Sergei Khrushchev, Son of Former Soviet Premier, Dies at 84

He also helped his father write his four-volume memoir in Russian and then translated it into English.

Nikita Khrushchev was first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and chairman of the Council of Ministers, or premier, from 1958 to 1964, when he was deposed and relegated to obscurity. He died in 1971 at 77.

Americans had a close-up look at the Soviet leader and his family in 1959, when he visited the United States at the invitation of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Times were tense: The Soviets had beaten the Americans into space, launching Sputnik in 1957, and American schoolchildren practiced duck-and-cover drills as the threat of nuclear annihilation hung over the planet.

The premier brought his son, then 24, with him on the trip.

“Americans who have observed and talked with him,” The New York Times observed of Sergei Khrushchev, “think he gives no sign of following in his father’s footsteps.”

Sergei Khrushchev said years later, in the interview with The Providence Journal, that during that trip his family felt as if they had landed on Mars, seeing things they had never imagined. “It was palms, cars, highways, everything,” he said. He took home movies of it all, including Times Square.

They were especially baffled by the concept of Disneyland, then four years old but already a top attraction in Southern California. When told that his family would not be allowed to visit the park out of concerns for their safety, the premier exploded in anger: “What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera there or something? Or have gangsters taken hold of the place?”