Nina Khrushcheva

Why organisations work with Nina Khrushcheva

• A primary read on Russian political culture from a scholar who has travelled and reported across the country’s eleven time zones, not a Moscow-watcher working from secondary sources.
• Author or co-author of three books on Russian power, including In Putin’s Footsteps (St. Martin’s Press, 2019) with Atlantic contributing editor Jeffrey Tayler, and The Lost Khrushchev, both grounded in original interviews and field research.
• A standing column at Project Syndicate, where she edits the Russia series, and a publication record across the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Newsweek that boards and investment committees already read.
• Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former director of the Russia Project at the World Policy Institute, with the institutional standing expected for closed-room conversations on sanctions, geopolitical exposure, and political risk.
• A family inheritance, as the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, that she uses as a lens on Soviet and post-Soviet authoritarianism rather than a biographical talking point.

Biography highlights

• Professor of International Affairs at The New School, New York.
• Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Princeton University; former research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
• Author of Imagining Nabokov (Yale University Press) and The Lost Khrushchev (Tate); co-author of In Putin’s Footsteps (St. Martin’s Press) with Jeffrey Tayler.
• Contributing Editor at Project Syndicate; bylines in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Newsweek.
• Member of the Council on Foreign Relations; former director of the Russia Project at the World Policy Institute.
• Recipient of the Carnegie Corporation’s Great Immigrants Award and the Trinity College Dublin Gold Medal of Honorary Patronage.

Biography

The Kremlin is not best understood through Western political vocabulary. It runs on a logic shaped by Russian literature, Soviet bureaucratic instinct, and a long memory of empire. Reading it from the outside, on quarterly briefings alone, has cost organisations real money over the past decade.

Nina Khrushcheva works that gap. A professor of international affairs at The New School, with a Princeton doctorate in comparative literature, she teaches courses on comparative propaganda, international media, and Russian contemporary politics. Her academic register is unusual: she reads the Kremlin the way a literary scholar reads a text, while also reporting from inside it.

That dual method runs through her books. In Putin’s Footsteps, written with Jeffrey Tayler of The Atlantic, is the product of travel across all eleven of Russia’s time zones. The Lost Khrushchev draws on her family inheritance as the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev to read the Soviet project from inside its own argument. Imagining Nabokov preceded both, with Yale University Press.

She edits the Russia series at Project Syndicate and writes regularly for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and Newsweek. She sits on the Council on Foreign Relations and previously directed the Russia Project at the World Policy Institute. The Carnegie Corporation named her among its Great Immigrants in 2013, and Trinity College Dublin awarded her its Gold Medal of Honorary Patronage in 2019.

Key speaking topics

• Russia under Putin
• Authoritarian governance and propaganda
• Post-Soviet political culture
• Geopolitical risk and sanctions exposure
• US-Russia relations
• Russia, China and the contested global order
• Soviet history and its modern uses

Ideal for

• Boards and investment committees with direct or indirect Russia exposure, including energy, commodities, and dual-use technology
• Chief risk officers, general counsel, and government affairs leads weighing sanctions and political risk
• Policy audiences, foundations, and academic institutions briefing on the post-Soviet space
• Senior diplomatic, defence and foreign-policy convenings on Russia, Ukraine, and the wider rules-based order

Audience outcomes

• A read of current Kremlin behaviour rooted in Russian political and literary tradition, not Western projection
• A clearer sense of where Putin’s regime is brittle and where it is durable, with implications for sanctions and exposure
• Context on how Soviet history is being repurposed in present-day propaganda and policy
• A sharper map of where Russia, China, and the United States actually intersect, beyond headline framings
• Specific reference points for how to test the assumptions in any internal Russia or geopolitics brief