DesertFox
02-12-2006, 06:13 PM
Nina L. Khrushcheva
The Washington Post
12 Feb 06
When I was growing up in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, it was President Leonid Brezhnev that I loathed. The dreaded Joseph Stalin seemed merely a name from a distant past. Back in 1956, he had been outed as a monster by my great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, in the famous "secret speech" at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and deleted from history.
But Brezhnev, with his sinister eyebrows, was everywhere. He brooded over me and my classmates from school posters, promising the bright, shining future of communism. And he had made his ominous presence felt in my own family. My school on Kutuzovsky Prospect was a haven for the party elite, where Politburo members -- including the Brezhnevs -- sent their children. My friends boasted of grandfathers who were ambassador to England or head of the KGB. But my once-powerful great-grandfather officially didn't exist. In 1964, Khrushchev had been "retired" by Brezhnev, removed as Soviet leader for the mysterious, undefined crime of "voluntarism" and exiled to a country estate outside Moscow. Like Stalin, he had been written out of the past.
More (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/11/AR2006021100845.html)
The Washington Post
12 Feb 06
When I was growing up in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, it was President Leonid Brezhnev that I loathed. The dreaded Joseph Stalin seemed merely a name from a distant past. Back in 1956, he had been outed as a monster by my great-grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, in the famous "secret speech" at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and deleted from history.
But Brezhnev, with his sinister eyebrows, was everywhere. He brooded over me and my classmates from school posters, promising the bright, shining future of communism. And he had made his ominous presence felt in my own family. My school on Kutuzovsky Prospect was a haven for the party elite, where Politburo members -- including the Brezhnevs -- sent their children. My friends boasted of grandfathers who were ambassador to England or head of the KGB. But my once-powerful great-grandfather officially didn't exist. In 1964, Khrushchev had been "retired" by Brezhnev, removed as Soviet leader for the mysterious, undefined crime of "voluntarism" and exiled to a country estate outside Moscow. Like Stalin, he had been written out of the past.
More (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/11/AR2006021100845.html)