Khrushchev's shoe

The shoe in my previous post belongs to Nikita Khrushchev, the chief director of the Soviet-Union from 1953 'til 1964. Before I talk about the shoe, let me first give you a short introduction on Khrushchev's personality. I will be teaching about him this week, and the more I read about him, the more I am fascinated.

Everybody knows that Stalin's reign was horrendous. But how should we define the period in which Khrushchev reigned? Ofcourse, he is famous for his 1956 'secret speech', in which he unambiguously breaks with Stalin's tradition of terror:

"Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his brutality and his abuse of power... He often chose the path of repression and annihilation, not only against actual enemies, but also against individuals who had not committed any crimes against the party and the Soviet government... This was the result of the abuse of power by Stalin, who began to use mass terror against the party cadres... Stalin put the party and the NKVD up to the use of mass terror when the exploiting classes had been liquidated in our country and when there were no serious reasons for the use of extraordinary mass terror. The terror was directed ... against the honest workers of the party and the Soviet state..."

This speech was the beginning of the proces of destalinisation. Stalin's pictures and statues were torn down, the cult around his person was abolished, and on October 31st 1961 his embalmed body was taken out of the tomb were it rested next to Lenin's body, and relocated to a more obscure place. The official denounciation of terror brought hope to the countries that were ruled by the Soviet-Union: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland. But soon Khrushchev showed that he didn't wish to break with all aspects of Stalin's reign. In 1956 he sent 200.000 soldiers to Hungary to supress a popular rising, killing 27.000 civilians.

Khrushchev's inflamable character has been the subject of some historical myths, the most famous of which evolves around the shoe-incident at the United Nations. More than once, Khrushchev banged on the table with his fists, whisteling, and shouting in Russian while someone else was speaking. The story goes that during one of these eruptions, he took off his right shoe and banged it on the table.
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Some years ago, his granddaughter Nina Khrushcheva, tired of being bothered again and again about the shoe-myth, decided to once and for all defend her illustrous grandfather and prove that the incident was all made up by the propaganda machines of the West, and in fact never happened.

She started working her way through the archives of the NY Times, expecting not to find any evidence that would support the shoe-claims. But, as she writes:
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"On Wednesday 12 October 1960, there it was, on the front pages of all national papers: Nikita Sergeyevich and his famous shoe. My heart fell. I was in a state of shock, probably no less than those in the UN hall 40 years earlier. Swallowing tears of disappointment, I stared at the page for minutes, then the words started to turn into sentences."
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Having discovered that the incident did indeed happen, Khrushchev's granddaughter talks about it with her family members, and finally discovers what made her grandfather act the way he did. His usual fistbanging has resulted in his wrist watch falling off his arm. When he picked it up from the ground, he saw his shoes, which he had taken of his feet earlier because the stiff new leather was bothering him. He instantly decided that a shoe would make for much better banging than his wrist. And so, out of purely practical reasons, the shoe banging resulted. Khrushchev's shoe became yet another symbol of the Cold War. An era of retorics and tensions, topped with a dash of propaganda.