Khrushchev On

By Sergei Khrushchev (c) 1990 by Sergei Khrushchev. Translation copyright by William Taubman

Twenty years ago, Nikita Khrushchev, a nonperson living under virtual house arrest in a dacha outside Moscow, created an international sensation when the first volume of his memoirs was published by Little, Brown & Co. The Soviet authorities denounced Khrushchev Remembers as a CIA hoax. A number of Western experts suspected the KGB. In 1974, after Khrushchev's death, a second volume was published. By then the controversy had died down, but curiosity lingered about the author's motivation and method.

This month Little, Brown will publish Khrushchev on Khrushchev, by Nikita's son Sergei, 55, an engineer in Moscow. This intimate portrait shows the deposed leader in his last years watching with dismay as his reforms are overturned. Now his son offers the most detailed and authoritative account to date of how the "special pensioner" was able to conduct his own defiant experiment in glasnost -- and why he had decided to brave the anger of his former comrades.

Father was used to being needed by everyone, to being constantly involved. Suddenly, the Great Cause had disappeared, and everything came crashing down. A man in this situation is like an ant when some malicious hand suddenly puts an insurmountable twig in its path. Suddenly, this businesslike, industrious creature begins to rush aimlessly in all directions. It's hard enough to start a new life when you're young and the years stretch endlessly before you. It's a hundred times harder when the sun is setting on your old age. Just yesterday Father had been making decisions as to what proposals to put before the United Nations, whether to reduce the armed forces, whether to build hydroelectric stations. And today? Whether to go for a walk or watch television.

All the telephones fell silent. In the midst of a conversation, Father's energy subsided, and the light in his eyes went out. "No one needs me now. What am I going to do without work?" he said to no one in particular. "I've got to learn how to kill time," he would often say. He would mechanically leaf through books from his extensive library, lay them aside and set off on interminable walks.

As always, Mama saw to it that everyone was fed, made sure that Father wore a clean white shirt, put everything in its proper place -- all with a warm, ; ready smile on her round face. She acted as if no catastrophe had occurred: the Central Committee had simply made another decision, in this case involving the dismissal of her husband, and she accepted it as she had accepted so many others. After all, she wasn't just his wife but a party member, and democratic centralism's dictates about subordination from top to bottom had become second nature to her. Once decisions were made, they had to be carried out unconditionally. Even to discuss them was fractious activity, sedition, just a step away from a political "deviation."

At the end of December, Mama and Father went out to Petrovo-Dalneye to see the new dacha where they were to live. The house seemed spacious and yet cozy. Naturally, we anticipated microphones in the dacha. It turned out that the receivers and tape recorders had been installed in the little gatehouse. The equipment was mediocre, and the eavesdropping was quite careless. The guards sometimes substituted music tapes for the blank recording tapes to while away the long evenings. When they did, we could make out the faint melodies through the walls of Father's room; the microphones had become speakers. A couple of times, on hearing the music, I pretended to be surprised and proposed searching for the source. A moment later, the music would stop.

Yet the silence oppressed us all the more. We tried to distract Father by attempting to strike up a conversation about some more or less neutral news from Moscow, but he didn't react. Sometimes he broke the silence himself by saying bitterly that his life was over, that life made sense as long as people needed him, but now, when nobody needed him, life was meaningless. Sometimes tears welled up in his eyes.

Father spent 1965 getting used to his new status as a pensioner. When he took a walk, he always brought along a small Falcon radio. In the morning he read newspapers, as he always had, frequently grumbling, "This is just garbage! What kind of propaganda is this? Who will believe it?" He found a Zenith shortwave radio that had been given to him in the 1950s by an American businessman and started to listen to Western Russian-language broadcasts. What he heard didn't exactly make him rejoice. Step by step, all his reforms were abolished.

I brought Father some "forbidden" books. Once I got a typewritten copy of Doctor Zhivago. Later, during a walk, he said, "We shouldn't have banned it. I should have read it myself. There's nothing anti-Soviet in it."

Sometimes, when he went for a walk, Father would meet vacationers and regale them with stories about the past. Or he'd comment on current international affairs. They all listened attentively and asked a lot of questions. Father answered them expansively. But if the questions were about Brezhnev and his policies, he responded jokingly, "I'm retired now. My job is to take walks and not criticize. Let them figure things out on their own."

When I once asked Father if he weren't bored by telling the same stories over and over, he slyly narrowed his eyes and said, "I'm an old man. When I die, all this will die with me. This way, maybe someone will remember. What I'm recounting is the very history they'd like to bury as deep in the ground as they can. But you can't hide the truth, it will find its way out."

Father's memoirs started because of General Pavel Batov, with whom he had fought during much of the war. After Father was forced out, Batov was asked whether Khrushchev had been at Stalingrad. The general hesitated and answered vaguely that he didn't know whether Khrushchev had been at Stalingrad or what Khrushchev had been doing during the war, for that matter!

That sort of "forgetfulness" was to be expected; after all, Khrushchev's name was being erased everywhere. Father pretended he didn't care, but he really did. Once he noticed a guard wearing an unfamiliar pin. The guard explained that it was to commemorate the 25th anniversary of victory and had been given out to everyone who was in the army on that day. Father didn't say a word, but the fact that he had been "forgotten" wounded him deeply. He kept coming back to it. Father's detractors had plenty of opportunities to wound and slander him. After all, he couldn't respond in public.

Father's only window on the world was a combination television-radio console, a gift from President Nasser of Egypt. The console also included a tape recorder that Father used when he first began to dictate his memoirs. Always keen on technical improvements, he made a wooden pedal he could press with his foot to stop the tape while he gathered his thoughts. At first no one, including Father, had any idea of the content or length of the memoirs, or of the role they would play in our lives. All we wanted to do was get him involved in some kind of project. To goad him on, I brought him Churchill's and De Gaulle's memoirs.

Later, the husband of Yulia ((Khrushchev's granddaughter and Sergei's - niece)), the journalist Lyova Petrov, brought a new tape recorder, and in August 1966 Father started dictating more systematically. We had no plan or schedule for the memoirs since we couldn't imagine the immensity of the work that lay ahead. However, the project quickly changed from amateur storytelling to a professional endeavor.

In the beginning, Father didn't want to dictate in the house because of the KGB listening devices there. As a result, his words on the early tapes are sometimes drowned out by the noise of planes flying overhead. Later he said, "The hell with the bugs," and dictated inside the house. He hadn't been trying to hide the fact that he was dictating -- he just didn't want to broadcast the contents to the KGB.

It took the authorities a long time to react. In the absence of any explicit prohibition against what he was doing, reports had to be passed up the line; decisions had to be considered at the highest level, then passed back down. All that took several years. Meanwhile, the work of transcribing and editing 1,500 typescript pages fell on me. That, too, took years.

Father dictated several hours a day, entirely from memory, without any reference material. Father was used to working on concrete issues in discussions with real people. As Pushkin said of Eugene Onegin, "He had not the least desire to dig in history's dusty chronicles." Father relied on his own memory, which was indeed phenomenal.

"It goes better when there's somebody around to listen to me, when I see a live human being in front of me and not a dumb box," he frequently complained. He was right. Whenever he had listeners, his dictation went faster and was livelier. Usually his visitors were old acquaintances, retired people far removed from politics who came for a week or more. When he was alone with the "dumb box," his speech became less vivid, with many stumbles and long pauses. During his walks he thought about what he would say and how he would say it. The most dramatic events of his life were engraved on his memory.

As Father dictated one reel after another, he began to agonize about what would happen to his memoirs. "It's all in vain," he would say during our Sunday walks. "Our efforts are useless. Everything's going to be lost. As soon as I die, they'll take it away and destroy it, or bury it so deep that there'll be no trace of it." Deep down I agreed with him. The fact that everything was quiet now didn't mean that it would continue that way forever.

In the summer of 1967, when Father seemed almost completely forgotten, his name suddenly cropped up again. An American news network decided to make a biographical film about him. But the Soviet side interpreted it as a provocation, a hostile move. Brezhnev couldn't bear any mention of Khrushchev's name. People like him, who are soft and weak on the one hand and vain on the other, have a peculiar way of perceiving and "processing" their bad deeds. Having done something wrong, they project their guilt onto their victim, trying in this way to justify their actions to themselves and to the world. Father's name stood in the way of Brezhnev's attempt to solidify his own role in history.

Instead of abandoning his memoirs after the uproar over the TV film, Father redoubled his efforts. The authorities became aware of those efforts in the winter of 1967-1968. Brezhnev was greatly upset. How to make Father stop work on the project? Should they search his dacha and seize the tapes? That would trigger a scandal, leaving Brezhnev looking like a tyrant and Khrushchev a martyr. So what was to be done? The choice was to call Khrushchev in and persuade him to cease work on his memoirs and turn over what he had written to the Central Committee. If he refused, he should be compelled, even intimidated into cooperating. After all, what was more important to him, a comfortable life in a state dacha or a bunch of papers?

Brezhnev had no desire to speak to his former boss. So he instructed his first deputy in the Central Committee, Andrei Kirilenko, a rude and high- handed man, to summon Khrushchev and get him to drop the memoirs. Arvid Pelshe, the chief of the party Control Commission, attended to add pressure; everyone knew the Control Commission wasn't to be trifled with.

In April 1968, on the eve of Father's birthday, I arrived as usual to spend the weekend at the dacha. Father wasn't inside. Mama said that he had gone to the edge of the forest to sit in the sun.

"Father is very upset," she said. "Yesterday he was summoned to the Central Committee. Kirilenko demanded that he cease work on the memoirs and hand over what's already been written. Father became infuriated and started to shout. He made a huge scene. He'll tell you everything but don't press him. He was very agitated yesterday, and he doesn't feel well."

I went down the path. Father was sitting on the bench, watching the sun go down. His dog Arbat was lying beside him. Father looked tired, his face seemed grayer and older. He asked, "Do you know already? Did Mama tell you?" I nodded. "Scoundrels! I told them what I think of them. Perhaps I went too far, but it serves them right. They thought I would crawl on my belly in front of them."

Father told me what he had said to Kirilenko and Pelshe: "As a citizen of the U.S.S.R., I have the right to write my memoirs, and you don't have the power to deny me that right. I want what I write about to be of use to the Soviet people, to our Soviet leaders and to our nation. The events I have witnessed should serve as a lesson for our future."

I tried to reassure him but couldn't stop worrying myself. I had to find a way to store the material safely until better times came. But there was no absolutely safe place for the tapes and transcripts inside the country. As the conversation with Kirilenko had shown, Khrushchev's name provided only so much protection. Even before the confrontation at the Central Committee, it had occurred to us to look for a safe place abroad. At first Father had hesitated, out of fear that we'd lose control over the manuscript and that it might be distorted and used against our state. But after carefully weighing the pros and cons, he asked me to find a way to get the material out of the country.

I didn't have the foggiest idea of how to carry out this plan. But after Father's encounter with Kirilenko and Pelshe, we came back to the idea of finding a safe hiding place abroad. It was at this time that we first discussed publishing the memoirs as retaliation if they were seized, or in some other extraordinary situation. Publication would solve once and for all the problem of preserving the memoirs and might also reduce the Central Committee's incentive to seize and destroy them in the Soviet Union. Why should they try to search for them if the book was available? What were they going to do? Buy up all the copies?

Aside from the physical problem of getting the memoirs out of the country, there was a moral consideration. It was no longer 1958, but it wasn't yet 1988 either. Only ten years before, Boris Pasternak had drawn thunder and lightning down upon himself by giving his manuscript to an Italian publisher.

Father was bolder than I. His were the memoirs of the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he insisted, the confessions of a man who had devoted his entire life to fighting for Soviet power, for a communist society. The memoirs contained truth, words of warning and facts; they should be read by the people. Let them come out first abroad and at home later. The reverse would have been better, but would we live long enough to see such a possibility?

In deciding to take this step, we crossed the threshold from legal to illegal activity. I felt uneasy. Where would it end? Arrest? Internal exile? It was no time to ponder the consequences; it was important to act. Many of those who took part in the effort are still alive, and I can't reveal the details or the names of those who offered their assistance. Many of them asked me not to, and I'm not about to violate their confidence; not everyone wants to become a hero of this book. I would like only to express my sincere thanks to those who helped.

Once the tapes and transcripts had crossed several borders and found a safe haven behind the steel doors of a vault, they were still a highly perishable item and not suitable for lengthy storage. What they had to say would be of use if people read them now, in today's circumstances.

Father agreed. "Anything might happen," he said. "It would be a good idea to arrange with some respected publisher to publish the book at some unspecified future date, but only after we give them the signal from here." He fell silent, and we continued strolling along the path.

By the end of the year we had reached a tentative agreement to publish the memoirs. Passages were removed that might constitute military secrets and incidental references to people then in power in the U.S.S.R. There weren't many such items, and Father agreed to delete them.

The publishers were worried that someone might be palming off a fake. And why not? Everything certainly looked strange. They were afraid of provocateurs and wanted to verify the authenticity of the material they were getting. We weren't in a position to write to them ourselves; it would have been too dangerous. Our colleagues found a solution. Father received two wide-brimmed hats from Vienna, one bright scarlet and the other black. The publishers asked us to send photographs of Father wearing these two hats to verify that they were dealing with us and not some impostor. When I brought the hats to Petrovo-Dalneye, they attracted everyone's attention because they were so outlandish. I explained that they were souvenirs from one of Father's foreign admirers.

Mama was amazed. "Can anyone really think that your father will wear them?"

When Father and I were out for a walk, I explained the real reason for the hats. He got a big kick out of the situation. The plan appealed to him; he liked witty people. When we returned from our walk, he got into the spirit of the game himself. Sitting on the bench in front of the house, he asked me loudly, "Bring me those hats. I want to try them on and see if they fit."

Mama was horrified. "You can't really be thinking of wearing them?"

"And why not?" he said, egging her on.

"Why, they're much too loud," she said, and shrugged.

I brought him the hats, grabbing my camera on the way. Father put one on and said, "Take my picture, let's see how I look." So I photographed him wearing one hat and holding the other in his hand. The publishers received the picture and knew that they were not being led astray.

Father's memoirs were later published in 16 languages. People around the world have been reading them for nearly two decades. But there is still no Soviet edition -- another example of our long-standing, thoughtless, "who cares?" attitude to the history of our homeland.