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On This Day: Khrushchev bangs shoes on desk in fieriest outburst at UN

He first disrupted a speech by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan after he defended Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold’s 'integrity'

On This Day: Khrushchev bangs shoes on desk in fieriest outburst at UN

SEPT 29, 1960: Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoes on his desk and shouted in anger in the most chaotic episode ever seen at the United Nations on this day in 1960.

He first disrupted a speech by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan after he defended Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold’s 'integrity'.

Khrushchev then accused the Swede of being a colonists’ stooge and called for him to resign for failing to send military force to the former Belgian Congo.

And ,when Macmillan mentioned how the USSR had called off talks with its Cold War rivals following the discovery of a American U2 spy plane, he hit the roof again.

He pounded his desk in the General Assembly chamber with his fists, wagged his finger at the Tory leader and then began shouting in Russian.

His words were translated as: 'Don't send U2s. You were supporting aggression.'

In a later speech, Lorenzo Sumulong, the head of the Filipino delegation, angered Khrushchev again when he accused the Soviets of colonialism in eastern Europe.

The Communist leader quickly came to the rostrum after being granted the right to reply by the General Assembly President Frederick Boland, of Ireland.

In an outburst shown in a British Pathé newsreel, Khrushchev denounced Sumulong as 'a jerk, a stooge, and a lackey' and a 'toady of American imperialism'.

It prompted a number of foreign leaders, including Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, whose nation was part of the non-aligned movement, to storm out.

Boland sent the Soviet premier back to his seat and the Filipino diplomat was allowed to resume his speech.

Back at his seat, Khrushchev boiled over in anger once more and pounded his fists again and is then said to have picked up his shoe and banged it on the desk.


His apparent footwear outrage was not filmed and a subsequent photograph purporting to show the moment to be fake, but sources largely agree it did happen.

Romanian Foreign Vice-minister Eduard Mezincescu, whose nation was a member of the Soviet-allied Eastern Bloc, then also fiercely denounced Sumulong and Boland.

It prompted Assembly President to switch his microphone off, which then triggered a raucous shouting match between Eastern and Western delegates.

Amid the chaos, a red-faced Boland declared the meeting adjourned and slammed his gavel down so hard that it broke and sent its head flying.

Khrushchev was angry because the UN had voted for a peace-keeping mission rather than a military force in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Following its independence from Belgium three months earlier, it had planned to nationalise many foreign-owned copper mines.

The povince of Katanga, which hosted most of the pits, then decided to break away amid claims that it was being sponsored by Belgian, American and British interests.

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Khrushchev thought Hammarskjold had done America’s bidding and so called for him to be replaced by a troika of three representing the East, West and non-aligned.

He refused and the following year was later killed en route to DR Congo in a mysterious plane crash that was has been blamed on saboteurs.

In 1998, letters were revealed at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that implicated MI5, the CIA and the former Apartheid government in the crash.

All parties had an interest in seeing the failure of peace talks, which were due to be brokered by Hammarskjold, who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

But Britain suggested that these may have been created as misinformation by the Soviets, who were also implicated due to Khrushchev’s personal animosity.

DR Congo, which had once been the richest country in Africa, has since seen a succession of civil wars and had its mineral wealth plundered by despots.