From the Publisher

By Louis A. Weil III

In November 1969 Strobe Talbott, then working on his thesis at Oxford, was summoned by TIME's Moscow bureau chief, Jerrold Schecter, for whom Talbott had worked as an intern the previous summer, and handed a pile of Russian typescript to translate. "After reading several pages," says Talbott, now editor at large, "I knew that I had in my hands one of the most fascinating and unusual documents ever to emerge from the Soviet Union." The papers, published in 1970 as the book Khrushchev Remembers, were transcripts of tapes recorded by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in forced retirement.

But when he donned headphones to listen to Khrushchev's sometimes animated, sometimes weary voice, Talbott discovered there were gaps on the tapes. That was also true of a second set of tapes and transcripts, published in 1974 as Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament. In that Watergate summer, Talbott and Schecter joked that the same "sinister forces" that Alexander Haig blamed for erasing material from President Nixon's tapes had been at work on Khrushchev's recordings. Actually, it was obvious from the context -- and noted in the books -- what had happened: friends and relatives who had worked with Khrushchev on his memoirs had deleted remarks about Soviet and foreign leaders or revelations about Soviet history that may have been dangerously indiscreet.

Would that material ever surface? Astonishingly, the answer is yes. Last year TIME received nearly 100 additional hours of Khrushchev tapes with enough material to make a third book, excerpted in this issue and to be published, like the previous two, by Little, Brown, a part of Time Warner Inc. This time Schecter, now an author and a founding editor of a new joint U.S.-weekly newspaper, did the translating and editing, in collaboration with Vyacheslav Luchkov, a scholar and expert on Soviet psychology. The title, Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes, underscores the connection between Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev. Says Talbott: "As though anticipating what Gorbachev tried to do, Khrushchev even uses the word perestroika in his own appeal for sweeping reconstruction of the Soviet political and economic system."