- •Contents
- •Acknowledgments
- •Abbreviations and Acronyms
- •THE MEMOIRS
- •Before and After the Peace Treaty with Austria
- •Meeting with Adenauer (September 1955)
- •The Visit to Great Britain
- •Beginning of the Visit to the United States
- •From New York to Iowa
- •Washington and Camp David
- •The Visit to France
- •The Visit to the United Nations
- •John Kennedy and the Berlin Wall
- •The Cuban Missile Crisis
- •On the Road to Socialism
- •Mao Zedong
- •Ho Chi Minh
- •Albania
- •Germany
- •Hungary
- •Czechoslovakia
- •Romania
- •India
- •Burma
- •India, Afghanistan, Iran, and Again India
- •Indonesia
- •Egypt
- •The Six Day War in the Middle East
- •From Syria to Yemen
- •How Khrushchev Subdued America
- •Biographies
- •Index
How Khrushchev Subdued America
1960 TURNED OUT TO BE AN incredibly difficult year for the USSR. The spy pilot Powers, whom we shot down near Sverdlovsk, complicated our relations with America. The four-power meeting of the “nuclear club” in Paris was a fiasco. And against this background there followed the news of the arrival in New York of a Soviet delegation headed by Khrushchev to take part in the fifteenth session of the United Nations General Assembly.
The Soviet delegation arrived in New York on September 19 on board the ocean liner Baltika.
The next day Khrushchev went to meet Fidel Castro. Castro was staying in Harlem, a black district of New York, at the Hotel Theresa. The Cuban delegation had previously been housed in another hotel downtown, but the owner had charged an exorbitant rent. The Cubans reacted by setting off, rucksacks on their backs and suitcases in their hands, for the United Nations building. Castro himself had barged into the office of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold and declared that he would not leave until the latter had provided the delegation with accommodation. Otherwise, said Castro, they would pitch their tents on United Nations territory, in the public garden, and live there until the end of the session. After all, they were military people and used to hard living. A hotel, of course, was found immediately.
When we got close to the Hotel Theresa, we found it surrounded by a crowd five thousand strong. The noise and the yelling were unbelievable. Some were shouting “Long live Castro!” and others “Death to Castro!” There were plenty of cops and detectives there. However, instead of imposing order and keeping a corridor open for passage, they all clustered in front of the entrance and blocked passage into and out of the hotel. So the lads from the Ninth Directorate had to handle the situation on their own. In the melee that ensued I too had to make use of my fists.
The next day the newspaper The Daily News reported that “the hefty chief of Khrushchev’s guard, 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighing 220 pounds, began to flail around with his fists, which landed mainly on the police.”
This article, originally published in Argumenty i Fakty no. 52 (2000): 12, forms part of the reminiscences of retired Colonel General Nikolai Zakharov, who was first deputy chairman of the KGB and head of the KGB’s Ninth Directorate, responsible for guarding top state figures. The text was prepared by V. Muruzi.
A fuller version of the text has now been published in the book by Nikolai Zakharov, Skvoz gody: Vospominaniya [Through the Years: Memoirs] (Tula: Izdatelstvo “Grif,” 2003), 251–60.
[ ]
But no scandal resulted. From that point on, the police let me through into the United Nations building, in which, naturally, strict security was maintained, without showing my pass, greeting me with a salute to their caps.
On October 12, there took place the stormiest session of the United Nations General Assembly. The question under discussion, introduced by the Soviet delegation, was that of the abolition of the colonial system. Khrushchev spoke first. After his speech a Filipino took the rostrum and said, among other things, that the Soviet Union was a “concentration camp.”
When Khrushchev heard the simultaneous translation, he exploded. It was worse than insulting. It was downright unjust! After Stalin’s death and the shooting of Beria, thousands of innocent people had been rehabilitated and released from the camps and prisons. That Khrushchev deserved credit for this was indisputable.
Sitting behind Khrushchev, I saw how he consulted with Gromyko and then resolved to ask the president of the session [Frederick Henry Boland]1 to give him leave to speak on a point of order––a right provided for under the official procedure. Nikita Sergeyevich raised his hand, but Boland either did not see it or pretended not to see it. Khrushchev stood up and again raised his hand. Now it was simply impossible not to notice Nikita Sergeyevich standing there with his hand raised. But the speaker continued to hold forth, while the head of the Soviet delegation continued to stand with his hand raised. It seemed that the chair was simply ignoring him.
Then Khrushchev took off one of the light boots he was wearing and began to bang it on the table. He banged to a regular rhythm, like the pendulum of a metronome. That was the moment that entered world history as Khrushchev’s famous shoe. The conference hall of the United Nations had never seen its like before. A sensation was born right before my eyes.2
It was only then that Boland gave the head of the Soviet delegation leave to speak. As he approached the rostrum, Nikita Sergeyevich waved his hand in front of the Filipino’s nose, as if to say: “Go away!”3
The agitated Khrushchev began to speak. His opening was not bad. “First of all,” he said, “I protest against the behavior of the president of the
session, against the unequal way in which he treats different speakers. The president of the session is abusing his rights to defend the interests of the imperialists. Why did he not stop the Filipino when that imperialist kholui was defaming the Soviet Union and the countries of the socialist camp?”
At that point the simultaneous translation came to a halt as the interpreters frantically searched for equivalents for kholui.4 But Khrushchev went on regardless:
[ ]
“We have gathered together here not to throw lies and slander at one another, but to discuss in a constructive manner the questions of disarmament and the abolition of colonialism. I sit here in the hall and see the Spaniards. Whenever some colonizer supports the policy of colonialism, they applaud. Why? Because they are themselves colonizers. The hangman of the Spanish people is a colonizer and oppresses the enslaved people of the colonies. There is a saying that a crow does not peck out the eyes of another crow. And one colonizer supports another. But we must take a shovel and dig a deep grave, and bury colonialism as deep as we can, and drive in a stake, so that this evil may never be reborn.”
Hearing this angry tirade and smarting at the insult, the Spanish delegation suddenly jumped out of their seats. Shaking their fists, they began to threaten Khrushchev. I was unexpectedly transfixed by the thought: “The Spaniards are a fiery people. Perhaps they are carrying knives?” And Khrushchev had to pass close by their delegation to return to his seat. I quickly jumped up, made my way to the rostrum almost at a run, sat down close by, and waited for Nikita Sergeyevich to finish speaking.
Khrushchev came down from the rostrum and returned to his seat. I shielded him from the Spaniards, and not––so it seems to me––needlessly. As soon as we got near to the Francoists, the fiery southerners again jumped up, and the head of the Spanish delegation, unable to reach Khrushchev, threw himself on me. Fortunately, we got back to our seats without suffering any losses.5
On October 13, the session unanimously adopted the proposal of the Soviet delegation that the question of the abolition of colonialism be discussed at the plenary session of the General Assembly.
1 The Irish diplomat Frederick Henry Boland was president of the fifteenth session of the United Nations General Assembly. See Biographies. [GS/SS] 2. The well-known Soviet journalist Ilya Shatunovsky interviewed one of the United Nations employees who worked with the Soviet delegation. She provided some interesting addi-
tional details about what happened:
Khrushchev appeared in the hall after the other delegates. He went up to the heads of the delegations from the socialist countries and shook hands with them. The journalists ran after him, pushing one another out of the way. Microphones were held out to him from all sides. Lights flashed, camera shutters clicked. When Khrushchev was literally a single step away from his place, one of the zealous correspondents accidentally trod on his heel, and his shoe flew off. I quickly
retrieved the shoe, wrapped it in a napkin, and when Khrushchev sat down a moment later surreptitiously handed him the bundle under the table. As you can see, there is very little space between the seat and the table. And being plump Khrushchev was unable to bend down to the floor to put on or take off a shoe. His belly was in the way. So he sat there, turning his shoe over in his hand under the table. When the other delegate’s speech agitated him, he started in his anger to bang with the thing that happened to be in his hands. If at that moment he had been holding an umbrella or a walking stick, then he would have banged with that. Evidently nobody in the crowd of journalists noticed that Khrushchev’s shoe had come off. And apparently even the people sitting right next to him paid no attention to me handing him some kind of bundle. And when he began to
[ ]
bang his shoe on the table, everyone assumed that he had taken it off specially for that purpose (N. A. Zenkovich, Sobraniye sochinenii: Tainy ushedshogo veka: Vlast, Raspri, Podopleka [Collected Works: Secrets of the Departed Century: Power, Strife, Hidden Motives] [Moscow: OLMA-PRESS, 2000], 1:284).
The New York Times journalist James Ferron claimed that he was there and saw everything with his own eyes. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Mr. Ferron that appeared in the October 5,
1997, issue of The New York Times:
Q.Was that at the time of Khrushchev and the shoe incident?
A.I actually saw Khrushchev not bang his shoe. He never banged his shoe. He was sitting at his desk in the General Assembly, and they were banging their desks with their fists— the communists and the representatives of the Third World countries––because someone from the Philippines was speaking who was viewed as an American lackey. Khrushchev leaned over, took off a slip-on shoe, raised it, and then waved it pseudo-menacingly and put it on his desk. The only pictures available were pictures of a seated Khrushchev with the shoe resting on the desk. There is no picture of him hitting the desk, because he never did it.
Q.How did the legend materialize that he banged the desk?
A. The Associated Press wrote the story that way. And that was the information The New York Times used. [SK]
3The familiar form of the imperative is used, which in this context expresses contempt. [SS]
4Usually translated as “lackey” or “bootlicker.” [GS/SS]
5. Alexei Adzhubei, chief editor of the newspaper Izvestia, who was also present at the session, adds his testimony:
The Filipino got what he deserved: the label of lackey of imperialism. At the end of the next day, he ascended the rostrum and declared that he had looked in several Russian-English dictionaries to find out what the word kholui meant. According to one dictionary, it meant “lick-spittle” or “toady.” According to another dictionary, an English one, it meant a base and loathsome person, a groveler. He asked Mr. Khrushchev to remove the word kholui from the protocols of the General Assembly. At once he had his answer: it would be done, provided that the word kholui remained in the protocols where it occurred in the text of the speech of the Filipino delegate. Apparently failing to grasp what this meant, the Filipino said: “I agree. Let the word kholui remain in my speech (Zenkovich, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:283). [SK]
[ ]