From 2002 to 2004, Khrushcheva was an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University in New York. Khrushcheva is currently a professor of International Affairs in the graduate program at
The New School in New York. Khrushcheva is the author of numerous articles. She directed the Russia Project at the World Policy Institute, and has been a long-time contributor to Project Syndicate: Association of Newspapers Around the World, and editor of Project Syndicate's Russia column. Her articles have appeared in
Newsweek,
The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal, the
Financial Times and other publications. She had a two-year research appointment at the School of Historical Studies of Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and then served as Deputy Editor of East European Constitutional Review at
NYU School of Law. She is a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations and a recipient of
Great Immigrants: The Pride of America Award from Carnegie Corporation of New York. She is the author of
Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics (
Yale UP, 2008) and
The Lost Khrushchev: A Journey into the Gulag of the Russian Mind (Tate, 2014), co-author of ''In Putin's Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia's Eleven Time Zones'' (St. Martin's Press, 2019) and (in Russian) "Nikita Khrushchev: An Outlier of the System" (Никита Хрущев: вождь вне системы) (Diletant.media, 2024). In March 2022, Khrushcheva was critical of
Vladimir Putin's conduct in
the war that he waged against Ukraine, saying that her grandfather would have found Putin's conduct to be "despicable". In October 2022, she said, alluding to
George Orwell's novel
1984, that in "Putin’s Russia, war is peace, slavery is freedom, ignorance is strength and illegally annexing a sovereign country’s territory is fighting colonialism." In January 2024, she wrote that "Putin will throw everything he has at this war", suggesting "that Ukraine is unlikely to reclaim all of its territory" and "the west should focus on
bolstering Ukraine’s defences, while preparing to seize any opportunity to engage in realistic
talks with the Kremlin." In March 2026, the Russian justice ministry designated Khrushcheva a "foreign agent". ==Work==