CRANSTON, R.I. -- Nikita Khrushchev's son lives in a modest suburban ranch house with a Buick and a Pontiac in his garage, a lovingly tended garden in the back yard and a ball field across the street. Radiating in all directions from his driveway are similarly sunny homes on similarly sculpted parcels with sprinkler systems, lawn ornaments and barbecues.

Sergei Khrushchev is ensconced here in America, the very place his father predicted would one day fall to communism. That was 40 years ago. Instead, the Soviet empire is no more, and Nikita's only surviving son is studying a booklet about American government in preparation for a trip Wednesday to a federal office building, where he will take a U.S. citizenship test.

A hint of gloating was evident in the news stories on this turnabout: The son of the blustering Soviet premier who promised to surpass America has now succumbed to its charms. But Khrushchev isn't a willing foil. Having spent the past 30 years trying to secure his father's historic legacy, he knows he has given the full measure of a son's devotion to Nikita. In Khrushchev's mind, his decision on U.S. citizenship is no more a repudiation of his father than his preference -- yes, it's true -- for beer over vodka.

"It's impossible to move historical figure from one historical era to another," says Khrushchev, 64, in heavily accented English. He refuses to feel guilty. The world today would be unrecognizable to the Nikita Khrushchev who ruled the Soviet Union from 1953 until his abrupt removal in 1964. Khrushchev finds the question of what his father, who died in 1971, would think about his decision absurd.

Nowadays, no interview passes without that question being put to Khrushchev. As befits any Ivy League lecturer -- at Brown University in Providence -- he replies with an analogy.

"It would be like asking George Washington what he thought about gulf war," Khrushchev says. "He'd say, 'We Americans have gone crazy. Our real enemies are the British. Why are we fighting these Arabs?' That was [Washington's] historical vision at the time, and he was right. The same if you're trying to say, 'What would Khrushchev say in 1950 about my decision in 1999?' "

The right thing to do

What Khrushchev says about his pending U.S. citizenship is that it seems the right thing to do. After living here eight years, it recently occurred to him that he and his wife, Valentina, are likely to live out the rest of their days in the United States. That being the case, he felt obliged to become a citizen.

"Some people prefer to return what they borrowed from the other people," he says. "I'm thinking that I have to return the money. The same way I think if I live here, I have to be a citizen."

He is speaking now in the closet-sized, third floor, walk-up office at Brown, where he is a senior fellow in international studies. He writes and teaches classes about Russia's tortured struggle toward democracy and a market economy, both of which he, a former member of the Soviet Communist Party, supports.

Though far thinner than his bowling ball-shaped father, Khrushchev shares his father's blunt-as-a-potato face beneath the same expansive, nearly hairless dome. He also reveals a warmth and a sense of humor that Nikita Khrushchev occasionally flashed when not pounding his shoe on a desk.

The younger Khrushchev especially demonstrates this side in his gentle jibing with Valentina, whom he frequently reaches out to pat.

Although the spotlight has been acute recently, since the news of his citizenship plans, Khrushchev has not exactly been in hiding. A United States map on his office wall marks dozens of places where he has made speaking appearances.

Theoretically, some of those spots might well have been targeted by the guided missiles he helped design when he, an engineer by profession, worked in the Soviet armaments industry.

'He was so proud of me'

Sergei Khrushchev was already a young adult when his father was in power, but Nikita Khrushchev discouraged his children from politics. "He came to believe an engineer was better than a politician. He was so proud of me for that."

Still, father and son were close. Sergei accompanied Nikita on many of his foreign visits, including his famous trip to the United States in 1959. He was present during many of the critical moments of Nikita's tenure, including the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. And Sergei Khrushchev was at the family home in Moscow when his father returned from the Kremlin in 1964 after being toppled from power.

'I'm retired'

"It's over," his father wanly told his family that day. "I'm retired."

Nikita Khrushchev would be given a dacha, servants and bodyguards, but his name would no longer be mentioned in public. When he died, his grave was off limits. He at least left office alive, hardly a given in a country that had recently endured waves of state-sanctioned murder. Above all, Nikita Khrushchev was proud that his regime had eliminated the worst excesses of his predecessor (and mentor) Josef Stalin.

"He said, 'If I did only one thing and it was that I was ousted without any blood, I would not have lived my life for nothing.' "

Walks with Nikita

Sergei Khrushchev spent much time with his father during his forced retirement. They took daily, hourlong walks in the woods and worked together on the first of Nikita's memoirs, "Khrushchev Remembers," which Sergei helped smuggle out of the country and which were published in the West in 1970. After Nikita's death, Sergei continued to work on the multivolume memoirs and wrote his own recollections about his father in his 1990 book, "Khrushchev on Khrushchev."

A job at Brown

Not long before that, Sergei Khrushchev had appeared at a series of conferences on the Cuban missile crisis organized by Brown University's foreign policy institute. So taken was the institute's director, Mark Garrison, that he offered Khrushchev a one-year fellowship at Brown. That was eight years ago.

For Garrison, a former diplomat who studied Russia most of his adult life, getting to know Khrushchev was like a baseball fan forging a friendship with Babe Ruth's child.

"Initially, it was a tremendous curiosity," says Garrison, "but then our relationship developed, not because who he was but what he was like." Garrison, now retired, calls Khrushchev a thoughtful and understanding friend who "is able to tune into other people's sensitivities and needs."

Just as significantly, Khrushchev introduced Garrison to the pleasures of a Russian sauna, which the Khrushchevs built themselves in their basement. ("Americans," Khrushchev sniffs, "know nothing about saunas.")

Support from Nixon

The Khrushchevs have been inching toward citizenship for some time. In 1993, they applied for permanent residency status. One-time cold warriors Richard M. Nixon and Robert S. McNamara sent letters of support.

Even as he approaches this final step, Khrushchev displays none of the falling-in-love glow of many newcomers on the verge of U.S. citizenship. He doesn't convey the sense that living in the United States has been a lifelong dream, for the simple reason that it hasn't been. He finds life pleasant here, and doesn't see any reason to change.

"Americans are very friendly," he says. "I now have many friends here. I like this climate. This climate of Rhode Island is reminding me of the Ukrainian climate where I grew up. Same skies, warm weather."

Not a baseball fan

On the other hand, he's not interested in baseball, doesn't care for hamburgers and can't stand contemporary American music. But then, he can't stand contemporary Russian music, either.

Career considerations are what led him here. After his work on missile systems, he was director of a large Moscow computer institute.

Eventually, he decided to devote himself exclusively to his father's memoirs and to writing about contemporary Russia.

But he couldn't do the work in Russia. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, old obstacles to academic research -- namely, state repression -- were replaced by new ones. The new Russia offered no financial support for scholarly inquiry, not only his, but anyone's.

"They are not investing in anything. When you have university professors who have salaries much less than the bus driver it is clear signal that nobody is interested."

No warmonger

Much of his work involves correcting what he believes are misguided notions about his father. Nikita, he insists, was no warmonger. He had no intention of attacking America. Even his famous "We will bury you" remark was not a threat about military conquest but a conviction that communism would ultimately prove a better concept than capitalism.

"We believed that centralized economy or socialism will win sooner or later everywhere in the world, including the United States, because it will be more effective," Khrushchev says.

Common misperceptions

It's easy to say now that time has proved his father wrong, but, Khrushchev says, in the early 1960s, when the Soviet economy was at its strongest, the results were far from obvious.

Today, his main theme is that both sides were guilty of misperceptions about the other, which, during the Cuban missile crisis, edged the world closer to nuclear catastrophe than ever before or since.

"You thought that we will begin war against you at the first possibility, and we thought you would begin the war at the first possibility." In reality, he says, neither side wanted war.

What is overlooked, he adds, is that the crisis was resolved because his father and President John F. Kennedy were able to deal with each other directly rather than through propaganda. The crisis eased, Khrushchev says, because his father came to believe in Kennedy's word.

"He told me, 'I trust the American president. I think he's honest man.' "

Next year, if all goes well, Nikita's boy will vote for the next U.S. president. It's impossible to know what the old Soviet bear would make of that development. The rest of us, though, can marvel over the distance traveled.

Pub Date: 6/20/99