TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061890/0618600.000

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                æ                                                              EXCERPT, Page 78

Khrushchev on Khrushchev

By Sergei Khrushchev


How, and why, the deposed Soviet leader defied the Kremlin and
outfoxed the KGB by allowing his memoirs to be smuggled to the
West

[(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.