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When Sergei N. Khrushchev, senior fellow of Brown's Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies, kicks off an exhibit of his famous father's memorabilia at the John Hay Library on March 23, he'll offer some modern-day perspectives on the Cold War. He says he'll speak to misperceptions about the period that linger to this day.

But the exhibit that will be launched in conjunction with Khrushchev's talk also will feature much of the old, right down to the shoes. Yes, the collection on display will include a pair of shoes nearly identical to the one that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev removed and pounded on a desk in a burst of anger at the United Nations in October 1960. (Word has it that the Soviet leader always wore the same style of shoe.) Sergei Khrushchev focuses mostly on post-Cold War affairs in his teachings these days; the seminar he teaches at Brown is called "Relations Among Post-Soviet States." But his research and writing time is devoted largely to trying to understand the era of his father - his place in the history of the Cold War and his efforts at reform.

There is an ample body of evidence surrounding Nikita Khrushchev's actions and thoughts when you compare him to other leaders of the former Soviet Union, because he had more of a tendency to communicate through speeches and memoirs. A complete print version of Khrushchev's memoirs is being collected and translated into English, to be published by Penn State Press. At the same time, Brown is immersed in a project designed to preserve tapes of the memoirs.

Mark Brown, Curator of Manuscripts at the John Hay Library, explains that the tapes themselves have quite a history. Knowing that the KGB was about to confiscate the memoirs that his father had dictated onto tape, Sergei hastily made copies of the tapes onto blanks in Moscow. In doing so, however, he didn't copy them in the correct order, and some segments are at much higher speed than they should be while others are at much lower speed.

"These tapes did not have an easy fate," Khrushchev explained.

Brown said he is coordinating the effort to convert the tapes into digitized format, placing the sections of Khrushchev's memoirs in the correct order and adjusting the speed. The University is making use of equipment purchased by its new media lab, which was established in the fall. Brown also has hired a fluent Russian speaker with a Ph.D., in library science to assist with the project. The University is working with tapes that are on loan from Columbia University.

While exhibit organizers have not yet selected the final list of items from Sergei Khrushchev's archive in Special Collections that will be on display at the John Hay Library, Brown said they will include items about both father and son. The library will display Cold War-era items such as letters, news clips, photographs of state visits and an oversized photograph of Nikita Khrushchev and his wife.

In addition, the exhibit will include items about Sergei, whose odyssey also has been well-chronicled in recent years. The trained design engineer who arrived at Brown in 1991 as a visiting scholar originally planned to stay only a year and return to Moscow, but settled comfortably into a suburban American life after conditions worsened in his homeland. In July 1999, just after his 64th birthday, Khrushchev became an American citizen.

Khrushchev says he is asked to make more than 30 speeches a year on Cold War and post-Cold War topics, before a wide range of audiences. When he does his talk at the John Hay on March 23 at 8 p.m., he may tell the audience what he tells students in his seminar: that he is giving his impressions of what happened in history, and that they may have their own plausible explanations for the events. Clearly, understanding the Soviet and post-Soviet eras remains a work in progress.

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