MOSCOW — The most powerful man in the Soviet Union was preparing for bed on the evening of November 22, 1963, when the government telephone rang inside his residence on the Lenin Hills. Nikita Khrushchev, finishing his dinner and his evening mail, received the first fragmentary report that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.
The initial message said only that Kennedy had been wounded. It did not say he was dead.
The call came through the government line, according to the account of Khrushchev’s son Sergei in his memoir “Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower.” Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who had learned of the shooting at his own home, placed the call. Khrushchev did not yet know the outcome.
He received the news as an assassination attempt, not as a death.
Across the Atlantic, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin was in a Washington dentist’s chair when the news spread through the city. According to his published memoirs, he postponed his dental procedure immediately, returned to the Soviet Embassy, and began communicating with Moscow. Because of the time difference, his report reached the Soviet Foreign Ministry between seven and eight in the evening, Moscow time.
Then came confirmation. Kennedy was dead.
What happened next inside the Kremlin and inside Khrushchev’s private residence has been documented in Soviet Central Committee archives, declassified CIA and FBI memoranda, oral history records, and the recollections of Khrushchev’s own family. Together they describe a reaction that stunned American diplomats in Moscow and that most Americans never knew.
According to Sergei Khrushchev’s account, his father was so shaken by the news that he knelt on his knees and wept. It was not a political gesture. There were no cameras.
There was no audience. Khrushchev was in his own home, among his family. The leader of the Soviet Union, a man who had survived Stalin’s purges by being harder and more ruthless than those around him, a man who had threatened nuclear war over Berlin, a man who once told an American audience “we will bury you,” was on his knees crying.
American diplomats in Moscow witnessed something they had never seen before and would never see again. According to oral history records of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, an American diplomat reported that Khrushchev came personally to the American Embassy, signed the condolence book, and was weeping. He stood inside the embassy of the country his nuclear missiles were aimed at, before its staff, and cried.
Khrushchev’s wife, Nina, acted with a personal warmth that was unprecedented in Soviet history. She sent an official letter directly to Jacqueline Kennedy. According to documents in the Soviet Central Committee archive, the gesture was described as unique.
Never before had the wife of a Soviet leader sent a personal condolence message to an American first lady. Nina Khrushchev wrote that her family, and indeed all the Soviet citizens she knew, had been shaken by the tragedy.
Behind the grief, however, the Kremlin was in crisis. According to declassified archival documents reported by Russia Beyond, based on American intelligence reports from inside the Soviet Union, the Kremlin was in a state of shock and disarray. The fear was not about Kennedy.
The fear was about what would come next. Soviet leadership worried that in the absence of an American president, an irresponsible general might launch a missile attack on the Soviet Union.
For Soviet leaders, that fear seemed entirely rational. They had watched Kennedy struggle with his generals throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis. They knew Kennedy had overruled the Joint Chiefs of Staff repeatedly.
They knew there were men in Washington who wanted war. Now Kennedy was gone.
The Kremlin took an extraordinary step. According to a highly classified FBI memorandum documenting Soviet reactions to the assassination, Soviet military forces were placed on alert. The Soviets believed the assassination was the result of a conspiracy by right-wing extremist elements displeased with the Kennedy administration.
They feared those elements would exploit the chaos of the assassination to justify a military strike against the Soviet Union. The FBI document, later declassified and published as part of the Kennedy archive, recorded that Soviet officials were anxious to learn how the United States would react under the new president, Lyndon Johnson, and feared an irresponsible American general might launch a missile attack.
That same evening, a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was convened. According to documents translated and published by the Cold War history archive Translating History, plans for official mourning ceremonies were laid out in meticulous detail. Khrushchev immediately dispatched formal condolence messages to both the new American president, Lyndon Johnson, and to Kennedy’s widow.
To Johnson, he wrote the following day that the heinous assassination of the American head of state, John F. Kennedy, was a grievous loss, indeed a very grievous loss, for your country. He added that the entire world, including we the Soviet people, feels the weight of this loss.
Khrushchev also made a decision that was strategically significant and personally revealing. He appointed Anastas Mikoyan, one of the oldest and most respected members of the Soviet Presidium, to represent the Soviet Union at Kennedy’s funeral. According to declassified CIA documents from its reading room, Mikoyan was close to Khrushchev and personally acquainted with many senior American officials, including through his participation in the settlement of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Sending Mikoyan was a signal to Washington that Moscow wished to preserve the atmosphere of detente. It was also a personal gesture from one leader who shared another’s grief.
When Mikoyan arrived at the White House and joined the line of mourners, Jacqueline Kennedy was there. Her words to him became one of the most astonishing diplomatic moments of that terrible week. According to Ambassador Dobrynin’s memoirs, Jackie told Mikoyan that on the morning of the day her husband was killed, he had told her unexpectedly at the hotel before breakfast that they needed to do everything possible to build good relations with Russia.
She said she did not know what had prompted him to say that at that particular moment, but his words seemed to be the result of deep reflection. She said she was confident that President Khrushchev and her husband could have succeeded in the search for peace and that they had truly sought it.
Then Jackie did something that astonished the Soviet leadership. She wrote Khrushchev a personal letter. It was dated December 1, 1963, one of the last nights she would spend in the White House.
The letter was sent secretly through the State Department. According to diplomatic cables, Secretary of State Dean Rusk was not even informed that the letter had been sent. Only National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and President Johnson apparently knew of it.
The content of the letter, now declassified and available at the Kennedy Library, reveals a woman of extraordinary composure writing one of the most remarkable diplomatic documents of the Cold War. Jackie wrote to Khrushchev that she was writing because she knew how much her husband had cared about peace and how central the relationship between you and him had been to that concern in his view. She told Khrushchev that her husband had quoted his words in some of his speeches.
The phrase she referred to, “in the next war the survivors will envy the dead,” was something Kennedy had used to argue against nuclear conflict.
She wrote that Kennedy and Khrushchev had been adversaries, but that they had been allies in the determination that the world must not be destroyed. Then Jacqueline Kennedy, writing to the leader of America’s nuclear adversary from the White House she was about to leave, offered a theory of history and a personal challenge to him. She wrote about the danger that war might not be started by great men so much as by small ones.
She wrote that while great men know the need for restraint, small men are often driven by fear and pride. She implicitly asked Khrushchev to be one of the great men, to continue the work he and Kennedy had begun.
Khrushchev received the letter. He did not make it public. He kept it secret, but his response is preserved in the diplomatic record.
The Soviet leader who wept at Kennedy’s assassination understood exactly what Jackie was saying.
The two men had come close to destroying the world. Then they exchanged secret letters, signed the first nuclear arms limitation treaty in history, and linked their offices with a telephone line so they would never again have to wait days for messages while their missiles were aimed at each other. Then one of them was shot in Dallas on a Friday afternoon.
Khrushchev himself was removed from power less than a year later, on October 14, 1964, in a coup engineered by his rivals inside the Communist Party, including Leonid Brezhnev. He was accused of reckless schemes and adventurism. His failures in agriculture were cited.
His foreign policy was criticized. The Cuban Missile Crisis, which he had resolved without war, was recast as a humiliation. He spent his final years under virtual house arrest at his dacha outside Moscow, where he dictated his memoirs in secret onto tapes that were later smuggled out of the Soviet Union.
In those memoirs, Khrushchev wrote about Kennedy. According to Sergei Khrushchev, who edited his father’s memoirs after his death in 1971, his father regarded Kennedy as a man who understood the scale of the danger. The experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis had left its mark on both men.
Khrushchev recognized that he and Kennedy had looked together into the nuclear abyss and had chosen not to jump. That shared experience created something for which there was no political name. It was not an alliance.
It was not a friendship. It was a mutual recognition between two men who chose to preserve the life of the world.
The Soviet people mourned sincerely. According to KGB reports sent to the Central Committee and later declassified, Soviet citizens across the Soviet Union genuinely grieved for Kennedy and expressed hope for a just punishment. The young, handsome, peace-leaning American president and his glamorous wife commanded an admiration that Soviet propaganda had never managed to suppress.
An American diplomat traveling in the Soviet Union in the days after the assassination reported speaking to taxi drivers and ordinary Russians. Their usual response was that Kennedy had been a great man. They had not said that while he was alive, but they said it now.
Thompson R. Buchanan, an American diplomat serving in the Soviet Union, relayed a striking observation about the Russian reaction. He said the Russians took the assassination as if we had killed their leader.
In a sense, that was true. Kennedy had been their ideal, the kind of young leader they wished they had. That observation captured something real.
Kennedy was the face of another possible America. An America that talked about peace, signed nuclear test ban treaties, and wrote private letters proposing coexistence. His death was mourned behind the Iron Curtain with a grief that had no political justification but every human justification.
What Khrushchev did when he heard of Kennedy’s assassination was not the act of an enemy. According to his son’s account, he wept in his private residence. He went to the American Embassy and wept publicly before everyone.
He sent one of the Soviet Union’s most senior statesmen to the funeral. His wife broke Soviet protocol to write personally to the widow. And when the widow wrote back asking him to continue the work the two men had begun, Khrushchev kept that letter secret and close.
Two men had been on the verge of ending the world. Then they exchanged secret messages, signed the first nuclear arms limitation treaty in history, and linked their offices with a telephone line so they would not have to wait days for letters while their missiles were pointed at each other. Then one was killed in Dallas on a Friday afternoon, and the other fell to his knees weeping, according to his son’s account.
This documentary account is based on historical research drawn from the archives of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Soviet Central Committee documents, declassified CIA and FBI memoranda, the published memoirs of Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, and Sergei Khrushchev’s books about Nikita Khrushchev. Norman Cousins published accounts of his missions as an intermediary.
Oral history records of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Jacqueline Kennedy’s personal letter to Khrushchev after its declassification, and contemporary news reports from The New York Times, Pravda, and TASS were also used. Historical interpretations may vary among scholars and historians. Viewers are encouraged to consult primary sources for independent research and verification.
This content is intended for educational purposes.