Word: nikita
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...fondly to the view of Khrushchev as a moderate, one theory is that he was pushed into taking the Caribbean gamble, either by the military or by the so-called "hard line" or "Stalinist" group, which some experts suspect of strong and continuing influence. This, presumably, is just what Nikita would like the world to think. Some Western observers even go so far as to argue that if Khrushchev was forced into the Cuban move by "extremists," he is now in a better position than before, having proved the extremists wrong and presumably put them in their place...
...were outracing the statesmen, threatening to tumble out of control. Khrushchev literally begged Kennedy to keep things under control, promised he would do the same. He compared his struggle with Kennedy to two men pulling on a rope with a knot in the middle. The harder we pull, wrote Nikita. the tighter the knot gets...
This helped explain the series of events that had taken place in Turkey itself earlier in the week, after Kennedy's first television announcement of the Cuba missiles threat. Out of the blue, Soviet Ambassador Nikita Ryzhov sought an audience with Foreign Minister Feridun Erkin, confronted him with a blunt demand for immediate withdrawal of U.S. missiles and NATO installations in Turkey. Premier Ismet Inonu himself drafted the note of rejection. Next Ryzhov arrived with a second, blunter ultimatum: Withdraw the U.S. bases or the Soviet Union will put Turkey's cities first on the list for annihilation...
...first excited note in a panic after convincing himself that the U.S. was on the verge of a Cuba invasion, then was forced by a more militant Kremlin faction to make his Turkey demand. But a majority of Western experts and diplomats see the zigzagging messages as evidence of Nikita Khrushchev's bargaining methods, or simply of confusion. In any case, argue several experts. Khrushchev could not have fired his messages off so swiftly had each one been the subject of a great debate in the Presidium. In Russia, fights take time...
...made sure that no potential rival can rise too high. On all the major platforms of power-the Central Committee's Presidium, the Party Secretariat, the Bureau of the Federal Russian Republic, the Presidium of the Soviet Council of Ministers-only one name appears more than once: Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev. He has planted his cronies in key positions everywhere. Even before the full-scale battle with the "antiparty group" in 1957, more than 70 of the members of the Central Committee owed their careers to Khrushchev or were his close friends. In fact, one Kremlinologist suggests that "Khrushchev...