A great-granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev says she watched communism's fall happily from New York while her sister participated at the barricades in Moscow.

"I didn't expect our people to behave so bravely. For me, it's incredible," Nina Khrushchev, 29, said Wednesday. She is staying with friends in New York before entering graduate school at Princeton."The 74 years of Communist regime, I thought it destroyed everything in ourselves, but now I see it's not like that," Khrushchev said. "I'm very thankful to Gorbachev, who practically did all that - not now, but these six years he worked. He showed us we could be people who could fight and we could succeed."

Although she followed the coup and its collapse via television and newspapers, she said she really understood astounding changes were occurring when she talked to her sister, Xenia, 27, by telephone last week.

Xenia told her she had been in the crowd that Russian President Boris Yeltsin exhorted to resist the coup, Khrushchev said.

"I couldn't believe that my sister - she was very unpolitical - could go at night somewhere because of the political situation," in defiance of curfews and emergency decrees, Khrushchev said.

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"She told me she spent two nights in the street, she demonstrated and she helped make barricades, and I understood that if my sister did that, there is something really in the people."

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