Nikita's Boy

The next of kin of Russia's great have often lived in fear and died in horror. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great slew their sons; Catherine the Great killed her husband. Stalin shot his wife in 1934, later tried perhaps to make amends by corrupting his son Vasily with unearned honors that did him little good; in 1962 truculent Vasily died in exile, probably from alcoholism.

In this, as in most other respects, Nikita Khrushchev's style is more bourgeois than Borgia. His only son Sergei is a bespectacled engineer who shuns the limelight the way Papa relishes it. What really interests Sergei Nikitovich Khrushchev is butterflies and home movies.

Before joining Papa in Cairo this week, Sergei, now 29, visited London with a top-drawer delegation of Soviet aviation experts headed by Air Minister Petr Dementiev. Outranked by most of his associates, he remained respectfully mum in their presence. Most of the time he was too busy to talk. As the delegation was feted and followed for twelve days through Britain's top aircraft plants, at banquets, soccer matches, theatrical performances and historic monuments in England, Scotland and the Channel Islands, Sergei shot enough 16-mm. cinefilm to reach from Krasnovodsk to Komsomolsk.

On one of his few private side trips, he spent fruitless hours on the shores of Loch Ness, hoping for a shot of the Monster. His only other consuming ambition was to see the movie Ben Hur. It was not showing anywhere in London, so his British hosts thoughtfully took him to see How the West Was Won instead. The West has yet to win Sergei. Given a free shot of whisky at a Scotch distillery, he grimaced: "No, no. Too strong, I prefer dry Georgian wine." But he finished it.

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