Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Khrushchev, Sergei

Title Nikita Khrushchev : creation of a superpower / Sergei N. Khrushchev ; translated by Shirley Benson ; foreword by William Taubman ; annotations by William C. Wohlforth
Published University Park, Pa. : Pennsylvania State University Press, ©2000

Copies

Description 1 online resource (xviii, 765 pages) : illustrations
Contents COVER Front -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Foreword (William Taubman) -- Preface -- Prologue -- PART I -- Chapter 1: Start -- Chapter 2: Acceleration -- Chapter 3: Testing -- Chapter 4: Breakthrough -- PHOTO SECTION A -- PART II -- Chapter 5: The Race -- Chapter 6: Crisis -- Chapter 7: Departure -- PHOTO SECTION B -- Epilogue: Stagnation -- Index -- COVER Back
Summary 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 but 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, more than policy documents from archives and memoirs from associates are needed. 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 this book Sergei tells the story of how the Cold War happened in reality from the Russian side, not from the American side, and this is his most important contribution
Notes Abridged and translated from: Nikita Khrushchev : krizisy i rakety
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
Print version record
digitized 2024. HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Subject Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich, 1894-1971
Khrushchev, Sergei
SUBJECT Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich, 1894-1971 fast
Khrushchev, Sergeĭ fast
Chruščev, N.S., 1894-1971. (NL-LeOCL)070064687 nta
Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich, 1894-1971. sears
Subject Heads of state -- Soviet Union -- Biography
World politics -- 1945-1989.
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Historical.
HISTORY.
HISTORY -- Modern -- 20th Century.
Heads of state
Politics and government
World politics
15.50 general world history; history of great parts of the world, peoples, civilizations: general.
Communisme.
Politiek.
Heads of state -- Soviet Union -- Biography.
World politics -- 1945-
SUBJECT Soviet Union -- Politics and government -- 1953-1985. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85125849
Subject Soviet Union
Soviet Union -- Politics and government -- 1953-1985.
Genre/Form Biographies
Biographies.
Biographies.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 0585386145
9780585386140
Other Titles Creation of a superpower