Khrushchev denounced his mentor, Stalin.

Khrushchev did not really know anything other than Communism.

Worried by the protests, Khrushchev tried to cool off the anti Stalin campaign.

When Khrushchev came back, he was smiling Sputnik s launch was successful.

Initially, Khrushchev didn t plan to keep his denunciation of Stalin a secret.

Both Putin and Khrushchev sought to use Solzhenitsyn for their own purposes.

MOSCOW On October 4, 1957, my father, Nikita Khrushchev, awaited a telephone call.

MOSCOW 45 45 On October 4, 1957, my father, Nikita Khrushchev, awaited a telephone call.

Following the death of Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev became the new leader of the USSR.

That silence lasted until 1961, when Khrushchev permitted new revelations of Stalin era crimes.

Khrushchev had, of course, been an intimate part of Stalin s repressions, but he also didn t know half of what was going on.

Stalin replaced the dying Lenin, Khrushchev denounced Stalin, Brezhnev banished Khrushchev to his dacha, and Gorbachev buried Chernenko.

Yet Khrushchev, isolated and in disgrace, continued to see a bond between himself and the great author.

Khrushchev transferred the peninsula to Ukraine in 1954 as a gift to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the unification of Ukraine and Russia.

Khrushchev, for example, was stunned when he discovered that in the 1930 s and 1940 s, some 70 of Party members were annihilated.

Király, Kolakowski, and Khrushchev each in his own way is a symbol of today s new and uniting Europe, a Europe of rapprochement and forgiveness among erstwhile opponents.

It will be a scene that would easily have been familiar to Soviet leaders like Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev, taking the salute atop Lenin s tomb.

Such a moment occurred 50 years ago, with Nikita Khrushchev s so called Secret Speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

In choosing to allow One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to be published, Khrushchev knew that he was undermining the entire Soviet era up to that point.

Of course, Russian politicians are always fond of assigning a due date for change Nikita Khrushchev once memorably promised to build communism in 20 years.

Nikita Khrushchev famously boasted in 1959 that the Soviet Union would overtake the US by 1970, and by 1980 at the latest.

I assume that the reference to how a tipsy Khrushchev attempted to sign something by no means fits into the overall picture of human society.

(But, even here, my ideas and policies were not novel in 1955 Khrushchev talked albeit in a very different context about uniting two Germanys.)

Khrushchev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin all saw their hold on power undermined when they sought to please or placate the West only to receive nothing in return.

But Khrushchev never envisioned the breakup of the Soviet empire as part of his thaw.

The question for me is how these three men with such different backgrounds and trajectories Khrushchev, a Russian peasant turned proletarian who became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party

But Khrushchev never envisioned the breakup of the Soviet empire as part of his thaw. So the Red Army invaded Hungary on a scale larger than the Allies D Day invasion of Europe in 1944.

As Solzhenitsyn wrote in his memoir The Oak and the Calf as late as 1966, he Khrushchev sent me New Year s greetings which astonished me because I was on the brink of arrest.

The paradox is that, in the Soviet era, his art was used, briefly, as a force for liberation, because Nikita Khrushchev allowed the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in order to buttress his anti Stalin thaw.

But today, Khrushchev is remembered mostly for his contribution to the demise of Stalinism and, via Mikhail Gorbachev, whose hero he was, ultimately for helping to bring about communism s demise.

Yet, within days, the word Stalinism was being expunged from a new Soviet dictionary, and three years later my grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin s cult of personality in his famous Secret Speech to the Communist Party s XXth Congress.

One difficult question not raised during those discussions at Harvard is this what would have happened if the opponent had not been Khrushchev, who behaved rather rationally throughout the crisis, but had been an irresponsible Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il or a fundamentalist?

One difficult question not raised during those discussions at Harvard is this what would have happened if the opponent had not been Khrushchev, who behaved rather rationally throughout the crisis, but had been an irresponsible Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il or a fundamentalist?

But neither Khrushchev, nor Mikhail Gorbachev, nor Boris Yeltsin were able to uproot Russia s stubborn culture of indifference and subordination, precisely because they insisted on top down change and expected that the Russian people would simply acquiesce en masse.