About the capitalist states, it doesn’t depend on you whether or not we exist. If you don’t like us, don’t accept our invitations, and don’t invite us to come and see you. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.*
Nikita Sergeyevich Khruschev (1894-1971); reported statement at a reception for Wladyslaw Gomulka at the Polish Embassy, Moscow, November 18, 1956
Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev enjoying a hot dog in Des Moines, Iowa, during his 1959 tour of the U.S. (Photo from American Meat Institute, National Hot Dog & Sausage Council, http://www.hot-dog.org)
* The exact phrasing of the last line is debatable. As Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 16th Edition has it, “Neither the original nor the translation of the last two sentences appeared in either Pravda or the New York Times, which carried the rest of the text. Another possible translation of the last sentence is: We shall be present at your funeral, i.e., we shall outlive you; but the above is the familiar version.”
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
hello…
I’m trying to find the kruschev quote refering to the U.N. declaration of human rights as “a letter to santa claus”…can anyone help please
john lockwood
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Very controversial, and in context, quite inflammatory. Consider that 1956 was also the year of the Suez Crisis (the UN had passed a resolution calling for European troops out of Arab lands on November 7), and the year of the Hungarian revolt, which was ended about a week earlier, on November 10 (or 14, by some accounts) and the invention of the Molotov Cocktail. Plus this event at an embassy of a satellite state. Nerves were a little raw.
And of course, the New York Times comes through as the paper of record. “Main Stream Media” are critical to history, just for recording the events as they happen, for later analysis.
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This was a very controversial quote at the time, with the “Better Dead Than Red” types who argued for a war — which would have been a nuclear one — using this translation and treating it as a threat, while those who argued for ‘peaceful coexistence insisting the proper translation was ‘we will see you buried.’ As it happens, I’d never seen the whole quote, but the second translation makes sense in context as well as coming from the less hysterical ones. (Fortunately they had the better of it, or we’d be arguing, if at all, using stone tablets, not the Internet.)
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