On Oct. 15, 1964, the world heard the shocking news: Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev had been removed as leader of the Soviet Union. Weeks earlier his son Sergei, then 29 and an engineer working on a rocket project, had been told by a former kgb guard about the plot, but Nikita initially dismissed the story as nonsense. As the days slipped by and the intrigue grew, the senior Khrushchev realized that his son was right. But it was too late. After more than a decade as one of the globe's two most powerful leaders, Khrushchev became a nonperson overnight. He died in 1971.
In the months after Khrushchev's ouster, Sergei began to record impressions of his father's last days in the Kremlin so that, as he puts it, the story "would not be lost to history." Last July, after Mikhail Gorbachev praised Khrushchev and the Soviet press began to rehabilitate the former leader's reputation, the editors of TIME encouraged Sergei to write about his father. In October the first of four installments appeared in the Soviet weekly Ogonyok.
Sergei, now 53, lives with his second wife Valentina in a Moscow apartment building that is reserved for the elite. Transferred from his high-security job in 1968, Sergei serves as a deputy director of a scientific institute. Sergei insists that he wanted his story to be published not to glorify his father but to correct the "fabrications" that have appeared. "Many people may find it hard to believe," he says, "but Nikita Sergeyevich was a very trusting man, sincere almost to the point of naivete."
The younger Khrushchev's story not only sheds light on one of the century's great palace intrigues but also points up circumstantial parallels that may be viewed as cautionary by Gorbachev. Like Gorbachev, Khrushchev was a larger- than-life figure who, in attempting reforms that pale beside those being tried today but were radical for their time, made powerful enemies within the collective Soviet leadership. Sergei's tale is also a parable of treachery. Even Anastas Mikoyan, then Soviet President and a putative Khrushchev ally, comes off as a bet hedger who bows to pressure from a web of plotters that includes Presidium ((now called Politburo)) members Leonid Brezhnev, Nikolai Podgorny and Mikhail Suslov, Deputy Premier Alexander Shelepin and KGB chief Vladimir Semichastny.
One evening in early September, the special government phone rang. That surprised me. Everyone knew my father was not in Moscow. I heard an unfamiliar voice.
"May I speak to Nikita Sergeyevich?"
"He's not in Moscow."
"To whom am I speaking?" I could hear the disappointment in the voice on the other end.
"This is his son."
"How do you do, Sergei Nikitovich. This is Vasily Ivanovich Galyukov. I'm the former chief of security for Nikolai Grigoriyevich Ignatov ((President of the Russian Republic)). I've been trying to reach Nikita Sergeyevich all summer. I have to tell him something very important."
I was all the more surprised. What could Ignatov's former chief of security have to tell Khrushchev? "Please, hear me out," said Galyukov hurriedly. "I happen to know that there is a plot against Nikita Sergeyevich. I wanted to tell him about it personally. There are many people involved."
I thought the man must be insane. What kind of plot could there be nowadays? It was nonsense.