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If Nikita Khrushchev noticed any incongruity between the lofty slogans and the harsh socialist reality of Moscow street-corner life, he said nothing to his driver, or to his son, Sergei, sitting beside him in the backseat. He had said more than enough at the Twentieth Congress, and although six weeks would pass before the Central Intelligence Agency got wind of his secret speech, the Americans would be just as stunned as the 1,500 shocked delegates who had heard him in the Great Kremlin Palace less than forty-eight hours earlier.

Father and son sat in silence, behind the ZIS’s pleated curtains, watching the city stream drably past. Directly behind them, in the lane reserved exclusively for party high-ups, rode the three other Presidium members who had jointly ruled Russia since Stalin’s death three years earlier: Nikolai Bulganin, Lazar Kaganovich, and Vyacheslav Molotov. Behind them, in descending order of importance, rode lesser officials in less imposing ZIMs and Pobedas: Dmitri Ustinov, the armaments minister; Aleksei Kirichenko, a new addition to the Presidium; and the usual entourage of KGB bodyguards and eager aides.

Khrushchev’s car led the convoy, as befitting his new rank as first among equals in the Presidium, as the Politburo was then known. But the men in the rear were crowding his bumper, biding their time for an opportunity to overtake him. This Khrushchev knew, understood almost instinctively, from the survival skills he had honed during two treacherous decades in Stalin’s inner circle. When the “boss” was alive, they had all vied for his favor, slid tomatoes onto each other’s chairs in prank-filled drinking contests that lasted till dawn. Like sixty-year-old frat boys, they all laughed when Lavrenty Beria, the secret police chief and serial rapist, pinned little notes with the Russian word prick spelled in big Cyrillic letters on Khrushchev’s unsuspecting back. But the day the boss died, the jokes ended and the plotting began. This Khrushchev also knew from personal experience, for it was he who had masterminded the coup against the psychopath Beria. Stalin’s chief henchman and self-anointed successor had been dispatched with a bullet to the brain, and it was Khrushchev, the class clown of this murderous fraternity, who had unexpectedly emerged to fill the power vacuum.

The convoy sped north unimpeded by traffic, since so few Muscovites owned cars. A few rickety Moskviches, twenty-six-horsepower knockoffs of the 1938 Opel Kadett, quickly clattered out of the way, and soon Khrushchev and his retinue reached the new suburbs. These vast tracts of land around the capital were also being completely remade. The little wooden dachas and garden plots that supplemented the diet of city dwellers were being bulldozed in accordance with the latest Five Year Plan to allay the capital’s dire housing shortage. In Moscow, divorced couples still often lived together in communal apartments with three other families. Government workers and newlyweds were housed in dormitories where toilets and kitchens were divvied up on a time-share basis. For those without blat—connections—the waiting list for new apartments could stretch into the decades. People got married while still in their teens just to get in line. The situation was much the same throughout the Soviet Union, and even more drastic in the western parts of the country, where entire cities had been reduced to rubble during the war.

To remedy the housing shortage, Khrushchev had embarked on a massive national construction binge, which, like Stalin’s oppressive overhaul of Moscow’s downtown districts, was leaving its own unique architectural imprint on the city’s outer rings. But the suburban building boom looked nothing like the Levittown planned communities sweeping across America, where the appetite for new homes seemed just as insatiable and the explosion of affordable automobiles was changing the way people lived. Outside Moscow, there were