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Home » A reminder for those people who say they’ve never seen anything on the world stage like what happened yesterday with Zelensky, Trump and Vance

A reminder for those people who say they’ve never seen anything on the world stage like what happened yesterday with Zelensky, Trump and Vance

The New Neo Posted on by

I suggest they stroll down memory lane with me if they’re old enough – or take a look at a vignette from history if they’re not old enough. I bring you (drum roll please) that wily old showman, Nikita Khrushchev.

I was just a mere wisp of a girl, but well I remember this incident. Although there’s no footage of it and therefore I don’t remember “seeing” it, I certainly heard a great deal about it. The setting was the UN and the year was 1960:

The alleged shoe-banging incident occurred when Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, pounded his shoe on his delegate-desk in protest at a speech by Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong during the 902nd Plenary Meeting of the United Nations General Assembly held in New York City on 12 October 1960.

Khrushchev at a meeting of the UN General Assembly on 22 September, three weeks before the incident
In 2003, American scholar William Taubman reported that he had interviewed some eyewitnesses who said that Khrushchev had brandished his shoe but not banged it. He also reported that no photographic or video records of the shoe-banging had been found. However, in his biography of Khrushchev, he wrote that he accepted that the shoe-banging had occurred. There is at least one fake photograph …

So we even have fake news photographs, way before AI.

More:

On 12 October 1960, head of the Filipino delegation Lorenzo Sumulong referred to “the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights and which have been swallowed up, so to speak, by the Soviet Union”. Upon hearing this, Khrushchev quickly came to the rostrum, being recognized on a point of order. There he demonstratively, in a theatrical manner, brushed Sumulong aside, with an upward motion of his right arm—without physically touching him—and began a lengthy denunciation of Sumulong, branding him (among other things) as “a jerk, a stooge, and a lackey”, and a “toady of American imperialism” and demanded Assembly President Frederick Boland (Ireland) call Sumulong to order. Boland did caution Sumulong to “avoid wandering out into an argument which is certain to provoke further interventions”, but permitted him to continue speaking and sent Khrushchev back to his seat.

According to some sources, Khrushchev pounded his fists on his desk in protest as Sumulong continued to speak, and at one point picked up his shoe and banged the desk with it. Some other sources report a different order of events: Khrushchev first banged the shoe then went to the rostrum to protest. Sumulong’s speech was again interrupted. Another point of order was raised by the highly agitated Romanian Foreign Vice-minister Eduard Mezincescu, a member of the Eastern Bloc. Mezincescu gave his own angry denunciation of Sumulong and then turned his anger on Boland, his provoking, insulting, and ignoring of the Assembly President leading to his microphone being eventually shut off. This prompted a chorus of shouts and jeers from the Eastern Bloc delegations. The chaotic scene finally ended when Boland abruptly declared the meeting adjourned and slammed his gavel, named Thor’s gavel, down so hard he broke it, sending the head flying.

Pretty impressive as a public brouhaha, IMHO.

It wasn’t Khrushchev’s only such performance at the UN, either:

This incident should not be confused with an earlier one at the General Assembly, on 29 September, when Khrushchev angrily interrupted Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, banging the desk and shouting in Russian, at which Macmillan drily said “I should like that to be translated, if I may.”

Oh, for a little bit of that old-fashioned British dry humor.

Comments

A reminder for those people who say they’ve never seen anything on the world stage like what happened yesterday with Zelensky, Trump and Vance — 19 Comments

  1. When I saw the title of this piece I immediately thought of the shoe incident before opening the link. I was too young to be aware of it at the time but read about it a few years later.

  3. I remember the story of the shoe-banging. Was it at that time he said, “We will bury you,” or was that another occasion?

  5. Ah. I looked it up. The “We will bury you” comment was at a reception for Western ambassadors at the Polish Embassy in Moscow, four years before the shoe-pounding incident at the UN.

  6. It looks like the “bipartisan group of legislators/Senators” in favor of the war continuing who met with Zelensky before his meeting in the Oval Office–presumably far less able to influence events than when Biden was President–may have given Zelensky false expectations, and bad advice on how to approach Trump, never emphasizing that “since there was a new sheriff in town,”–a whole new approach–that Zelensky had to approach and deal with President Trump in an entirely different way than he did Biden. *

    * See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/03/bipartisan-group-rinos-democrat-senators-met-zelensky-blew/

  8. Neo, I think Z thought that he could control the meeting. Sometimes an Ego isn’t the best.
    Que up Trump

  9. imo President Trump showed more patience and respect for Zelensky than Obama was willing to show for a closer ally, Netanyahu.

  10. Perhaps Zelensky’s foreign policy team tried to warn him, but Zelensky arrogantly ignored them, because he figured he was the one who had a real understanding of the situation. He demanded aid and pushed Biden around, and Zelensky thought that he could use the same tactics on Trump.

    And, as I commented above, perhaps his American fan boys (deliberately?) also gave him exactly the wrong advice.

  11. The Gateway Pundit isn’t exactly top tier in credibility, IMO. Fool me once, shame on me ..

    Of the three involved, who again had the bigger ego, and is the best statesman? Time will tell.

  12. Here’s my go-to mob guy, Michael Franzese, on the exchange:
    _______________________________________

    Trump does not want to put the American military in harm’s way because of Ukraine.

    So what does he want to do? He wants an immediate ceasefire because, as he said, hundreds of thousands of people are dying—many innocent people are dying.

    “Let’s stop the war.”

    Yet, Zelensky comes over here with an arrogant attitude—not realizing, not expressing, not even being grateful for the fact that this war could have been over in two weeks, three weeks, two days—who knows—if America hadn’t supported them. But instead, he comes here demanding that Trump and Vance do something they don’t want to do at this point.

    Let me tell you something—if you want to bring your enemy to the table, what do you do? Do you start badmouthing them and pushing them away? No.

    I’ve learned something on the street, my friends. Years and years of negotiations with guys I didn’t like—guys I knew would have put a bullet in my head if they had the chance. How did I negotiate? The best way to defeat your enemies is to make them your friends.

    So what is Trump doing? He wants to bring Putin to the table so they can get a ceasefire and, eventually, an end to the war. And yet, Zelensky is demanding that he badmouth Putin?

    Do we want to go to war? Do we want another world war?

    Of course not. These are nuclear superpowers. It’s time to negotiate.

    That doesn’t mean you’re in bed with somebody. It doesn’t mean you love somebody. It doesn’t mean they have their thumb on you.

    –Michael Franzese, “Emergency Livestream: Zelenskyy vs Trump, DOGE, Epstein Files, Elon Musk”
    https://youtu.be/OCdsP8GNtWk?t=640
    _______________________________________

    Franzese was put into for solitary for three years. A guard gave him a Bible, he became a Christian, and now he runs a YouTube channel and does outreach programs particularly for youth.

  13. So we are dealing with three mobsters and murderers?

    One certainly.

    One ex-comedian.

    One, our President, neither a murdered and not always funny.

    If you think you can befriend Putin, well, stay away from windows, make your own tea, and don’t fly on anything he has a hand in.

  14. Just an item of trivia, about N. Khushchev’s (sp?), shoe rapping-

    I think- in the non-fiction travel book by John Steinbeck, “My Travels With Charley”, John Steinbeck, Steinbeck and a man he met [in a place like a diner], talked about the shoe rapping event.

    Their conversation went something like this:

    The man- “I saw a lot of magazine pictures, of Khushchev doing that shoe rapping thing, and you know what?…[when you look at the photos of Khushchev’s back- he’s banging on the table, and still has BOTH of his shoes on!] How strange!”

    John Steinbeck- “Yeah, he didn’t [use one of his own shoes, to do that silly stunt].

    I guess he borrowed one of his flunkies’ shoes, to rap on the table,…or maybe he snuck a shoe…wrapped up in a paper bag, into the building, like he was pretending his little shoe was a submarine sandwich, or something.

    How strange.”

  15. Re: Interview with Nina Khrushcheva about Zelenskyy-Trump exchange

    Synchronicity strikes. Nina Khrushcheva, great-granddaughter of Nikita “The Shoe” Khruschev, was interviewed on “Face the Nation.”

    Khrushcheva received a Ph.D at Princeton, taught at Columbia and is now Professor of International Affairs at The New School. In spite of such grooming, she’s actually somewhat sensible.
    _____________________________________

    Face the Nation: I want to bring in a professor in the Julian Jay Studley Program at The New School and great-granddaughter of a former leader of the Soviet Union.

    Nina, great to have you on with us. Let’s start with the reaction to what happened in the U.S. What kind of implications did today’s events have on a global scale?

    Khrushcheva: Well, we’ve never seen such a blowup in the White House. That’s something that was unimaginable until this moment.

    But I’m sure everybody is basically shocked and saying the same thing. It doesn’t look very good for Volodymyr Zelenskyy at this point, because as Donald Trump said, he doesn’t have the cards—and he really doesn’t.

    So, the question is whether Zelenskyy will want to repair the relationship, which is going to be very hard because it has been breaking down over time. In fact, today’s meeting happened only because Emmanuel Macron, who was here earlier this week, convinced Trump to meet with Zelenskyy. Trump didn’t want to do it.

    Face the Nation: How is that relationship going to be repaired?

    Khrushcheva: We’re getting closer to something that has been speculated about for at least the last month—longer, even—since Trump was elected. The question is: Will it be America against Europe? That would be absolutely unheard of.

    America has been the leader of the Western world, the primary member of NATO. So now, we may see more fractures. Europe might realize it needs to create its own international, military, and policy agenda and accept that under Trump, the U.S. is not going to be the same kind of partner it once was.

    At this point, they may just try to maintain some kind of relationship with Trump to avoid further damage rather than hoping for closer cooperation.

    –“Face the Nation”, “Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter reacts to heated Trump-Zelenskyy meeting in Oval Office”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHUunIZaRX4

  16. I saw the shoe incident and the ” we will bury you incident. What did Nikita do during WW2?

  17. Sennacherib:

    Khrushchev had an interesting history. For one thing, he was literally Ukraine-adjacent. From his Wiki page:

    Khrushchev was born on 15 April 1894, in Kalinovka, a village in what is now Russia’s Kursk Oblast (then Kursk Governorate), near the present Ukrainian border.[ His parents, Sergei Khrushchev and Kseniya Khrushcheva, were poor Russian peasants, and had a daughter two years Nikita’s junior, Irina.Sergei Khrushchev was employed in a number of positions in the Donbas area of far eastern Ukraine, working as a railwayman, as a miner, and laboring in a brick factory. Wages were much higher in the Donbas than in the Kursk region, and Sergei Khrushchev generally left his family in Kalinovka, returning when he had enough money. When Nikita was six or seven, the family moved to Yuzovka (now Donetsk, Ukraine) for about a year before returning to Kalinovka.

    Kalinovka was a peasant village; Khrushchev’s teacher, Lydia Shevchenko, later stated that she had never seen a village as poor. Nikita worked as a herdsboy from an early age. …

    In 1908, Sergei Khrushchev moved to the Donbas city of Yuzovka; fourteen-year-old Nikita followed later that year, while Kseniya Khrushcheva and her daughter came after. Yuzovka, which was renamed Stalino in 1924 and Donetsk in 1961, was at the heart of one of the most industrialized areas of the Russian Empire. After working briefly in other fields, Khrushchev’s parents found Nikita a place as a metal fitter’s apprentice. Upon completing that apprenticeship, the teenage Khrushchev was hired by a factory. He lost that job when he collected money for the families of the victims of the Lena Goldfields massacre, and was hired to mend underground equipment by a mine in nearby Ruchenkovo, where his father was the union organizer, and he helped distribute copies and organize public readings of Pravda. He later stated that he considered emigrating to the United States for better wages, but did not do so.

    Khrushchev later did a lot of Stalin’s dirty work in Ukraine.

    About WWII:

    When Soviet troops, pursuant to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, invaded the eastern portion of Poland on 17 September 1939, Khrushchev accompanied the troops at Stalin’s direction. A large number of ethnic Ukrainians lived in the invaded area, much of which today forms the western portion of Ukraine. Many inhabitants initially welcomed the invasion, though they hoped that they would eventually become independent. Khrushchev’s role was to ensure that the occupied areas voted for union with the USSR. …

    As the Germans advanced, Khrushchev worked with the military to defend and save Kiev. Handicapped by orders from Stalin that under no circumstances should the city be abandoned, the Red Army was soon encircled by the Germans. While the Germans stated they took 655,000 prisoners, according to the Soviets, 150,541 men out of 677,085 escaped.[58] Primary sources differ on Khrushchev’s involvement. According to Marshal Georgy Zhukov, writing some years after Khrushchev fired and disgraced him in 1957, Khrushchev persuaded Stalin not to evacuate troops from Kiev. However, Khrushchev noted in his memoirs that he and Marshal Semyon Budyonny proposed redeploying Soviet forces to avoid the encirclement until Marshal Semyon Timoshenko arrived from Moscow with orders for the troops to hold their positions. Early Khrushchev biographer Mark Frankland suggested that Khrushchev’s faith in his leader was first shaken by the Red Army’s setbacks. …

    In 1942, Khrushchev was on the Southwest Front, and he and Timoshenko proposed a massive counteroffensive in the Kharkov area. Stalin approved only part of the plan, but 640,000 Red Army soldiers were involved in the offensive. The Germans, however, had deduced that the Soviets were likely to attack at Kharkov, and set a trap. Beginning on 12 May 1942, the Soviet offensive initially appeared successful, but within five days the Germans had driven deep into the Soviet flanks, and the Red Army troops were in danger of being cut off. Stalin refused to halt the offensive, and the Red Army divisions were soon encircled by the Germans. The USSR lost about 267,000 soldiers, including more than 200,000 captured, and Stalin demoted Timoshenko and recalled Khrushchev to Moscow. While Stalin hinted at arresting and executing Khrushchev, he allowed the commissar to return to the front by sending him to Stalingrad.

    Khrushchev reached the Stalingrad Front in August 1942, soon after the start of the battle for the city. His role in the Stalingrad defense was not major—General Vasily Chuikov, who led the city’s defense, mentions Khrushchev only briefly in a memoir published while Khrushchev was premier—but to the end of his life, he was proud of his role. Though he visited Stalin in Moscow on occasion, he remained in Stalingrad for much of the battle and was nearly killed at least once. He proposed a counterattack, only to find that Georgy Zhukov and other generals had already planned Operation Uranus, a plan to break out from Soviet positions and encircle and destroy the Germans; it was being kept secret. Before Uranus was launched, Khrushchev spent much time checking on troop readiness and morale, interrogating Nazi prisoners, and recruiting some for propaganda purposes. …

    After Uranus forced the Germans into retreat, Khrushchev served on other fronts of the war. He was attached to Soviet troops at the Battle of Kursk, in July 1943, which turned back the last major German offensive on Soviet soil. Khrushchev related that he interrogated an SS defector, learning that the Germans intended an attack—a claim dismissed by his biographer Taubman as “almost certainly exaggerated”.[71] He accompanied Soviet troops as they took Kiev in November 1943, entering the shattered city as Soviet forces drove out German troops. As Soviet forces met with greater success, driving the Nazis westwards towards Germany, Nikita Khrushchev became increasingly involved in reconstruction work in Ukraine. He was appointed Premier of the Ukrainian SSR in addition to his earlier party post, one of the rare instances in which the Ukrainian party and civil leader posts were held by one person.

    He helped Ukraine rebuild after the war.

  18. I was brainstorming with Chat about an imaginary interview explaining how Khrushchev got nicknamed “The Shoe.” But give Chat an excuse to get creative and Chat lunges at the chance.
    ____________________________________

    Imagining a Khrushchev Interview in Retirement (1968)

    INTERVIEWER: “Comrade Khrushchev, do you regret your leadership decisions?”

    KHRUSHCHEV (laughs): “Which ones? The ones that kept me alive? The ones that kept you alive? Or the ones that got me kicked out?”

    INTERVIEWER: “Let’s start with Cuba. You nearly brought the world to war.”

    KHRUSHCHEV: “Nearly, yes. But did I? No! You think Stalin would have backed down? The Americans were sweating. Kennedy was sweating. But in the end, we made a deal. I gave them my missiles in Cuba, and they took theirs out of Turkey. The whole world thought I lost, but I got what I wanted.”

    INTERVIEWER: “And what was that?”

    KHRUSHCHEV: “To live. And to make sure everyone else lived, too.”

    INTERVIEWER: “Some say you betrayed Stalin’s legacy.”

    KHRUSHCHEV: (stares for a moment, then chuckles) “Stalin’s legacy? Stalin’s legacy was fear. A man couldn’t open his mouth without wondering if the NKVD would knock at his door at night. I buried Stalin. You should be thanking me.”

    INTERVIEWER: “And yet, you were known as ‘The Butcher of Ukraine.’”

    KHRUSHCHEV: (sighs, rubs forehead) “Yes, yes. That was my job. You don’t say ‘no’ to Stalin. But tell me, do they call Brezhnev ‘The Butcher of Hungary’? Do they call Kennedy ‘The Butcher of Vietnam’? No? Ah, history is funny that way.”

    INTERVIEWER: “Do you miss power?”

    KHRUSHCHEV: “Do I miss the weight of a million problems on my back? No. But do I miss telling those bureaucrats to go to hell? Yes. Very much.”

    INTERVIEWER: “If you had to summarize your time in office, how would you do it?”

    KHRUSHCHEV: “I took the Soviet Union to the edge of a cliff. And when I looked over, I decided we should take a step back.”

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