Leonid Khrushchev's daughter sues to defend his name

Says allegations of treachery are unfounded

The suits target a docudrama on Leonid Khrushchev. (Associated Press)

MOSCOW - Yulia Khrushcheva sat in the afternoon shadows of her Moscow kitchen, her delicate fingers brushing back her 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 allegations 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 said.

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 Vladimir Putin and 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 alleged 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 change, she said, Russian autocrats have traditionally 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, Putin.

New textbooks praise Putin's concentration of power and laud Stalin as a successful if brutal leader. Last year, 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 Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "First Circle," have been critical of the dictator. But viewers of a miniseries improbably titled "Stalin Lite" say it depicted Stalin as a hero.

In June, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, another Soviet-era reformer, urged the creation of a memorial to victims of Stalin's gulag, lamenting those who think of him as a "brilliant manager" rather than a murderous dictator.

Khrushchev is generally recalled in the West as the shoe-banging Soviet leader who confronted a youthful President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. But in Russia, he may be best remembered for the 1956 speech.

To those who defend Stalin's memory, the story of Leonid's supposed treachery suggests the speech was an act of vengeance.

According to official accounts, Senior Lieutenant Leonid N. Khrushchev, a fighter pilot, disappeared during an air battle near the town of Zhizdra southwest of Moscow on March 11, 1943. Leonid's fellow pilots presumed that the 26-year-old's plane had been shot down and he was killed. Neither he nor his aircraft was ever found.

His death certificate says he died on the day of the air battle. He was posthumously awarded the Order of the Great Patriotic War.

William C. Taubman of Amherst College, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2003 biography of Nikita Khrushchev, rejects stories of Leonid's alleged defection and execution. "I'm convinced Leonid was shot down and killed in the war, and that he was neither a captive nor collaborator of the Germans," he wrote in an e-mail.

However, a small but persistent group of authors have reasserted the claim repeatedly since the 1991 Soviet collapse.

In a 2004 encyclopedia titled "The Epoch of Stalin: The People and the Events," Vladimir Sukhodeyev wrote that Nikita Khrushchev fell to his knees and begged Stalin to spare Leonid's life.