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| For Immediate Release: | April 14, 2000 |
| Contact: | World Affairs Council of Philadelphia 215-731-1100 Pennsylvania-Russia Business Council (215) 708-2628, (215) 963-7079 |
Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower
Attend a Presentation and Meet the Author ofNikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower
Sergei N. Khrushchev
Tuesday, April 18, 2000
Location: The Downtown Club,
Public Ledger Building, 11th Floor
6th & Chestnut Streets
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Lecture: Presentation featuring Sergei Khrushchev, author of Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower. Guest appearance by Professor David Eisenhower.
Program: Registration and reception: 5:45 p.m.
Presentation: 6:15-7:15 p.m.
Dinner: 7:30-8:45 p.m.
Cost: $10 lecture only, $55 lecture and dinner.
More is known about Nikita Khrushchev than about many former Soviet leaders, partly because of his own efforts to communicate through speeches, interviews, and memoirs. (A partial version of his memoirs was published in three volumes in 1970, 1974, and 1990, and a complete version was published in Russia in 1999 and will appear in an English translation to be published by Penn State Press). But even with the opening of party and state archives in 1991, as William Taubman points out in his Foreword, many questions remain unanswered. "How did Khrushchev manage not only to survive Stalin bur to succeed him? What led him to denounce his former master (an event that some interpreters herald as the first act in the drama that led to the end of the USSR)? How could a man of minimal formal education direct the affairs of a vast intercontinental empire in the nuclear age? Why did Khrushchev's attempt to ease East-West tensions result in two of the worst crises of the Cold War in Berlin and Cuba? To resolve these and other contradictions, we need more than policy documents from archives and memoirs from associates. We need firsthand testimony by family members who knew Khrushchev best, especially by his only surviving son, Sergei, in whom he often confided." As Sergei says, "During the Cold War our nations lived on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, and not only was it an Iron Curtain but it was also a mirror: one side perceived the other as the 'evil empire,' and vice versa; so, too, each side feared the other would start a nuclear war. Neither side could understand the real reasons behind many decisions because Americans and Russians, representing different cultures, think differently. The result was a Cold War filled with misperceptions that could easily have led to tragedy, and we are lucky it never happened. And still, after the Cold War, American-Russian relations are based on many misunderstandings." In his book Sergei tells the story of how the Cold War happened in reality from the Russian side, nor from the American side, and this is his most important contribution. Sergei N. Khrushchev was born in 1935 when his farther was Moscow parry chief. He accompanied his father on major foreign trips to Great Britain in 1956, East Germany in 1958, the United States in 1959, Egypt in 1964, among many others. After he became a control systems engineer and went to work for leading Soviet missile designer Vladimir Chelomei, Sergei attended many meetings at which his father transacted business with key leaders in the Soviet defense establishment. In 1991 he received an appointment to the Center for Foreign Policy Development of the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, where he is today. He and his wife, Valentina Nikolayevna, applied for U.S. citizenship in 1999, an event widely covered in the media. For further details, please contact Val Kogan of the Pennsylvania-Russia Business Council at (215) 708-2628, (215) 963-7079 or visit the PRBC website at http://www.fita.org/prbc. For registration, please contact Denise Bala of the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia at 215-731-1100.
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