KHRUSHCHEV IN RETIREMENT

...Khrushchev was lost and did not conceal it...

...In the past, Khrushchev's foreign policy had not been very consistent, but he was a most sincere supporter of peace—although it was he who had ordered the installation of rockets in Cuba and the building of the Berlin wall...

...He would mostly tell them about the tragic events of Stalinist times...

...However, these people did not interfere in his life...

...Even on holiday he carried on receiving many government officials from West and East who were visiting the U.S.S.R., in particular parliamentary delegations from Japan and Pakistan...

...Had not Khrushchev himself played a part in the repressions in the Ukraine and in Moscow...

...Khrushchev was assigned a personal pension of 400 roubles a month, which is not much, considering his recent position in the government—the manager of a medium-sized firm or the head of a laboratory in a scientific institute would get approximately the same...

...Gradually he grew more and more harsh and uncouth and, in time, any argument would provoke him to outbursts of ungovernable rage...

...The question of whether the Communist party should have its mandate to rule a country renewed by popular will did not arise for him...

...Gradually he became more like his old self again...

...Khrushchev sent a request to the Central Committee to give him a secretary-cumtypist...

...The dramatist Shatrov also spent a few hours with him, and Khrushchev talked to him in particular about his desire to write his memoirs...

...But he did not deny that they existed...

...And what's more...

...He did not like it and said that he would never have allowed it to be published...

...They could have done it some other way," he said, "it was a very grave mistake...

...Nina Petrovna, Khrushchev's wife, who was once a teacher of political economy and, unlike her husband, not noted for her unorthodox views, began pleading with him to go home...

...was laid on his grave, but none of the leaders of the Party or of the government was present at the hasty ceremony...

...But who was not implicated in all these crimes to some degree or another...

...However, he was extremely guarded in his answers and never spoke out in criticism of the people who had removed him from the helm of power...

...But this house was not to his liking...

...Though, as with much else, Khrushchev involuntarily embroidered upon his own role, it is true that he did wipe out many of the crimes of Stalin's racist policies during his years of power...

...And suddenly, like a horseman or, I should say, like a tank that is racing forward full throttle, he had been stopped short and thrown out of political life by his very own aides and subordinates, who recently had been so subservient to him...

...At the session of the Presidium of the Central Committee, Khrushchev fought his accusers with fury and crudity...

...To his family's surprise he started listening to foreign broadcasts in Russian...

...However, the next day this meeting was suddenly canceled without any explanation...

...The three Soviet cosmonauts, who had just landed in the Kazakh steppe on the morning of October 13, were also at a loss to understand what had happened...

...There is also a growing awareness of the significance of that radical turnabout in the policies of the Soviet Union and the world Communist movement, which is still connected with Khrushchev's name...

...The communique said that the Plenum had acceded to the request of N. S. Khrushchev to be relieved of his duties as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R...

...that Hungary had been an enemy of the U.S.S.R...

...And so, completely unexpectedly, both for the Soviet people and for political observers all over the world, the most powerful of all Soviet leaders was sent into retirement—the man whose power by the autumn of 1964 was as limitless as only Stalin's had been in the past...

...The district where Khrushchev was registered as a voter was well known to foreign reporters and, of course, many would go there on election day to ask the ex-Premier some questions...

...With Serov there, Khrushchev's power had been unshakable...

...He would admit many of his past mistakes, to himself and to those closest to him...

...Perhaps I am abnormal, perhaps we are all abnormal," Khrushchev said, "but Tvardovsky was not 312 abnormal...

...construction...

...These regrets troubled Khrushchev so much that he asked his family to invite to the dacha some of the artists he had harangued so foully at the Manezh and at later notorious meetings in the Central Committee...

...He regretted, for example, that he had not completed the rehabilitation of Party members...

...Khrushchev also had a small private residence near Metrostroyevsky Street, but later he and his family occupied one of the private houses in the region of Michurinsky Avenue...

...On Khrushchev's nomination, Kirillenko was soon elected a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU...

...Full of innumerable plans, he wanted to see everything, and hardly a week passed when Khrushchev did not undertake some routine reform or reorganization...

...trade...

...Foreign reporters heard about it from Victor Louis, the journalist with the reputation of being closest to the authorities, who has frequently carried out extremely "delicate," or extremely dubious, tasks...

...The desire to leave his memoirs to his contemporaries and descendants increasingly obsessed Nikita Sergeevich too...

...Khrushchev's book was quickly declared a "forgery" by our press, but, for the first time since 1964, the Soviet people saw a reference to his name in the papers...

...Khrushchev spoke fondly of Academician Sakharov, frequently recalling his meetings with him and regretting their sharp conflict in 1964, over Lysenko...

...Rumors of his sudden demise had begun to spread during the years when he was in office—at the peak of his popularity and power...

...When Khrushchev had insisted on a change of leadership in the Sverdlovsk oblast Party Committee, incensed by what he saw there during his first major tour of the country, he had recommended Kirillenko for the post of First Secretary...

...Sometimes Khrushchev watched television...

...Of course the man was implicated in many of the criminal acts of the Stalinist period...

...Khrushchev also regretted many of the other things he had done, or had not done— many of which already seemed to be in a different world...

...However, he was driven to absolute fury by his talk with Secretary of the Central Committee and member of the Politburo Andrei Kirillenko...

...Once he even had a visit from the popular artist Vladimir Vysotsky...

...Kremlin a session of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU had begun, in which Suslov and Shelyepin proposed the immediate removal of Khrushchev from all his posts...

...But in a personal sense Serov had been completely devoted to Khrushchev and was prepared to follow his every instruction and order...

...lie added, "in Hungary they really wanted to throw the Communists out of power, while in Czechoslovakia the Communists were firmly in control...

...With the years, Khrushchev became more critical both of himself and of his work...

...True, he got as good as he gave: "You still live too well," Kirillenko said...

...But even his wife and children could not tell their friends straightaway about his death...

...Everyone was tired of the endless reorganization...

...This was how he saw M. Shatrov's play The Bolsheviks—which was very successful at the end of the '60s--at the Sovremennik Theater...

...The time and place of his funeral were not reported...

...He refused to accede to Pel'she's request and call his memoirs "forgeries...

...You have no idea how devoted to Communism she is...

...A lover of long walks, Khrushchev requested that he be given a flat in the new blocks on the Lenin Hills...

...He had become more tolerant, but even now there was no way he could be made into a supporter of pluralism, in political or intellectual life...

...He truly was a rough diamond, in whom native wit combined with dire lack of education, goodness with cruelty, simplicity with cunning...

...When an article appeared in her journal criticizing some of the inept dogmas of the Lysenko school, he was incensed...

...Shatrov was surprised, on the one hand, at Khrushchev's simplicity and common sense and, on the other, at his ignorance of some of the most basic facts of our history and social life...

...The time has not yet come to describe just how his book of memoirs was written, but the appearance of the first volume was not only a sensation in the West, it also came as a great surprise to the Soviet Politburo...

...It was no coincidence that Khrushchev's son, Sergei, who became a friend of the outstanding sculptor, later asked Neizvestny to make a memorial for his father's grave...

...Only on the morning of September 13, the day of his funeral, did a brief announcement appear in Pravda of the death, at 78 years of age, of "the former First Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, and holder of a personal pension, N. S. Khrushchev...

...During this period he essentially ceased to be a politically significant presence...

...But they wouldn't give you anything if you ever stuck your hand out...

...sHaving a lot of spare time at his disposal, Khrushchev began to read widely...

...Like many young Communists at the end of the '20s, he had greatly liked N. I. Bukharin and respected A. Rykov...

...The dacha was a real palace: its indoor swimming pools were inlaid with marble brought from Italy...

...And in 1945 he had taken a large number of valuables out of conquered Germany for his own use...

...However, they gave him a flat in one of the quarters of old Moscow...

...He was summoned to the Central Committee of the CPSU, made to come, and invited to talk with Chairman of the Committee of Party Control and member of the Politburo Arvid Pel'she...

...When asked about Khrushchev, Brezhnev at first did not answer, but then, after a moment's silence, he said: "Krushchev is up in the air...

...The flight controllers were in constant telephone communication with Khrushchev, informing him of what was happening at the cosmodrome...

...On the morning of October 15 all the Moscow papers came out without a single reference to Khrushchev, whose name had previously cropped up dozens of times in almost every issue of any Soviet newspaper...

...I could go round the country with outstretched hands and they would give me something...

...Many criticisms he answered firmly by saying that a Communist was bound to act the way he had acted and that he would die a Communist...

...Twice he was visited by the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko...

...He called Rada Nikitichna foul names and very nearly drove her from the house...

...Khrushchev followed the military conflicts on the Soviet-Chinese border during the years 1969-70 with the greatest unease...

...He himself began to realize that the end was near...

...On the evening of October 12 Khrushchev entertained French Minister of State A. Palevsky in his dacha...

...He came out in the autumn of 1970, but his health was undermined and soon he had to go back to the hospital...

...They were a willing audience...

...He tried to prove that he had never been anti-Semitic, and would point to his friendships with some of the Jews who had worked in his Administration...

...The Kremlin was completely cut off, and only A. I. Mikoyan drove out to the government airport for a short time to meet President 0. Dortikos of Cuba, who was on a visit to Moscow...

...This is some sort of provocation...

...He also avoided this subject in conversations with his rare visitors, and even kept off it in his memoirs...

...But in the last ten years interest in his personality and politics has been growing continually...

...Pel'she was the most senior member of the Politburo in age...

...Khrushchev no longer contemplated a return to power...

...This was a boundary line that Khrushchev was incapable of crossing...

...Apart from the dacha, N. S. Khrushchev and his wife, Nina Petrovna, were allocated a flat in Moscow...

...He started going to theaters and concerts...

...A high concrete wall, almost 2 km long, hid this most costly of all government dachas from the vulgar gaze of ordinary vacationers...

...Khrushchev reserved the right to use the medical services of the Kremlin hospital and draw special rations...

...and that Soviet troops had already been posted there earlier...

...Almost every evening he would listen to the Voice of America, the BBC, and the Deutsche Welle...

...Khrushchev would see him any time, take all the members of the Presidium to see him in the Lenin Hills, and fulfill his every request...

...Most of these he viewed with morbid hostility...

...He liked the play and expressed a desire to talk with its author, and with the director of the theater, Efremov...

...Then after Molotov's fall from power, he moved into the dacha that had belonged to the Molotov family—a large, but extremely tastelessly designed house...

...He had never in his life been to the Tretyakov Gallery, let alone the Russian Museum in Leningrad, or the Pushkin Museum in Moscow...

...He bitterly regretted the savage political campaign that had been waged against Pasternak during the years 1959-60, and yet if on occasion he flicked through Pasternak's verses, he always threw the book down: such poetry was alien to him...

...A small subdivision of MVD-KGB troops were detailed to guard the ex-Premier...

...Another, different section of Medvedev's reflections, "Khrushchev in Retirement" appeared in the October 1979 issue of Harper's...

...As a rule, his workday had 14-16 hours...

...Lysenko had some hypnotic sway over him and remained for him an indisputable authority...

...In the years 1961-63 he had had several sharp polemical clashes with Yevtushenko, but Nikita Sergeevich was a forgiving man by nature and he willingly chatted with his guest at some length...

...At that very moment, after coarse and harsh altercations with Brezhnev and Malinovsky, Khrushchev 308 flew off to Moscow to take part in the session of the Presidium and Plenum of the Central Committee, which for the first time in ten years had been called without his knowledge and consent...

...Khrushchev's daughter, Rada, who had for a long time worked as deputy editor-in-chief of the popular journal Science and Life, had tried several times at the end of the '50s to change her father's attitude both to classical genetics and to Lysenko...

...At that time he had also grown close to Brezhnev, particularly during their joint work on the Zaporozhskii oblast committee, though Brezhnev's influence at that time was still not too significant...

...space flights...

...Khrushchev was a man with exceptional strength of will and courage, he was noted for his independent outlook, he was not afraid of taking bold or risky decisions...

...The conversation took place in the director's office...

...It was he who had persuaded Khrushchev to visit the Manezh during the artists' exhibition...

...Of course, Thorez was not afraid for the party so much as for his own position in it...

...However, Khrushchev was too strong a personality to remain inactive for long...

...Also present at these meetings was the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, A. I. Mikoyan, who was also on holiday near Sochi at the time...

...The first three cosmonauts in history took off from earth in their space ship...

...For Khrushchev it was very important that, unlike Stalin's son, Vasilii, Svetlana had publicly supported the resolutions of the 20th and 22nd Party Congress and had even spoken on their content herself at one of the Party meetings...

...Only a few hours later were the cosmonauts called to the telephone and hastily congratulated on the successful completion of their flight by Leonid Brezhnev...

...And he had been prepared to rehabilitate almost all of those accused, despite the objections of certain members of the Party leadership...

...But he was a fairly experienced orator and conversationalist— he was not one of those politicians who cannot give even a small speech without notes and the help of a whole staff of speech writers...

...And he told me more than once that this story was a great work of art and that Solzhenitsyn is a great writer...

...In spite of his 70 years, he was a man of vast energy and an iron constitution, and he had never worked so hard as in the years 1953-64...

...Thus he always got very upset when he heard or read that he, Khrushchev, was antiSemitic...

...The next day Khrushchev invited newsmen to come and see him and said jokingly: "When I am going to die, I will tell you at a press conference...

...Khrushchev greatly disapproved of the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia...

...Attempts to rehabilitate Stalin roused his sincere indignation...

...He always voted in the elections of the place where he had a permanent residence permit...

...Now Khrushchev blamed Leonid Ilich, who had been his chief "ideologist" at the start of the '60s, for everything...

...But in the plenary session of the Central Committee he kept his silence, not replying to Suslov's speech or to the many hostile comments from the floor...

...For a long time they could not even get through to the Kremlin...

...He was very upset, even rude...

...Khrushchev there and then wrote a short statement that was published the following day in the papers...

...Khrushchev invited Palevsky to visit him on the following morning...

...and state security...

...He [Ilich] needed a passport into the Presidium of the Central Committee," Khrushchev said...

...Khrushchev was very proud of Jinos Kadár and frequently praised him, reflecting that it was he, Khrushchev, who had approved Kadir's rise to power...

...Khrushchev tried to prove, if only to his family, that he had been right...

...Early in 1965 it was suggested that he vacate Molotov's house, and not far from the village of Petrovo-Dal'nyeye . . . a more modest dacha was set aside for him...

...The flight controllers were baffled...

...The reason for this silence became clear only toward the evening of October15, when the editors of all newspapers received a short official communique about the Plenum of the Central Committee that had taken place in the Kremlin...

...Of course, here too there was a limit...

...He owed his rise in the Party hierarchy more to M. Suslov than to Khrushchev, and as early as 1941 Pel'she had become the secretary of the Central Committee of Latvia...

...Prominent figures from Stalinist times were also engaged in that task: Molotov, Kaganovich, Poskrebyshev, Zverev...

...As we know, Khrushchev's funeral took place on September 13, 1971 in Novodevichy cemetery in the presence of his nearest relatives and a small circle of friends...

...In the first weeks of his retirement Khrushchev was in a state of nervous shock...

...But he was not one to back down in circumstances like these...

...A few 310 people kept a round-the-clock watch on his house and also accompanied him in walks...

...He began reading the newspapers and asking his children and grandchildren about the changes that had taken place in the wake of his retirement...

...The whole area round Novodevichy cemetery was cordoned off and no one was allowed in that day...

...It was a surprise for Krushchev, too...

...Immediately after the meeting he went to his residential dacha on the outskirts of Moscow, where almost all his closest relatives had gathered...

...She could not flee the Soviet Union," Khrushchev said...

...It must be said, too, that !War was the only leader of a Communist country who regularly remembered Khrushchev and sent him greetings on all Soviet holidays...

...He could not hold back the tears...

...In November 1964, the Plenum of the Central Committee reversed one of Khrushchev's most clumsy reforms, which had divided almost all the oblast committees in the country into agricultural or industrial ones and had destroyed the rural district committees—the most important link of party control...

...Almost every military or government figure who was no longer in office—and even some who still were—was writing his memoirs...

...Now he could read for himself...

...He loved Tvardovsky's poetry—he could understand it...

...Brezhnev telephoned him and invited him to the Central Committee of the CPSU to discuss the question of his "everyday living arrangements," but Khrushchev was still in a state of excessive excitement and did not want to speak with any of the new leaders...

...Khrushchev did not like this flat...

...And he disapproved of the trials of Sinyaysky and Daniel, and followed with sympathy the first signs of the dissident movement, which in its early stages developed largely as a protest against the partial rehabilitation of Stalin, undertaken before the 23rd Congress of the CPSU...

...France was getting ready for its presidential elections, and everyone was asking whether de Gaulle would stand for a new term, and Khrushchev asked the French Minister, whom he considered to be a close friend of de Gaulle...

...An exception was made only for a few diplomats and foreign journalists...

...But in all the years of his retirement, however, not one Party or government official could bring himself to visit him...

...When people reminded him of Hungary, Nikita Sergeevich grew annoyed and tried to prove that Hungary was a completely different case...

...Yet even now he did not regret having helped the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich a few years previously...

...But some criticisms were abnormally painful to him...

...It was decided to give Khrushchev and his family one of the "remote" dachas that had previously belonged to Stalin...

...Translated by MARJORIE FARQUHARSON q 315...

...The conversation was fairly direct...

...party affairs...

...Right," said Khrushchev, "you can take away the dacha and my pension...

...They telephoned Khrushchev, but no one came to the phone...

...You could call the '60s the decade of the memoir in the history of our country...

...They were usually told that he was ill, but this could not be repeated endlessly...

...Somehow the question of a lasting arrangement for the retired Premier had to be resolved...

...A real politician," he said, "always fights for his power to the very end...

...On the afternoon of September 11, 1971, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev died...

...But Khrushchev, who loved his daughter deeply and respected her learning, was unyielding...

...He concerned himself not only with questions of foreign policy, industry, and agriculture, but also with literature, art, science...

...Once the secretary of one of the oblast Party committees in the Ukraine, Kirillenko owed 314 his position to Khrushchev...

...For a few days he could not speak with his family...

...It was Serov, for example, who had organized the resettlement of many of the peoples of the Northern Caucasus...

...He never visited museums even on his trips abroad...

...Pasternak he could never understand or accept...

...All the government phones in Moscow were disconnected...

...The request was considered and turned down...

...He was assigned a personal pension of 1,200 roubles, a series of privileges, and a perpetual security guard...

...He had a huge personal library, as in the past he used to receive copies of almost all the books that were published in our country...

...Khrushchev's family frequently visited the dacha at Petrovo Dal'nyeye with their friends, 313 and Nikita Sergeevich was glad to talk with them...

...Khrushchev spoke about Tvardovsky a lot, and with great respect...

...He reacted much more calmly to the fall of Lysenko's clique, but here he could not count on his family's sympathy...

...It was rather a tedious job for them...

...Some of the government officials and leaders of Communist parties who came to Moscow expressed their desire to meet him...

...When he was bored, Khrushchev often started long conversations with his security men...

...If Bukharin and Zinoviev are rehabilitated, it will lose the half that's left...

...October 12 was a particularly intensive day...

...And he was greatly touched when Ernst Neizvestny sent him a copy of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment with his own original illustrations...

...in the war...

...The failure of these hasty and ill-considered reforms exasperated him...

...As a result, the preliminary decision about N. S. Khrushchev's living arrangements was changed...

...It was from these broadcasts that he learned about many of the events that were taking place both in our country and abroad, and he would discuss them with his family...

...Was it not Serov, and Zhukov, who had saved Khrushchev and made his power secure during the alarming days of the June Plenum of the Central Committee in 1957...

...That day in the Reprinted, with permission, from the British journal Index on Censorship, 3/1979...

...He welcomed the first steps toward detente taken in 1969-70...

...He utterly denied handing over his memoirs to any foreign publishing house and condemned their publication...

...Nikita Sergeevich lost his popularity while still in office, and during the years of his enforced retirement there was not one group in the country that would have wished to see him back in power...

...Thousands of censors and editors went carefully through the papers, journals, and books, striking out of all manuscripts and proofs any reference to the "great Leninist" and "fighter for peace," N. S. Khrushchev...

...He himself understood very little about the fine arts, and was not interested in paintings or 311 sculpture...

...I wanted to rehabilitate them," Khrushchev said, "but Thorez interfered...

...However, he continued to bemoan the power he had lost, indignant with the people who had recently been his allies, many of whom had been promoted to leading positions thanks to him alone...

...However, after he had heard the details of Alliluyeva's escape the next day on the Voice of America, he was deeply wounded and shaken...

...he would read through all the issues of Novy Mir with their stories and novels by F. Abramov, V. Tendryakov, C. Aitmatov, and B. Mozhaev...

...For him it was a great personal tragedy, and even afterward he did not want to talk about Alliluyeva...

...And now it was this selfsame Kirillenko who was raining torrents of the foulest abuse on him...

...Nikita Sergeevich was upset by his conversation with him, and eye witnesses told me that he came out of Pel'she's office clutching his chest...

...Gradually, however, the circle of people he met began to widen...

...He sometimes used to complain when he met writers that he only had the reports of his ministers and their deputies to read, and messages from foreign heads of state—and even these documents were usually read for him by aides, who marked the salient points...

...But then Maurice Thorez and Harry Pollit had hurried to Moscow, and begged him to put it off for a while...

...Khrushchev felt extraordinary regret for the notorious ideological campaigns of 196263, which had mostly been directed against a large group of artists and sculptors, and which greatly harmed his reputation, both among the Soviet intelligentsia and abroad...

...the boy answered, "Grandfather is always crying...

...He was an unusual man...

...For this reason Khrushchev's new living quarters were surrounded by yet another high fence...

...To begin with, he had the superb friezes stripped from the ceiling...

...He started going to Moscow more often, sometimes strolling round the streets with his wife (accompanied by a bodyguard of course...

...Of course, he could not remember such remote events as the trials of 1928-31, but very often he thought about the trials of 1936-38...

...Once a report of his death was even published in the foreign press...

...But he, Nikita Sergeevich, had listened to the other members of the Presidium of the Central Committee and replaced Serov with the leader of the Communist Youth Organization, A. Shelyepin, who, as it turned out, had his own dreams of taking Khrushchev's place...

...However, by October 14 many people began to guess that something important was going on...

...During the elections to the Supreme Soviet or to local Soviets, Khrushchev went to Moscow...

...But Khrushchev listened to him, and sent the detailed conclusions of the Central Committee to the archives...

...The first two years of life in retirement were the most difficult for Khrushchev, but later he got used to his status as a pensioner and became more and more gregarious...

...When his relatives told him about the flight of Stalin's daughter Svetlana to the West, Khrushchev could not believe it...

...He was full of energy and a thirst for work...

...questions of the people's education...

...However, in many countries in the West and in several Communist parties Khrushchev continued to be a popular figure...

...Thousands of tons of printed books and journals were held back in warehouses and then sent off to be pulped...

...He had never liked writing anything down himself: you can find a lot of spelling mistakes even in the resolutions he entered in important state documents...

...When a teacher in one of the Moscow schools where Khrushchev's grandson studied asked, "What does Nikita Sergeevich do now...

...owing to his advancing years and deteriorating state of health...

...This was a whole neighborhood of private government houses, surrounded by a high wall, which Muscovites ironically called "the collective farm" or "The Road to Communism...

...His fall was greeted with surprising calm, you could even say, with some relief...

...As he vented his indignation at Shelyepin, Khrushchev deeply regretted that he had personally removed the former Chairman of the KGB, I. Serov, from his job and sent him to Kazakhstan...

...Yet with all this he very often fell under the influence of unscrupulous, selfseeking people—and when he fired a bad civil servant or bureaucrat he would very often replace him with a far worse one...

...However, the Soviet people knew nothing of Khrushchev's death on the evening of September 11...

...A wreath from the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R...

...In 1938, when Khrushchev became leader of the Central Committee of the Ukraine and quickly started moving new people into Party work, the 30year-old Kirillenko, who had just graduated from an institute and was working as an ordinary engineer, was drawn into responsible Party work...

...Palevsky gave an evasive answer, but Khrushchev interrupted him, saying he was firmly convinced that de Gaulle was bound to stand...

...the military...

...His attitude to Solzhenitsyn was different...

...Only now did Khrushchev read the manuscript of The First Circle...

...So, for example, early that morning, all the printing presses in the Soviet Union were stopped...

...In his jubilation and excitement Khrushchev did not notice that all the other telephones in his residence had stopped working and that all his links with the outside world had been cut off...

...He sometimes came to Moscow on business, but over a period of years he never once spent the night in his town apartment...

...In the first months no one except his family visited Khrushchev...

...Of course, he knew a few of the most famous paintings, like Repin's Ivan the Terrible Murders His Son—but only as reproductions...

...In 1953, when he had settled down in Moscow, Nikita Sergeevich moved into a big comfortable house in Usovo, which had at one time been a landowner's estate...

...He did not trust the Chinese leadership and spoke about it with hostility...

...For this reason he categorically refused to go to Moscow...

...When the space ship completed its third orbit, Khrushchev and Mikoyan linked up with the cosmonauts by radiotelephone and congratulated them on their success...

...The sensation of limitless power prevented him from understanding things as they really were and from taking the right 309 decisions...

...Only now, after his retirement, did suspicion set in, although Khrushchev avoided talking about Lysenko and concealed his disappointment with him...

...Khrushchev made only one observation—that the meeting of the Sovnarkom (Soviet of People's Commissars) in the play takes place without people like Kamenev and Bukharin...

...The day after this meeting Khrushchev had his first heart attack, and spent several months in the hospital...

...He visited almost all the countries of the world, and made several tours of the entire Soviet Union...

...It was he who had set him against the group of young artists...

...A Special Commission of the Central Committee of the CPSU had long ago told him how all these trials were conducted in Stalin's time: how coercion, threats, and torture would extract clumsy and miraculous "confessions" from the accused...

...He had known Svetlana Alliluyeva for a long time and met her often...

...In the first years of his retirement Khrushchev suffered greatly from loneliness: only his very closest relatives visited him at Peerovo-Dal'nyeye...

...Of course, this fell far short of Khrushchev's previous residences, but it had an important advantage for Nikita Sergeevich: a large plot of land...

...The entire dacha section of PetrovoDal'nyeye was surrounded by a high fence, but the entrance gate was usually guarded by elderly attendants, who could be evaded without much difficulty...

...Khrushchev, however, did not feel the slightest bit ill or tired...

...This was quite true...

...The man who not so long ago had been an almighty dictator now sat for hours immobile in his chair...

...After Hungary and the 20th Congress," Thorez said, "our Party lost almost half its members...