About the Author

Sergei Khrushchev is Senior Fellow at Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

William Taubman is Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. He is the author of Stalin's American Policy (1983) and Moscow's Silent Spring (1990). He is currently at work on a biography of Nikita Khushchev.

William C. Wohlforth is Assistant Professor of International Politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University. He is the author of Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions during the Cold War (1993) and editor of Witnesses to the End of the Cold War (1996) and Cold War Endgame: Oral History, Analysis, and Debates (forthcoming).

Reviews

"A fascinating portrait of a man of immense vitality, a fervent Communist, convinced that the Soviet Union would surpass the U.S., and the process by which he began subconciously to understand the system itself did not work." - Kirkus Reviews "Sergei Khrushchev is an intelligent observer; he had many opportunities to converse with his father, he overheard his father's discussions with others, and kept a record of the events which he had witnessed. He writes straightforward prose, without literary pretensions. The most valuable information which this book provides bears on something that for all its importance rarely emerges from documents, namely attitudes and ambience - the imponderables that determine how statesmen act." - Richard Pipes, in The London Times Literary Supplement "[R]emarkably wide-ranging and comprehensive....lively and absorbing....Sergei's account overall is far more reliable and incisive than the average memoir is, For those who want to understand the Cold War and its legacy, the book fills a crucial gap. Readers interested in Soviet military policy, the Suez crisis of 1956, the Berlin crises of 1958 and 1961, the U-2 affair of 1960, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and countless other topics pertaining to U.S. Soviet relations will find them all here. The book is a valuable source of anecdotes and reminiscences for scholars, and it will also appeal to general readers who want to find out more about the Cold War rivalry....Sergei's monumental book is not the final word about Khrushchev, but it does make the task of understanding, assessing, and ultimately judging Khrushchev a good deal easier." - Mark Kramer, Director of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies, in The Providence Sunday Journal