Khrushchev Remembers

"Khrushchev has such an original voice. He talked it all into a tape recorder. I have heard some of those tapes, because when I was at Columbia University in the 1970s, they’d already published the volume that I recommended to you, but were doing more volumes from the very extensive tapes that he’d recorded and smuggled out. So I could hear his voice on the other side of my office wall booming away. The informational content is extraordinary because it’s very rare that you get a national leader who gives you, with such immediacy and in such detail, his take on a whole range of things. There’s the Stalin period, his own dealings with the West, his own policies, his relationships with colleagues, etc. It’s often unexpected, because Khrushchev really was a non-standard kind of person. He has his own take on things, and he doesn’t feel a great need to wrap things up and smooth things down. That wasn’t his style. And so you get an awful lot of unvarnished observations and reactions, which I find fascinating, in that book. Yes, he’d been ousted in the Politburo by due process: he’d been voted out. Brezhnev was the organizer and successor. There was a bit of a tradition that when Russian politicians were forced out, they were also forced out of life, or at least sent very far away from the capital. That didn’t happen with Khrushchev. As he put it when interviewed, he was living the usual life of a pensioner in Moscow. But he was doing what not a whole lot of pensioners do—which is recording his memoirs of high politics and then smuggling them out to the West. One of the funny things about Khrushchev in his retirement is that, although he was a non-intellectual and he’d never really liked intellectuals, he met some when he was in disgrace. People who worried about who they met with didn’t go and see him, but a few intellectuals didn’t care. Khrushchev got very friendly with, for example, the artist Ernst Neizvestny, who came to make a bust of him. That was an eye-opener to Khrushchev. He’d had his run-ins with intellectuals, trying to discipline them and so on, but now he gets to know them and hears what they think. Khrushchev puts it all down, his reactions. I found that fascinating."