The Khushchev of My Son (Volumes 1 and 2)

Author: (Russian) Shekhikhuzhaev, translated by Guojia Shen and Yu Tao
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-11-01
Features: On the evening of Sunday, October 28, 1962, it was an ordinary autumn day. The scorching heat of summer had reluctantly passed, and winter was just around the corner. The sidewalks of Moscow were crowded with people in a hurry. Cars were scarce on the streets, and the noise was not loud. The city had recently banned car horns. Therefore, the Seagull car, impatiently honking at the red light, stood out even more. This was no ordinary intersection. The Seagull car had been speeding through the streets of Moscow for half an hour, seemingly aimlessly weaving through narrow alleyways. The alley it was trying to reach was impossible to find, and the driver was becoming increasingly agitated. The low growl of the government emergency siren sounded almost like a desperate cry. The urgency was justified. In the car sat a responsible comrade, short and sturdy, with a large head. A few sparse brown hairs barely covered his shiny bald head. His thick, short fingers clenched a red official document bag with five seals. The bag prominently featured large black letters: Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The rest of the bag was blank, with no address. The responsible comrade in the Seagull car was no ordinary figure. Newspapers, magazines, radio, and television across the country all followed his lead. Inside the bag was the typed draft of a reply from Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy of the United States. The world was on the brink of disaster, and irreversible events could happen at any moment. Therefore, this time the letter was not sent through the normal communication channels between world leaders but was broadcast immediately on Moscow Radio. This measure was extraordinary in international life but highly effective. Within minutes, our reply would be placed on the recipient's desk. As everyone knows, the U.S. radio monitoring department was not without reason. The matter was about the deployment of Soviet intermediate-range ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba. Soviet leaders believed that only by gambling on this could they prevent the United States from repeating the risky airborne landing in the Bay of Pigs last April. However, neither Khrushchev nor his colleagues in the Presidium of the Central Committee could predict how the United States would react to this move. The deployment of missiles was an agreement between Cuba and the Soviet Union, seemingly posing no threat to anyone. It was hard to imagine that a small country like Cuba, even with dozens of missiles parked among the palm trees, would make its powerful neighbor tremble with fear. But the Americans operated on different principles. The Soviet-Cuban agreement was seen as an unacceptable invasion of the Western Hemisphere. The United States could not tolerate this, and the storm broke. Quarantine at sea, air raid threats, reconnaissance planes circling constantly over the island, and finally, the declaration of military readiness at the highest level. The world was on the brink of war, with the risk of nuclear conflict hanging in the balance. Both the Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers and the U.S. President knew the fatal consequences of a nuclear conflict. They both believed that it was absolutely necessary to avoid armed conflict. However, simply not wanting to go to war was not enough; they had to find the only correct measure to prevent war from breaking out. Both leaders realized that if the situation spiraled out of control, conflict was inevitable.