Word: khrushchevism
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Throughout the 180 hours of tapes that he is known to have made, Khrushchev stressed his concern that his version of events be told, so that future generations of Soviet historians, Communist theoreticians and ordinary Russian citizens would treat his memory with respect. Khrushchev and his family hoped that the memoirs might some day be published in the U.S.S.R., but they also feared that if the reminiscences did not reach the West before he died they might never appear anywhere. They would be impounded after his death by the authorities, and either locked up in party archives or destroyed...
...Khrushchev was too shrewd and too proud to accept such a fate for what he called "the substance of my viewpoint." Though publicly powerless, he believed that as a loyal Soviet citizen he could dictate his reminiscences without provoking direct interference from the regime. His family, associates and friends screened the tapes for details of security matters and potentially compromising material. These they removed...
...Khrushchev did all the dictating at his dacha in the village of Petrovo-Dalneye, 20 miles west of Moscow. His country villa was under the surveillance of secret police stationed in a separate guardhouse at the entrance to the fenced-in compound. The police kept a watchful eye on Khrushchev, but stayed out of the house where he lived with his wife Nina Petrovna. When the weather was good, Khrushchev took his tape recorder outdoors. On many of the tapes there are sounds in the background of birds singing, children playing, and planes coming in to land at a nearby...
...three years after the taping began, Khrushchev's associates in the memoir project decided that it was time to act. Little, Brown and Time Inc. acquired the right to publish the first portion of the memoirs. In an introduction written for Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, TIME Diplomatic Editor Jerrold L. Schecter, who was chief of the TIME-LIFE bureau in Moscow from 1968 until 1970, notes that: "Because these were the unsanctioned words of a deposed leader, the transcripts of the tapes were handled in much the same way as novels, poetry, and other 'underground' Soviet...
Time Inc. authenticated the tapes by voiceprint analysis-an electronic method of matching the voice patterns on the tapes with recorded Khrushchev speeches-and published Khrushchev Remembers, first as a series of four articles in LIFE, and subsequently as a Little, Brown book. Khrushchev himself was never involved directly with Little, Brown or Time Inc. Therefore, when the first volume of his memoirs was published in the West, he could truthfully tell an irate Arvid Pelshe, chairman of the Party Control Commission, that he had never "turned over" his memoirs to anyone. Under pressure from Pelshe, Khrushchev made a statement...