SON OF FORMER SOVIET LEADER KHRUSHCHEV DIES
To many Americans of the 1950s and 1960s, Nikita Khrushchev was the personification of Communism and the Cold War. He was the blunt leader of the Soviet Union who, when hostilities were on the rise in 1956, addressed Western diplomats with the words: “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.”
The statement was described by Soviet interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev as an “exact translation.”
Years later, Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, said “he meant that capitalism would die and that the Soviet economic system would bury it. But … these words were used against him and misunderstood by Americans.”
Sergei Khrushchev, who was a top Soviet expert on guided missile design, grew disillusioned with the Communist system, which he said “is not effective in any society,” and settled in the United States.
He died June 18 in Cranston, R.I., at the age of 84. The cause was not disclosed.
Khrushchev remained a staunch defender of his father, who had succeeded Josef Stalin as premier in 1953.
He joined his father on a visit to the U.S. and made home movies of things unknown in the Soviet Union: motorcycle police, billboards, Times Square.
He was also with his father during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the two superpowers narrowly averted a showdown after the Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles in Cuba.
“(My father) told me, ‘I trust the American president,’ ” Sergei Khrushchev said in 1999. “‘I think he’s honest man.’ ”
After his father retired, Khrushchev took long walks with him and helped write his memoirs.
Sergei Nikitich Khrushchev was born July 2, 1935 in Moscow, one of six children.
He received a doctorate in 1961 from what is now the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. He became director of the Soviet missile design bureau and later was research director of a computer institute.
After the Soviet Union fell, Khrushchev went to Brown University for a one-year term as a visiting scholar at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
He applied for permanent U.S. residency, with letters of support from former presidents Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush and former defence secretary Robert Mcnamara. Khrushchev and his wife, Valentina Golenko, became naturalized U.S. citizens in 1999.