Table of Contents

Contents

Captions to Photographs

Translators Preface

Editors Foreword

Andrei Bitov. The Baldest and the Boldest

Abbreviations and Acronyms

The Memoirs

Prologue

Part I. The Beginning of the Road

A Little About Myself

The Fourteenth Party Conference

A Few Words About the NEP

The Fifteenth Party Congress

The Move to Kharkov

The Move to Kiev

At the Industrial Academy

Personal Acquaintance with Stalin

Moscow Workdays

The Kirov Assassination

Some Consequences of the Kirov Assassination

In the Ukraine Again

The Ukraine-Moscow (Crossroads of the 1930s)

The Second World War Approaches

The Beginning of the Second World War

Events on the Eve of War

Part II. The Great Patriotic War

The Difficult Summer of 1941

People and Events of Summer and Fall 1941

1942: From Winter to Summer

By the Ruins of Stalingrad

Turn of the Tide at Stalingrad

The Road to Rostov

Before the Battle of Kursk and at Its Beginning

To the Dnieper!

Kiev Is Ours Again!

We Liberate the Ukraine

Forward to Victory!

Postwar Reflections

The Far East After the Great Patriotic War

War Memoirs

Appendices

A Short Biography of N. S. Khrushchev

L. Lasochko. The Khrushchev Family Line: A Historical Note

Sergei Khrushchev. The History of the Creation and Publication of the Khrushchev

Memoirs (1967-1999)

Conversation with N. S. Khrushchev at the Party Control Committee

Biographies

Index

About the Author

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894-1971) was First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964.

Sergei Khrushchev is Senior Fellow at the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower (Penn State, 2000).

Reviews

“Nikita Khrushchev was one of the most important political leaders of the twentieth century. Without his memoirs, neither the rise and fall of the Soviet Union nor the history of the Cold War can be fully understood. By dictating his memoirs and publishing them in the West, Khrushchev transformed himself from the USSR’s leader to one of its first dissidents. His remarkably candid recollections were a harbinger of glasnost to come. Like virtually all memoirs, his have a personal and political agenda, but even what might be called Khrushchev’s ‘myth of himself’ is vital for understanding how this colorful figure could place his contradictory stamp on his country and the world. The fact that the full text of Khrushchev’s memoirs will now be available in English is cause for rejoicing.”—William Taubman,winner of the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for his book Khrushchev: The Man and His Era

“One of the most extraordinary archives of the twentieth century”—Strobe Talbott,former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State

“Khrushchev had a remarkable memory, and although the style and broad outline of what he has to say will be familiar to those who read the original two-volume English version issued in the early 1970s, the detail he provides here, particularly on the war, adds a great deal.”—Robert Legvold Foreign Affairs

“But his personal slant, conveyed in the World War II memoirs that make up half of this huge book, is important for understanding the political atmosphere during that colossal struggle. And the detail of his recall, without notes or references, is extraordinary.”—Robert V. Daniels The New Leader

“Sergei Khrushchev (Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute, Brown Univ.) has edited an exquisitely detailed, amply documented, remarkably translated first volume of a proposed three-volume translation of his father’s memoirs, based on the four-volume Russian edition of 1999.”—C.W. Haury Choice

“There is a lot less high politics here than one would expect. Khrushchev’s focus is very often on chance encounters and small vignettes, often told at great length, rather than on reflections on the ‘big picture’ or revelations about key historical events. Yet it is this above all else that makes this work so readable, for it allows Khrushchev’s personality to come through in the text in all its contradictions and complexity.”—William Tompson Political Science Quarterly

“This volume far exceeds in detail earlier editions of the Khrushchev memoirs and for readers of this journal especially, his observations of the war years are intriguing.”—Paule Wanke Journal of Military History