Nina Khrushcheva, bisneta de Nikita Khrushchev
The Russian Ministry of Justice declared Nina Khrushcheva, a professor at an American university and great-granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, a “foreign agent”. For many Russians, the great-grandfather was the “traitor who handed Crimea to Ukraine” and destroyed the figure of Stalin.
According to the official statement issued this Friday by the Russian Ministry of Justice, Nina Khrushcheva is now classified as a “foreign agent”.
The note accuses the great-granddaughter of the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to have disseminated false information about the Russian authorities, having spoken out against the “special military operation” in Ukraine and having collaborated with other “foreign agents”, participating in the dissemination of informative materials.
Hundreds of cultural figures, journalists and businesspeopleas well as media outlets and organizations, have been classified as “foreign agents” since Russia introduced this classification in 2012, which is applied to people considered enemies of the state.
Anyone labeled as a “foreign agent” is required to include a lengthy declaration of disclaimer in all its appearances and public statements, including social media posts, notes the .
Khrushcheva’s mother, Yulia, was Nikita Khrushchev’s granddaughter. He was born in Moscow two weeks after his great-grandfather left power in October 1964 and has been very critical of the war in Ukraine and the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin.
Resident in the USA since 1991, the year of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he is currently international relations teacher at a New York university. In 2024, he published “Nikita Khrushchev: A Leader Outside the System“, in Russian, with biographical notes, describes the Soviet leader who initiated the thaw inside and outside the country.
Khrushchev, who served as General Secretary of the USSR from Stalin’s death in 1953 until his resignation in 1964, is accused by ultranationalists of having “illegally” handed over the Crimean peninsula to the then Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraineem 1954.
Joseph Stalin with Nikita Khrushchev in 1938
“Nikita”, as he was also called, is perhaps best known in the West for his strong criticism of his predecessor, Josef Stalinrecalls the independent Russian portal. On February 25, 1956, during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the then Soviet leader delivered what would become known as his “Secret Speech”.
With this denunciation of Stalin and his “cult of personality”for the first time a senior Soviet official publicly described the state terror as a result of abuses of power and violations of “socialist legality”.
Even so, the sentencing was selectivehighlights Meduza. The true extent of the terror and the complicity of the Communist Party has never been openly addressed, and Much of this criticism would later be reversed.
Despite this, Khrushchev’s speech became a decisive moment in the history of the USSR, marking a unequivocal break with the Stalinist era and the beginning of a period of relative openness known as the “Thawing”.
However, history took some turns. 60 years after the handover of Crimea to Ukraine in 2014, Russia invaded and annexed the Ukrainian peninsula. And in June last year, , which unveiled a statue of the dictator in one of the city’s busiest subway stations, in yet another attempt to revive the legacy of the bloodthirsty dictator.
In Russia, said the BBC correspondent in Moscow, Steve Rosenbergheld last year in the Russian capital, no one knows what the future holds — but also no one knows what the past will bebecause, in this country, the past is constantly changing.
