Nikita Khrushchev’s Great-Granddaughter on Her Grandfather, Nikita’s Son

choi

I intended to have it published here in Yilubbs.com last night, which however was not accessible.

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A Soviet memoir | Lost in Translation; What happened to Nikita Khrushchev’s son?  Economist, July 12, 2014
www.economist.com/news/books-and ... on-lost-translation
(book review on Nina Khrushcheva, The Lost Khrushchev; A Journey into the Gulag of the Russian mind. Tate Publishing, 2014)

Note:
(a) "NINA KHRUSHCHEVA is the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev; her mother was his granddaughter. Yet Nina grew up calling the one-time Soviet leader 'Grandfather' because her real grandfather, Leonid, had been written out of the family history."
(i) Nina (name)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_(name)
(is quite a popular name ending [for female given names] in Russia)
(ii) Nikita (a Slavic masculine [given] name; derived from Greek Niketas meaning "victorious")  Wikipedia
(iii) Leonid
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid
(a Russian and Ukrainian version of the given name Leonidas [died 480 BC; a warrior king of Sparta]. The French version is Léonide)

(b) "Ms Khrushcheva has adopted her mother’s surname as an act of solidarity with her [mother's] family * * * Her father, Lev Petrov, was a cosmopolitan foreign correspondent (and part-time Soviet spy)”
(i) Lev
(A) Lev
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev
(Lev is a male first name and sometimes last name of Slavic origin, which translates as "lion")
(B) The surname Lev is “from Slavic lev ‘lion,’ which was used as an equivalent of the Yiddish personal name leyb (see Leib 1)
* The Jewish (Ashkenazic) surname Leib: “from the Yiddish personal name Leyb, meaning ‘lion,’ traditional Yiddish translation equivalent of the Hebrew name Yehuda (Judah), with reference to the Old Testament description of Judah as ‘a lion’s whelp’ (Genesis 49: 9).”
* Both surname meanings (for “Lev” and Leib”) are from Dictionary of American Family Names, by Oxford University Press.
* Judah (biblical person)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_(biblical_person)
(section  Etymology)
(C) lev (noun masculine, from Proto-Slavic [can’t not transcribe]): “lion”  (in Czech, Slovak and Slovene languages)
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lev
(ii) Petrov (surname)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrov_(surname)


(c) “The main influences on her [Nina Khrushcheva’s] childhood were her mother Yulia, and her grandmother Lyuba."
(i) Yulia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yulia
(Slavic female given name, the equivalent of the Latin Julia)
(ii) Julia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia
(a Latinate feminine form of the name Julius. Julius was a Roman family, derived from a founder Julus, the son of Aeneas and Creusa in Roman mythology)
(iii) Learn About Lyuba. Anchorage Museum, undated
www.anchoragemuseum.org/galleries/mammoths/lyuba.aspx
("In 2007, a Siberian reindeer herder made a fantastic discovery – an intact baby woolly mammoth, preserved in the frozen Arctic soil for some 42,000 years. The baby mammoth was named Lyuba (pronounced Lee-OO-bah) after the herder’s wife. The discovery made headlines across the globe. This exhibition is Lyuba’s United States debut")
(iv) Ljuba (name)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ljuba_(name)
(female given name; Slavic origin; comes from the basic word l'ub love)

(d) “The main part of ‘The Lost Khrushchev’ is a biography of Leonid, a rebellious rapscallion, ‘a kind of Soviet James Dean,’ the author suggests, who grew up in the shadow of his famous father, one of Stalin’s trusted henchmen, in the 1930s.”

rapscallion (n; alteration of earlier rascallion, irregular from rascal): “RASCAL, NE'ER-DO-WELL"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rapscallion

(e) “The author [Nina Khrushcheva] is contemptuous of Western historians who repeat this tittle-tattle without examining the evidence.”

tittle-tattle (n; reduplication of tattle): "GOSSIP: PRATTLE"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tittle-tattle
(f) “Perhaps the most interesting part of the book, though, is not the rebuttal of the smears, but the author’s analysis of what motivated them. Ms Khrushcheva traces them to a continuing hatred in some quarters for Nikita Khrushchev, and particularly for his disloyalty to Stalin, whose crimes he exposed in the secret speech to the Communist Party Congress in 1956. By smearing the son, this political camp aimed to discredit the father’s reformist legacy.”

Nikita Khrushchev
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev
(1894-1971; First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1953-1964); Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier (1958-1964); Khrushchev's party colleagues removed him from power in 1964, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier)
(g) “The author, who teaches at the New School for Public Engagement in New York”

The New School for Public Engagement
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_School_for_Public_Engagement

The New School is a private University founded in 1919.