Russia’s Khrushchev kin claim family honor under attack

MOSCOW | Yulia Khrushcheva sat in the afternoon shadows of her Moscow kitchen, her delicate fingers brushing back her silver-blond hair, talking of the anguish of seeing her family’s reputation under attack.

The 68-year-old granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev has filed a series of lawsuits against a state-owned TV network for airing a docudrama that, she says, falsely depicts her father, Leonid, as having been shot as a traitor in World War II.

These claims of her father’s treachery, which historians dismiss, have been published more than a dozen times in books, magazine articles and newspapers in the post-Soviet era, and sometimes she cannot bring herself to read them. “I am not that brave,” she says.

Some members of the Khrushchev family and others say the persistent rumor is part of a quiet battle of political symbols in which the champions of a strengthened state have tried to weaken democratic institutions.

The aim, they say, is to burnish the reputation of strong leaders, such as former President Vladimir Putin and Josef Stalin, by tarnishing that of Khrushchev - who denounced Stalin’s mass arrests, executions and deportations in a secret 1956 speech to the Communist Party leadership that later became public.

The tactic, they say, is to smear the son with a bogus charge in order to defame his famous father and then to claim Khrushchev’s celebrated speech was actually motivated by a desire for revenge.

“This is not about Khrushchev or Stalin, it’s about the future of Russia,” said Sergei Khrushchev, Leonid’s half-brother and a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

Irina Shcherbakova of the Memorial, a Moscow human rights group, said authorities “undoubtedly” help spread the rumors of Leonid Khrushchev’s purported execution as part of Russia’s epic struggle between authoritarianism and reform - of which Stalin and Khrushchev are the two icons.

“The reason these rumors persist … is rooted in the fate of the country, when reformers are considered to be weak and tyrants strong,” she said.

In an effort to rewrite history after a period of reform, she said, Russian autocrats traditionally have resorted to “banal myths, tabloid stories, loud TV talk shows.”

However, some political analysts see in the attacks on Khrushchev’s memory a settling of scores among the descendants of Soviet-era elites rather than any state-orchestrated campaign to undermine reform.

“I don’t think Khrushchev is of any interest to today’s Russian government,” said Masha Lipman, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, who has often been critical of the Kremlin.

Still, the celebration of state power has been a major theme in Russian arts and education in recent years. The country’s film industry, largely state-subsidized, has produced thrillers showing Russia under siege from the West, protected only by decisive czars, steely Communist Party first secretaries and vigorous modern presidents - essentially, Mr. Putin.

New textbooks praise Mr. Putin’s concentration of power and laud Stalin as a successful if brutal leader. Last year, Mr. Putin told history teachers that no one could make Russians feel guilty about Stalin’s crimes because “in other countries, even worse things happened.”

Russian television, which is mostly state-owned or -controlled, seems split over how to depict Stalin. Some recent entertainment programs, including a dramatization of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “First Circle,” have been critical of the dictator. However, viewers of a miniseries improbably titled “Stalin Lite” say it depicts Stalin as a hero.

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