Life with Father

...At home, the two regularly went for after-dinner walks, during which the senior Khrushchev would often comment on events of the day...

...ICBMs were the centerpiece of the Khrushchev strategy at home and abroad...

...The most gripping section of the book is a 180-page chapter on the Cuban missile crisis, which was more acute than many realized at the time...

...Khrushchev cut back the military establishment more radically than any U.S...

...I described my observations in Hungary and the testimony of the various Moscow correspondents...

...The conspiracy apparently began more than a year before it succeeded...

...He rebuffed Navy demands to create a fiveocean surface fleet, concentrating scarce resources on submarines...

...We talked some about Germany and Eastern Europe...

...The KGB chief rejected these overtures...

...Because communication links with the Soviet Embassy in Washington were notoriously slow, and U.S...

...in launching intercontinental ballistic missiles and space satellites...

...national security" mavens, citing dubious projections, were inciting hysteria about the alleged "missile gap," the functioning Soviet missiles could be counted on the fingers of one hand, as the author explains in detail and as President Eisenhower knew...

...The repairman was sent for, but it was Sunday and he was not on the premises...

...But there is abiding interest, in the West if not so much in Russia, in Nikita S. Khrushchev—partly because of his ebullient personality, and partly because of the realization that, with all his apparent inconsistencies, he put an end to Stalinism in the Soviet Union and the Leninist doctrine of "inevitable" war with the United States...

...In Russia, various Khrushchev contemporaries— from speechwriter Fyodor Burlatsky to former KGB chiefs Aleksandr Shelepin and Vladimir Semichastny—have described their encounters with Khrushchev in articles and interviews...

...How THE COUP would actually be staged was a tricky question, although it became less difficult once it was clear that Khrushchev would not resist...

...Much of the narrative is familiar, but there are some striking new details...

...I asked each official what he considered likely to be happening in coming months and years...

...in the Cuban missile crisis, matters proved to be more complicated...

...He has since made his way to Brown University...

...At the beginning of October 1964,1 was in Washington preparing to begin an assignment as Central European correspondent of the Washington Post...

...But, alas, he did think that the potential threat of his missiles could be used for diplomatic leverage...

...The logic of the crime, he said, would necessitate elimination of the murderer, and then the murderer of the murderer, and so on...

...In Yugoslavia, he was lively and spirited...

...military leaders to start shooting and score a decisive "victory" (or, in Castro's case, achieve revolutionary martyrdom...

...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "An Empire Loses Hope, "The New Russian Tragedy" Hardly anyone nowadays wants to learn more about Lenin, Stalin or Mao Zedong (enough is enough of those evildoers...

...Nevertheless, as part of its strategy of "running to the Right" of Vice President Richard M. Nixon in 1960, the Kennedy campaign adopted the myth of the missile gap (along with extreme hostility to Cuba...

...The major intervening event was the assassination of President Kennedy, which affected him deeply...

...Rather, as the title indicates, the narrative is largely about the Soviet effort in the late 1950s and the decade of the '60s to outdo the U.S...

...The projected limits would be 1,500 nuclear missiles each for the U S. and Russia...

...First, there were three volumes of his memoirs, Khrushchev Remembers...

...Apart from a few dozen pages of autobiographical notes left by his mother, Nina Petrovna, and a few contemptuous pages about his brother-in-law, the journalist Aleksei I. Adzhubei, there is little about Khrushchev family life, or about Sergei's education, personal friends and other outside influences...

...The door closed with a crash and the elevator began to creak as it moved slowly upward...

...Defense Secretary Robert S. MacNamara dismissed the "gap" a few weeks after taking office, but only after Kennedy had bought off the Air Force by promising 50,000 missiles...

...Hurriedly tearing the envelope open, he began passing pages from the valuable document through the crack...

...There are other flashes of humor in the book, and the narrative style is crisp and straightforward, but most of it is quite serious...

...But partisans of "national missile defense," a mini-"Star Wars," may prevent such an accord from ever being concluded...

...the "experiment" with a centralized economy had failed...

...This interesting book is something of a hybrid...

...Briefings were arranged with Administration officials...

...Forty years later, after the death of Soviet Communism, plus the conclusion of SALT-i, START-I and START-II agreements, even the projected START-III will not reduce the U.S...

...Moscow correspondents who had come to covertile visit saidthat Khrushchev had been that way for weeks, and told of sharp open criticism of him from stalwart Soviet Communists...

...We learn for the first time, though, that long before the Central Committee meeting where Khrushchev resigned, Brezhnev had approached Semichastny and explored the possibilities (poison, plane crash, auto crash) of physically eliminating the senior leader who had made Brezhnev's own career, in Kiev and in Moscow...

...Which floor?' he asked...

...then I changed the subject to Russia...

...Leonid Ilyichev, Party secretary for ideology, offered to take it personally to the Moscow Radio Center...

...Then it would be my turn, said Semichastny, smiling, 'and then yours.' He nodded at Brezhnev...

...Nor is it a traditional book of memoirs by Sergei Khrushchev...

...Besides, Hanoi had not consulted Moscow before launching the 1960 uprising in South Vietnam...

...Nothing seemed to work...

...This seemed to him to be true during the Suez crisis...

...But one exchange with McGeorge Bundy, then President Lyndon B. Johnson's national security adviser, was not...

...The first, an account of the early stages of the missile race—and the attendant U-2 incident—is a striking illustration of a major underlying theme, namely the mutual misperceptions of Russian and American officials...

...He accompanied his father on major foreign trips, too, including the 1959 visit to the U.S...

...Where did I get that idea, Bundy asked, almost angrily...

...He had no intention of starting a war (he had seen enough between 1941 and 1945), and he did not think the U.S...

...President ever has since 1948...

...Khrushchev considered medium-range missiles and battlefield nuclear weapons a waste of money, and declined to compete with the U.S...

...Uyichev "tried to slip the envelope through a crack in the elevator door, but [its] wax seals got in the way...

...in strategic bombers and other conventional aviation, and reduced manpower levels in the Armed Forces to one-tenth of the levels under Stalin...

...The interest in Khrushchev has been sustained by numerous original sources...

...Khrushchev could retire voluntarily because of old age, I replied, or else he could be overthrown by colleagues, as he nearly had been in 1957...

...A few minutes later, the elevator finally started to rise...

...In the midst of the crisis in October 1962, the CIA reported to Kennedy that there were 50 ICBMs in place in the Soviet Union itself...

...In addition, he rejected demands to compete with the U.S...

...Three sections stand out...

...After driving around in circles for some time, "they finally tracked down the building...

...The final section of great interest is Sergei Khrushchev's account of the conspiracy to overthrow his father, and the latter's lack of resistance to it...

...array of ICBMs to preKennedy levels...

...it is almost entirely focused on his years in power, from Stalin's death in March 1953 to his own removal from office in October 1964...

...The savings achieved went to missiles, but also to housing, food subsidies and other civilian needs...

...Basically, his son explains, at 70 he was tired, and he had begun to realize that not individuals but the system itself was at fault...

...Then came Khrushchev on Khrushchev, an account of the Soviet leader's last years by his son, Sergei N. Khrushchev (born 1935), a control systems engineer who worked for 10 years in a top Soviet missile design bureau...

...IN HIS work for the missile designer Vladimir Chelomei, Sergei Khrushchev attended numerous high-level meetings chaired by his father and witnessed both successful and unsuccessful missile tests and launches...

...A Personal postscript...

...Actually, there were "about 20," Sergei Khrushchev comments, and Kennedy knew that it took a long time to make any of them operational...

...We have no evidence whatsoever of anything like that happening," Bundy pronounced categorically (as if evoking the shades of omniscient intelligence agencies...

...To avoid a nuclear holocaust, both Kennedy and Khrushchev had to maintain continuous tight control of lower commanders, any of whom might have turned out to be (in Kennedy's phrase) "the son of a bitch who hasn't gotten the word...

...At a time when U.S...

...The Soviets had not only installed missiles but introduced hundreds of nuclear warheads and three Soviet divisions, whose commanders were almost as itchy as Fidel Castro and U.S...

...How would this supposedly take place, Bundy asked skeptically...

...Besides, unlike Molotov and that group in 1957, these people are all his creatures (sic)" Two weeks later, Khrushchev was out, Brezhnev was in, and Bundy returned his attention to Vietnam...

...Anyone who has spent any time in Moscow has one or more similar stories...

...The elevator, in its wire cage, was visible to everyone...

...ability to intercept radio broadcasts was legendary, Khrushchev suggested that, to save time, the letter be broadcast...

...Khrushchev's successors promptly restored his cuts in the military budget, thereby eventually producing the economic crisis of the late 1980s...

...Moreover, in the 1990s the author was able to call on newly declassified Soviet archives, as well as American sources...

...Khrushchev saw clearly (as did President Dwight D. Eisenhower) that, past a certain point, it did not matter who had more, or more advanced, missiles, since nobody was going to use them...

...in the "limited nuclear war" scenarios popularized by Henry Kissinger...

...Sergei Khrushchev began writing this book in 1989 and finished it last year...

...That is why most of us never believed in the "missile gap" or other claims of actual or potential Soviet parity with the West...

...Uyichev "jumped out before the car even came to a full stop...

...Although he conveys his father's and his own past thoughts, the views of both Khrushchevs can be seen to evolve with the frustration of domestic reform and international ambitions...

...He suspected that the Chinese were trying to lure the Soviet Union into a war with the U.S...

...would do so...

...Off he went in a giant black Chaika limousine: "However, neither he nor his driver from the Kremlin garage knew exactly where the Moscow Radio Center was located...

...I never had the opportunity to talk with Khrushchev, but I was one of hundreds of j ournalists who followed him around on trips to Yugoslavia in September 1963 and Hungary in February 1964...

...it took a while to unify the two originally separate groups of conspirators (the "Ukrainians" led by Leonid I. Brezhnev, and the so-called "Komsomols" led by Shelepin and Semichastny) and to line up, one by one, a majority in the Central Committee...

...The change in Khrushchev's bearing and demeanor was striking...

...They enabled Moscow to compensate in part for continuing poverty and the manpower shortage induced by the death of millions of young men in World War II...

...In Hungary six months later, he was weary and irritable...

...It tells how "Father's" decisive letter to President John F. Kennedy, agreeing to withdraw Soviet missiles from Cuba, was drafted and approved by the Communist Party Presidium at a dacha outside Moscow...

...In a spirit of distinctly post-Soviet irony, the author begins with a Gogolesque Prologue...

...Most of their answers were easily forgettable...

...For some reason it got stuck between floors...

...Internationally, the increasing "threat" of Soviet ICBMs, armed with nuclear warheads, acted as a deterrent to U. S. hawks and other potential Soviet adversaries...

...Now that the Khrushchev era is coming to a close," I began my question—and was sharply interrupted...

...Although he was voluble in his support for revolutionary Cuba, and uniquely concerned with Germany (where he tried to head off what eventually happened in 1989), he refused to become involved in Vietnam...

...It is not a full-scale biography of the senior Khrushchev...