Khrushchev's Last Testament: Power and Peace

Former Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev, who died in 1971 at the age of 77, once warned a Kremlin colleague that he might some day rise from the grave and tell his tale, despite the silence imposed on him by the men who had forced him into retirement. This week TIME presents the first of two sets of excerpts from a forthcoming volume of memoirs in which Khrushchev makes good on his prophecy. He emerges as a candid, pungent and uniquely qualified commentator on recent Soviet history.

During the last four years of his life, Khrushchev dictated his reminiscences into a tape recorder. Transcriptions of the tapes, translated and edited by TIME Correspondent Strobe Talbott, formed the basis of Khrushchev Remembers, which was published by Little, Brown & Co. in 1970. TIME's new excerpts, from a sequel called Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, a Little, Brown book that will go on sale in June, are also taken from tape recordings made by Khrushchev.

The Last Testament deals primarily with the period from Stalin's death in 1953, when Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Communist Party, until his own ouster from power in 1964. Although an important record of the past, the former Soviet leader's freewheeling reminiscences bear directly on many contemporary issues. He discusses hitherto unknown incidents that contributed to the present Moscow-Peking conflict. He provides insights into the Soviet missile buildup, and the mutual suspicions that prevented any Russian-U.S. arms limitations accord. Khrushchev also presents typically blunt assessments of contemporary world political figures he dealt with, including Mao Tse-tung, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

Khrushchev resented his role in retirement as a "special pensioner"--or, as he put it, "a free cossack." One of the few compensations left to him was the freedom to talk about his years in power. This he did at great length and with obvious relish when anyone asked his views on past and present events. His family and friends did more than just listen; they prodded him with questions, and in 1967 urged him to begin tape-recording his stories.

Throughout the 180 hours of tapes that he is known to have made, Khrushchev stressed his concern that his version of events be told, so that future generations of Soviet historians, Communist theoreticians and ordinary Russian citizens would treat his memory with respect. Khrushchev and his family hoped that the memoirs might some day be published in the U.S.S.R., but they also feared that if the reminiscences did not reach the West before he died they might never appear anywhere. They would be impounded after his death by the authorities, and either locked up in party archives or destroyed.

Khrushchev was too shrewd and too proud to accept such a fate for what he called "the substance of my viewpoint." Though publicly powerless, he believed that as a loyal Soviet citizen he could dictate his reminiscences without provoking direct interference from the regime. His family, associates and friends screened the tapes for details of security matters and potentially compromising material. These they removed.

Khrushchev did all the dictating at his dacha in the village of Petrovo-Dalneye, 20 miles west of Moscow. His country villa was under the surveillance of secret police stationed in a separate guardhouse at the entrance to the fenced-in compound. The police kept a watchful eye on Khrushchev, but stayed out of the house where he lived with his wife Nina Petrovna. When the weather was good, Khrushchev took his tape recorder outdoors. On many of the tapes there are sounds in the background of birds singing, children playing, and planes coming in to land at a nearby airport. Sometimes Khrushchev worked from rough notes, and he can be heard shuffling papers on the tapes.

He was seldom disciplined or methodical in his approach. Usually he rambled, telescoping years, people, and ideas. News, such as the deaths of North Viet Nam's Ho Chi Minh or Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, would set him off on reminiscences that covered many subjects and years. But his comments on the details of events in which he participated were always graphic and sharp. Early in the project he worked with a primitive Russian tape recorder, which he had trouble operating. Later he used superior West German machines.

In 1970, three years after the taping began, Khrushchev's associates in the memoir project decided that it was time to act. Little, Brown and Time Inc. acquired the right to publish the first portion of the memoirs. In an introduction written for Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, TIME Diplomatic Editor Jerrold L. Schecter, who was chief of the TIME-LIFE bureau in Moscow from 1968 until 1970, notes that: "Because these were the unsanctioned words of a deposed leader, the transcripts of the tapes were handled in much the same way as novels, poetry, and other 'underground' Soviet texts that reach the West unofficially are handled. We undertook not to disclose any specifics of how, by whom and when the material was transcribed or delivered. These restrictions are still in force today."

Time Inc. authenticated the tapes by voiceprint analysis--an electronic method of matching the voice patterns on the tapes with recorded Khrushchev speeches--and published Khrushchev Remembers, first as a series of four articles in LIFE, and subsequently as a Little, Brown book. Khrushchev himself was never involved directly with Little, Brown or Time Inc. Therefore, when the first volume of his memoirs was published in the West, he could truthfully tell an irate Arvid Pelshe, chairman of the Party Control Commission, that he had never "turned over" his memoirs to anyone. Under pressure from Pelshe, Khrushchev made a statement to that effect, which was issued by Tass, the official Soviet news agency, in November 1970. Ironically, it was the first time since his downfall that the former leader's name had appeared in public print in the U.S.S.R.

Later that month Khrushchev went to a hospital in the Kremlin for treatment of a heart condition. Almost four months passed before he was able to return to his dacha and his tape recorder. In the meantime, he saw a copy of Khrushchev Remembers and had the edited text translated back to him in Russian. He was pleased and decided to continue dictating his memoirs.

A few months after his death, additional tapes came into the hands of Time Inc. Like the tapes that were the basis for Khrushchev Remembers, these were also authenticated by voice-print analysis; transcripts of the recordings were again translated and edited by Correspondent Talbott. British Kremlinologist and Khrushchev Biographer Edward Crankshaw, who introduced and annotated the first volume of his memoirs, has provided a preface for the sequel. He writes: "The chief value of the memoirs (and they have, it seems to me, a very great historical value) lies not in the facts they offer but in the state of mind they reveal, more often than not unconsciously, and the attitude not only of Khrushchev himself but also of the whole Soviet leadership to the world. In this respect I found the present volume even more fascinating than the first, though in a different way."

In March, Time Inc. gave all 180 hours of tape recordings and nearly 800,000 words of transcripts to the Oral History Collection of Columbia University. In announcing the acquisition of the material, Director Louis Starr said that the Khrushchev archive "is the most voluminous body of material by a foreign memoirist" in the collection. A team of experts at Columbia is now cataloguing the tapes and indexing the transcripts, which will be available for scholarly research.

Memories of a Free Cossack

I'm a free cossack. A pensioner's lot is simply to exist from one day to the next--and to wait for the end. An idle old age isn't easy for anyone. It's especially difficult for someone who's lived through as tumultuous a career as mine. Now, after a lifetime of weathering countless storms, I've run aground. But I'm not grumbling. There comes a time when every man, no matter how important, gets old and feeble; his faculties begin to break down. I realize that I'm luckier than many people of my age. I haven't seen them, but I hear they just sit around opening and shutting their mouths like fish out of water; their eyes have dimmed; their memories have completely deserted them; they mumble incoherently.

I'm grateful my own memory is still intact. I'm thankful that I have an opportunity to look back and speak out, to express my views openly, to point out our deficiencies, to suggest how we could organize our society in a more harmonious way. I'm glad that I have a chance to make a few observations which might make it possible for people younger than I to enjoy their lives a bit more than people of my generation have been able to enjoy theirs. Now that I'm back dictating my reminiscences, I should explain that for almost half a year I've been in the hospital. During that time many people asked me if it were true that I was writing my memoirs. When I answered, "No," they would look at me with surprise and disappointment and say, "That's too bad because it would be interesting if you were to leave your memoirs to posterity." I agree.

I know that my recollections won't be of any use to those scholars who are covering up the true history of our party and whitewashing Stalin. Perhaps the people for whom I'm recording my memories aren't even born yet. Then again, maybe they are. Maybe they're the generation that's just coming into bloom. I hope so. I'm convinced that if this record of my long life and considerable political experience comes into the hands of objective, courageous scholars, they will find more than a few grains of truth in what I have to say.

I'm not denying that progress has been made. After Statin's death and [Police Chief Lavrenty] Beria's arrest, our people began to feel freer. For the first time they received an opportunity to exercise their right to express their desires and their dissatisfactions. It is essential that people enjoy their inalienable rights here in the Soviet Union as in every other state. It was for these rights that ten million or more of our citizens paid with their lives in Stalin's jails and camps.

But the progress we achieved after Stalin's death has been slowed down, and my viewpoint runs counter to the line being pushed by our historians at the moment. I don't care. As they say, I'm no longer on my way to the fair; I started my journey home a long time ago. Who knows how many years my ticker has left to run.

Everything I've said in my memoirs I say as a Communist who wants a more enlightened Communist society--not for myself, because my time has already come and gone, but for my friends and for my people in the future.

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