Kremlin strongman Nikita Khrushchev once declared that the Soviet Union would abandon Communism when "shrimps learn to whistle." And in 1959—three years before he drew America to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis—Premier Khrushchev told then-Vice President Richard Nixon that his grandchildren would grow up in a Communist state.

In retrospect perhaps the old Cold Warrior, who was pushed out of office in 1964 and died seven years later, should have tended more carefully to his own backyard. Not only has the former Soviet Union embraced capitalism and, at least tentatively, the trappings of democracy, but now Khrushchev's only surviving son, Sergei, 64, has decided to become an American citizen. He and his second wife, Valentina Golenko, 51, passed the written test on June 23 and could be newly minted Americans this month. The elder Khrushchev "must be spinning in his grave," says Brookings Institution guest scholar Helmut Sonnenfeldt.

sergei, a soft-spoken former Muscovite, and his wife cite friendly people and better weather among the many advantages of life in the U.S. "We like it [here]," says Sergei, a political analyst currently living in Cranston, R.I., where Golenko spends part of each day tending grapes and Japanese irises in the garden behind their ranch-style house. "It's so pleasant to go out on the deck in the morning to drink coffee," he says, "not all these clouds and gloomy skies of Moscow."

Unmentioned, but also vital to Khrushchev's decision, is the matter of job security. Back in Moscow, where Sergei lived as a sort of princeling until his father was forced by Kremlin rivals to retire, the future was unpredictable for the son of a former autocrat. Trained as a rocket engineer, Khrushchev served as a deputy chief of the Soviet Missile Design Bureau before his father's fall. But after that, he says, he was never considered for promotions and for decades was denied the right to travel abroad.

In 1989, Khrushchev quit his job at the Computer Control Board in Moscow to write a biography of his father. Two years later, Mark Garrison, then director of Brown University's Center for Foreign Policy Development in Providence, R.I., offered him a research fellowship. "It was originally for a year," says Garrison, "but we kept extending him. He turned out to be...an excellent observer of the Soviet scene."

Much of his knowledge came firsthand. Sergei Khrushchev was raised in Ukraine, where his father, at the time a ruthless supporter of Stalin, was making his way to the top of the local Communist party organization. But at home, Sergei reports, Nikita was attentive to his second wife, Nina Petrovna (his first wife died in a 1921 famine), and five children, of whom Sergei was second youngest. "He liked to row a boat and take the family," he says.

After the family moved in 1950 to Moscow, where the elder Khruschev rose from city party boss to the nation's leader in less than a decade, Sergei had a front-row seat at events that would change the world—the space race, the capture of American spy-plane pilot Francis Gar•' Powers in 1960, the missile crisis—although he says his father rarely discussed his work at home. At times, says Sergei, Nikita's excitable nature was misunderstood as threatening, such as the time he eagerly told reporters that Russia would "bury" the West. "It was a conversation about economics," says Sergei, not a military assault. "He wanted a better life for his people."

Father and son shared a taste for learning, the arts and taking saunas—a habit they indulged after Finland's president presented Nikita with a sauna as a goodwill gesture. At the moment, neither of Sergei's two grown sons from a previous marriage plans to emigrate to the U.S. But they, too, according to their father, occasionally suffer the burden of living in the shadow of a giant. As Sergei said at Nikita's private burial, "There were those who loved him, there were those who hated him, but there were few who would pass him by without looking in his direction."

Patrick Rogers
Julia Campbell in Rhode Island and Glenn Garelik in Washington, D.C.