Son of Former Soviet Leader Savors All-American Life

CRANSTON, R.I. —  Sergei Khrushchev is home.

Home, for the favorite son of the late Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, is a clapboard ranch house in the Providence ‘burbs--a two-bedroom model surrounded by look-alike houses, driveways full of Buicks and Dodges and finely Lawn-Boy’d grass.

And why is a rocket engineer who designed missiles that were pointed at the United States at the height of the Cold War now living out his years on the corner of Neptune and Laurelton, across from the Garden City school playground?

This half-acre of suburbia, he says, is “retirement paradise.”

Oh, it’s no Varadero, Cuba. But Cranston can sizzle in the spring, as on this June afternoon. Big, heavy sun. Cloudless sky. Temp pushing 88. It’s enough to make a 63-year-old Communist--uh, former Communist--feel young again.

What could better illustrate how the Cold War has come full circle than the sight of this barbecue-loving proud-to-be-a-suburbanite dabbling about his American dacha?

This is no ordinary Russian immigrant. This is the son of the baldheaded nemesis who banged his shoe on the table at the United Nations.

The guy who declared, not too tactfully, “We will bury you.”

The guy who oversaw the building of the Berlin Wall, who ordered Soviet tanks to crush a revolt in Hungary, who caused the world sleepless nights by sending nuclear missiles to Cuba in 1962.

And now his son, Sergei, will become an American. Just days shy of his 64th birthday--the same age his father was at the height of his power--he applied for U.S. citizenship. Last Wednesday he passed the test, missing only one question.

On this day before taking the test, he’s shelved his U.S. history books and put aside the multiple choice practice quizzes (“How many stars are on the U.S. flag?” . . . “For what famous Civil War speech is Abraham Lincoln known?”). He has slipped into clothes appropriate for South Florida: khaki shorts, leather moccasins and a short-sleeved, tangerine-colored shirt with embroidered white swirls. A little something his wife, Valentina Golenko, picked up at the Rhode Island Mall.

Khrushchev places a couple of plastic patio chairs in his backyard under his latest achievement--a latticework to accommodate three grapevines he’s just planted--and sinks into a chair, gingerly, as if settling into a hot tub. Arthritis in both hips makes sitting a chore.

He undoes a third shirt button.

“Ah, I love the heat,” Khrushchev says. “And this sky, it reminds me of Ukraine sky.” He pours some Shaw’s Lemon-Lime soda into a whiskey glass for his guest. What? No Stolichnaya?

“Too hot for vodka,” he explains. Then a hefty chuckle. “This is spring in Rhode Island, not Moscow.”

Life, American style, could be worse.

It means waking to the chik-chik-chik of lawn sprinklers, shopping for mulch and paneling and paint at the Home Depot (“I love Home Depot--it pushes you to some creation”), browsing at flea markets, growing pink roses in the frontyard and strawberries, gooseberries, lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes in the back.

Khrushchev now has time to water his night violets, prune “Nicholas” and “Veronica,” his pear trees, trim his two yews, and putter with his collections of African butterflies and Cuban seashells.

And on Saturdays from November through late March, he and Valentina work up a sweat in their basement “banya,” the traditional Russian steam bath, thwacking each other’s bare backs and bottoms with bundles of birch twigs.

“We did all of the paneling in the basement ourselves,” Khrushchev says proudly while giving a visitor a tour of his home. “We built our banya, too.”

On the paneled walls of his basement, on the walls of his study, living room, dining room, giants of history stare from black-and-white photographs taken during a time when the downing of a U2 spy plane made a newly nuclear world hold its breath:

Nikita Khrushchev, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nina Petrovna Khrushchev, grinning, albeit nervously, on the steps of the U.S. president’s retreat at Camp David, Md.; Papa Khrushchev, Sergei and his toddler, Nikita Jr., strolling the grounds of the premier’s Moscow country gardens in 1962; Sergei with Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit Earth.

A bronze “X” atop the fireplace mantel--a gift from Ernst Neizvestny, the dissident Soviet sculptor who, despite a violent shouting match with the Soviet leader in 1963, designed the monument that has stood at Khrushchev’s grave in Novodevich cemetery since his death in 1971.

Rows and rows of books on his father’s life, reports and speeches, in Russian, lining shelves along the wall in his cellar.

A black lacquered silverware box decorated with a hand-painted, Velasquez-like portrait of Nikita Khrushchev, the champion of communism, somber in his navy blue uniform, three gold stars pinned to his left breast pocket.

From the side, Sergei Khrushchev looks--it’s almost spooky--like Papa: the sapphire-blue eyes, the shoe-button nose, the white tufts of hair rimming a square forehead, the round, beefy jowls.

The resemblance is so striking that when he first came to the United States to lecture at Brown University in September 1991--nine months after the Soviet Union collapsed--students, faculty, even mailmen would stop and stare “as if I were a white elephant.”

Even today, he says, little old ladies with pushcarts sometimes stop him in the supermarket aisle and ask: “Didn’t I see you the other night on the History Channel?”

The surname, the Nikita look, can sometimes be a nuisance: Khrushchev recalls having once had an invitation to a dinner party canceled because the host, a retired U.S. Army general, wouldn’t have a communist in his home.

A Taste for Kansas Beef

In fact, Sergei Khrushchev says he stopped believing in communism’s ultimate triumph as early as the 1970s.

The “we will bury you” remark was misunderstood, he insists. “He meant that capitalism would die and that the Soviet economic system would bury it. But my father was a part of the Cold War, a war of propaganda, and so these words were used against him and misunderstood by Americans.

“But all of us make mistakes. You can’t live in paradise surrounded by barbed wire.”

Khrushchev harbors no bad feelings, though. He’s gregarious, neighborly, charming. He often invites his neighbors over to show off his green thumb or for steak barbecues. He loves American steaks, but only those cooked at home on the grill, unless, of course, he’s traveling in Kansas. “Kansas steaks are the best.”

No, this is not the life young Sergei and his three sisters knew as Cold War kids in a world of Communist Party privilege: chauffeured limousines, massive downtown Moscow apartments, access to scarce Western goods and the best schools, hunting and fishing trips with Papa Khrushchev on the premier’s country estate.

It’s a far cry from being chief of the Soviet Missile Design Bureau from 1958 to 1968, first deputy director at the Control Computer Institute in Moscow, and a professor of missile guidance systems at Moscow Technical Institute.

And he’s certainly beyond the glory days when he won the Lenin Prize and the Prize of the Council of Ministers of the USSR for his work with missiles and computer-guidance control systems.

But in the mornings, Khrushchev can rise when he wants (usually 7 a.m.), have a cup of plain yogurt, perhaps some smoked fish and coffee, switch the tweeting phone to answering-machine mode and sit at his mahogany desk to write.

For five hours at a stretch, he scratches out his memoirs in longhand. Then Valentina scoops up the scribble, sits on a stool in the kitchen and types it out on an electric Olympia.

In his three books published in America, Khrushchev does his best to soften history’s verdict of his father. He describes Papa’s love of family, Papa’s fight to provide cheap housing for all Soviet citizens, Papa’s attempt to get Soviet farmers to plant corn, Papa’s push to produce more consumer goods and trim the military budget.

As it turned out, the peasant-turned-premier tumbled abruptly from power after 11 years, on Oct. 24, 1964, the first Soviet leader who didn’t die in office. After his fall, the man with the hands-flying, jaws-working, piggie-eyes-darting style plunged into a deep depression, often dissolving in tears.

To pull him out of his funk, his wife, Nina, gave him a German tape recorder, and he took to dictating his memoirs on a bench in the family garden. Eventually the tapes were smuggled out to the West and fashioned into a two-volume bestseller.

Nikita Khrushchev died an “unperson” in classic Soviet fashion, unlamented and unloved by the general Soviet public, edited out of books, airbrushed out of photographs, the mere mention of his name a crime.

But today, in a Rhode Island suburb halfway around the world, trumpeting the Khrushchev name is no longer a crime. So his son works and works and works to write “more truthful portraits of my father.”

His fourth book, “Creation of Superpower,” published by Penn State Press, is to arrive in bookstores in the winter of 2000. “I feel pressure, on the inside, to fulfill an obligation to myself, my father, my country, to America, to the world.”

When Khrushchev finishes his morning writing, he lunches, then climbs into his 1994 Buick Century and drives 20 minutes to a drab colonial-style house on a leafy Providence street, Brown’s Center for International Studies. There he reads the Russian papers, maybe a passage from Gogol, Pushkin, Dickens. And he never misses the Moscow evening TV news, live in his tiny office via satellite.

Only on Fridays does he return home late. That’s the one day a week he must lecture to undergraduate seniors on “Relations Among Post-Soviet States.” Otherwise he’s free to speak as he pleases, wherever he pleases.

And speak Khrushchev does: at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.; at the Naval War College in Rhode Island; on Royal Olympic cruise ships; at farm forums in Montana; at political science conferences from Florida to California.

“If there’s one bad thing I picked up from my father,” he says, “it would have to be that I talk too much.”

Khrushchev has three sons: Nikita, 39, who works for a Moscow publishing house; Ilyad, 29, a computer engineer who sells communications equipment; Sergei Jr., 25, a college student in Moscow. Whenever they phone, they urge their parents to come home.

No way, says Khrushchev.

Not even for a visit?

He shakes his head.

“No, no, no. I want to live the rest of my life here. I’m comfortable here. I like the heat in Rhode Island. And what would I do in Russia? I cannot return to the job I left in 1991, at the Soviet Control Computer Institute. Someone else has the job. And my contacts? Well, there is no more Soviet Union.”

His retirement rubles and pension have all been devoured by Russian inflation, he says. “My son called me once, asking for a little money, and I said, ‘Sure, take what’s in my bank account. He said, ‘Papa, it wouldn’t be enough to pay for a driver’s-ed course.’ ”

So what’s next for Khrushchev?

After months of brushing up on Americana, he can’t wait to get his hands on that U.S. passport. Not that he needed to bother with a citizenship test. Six years ago, Khrushchev received permanent resident status, thanks, in part, to supporting letters from former President Richard Nixon; Robert McNamara, defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations; Thomas J. Watson Jr., chairman emeritus of IBM; and a former CIA official, David Gries.

But to Khrushchev, citizenship is special. “If you are living in a country and you plan to live in that country for a long time, I think it is your obligation to become its citizen,” Khrushchev says.

Would his father approve?

“I would hope that my father would be supportive,” he says. “After all, it’s not as if I am defecting.”