Khrushchev's words and his shoe banging

[Martin Votruba]

To add to an old thread -- Khrushchev's daughter Rada Adzhubei was 
asked about the reported shoe-slamming incident in a recent interview 
(pub.: 18 Feb. 2006, the URL is below).  She says she learned about 
it from her husband Alexei, editor of Izvestia then.

While her husband did not actually see it, she believes it and 
supplies a detail or two.  The following is my translation of the 
translation of the passage from the interview where she responds to a 
question about the incident --


x x x

To be honest, I did not pay attention to it at the time.  That's the 
way he was, that was his temperament. [...] That day, Andrei Gromyko 
[...] cautioned Father: "Nikita Sergeyevich, if they begin to 
criticize us, we'll get up and leave the hall."

Father became outraged: "You mean we are supposed to leave?  And why 
have we come, then?  Nothing of the sort, we'll protest!"

I can imagine him vividly.

He often told us about a deputy to the inter-revolutionary Duma, a 
Badayev, Bolshevik, after whom a well-known brewery was named later. 
This Badayev was semi-literate, unable to write his own speech, but 
Lenin valued him as a master obstructionist.  When something against 
the Bolsheviks came up, he shouted, whistled, stomped his feet.

Well, and when a delegate to the UN began to make offensive 
statements aimed at the Soviet Union, Father began to slam the table 
with his fist, then with his watch, which, it seems, he dropped [or: 
fell off], so he took off his shoe and slammed the shoe.  That is 
what my husband told me, who was in [Khrushchev's] press corps.  But 
he did not see it with his own eyes.  As most journalists, he, too, 
sat in the bar during the less important speeches.  By the time he 
managed to run to the gallery, the scandal was over.

http://tinyurl.com/e4lk4

x x x


When Khrushchev's granddaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, wrote about her 
search for the truth about the incident (The New Statesman, 2 Oct. 
2000), she emphasized her search through the contemporary 
periodicals, but actually added a few other details that she 
attributed to her relatives.


Martin

votruba "at" pitt "dot" edu

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