First Soviet Fellows Join IOP

John F. Kennedy '40 certainly would not have predicted it.

The first two Soviet fellows to come to the Institute of Politics (IOP) at the school bearing the former president's name are two men who spent the Cuban Missile Crisis on the other team's side.

Sergei Khrushchev, one of seven new fellows at the Kennedy School of Government's IOP, is the son of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier who faced off against Kennedy during the missile crisis. The second Soviet fellow--Melor Sturua--wrote speeches for the elder Khrushchev while working for the Soviet newspaper Izvestia.

"We're in the era of glasnost and perestroika," said Terry A. Donovan, associate director of IOP. "To have these people here at this particular time in history will present students with a great opportunity to learn about changes taking place in the Soviet Union."

While Khrushchev and Sturua spend the semester at the IOP, Alexander Merkushev, an editor for the Soviet Tass news agency, will be a fellow at the Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

"Now that I am here I can see everything happening in my country from afar," Merkushev said in an interview last week. "I can get a better perspective, looking at the Soviet Union with the eyes of an American."

Merkushev, who will be studying the effect of perestroika on journalism in the Soviet Union, said that Gorbachev's glasnost reforms have destroyed the Soviet press as a "monolithic" institution.

"There is no longer any such thing as `the Soviet press,'" he said. "We have a huge variety of responses in the press to everything from market reforms to the future of glasnost."

"Merkushev represents the new generation of Soviet journalists in the age of glasnost," said Marvin Kalb, who directs the Barone Center.

Khrushchev, who will be in Moscow until joining the IOP in late October, has just written a book-- Khrushchev on Khrushchev--that describes his father's tenure at the helm of the Soviet Union and relates those years to the present rule of Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

While most IOP fellows lead study groups on politics for undergraduates, Kruschev is joining the IOP as a "research fellow" and will not lead a group.

Sturua, a member of Nikita Kruschev's "brain trust" and a journalist with Izvestia for the past 40 years, will run a seminar called "Perestroika--Past, Present, and Future."