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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 airport. Sometimes Khrushchev worked from rough notes, and he can be heard shuffling papers on the tapes.
He was seldom disciplined or methodical in his approach. Usually he rambled, telescoping years, people, and ideas. News, such as the deaths of North Viet Nam's Ho Chi Minh or Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, would set him off on reminiscences that covered many subjects and years. But his comments on the details of events in which he participated were always graphic and sharp. Early in the project he worked with a primitive Russian tape recorder, which he had trouble operating. Later he used superior West German machines.
In 1970, 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 texts that reach the West unofficially are handled. We undertook not to disclose any specifics of how, by whom and when the material was transcribed or delivered. These restrictions are still in force today."
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 to that effect, which was issued by Tass, the official Soviet news agency, in November 1970. Ironically, it was the first time since his downfall that the former leader's name had appeared in public print in the U.S.S.R.
Later that month Khrushchev went to a hospital in the Kremlin for treatment of a heart condition. Almost four months passed before he was able to return to his dacha and his tape recorder. In the meantime, he saw a copy of Khrushchev Remembers and had the edited text translated back to him in Russian. He was pleased and decided to continue dictating his memoirs.