At the height of Cold War tensions, a heated United Nations debate on October 12, 1960, produced one of the organisation’s most debated episodes. A Soviet leader, a Philippine delegate who challenged him, and a shoe that may or may not have struck a desk.
He also demanded that Assembly President Frederick Boland of Ireland call Sumulong to order. A UN staffer offered a different explanation for how the shoe came off: she claimed a journalist had stepped on Khrushchev’s heel, causing it to fall off. Viktor Sukhodrev, Khrushchev’s interpreter, remembered the Soviet leader pounding the desk with his fists so hard that his watch stopped. Sumulong’s speech was interrupted again when Romanian foreign vice-minister Eduard Mezincescu, a member of the Eastern Bloc, raised another point of order. He delivered his own angry denunciation of Sumulong before turning on Boland. His provocations and insults continued until his microphone was shut off, prompting shouts and jeers from Eastern Bloc delegations.
Sumulong had criticised Moscow over its treatment of people in Eastern Europe, referring to “the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights and which have been swallowed up, so to speak, by the Soviet Union”. “You will not be able to smother the voice of the peoples,” Khrushchev said. Khrushchev removed his right shoe, stood up and brandished it at the Philippine delegate before banging it on his desk, according to a report by The New York Times correspondent Benjamin Welles. Khrushchev “leaned over, took off a slip-on shoe, waved it pseudomenacingly, and put it on his desk, but he never banged his shoe, according to Feron. A KGB general remembered Khrushchev banging the shoe rhythmically, “like a metronome”. She said she later passed the shoe to the Soviet leader wrapped in a napkin, after which he did bang it, according to The New York Times . Irritated that a “capitalist lackey” had effectively broken a good watch, Khrushchev then took off his shoe and began banging it, according to Sukhodrev’s account.
