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Nikita Khrushchev

Much of what we know today about the leadership of the Soviet Union during the Cold War is attributable to the late son of Nikita Khrushchev.

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The Cuban Missile Crisis as seen from the Kremlin

During the

Nikita Khrushchev’s son remembers a great turning point of the Cold War, as seen from behind the Iron Curtain

On May 1, 1960, a Soviet V-750 surface-to-air missile (known in America as the SA-Z “Guideline”) shot down a U-2, one of the “invulnerable” American spy planes. The plane was a phantom—of all the secret projects of those years, perhaps the most secret.

Nikita Khrushchev’s son recalls a world in which the United States was the Evil Empire, and the Soviet superpower was a carefully maintained illusion.

Sixty years ago this month, the Soviet Union orbited a “man-made moon” whose derisive chirp persuaded Americans that they’d already lost a race that had barely begun.

The U-2, Cuba, and the CIA

In the still of the October night, the slender, birdlike plane lifted into the sky from its base in California, climbed sharply on a column of flame, and headed east through the darkness.

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