Khrushchev's words and his shoe banging

[Mark Nuckols]

Interesting. She says he "took off his shoe." What, then, of the numerous 
claims of a "third shoe" brought into the chamber for a calculated display 
of histrionics?


>From: Martin Votruba <votruba+ at PITT.EDU>
>Reply-To: Slavic & East European Languages and Literature list              
><SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>
>To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
>Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Khrushchev's words and his shoe banging
>Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 22:22:51 -0500
>
>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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