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I met Sergei Nikitich Krushchev once--sort of. I shook his hand and got his autograph on one of his books anyway.
This was at a lecture Nikita Krushchev's son gave at Rowan University on the 51st anniversary of the Glassboro Summit. (You can look it up, using Google.) When he was done speaking, he asked for questions and there was the usual awkward silence. So I raised my hand and asked about something I'd always wondered. Both Robert Heinlein and Edward Teller had argued passionately for a nuclear first strike on the USSR in the 1950s. Were there similar voices in Russia arguing for a first strike against the United States?
"No," he said. "You had nine atomic bombs for every one of ours. The imbalance was too great."
That gave everyone else permission to as questions and they did. The most interesting response to which was elicited by "Did you ever meet Stalin?"
Well, he said (I paraphrase here), when I was in college, studying to be a rocket engineer, my friends and I went to Red Square for the parade where they showed off all the latest rocketry. Stalin and the other big leaders were on top of Lenin's Tomb, so we jumped up and down and waved and shouted, "Comrade Stalin! Comrade Stalin!" He looked down on us and said, "Hello there."
Sergei Nikitich smiled, then, gestured at the audience and said, "So. You met me, I met Stalin."
Which means that his Kevin Bacon number with Stalin was one. Mine is two. And if you ever met me at a convention or a book signing... Well, then, no matter what your politics might be, you and Stalin have a Kevin Bacon number of three.
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