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There is no shortage of books about Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev (NSK). Amazon.com lists more than a hundred books that include the word Khrushchev in their titles, including the memoir Khrushchev Remembers by NSK himself. This interest is not surprising, as Khrushchev presided over the transition of the USSR from Stalinism to a more open society and that transformation determined, to a large extent, the course of history in the latter part of the twentieth century.
The author of Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower is NSK's son, Sergei, who himself has undergone a remarkable transformation. He used to be a designer of cruise missiles for the Soviet navy during his father's tenure. Much later, he settled in the United States and became interested in another kind of cruises:. He lectures on luxurious cruise ships, sharing his recollections, presumably not gratuitously, with the bourgeois customers who, according to his father, were supposed to be surpassed and buried by the new glamorous society he was building in the now defunct USSR. And my hunch is that even though his father would probably be shocked by this twist of irony, being a pragmatic, he would approve of his enterprising son.
The book was written in Russian and has been translated into impeccable English. It is not really a biography. Rather, it is a collection of firsthand and secondhand accounts of the events witnessed by Sergei Khrushchev. The accounts of the events before Stalin's death and during the ensuing struggle for power up to the time when NSK became undisputed leader of the USSR are sketchy, simply because the author was too young at the time. Thus, the book does not shed much new light on the jockeying...