TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100190/1001480.000

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                یm                                                          EXCERPT, Page 68

Khrushchev's Secret Tapes

By Nikita Khrushchev


[(c) 1990 by Little, Brown and Company (Inc.). Translation (c)
1990 by Jerrold L. Schecter.]


    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.

_______________________________________________________________
A SUDDEN DEATH


    I saw Stalin's wife Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva just
before the end of her life in 1932. It was, I think, at the
celebration for the October Revolution. There was a parade in
Red Square, and Alliluyeva and I were standing next to each
other by the Lenin Mausoleum and talking. It was a cold, windy
day. As usual, Stalin was wearing his military greatcoat. The
upper button was left undone. She glanced at him and said, "My
man didn't wear his scarf again. He will catch cold and get
sick." I could tell from the way she said this that she was in
her usual good humor.

    The next day Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin's lieutenants,
summoned the party secretaries for a meeting and said that
Nadezhda Sergeyevna had died suddenly. I asked myself, "How can
it be? I just talked to her. Such a beautiful woman." However,
people sometimes just up and die.

    In a day or two, Kaganovich gathered the same group and
said, "I'm speaking on Stalin's behalf. He asked me to bring
you together and tell you what really happened. She didn't die
naturally. She committed suicide." He didn't go into details,
and we didn't ask any questions.

     We buried her. Stalin seemed to be suffering at the grave.
I do not know how he felt on the inside, but outwardly he
mourned.

    After Stalin's death, the story of her death became known
to me. Of course, this is not documented. Vlasik, the chief of
Stalin's bodyguards, said that after the parade everybody went
to [military commissar] Kliment Voroshilov's big apartment for
dinner. After parades and that kind of thing they always went
to the home of Voroshilov to eat.

    The marshal of the parade and some members of the Politburo
went there directly from Red Square. Everyone drank, as is
usual in such cases. Finally, everyone left. So did Stalin. But
he didn't go home.

    It was late. Who knows what time it was. Nadezhda Sergeyevna
got worried. She started searching for him by phoning out to
one of the dachas. She asked the duty officer, "Is Stalin
there?"

    "Yes," he answered, "Comrade Stalin is here."

    "Who's there with him?"

    He named a woman. She was the wife of a military man named
Gusev, who had also been present at the dinner. When Stalin
left, he took her with him. I was told she was very beautiful.
So Stalin was sleeping with her there at the dacha and
Alliluyeva learned about it from the duty officer.

    In the morning -- I don't know exactly when -- Stalin came
home and Nadezhda Sergeyevna was no longer alive. She didn't
leave a note, or if there was one, it was never revealed to us.

    Vlasik later said, "That duty officer was an inexperienced
fool. She asked him, and he just told her everything."

    Later there were rumors that maybe Stalin killed her. This
side of the story is not clear, but the other side seems to be
more certain. Vlasik was, after all, a bodyguard.

    I remember once coming to Stalin's after Nadezhda's death
and seeing a beautiful young woman with dark skin. She was from
the Caucasus. When I entered, she disappeared like a mouse. I
was told she was a tutor for Stalin's children; but she was not
there for long. Later she vanished. From something Lavrenti
Beria, Stalin's last police chief, said, I understood that she
had appeared on the scene at his recommendation. Beria really
knew how to pick these "tutors."


_______________________________________________________________
WORDS OF THANKS


    In the days leading up to Stalin's death, we believed
America would invade the Soviet Union. That's why antiaircraft
batteries surrounded Moscow and were manned around the clock.
Live shells were laid out next to the guns. Stalin was afraid
that the capitalist countries would attack us. First and
foremost, that meant America, with its powerful Air Force and
its atom bombs.

    We had only just developed the device and had few bombs. Our
own people who dealt with nuclear-energy problems did a good
job, but I'll share a secret with you: we got assistance from
some good people who helped us master the production of nuclear
energy faster than we would have otherwise, and who helped us
produce our first atom bomb.

    These people suffered for what they believed in. They were
committed to ideas. They were neither agents nor spies for the
Soviet Union. Rather, they were people sympathetic to our
ideals. They acted on their progressive views, without seeking
any payment. I say "progressive" because I don't think they
were communists. They did what they could to help the Soviet
Union acquire the atom bomb so that it could stand up to the
United States of America. That was the issue of the times.

    I don't mean to diminish the merits and accomplishments of
our own scientists, but one must not discount the help that was
provided to us by our friends. Those friends suffered; they
were punished. But their names are known, and thanks to their
help we were able to build the atom bomb. We did that to
achieve equality.

    I was part of Stalin's circle when he mentioned the
Rosenbergs with warmth. I cannot specifically say what kind of
help they gave us, but I heard from both Stalin and Molotov,
then Minister of Foreign Affairs, that the Rosenbergs provided
very significant help in accelerating the production of our
atom bomb.

    Let this be a worthy tribute to the memory of those people.
Let my words serve as an expression of gratitude to those who
sacrificed their lives to a great cause of the Soviet state at
a time when the U.S. was using its advantage over us to
blackmail our state and undermine our proletarian cause.
[Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed  in the electric chair
in New York in 1953 after being convicted of conspiracy to
commit espionage by spying on American atom bomb secrets for
the Soviet Union.]

_______________________________________________________________
"IT WAS A MISTAKE"


    On the radio these days [Khrushchev was recording this in
late 1968] I often hear irresponsible statements about
Czechoslovakia. Honestly, I don't understand how we could have
reached this critical state of affairs. The Czechoslovak people
are our closest allies and most loyal partners in the struggle
to build socialism. I simply can't accept the accusation that
they have succumbed to imperialist propaganda, that they want
to change the course of their society and return to capitalism.
I just don't believe it. It contradicts all my understanding
of progressive Marxist-Leninist teachings.

    Obviously, bad feelings run deep and have affected the wide
masses. There is no other explanation for the fact that when
our troops invaded Czechoslovakia, there were instances when
they were fired upon and sustained casualties. I have heard of
cases where coffins were brought home and funeral services
conducted in secret. I can only imagine the suffering of those
who lost loved ones during the invasion.

    It was a mistake to send our troops into Czechoslovakia. Now
the wise and logical thing is to take them back out. The sooner
the better. The presence of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia is
seen as a sign of disrespect for their government's
sovereignty.

    I think time will heal these wounds. The Czechoslovak people
will fall into step with the people of the other socialist
countries, especially with the Soviet people. Our goals are the
same -- to work side by side in the struggle for socialism and
communism. I think all will turn out well in the end.