Half a century may have mellowed the recollections of many Americans regarding the hottest days of the cold war, but one of the iconic figures of that time remains an intimidating figure in our collective memory: Nikita Khrushchev, remembered as the bellicose premier of the Soviet Union during the days of Sputnik, who went eye to eye with John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis and who was rumored to have banged his shoe on the desk at the United Nations and shouted “We will bury you!” In an interview with his son, Sergei, however, I was shown a different side of the man so many Americans feared.
In the memories of Sergei Khrushchev, a 78-year-old historian with dual American-Russian citizenship, Nikita Khrushchev was a devoted family man, a brave reformer who brought an era of relative prosperity to the Soviet Union and a polymath who was not only intimately familiar with Christian Scripture but also reflected the Christian humanist values that his enemies always considered more characteristic of themselves.
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