Monday, Oct. 01, 1990

Khrushchev's Secret Tapes

Ousted from power in 1964, Nikita Khrushchev became a nonperson, living out his last seven years under virtual house arrest in the village of Petrovo- Dalneye, on the outskirts of Moscow. To keep himself going but also to make sure that his side of the story survived, Khrushchev dictated hundreds of hours of reminiscences. Many of the tapes were smuggled to the West, and Little, Brown published two volumes of memoirs: Khrushchev Remembers in 1970 and Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament in 1974.

Khrushchev's relatives and friends feared, however, that the former Kremlin ruler had sometimes gone too far in fulminating against the shortcomings of the Soviet system, denouncing political figures who were still alive and exposing what the authorities would consider state secrets. So, to avert reprisals, they held back some of the tapes.

Last year -- with the Soviet Union officially willing as never before to hear the often ugly truth about its past, with Mikhail Gorbachev emulating some of Khrushchev's reforms and with the "special pensioner" of Petrovo- Dalneye undergoing a posthumous rehabilitation -- TIME acquired the missing tapes. It was no wonder they had been kept secret: in them, Khrushchev sheds startling new light on Stalin's complicity in the murder that launched the savage purges of the 1930s; on a secret overture to Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime during World War II; and on Fidel Castro's apocalyptic recklessness during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

What follows is excerpted from Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes, to be published in October by Little, Brown.

My time has passed. I'm very tired. I'm at the age when I have nothing before me but the past. My future is only to go to my grave. I am not afraid of death. In fact, I want to die. My situation is so dull and boring. But I do want this opportunity to express my opinion one last time.

My generation has lived through revolution, civil war, the transition from capitalism to socialism, the Great Patriotic War, the development and strengthening of socialism. I was lucky enough to be part of the process, from the smallest cell of our party organization right on up to the Politburo, and to have been involved in our country's social and political reconstruction ((he uses the word perestroika)).

Based on the most progressive of theories, Marxism-Leninism, we followed a complicated path that included mistakes and outrages -- some deliberate, some innocent. For those, let our descendants forgive us.

I'm not suggesting that what I have to say is the final truth. No, let history be the judge. Let the people decide.

Death in Leningrad

The story of Sergei Kirov's murder helps draw back the curtain on how the meat grinder of the purges got started. First, though, I must describe the atmosphere of those times -- the early days, before a petty bourgeois mentality began to take over the party. Those were romantic times. We gave no thought to dachas and fancy clothes. All our time was spent on work.

When I attended the 17th Party Congress in 1934, we were told that only six people at the congress ((out of 1,966)) had cast votes against Stalin. Years later, it emerged that actually the figure was more like 260, which is incredible if you take into account Stalin's position and his vanity.

Stalin knew perfectly well who might have voted against him -- certainly not the likes of Khrushchev, who had risen through the ranks under Stalin and who deified him. No, Stalin understood that it was the old cadres from Lenin's time who were displeased with him.

During the 17th Congress, a party secretary from the North Caucasus went to see Kirov, the Leningrad party chief, and said, confidentially, "There's talk among the old cadres that the time has come to replace Stalin with someone who will treat those around him with more decency. The people in our circle say you should be made the General Secretary."

Kirov went to Stalin and told him everything. Stalin listened and replied simply, "Thank you, Comrade Kirov."

In late 1934, Leonid Nikolayev, a disgruntled ex-Bolshevik, showed up outside the Smolny Institute in Leningrad, where Kirov's office was located. Nikolayev was arrested, probably because he looked suspicious. He was searched and found to be carrying a gun. Yet he was set free. The only conclusion is that he was released on orders from higher-ups in the same organization who had sent him to commit a terrorist act. A short time afterward, Nikolayev penetrated Smolny and shot Kirov as he was coming up the stairway. Kirov's bodyguard had lagged behind.

Later there was a rumor that Stalin demanded that Nikolayev be brought before him. Nikolayev fell to his knees, said he had acted on orders and begged for mercy. Maybe he figured he would be allowed to live because he had only carried out his mission. He was a fool. For the mission to remain secret, he had to be exterminated. And so he was.

Something else I know. When Stalin came to Leningrad to investigate Kirov's murder, he ordered the commissar who had been personally responsible for guarding Kirov that day brought to him for interrogation. The truck taking him to see Stalin crashed, and the commissar was killed.

Much later, there was an attempt to find and question the people who were escorting the commissar at the time of the accident. They had all been shot. I suggested looking for the driver. Fortunately, he was alive. He told us there hadn't been a serious accident at all, just a dented fender. But he did recall hearing a thump in the back of the covered truck. That was the end of the commissar.

I have no doubt that Stalin was behind the plot. Kirov had turned the Leningrad party organization into a good, active group. He was very popular, so a blow aimed at him would hurt the party and the people. That's probably why he was marked for sacrifice: his death provided a pretext for shaking up the country, alarming the people so that they would accept the terror and let Stalin get rid of the undesirables and "enemies of the people."

Stalin started by crushing the Old Bolsheviks, then broadened the purge to annihilate the flower of our party, our army, our intelligentsia and ordinary people.

I came under suspicion on two occasions. During the period when members of the Comintern, or Communist International, started disappearing into the meat grinder, the Polish representatives were virtually all arrested and shot as enemy agents. I came to Moscow from the Ukraine for a Central Committee meeting. Nikolai Yezhov, chief of the secret police, and I were standing around, and Stalin came over. He shoved his finger into my shoulder and said, "What's your name?"

"Comrade Stalin," I said in surprise, "I'm Khrushchev."

"No, you're not," said Stalin brusquely. "Someone's told me that you're really named so-and-so." I can't remember the Polish name he mentioned, but it was completely new to me.

"How can you say that, Comrade Stalin?" I replied. "My mother is still alive. You can ask her. You can check at the plant where I worked, or in my village of Kalinovka in Kursk."

"Well," he answered, "I'm just telling you what I heard from Yezhov."

Yezhov started to deny saying any such thing. Stalin then called Georgi Malenkov, who was at that time in charge of cadres for the Moscow party organization, as his witness, saying now that he was the one who had told him that I was really a Pole. Malenkov too denied he had said anything of the kind. The hunt for Poles had reached the point that Stalin was ready to turn Russians into Poles!

Another time, Stalin asked me to come to the Kremlin. His face was, as usual, absolutely expressionless. He looked at me and said, "You know, Antipov has been arrested." Nikolai Antipov was a prominent politician from Leningrad.

"No, I didn't know," I answered.

"Well," said Stalin, "he had some evidence against you." He was staring into my eyes with that blank look of his.

I stared back, at first not knowing what to say. Then I answered, "I don't know anything about the whole business. But I do know that Antipov could not offer any evidence against me, because we've had only a nodding acquaintance."

I think Stalin was trying to read something in my eyes. Whatever he saw there gave him no reason to suspect any link between me and Antipov. If he'd somehow got the impression that I was trying to hide something, well, the world might soon have learned about a new enemy of the people.

A Visitor from Berlin

In the early hours of Aug. 24, 1939, Stalin was in a good mood. He told me that Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, had come the previous day with a draft treaty on friendship and nonaggression for us to sign. Stalin was elated. "Hitler wants to trick us," he said, "but I think we've got the better of him."

He said the document we had signed would give us a free hand toward Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia and Finland. The fate of those countries would be up to us. Germany would be out of the picture.

All this was very much to our advantage. I want to acknowledge this straightforwardly. The access we gained to the Baltic Sea significantly improved our strategic situation because it deprived the Western powers of a foothold that they might have used against us in the future.

We'd been looking down the barrel of our enemy's gun, and Hitler had given us a chance to get out of the way. That was our justification for the pact, and it's still the way I see it today.

Still, it was a very difficult step to take. Here we were -- communists, antifascists, people who were philosophically opposed to Hitler -- suddenly joining forces with him in this war. Stalin thought he was buying time. The % treaty wouldn't save us from a German attack -- it would only give us a chance to catch our breath. The day he signed the pact with Ribbentrop, Stalin said, "Well, for the time being at least, we've deceived Hitler" -- showing he understood the inevitability of war.

When Hitler moved with such lightning speed against France in 1940, it was clear that the war in the West was a rehearsal for one in the East. Stalin was extremely nervous. Even in normal times he had the habit of pacing during a meeting. On this occasion, he was racing around, cursing like a cabdriver. He cursed the French and the English. How could they allow Hitler to roll over them this way? Now it was our turn. Stalin understood that.

No one with an ounce of political sense should buy the idea that we were caught flat-footed by a treacherous surprise assault. Yet to this day some of Stalin's lackeys are trying to whitewash his failure to prepare us adequately by saying Hitler fooled us by breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

I remember coming to see Stalin at the beginning of the war at the High Command Headquarters on Myasnitskaya Street. He was by then a sack of bones in a gray tunic. He asked me, "How's it going?"

"Badly," I replied. "We've got no weapons."

Stalin answered slowly, in a low voice. "Well, everyone talks about how smart Russians are. Look how smart we are now." On another occasion, early in the war, he said, "Lenin left us a state and we turned it to shit."

As an illustration of how desperate he was, Stalin tried to make a very secret approach to Hitler during the war. I think it was in 1942. Stalin wanted to reach an agreement that would let the Germans keep the territory they occupied in the Ukraine, Belorussia and even certain areas of the Russian Federation. One of our people was sent to Bulgaria and instructed to inform a German contact there that the Soviet Union was willing to make some territorial concessions. There was never any answer from Hitler. Apparently, he felt the Soviet Union's days were numbered. Why enter into negotiations when everything was practically his anyway?

Of course, Stalin would say that he was just stalling for time so that he could build up our forces and eventually win back what he had given away. But to gain time at the cost of such concessions!

That was the Stalin I remember during the war. Yet after the victory, there he was, strutting around like a rooster, his chest puffed out and his nose sticking up in the sky.

I still feel the pain of these memories. I still experience an ache for the people of Russia. Those who shield Stalin from blame are nothing but ass kissers.

Waging the Cold War

As the struggle against German fascism came to an end, Stalin was confident that communists would come to power in much of Western Europe. When Charles de Gaulle visited Moscow in 1944, Stalin got very drunk and teased him by asking, "Are you going to arrest ((the French Communist leader Maurice)) Thorez?" Thorez was living in Moscow at the time, but he was planning to return to Paris after the defeat of the Germans. Stalin signed a Franco-Soviet treaty during De Gaulle's visit, but he didn't attach much importance to it. "When Thorez arrives on the scene," he told us, "then the real work starts." At that time the Communist Party in France was large and powerful enough to have real political influence. It also had arms caches from the war.

Later, there was a similar situation in Italy. Palmiro Togliatti, the Italian Communist leader, was ready to start an armed insurrection. Stalin restrained Togliatti. He warned that an insurrection would be crushed by the American forces there.

Still, we had our hopes. Just as Russia came out of the First World War, made the revolution and established Soviet power, so after the catastrophe of World War II, Europe too might become Soviet. Everyone would take the path from capitalism to socialism. Stalin was convinced that postwar Germany would stage a revolution and create a proletarian state. Stalin wasn't the only one who incorrectly predicted this. All of us believed it. We had the same hopes for France and Italy.

But events did not develop in our favor. The powerful economy of the U.S. prevented the devastated economies of the European countries from reaching the flash point of revolutionary explosion. Things did not happen the way we expected in accordance with Marxist-Leninist theory. Unfortunately, all these countries stayed capitalist, and we ended up being disappointed. We concentrated on the consolidation of the gains of socialism in the fraternal countries of Eastern Europe.

In 1948, after the victory of the proletariat and the overthrow of the reactionary leadership in Czechoslovakia, Stalin was vacationing in the Crimea. Klement Gottwald, the Czechoslovak President, and his wife came for a visit. Stalin phoned and asked if I could come to the Crimea as soon as possible. "Gottwald is here and says he can't get along without you. He absolutely demands that you come." This was Stalin's idea of humor.

The next day I flew to Yalta. We met over meals. By then Stalin could not resist forcing liquor on people to get them drunk. Gottwald already had a fondness for drink, so Stalin didn't have to work very hard at getting him drunk. I remember Gottwald saying, "Comrade Stalin, why are your people stealing our technical secrets? They steal everything they can. We can see what's happening. It's an insult to us. We have no secrets from you. If you need some new technology or advanced designs, just say so and we'll give them to you. That would be much better. We are fully prepared to become part of the Soviet Union. I am asking you, Comrade Stalin: let's sign a treaty adding Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union."

Stalin stopped him right there. "Well, anything is possible," he said vaguely. But in fact he categorically rejected the idea of Czechoslovakia's joining the Soviet Union. I think he was right to do that.

Unfortunately, Stalin was not always so sensible. Some time later, during another meeting with Gottwald, Stalin asked if the Soviet Union should move its troops into Czechoslovakia. The reason could have been simply that the cold war was gaining momentum. Truman was President, and Stalin feared war with America.

Gottwald answered, "Please, Comrade Stalin, anything but that! Under no circumstances should you send Soviet troops into our country. It would poison the well and create impossible difficulties for our own Communist Party."

Fortunately, Stalin was just probing. Thank goodness we didn't move troops into Czechoslovakia -- at least not on that occasion. The Czechoslovaks had the warmest and the most brotherly feelings toward us, especially compared with the peoples of certain other countries.

In 1955 we established the Warsaw Pact. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, was instructed to prepare some proposals for the organization. He came up with a list of member states that did not include Albania and the German Democratic Republic.

"Why aren't these countries on the list?" I asked him.

Molotov answered that Albania was far away; it had no common border with the U.S.S.R. There was no way we could help Albania. As for the G.D.R., he threw the question back at us: "Why should we fight with the West over the G.D.R.?"

, I was amazed, but I patiently tried to explain the matter to him. "Don't you see, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, that if we form a military organization with some socialist countries but not the G.D.R. and Albania, we'll be sending a signal to our Western foes. We'll be telling them, to put it crudely, 'You are allowed to eat up Albania and the G.D.R.' We'd just be building up the appetite of the Western revanchists."

In the end all of us, Molotov included, favored having the G.D.R. and Albania join the Warsaw Pact.

In 1956, when we were debating whether or not to use military force against the counterrevolution in Hungary, I had a sharp disagreement with another comrade, Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, which caused me genuine sadness. Anastas Ivanovich and I were very close.

Neither he nor Mikhail Suslov, the senior party ideologist, was at the meeting ((at which the Soviet leaders decided to crush the Hungarian revolution with tanks)). They were in Hungary, trying to deal with the situation that was developing there. Mikoyan flew home only after we'd made our decision. His apartment and mine were on the same floor. When I told him about our decision, he objected strenuously that armed intervention was not right and that it would undermine the reputation of our government and party.

I replied, "The decision has already been made. Besides, I agree with it."

Anastas Ivanovich was quite agitated. He even threatened to do something to himself as a sign of protest -- I don't want to use his ominous words -- something about ending it all.

"That would be very stupid," I told him. "I know that if you think about it, you'll see the necessity for our decision." Fortunately, he calmed down. We sent in our troops. Budapest put up quite a bit of resistance, but it was all over in a matter of days.

Cuban Crisis

I was haunted by the knowledge that the Americans could not stomach having Castro's Cuba right next door to them. Sooner or later the U.S. would do something. It had the strength, and it had the means. As they say, might makes right. How were we supposed to strengthen and reinforce Cuba? With diplomatic notes and TASS statements?

The idea arose of placing our missile units in Cuba. Only a narrow circle of people knew about the plan. We concluded that we could send 42 missiles, each with a warhead of one megaton. We picked targets in the U.S. to inflict the maximum damage. We saw that our weapons could inspire terror. The two nuclear weapons the U.S. used against Japan at the end of the war were toys by comparison.

We sent a military delegation to Cuba to inform Fidel about our proposals and get his consent. Castro gave his approval. We wanted to do the whole thing in secret. Our security organs assured us this was possible even though American planes overflew Cuban territory all the time. Supposedly, the palm trees would keep our missiles from being seen from the air. We installed the missiles aboveground because silos would have required too much time to build and we believed there was not much time before the Americans invaded. It was our intention after installing the missiles to announce their presence in a loud voice. They were not meant for attack but as a means of deterring those who would attack Cuba.

The security people turned out to be wrong. The Americans caught us in the act of installing the missiles. In spite of all the uproar, we pushed ahead. When we began shipping the nuclear warheads, I constantly feared they would capture our ships. But they didn't. We installed the 42 missiles.

Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko, the Foreign Minister, was in New York City at a United Nations session. He was invited by Secretary of State Dean Rusk to Washington. Our position was neither to confirm nor to deny the presence of missiles, but in answer to a direct question, we would deny. Later we were accused of perfidy and dishonesty. Look who was making this accusation -- the U.S., which had us encircled with its own military bases! We were just copying the methods used by our adversaries. Besides, we had both a legal and moral right to make an agreement with Cuba.

Rusk told Gromyko, "We know everything."

Gromyko answered like a Gypsy who's been caught stealing a horse: "It's not me, and it's not my horse. I don't know anything."

Rusk said, "We'll see this through to the end. Tell Khrushchev we wish we could prevent all this from occurring, but anything may happen." In a word, he exerted pressure on us -- although I wouldn't go so far as to call it a threat; he appealed to us to do something to head off a confrontation.

I told my comrades, "We've achieved our goal. Maybe the Americans have learned their lesson. Now they have the time to think it over and weigh the consequences."

Kennedy was a clever President. I still regard him with great respect. He understood that in spite of the American advantages, the missiles we had already installed could strike New York City, Washington and other centers.

Then we received a telegram from our ambassador in Cuba. He said Castro claimed to have reliable information that the Americans were preparing within a certain number of hours to strike Cuba. Our own intelligence also informed us that an invasion would probably be unavoidable unless we came to an agreement with the President quickly. Castro suggested that to prevent our nuclear missiles from being destroyed, we should launch a pre-emptive strike against the U.S.

My comrades in the leadership and I realized that our friend Fidel totally failed to understand our purpose. We had installed the missiles not for the purpose of attacking the U.S. but to keep the U.S. from attacking Cuba.

Then we received a message from President Kennedy through our ambassador in Washington, Anatoli Dobrynin. It was somewhere between threat and prayer; he both demanded and begged that we remove the missiles.

We agreed to remove the rockets and warheads if the President would publicly give assurances, in his own name and that of his allies, that their armed forces would not invade Cuba. We sent a message to that effect to Washington, and the talks continued. Robert Kennedy was the basic intermediary. He showed a great deal of fortitude and sincerity in the way he helped to prevent an even worse conflict. President Kennedy assured us that there would be no invasion.

Castro was hotheaded. He thought we were retreating -- worse, capitulating. He did not understand that our action was necessary to prevent a military confrontation. He also thought that America would not keep its word and that once we had removed the missiles, the U.S. would invade Cuba. He was very angry with us, but we accepted this with understanding. We believed this came from his being young and inexperienced as a statesman. He had been deceived many times, so he had the right not to believe the word of the President. So we did not take offense, although we felt sorrow and pain to hear his words of disappointment in our Cuban policy.

Later, when I met Castro in the Soviet Union, I told him, "You wanted to start a war with the U.S. If the war had started, we would somehow have survived, but Cuba no doubt would have ceased to exist. It would have been crushed into powder. Yet you suggested a nuclear strike!"

"No, I did not," replied Castro.

"How can you say that?" I asked Fidel.

The interpreter added, "Fidel, Fidel, you yourself told me that."

"No!" insisted Castro.

We checked the documents. The interpreter said, "Here is the word war; here is the word blow."

Fidel was embarrassed. He had failed to think through the obvious consequences of a proposal that placed the planet on the brink of extinction. The experience taught him a good lesson, and he later began to consider his behavior more thoroughly.

Pride and Regret

In 1958 there was a terrific commotion in Moscow about Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago. Suslov, who was in charge of the Central Committee's Department of Agitation and Propaganda, told the Politburo the book was of poor quality and un-Soviet in tone; therefore it would be harmful to let it be published. I don't think anyone had read the book, and Suslov probably hadn't read it either; more likely he was given at most a three-page summary by an aide.

I regret that I had a hand in banning the book. We should have given readers an opportunity to reach their own verdict. By banning Doctor Zhivago we caused much harm to the Soviet Union. The intelligentsia abroad, including many who were not opposed to socialism, rose up against us.

Today you hear it said that we have no censorship. That's nonsense. That's talk for children. We have the most real -- and I might even say the most cruel -- censorship. We should not turn criticism into censorship, because critics and ideologues will turn into police bullies.

I just wish I'd handled the Pasternak affair the way I dealt with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ((published in 1962)). In that case, I read the book myself. It is very heavy but well written. It made the reader react with revulsion to the conditions in which Ivan Denisovich and his friends lived while they served their terms.

Only Suslov squawked. He wanted to hold everything in check. "You can't do this!" he said. "That's all there is to it. How will the people understand?" My answer then and now is that the people will always distinguish good from bad.

In deciding not to interfere with Solzhenitsyn's book, I proceeded from the premise that the evil inflicted on the Communist Party and on the Soviet people had to be condemned; we had to lance the boil, to brand what had happened with shame so that it would never happen again. We had to brand the truth firmly into literature.

Readers really devoured Solzhenitsyn's book. They were trying to find how an honest man could end up in such conditions in our socialist time and our socialist state.

Stalin was to blame. He was a criminal in this respect, and criminals should be tried. They should be tried not only in a courtroom by a judge but by society as well. The strongest trial is to brand Stalin a criminal in literature.

I am now of an age to repent my own mistakes of judgment about what to support. Too often we relied on administrative means rather than permitting events to develop in a creative direction. We were too concerned with what to restrain, what to forbid. I shared responsibility for that form of governing, but now I'm against it. We have to show tolerance toward change. Do these changes really affect communist ideology? In my opinion, no.

The Question of Questions

Nor should we be afraid of letting people leave the Soviet Union. Paradise is a place where people want to end up, not a place they run from! Yet in this country, which is supposed to be the workers' paradise, the doors are closed and locked. What kind of socialism is that? What kind of shit is it when you have to keep people in chains? Some curse me for the times I opened the doors. If God had given me the chance to continue, I would have thrown the doors and windows wide open.

The revolution was made for a piece of bread. We must provide that bread. Through the existing system it is not possible to acquire food on time and in the quantity needed. Moscow can't satisfy the needs of its own population, yet it is better off than other cities of the Soviet Union. Kiev, for example, has always been a mirror that reflected the state of agricultural production. Now this mirror shows us a very unattractive image.

From the situation in the markets, I believe that the Soviet Union has to use the services of capitalism -- the system we have made it our goal to defeat (I mean, of course, economically). We ought to be able to give our people more than the capitalist world gives. After all, the Soviet socialist system is the most progressive in the world. Yet even after 50 years, communist parties are still unable to win in parliamentary elections. This is something to think about. People refuse to follow us. We are not yet a mirror into which the West wants to look. We have to create tangible advantages and therefore create conditions for the victory of our way of life. This is the question of questions.