Cold War First Lady Nina Khrushcheva Sends a Message for World Peace
In this 1962 “address to the women of America,” Nina Petrovna Khrushcheva, the wife of Premier Nikita Khrushchev, urges the United States to end the cold war by full disarmament and to dump all weapons into the ocean.
Though it is unclear if this recording aired on WNYC, the broadcast was transmitted to American audiences via shortwave radio. A February 19th article in the New York Times describes her “accented but flowing” message:
The Premier’s wife expressed gratification over the ‘peace movement’ of American women. Her formula for world peace was this: ‘Let us sink atom bombs along with the other weapons in the deepest part of the ocean and live without weapons as good neighbors.’
Invoking a national memory of fifty years of war she asserts that her country does not want to fight with the United States:
Our people are engaged in the greatest and noblest undertaking that has ever fallen to man. During the time in twenty years we want, in the main, to build a communist society in our country, a society of plenty, full equality and happiness for all.
Nina was the first wife of a Russian political leader to assume a typical First Lady role, which was projected towards an attentive global audience. This era in Soviet politics, known as the Khrushchev Thaw, emphasized the unraveling of Stalinism and peaceful coexistence with other nations. Nina was the smiling face of the Khrushchev Thaw.
She traveled at Nikita’s side on diplomatic trips to foreign countries, communicated in several languages and had a career as a teacher and communist party leader. When reached for comment, her granddaughter and namesake Nina Khrushcheva said:
...she was rather well educated, certainly better than Nikita Khrushchev, and was once his teacher in political economy...She worked as a propagandist (and apparently a very good one) during the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War, and was very upset when she had to give up her job in the 1930s because Stalin's mandate was to return women back to the family and end the suffrage movement. She told me once that ‘during World War II she could have been very helpful to the soldiers.’
...she was very proper and professional, her job was to be at the side of the leader and to represent the country on foreign trips so she did what was expected of her to the best of her ability, essentially perceiving those trips as her communist party duty...As a side note, she was also a wonderful grandmother, firm yet forgiving.
In 1959, the family embarked on a cross country tour of the United States. With fascination, the press described her adventures dining in Hollywood with Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope, dodging questions on foreign policy from the press, sneaking away in San Francisco to do a little shopping and showing off pictures of her grandchildren.
An Associated Press article from September 28th, 1959 recounts how reporters anticipated this visit with catty remarks about her appearance, “some sophisticated reporters commented caustically upon Mme. Khrushchev[a]'s poorly corseted figure, undistinguished wardrobe, placid peasant face and incredible long page-boy-in-snood hair-do.” However, her charm eventually won over the public. The reporter, who was perhaps ignorant of Khrushchev’s de-stalinization policies, further suggested that “There was the feeling that anyone who had the good sense to marry her, stay married to her, and bring her over here couldn’t be all villain, no matter what he was doing during Stalin’s regime.”As Albin Krebs notes in Nina's 1984 New York Times obituary “she turned out to be her husband's greatest public relations asset, as Americans took to her cheerful personality and motherly manner.”
After Nikita was ousted in 1964, the couple retired in quiet obscurity to a dacha near Moscow. The Times obituary criticized the Russian government for letting Nina’s death go unnoted by reporters in Moscow for 10 days:
The only public mention of [her death], a brief notice in the Moscow newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva on Aug. 11, referred to her by her maiden name of Kukharchuk and described her as a 'personal pensioner.' Her husband's death notice [in 1971] described him similarly, neglecting to mention that he had once been First Secretary of the Communist Party and Prime Minister.
Nina served a diplomatic spousal role to foreign countries but rarely made public appearances in the Soviet Union. As the couple were never officially married, it is not surprising that the Soviet press would use her legal last name, nor make mention of Nikita’s death at a time when the Soviet Union was reverting back to Stalinist policies. According to her granddaughter:
Since the First Lady position didn't exist, Nina's death in 1984 mattered more to the Westerners than to the Soviets. For the West she was one of the political symbols of Khrushchev's Thaw, of his communism with the human face, but to the Soviets she was just a former leader's wife. Moreover a leader who targeted Stalinism, something that even today Russia is still conflicted about. Over 50 percent of people consider Stalin's role in Soviet affairs positive.
My utmost thanks to Nina Khrushcheva for providing her commentary. Khrushcheva is a Professor at The New School and a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute. Learn more about the Khrushchev family in her latest book, The Lost Khrushchev: A Journey into the Gulag of the Russian Mind.
Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.
WNYC archives id: 150300
Municipal archives id: T4070