Disneyland claims it is the “Happiest Place on Earth,” but it wasn’t very welcoming to Nikita Khrushchev on September 19, 1959. Khrushchev, the leader of the  Soviet Union, was in the United States for a summit with US president Dwight Eisenhower. He wanted to see Hollywood during his visit, so US authorities arranged for the leader of the Communist World to tour Twentieth Century Fox Studios. He even lunched with Frank Sinatra.

So far, so good, but then Fox’s president, Spyros Skouras, insulted Nikita Khrushchev at a town hall meeting in Los Angeles. You see, this was shortly after Khrushchev’s famous (infamous?) speech to the United Nations about how the Soviet economy would “bury” capitalism. Unfortunately, Khrushchev had a volcanic temper when angered. He followed with some bellicose statements of his own.

Things grew worse still when the Soviet leader found out he could not go to Disneyland. It seems that the people in charge of his security lacked confidence they could protect him from the crowd in an open place like a theme park. Khrushchev responded by asking sarcastically, “What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera there or something? Or have gangsters taken hold of the place that can destroy me?”

Happily, Khrushchev calmed down eventually, and the rest of his trip to the US passed without any further dramatic incidents.

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Nikita Khrushchev and the USSR

I find it hard to have much personal sympathy for anyone who led the Soviet Union. All were repressive in various ways, and some, Khrushchev included, had quite a bit of blood on their hands. But if there’s anyone I come closer to sympathizing with than others, it’s Khrushchev. He came to power right after history’s most murderous dictator, Joseph Stalin, and inherited a country with great military power but little else going for it. Economic productivity, despite his boasts to the international community, was mediocre, and the standard of living in the USSR was modest at best.

Although he did lose his temper at times and had an unfortunate tendency toward diplomatic gamesmanship (the Cuban Missile Crisis comes to mind, above all), he might’ve been the only leader in the history of the USSR besides Lenin who truly believed in communism. He cared about trying to make life better for his Soviet comrades and wanted to raise their standard of living. Khrushchev also had the gargantuan task of exposing all of Stalin’s awful deeds and trying to steer his country on a new course.

All these things, along with the proclaimed hostility to communism of the US and its European allies, put Nikita Khrushchev in a very difficult position. The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation in the Cold War made his situation still more dicey. It’d still be a stretch to say I sympathize with him, but I certainly don’t envy all the things he had to deal with. Was letting him experience some Disney magic too much to ask?

(Thanks to History dot com for introducing me to this story. I’d never heard it before reading from their website today.)

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