2024-04-03 09:03:34
The great-granddaughter of the former Soviet Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev will give the opening speech at the 2024 Salzburg Festival on July 26th. The festival announced this on Wednesday. Moscow-born and New York-based Nina Khrushcheva is considered an expert on contemporary Russian history and politics as well as an astute analyst and critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Nina Khrushcheva is a professor of international relations at the New School University in New York. As the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, she also has a special biographical connection to Russian politics, the Salzburg Festival informed. “She observes the developments and changes in Russian society from a cultural perspective, thinks about the influence of literature on politics and comments on the complex conditions that shape today’s Russia in the most important forums.”
Khrushcheva as an astute critic of Putin
“Nina Khrushcheva has been analyzing Putin’s behavior and the West’s contradictory reactions to it for decades – and she doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable assessments and scenarios,” explained festival director Markus Hinterhäuser. “As the person directly affected, she holds up a mirror to both the ‘worst barbarian’ and the floundering democracies, while at the same time the Putin critic strives to treat Russian culture with respect.”
Khrushcheva’s approach in the festival speech
In her festival speech at the ceremony at 11 a.m. in the Felsenreitschule, Nina Khrushcheva will take up one of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s most important premises – that beauty will save the world. She examines the question of what role art plays in the current political and cultural environment, which is characterized by war, crises, hostility and division.
Khrushcheva’s work at “Project Syndicate”
Nina Khrushcheva is also an editor and contributor to Project Syndicate: Association of Newspapers Around the World. The power of Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” or Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” certainly lies in the fact that they provide insights into human nature and not just that of the Russian soul, explained Nina Khrushcheva in an article on June 30, 2022 close connection between art and politics. “In any case, refusing to engage with Russian culture will not change Putin’s mind or force him to withdraw his troops from Ukraine. But it will cut off a potential source of information about his goals and motivations.”
Khrushcheva has written several books
Khrushcheva’s articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and other international publications. She has written several books, including “Imagining Nabokov: Russia between Art and Politics” (2008) and the political travelogue she co-authored, “In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones” (2019). Her latest book, “Nikita Khrushchev: An Outlier of the System,” will be published soon in Russian.
Khrushcheva exposes Putin’s propaganda
Recently, Nina Khrushcheva summed up in an article for “Project Syndicate” entitled “Russia is being prepared for permanent war”: “The goal of the current Kremlin propaganda is not to convince people that life in Russia is safe and is characterized by prosperity. This may have been the case at the beginning, but as the war in Ukraine dragged on, Putin had to adapt. Following Stalin’s narrative, according to which progress towards socialism brings with it further challenges that require an intensification of the class struggle, “Putin is now using his propaganda to prepare the Russian population for more war.”
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