Nina, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Khrushchev

The genealogy and the name of Nina L. Khruscheva need to be well explained. Leonid, the eldest son of Nikita Khruschev, was killed in air combat in World War II, when his daughter Julia was two years old. Faced with this tragedy, Nikita raised Julia as an adopted daughter and as her granddaughter.

Julia married Leo Petrov and they had Nina as their daughter, who always considered Nikita to be a grandfather by adoption and a great-grandfather by blood. Lev Petrov died in 1970 aged 47 and Nina had to decide how she would identify herself to the world. Her grandfather-great-grandfather suffered from repudiation, abandonment and anonymity because he was overthrown in 1964, leaving as a historical legacy his denunciation of Stalin’s crimes, after having been his close collaborator.

Understanding that his father Lev Petrov did not need historical validation, he decided not to identify himself as Nina Petrova, but as Nina L. Khruscheva to pay homage to the memory of his grandfather-great-grandfather, using his surname and not forgetting his father. The L, intermediate initial of her name, means Lvovna, which would be the Russian surname based on Lev, her father’s name.

Nina teaches International Relations at the prestigious New School University in New York. She graduated from Moscow State University and received her Ph.D. from Princeton University. She was a teacher there and also at Columbia University. With that multicultural formation, her writings captivate readers of important media outlets in the United States.

With the invasion of Ukraine, he pointed out that his grandfather would have described Putin’s actions as “despicable”, despicable His most recent article was titled: “Unhappy birthday, Andrei Sakharov”referring to the nuclear physicist who designed Russia’s hydrogen bomb and who became a pacifist, a defender of dissidents who rejected Soviet power and an activist for human rights. Sakharov confronted Nikita who was opposed to nuclear war, but pointed out that he could dedicate himself to his research and thermonuclear tests, but that he should not interfere by giving his opinion about the use that could be given to those weapons. When Khrushchev fell, the repression increased and Sakharov was sentenced to live in isolation in the city of Gorki with permanent KGB surveillance.

In 1975 Sakharov received the Nobel Peace Prize and in 1983 he published an insightful article in “Foreign Affairs” entitled “The Danger of Thermonuclear War”. “A thermonuclear war cannot be considered a continuation of politics by other means, it would be universal suicide.”

with that war “Continuous forest fires could destroy most of the planet’s forests. The smoke involved would destroy the transparency of the atmosphere. There would be a night that would last for many weeks on Earth, followed by a lack of oxygen in the atmosphere.” “Nuclear explosions could destroy or seriously damage the ozone layer that protects the Earth from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation.”

Putin intends to make Sakharov invisible and bury his legacy. In December, before invading Ukraine, he shut down “Memorial,” an active civil rights group that Sakharov and other dissidents created in 1987. This May 21 Physics Day at Moscow State University, lectures on the life of Sakharov. Nina concludes by saying: “Forgetting Sakharov’s legacy represents another step backwards. One hopes it is not a step towards universal suicide.”