In February, at the 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev had stunned the world by reversing decades of unbridled adulation of dictator Joseph Stalin by calling him a “criminal,” a “tyrant,” a despot who had tragically mismanaged Soviet relations with Nazi Germany at the outbreak of World War II, costing tens of millions of Russian lives.

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With this surprise speech, Khrushchev opened the Kremlin to the winds of change. He gambled that he could dismantle Stalin’s suffocating dictatorship and reform the sclerotic communist system but still retain his autocratic clout. All he had to do, he thought, was ease the KGB’s grip on society, release thousands of political prisoners from Siberia, travel to the West and, when possible, attend national day receptions, where he played the role of a Bronx politician on the make.

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At the time, I was the youngest, least experienced diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, one of only four who spoke Russian. Even though relations between the superpowers were tense, the embassy was woefully understaffed.

Bohlen said he would be responsible for Khrushchev, and I was to look after Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the defense minister. As a former private first class in the Army, I thought the asymmetry in rank was comical. How was I to look after a marshal, the hero of Stalingrad, one of the great battles of World War II?

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I prepared as best I could. I read the embassy file on Zhukov and learned, not surprisingly, that the marshal loved his vodka. A mischievous idea popped into my head. With the help of Tang, the ambassador’s dexterous butler, I arranged for Zhukov to drink vodka, while I drank . . . water.

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On the big day, after meeting Khrushchev, I was introduced to Zhukov, who was very friendly. We wandered through the beautifully decorated back yard. I asked him questions about Stalingrad, and he was happy to answer them. All the while, one shot after another (I counted eight), he happily downed his vodka, I my water, Tang always standing nearby, tray in hand.

By the time Khrushchev signaled he was ready to leave, Zhukov was a bit tipsy, pronouncing to the Soviet leader that he had finally met a “young American who can drink like a Russian.” Khrushchev grinned. Bohlen, knowing a single glass of wine could easily push me over the top, looked baffled.

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“Tell me,” Khrushchev asked, “do you play basketball?” The Soviet national championship games were then underway.

“Yes,” I answered enthusiastically. “I played in college.”

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“So how tall are you?”

My reply, totally unplanned, seemed to wow everyone, most especially Khrushchev. “I’m six centimeters shorter than Peter the Great,” I said. The famous czar was 6-foot-8, a fact I knew from my teaching of Russian history.

Khrushchev looked up at me sharply, wondering if I was pulling his leg. But then this cloud of doubt passed, his blue eyes sparkled, and he burst into laughter, prompting everyone else to laugh, too.

From that moment on, whenever I saw Khrushchev, whether at a reception or in the Kremlin, he would jokingly refer to me as Peter the Great, a nickname that stuck like glue and opened more than a few doors for a budding “Russia expert” during what turned out to be an extraordinary year in modern Russian history.

For Russians, 1956 was “the year of the thaw,” a time when the sun seemed to rise on their usually dim horizons, when a measure of hope replaced the fear that once dominated their lives. For the only time in my life, I kept a diary, which inspired the title of my memoir.

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For me, 1956 was a priceless opportunity to engage in a year-long conversation with Russians, young and old, all over the country, in Moscow or in central Asia, the Caucasus or Ukraine.

What I learned was that communism as a governing philosophy of state was evaporating. But there was no realistic alternative. Moscow students told me that they would go to Red Square and launch another revolution “if we thought it would do any good.”

Eleven years after the end of World War II, Russians yearned desperately for peace but feared another war. Every Russian family had suffered terrible losses. For this reason, Khrushchev dropped Stalin’s ideological dogma about the “inevitability of war” between the communist and capitalist systems, replacing it with his own dogma about “peaceful coexistence” between the systems. In this way, Khrushchev came to be seen in Russia as a missionary of peace.

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Though tension between the superpowers was at a high level, Russians loved Americans, remembering U.S. aid shipments through Murmansk during World War II. They warmly embraced the early visits of American artists, such as violinist Isaac Stern, to Moscow and Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then called.

Perhaps my most gratifying moment in 1956 occurred when I visited the Podol ghetto in Kiev, where my mother was born in 1899. I met a Jewish tailor who said he knew my mother before she left for America in 1914. Forty-two years had passed, but, miraculously, he remembered her name, her father’s trade as a furrier and her older brother, Charlie. As we talked, he held my hand, not wishing to let go, and I held his, unable to hold back the tears.

So much had happened since this tailor had known my family — World War I, the Russian Revolution, the famine in Ukraine, the Depression, World War II, the Holocaust. Yet he remembered my mother. I could only think, “there but for the grace of God go I.” Had my mother not left the Podol, I would not be the young American visiting. Had she not survived the Holocaust, I would not be there at all.

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Through “the year of the thaw,” Russia seemed to be taking a deep breath. The people sniffed freedom for the first time in their history. It was an intoxicating feeling.

But by year’s end, the extraordinary “thaw” switched to a more familiar chill. In early November, the people of Hungary, also enjoying this fleeting sense of freedom, decided to cut their ties with Moscow in a bold proclamation of national independence. Khrushchev faced a cruel choice: He could allow Hungary to go its own way, or he could crush their revolution. He crushed it — it was the only way, he argued falsely, that he could keep the Soviet empire in one piece while also retaining his personal power. Khrushchev’s flirtation with freedom had failed.

This year, the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, I believe that Khrushchev’s place in modern Russian history deserves to be reevaluated. He has been relegated to the backbench of modern Russian leaders. Schools barely pay any attention to his bold 1956 policy of de-Stalinization. He has become a forgotten man, while his nemesis Stalin has been rehabilitated.

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And yet, more than any other modern Russian leader — including Vladimir Putin, the slick, modern autocrat who currently inhabits the Kremlin — Khrushchev was the only one who had the guts to attack the Stalin legacy of brutal political oppression, thereby breaking the long- established pattern of Russian despotism. He experimented with the proposition, risky in the extreme in Russia, that personal freedom might in time lead to a stronger state and a more satisfied populace. Mikhail Gorbachev, often seen as a “child of the Sixties,” followed in Khrushchev’s footsteps; but when he tried against huge odds to institute a program of greater personal freedom for the Russian people, he too failed.

Interestingly, Putin seems to feel a deeper personal and political affection for Stalin than he does for Khrushchev. Under his rule, far more consistent in spirit with traditional Russian autocracy, the Russian people have access only to the thinnest form of freedom: In their kitchens, they can discuss political alternatives to Putinism; under their pillows in the dead of night, they can whisper to one another about personal freedom; and, if they have the money, they can travel. But in public, walking the streets or chatting with friends, they must be — or be seen as — loyal subjects of the state and Putin.