(3 of 10)
I came under suspicion on two occasions. During the period when members of the Comintern, or Communist International, started disappearing into the meat grinder, the Polish representatives were virtually all arrested and shot as enemy agents. I came to Moscow from the Ukraine for a Central Committee meeting. Nikolai Yezhov, chief of the secret police, and I were standing around, and Stalin came over. He shoved his finger into my shoulder and said, "What's your name?"
"Comrade Stalin," I said in surprise, "I'm Khrushchev."
"No, you're not," said Stalin brusquely. "Someone's told me that you're really named so-and-so." I can't remember the Polish name he mentioned, but it was completely new to me.
"How can you say that, Comrade Stalin?" I replied. "My mother is still alive. You can ask her. You can check at the plant where I worked, or in my village of Kalinovka in Kursk."
"Well," he answered, "I'm just telling you what I heard from Yezhov."
Yezhov started to deny saying any such thing. Stalin then called Georgi Malenkov, who was at that time in charge of cadres for the Moscow party organization, as his witness, saying now that he was the one who had told him that I was really a Pole. Malenkov too denied he had said anything of the kind. The hunt for Poles had reached the point that Stalin was ready to turn Russians into Poles!
Another time, Stalin asked me to come to the Kremlin. His face was, as usual, absolutely expressionless. He looked at me and said, "You know, Antipov has been arrested." Nikolai Antipov was a prominent politician from Leningrad.
"No, I didn't know," I answered.
"Well," said Stalin, "he had some evidence against you." He was staring into my eyes with that blank look of his.
I stared back, at first not knowing what to say. Then I answered, "I don't know anything about the whole business. But I do know that Antipov could not offer any evidence against me, because we've had only a nodding acquaintance."
I think Stalin was trying to read something in my eyes. Whatever he saw there gave him no reason to suspect any link between me and Antipov. If he'd somehow got the impression that I was trying to hide something, well, the world might soon have learned about a new enemy of the people.
A Visitor from Berlin
In the early hours of Aug. 24, 1939, Stalin was in a good mood. He told me that Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, had come the previous day with a draft treaty on friendship and nonaggression for us to sign. Stalin was elated. "Hitler wants to trick us," he said, "but I think we've got the better of him."
He said the document we had signed would give us a free hand toward Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bessarabia and Finland. The fate of those countries would be up to us. Germany would be out of the picture.
All this was very much to our advantage. I want to acknowledge this straightforwardly. The access we gained to the Baltic Sea significantly improved our strategic situation because it deprived the Western powers of a foothold that they might have used against us in the future.
We'd been looking down the barrel of our enemy's gun, and Hitler had given us a chance to get out of the way. That was our justification for the pact, and it's still the way I see it today.