Word: nikita
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They came bearing royal gifts (Mongolian horses and a baby bear) to court British favor, but they were in a hostile land. Russia's Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev knew it the moment their sleek cruiser Ordzhonikidze slid into Portsmouth harbor last week...
Afterwards, sightseeing around London in a four-car cavalcade escorted by 21 motorcycle cops, Nikita Khrushchev recovered his old form. When the dean of war-damaged St. Paul's Cathedral pointed to the place "where Hitler dropped his bomb," Khrushchev cracked: "Looking ahead, Dean, you won't need a repair job if an H-bomb falls." At the Tower of London, told that Tower ravens are protected because of the legend that if they disappear the British Empire will perish, Khrushchev observed mischievously: "I don't see any ravens...
Meeting such hostility was nothing new to Nikita Khrushchev. What had been new was the spontaneous mass enthusiasm he had stirred during his Asian tour last year. He was not used to having such crowds with him. Dealing with hostility has been his specialty...
...Nikita Khrushchev had been born in a mud-and-reed hut in the village of Kalinovka on the Kursk steppe, where as a barefoot boy he had tended cattle. He grew up to have the Russian peasant's rough manners (even today he sometimes stuffs his mouth with food at public banquets, picks his teeth with his fingers). He was short (5 ft. 5 in.) and thickset with a round face and jug ears. He had small, dark, merry, merciless eyes and was as shrewd and crafty as he looked...
Communist leaders at the 20th Party Congress had already heard First Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev bluntly charge that Stalin "murdered" Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and some 5,000 other Red army officers in 1937 (TIME. March 26). Khrushchev implied that the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939 was a desperate effort by Stalin to escape the consequences of this action. He ridiculed Stalin's vaunted "military" genius and accused him of fleeing the Kremlin during the defense of Moscow. Evidently it was not possible for the party leaders to speak so directly to the Russian people without risking a public convulsion...