Adoptive granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev has been named as a ‘foreign agent’ in Kremlin crackdown

By Iona Cleave

Iona Cleave is a Foreign Breaking News Reporter at The Telegraph. She covers defence, war and breaking news from across the world, particularly the US, Middle East and Russia-Ukraine war.

Published 21 April 2026

Without warning, Prof Nina Khrushcheva became number 1,164 on the Kremlin’s list of “foreign agents”.

As the adoptive granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader who succeeded Stalin and a titan of the Cold War era, the move has caused a quiet stir amongst Moscow’s elite.

She tells The Telegraph: “I was surprised it did not come sooner, because anyone who says anything that the Kremlin does not approve of should expect it.”

This is the new Russia, she explains, where Vladimir Putin allows his security forces – what she calls the “collective KGB” – to rule over a state apparatus fed by a climate of fear, violence and paranoia.

“Under Putin, Stalinism is on the rise,” argues Prof Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at The New School in New York. “We are witnessing the Gulagisation of the state.”

She has been based in the US since 1991, but frequently visits Russia and has been a vocal critic of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In March, the state accused her of spreading “fake news” about what it calls a “special military operation”.

The machinery of repression has been moving fast since the start of the war in February 2022. Arrests of anti-war protesters were followed by the banning of independent news outlets; restrictions on messaging apps, and now near-daily internet shutdowns.

Russia’s foreign agent law, created in 2012 to identify non-governmental organisations that received foreign funding, has been expanded and wielded aggressively against those who criticise Putin’s regime.

Inspired by the Stalin-era identification of enemies of the state, it demonises individuals, pushing them to the margins of political and social life.

‘The absurdity of repression becomes normal’

The repercussions are swift: people are blocked from public sector work and banned from organising events or fundraising, and everything they publish – including online content – is labelled foreign-agent material.

Prof Khrushcheva says: “Once the punishing state starts moving, it lacks a mechanism to stop, and so the absurdity of repression becomes normal.” She says the foreign agent law is part of the repression, “intended to terrify people so they stop speaking”.

Her name carries historical weight, yet she could not stay off the ever-lengthening list of the state’s enemies – although she is keen to point out: “My name is big for sure, but I am not.”

Her designation as a foreign agent will have caused whispers among members of Russia’s elite, and the irony of a granddaughter of Khrushchev – who abolished the Stalin-era lists – being listed decades later is not lost on her.

What would her grandfather think of Russiatoday? Prof Khrushcheva says: “I think he would have said, ‘I left you such a legacy, I de-Stalinised the Soviet Union, I freed you from the deadly embrace of the KGB, and look what you have done’.”

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there was a surge in sales (and reported thefts) of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s dystopian novel about the destructive consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, historical revisionism and propaganda.

Prof Khrushcheva, like many Russians, cites the parallels between Russia today and the book’s themes – particularly the depictions of a state twisting history to control its citizens.

Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Under Putin, Stalin’s legacy has been rehabilitated and nostalgia for the Soviet Union cultivated.

The Kremlin aggressively promotes “traditional values”, such as patriotism and a heteronormative nuclear family structure, and has deepened the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church. The war in Ukraine has frequently been framed with reference to the “patriotic” Second World War.

How Putin’s Russia glorifies Stalin

The state has waged war on historical memory, selectively omitting the purges, famines and mass executions, with Putin leveraging Stalin’s strongman image to promote his own legitimacy.

In school textbooks, the Great Purge of 1936 to 1938, in which hundreds of thousands of people were executed, is listed as the result of a “complicated international situation”.

Monuments that glorify Stalin are proliferating as memorials to his victims disappear. By late 2024, there were more than 110 statues and monuments commemorating the dictator, half of which had been erected in the past decade.

Prof Khrushcheva says: “I often say, ‘when Stalin is on the rise, Khrushchev is in the dog house’. This Russian state has decided who it wants to celebrate.”

Her grandfather was, though, a leader of complex contradictions.

He is often credited with the de-Stalinisation of the state: he abolished gulags, freed millions of innocent prisoners, and, in his Secret Speech of 1956, unexpectedly denounced all the crimes of his predecessor.

However, before taking power he had been a brutal enforcer of the Great Purge. Also in 1956, he sent in the military to crush the Hungarian Uprising, and in 1962 he brought the world to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

For her part, Prof Khrushcheva, 61 – who was raised as Khrushchev’s adoptive granddaughter but is actually his great-granddaughter – remembers him as a joyful man.

She says: “He played with us, he made jokes, he let us misbehave because he believed children should. My memories of my childhood help explain his political career; he was an intuitive leader, able to speak off the cuff, never afraid to be funny or ridiculous, and I remember that.”

Khrushchev, who died in 1971, spent years in Ukraine and took part in its post-war reconstruction. He would be “appalled at the invasion”, Prof Khrushcheva says, adding: “He would have thought, ‘Why on earth are we bombing a brotherly nation?’ It would have been heartbreaking for him.”

She recalls a popular Soviet poet visiting her grandfather to express concern that people were forgetting the times of repression and fear.

His response was: “It’s great they are forgetting, let them live.”

But, says Prof Khrushcheva: “We’re not forgetting any more – Russians are living it now.”