Khrushchev Quotes

A heckler once interrupted Nikita Khrushchev in the middle of a speech in which he was denouncing the crimes of Stalin. “You were a colleague of Stalin’s,” the heckler yelled, “why didn’t you stop him then?” Khrushschev apparently could not see the heckler and barked out, “Who said that?” No hand went up. No one moved a muscle. After a few seconds of tense silence, Khrushchev finally said in a quiet voice, “Now you know why I didn’t stop him.” Instead of just arguing that anyone facing Stalin was afraid, knowing that the slightest sign of rebellion would mean certain death, he had made them feel what it was like to face Stalin—had made them feel the paranoia, the fear of speaking up, the terror of confronting the leader, in this case Khrushchev. The demonstration was visceral and no more argument was necessary.

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.

There was also the fact that sending a penniless writer to get $135 worth of beer was — as Khrushchev said of Nixon — 'like sending a goat to tend the cabbage'.

Here's the truth: the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons, and Iran doesn't have a single one. But when the world was on the brink of nuclear holocaust, Kennedy talked to Khrushchev and he got those missiles out of Cuba. Why shouldn't we have the same courage and the confidence to talk to our enemies? That's what strong countries do, that's what strong presidents do, that's what I'll do when I'm president of the United States of America.

If you live among wolves you have to act like a wolf.

Nearly every night there were screenings in the private projection rooms in the Kremlin or the various dachas. Khrushchev says that Stalin was particularly keen on Westerns: 'He used to curse them and give them proper ideological evaluation, but then immediately order new ones.

When Khrushchev asked whether his brass hats would guarantee that keeping the missiles in Cuba would not bring about nuclear war, they looked at him, he later told Norman Cousins of the Saturday Review, an informal emissary between Kennedy and Khrushchev, “as though I were out of my mind or, what was worse, a traitor. So I said to myself, ‘To hell with these maniacs.’”6

One of the ironic things,” Kennedy observed to Norman Cousins in the spring of 1963, “…is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems…. The hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another.”8

Instead, so long as Kennedy lived and Khrushchev stayed in power, there was steady movement toward the relaxation of tension—the American University speech, the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the establishment of the “hotline” between the White House and the Kremlin.

Any fool can start a war, and once he's done so, even the wisest of men are helpless to stop it - especially if it's a nuclear war.

Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any god there.

The most enduring lesson of the Cuban missile crisis is that, in a world with nuclear weapons, a classic military victory is an illusion. Communism was not defeated militarily; it was defeated economically, culturally, and ideologically. Khrushchev’s successors were unable to provide their own people with a basic level of material prosperity and spiritual fulfillment. They lost the war of ideas. In the end, as I have argued in Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, communism defeated itself.

Whether you like it or not. history is on our side. We will bury you!

Khrushchev first denounced Stalin's purges at the Soviet Communist Party's 20th Congress. After his dramatic speech, someone in the audience shouted out, asking what Khrushchev had been doing at the time. Khrushchev responded by asking the questioner to please stand up and identify himself. The audience remained silent. Khrushchev replied: "That is what I did, too.

The train is speeding into a luminous future. Lenin is at the controls. Suddenly—stop, the tracks come to an end. Lenin calls on the people for additional, Saturday work, tracks are laid down, and the train moves on. Now Stalin is driving it. Again the tracks end. Stalin orders half the conductors and passengers shot, and the rest he forces to lay down new tracks. The train starts again. Khrushchev replaces Stalin, and when the tracks come to an end, he orders that the ones over which the train has already passed be dismantled and laid down before the locomotive. Brezhnev takes Khrushchev’s place. When the tracks end again, Brezhnev decides to pull down the window blinds and rock the cars in such a way that the passengers will think the train is still moving forward. (Yurii Boriev, Staliniad, 1990)

In the First World War we lost in all about three million killed. In the Second we lost twenty million (so Khrushchev said; according to Stalin it was only seven million. Was Nikita being too generous? Or couldn't Iosif keep track of his capital?) All those odes! All those obelisks and eternal flames! Those novels and poems! For a quarter of a century all Soviet literature has been drunk on that blood!

That’s where perestroika really took place. 1960s dissident life is the kitchen life. Thanks, Khrushchev! He’s the one who led us out of the communal apartments; under his rule, we got our own private kitchens where we could criticize the government and, most importantly, not be afraid, because in the kitchen you were always among friends. It

Didn’t JFK give Khrushchev a written promise not to invade Cuba, not to permit an invasion from American territory—or from any other place in the Western Hemisphere? Written, by God! So now, a hostile European power, Soviet Russia, totally against your Monroe Doctrine, is openly established ninety miles off your coast, the borders of which are guaranteed in writing by your own President and ratified by your own Congress. The Big K pulled off a colossal coup never duplicated in your whole history. And all for nothing!

If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river

Stalin's successes and failures must be not just re-studied; they have yet to be discovered and acknowledged.

I am not afraid of the devil, and you are just a man.

As the saying goes, in the hanged man’s home don’t mention the rope.

The issue was not whether Kennedy and Khrushchev wanted to control events; it was whether they could.

Khrushchev murders people without regard to race, color, or creed, and therefore whatever he is guilty of, he is not guilty of discrimination?

(Under Khrushchev, reproof was not so severe; judges who “made mistakes” were sent—where do you think?—to work as lawyers

Lenin found music depressing. Stalin thought he understood and appreciated music. Khrushchev despised music. Which is the worst for a composer?

I would have skipped the following day if I could have. I ddin't even like Disney World. I was, in fact, slightly afraid of it. When Khrushchev visited Disneyland in 1959, he wasn't allowed in. It was said that the American authorities couldn't guarantee his safety inside. And whatever else Khrushchev was, I would have backed him against an infantry division.

After receiving his first briefing on nuclear weapons in September 1953, Khrushchev later recalled, “I couldn’t sleep for several days. Then I became convinced that we could never possibly use these weapons.

It’s a common observation that all science fiction novels say as much about the time of their composition as they do about the future. As they wrote Hard to Be a God, the Strugatsky brothers were working under considerable political pressure. Following Khrushchev’s infamous visit to an exhibition of abstract art in 1962 (“dog shit” was one of his more printable responses) a wave of panicked ideological house-cleaning swept through the Soviet Union’s artistic establishment. For SF writers, as Boris Strugatsky remembers, this resulted in a reminder that the only truly orthodox subject was “the collision of two worlds.

Once the Cuban missile sites were operational, Khrushchev planned to announce their existence during a speech at the United Nations. And then he would offer to remove them—if NATO agreed to leave West Berlin. Or

After asking Humphrey to name his native city, Khrushchev bounced to his feet and drew a bold blue circle around Minneapolis on a map of the United States hanging on his wall—“so that I don’t forget to order them to spare the city when the rockets fly.

The worst lie ever told is that it is easier to destroy than to create. This lie makes people apathetic about a number of imminently avoidable horrors, particularly the nuclear ones. But Oppenheimer didn’t just go outside one day and trip over an atomic bomb. Nuclear development required trillions of dollars and a massive sustained effort by America’s top politicians, military advisors, and scientific geniuses. Not one damn bit of it was easy. It was certainly harder that sitting down with Stalin or Khrushchev and having a talk . . . America had options. The path of destruction was a choice. It has always been America’s choice, and we citizens have always shrugged, assuming it’s too late to turn back the doomsday clock, although we’re the ones who wound it in the first place.

In hindsight, Khrushchev stands out as a rare case of a nuclear optimist. His nuclear brinkmanship was exceptionally crude and aggressive, reckless and ideology-driven. The architect of the New Look played hardball. But he relied more on his instincts than on strategic calculations. And he was not a master of diplomatic compromise. His improvisations, lack of tact, rudeness, and spontaneity let him down, after several strokes of luck. His ideological beliefs, coupled with his emotional vacillations between insecurity and overconfidence, made him a failure as a negotiator.

You may tell anyone you want,” Khrushchev continued, “that we will never accept Adenauer as a representative of Germany. He is a zero. If Adenauer pulls down his pants and you look at him from behind you can see Germany is divided. If you look at him from the front, you can see Germany will not stand.

(from Diana to Deborah, 8 May 1998) Talking of language difficulty Tony Lambton says Selwyn Lloyd introduced him to Khrushchev saying 'He's the best shot in England,' and the translator said 'Lord Lambton is to be shot tomorrow.' Khrushchev thought it quite normal but patted him on the shoulder kindly.

In 1954 the gulag at Kengir witnessed an uprising by Christian and Muslim prisoners. The guards were driven out, and for forty days worship was freely practiced in the camp. Solzhenitsyn later documented the atmosphere of elation and idealism which prevailed in this doomed island of faith: the Muslims put on turbans and robes again, and 'the grey-black camp was a blaze of color'. The Chechens made kites from which they showered the neighboring villages with messages about the evils of the atheist system. Many marriages were celebrated. Survivors recall the forty days as a testimony to a possible way of living which had been suffocated by dreary unbelief. Delight in the present, and the knowledge of heaven outweighed the awareness of Khrushchev's inevitable revenge. The rebels were crushed under the attacks of tanks, but in the long term, this same spiritual outweighing insured the atheist dystopia's downfall.

But there was never any such thing as Stalinism. It was contrived by Khrushchev and his group in order to blame all the characteristic traits and principal defects of Communism on Stalin—it was a very effective move. But in reality Lenin had managed to give shape to all the main features before Stalin came to power.

for just as Stalin had never hesitated to purge his police cadres and liquidate their chief, so Khrushchev had followed up his inner-party maneuvers by removing Zhukov from the Presidium and Central Committee of the party, to which he had been elected after the coup, as well as from his post as highest commander of the army.

Ukraine, in contrast, had deep ethnic, cultural, and economic ties to Russia—and to Putin. It was the historical root of Russia itself: Kievan Rus, the medieval fief whose leader, Vladimir the Great, adopted Christianity in 988, and the frontier of the tsarist empires that followed—its name translated literally as the Ukraine, or “the border.” Its borders had shifted over time: Parts of its western territory had belonged to Poland or the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Stalin seized some of it with his secret pact with Hitler in 1939 and the rest after the end of the Great Patriotic War. Ukraine’s modern shape took form, but it seemed ephemeral, subject to the larger forces of geopolitics, as most borderlands have been throughout history. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev decreed that Crimea, conquered by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century and heroically defended against the Nazis, would be governed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from Kiev, not from Moscow. No

You stuck listening devices all over the dacha--even in the bathroom. You spend the people's money to eavesdrop on my farts.

Cooking was therapy for Eisenhower: on hearing about Pearl Harbor, he went straight to the kitchen and made vegetable soup.

JFK's great virtue, and the essential difference between him and George W. Bush, was that he had an instinctive appreciation for the chaotic forces of history.

leader had expected that the Europeans would help him overwhelm American intransigence. He had assumed that

As the result of the war, Stalin’s economic administrator, Nikolai Voznesensky, informed him in January 1946, the USSR lost 30 percent of its national wealth.

We cannot possibly permit it, either as Communists or internationalists, or as the Soviet state. We would have capitalists on the frontier of the Soviet Union.

Terror and blackmail are in the order of things in that country, Where money is law, power, and force.

The great problem? “We both look at the same set of facts and see different things.

Technically speaking, Khrushchev’s coup followed the methods of his dead and denounced master very closely. He too needed an outside force in order to win power in the party hierarchy, and he used the support of Marshal Zhukov and the army exactly the same way Stalin had used his relationships to the secret police in the succession struggle of thirty years ago.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we deem it the central revelation of Western experience that man cannot ineradicably stain himself, for the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep. No temple has ever been so profaned that it cannot be purified; no man is ever truly lost; no nation is irrevocably dishonored. Khrushchev cannot take permanent advantage of our temporary disadvantage, for it is the West he is fighting. And in the West there lie, however encysted, the ultimate resources, which are moral in nature. Khrushchev is not aware that the gates of hell shall not prevail against us. Even out of the depths of despair, we take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep we fall, for there is always hope. In the end, we will bury him.

Under Khrushchev, Stalin-era laws restricting job mobility were abandoned, the official workday was shortened, minimum wages were established and a system of maternity leave introduced, along with a national pension scheme (extended to collective farmers after 1965). In short, the Soviet Union—and its more advanced satellite states—became embryonic welfare states, at least in form.

To paraphrase what the President of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev said on American TV in 1953, “You Americans are so gullible! No, you won’t accept Communism outright. But we’ll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you finally wake up and find you already have Communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you fall like over-ripe fruit into our hand.

By now Khrushchev was throwing his weight around in higher circles too. The NKVD sent two agents to western Ukraine (one of them, William Fisher, aka Colonel Rudolf Abel, was arrested by the FBI in 1957 and called the highest-ranking Soviet spy ever caught in the United States) to recruit German residents allowed by the Nazi-Soviet Pact’s secret protocol to return to German-occupied territory.

The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s second attempt to become the historical pivot around which the socialist universe revolved. Lenin had carried out the Great October Socialist Revolution, setting a precedent for the proletariat of the whole world. But modern revisionists like Khrushchev had usurped the leadership of the party, leading the Soviet Union back on the road of capitalist restoration.

It was a sober lesson for President Kennedy—that in a dangerous world, the perception of weak American leadership can embolden our enemies to take aggressive action. Khrushchev came away with the opinion that the new American president was weak and inexperienced, while President Kennedy, in an interview with James Reston of the New York Times, said the summit meeting had been “the roughest thing in my life.

Mr. Nixon, he was fond of recalling aloud, shook his finger in Khrushchev’s face in their famous “kitchen debate” and proclaimed, “You may be ahead of us in rocket thrust but we are ahead of you in color television.” “I will take my television in black and white,” said the Senator. “I want to be ahead in rocket thrust…. Mr. Nixon may be very experienced in kitchen debates, but so are a great many other married men I know.

The massacre of the AVH men had made for a grotesque spectacle, and its images changed the minds both of Khrushchev and of Mao Tse-tung. The previous day, both of them had been inclined to let the Hungarians deal with the rebellion themselves. When Mao’s agents reported to him that the atmosphere was turning anti-Communist, though, Mao sent word to Moscow that the Soviets must act. 14 After his sleepless night, Khrushchev was inclined to agree.

Krushchev himself is 'revealed' not as an honest communist but instead as a political leader seeking personal advantage while hiding behind an official persona of idealism and probity, a type familiar in capitalist countries. Taking into account his murder of Beria and the men executed as 'Beria's gang' in 1953, he seems worse still - a political thug. Krushchev was guilty IN REALITY of the kinds of crimes he DELIBERATELY AND FALSELY accused Stalin of in the 'Secret Speech'.

After all, Malthus was wrong. Marx was wrong. Democracy did not die during the Great Depression as the Communists predicted. And Khrushchev did not 'bury' us. We buried him. Neville Chute's On the Beach proved as fanciful as Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May. Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb never exploded. It fizzled. The Clash of 79 produced Ronald Reagan and an era of good feelings. The Club of Rome notwithstanding, we did not run out of oil. The world did not end at the close of the second millennium, as some prophesied and others hoped. Who predicted the disappearance of the Soviet Empire? Is it not possible that today's most populous nations -China, India, and Indonesia- could break into pieces as well? Why do predictions of the Death of the West not belong on the same shelf as the predictions of 'nuclear winter' and 'global warming'? Answer: the Death of the West is not a prediction of what is going to happen, it is a depiction of what is happening now. First World nations are dying.

For several crucial days, I believe, Kennedy and Khrushchev were each privately prepared to back down, “but not yet,” as they sparred with forces armed with thermonuclear weapons. If their bargaining had gone on one more day, then nearly all then-living humans might have died from it, and few if any now alive would ever have existed. Yet—have we had a president since World War II who would have acted in those circumstances more responsibly, more prudently? Do we have such a president now? Does Russia?

Less well known but perhaps even more convincing is that Khrushchev’s own and most ambitious attempt at reversing the process of detotalitarization turned into a complete failure. In 1957, he introduced a new “law against social parasites,” which would have enabled the regime to reintroduce mass deportations, re-establish slave labor on a large scale, and—most importantly for total domination—to let loose another flood of mass denunciations; for “parasites” were supposed to be selected by the people themselves in mass meetings. The

On August 21, 1968, Pavel and six of his friends reacted with horror to the shortwave reports coming out of Czechoslovakia. For months they had been listening for every detail of the Prague Spring, cheering on Alexander Dubček’s attempt to create a “socialism with a human face.” They waited to see how Khrushchev’s conqueror and successor, Leonid Brezhnev, would deal with the rebellion of a satellite state. Would he show the same ruthlessness Khrushchev showed Hungary in 1956, or would there be a new sense of tolerance? Now the answer was clear.

But there was even more that Khrushchev knew and Kennedy didn’t—secrets that Khrushchev had chosen not to reveal at the time and that remained unknown to any Americans (including me) for twenty-five years or more. First, that the number of Soviet troops116 in Cuba was not seven thousand, as we had at first supposed, or seventeen thousand, as the CIA estimated at the end of the crisis, but forty-two thousand. And second, that along with SAMs and ballistic missiles, they had been secretly equipped with over a hundred tactical nuclear weapons, warheads included.

In this chapter, I want to focus on the really big crimes that have been committed by atheist groups and governments. In the past hundred years or so, the most powerful atheist regimes—Communist Russia, Communist China, and Nazi Germany—have wiped out people in astronomical numbers. Stalin was responsible for around twenty million deaths, produced through mass slayings, forced labor camps, show trials followed by firing squads, population relocation and starvation, and so on. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s authoritative recent study Mao: The Unknown Story attributes to Mao Zedong’s regime a staggering seventy million deaths.4 Some China scholars think Chang and Halliday’s numbers are a bit high, but the authors present convincing evidence that Mao’s atheist regime was the most murderous in world history. Stalin’s and Mao’s killings—unlike those of, say, the Crusades or the Thirty Years’ War—were done in peacetime and were performed on their fellow countrymen. Hitler comes in a distant third with around ten million murders, six million of them Jews. So far, I haven’t even counted the assassinations and slayings ordered by other Soviet dictators like Lenin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and so on. Nor have I included a host of “lesser” atheist tyrants: Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceaus̹escu, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-il. Even these “minor league” despots killed a lot of people. Consider Pol Pot, who was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party faction that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Within this four-year period Pol Pot and his revolutionary ideologues engaged in systematic mass relocations and killings that eliminated approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population, an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million people. In fact, Pol Pot killed a larger percentage of his countrymen than Stalin and Mao killed of theirs.5 Even so, focusing only on the big three—Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—we have to recognize that atheist regimes have in a single century murdered more than one hundred million people.

...Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender. Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face—that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand—the ultimatum. And what then—when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it's a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." "There is a point beyond which they must not advance." And this—this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said, "The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits—not animals." And he said, "There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty." You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness...

It is my unshakeable belief that when the proper perspective is restored, statues will be raised again to Stalin.’ ‘Goering said the same of Hitler during the Nuremberg trial. I don’t see any statues –’ ‘Hitler lost.’ ‘But surely Stalin lost? In the end? From the “objective perspective”?’ ‘Stalin inherited a nation with wooden ploughs and bequeathed us an empire armed with atomic weapons. How can you say he lost? The men who came after him – they lost. Not Stalin. Stalin foresaw what would happen, of course. Khrushchev, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov – they thought they were hard, but he saw through them. “After I’ve gone, the capitalists will drown you like blind kittens.” His analysis was correct, as always.

Everything did change, faster than his fingers could type. What he had been too cautious to hope for was pulled from his dreams and made real on the television screen. At that momentous hour on December 26, 1991, as he watched the red flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the empire “empire extending eleven times zones, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic coast, encompassing more than a hundred ethnicities and two hundred languages; the collective whose security demanded the sacrifice of millions, whose Slavic stupidity had demanded the deportation of Khassan’s entire homeland; that utopian mirage cooked up by cruel young men who gave their mustaches more care than their morality; that whole horrid system that told him what he could be and do and think and say and believe and love and desire and hate, the system captained by Lenin and Zinoviev and Stalin and Malenkov and Beria and Molotov and Khrushchev and Kosygin and Mikoyan and Podgorny and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko and Gorbachev, all of whom but Gorbachev he hated with a scorn no author should have for his subject, a scorn genetically encoded in his blood, inherited from his ancestors with their black hair and dark skin—as he watched that flag slink down the Kremlin flagpole for the final time, left limp by the windless sky, as if even the weather wanted to impart on communism this final disgrace, he looped his arms around his wife and son and he held them as the state that had denied him his life quietly died.

On Saturday, 28 February 1953, Josef Stalin invited four of his senior associates to the Kremlin: Georgy Malenkov, Lavrenty Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, and Nikolai Bulganin.1 During the final six months of his life, Stalin and these four men constituted what was known as the “ruling group” or simply the “Five.” They met regularly in Stalin’s home. The leader’s other old friends—Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Kliment Voroshilov—were in disgrace, and he did not wish to see them.2 Assembling a small group of supporters to act as his right hand in ruling the country was a key element of Stalin’s modus operandi. He liked to name these groups according to the number of members: the Five (Piaterka), the Six (Shesterka), the Seven (Semerka), the Eight (Vos’merka), the Nine (Deviatka).

His plan was too clever by half, and he became its main victim. In fact, as he admitted to a visiting American in 1969, the U-2 was the beginning of the end. Dr. A. McGehee Harvey came to Moscow to treat Khrushchev’s daughter Yelena, who was suffering from collagenitis. During a dinner at Khrushchev’s house (itself not easy to arrange since Khrushchev then lived under virtual house arrest), Dr. Harvey asked why his host had fallen from power. “Things were going well until one thing happened,” Khrushchev answered. “From the time Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2 over the Soviet Union, I was no longer in full control.” After that, “those who felt that America had imperialist intentions and that military strength was the most important thing had the evidence they needed, and when the U-2 incident occurred, I no longer had the ability to overcome that feeling.

...The gulag—with its millions of victims, if you listen to Solzehnitsyn and Sakharov—supposedly existed in the Soviet Union right down to the very last days of communism. If so—as I've asked before—where did it disappear to? That is, when the communist states were overthrown, where were the millions of stricken victims pouring out of the internment camps with their tales of torment? I'm not saying they don't exist; I'm just asking, where are they? One of the last remaining camps, Perm-35—visited in 1989 and again in '90 by Western observers—held only a few dozen prisoners, some of whom were outright spies, as reported in the Washington Post. Others were refuseniks who tried to flee the country. The inmates complained about poor-quality food, the bitter cold, occasional mistreatment by guards. I should point out that these labor camps were that: they were work camps. They weren't death camps that you had under Nazism where there was a systematic extermination of the people in the camps. So there was a relatively high survival rate. The visitors also noted that throughout the 1980s, hundreds of political prisoners had been released from the various camps, but hundreds are not millions. Even with the great fall that took place after Stalin, under Khrushchev, when most of the camps were closed down...there was no sign of millions pouring back into Soviet life—the numbers released were in the thousands. Why—where are the victims? Why no uncovering of mass graves? No Nuremburg-style public trials of communist leaders, documenting the widespread atrocities against these millions—or hundreds of millions, if we want to believe our friend at the Claremont Institute. Surely the new...anti-communist rulers in eastern Europe and Russia would have leaped at the opportunity to put these people on trial. And the best that the West Germans could do was to charge East German leader Erich Honecker and seven of his border guards with shooting persons who tried to escape over the Berlin Wall. It's a serious enough crime, that is, but it's hardly a gulag. In 1955[sic], the former secretary of the Prague communist party was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. 'Ah, a gulag criminal!' No, it was for ordering police to use tear gas and water cannons against demonstrators in 1988. Is this the best example of bloodthirsty communist repression that the capitalist restorationists could find in Czechoslovakia? An action that doesn't even qualify as a crime in most Western nations—water cannons and tear gas! Are they kidding? No one should deny that crimes were committed, but perhaps most of the gulag millions existed less in reality and more in the buckets of anti-communist propaganda that were poured over our heads for decades.

It was my mother, my frequent co-conspirator in the kitchen and my conduit to our past, who suggested the means to convey this epic disjunction, this unruly collision of collectivist myths and personal antimyths. We would reconstruct every decade of Soviet history - from the prequel 1910s to the postscript present day - through the prism of food. Together, we'd embark on a yearlong journey unlike any other: eating and cooking our way through decade after decade of Soviet life, using her kitchen and dining room as a time machine and an incubator of memories. Memories of wartime rationing cards and grotesque shared kitchens in communal apartments. Of Lenin's bloody grain requisitioning and Stalin's table manners. Of Khrushchev's kitchen debates and Gorbachev's disastrous antialcohol policies. Of food as the focal point of our everyday lives, and - despite all the deprivations and shortages - of compulsive hospitality and poignant, improbable feasts.

Khrushchev told Norman Cousins, a few months after the crisis, his reaction at the time: When I asked the military advisors if they could assure me137 that holding fast would not result in the death of five hundred million human beings, they looked at me as though I was out of my mind, or what was worse, a traitor. The biggest tragedy, as they saw it, was not that our country might be devastated and everything lost, but that the Chinese or the Albanians might accuse us of appeasement or weakness. So I said to myself, “To hell with these maniacs. If I can get the United States to assure me that it will not attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, I will remove the missiles.” That is what happened, and now I am reviled by the Chinese and the Albanians.… They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?

The Marxist prediction that capitalism would ultimately collapse and be replaced by socialism (Khrushchev’s tactless ‘We will bury you!’) had been a comfort to Soviet Communists as they struggled against Russia’s historical ‘backwardness’ to make a modern, industrialised, urbanised society. They made it, more or less, by the beginning of the 1980s. Soviet power and status was recognised throughout the world. ‘Soviet man’ became a recognisable animal, with close relatives in the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, more problematic relatives in China and North Korea, and admirers in the Third World. Then, in one of the most spectacular unpredicted ‘accidents’ of modern history, it was Soviet ‘socialism’ that collapsed, giving way to what the Russians called the ‘wild capitalism’ of the 1990s. An array of fifteen new successor states, including the Russian Federation, emerged blinking into the light of freedom – all, including the Russians, loudly complaining that in the old days of the Soviet Union they had been victims of exploitation.

The Germans were eventually beaten only when the liberal countries allied themselves with the Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of the conflict and paid a much higher price: 25 million Soviet citizens died in the war, compared to half a million Britons and half a million Americans. Much of the credit for defeating Nazism should be given to communism. And at least in the short term, communism was also the great beneficiary of the war. The Soviet Union entered the war as an isolated communist pariah. It emerged as one of the two global superpowers, and the leader of an expanding international bloc. By 1949 eastern Europe became a Soviet satellite, the Chinese Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War, and the United States was gripped by anti-communist hysteria. Revolutionary and anti-colonial movements throughout the world looked longingly towards Moscow and Beijing, while liberalism became identified with the racist European empires. As these empires collapsed, they were usually replaced by either military dictatorships or socialist regimes, not liberal democracies. In 1956 the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, confidently told the liberal West that ‘Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!

Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned

Today it is considered bad manners to point to any Soviet source of American anti-Americanism. But throughout their history, Americans had never before been anti-American. They voluntarily came to the US. They were always a proud and independent people who loved their country. Ares is the Greek god of war. He was usually accompanied in battle by his sister Eris ( goddess of discord ) and by his 2 sons, Deimos ( fear ) and Phobos ( terror ). Khrushchev and Ceausescu. Both men rose to lead their countries without ever having earned a single penny in any productive job. Neither man had the slightest idea about what made an economy work and each passionately believed that stealing from the rich was the magic wand that would cure all his country's economic ills. Both were leading formerly free countries, transformed into Marxist dictatorships through massive wealth redistribution, which eventually made the government the mother and father of everything. Disinformation has become the bubonic plague of our contemporary life. Marx used disinformation to depict money as an odious instrument of capitalist exploitation. Lenin's disinformation brought Marx's utopian communism to life. Hitler resorted to disinformation to portray the Jews as an inferior and loathsome race so as to rationalize his Holocaust. Disinformation was the tool used by Stalin to dispossess a third of the world and to transform it into a string of gulags. Khrushchev's disinformation widened the gap between Christianity and Judaism. Andropov's disinformation turned the Islamic world against the US and ignited the international terrorism that threatens us today. Disinformation has also generated worldwide disrespect and even contempt for the US and its leaders.

Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned out badly, you might get shot. Better to avoid all responsibility. An example of what could happen

Demonstrating for peace to promote war was nothing new. Totalitarianism always requires a tangible enemy. To the ancient Greeks, a holocaust was simply a burnt sacrifice. Khrushchev wanted to go down in history as the Soviet leader who exported communism to the American continent. In 1959 he was able to install the Castro brothers in Havana and soon my foreign intelligence service became involved in helping Cuba's new communist rulers to export revolution throughout South America. At that point it did not work. In the 1950s and 1960s most Latin Americans were poor, religious peasants who had accepted the status quo. A black version of liberation theology began growing in a few radical-leftist black churches in the US where Marxist thought is predicated on a system pf oppressor class ( white ) versus victim class ( black ) and it sees just one solution: the destruction of the enemy. In the 1950s UNESCO was perceived by many as a platform for communists to attack the West and the KGB used it to place agents around the world. Che Guevara's diaries, with an introduction by Fidel Castro, were produced by the Kremlin's dezinformatsiya machine. Changing minds is what Soviet communism was all about. Khrushchev's political necrophagy ( = blaming and condemning one's predecessor in office. It is a dangerous game. It hurts the country's national pride and it usually turns against its own user ) evolved from the Soviet tradition of sanctifying the supreme ruler. Although the communists publicly proclaimed the decisive role of the people in history, the Kremlin and its KGB believed that only the leader counted. Change the public image of the leader and you change history, I heard over and over from Khrushchev's lips. Khrushchev was certainly the most controversial Soviet to reign in the Kremlin. He unmasked Stalin's crimes, but he made political assassination a main instrument of his own foreign policy; he authored a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West but he pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war; he repaired Moscow's relationships with Yugoslavia's Tito, but he destroyed the unity of the communist world. His close association with Stalin's killings made him aware of what political crime could accomplish and gave him a taste for the simple criminal solution. His total ignorance about the civilized world, together with his irrational hatred of the "bourgeoisie" and his propensity to offend people, made him believe that disinformation and threats were the most efficient and dignified way for a Soviet leader to deal with "bourgeois" governments. As that very clever master of deception Yuri Andropov once told me, if a good piece of disinformation is repeated over and over, after a while it will take on a life of its own and will, all by itself, generate a horde or unwitting but passionate advocates. When I was working for Ceausescu, I always tried to find a way to help him reach a decision on his own, rather than telling him directly what I thought he should do about something. That way both of us were happy. From our KGB advisors, I had learned that the best way to ut over a deception was to let the target see something for himself, with his own eyes. By 1999, President Yeltsin's ill-conceived privatization had enabled a small clique of predatory insiders to plunder Russia's most valuable assets. The corruption generated by this widespread looting penetrated every corner of the country and it eventually created a Mafia-style economic system that threatened the stability of Russia itself. During the old Cold War, the KGB was a state within a state. In Putin's time, the KGB now rechristened FSB, is the state. The Soviet Union had one KGB officer for every 428 citizens. In 2004, Putin's Russia had one FSB officer for every 297 citizens.

Khrushchev had been ready to settle for a

What he had been too cautious to hope for was pulled from his dreams and made real on the television screen. At that momentous hour on December 26, 1991, as he watched the red flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the empire extending eleven times zones, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic coast, encompassing more than a hundred ethnicities and two hundred languages; the collective whose security demanded the sacrifice of millions, whose Slavic stupidity had demanded the deportation of Khassan’s entire homeland; that utopian mirage cooked up by cruel young men who gave their mustaches more care than their morality; that whole horrid system that told him what he could be and do and think and say and believe and love and desire and hate, the system captained by Lenin and Zinoviev and Stalin and Malenkov and Beria and Molotov and Khrushchev and Kosygin and Mikoyan and Podgorny and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko and Gorbachev, all of whom but Gorbachev he hated with a scorn no author should have for his subject, a scorn genetically encoded in his blood, inherited from his ancestors with their black hair and dark skin—as he watched that flag slink down the Kremlin flagpole for the final time, left limp by the windless sky, as if even the weather wanted to impart on communism this final disgrace, he looped his arms around his wife and son and he held them as the state that had denied him his life quietly died.

Hurricane Daisy delayed the continuing surveillance, however when they could resume flying on October 14th, the crystal-clear photos indicated that launch sites were being prepared for both mobile medium-sized missiles, and more extensive sites for the larger-sized ballistic missiles. Although the actual missiles were not yet in place, the CIA understood the enormity of the threat. Missiles that could reach 2,000 miles into the United States could not be ignored! With Cuba only 90 miles to the south of Key West, it posed an extreme threat to national security. On October 22, 1962, the discovery of these missiles was finally announced to the public, and a naval quarantine was implemented around Cuba. President Kennedy was careful not to call it a “blockade,” since use of the word would be considered an act of war! Regardless, U.S. warships were deployed that would intercept and board any ship heading to the island. Castro announced that Cuba had the right to defend itself from American aggression. He added that the decision to deploy missiles was a joint action on the part of both Cuba and the Soviet Union. Kennedy discounted Castro’s bluster but not the threat. The final decision to remove the missiles from Cuban soil would be between Khrushchev and Kennedy, without any Cuban involvement. Allowing Khrushchev to save face, Kennedy agreed to remove American missiles aimed at the Soviet Union from Italy and Turkey. It also included a commitment that the United States would not invade Cuba.

In June, 1957, Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet Communist Party boss, was interviewed before a nation-wide American television audience. With calm assurance he stated: “. . . I can prophesy that your grandchildren in America will live under socialism. And please do not be afraid of that. Your grandchildren will not understand how their grandparents did not understand the progressive nature of a socialist society.

One of the most famous enemies of Soviet communism is Vladimir Bukovsky. He was tortured by Soviet authorities and spent many years in Soviet prisons. He was even declared “insane” and sent to a psychiatric prison. When Bukovsky was exiled to the West, people paid lip service to his courage; but few heeded his warnings about Gorbachev’s Perestroika. Bukovsky reminded everyone that all Soviet leaders were liars. Gorbachev, he said, was no exception—and was certainly no democrat. Like Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, Gorbachev was a liar and a hangman. But hardly anyone listened. Everyone wanted to believe the Cold War was over.

Khrushchev, too, looks like the kind of man his physicians must continually try to diet, and historians will some day correlate these sporadic deprivations, to which he submits “for his own good,” with his public tantrums. If there is to be a world cataclysm, it will probably be set off by skim milk, Melba toast, and mineral oil on the salad.

In 1961 the Russians put the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin. Nikita Khrushchev was the Russian premier, and he said that when Gagarin went into space, the cosmonaut discovered that there was no God there. In response C. S. Lewis wrote an article, “The Seeing Eye.” Lewis said if there is a God who created us, we could not discover him by going up into the air. God would not relate to human beings the way a man on the second floor relates to a man on the first floor. He would relate to us the way Shakespeare relates to Hamlet. Shakespeare is the creator of Hamlet’s world and of Hamlet himself. Hamlet can know about Shakespeare only if the author reveals information about himself in the play. So too the only way to know about God is if God has revealed himself.2 The

On October 26, 1963, Nikita Khrushchev contacted President Kennedy and offered to remove the missiles from Cuba in exchange for a promise that the United States would not invade the Island Nation. A day later on October 27th, Khrushchev sent a letter proposing that the Soviet Union would dismantle their missiles in Cuba, if the Americans reciprocated by removing their missile installations in Turkey. Although the cold war was far from over, both sides knowing how close they came from an all-out conflict, had a “hot line” installed between Washington and Moscow, hoping to prevent any similar situations in the future. The hot line is sometimes called the red telephone, even though it wasn’t even a telephone, nor was it red. The first connection was a teletype machine, after which a fax machine was used. In 1986, the hotline became a computer link and messages are now sent by email.

To smooth over Castro’s ruffled feathers; Khrushchev eventually wrote him a personal letter explaining his reasons for reaching an agreement with the United States following the Cuban Missile Crisis. In it, he also extended Castro an invitation to come and visit him in Moscow. The Cuban leader, feeling that this enhanced his international standing, set aside his resentments and swallowed his pride, knowing that his country would have to depend on the USSR for its many needs. He also understood that the ideology that brought his country to where it was had also created many divisions among its people. The United States, on which Cuba had depended on for so many years, was no longer an ally they could trade with, and the new friendship with a distant country created many of its own problems. Many of Cuba’s professional class had fled the country for the United States, when the companies they worked for became nationalized. The brain drain Cuba experienced was hard to replace, and most of those that had stayed, were not prepared to fill the more technical positions. The shelves were bare and people were becoming intolerant of the many domestic problems they were required to face.

During World War II, rationing in Russia had made vinyl prohibitively expensive, and cheap X-ray film became the bootleg music industry’s substitute. After purchasing a used X-ray plate for a ruble or two from a medical facility, music lovers could cut the plate into a disk with scissors or a knife before having it etched with their favorite tunes. Students studying engineering, I was told, particularly excelled in this bootlegging process. But even a thawed Khrushchev regime had its standards to uphold, and in 1959 the government began a crackdown on this illicit music market. One government tactic was to flood record shops with unplayable records, many intended to damage record players. Some of these records included threatening vocals placed in the middle of a recording, which screamed at the unsuspecting listener, “You like rock and roll? Fuck you, anti-Soviet slime!” Eventually the use of bone records declined as replacement technologies, such as magnetic reel-to-reel tape, took over. But until then, bone-record makers were hunted down and sent to the Gulags. Particularly offensive to the Soviet government were bootleggers who reproduced American jazz records, music Stalin had declared a “threat to civilization.” Despite

If you live among wolves you have to act like a wolf. -Nikita Khrushchev T

In a “secret speech” to the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev made a sensational revelation of the crimes of Stalin’s era. In the name of the future of socialism, Stalin had had millions of his own citizens tortured, subjected to inhuman deprivations, executed, or sent to die in Siberian labor camps. What had been dismissed as capitalist propaganda was now revealed as true by the leader of the socialist world: The flagship socialist nation was guilty of horrors on an unimaginable scale.

Eisenhower knew that keeping the U-2 pilots from wearing military uniforms was a contrivance, but he knew that one day, the program would be revealed: that the fliers were civilians would carry weight with world opinion. A nonmilitary President might not have been so sensitive to the distinction. As

In “Flag Plot,” the naval operations room, Anderson became irritated with McNamara’s specific instructions on how to run the blockade. The admiral told McNamara that the Navy had been conducting blockades since the days of John Paul Jones and suggested that the defense secretary return to his office and let the Navy run the operation. McNamara rose from his chair and retorted that the operation was “not a blockade but a means of communication between Kennedy and Khrushchev,

You are very lucky. You are a poet. You can tell the truth. But I was a politician. I had to shout to hold my job.

Provoking military conflict had been specifically forbidden by Khrushchev. Commander-in-Chief Ivan Konev’s tank divisions encircled the city as a display of force, nothing more. This was Ulbricht’s show, and he would dictate the pace of Phase Two. On August 15, along the border of the US and Soviet Sectors on Zimmerstraße, workers began to erect a more permanent structure

Bowing to what he saw as inevitable to save the GDR, Khrushchev seized the initiative and finally ordered Ulbricht to build a wall. “We will give you two weeks to make the necessary economic preparations . . . then you will issue the following communiqué:

This was not media hype. Pope Pius XII himself weighed in, announcing his blessing from the Holy See. A few year later, when Khrushchev toured Washington, D.C., in 1959, the supermarket brought a temporary détente to the Cold War. As the Soviet premier scanned the store, he erupted with spontaneous praise: “I want to greet the manager of this supermarket. I am truly filled with admiration over what I see.

At what seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of the fear of death and the unfamiliar faces of the doctors bent over him. The glance swept over everyone in a second. Then something incomprehensible and awesome happened that to this day I can’t forget and don’t understand. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace, and no one could say to whom or at what it might be directed. The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh.18 Khrushchev, too, noted the gesture. He thought it simply the final reflex of a dying organism.

Behind the incongruity between actual and perceived reality, there always lies an element of intellectual arrogance, of intellectual rigour and dogmatism. ‘It is I, not they, who know what poor people can afford’, the Japanese industrialist in effect asserted. ‘People behave according to economic rationality, as every good Marxist knows,’ as Khrushchev implied. This explains why the incongruity is so easily exploited by innovators: they are left alone and undisturbed.

What the scientists have in their briefcases is terrifying. - Nikita Khrushchev

Cecilia sipped her tea and imagined herself going back through time and putting that Khrushchev in his place.

When President Eisenhower accepted the responsibility for the U-2 flights over the Soviet Union, no one would have questioned that he did this for correct and honorable reasons. National Aeronautics and Space Administrator (NASA) Keith Glennan had already made a public statement that the U-2 was operating out of Turkey as a NASA high-altitude, flight-research aircraft and had strayed over Russian territory inadvertently in high winds. Then, Nikita Khrushchev produced the wreckage of the U-2 deep in Russia near Sverdlovsk, it made a mockery of the NASA cover story; and when he produced the pilot alive and well, it demolished the rest of the plausible disclaimer. The CIA was caught without a plausible cover story, and the President had to choose. He could either discredit Allen Dulles and the CIA for operating that clandestine flight and a long series of flights without his knowledge, or he could, as Eisenhower did, stand up and take the blame himself on the basis that he knew of and had ordered the flights and was in complete control of everything done in the foreign arena by this Government. The latter choice would mean that the President of the United States is Commander in Chief during peacetime clandestine operations as he is in time of war. This is a totally new doctrine born of the vicissitudes of the Cold War. Many have considered this a very noble stand on the part of President Eisenhower, and it was. However, this public admission by the Chief of State that he had directed clandestine operations within another state is exactly the type of thing that reduces the prestige and credibility of United States in the family of nations to the condition described by Arnold Toynbee.