink, wink) "air defenses". Also, Nikita added, bring cigars.

"Cigars" was a euphemism for weapons. When Nikita asked Kirill if he understood what he meant, Kirill said yes.

Lavrenty was one of those people who always show up late for meetings. Psychologists tell us people do this to puff themselves up by letting everyone know 1) they're too busy to make meetings on time, and 2) the meetings aren't important enough for them to show up on time anyway. But as Lavrenty found out when he finally did show up, this meeting was plenty important.

Malenkov was the first to rise. He immediately began trashing Lavrenty who just sat by with a smirk, confident that the meeting would end up with Georgy's arrest. But then others continued the harangue. When Nikita's turn came, he yelled that Lavrenty's reforms after Stalin's death, particularly the plan to abandon East Germany as a Communist state, proved Laventry was no real socialist. He was, Nikita said, just a (ptui) "careerist". Lavrenty continued to sneer.

Then Georgy pushed a button and in rushed Kirill and his soldiers, among them the thick-haired #2 military leader of Moscow, Leonid Brezhnev. Lavrenty was informed he was under arrest and was grabbed. Reportedly Nikita himself took hold of Beria's arm when it looked like he might be going for a gun.

How could a man as savvy as Lavrenty remain so oblivious to reality until it was too late? Well, there are theories that Nikita had planned a double cross-diversion to throw Lavrenty off guard. One possibility is that Nikita actually told Lavrenty that Malenkov would be attempting a coup at the meeting, but that he, Nikita, would have the guards come in and arrest Georgy. This would explain Lavrenty's lack of concern during the speeches. This scenario, though, is purely hypothetical. But there is no doubt but Lavrenty was surprised. "Nikita, what's going on?" he shouted as Kirill's men began to haul him away. Nikita said nothing.

Kirill and his men hustled the still volubly protesting former head of the MGB out of the room. They removed his tie and belt and even cut the buttons off his pants, reasoning he couldn't get very far with his pants falling down. After some delay, Beria was trundled into a car, covered up with a carpet, and driven to one of the military bunkers outside Moscow. During this time Beria's own guards were sitting in the anteroom eating sandwiches which had been sent in.

Not surprisingly, Nikita's son, Sergei, remembered when his dad got home that night he looked rather tired. He told Sergei and Nina that they had arrested Lavrenty.

Laventry was kept on ice until a week before Christmas. Then along with six others he was tried as an enemy of the state as well as for terrorism and counter revolutionary activities. But everyone also wanted to hear about his making whoopee with the young ladies. They heard enough.

The trial was held in Kirill's bunker and followed the judicial proceedings typical of the era. There was no defense counsel, no right to appeal, and any sentences were carried out immediately. The trial lasted six days and wound up on Christmas Eve. Lavrenty, aware of the inevitable verdict, admitted his mistakes and begged for forgiveness.

What happened next varies depending on what source you read. As soon as the verdict was pronounced, Laventry may have been taken into another specially prepared room. Or perhaps the soldiers just put a wooded board behind him to avoid ricochets. In any case, Laventry's tunic was removed, leaving him in his undershirt, and his hands were tied behind his back. His pleas for mercy then got so irritating that he was gagged with a towel which just left his frightened eyes sticking out. Then General Pavel Batitsky walked up and shot him in the forehead.

Nikita emerged as the First Secretary of the Party. But he still was not totally in charge. From 1953 to 1956, there was a lot of intrigue back and forth with temporary alliances being made where one of the old group would be trashed and belittled in the Presidium meetings. Then later they would switch their guns to someone else. In particular Malenkov was a frequent butt of Nikita's denouncements.

What we see, then, is the Soviet system as painted to Americans and others of the West where a single all powerful dictator wielded unbridled power isn't quite correct. Obviously such a situation could evolve, but the various offices were constructed on Lenin's idea of collective leadership. But as everyone knows, collective leadership doesn't work very well. Effective governments, even with long traditions of regularly held free elections, avoid the junta approach and opt for a single person at the top. Call him or her what you will - President, Prime Minister, Premier, or just The Supreme Big Stud - you need someone in charge.

But if there was any doubt that Nikita saw himself as the true leader of the Soviet Union, that was dispelled in 1956 when during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party he stood up in a secret session and issued his famous speech against Stalin. He blamed Josef for the purges where millions of honest Communists were imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Then he, in an act which took a lot of яйца, began to berate Malenkov, Molotov, and even his older mentor, Lazar Kaganovich. Where were they, he shouted, when Stalin began his purges? Why they were right there in Moscow, spineless dupes who wouldn't stand up to the murderous leader, a murderous leader who, we have to point out, was also working closely with that rising party leader, Nikita Sergeyevich.

After the 20th Congress Nikita's more blustery nature began to show itself and in an increasingly embarrassing manner. His speeches - sometimes they went on for hours - could be incoherent ramblings with coarse insults thrown out at groups and individuals. He could act a complete кисель even in what should have been more relaxed settings.

When Nikita denounced Stalin, Soviet artists hoped their country would move into the twentieth century. A large exhibit of Russian art was soon set up and of course the top government officials were invited. But Nikita was at his infantile worst. Looking at the paintings and sculptures, he began to shout that the art was dog-дерьмо and that a donkey could smear better than that with his tail. He had seen a painting, he said, that looked like an infant had мочился on the canvas. Anyone who made art like that had to be nothing more than a педик.

(In fairness to Nikita, we have to mention that he did not say the artists didn't have the right to make such art and sell it if they wanted. Nor did he say that artists who painted in modernists styles should be jailed. But his complaint was that the government shouldn't be expected to pay for such art. Ironically such an argument is increasingly made today in Western countries regarding six-figure priced "art" that accidentally gets thrown out because the museum custodians thought it was trash left out for the night).

Nikita, though, was a traditionalist in other arts as well. He vehemently denounced jazz (then becoming popular in Russia) and modern dances - where he said young ladies did nothing but wiggle their задницы. One of his worst tirades which caused major embarrassment for the other Presidium members was at a Writer's Conference when he began yelling at the tiny, mild mannered poetess, Margarita Aliger. Margarita was a full-fledged member of the Communist party, and when she mentioned her party loyalty, Nikita yelled he didn't consider people like her real Communists. At this point, some of the other party leaders began to think Nikita had been hitting the vodka too hard.

This emerging behavior as a foul-mouthed, uneducated деревенщина fell far from convincing the Big Three, Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich, that Nikita was the man to lead a modern Communist state that was now emerging onto the world stage.

Malenkov and the others saw that Nikita was moving toward a one man rule and were getting nervous that he might send them the way of Beria. Ultimately, they decided to do a replay of Beria's last Presidium meeting. They even managed to get the famous and extremely popular World War II general, Georgy Zhukov, to join them.

In June, 1957, at the meeting of the Presidium, Malenkov rose to make a motion. Nikita, he said, was an incompetent bumbling fool. Agriculture was in the doldrums, factory output was falling, and the world was screaming bloody murder about their recent invasion of Hungary. Nikita, Georgy said, was disrespectful to his colleagues and didn't consult them as their offices merited. So he, Malenkov, wanted a vote as to whether Nikita should continue as First Secretary.

Nikita then rose, and he began trashing Georgy. Others joined in and the shouting went back and forth for several hours until it was time to adjourn. Everyone returned the next day, and the shouting went on for nearly a week.

But eventually it became clear that Malenkov and the others had misread the dissatisfaction with Nikita. They gained little support from neutral members, and even Bulganin, who they thought was on their side, was lukewarm about removing Nikita.

And of course, Nikita had not been idle once he saw what was going on. After the first day, he sent word that all his supporters who were out of town to get their rosy-red задницы back to Moscow. Planes were dispatched, and soon the Presidium was at full strength with a strong majority supporting Nikita. Then once it was clear the coup had failed, Nikita himself brought to vote motions stripping Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich of their offices. Their places were taken by Nikita's friends.

Georgy, Vyacheslav, and Lazar all expected they would go the way of Beria. But perhaps it was because Nikita did not want to be seen as the next Stalin that he took what for the times was a very lenient approach. Georgy was dispatched to be a manager of a hydroelectric plant in Kazakhstan, and Vyacheslav was sent to be the ambassador of Mongolia.

But when Lazar wasn't offered another job, he was certain he would be executed. So he called Nikita and begged for mercy. Nikita just said he'd think about it. In the end Lazar was just retired and was even granted a pension.

So it wasn't until 1957 that Nikita was fully in charge. Afterwards, people noticed he was far more relaxed and confident, and he could even regale visitors with jokes at his own expense. He once told the story about how they arrested a man who was running around the Kremlin shouting "Khrushchev is a fool! Khrushchev is a fool!"

"We gave him twenty-three years," Nikita said. "Three for insulting a government official. And twenty for revealing a state secret."

These were the classic Khrushchev years. He said he would bury us and even went into spittle flinging diatribes when the US government wouldn't let him go to Disneyland. We see him rubbing elbows with Nehru and Nassar and shaking hands with Castro. He's making speeches where we see him waving his arms and pounding his fists on the desks.

Today one of the greatest debates on the Fount of All Knowledge (i. e., the Internet) and elsewhere is whether Nikita really did take off his shoe and pound it on his desk at the UN. At the time, no one doubted it, at least not in the US. The story appeared in US newspapers and quickly became standard fare for ridicule of the round little Russian dictator. In one skit, a comedian sat down at a piano and asked if the audience knew how Khrushchev played the piano. Then he took off his shoe and started pounding the keys. And on the game show, To Tell the Truth, when one of the contestants looked like Khrushchev, a panelist took off his shoe and began pounding the table.

There are people who swear they saw film clips of Nikita banging his shoe. But when you retrieve the videos you see no shoes. Another famous photo that supposedly - quote - "proves" - unquote - the shoe pounding incident is really just a crude fake. Not only could a 2-year old recognize it is a computer cut-and-paste job, but the original photo (with no shoe) was one of the most famous of Nikita ever taken and had appeared in magazines and newspapers long before the Internet. It is a bit ironic that people who denounce the old Soviet regime for doctoring up photos, so easily fall for the trick themselves. The #1 Rule for faking photos is don't use media stock images that millions of people have seen before.

We get alternative explanations, none of which agree. Maybe Nikita's shoe was too tight. Maybe a reporter trod on the Premier's shoe and it came off. Maybe he took the shoe off and waved it around and then put it down on the desk (but didn't bang it).

Oddly enough, Nikita's children and grandchildren - who, of course, weren't there - don't explicitly deny the shoe incident. So true or not, the shoe incident shows us that Nikita's impulsive behavior was still a matter of embarrassment even to the family. But shoe or no shoe, it's one thing to cause embarrassment to your family, and something else to cause it to the country. And it's even worse when the economy isn't going so hot, and you keep proposing obsessive harebrained ideas to fix it.

Somehow Nikita had decided the way to bring the Soviet Union out of the doldrums was to plaint maize (called "corn" in the United States although in certain regions the word can refer to another grassy plant). Nikita envisioned a plan where vast tracts of land would be opened to planting the crop, and with huge fields of the golden grain ripening in the brilliant Soviet sun, all the problems would be over. But Nikita seemed oblivious that the idea was so simplistic as to be self-satirizing, and that some of the areas he picked extended beyond the Arctic Circle. He ended up as a joke even among the Russians. The reason Nikita wanted to send cosmonauts to the moon was so they could plant maize.

Then, of course, came the Cuban missile Crisis. Russia had been sending nuclear missiles to Fidel Castro in Cuba. When the US found this out, they demanded the missiles' removal and the world came within days of a nuclear war. But finally it was agreed on a missile swap. Nikita would remove the missiles in Cuba and Kennedy would remove the missiles in Turkey and agree not to invade Cuba. Although this was probably Nikita's finest hour - after all, his decision to remove the missiles prevented a nuclear war - it was seen by the world as a humiliating defeat for Nikita.

The Cuban missle crisis convinced a number in the Presidium that Nikita had forgotten the real goal of Karl Marx and he was over-liberalizing the Soviet way of life. Despite his rhetoric, he didn't seem that interested in spreading Communism through the world. He was becoming lax in his control on Soviet control over the regions in Eastern Europe. Although Hungary had tried to shake itself free of the Soviet Union in 1956 and had fallen to Soviet intervention, the truth was that after the Hungarian revolution that speech and press had become freer and the people were able to listen to western broadcasts - such as the BBC - without fear. By October 1963, the rest of the Presidium had had enough.

Nikita had been vacationing on the Black Sea when he got a call from the Secretary of the Central Committee and Second Secretary of the Soviet Union. That was none other than Leonid Brezhnev, the same Leonid who had helped Nikita arrest Beria ten years before. They were having a meeting to discuss agricultural affairs, he said. Could he attend?

Why, Nikita asked querulously, did they need him at a meeting about farming? He was on vacation, for crying out loud. Well, said Leonid, there are issues that will require his decision, and it would be better for him to be there. Can't you put off the meeting, asked Nikita. No, said Leonid, we can't, it's too important, and Nikita agreed to fly back to Moscow the next day.

Leonid called the meeting to order. But first, he said, there is a change in the agenda. They would not, he said, be talking about agriculture. No, Leonid said, the one agenda item would be about you, Nikita Sergeyevich. Then began a blistering series of speeches. Each man in the room stood up and denounced Nikita's leadership, his failures, his bullheadedness, his ego, his refusal to listen to others, and his failed policies. Unlike in 1956, there were no exceptions. Everyone stood up and trashed Nikita, included Vladimir Semnichasty, head of the KGB, the secret police with the ever changing initials.

You might expect that at that point a group of KGB men would come in and haul Nikita away. Nope, the meeting was temporarily adjourned to the next day. Everyone headed back to their residences. Nikita went off to his Moscow apartment where he told his now grown son, Sergei, that it looked like it was all up. Sergei later said that he had heard of the plans earlier and had warned his dad. But Nikita hadn't considered the plot credible.

The next day the meeting continued with more of the same. Finally Nikita was invited to step down voluntarily, and many Americans heard the announcement while listening to the last game of the World Series. Nikita had resigned for health reasons, they heard. Then in an early two-for-one deal, Leonid was given the job of First Secretary, and Alexei Kosygin was named Premier.

Nikita and Nina were given an apartment, a pension, and a country cottage dacha south of Moscow. Nikita spent the rest of his life at his homes and taking the air in the public parks. People remember seeing him walking around and sitting on the benches, usually unsmiling and not speaking to anyone.

In 1970, a man named Victor Louis presented a manuscript to the English publishers, Little, Brown, and Company. It was, Victor said, the memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev. The publishers were a bit skeptical, but they gave Victor a hat of a distinctive design. To verify he really had access to Nikita (and so to confirm the authenticity of the manuscript), they wanted a photo of Nikita wearing it. Although today you could easily Photoshop the hat in, back then you could tell a cut-and-paste job. The publishers received the photo and in 1970 issued the book as Khrushchev Remembers. Selected excerpts appeared in Life magazine, also in 1970.

How, you wonder, could Nikita get away with smuggling a manuscript out of the Soviet Union? Well, at that point, no one really cared what Nikita did. In fact, Yuri Andropov, the new head of the KGB, had been fully aware of the manuscript and the smuggling plan. For appearance's sake, Yuri had Nikita sign a statement that the book had been fabricated. But in the end, everyone knew it was authentic, and those involved in the shenanigans - which included Nikita' son, Sergei - were left alone.

Decades of eating good Russian food accessible to high-level Party members had been having an adverse effect on Nikita's health. By 1970, he was taking nitroglycerin pills for angina and had been hospitalized several times. On September 5, 1971, he visited his daughter, Rada, and her husband outside Moscow. He returned home the next day but was still having chest pains. The doctors insisted he go to the hospital where he lived for five more days.

George Orwell was once asked why is it that countries like England and America had much more personal freedom than many totalitarian countries that themselves had constitutions that guaranteed free elections, free speech, and a free press. He said he thought it was simply a matter of tradition. Russia, well before the Soviet era, had been a closed society with a secret police that could haul you off whether it was the Okhrana, Cheka, OGPU, NVKD, MGB, or KGB. The magician and escape artist, Harry Houdini, toured Russia in 1903, and said you couldn't believe the relief you feel when you leave Russia. So in many ways, Lenin, Stalin, and Nikita were just continuing the long tradition of the Tsar's.

To correct Niktia's errors, Leonid Brezhnev began sending Russian "advisors" throughout the world. More to Cuba, Angola, and North Vietnam. Attempts of the Eastern Block countries to shake off Soviet control were met with invasion as the Czechs found out in 1968.

Up until 1990 everyone thought the old USSR was here to stay. The feeling was so universal that it permeated deeply into American entertainment, and a character on a popular American television show was clearly the product of a Soviet system that was still functioning as late as Star Date 4523.3. "It's a Russian inwention," Ensign Pavel Chekov told Captain James Tiberius Kirk when they were looking at a strain of wheat that was the favorite food of furry little fluffballs. Ensign Chekov had also once referred to the smarmy intergalactic con-man, Harvey Mudd, as "that unprincipled, evil-minded, lecherous, kulak", giving an ironic tribute to Josef and his times.

Ironically, it was Brezhnev's success that brought him down. Creating more Soviet satellite countries cost money. The remora like countries expected - and got - Soviet money to establish their new Marxist regimes. That, of course, required lots of rubles which when they left the Soviet Union never returned.

It was when Leonid decided to add Afghanistan to it's partners that things really fell apart. Russia sent troops into Afghanistan in 1979 and they stayed there until 1989. By then the Soviet people had gotten sick of the whole mess. The leaders began to face reality that with the dawn of the computerized information age, you can't keep a country isolated from the rest of the world. The leaders who followed Leonid began to accept what had once been underground - or at least ignored - modernization of their culture. Even public performances of rock and roll were suddenly OK, and once Konstantin Chernenko even got up on stage and began to dance with a rock group.

Is this, the Soviet generals asked, what we've been fighting for? Not bloody likely and so in August 1991 the generals told the army to stage a coup against the Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachov. But the army did no such thing and the Soviet Union came a-tumbling down.

But are we seeing in recent events a return to those not-so-good days of yesteryear where the Russian Federation - the much reduced and scaled back remnant of the Soviet Union - is moving toward re-occupying state former territory, recreating a state controlled press, suppression of free speech and art, establishing leader personality cults, and wanting to do the opposite of whatever the Americans do? Some Russians think so.

But who knows? When you get down to it, people aren't really that hot at predicting the future. Nikita once said that the grandchildren in the West would grow up under Communism. Boy, did he blow that one. Today some of his own grandchildren now live in the United States, and his son, Sergei, not only lives in America, but in 1999 became a US citizen.

References

Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, William Taubman, W. W. Norton and Company, 2003.

Khrushchev Remembers, Nikita Khrushchev, Little, Brown, and Company, 1970.

Khrushchev Remembers, Life Magazine, November 27, 1970, December 4, 1970, December 11, 1970, December 18, 1970.

"The Case of Khrushchev's Shoe", Nina Khrushcheva, New Statesman, October 2, 2000

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Knopf, 2004. Mostly covers Joseph in the years he was in power but does cover his childhood and rise to be Lenin's right hand man.

Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times - Soviet Russia in the 1930's, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Oxford University Press (2000). A book that explains why Stalin lasted as long as he did, oddly enough by creating a stratified society where there was various levels of special privileges. Even today there are people who lived through the times of Stalin that - amazing as it seems to us - yearn for the good old days.

The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, Adam Hochschild, Viking, New York, 1994. A book based on interviews of people who experienced first hand Stalin's labor camps and prisons.

AllRussias.com, Alex Chubarov, http://www.allrussias.com/