Word: khrushchev
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...your story on Khrushchev's reminiscences [Dec. 7], you report an odd linguistic controversy about the proper affectionate and intimate variation of the name Svetlana in Russian. Nikita Khrushchev says Stalin called his daughter Svetlanka. But in Russian the ending nka is usually used in talking to pets, as in Anton Chekhov's story about the dog Kashtanka. Stalin's daughter says her father always called her Svetochka. Since Stalin, the author of Marxism and Linguistics, fancied himself an expert on the Russian language, as on everything else, it still may be hard to argue with...
...VIET NAM: Before the Geneva conference of 1954, when Viet Nam was divided into North and South, Ho Chi Minh visited Moscow. The Communists had not yet scored their stunning victory at Dienbienphu and their situation was "very grave," says Khrushchev. When the Russians heard that France proposed the 17th Parallel as the dividing line at the conference, "we gasped with surprise and pleasure. The 17th Parallel was the absolute maximum we would have claimed ourselves...
...took great care never to offend China until the Chinese actually started to crucify us. And when they did start to crucify us, well, I'm no Jesus Christ, and I didn't have to turn the other cheek." On his final visit to Peking, in 1959, Khrushchev tried vainly to get Mao Tse-tung's permission to build a radio in China that would reach Soviet submarines. Mao's reply: "No! We don't want you here. We've had foreigners on our territory for years now, and we're not ever...
Bolted Borders. In this final installment, Khrushchev does not discuss the events leading to his own downfall in 1964. But he does offer some thoughts about life inside his vast country. "If you try to control your artists too tightly, there will be no clashing of opinions, consequently no criticism, and consequently no truth," he says. In a similar vein, he says of the country's stifling travel restrictions: "Why should we build a good life and then keep our borders bolted with seven locks...
Recalling his widely quoted threat that Communism will "bury" America, Khrushchev says that he did not actually mean that the Soviet Union will triumph over the U.S., but that "the working class of the United States would bury its enemy, the bourgeois class." He offers surprisingly little hope for truly peaceful relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union: "Peaceful coexistence among different ideologies is not [possible]." History may contradict Khrushchev on that and many of his other judgments. But it is not likely to overlook the earthy, peasant-born Ukrainian who rose to become a world statesman...