From behind the iron curtain
by Paul D. Matson, reporter

     Russia had to protect its friends just as America would protect its allies, a living, historical time capsule told SE and NE audiences last week when he spoke on the Russian-American cold war.
     “We knew Castro was a son-of-a-bitch, but he was our son-of-a-bitch,” Dr. Sergei Khrushchev, author and Brown University professor, said as he explained Russia’s actions against the United States during the Cold War.
     Dr. Khrushchev is the son of former chairman of council of ministers of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev, who was in power at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the early part of the cold war.
     In his visit to TCC, he tried to explain how and why his father acted as he did in an era that brought the world as close to nuclear destruction as it has ever come.
     Speaking on Russian economic and political reforms, Dr. Khrushchev shed new insights on his father’s thinking.
     Russia’s economy was one-third that of the United States. However, the military wanted more than the government could afford to spend. Submarines were built for shore defense and “nothing more,” he said.
     The build up of the rest of the navy was too expensive, and the economy was the main reason Prime Minister Khrushchev declined President John Kennedy’s offer of joint military inspections, fly overs and space exploration, fearing it would show the United States how weak the Russians really were.
     Dr. Khrushchev stated that the Cuban Missile Crisis was a psychological crisis for the United States because of the negotiations with the Russians.
     He said his father was aware of how upset the Americans would be with the missile build up in Cuba but wondered if Americans did not realize how upset the Russians were when the United States put its nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy.
     He said the fear in the United States was the same fear that Russia was experiencing at that time and the Iron Curtain did not divide two sectors but instead “divided two evil empires.”
     He told of the tanks that were the pride of the communists during the Cold War, which now sit rotting in a field in Siberia.
     Dr. Khrushchev, who is now a U.S. citizen and lives in the United States with his wife, said his father hated Richard Nixon and supported Kennedy for president but could not show his support, fearing it would hurt JFK’s chances of winning.
     Khrushchev, a noted author, has written over 145 books and articles on engineering and computer science and is a Senior Fellow at Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies at Brown University in Rhode Island.
     His latest book, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, is a portrait of his father.
     At the end of his first lecture on the NE Campus, Dr. Khrushchev was presented with a custom-made western hat donated by Peters Brothers Hats of Fort Worth. The company has given a cowboy hat to every visiting president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, including Kennedy before he left for Dallas the morning of his assassination.