Word: dacha
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...Central Committee, there were signs that he had finally decided to adjust -- though not jettison -- the two hats he wears: one as General Secretary of the Communist Party, the other as President of the Supreme Soviet, the country's parliament. Closeted with his aides for several days at his dacha on the outskirts of Moscow two weeks ago, Gorbachev drafted a proposal that would reduce the party's role in government decision making and significantly enhance his powers as head of the Supreme Soviet. As a Moscow analyst explained, "The party, not Gorbachev, needs to resign from managing the economy...