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Nina L. Khrushcheva
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The Lost Khrushchev: A Journey into the Gulag of the Russian Mind Paperback – May 13, 2014

by Nina L. Khrushcheva (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 22 ratings
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The Lost Khrushchev: A Journey into the Gulag of the Russian Mind tells the story of Leonid Khrushchev, the author's grandfather, and the oldest son of former Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Part political memoir, part historical investigation, this family chronicle is a window into Leonid's life and death and what that means in contemporary Russia. Khrushcheva's search began thirty years ago after a chance conversation with Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin's all-powerful foreign minister. What inspired the author to finally document the Khrushchev family's past was a persistent accusation in Russian media that twenty-five-year-old Leonid--a fighter pilot during World War II--did not die in battle in 1943 as was once presumed, but instead was executed by Stalin for his alleged desertion and service to the Nazis. So what happened to that lost Khrushchev? Khrushcheva also addresses the legacy of her great grandfather, Nikita Khrushchev, whose leadership from 1953 to 1964 has much bearing on Russian politics today.
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  1. Print length
    320 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Tate Pub & Enterprises Llc
  4. Publication date
    May 13, 2014
  5. Dimensions
    6 x 0.75 x 9 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1629945447
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1629945446
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The most interesting part of the book is... the author's analysis... Nina Khrushcheva shows how the attacks on Leonid are perpetrated by the same journalists, politicians and propagandists who are trying to rehabilitate Stalin, and to stoke anti-Westernism. Reform, in Vladimir Putin's Russia, is akin to treason. She uses the controversy to show how modern Russia is still choked by undigested lumps of Soviet history."--The Economist

"A woman who prefers simplicity, Nina Khrushcheva is direct, blunt and, at times, wickedly funny. This particular gulag in her book refers to a mind-set that includes the hope that the next czar will be better than the last. It also refers to the still-lingering sense among many Russians that Russia was better off before its post-Stalinist reforms."--Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post

"Nina Khrushcheva's 'The Lost Khrushchev' [is] the haunting story of her grandfather, the son of the Soviet leader."--Peter Baker, The New York Times

From the Inside Flap

  • "A fascinating read, part detective story, part family history, and all relevant to politics in Russia today." --Jack F. Matlock, Jr., US Ambassador to the Soviet Union 1987-1991, author of Autopsy on an Empire and Reagan and Gorbachev.
  • "This is a wonderful book, beautifully written and very moving. It does a great service to Russia and the enduring legacy of the Khrushchev family. Russia's often-tragic history, great bravery, enormous human strengths (and weaknesses) and unique culture all shine in 'The Lost Khrushchev." --Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director, Earth Institute at Columbia University, author of "To Move the World: JFK's Quest for Peace."
  • "In demolishing the Putin-era slander that her fighter pilot grandfather, Leonid Khrushchev, killed in action in 1943, had been a Nazi spy, Nina Khrushcheva offers not just an understanding portrait of a rebellious young tearaway turned hero but a profound glimpse into the ""gulag of the Russian mind,"" in which a permanent disposition to despotism and paranoia coexists with fleeting efforts at freedom and truth," --Lord Robert Skidelsky.
  • "Nina Khrushcheva's deeply personal and fascinating book takes us into the bosom of what was, half a century ago, the First Family of the USSR. The story she tells has elements of tragedy, courage, and intrigue. It adds fresh information and a new human dimension to a crucial prelude to the eventual collapse of the Soviet dictatorship: Khrushchev's reforms and, when he was a pensioner and nonperson, his successors' effort, ultimately unsuccessful, to besmirch his legacy." --Strobe Talbott, President, the Brookings Institution, editor and translator of Khrushchev's memoirs.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tate Pub & Enterprises Llc (May 13, 2014)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1629945447
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1629945446
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.2 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.75 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 22 ratings

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Nina L. Khrushcheva

Nina L. Khrushcheva

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Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
22 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Janet
5.0 out of 5 stars I recommend this book
Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2017
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Very interesting. I recommend this book.
One person found this helpful
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Dr. A. D.
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2017
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Really exciting book!
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Julian Douglass
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Read
Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2019
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This is an unique look into the Soviet system of governance and the history of the Soviet Union in general. I like the intimate touch the Ms. Khrushcheva gives and how she integrates modern history into her memoir. Solid read.
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Old Historian
1.0 out of 5 stars This Book Is An Elaborate Fairy Tale
Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2014
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This book is a fairy tale. It is a feint in one direction (defending Leonid Khrushchev) so as to attack Vladimir Putin (attacking him is popular and profitable today in the West), and attempting to defend the murdering and indefensible Nikita Khrushchev; all of this using the name of the Khrushchev clan. She has position in the West because of the family name. Her history and facts are errant and scrambled, but they can be sold because few understand the Russias and the Soviets.
Nina Petrovna is a Petrovna by Russian paternal rule of tradition, but chose to change her name to Nina Khrushcheva (the Russian language female ending for Khrushchev, and hereafter referred to as Nka). It is much more powerful and profitable in the U.S. to be called Khrushcheva than Petrovna. Interestingly, her bios are very scant regarding her Russian life and her American life.
NKa has three interests in the book. Her first is to present herself as a Western thinker, regardless of how she presents herself as Great Russian (the ethnographers rendering of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union's republic called Russia, and the current Russian Republic). She conveniently leaves out the Khrushchev ties to Ukraine (known as Little Russia by the same ethnographers). This is important in Nikita Khrushchev's demonic side and I'll address this.
NKa has been able to parlay her name change into very creditable associations; achievable with far more ease than as Nina Petrovna. Petrovna to Khrushcheva also sets her above any unrelated Khrushchev subject writer. There is no one else in the West to challenge her, as such. That is a good reason for this current quest of hers.
But my real concern is that, notwithstanding the lauds from people who wouldn't know Soviet diplomatic or military history if it struck them in the face, is that NKa shows, in her writing, her complete lack of knowledge of matters Soviet, Great Russian and Little Russian. Her history understanding is Western, and not accurate; perhaps some by ignorance, but definitely some by invent.
Nka's second interest is to defend Leonid Khushchev, the son of Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev. In defending Leonid, she ultimately can defend Nikita Khrushchev and, by the current West position, attack Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Republic. Some of her writings, no, most of her writings on Leonid are nearly 70-year-old memories of a collection of friends (some who had changed stories form 65 years before) and strangers...none of which had any proof of anything.
Nka's last interest, the rehabilitation of the Khruschev clan, increases her importance and remuneration in the U.S.. She has manipulated Nikita Khrushchev's horrible human rights record into a defense of `he really didn't want to, but had to because of Stalin'. NKa, in this book, inserts a truth early on saying that as directed by Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, the virtual mini-Stalin of Ukraine where he was Fist Secretary of the Ukraine Communist Party, selected 5,000 to be executed, and they were executed, on Nikita Khrushchev's orders, because they had done nothing other than fill the required 5,000 deaths. That defense certainly didn't fly for the Germans at Nuremberg.
Nikita Khrushchev's entire career is recorded and much of it from his own historical statements, so Nka can manipulate it but not change it. For instance, the 1939 Soviet-German Pact which Nka criticizes as many in the West have done, was one of the few Stalin acts which Nikita Khrushchev fully supported and never opposed during his lifetime. The Pact was even supported by the very anti-communist Winston Churchill, as well as Neville Chamberlain.
Nka says Khrushchev lamented the mass deportations by Stalin; but only of certain groups. He never returned the Volga Germans nor the Crimea Tartars (which today has proven to be a gigantic mistake on this part, and hence Crimea leaving Ukraine).
Nka writes in this book that Nikita Khrushchev, after his forced retirement, and on observing the 1968 Soviet led Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia, lamented (told only to his family) the Soviet Union had learned nothing since the Khrushchev ordered 1956 occupation of Hungary. Khrushchev's Hungary operation resulted in 3,000 Hungarian civilians deaths, while 108 civilians died in the Czech occupation. Neither is justified, but the relative difference belies the objectivity of Nka, and thus, the value of this book as only selfish propaganda.
Nka complains that Nikita Khrushchev, the only Soviet leader with a heart (she says in the book), has virtually been removed from historical, kind Soviet history. And that is precisely what Khrushchev did to many others when he took over; for example Malenkov and the great Marshall G. Zhukov (who incidentally a short time before gave great assistance to Nikita Khrushchev). It is common in Soviet history to re-write it to make the party in power look good. This occurred with the six volume WWII history where Nikita Khrushchev became a hero and Stalin the dud. However, one year after Nikita Khrushchev's leaving office, a one volume history came out and all the photos had been removed, and all the glories were gone, regarding Khrushchev. Nka whines about this, but as most of Nka's claims for the Khrushchev clan they ring hollow because they are false.
If you want to know about Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin and others, and WWII from a rare un-biased British source then you'll want to read Russia At War by Alexander Werth. Werth was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, of British parents who moved back to England when Alexander was 18. He spoke both English and Russian as native languages, and during WWII was attached to Soviet forces as the BBC war correspondent. With Werth you will find unbiased history and not the histrionics of Nina Petrovna (Khrushcheva).
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Florian
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential Reading
Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2014
"The Lost Khrushchev" is written by Nina Khrushcheva, Nikita Khrushchev's great-grandaugher on her mother's side. Although it is just a technical description of the relations, as like everything in Russia things are more complex, more tragic and more romantic. Nina's mother, Yulia Khrushcheva, is the daughter of Leonid Khrushchev and Lyubov Sizykh. Leonid, Nikita Khrushchev's son from his first marriage to Yefrosinia Pisareva, died in the 1943 World War II battle over the Orel region; his wife Lyuba was arrested and sent to Gulag in Mordova, one of thousands of detention camps for Soviet political prisoners across the vast country. After losing her parents Yulia became her grandfather's adoptive daughter and her step-grandmother Nina Kukharchuk (Khrushcheva), Khrushchev's second wife, became a mother to her. The story Nina Khrushcheva is telling in "The Lost Khrushchev" is a personal look at her grandfather's legacy and her family as the inheritors of that legacy. Khrushchev, Political Commissar of the Soviet Front during World War II, Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, First Secretary of the Communist Party of USSR from 1953 to 1964 and the Soviet Premier. He was the first one to attack totalitarianism in his 1956 "Secret Speech" at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress denouncing Joseph Stalin's "pernicious cult of personality and its consequences," and launching the period known as the Thaw, when millions of Soviet citizens were released from the Gulag. The Thaw unlocked the door to better international contacts, and most importantly to a more frank exchange of ideas, making the intellectuals-poets, writers and artists-a catalyst for the new era of openness and debate. However, despite all the changes the Soviet Union, and now Russia, have gone through since the Thaw, this openness is seen not as a jump-start of the Russian liberation, but as a plot to undermine a great nation. Today Khrushchev's legacy is in demise, and our family story is not just the one of struggling with and surviving Stalinism; it is also a tale of enduring the most surprising consequence of de-Stalinization-the return of the Stalin (and state) worship. Khrushcheva's general argument is that Russia has reverted to a form of Stalinism under Vladimir Putin. It looks at a particular Russian frame of mind, which she calls the "Gulag syndrome." Her political analysis becomes only more relevant through the prism of her Kremlin's family story, that is the book is a brilliant example of how to find deeper meaning in individual life.
Indeed, growing up Khrushchev is an experience very few people can narrate. Khrushcheva's is not a simple story of privilege and glamour. It is a more complicated story of disenfranchisement and survival. Closely intertwined with that family saga is the escalation of the Cold War, its demise, and now, the post-Soviet Stalinism of Putin's variation.
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Top reviews from other countries

anonymous
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful book!
Reviewed in India on June 25, 2018
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A wonderful book - I couldn’t put it down, had to finish it in one setting. The author provides a very interesting and nuanced family and political history, using beautiful language and descriptions. Highly recommended for anyone interested in Russia!
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