Khrushchev's son and Chelomei's guidance-system engineer
During the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, Khrushchev tried to watch the historic moment through a telescope from Ukraine — with a KGB officer at his side.
Soviet rocket engineer and computer scientist. The son of Nikita Khrushchev, he developed guidance systems for cruise missiles and the Proton space booster at Vladimir Chelomei's OKB-52 design bureau, contributing to submarine-launched missiles, military spacecraft, Moon vehicles, and the Proton booster. At age 28 he was named a Hero of Socialist Labor and awarded the Order of Lenin in 1963. He later served as first deputy director of the Control Computer Institute (INEUM), and after moving to the United States in 1991 taught Cold War history and the Soviet space program at Brown University's Watson Institute while publishing several books on his father's era.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1958Graduated Moscow Power Engineering Institute; joined OKB-52 (Chelomei design bureau)
- 1958–1968OKB-52 engineer → deputy department chief — guidance systems for cruise missiles, military spacecraft, Moon vehicles, Proton booster
- 1959Awarded Lenin Prize
- 1963–1964Leading constructor and deputy head of OKB-52
- 1963Hero of Socialist Labor and Order of Lenin
- 1968–1991Control Computer Institute (INEUM) — section head → first deputy director
- 1991–2020Moved to USA; Senior Fellow and professor, Watson Institute, Brown University
Related historical events
Editor of His Father's Memoirs
After his father Nikita Khrushchev was removed from power in 1964, Sergei became, alongside his engineering career, central to preserving his father's memoirs. From 1966 the retired leader began dictating his recollections into a German-made Uher tape recorder. Sergei hired a typist to transcribe the tapes and arranged the scattered dictation into a coherent chronological narrative of some 1,500 pages. He made two copies of the tapes, entrusting one to Time magazine and another to a friend at the Moscow Technical University; when his father was hospitalized in July 1970, the KGB confiscated the original tapes. After Nikita's death in 1971 the memoirs were published in the West as Khrushchev Remembers (edited by Strobe Talbott); published against the Soviet leadership's wishes, the venture became a celebrated act of Cold War subterfuge nicknamed the "Jones Project." Sergei himself was placed under surveillance for his role, and later edited the complete edition of his father's memoirs (Time, People, Power, 1999) for publication in Moscow. After moving to the United States he wrote his own books about his father, Khrushchev on Khrushchev (1990), Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (2000), and the three-volume Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, defending the Thaw from an anti-Stalinist position and historicizing the era he had witnessed. His archive of the memoirs was donated to Columbia University's Oral History Office and the Brown University Library, where it remains a foundation of Nikita Khrushchev scholarship.