The goodbye look
I'm pretty sure that Khrushchev thought he was going to keep on keeping on when he got off that airplane in Moscow in October 1964. That didn't work out.
We're now more than two months into Russia's war of aggression with Ukraine. Every morning, after coffee and breakfast, my wife and I come home and turn on the news specifically to see if Ukraine's leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is still alive. So far he's 67 for 67.
You know what else is 67 for 67? At least one talking head per day predicting that neither sanctions nor lack of military success will deter Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, from his misguided (and entirely counterproductive) moves to put the old USSR band back together as a foil to NATO and the west. This, whether Ukraine, Crimea and Moldova like it or not.
I don't know about that. From where I sit, it's not entirely improbable that a Soviet leader, like Putin, could be shown the door, without a coup. That's because its happened before, in 1964 to be exact, when Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party and chairman of the Council of Ministers (though Russia's current governing structure is different that that of the USSR, this is roughly equivalent to the position that Putin now holds), was convinced to “retire,” without much more than the exchange of a few angry words.
Khrushchev was an interesting historical figure. He came to power advocating for “de-Stalinizing” the USSR. He advocated for a better relationship with the West, viewing capitalist nations as rivals rather than enemies. This was a bold view to hold in public, especially causing damage and distrust among the Chinese communists and ultimately disrupting the Sino-Soviet relationship. Khrushchev also pushed the USSR (unsuccessfully) to achieve agricultural independence.
By the standards of his predecessors and successors, Khrushchev was, in many ways, a progressive figure. But he was also the leader of a communist empire eager to scrap it's way to preeminence over the capitalist West.
With regard to that, the Soviet Union, under Khrushchev, enjoyed a series of successes: Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, Tsar Bomba, Gary Francis Powers, the Berlin Wall – and had the West spooked. At the height of all of this, in 1962, Khrushchev and Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro agreed to locate a number of Soviet-made, medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter U.S. aggression, e.g., another Bay of Pigs.
Though the Soviet Union took great care to conceal both their shipments of missile supplies to Cuba and their construction of launch facilities on the island, United States Air Force U-2 overflights revealed construction that the CIA deemed, with high probability, to be nuclear missile launch sites.
On October 22, 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy went on TV and addressed the nation with the news of the crisis in Cuba. I remember sitting in our living room in South Florida, about 150 miles away, watching this address on a black and white TV set with rabbit ears, thinking that the technology of the era had brought us to the brink of destruction.