Russians wallow in bitter nostalgia for Khrushchev: The late Soviet leader and prophet of perestroika still inspires the children of the Sixties, writes Andrew Higgins in Moscow

THIRTY YEARS after his overthrow, more than two decades after his death, Nikita Khrushchev finally received a grand Soviet-style send-off, honoured in the Hall of Columns with glowing tributes and bitter nostalgia from a generation intoxicated by his post-Stalin thaw but appalled by the post-Soviet meltdown.

In the same chandeliered ballroom where the body of Lenin once lay in state and where Stalin staged his most ghoulish show trials, Khrushchev was held up as the true prophet of perestroika, a warning about the perils of reform and a rebuke to Boris Yeltsin.

Sergei, Khrushchev's son, back in Moscow from Brown University in the United States, said: 'Khrushchev went because the time of reform was over, the energy, the cycle of reform was passed.' Mr Yeltsin's reform, he added, was finished. 'It seems the potential for this reform has also exhausted itself. What is going on now is just the strengthening of power in the hands of people who have it.'

The occasion for this and other speeches was billed as an academic conference, the centrepiece for celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of the former Soviet leader's birth.

It also made up for the formal farewell he never got. A huge black-and-white photo decorated the hallway and Khrushchev's relatives all attended. When he died in 1971 Khrushchev was virtually a 'non-person', buried not in the Kremlin wall like other leaders but in Novodevichy Cemetery instead. Worried about crowds, the authorities closed the Underground station and nearby bus routes on the day of his wake.

The Hall of Columns conference, though, had more to do with present rather than past political fortunes. It became a jamboree in celebration of Russia's Shestidesyatniki - the 'people of the Sixties' who came of age under Khrushchev's timid but ground breaking reforms, came to power under Mikhail Gorba chev but who have been largely sidelined under Mr Yeltsin.

Barely mentioned was the fact that Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall, sent missiles to Cuba, banned jazz, suppressed the Hungarian uprising. The biggest mistake cited during the meeting was his decision to make Crimea a part of Ukraine instead of Russia - a meaningless gesture in 1954 but which now may bring armed conflict between two countries.

For his admirers Khrushchev, though himself a protege of Stalin, is the hero of de-Stalinisation and his rule is also recalled, remembered as a golden age when Russia was strong and put the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin.

A spokesman for the Shestid esyatniki is the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who could once fill the 1,000-seat Lenin stadium for readings of his verse but who is today almost ridiculed as a has-been. He has written a poem to commemorate Khrushchev and intoned it from the podium, hailing the late general secretary as 'the godfather of Gagarin and Solzhenitsyn' and mourning Russia's path from 'Khrushchev's rockets to our racketeers'.

Alexander Yakovlev, a long- time confidant of Mr Gorba chev, won the loudest applause with a speech recalling how he had been 'turned inside out' by Khrushchev's report to the Communist Party condemning Stalin in 1956. 'There was only silence as Khrushchev revealed fact after fact, each one worse than the last.' Mr Ya kovlev said Khrushchev was no democrat but added 'a man can go very far when he does not know where he is going'.

Among those listening was the widow of Nikolai Bukharin, an early Bolshevik executed in 1938 after being found guilty on trumped-up charges of plotting to murder Lenin.

Mr Gorbachev did not attend the conference, but he has appeared on television to praise his predecessor as head of the Communist Party and to needle Mr Yeltsin. He also summoned writers and journalists, telling them that he 'wanted to lobby for Khrushchev'. Mr Gorbachev has compared the 1991 putsch with the palace coup that removed Khrushchev in 1964. Both men were betrayed by colleagues.

The Moscow mayor's office has published for the conference a booklet with secret transcripts of party conclaves in 1957 - when Khrushchev survived an attempt to oust him - and in 1964 when Brezhnev took over as party leader. Television and newspapers have published tributes. The newspaper Kommersant said: 'It is the only period of Soviet history that allows us to be nostalgic without seeming either cynics or complete idiots.'

(Photograph omitted)