Word: khrushchev
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Cover Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev beamed his golden smile into the radiotelephone that connected him with the heavens. He was talking to Russia's latest space heroes, three cosmonauts whirling high above the Black Sea resort where their leader was vacationing. He congratulated them warmly, told them to keep in good shape for the huge reception planned on their return to Moscow, then uttered an eerily prophetic goodbye. "Here is Comrade Mikoyan," Nikita chortled. "He is literally pulling the telephone from my hands. I don't think I can stop...
...Khrushchev had gone to the Black Sea, as he liked to, to relax, while also tending to a little business and receiving occasional visitors. Thus the West has a witness to at least part of the story. In the morning after his talk with the cosmonauts (see SCIENCE) and his prophetic crack about Mikoyan, Khrushchev received France's Atomic Science Minister Gaston Palewski. In the midst of their conversation, a messenger burst in. Nikita excused himself, as the minister later recalled, explaining that he had to return to Moscow "for the cosmonauts." Then he disappeared into the dusk...
...next clue to Nikita's fate came three days later, when home-bound Moscow workers queued up before newspaper kiosks and were greeted with hastily scribbled signs: "There will be no Izvestia tonight." Something was definitely in the works. Shortly after midnight, Tass tersely announced it. Nikita Khrushchev had been "released" from all his duties "at his own request" for reasons of "age and deteriorating health." His successors were named and congratulated: Leonid Brezhnev, 57, Secretary of the Central Committee, and Aleksei Kosygin, 60, who had served as First Deputy Premier...
Brezhnev, a florid, clever politician who so far, however, has mostly performed ceremonial functions, inherited the more powerful of Khrushchev's jobs and the one that has been traditionally the key to Soviet power: the secretaryship of the Communist Party. Kosygin, a trained economist and business-minded technician who has had little political experience but may just be the smarter and deeper of the two, inherited the premiership. Both had been known as Khrushchev's prot...
Thus, some time between the moment his French visitor saw Khrushchev's exit from his Black Sea home and the time Tass announced the news of his removal, Communism's most raucous, most human, most infuriating, and in many ways most fascinating dictator had been deposed and replaced by two of his underlings...