NavList:

Dave, you wrote:

"Years later, I was watching an education channel program where the guest brought up this very same speech and quote of Krushchev.  He said the problem was that the translater translated literally what was just a colloquialism (sp?) of the Russion language."

 

And years later, Khrushchev commented on the misunderstanding and explained that what he meant was that capitalism will be over-thrown and "your own working class who will bury you" (and 'we will present at your funeral' is the sense of the expression he used). But ya know, Khrushchev was quite comfortable with saber-rattling. Any of thousands of people in the Soviet government could have explained that the premier did not mean what his words were translated to mean. This was a simple matter. But Khrushchev's foreign policy indulged in bluff and bluster on a daily basis and a little mistranslation didn't necessarily hurt... :-)

 

(sorry, off-topic)