(3 of 6)
That sort of "forgetfulness" was to be expected; after all, Khrushchev's name was being erased everywhere. Father pretended he didn't care, but he really did. Once he noticed a guard wearing an unfamiliar pin. The guard explained that it was to commemorate the 25th anniversary of victory and had been given out to everyone who was in the army on that day. Father didn't say a word, but the fact that he had been "forgotten" wounded him deeply. He kept coming back to it. Father's detractors had plenty of opportunities to wound and slander him. After all, he couldn't respond in public.
Father's only window on the world was a combination television-radio console, a gift from President Nasser of Egypt. The console also included a tape recorder that Father used when he first began to dictate his memoirs. Always keen on technical improvements, he made a wooden pedal he could press with his foot to stop the tape while he gathered his thoughts. At first no one, including Father, had any idea of the content or length of the memoirs, or of the role they would play in our lives. All we wanted to do was get him involved in some kind of project. To goad him on, I brought him Churchill's and De Gaulle's memoirs.
Later, the husband of Yulia ((Khrushchev's granddaughter and Sergei's - niece)), the journalist Lyova Petrov, brought a new tape recorder, and in August 1966 Father started dictating more systematically. We had no plan or schedule for the memoirs since we couldn't imagine the immensity of the work that lay ahead. However, the project quickly changed from amateur storytelling to a professional endeavor.
In the beginning, Father didn't want to dictate in the house because of the KGB listening devices there. As a result, his words on the early tapes are sometimes drowned out by the noise of planes flying overhead. Later he said, "The hell with the bugs," and dictated inside the house. He hadn't been trying to hide the fact that he was dictating -- he just didn't want to broadcast the contents to the KGB.
It took the authorities a long time to react. In the absence of any explicit prohibition against what he was doing, reports had to be passed up the line; decisions had to be considered at the highest level, then passed back down. All that took several years. Meanwhile, the work of transcribing and editing 1,500 typescript pages fell on me. That, too, took years.
Father dictated several hours a day, entirely from memory, without any reference material. Father was used to working on concrete issues in discussions with real people. As Pushkin said of Eugene Onegin, "He had not the least desire to dig in history's dusty chronicles." Father relied on his own memory, which was indeed phenomenal.
"It goes better when there's somebody around to listen to me, when I see a live human being in front of me and not a dumb box," he frequently complained. He was right. Whenever he had listeners, his dictation went faster and was livelier. Usually his visitors were old acquaintances, retired people far removed from politics who came for a week or more. When he was alone with the "dumb box," his speech became less vivid, with many stumbles and long pauses. During his walks he thought about what he would say and how he would say it. The most dramatic events of his life were engraved on his memory.