Dr. Sergei Nikitich Khrushchev’s voice takes me back to a childhood spent watching Cold War-era spy films. It is raspy, Slavic, heavily accented and somehow — here I betray my own prejudices — sinister. Sergei was 18 when his father, Nikita, succeeded Josef Stalin to become first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. By Sergei’s 20th birthday, Nikita was the leader of the USSR. An armistice in Korea was still two months away, Elizabeth II had just been crowned and television was still in black and white.
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