Khrushchev Remembers

xxviii, 639, [3] pp. 8vo. A collection of Khrushchev's words from various sources, with introduction, commentary & notes by Edward Crankshaw, translated & edited by Strobe Talbott. "Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (April 15, 1894 – September 11, 1971) led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964. Khrushchev was responsible for the partial de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, for backing the progress of the early Soviet space program, and for several relatively liberal reforms in areas of domestic policy...Beginning in 1966, Khrushchev began his memoirs. He dictated them into a tape recorder, and, after attempts to record outdoors failed due to background noise, recorded indoors, knowing that every word would be heard by the KGB. However, the security agency made no attempt to interfere until 1968, when Khrushchev was ordered to turn over his tapes, which he refused to do. However, while Khrushchev was hospitalized with heart ailments his son, Sergei, was approached by the KGB and told that there was a plot afoot by foreign agents to steal the memoirs. Since copies had been made, some of which had been transmitted to a Western publisher, and since the KGB could steal the originals anyway, Sergei Khrushchev turned over the materials to the KGB, but also instructed that the smuggled memoirs be published, which they were in 1970 under the title Khrushchev Remembers. Under some pressure, Nikita Khrushchev signed a statement that he had not given the materials to any publisher, and his son was transferred to a less desirable job. Upon publication of the memoirs in the West, Izvestia denounced them as a fraud. When Soviet state radio carried the announcement of Khrushchev's statement, it was the first time in six years he had been mentioned in that medium."