Khrushchev detested nighttime meetings. He had held few, if any, of them in his nine years in power. They reminded him of Stalin’s times, when the dictator would summon his terrified subordinates to the Kremlin in the middle of the night. Nobody had ever known what to expect. An angry glance could be a prelude to promotion. A smile might mean death. It all depended on the tyrant’s whim.
