How it was 09/11/1999 (1999)

Meetings of Nikita Khrushchev with the intelligentsia, 1962-1963.

As is known from history, Nikita Khrushchev was not a great admirer of the arts.

In the chronicle of those years we will not find him in the box of the Bolshoi Theater or at the Moscow Art Theater premiere.

The more incredible was the event that occurred on December 1, 1962: the head of state took part in the opening of the jubilee exhibition of the Moscow organization of the Union of Artists.

The process of acquaintance with the exhibits of the exhibition ended with a grandiose scandal, initiated by NS Khrushchev.

Using the most "refined" expressions, Khrushchev arranged a spacing for abstractionists.

After the scandal in the Manezh of the majority of the Soviet intelligentsia, it became clear that just so it will not end: first, the abstractionists-participants of the exhibition They lost state orders, then the intention was to abolish the Union of Cinematographers, and the unions of writers, artists and composers to merge.

Over the next two years, Khrushchev twice met with representatives of the creative intelligentsia in the Reception House on Sparrow Hills and in the Sverdlovsky Hall of the Kremlin.

With the assistance of the Russian State Archive of Recent History, the program will sound for the first time phonograms of NS Khrushchev's speeches.

These phonograms were stored in the archive under the "secret" signature for 36 years.

The participants of those memorable meetings recall how the sensational exhibition and subsequent events were held.

The artists Mikhail Ivanov, Pavel Nikonov, Boris Zhutovskiy, Illarion Golitsyn, director Vladimir Naumov, composer Tikhon Khrennikov, poet Andrei Voznesensky take part in the conversation.

Personnel chronicles: the removal of the body of IV Stalin from the mausoleum, NS Khrushchev at the exhibition in the Manege, fragments of NS Khrushchev's speeches, archival photographs as illustrations to phonograms.