Son of Khrushchev named fellow at Harvard University

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Nearly 30 years after President John F. Kennedy stared down Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in the Cuban missile crisis, Khrushchev’s son has been named a fellow at a Harvard University school named after the late president.

Sergei Khrushchev, 55, was one of seven fellows named Wednesday to take part in the fellows program of the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Khrushchev and Melor Sturua, a former Washington bureau chief of the Soviet journal Izvestia, are the first Soviets named fellows since the Institute of Politics was founded in 1966, said Theresa Donovan, director of the fellows program.

Khrushchev, who is scheduled to join the university in late October, has written a book about his father titled “Khrushchev on Khrushchev.” He is an engineer who specializes in rocket guidance systems and lives in Moscow.

For his part, Khrushchev will give a seminar on a topic to be announced and will do research for a book, Donovan said.

Sturua will teach a seminar titled, “Perestroika: Past, Present and Future”, Donovan said.

The other fellows named Wednesday are Margaret Carlson, senior political writer at Time magazine; Brock Evans, a vice president of the National Audubon Society; Dick Riley, former governor of South Carolina; Jessie Rattley, former mayor of Newport News, Va.; and Tom Luce, an attorney and unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor of Texas in the primary this past spring.

Each fall and spring the Institute of Politics invites politicians, former American and foreign government officials, journalists and leaders in public affairs to spend a semester at Harvard as fellows doing research and conducting study groups open to the entire Harvard community.

Charles Royer, former mayor of Seattle and the director of the Institute of Politics, said the group’s diversity “will help us understand not only our own U.S. elections but changing events around the world.”

Khrushchev has visited Harvard before, coming to the university briefly last year to discuss a university study of the Cuban missile crisis.

His father was Soviet premier from 1958 to his ouster in 1964 and he died in 1971.