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Khrushchev recalls another telephone call, informing him of the 1934 murder of Leningrad Party Chief Sergei Kirov by a Trotskyite dissident. It was that event that set the stage for one of the most terrifying eras of modern history: the Great Purges of the 1930s, or, as Khrushchev calls them, "the meat mincer." The NKVD, Stalin's secret police and precursor of today's KGB, suddenly became all-powerful, and thousands of party officials and army officers began to vanish. Khrushchev survived the grim era in willing ignorance. "I don't know where these people were sent," he says. "I never asked. If you weren't told something, that meant it didn't concern you." The usual estimate of party members imprisoned or murdered is nearly 1,000,000, in addition to millions of nonparty members and as much as half the officer corps. "The flower of our party was stamped out in the savage violence," says Khrushchev. He recommends that all who perished "be presented to the people as martyrs of the terror waged by Stalin."
It was during World War II, says Khrushchev, "that Stalin started to be not quite right in the head." Khrushchev, then party boss of the Ukraine, faced an appalling food shortage caused by war damage and a severe drought. Thousands died of starvation, and Khrushchev even began hearing of cannibalism, including one report that a human head and a pair of feet—apparently all that remained after a corpse had been eaten—had been found under a bridge. Yet Stalin refused to provide food-rationing cards or reduce quotas on farm produce that was shipped out of the Ukraine. "He would say: 'You're being soft-bellied! They're deceiving you. They're counting on being able to appeal to your sentimentality.' "
Cowboy Movies. "Those last years with Stalin were hard times," says Khrushchev. "The government virtually ceased to function. Stalin selected a small group which he kept close to him at all times." Another group was purposely—and ominously—uninvited. Says Khrushchev: "Any one of us could find himself in one group one day and the other group the next.
"We would meet either in his study at the Kremlin or, more often, in the Kremlin movie theater. Stalin used to select the movies himself. He liked cowboy movies especially. He used to curse them and give them the proper ideological evaluation, but then immediately order new ones.