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Sergei Khrushchev says his father's actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis were misunderstood.
By DAVID BALLINGRUD
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 24, 2001
ST. PETERSBURG -- To a generation of nervous Americans, Nikita Khrushchev was the Russian bear: unpredictable and pugnacious -- a bellowing, threatening, shoe-pounding Cold War nightmare who pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Reminded of this, for perhaps the millionth time, his son sighs and slowly shakes a large Russian head.
That fearsome image was propaganda, says Sergei Khrushchev, the 65-year-old son of the former Soviet premier. But not just U.S. propaganda, he says. Nikita Khrushchev himself helped build the image as a way to command the respect and attention of the West.
The real Nikita Khrushchev was a pragmatist, a manager, according to his son.
"It's true, he was an emotional man, but when he made a decision it was not an emotional decision. He was trying to advance the interests of his nation."
The lesson of the Cold War, said Sergei Khrushchev, 65, today a senior scholar at Brown University and a U.S. citizen, is that East and West misunderstood the other in the most fundamental ways, and thus placed the entire world in unprecedented danger.
The Cuban missile crisis was, in large part, "the result of cultural misunderstanding," he said.
Khrushchev was in St. Petersburg on Tuesday to share a forum with another son of the Cold War: Francis Gary Powers Jr., whose father's U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960.
Powers is the founder of the Cold War Museum and the curator of a special exhibition based on the U-2 incident that will open March 23 at Florida International Museum.
The two discussed the Cuba crisis and related matters at the Renaissance Vinoy Resort and Golf Club. Both are providing material to the museum's The Cuban Missile Crisis: When the Cold War Got Hot, which opened Dec. 15.
On May 1, 1960, Francis Gary Powers took off from Peshawar, Pakistan, for a high-altitude mission over the Soviet Union. He was shot down near Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains, and was held by the Soviets for 21 months.
While the incident quickly brought East-West relations to a boiling point, irony lay in what the Soviets were trying to conceal, said Khrushchev.
"We were hiding the fact that, at that time, we had nothing to hide," he said. The Soviets wanted the West to believe it had more missiles than it had, he said.
The incident helped set the stage for the crisis in Cuba two years later, when the Soviets tried to place missiles 90 miles from Florida beaches. The dangerous faceoff would not have taken place, Khrushchev said, if both East and West had a better grasp of what he called the other's "model."
His father, he said, only intended the missiles in Cuba to be "a signal that we were to be accepted as equal, as a nation that can protect its allies." His father thought the two countries "would exchange a few letters, and then the Americans would accept it, in much the same way we came to accept American missiles in nearby Turkey."
"We made the decision on our understanding, on our model. But in America, historically protected by two oceans, there was a very different reaction. The missiles created a psychological crisis.
"My father was trying to send a political message, but it was wrong. It made people in this country crazy."
Trained as an engineer, Khrushchev worked in computers after his father left office. In 1991 he came to Brown University's Thomas J. Watson Junior School for International Studies at the invitation of Thomas Watson, he said.
By the end of the decade,"the Soviet Union had fallen apart, and I was comfortable here. I asked my wife (Valentina Golenko), will we ever return to Russia? We decided we should stay, and we should stay as citizens."
This they did in the summer of 1999 in a ceremony in a school auditorium in Providence, R.I.
Khrushchev is skeptical that the current Russian government of Vladimir Putin will be able to end the influence of the criminal profiteers who came to power after the collapse. "I want to hope," he said, "but I don't know."