Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader famed for thumping his shoe on the podium during an angry speech at the United Nations, stars in a new photo exhibition that reassesses his turbulent era. 'Nikita Khrushchev and His Time,' which opened last week in Moscow's Manezh exhibition hall, is one of the largest exhibits on the colourful Communist leader to be mounted in Russia since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. Bald, stocky and famed for his peasant earthiness, Khrushchev is pictured in diverse settings ranging from Cold War summits with US president John Kennedy to casual days at home with his family. 'He was certainly photogenic,' said Viktor Akhlomov, a veteran Russian photojournalist who took pictures of Khrushchev in the 1960s for the Izvestia newspaper, including some on display at the exhibition. 'He was a like an engine that powered itself. No matter how you photographed him, it always came out,' Akhlomov, 71, recalled in an interview at the exhibition's opening. Khrushchev went down in history as a reformer who denounced the crimes of his predecessor, dictator Joseph Stalin, and ushered in a brief period of liberalism in the early 1960s known as The Thaw. But his years in power were also marked by erratic behaviour, including his risky decision to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, which sparked the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Khrushchev was ousted in 1964 by rivals within the Soviet leadership, after which he lived under house arrest until his death in 1971. Descendants of Khrushchev who attended the exhibition's opening praised it as a fresh look at the leader, often derided in Russia for half-baked schemes such as his plan to plant corn across the Soviet Union. 'This exhibition is pleasant because it gives a fairly balanced picture,' said Alexei Adzhubei, a grandson of Khrushchev who works as a molecular biologist in Moscow. Adzhubei said his grandfather was often unfairly targeted with media reports depicting him as an ignorant peasant. 'The supposed order he gave for corn to be planted in the Arctic -- nothing of the sort ever happened! He simply tried to promote corn in the Soviet Union to be used as livestock feed,' Adzhubei said. Even the famous 1960 shoe-banging incident at the UN was overblown, Adzhubei insisted, arguing that 'he did not incur any sanctions for the Soviet Union' over the outburst. Yulia Khrushcheva, a granddaughter of the Soviet leader, said Khrushchev was the victim of an official smear campaign during the rule of his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, damaging his reputation until the present day. 'There was much nonsense written about him in the West, but not the same kind of distortion of the facts there was here,' she said. Photos at the exhibition show Khrushchev at various stages of life: as a young man in what is now eastern Ukraine, as a loyal acolyte of Joseph Stalin in the 1930s and as an old man confined to his dacha after the coup. But most of the exhibition focuses on the years when Khrushchev was in power and tried to shake up the Soviet system, pledging to raise living standards to Western levels and to attain true Communism by 1980. Some photographs depict the poets, artists and jazz musicians who briefly flourished during the Thaw after Khrushchev loosened the burdensome cultural restrictions of the Stalin years. Khrushchev was not always a friend of the arts: in 1962 he visited an exhibition of abstract painting and angrily denounced the artists as 'fags' and 'bastards,' a notorious incident that helped bring an end to the Thaw. Ironically, that tirade took place in the Manezh, the same exhibition hall in central Moscow where the photography exhibit is running today. Yulia Khrushcheva said her grandfather, once ousted from power and confined to his dacha, came to regret the Manezh incident. 'He regretted it very much,' she said. 'There were many things he regretted in those years, from 1964 to 1971. We often talked about that.' Although often mocked, Khrushchev made a genuine effort to improve peoples' lives and presided over achievements like the first human spaceflight, by cosmonaut Yury Gagarin, said Khrushchev's grandson, Adzhubei. 'People lived with hope,' Adzhubei said. 'He gave people the chance to hope that they would live better in the future.' 