I NOW live like a hermit on the outskirts of Moscow. I communicate only with those who guard me from others—and who guard others from me." Thus begin the reminiscences of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who was the most powerful man in the Soviet Union from 1955 until his downfall in 1964. Khrushchev's rather forlorn comment on his enforced six-year silence is all the more poignant coming from a man who stood for so long at the center of history. At week's end the ex-Premier, 76, was admitted to a Moscow hospital, reportedly suffering from his second heart attack this year.
The first installment of the recollections appears this week in LIFE and 19 foreign publications, and will be published in fuller form in December by Little, Brown under the title Khrushchev Remembers. Several days in advance, Tass carried Khrushchev's name on its wires for the first time in six years, in issuing a statement from him denying that he had "passed on" his reminiscences to any publication. "This is a fabrication and I am indignant at this," Khrushchev said. His language, however, fell far short of a blanket denial. Moreover, British Sovietologist Edward Crankshaw, who wrote an introduction to the forthcoming book, pointed out that the Kremlin was almost forced to counter such a publishing coup in the West with some kind of denial. "They could not do anything else," said Crankshaw. "What could you expect in the circumstances?"
Something Savage. As Crankshaw points out in his foreword, Khrushchev's remembrances constitute "an extraordinary, a unique historical document" that "takes us straight into what has been hitherto a forbidden land of the mind." In Khrushchev's words: "I tell these stories because, unpleasant as they may be, they contribute to the self-purification of our party. I address myself to the generations of the future in hope that they will avoid the mistakes of the past."
The reminiscences cover a period of more than 30 years, concluding a few months before Khrushchev's ouster. The first segment recounts Khrushchev's career under the man who ruled over the Soviet Union for most of that time: Joseph Stalin. Khrushchev's overall judgment: He was a man of "outstanding skill and intelligence. In everything about Stalin's personality there was something admirable and correct as well as something savage." Nevertheless, "there was unquestionably something sick about Stalin." Absolute dictators like Stalin, says Khrushchev, "consider it indispensable that their authority be held on high not only to make the people obedient, but to make the people afraid of them as well."
Khrushchev first met Stalin in 1925, when the younger man was elected a delegate from the Yuzovka party organization in the southern Ukraine to the 14th Party Congress in Moscow. By then Khrushchev had discarded his mother's intensely religious training, fathered two children, lost his first wife during the famine of 1921 and married his second, Nina. Khrushchev recalls how, the first morning after reaching Moscow, he tried to take a streetcar to the Kremlin, but didn't know which number to take and ended up getting lost. He took to skipping breakfast so that he could get a front seat near Stalin at the meetings.