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The American Khrushchev
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Published: February 4, 2009
Khrushchev is alive and well and living in Rhode Island as an American citizen, teaching at Brown University and visiting to speak last month at UNC-Charlotte.
Dr. Sergei Khrushchev, that is -- son of Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the man who ran Russia from 1953 until 1964.
To my generation, the name "Nikita Khrushchev" was as familar and dreadful as "Osama Bin Laden" is today. The name conjures memories of the notorious "Kitchen Debate" debate with Richard Nixon, where he said what's usually translated as "We will bury you." "Khrushchev" invokes images of an angry Ukrainian peasant face and a shoe pounding his United Nations desk in 1960.
Up close and very personal, the name "Khrushchev" recalls Soviet missiles in Cuba, pointed my way and teasing the world toward the precipice of nuclear annihilation.
Less familiar but equally important are a couple of other things Nikita Khrushchev did. Behind closed doors, he told the 1956 Communist Party Congress what they knew but could never discuss: that Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili -- aka Joseph Stalin -- had been a brutal tyrant, guilty of crimes against humanity and Russia. Until Khrushchev put that dark reality on the table, the first tentative steps toward the reforms of Yuri Andropov, Mikhail Gorbechev and Boris Yeltsin could not be taken.
The other thing Khrushchev did was even more remarkable: he led Russia and lived to tell about.
Last November, American pundits again celebrated "yet another peaceful transfer of power." It's an obligatory media mantra that begs the Henny Youngman question: "Compared to what?" Russia is what.
For a thousand years, retirement benefits for Russia's leaders have not loomed large as a budget item. Except when handed-off successfully to the next hereditary autocrat, regime change in Russia has tended to involve explosions and family outings with revolver-wielding Bolsheviks.
But Nikita Khrushchev surprised the world by outliving his tenure in office and passing his Golden Years in a nice dacha outside Moscow while writing his memoirs: "Khrushchev Remembers' -- my copy of which his son Sergei was kind enough to autograph.
As a life-long history buff, I became fascinated decades ago with Russian history for a couple of reasons. My entire adult life has been spent as a presumptive target of thermonuclear warheads garaged in the Soviet Union and, more recently, in Russia. (Oh, sorry; you'd forgotten about that inconvenient reality?)
What, I wondered, is the underlying cause of this "does not play well with others" behavior? Life as an evaporation target has a way of concentrating the mind on Santayana's maxim: those who won't learn the lessons of history repeat the grade, if they survive.
So when Dr. Sergei Khrushchev came to UNCC, I went to see what he could share from his vantage point on the front row of history. He explained the historic importance of the precedent created when Nikita Khrushchev was allowed to live after he was eased out of office: That has now become the norm in Moscow. Mikhail Gorbechev and Boris Yeltsin both outlived Kremlin leadership. Failing some catastrophic reversal, a trend has been established.
Something like the orderly transfer of power we revere may finally have taken root in Russia. Dr. Khrushchev pointed out that Boris Yeltsin had it in his power to push through legislation modifying the fledgling Russian Constitution so he could remain in charge. He did not do so.
Similarly, Vladimir Putin's United Russia party could have done the same for him, but did not. Putin's successor--Dmitry Medvedev––is, per Dr. Khrushchev--really in charge and not the cat's paw that pundits paint him to be.
But catastrophic reversals do happen and this one is in the incubator: After his lecture, Dr. Khrushchev took questions and I asked him this: Russia's oil seems to have made the country a one-trick pony. What will Russia create and export if Barack Obama and his European, Indian, Chinese, and other counterparts succeed in dramatically reducing world oil demand? The answer was not encouraging.
Oil revenues are so huge that Russians are content to base a high standard of living on them, importing the stuff of the Good Life from Asia, the European Union. Unlike the U.S., there is no Russian flood of intellectual properties to help offset imported appliances, computers and Cyrillic I-pods, if there is such a thing.
What happens when the oil demand--not the oil well--runs dry? History has not dealt kindly with one-crop civilizations. Unless Russia can attain the economic diversification that a truly open society affords, the rest of the world may soon encounter a Bear with a growling stomach.
Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com
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