the son of Andrei Gromyko, Soviet foreign minister from 1957-1985, recorded a conversation he had with his father about the United Nations General Assembly meeting that took place on October 12, 1960.
Can you imagine? The urbane Macmillan, the British Prime Minister, was speaking. Since this was the height of the Cold War, he was attacking us. Well, I would say this was business as usual at the UN, and all the political, diplomatic, and propagandistic tricks were being played. I was sitting and wondering how to respond to these attacks when an opportunity presented itself during the debates. Without warning, Nikita Sergeyevich, who was sitting right next to me, bent down, and at first I thought he was looking for something under the table. I even moved back so I wouldn’t be in his way. Then he suddenly pulled out his shoe and started banging it on the table. To tell the truth, my first thought was that Khrushchev wasn’t feeling well. But I instantly understood that this was our leader’s way of protesting, and he was trying to put Macmillan in an awkward situation. I became very tense and forced myself to start banging the table with my fists – after all, I had to do something to support the head of the Soviet delegation. I didn’t look at Khrushchev. I felt very uncomfortable.
It is hard to say who looks more comical here – Khrushchev with his strange outburst or Gromyko, who was afraid not to go along his boss and felt compelled to bang the table with his fists, at least, if not his shoe, and was trying hard to look as if he meant it.
There are a lot of versions to this story. Some accounts have Khrushchev protesting against a speech by the Philippine representative about the need to free not only colonies, but also the Communist countries of Eastern Europe, while according to others it was the representative of Franco’s Spain who was at the podium.
Some journalists insist that no such incident ever took place, that it was made up, while others believe that Khrushchev simply took off his shoe and placed it on the table as an expression of how he felt about what was going on. All of these discrepancies are typical – by now, 50 years later, nobody cares just what it was that Khrushchev was protesting, but the fact that such a strange protest took place is certainly remembered. This idea was raised in the discussion between the elder Gromyko and his son:
“Dozens of delegates were looking at us and nobody even smiled. A Spaniard who was sitting in front of us could not contain himself, turned around, and literally hissed, ‘We don’t like you...We don’t like you.’ To be honest, I did not like the situation either, to say the least. There is no place for buffoonery in serious diplomacy. And Khrushchev was behaving like a real buffoon.”
“This episode will go down in the annals of the UN and will never be forgotten,” I [Gromyko’s son] said, and added. “And what is amazing is that you can deliver dozens of clever and even brilliant speeches, but decades later nobody remembers the orator. But Khrushchev’s shoe will not be forgotten.”
“Better to be forgotten than to have the reputation of a fool,” my father replied.
This last assertion is undoubtedly true, but how applicable is it to this particular situation? These days, many of the people who handle public relations for the election campaigns of dull Duma candidates would be thrilled to have such a colorful client. Turning to the more recent past, although nowhere near 50 years have passed, who remembers what was actually being discussed during the televised debates between Zhirinovsky and Nemtsov? Their words have long since been forgotten, but the glass of juice that Zhirinovsky splashed on his opponent is as well remembered as Khrushchev’s shoe. But while Zhirinovsky and those of his ilk intentionally lower political discourse to the level of punk rock showmanship, Khrushchev appears to have responded on impulse, to have acted intuitively. And to tell the truth, reading about this episode, you are not sure whether to gasp or cheer.
Of course, it is bad form to cause a scene in the UN, but what other Communist leader would even have been capable of something like this? Stalin, who preferred to show himself to the public as little as possible and cultivated a calm and dignified demeanor befitting his majesty? Brezhnev, who mindlessly slurred speeches he himself did not even understand? Among the array of Soviet monsters, Khrushchev was the most alive – not the nicest, not the smartest, but the most alive. This was the source of his strange behavior, his impulsiveness, which sometimes led to outbursts with dire consequences for others (e.g. the barbaric breakup of an avant-garde exhibition in Moscow’s Manege) and sometimes was a source of pleasant surprises (e.g. his granting of permission to publish Solzhenitsyn’s short stories). It would appear that the “aliveness” that sets Khrushchev apart from other Soviet politicians later made him an easy target for those, under Brezhnev, who tried to turn him into a walking joke.
Today’s generation knows little about Stalin, has a hard time remembering who the Soviet Union was fighting in the Second World War, and has only a vague sense of what perestroika was. But ask any young person who Khrushchev was, and you’ll get an immediate smile. “Oh, sure, he’s the one who wanted to plant corn everywhere and banged his shoe at the UN.”
But while Khrushchev was in power, he did not strike anyone as the least bit silly, not even the slightly reproachful (in retrospect) Gromyko. Some saw him as a liberator who freed millions from labor camps; some as a benefactor, who built thousands and thousands of inexpensive apartments; some saw in him the politician who led the USSR into space.* There were also those who saw him as a traitor to Stalin’s memory, who unsuccessfully tried to wage war against the party and state bureaucracy, or someone who humiliated Pasternak and gave tongue-lashings to outstanding poets and film directors (who saw nothing to laugh about in Khrushchev).
If Khrushchev seems a bit ridiculous today, it is an image that has been cultivated by others in the decades after his death, when it became important to forget everything of significance that he did, however many mistakes and blunders there may have been along the way. Back then, in the depths of KGB headquarters, someone had a brilliant idea: the easiest way to destroy a politician’s image is to ridicule and ignore him. For a long time, Khrushchev did not even appear in official histories. A typical example is the newsreel shown every year on April 12th (the anniversary of the first manned space flight), of Gagarin walking along a red carpet on Red Square, clearly on his way to report on his flight to someone. But the newsreel suddenly ends before that “someone” is shown. At the same time there appeared jokes about a short, fat, bald man and about corn and shoe banging. And did the shoe banging even take place? The evidence seems to suggest that it did.
Brezhnev would never have done anything like this – he would not have had the strength or coordination to bend down and take off his shoe. And in the end, is this the sort of thing a true Communist would really do?
After all, what if he had forgotten to change his socks?
* In fact, Khrushchev as commissar led the Soviet battle at Stalingrad, the building of the Moscow Metro, and the rebuilding of Ukraine after the devastation of World War II.
additional reading: Khrushchev, The Man and his Era, by William Taubman (Norton, 2003)
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